“What kind of criminal are you?”
“I’m not a criminal, I’m a botanist.”
“So I see.”
Amin stepped toward Miro.
“Well, now that you’re joining the ranks of us gun-toting outlaw farmers, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Amin swung a small canvas day pack off his shoulders and tossed it to Miro. Miro could smell the cannabis before he even picked the bag up off the ground. He opened it and saw two huge colas.
“Check the buds. Trichome city.”
Miro pulled a cola out and held it up for a closer look. It was a dense group of buds, some just beginning to open, others tightly clustered. All of them were covered with tiny silver hairs—trichomes—glistening in the sunlight. Miro was astonished.
“Where did you get this?”
Amin laughed.
“You gave it to me, fool. Last time I saw you, you handed me a couple seeds and said ‘try and grow these.’”
Miro vaguely remembered wanting to know how Elephant Crush would perform outdoors, but this was good news, this could be his salvation. If the plants were thriving he could grow some clones.
“I need to grab some cuttings.”
Amin shook his head.
“This is it. I only had two plants and I harvested them.”
Miro let out an audible sigh.
“Shit.”
“It’s nothing to get down about. Touch it. It’s some crazy, sticky shit.”
Miro gently felt the buds; they were sticky with resin, and when he looked at his fingers he saw they were covered with trichomes. It was such beautiful cannabis.
“This is all you got?”
“I kept a little for myself.”
Miro smiled wistfully at Amin.
“This won the Cannabis Cup.”
“So I heard.”
Miro put the Elephant Crush back in the backpack.
“Can you show me how to use the gun?”
Amin nodded.
“Remember the Boy Scout motto?”
“Be prepared?”
Amin flashed him a quick two-fingered salute.
“Like a motherfucker.”
31
ROLLING A BURRITO is harder than it looks. You have to warm the tortilla to make it pliable, pile on the right amount of ingredients—too many and you won’t get a good fold, too wet and the tortilla will self-destruct—roll the tortilla over, tuck in the ends, and then wrap it tight enough so it won’t fall apart yet loose enough that the salsa can circulate.
It had only taken Daniel a couple of days to get the hang of it and now he could roll a burrito with his eyes closed. He was fast, too. Lenny, the stocky Mexican who owned the taco truck, called him “Ramoncito” in honor of the speedy winger for Chivas. Daniel had tried to get Lenny to tell him something about Miro, but Lenny had the magical ability to be selectively unable to understand or speak English depending on who he was talking to or what he was talking about. Miro seemed to be involved in the business but he was never there. Lenny said he was a silent partner. A socio comanditario. That’s all Daniel could get.
If being a Mormon missionary had been an exercise in being ignored, snubbed, sneered at, and ridiculed, working on the burrito truck was the complete opposite. People said hi. They smiled. They were happy to see him. The regulars learned his nickname.
Daniel felt loved. Like he was a part of something special. His burritos made people feel good. They brought happiness to their lives. Wasn’t that part of his mission? To offer comfort to people in need? It occurred to Daniel that people didn’t need dogma, religion, or special underwear; people needed a good burrito.
Since he still hadn’t heard anything from his LDS mission sponsors and he’d stopped going to church, Daniel spent his free time at the library researching the history of the burrito. He was fascinated by the conflicting accounts, the legends and urban myths of the birth of the burrito. Some claimed the burrito originated in the sixteenth century, when Aztecs wrapped meats in tortillas as a way to make food portable for travelers, traders, and warriors. Others credited a man named Juan Mendez who, in Ciudad Juarez circa 1912, sold food from containers on the back of his donkey. He wrapped his meats in flour tortillas to keep them warm. Hence “burrito,” which means “little donkey.”
But to Daniel, the burrito seemed to be more than just a portable lunch. It was, in some strange way, similar to the Holy Trinity, the Godhead.
Three separate and distinct beings who are one in purpose.
In church Daniel had learned about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. On the taco truck he learned to fill a burrito with a different kind of trinity: grilled meat, rice, and refried beans. He wasn’t sure how to classify the salsa, but he knew that to eat it, packed as it was with fiery habaneros, was to take a leap of faith.
Daniel thought that if God had put him on Earth to do good deeds, to fill people’s lives with happiness, then perhaps God had put him on Earth to make burritos.
32
MARIANNA LOOKED at the laptop’s screen. The temperature in Los Angeles was in the mid seventies. That was in Fahrenheit. She did a quick translation in her head and still decided she might want to take a sweater. It was weird that the United States didn’t measure temperature in Celsius. They didn’t use the metric system, either. Was it because they thought inches and miles were better units of measure? Or did they see themselves as iconoclasts? Maybe they were just stubborn. She didn’t know many Americans and had never been to the States before. What kind of people don’t use metric?
She took a sip of her mineral water—it was carbonated and the bubbles tickled her nose and helped settle her stomach—and thought for the thousandth time that she was making a big mistake. What if the Miro who lived in Los Angeles wasn’t like the Miro she had spent a perfect weekend with? How would he react to the news that she was pregnant? Was he stubborn? Would he convert to metric for her?
…
“A little to the right.”
Guillermo nodded and tipped the painting up an inch.
“Too much. Go back.”
He adjusted it again and then turned to look at Shamus.
“How’s that?”
Shamus stood on the other side of his living room, studying the painting of the hippies on the beach. He smiled. It looked really good above his couch.
“Bueno.” Shamus clapped his hands together. He was happy. His apartment was really starting to come together. He had to admit that the paintings on the walls had made a huge difference. It wasn’t until he’d actually hung the art that he realized the bare walls had gotten to him, made him feel like he was back in the O.H. Close Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton. But now, now it looked like home.
Guillermo sat on the couch. “Is that Jesus?”
“No, man. That’s Jim Morrison.”
Guillermo squinted at the painting.
“Oh, yeah.”
“You ready to roll?”
Shamus tossed his car keys to Guillermo. Guillermo caught them and looked at Shamus.
“Where’re we going?”
Shamus pointed to the backpack filled with cannabis.
“We gotta take this shit to the store.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Damon?”
“He’s dead.”
…
Vincent had spent the morning sitting at his desk, trying to keep his eyes focused on an Excel spreadsheet blinking on his computer screen. Why did the Ventura store sell less bongs than the Hollywood outlet? Maybe all the customers were surfers and couldn’t take a bong to the beach. Who knew? He decided he’d have to drive out to Ventura and get to the bottom of it. People forget how much work it takes to run a successful business. It’s grueling. Not the fun part of hanging out with customers or taste testing the newest cannabis, not the part where you look at your bank balance and think, How did I ever get so much fucking money? It’s the minutia, the mind-numbing details. There’s inventory, making sure you’ve got product
coming in that will sell; there’s schedules to keep, making sure you’ve got someone behind the counter, juggling employees’ requests to have days off here and take vacations there; there’s sales tax to pay, withholding tax to calculate, property tax, business tax, and, if the desperate politicians in Sacramento got their way, a sin tax on the product itself—as if medicine was somehow connected with the idea of going to hell—and for all of it, for every single aspect that you had to think about, there were forms and forms and more forms. It was a Mobius strip of paperwork. Vincent had tried delegating. He had a bookkeeper, an accountant, and managers at each location, all responsible for as much of the drudge work as he could lay on them. But still, at the end of the day, he had to look everything over, double check for errors, lies, and outright theft.
But now was the fun part. Vincent stood in the middle of the room and let the clean smell of fresh paint fill his nostrils. A few workmen banged around on various cabinets and the counter that ran in front of the shelving units in the back. He looked at the color swatches the interior designer had given him and smiled. This was going to be the nicest, most up-scale Compassion Club yet. There were high-tech scales attached to a computer inventory system, a state of the art humidor to keep the cannabis from getting too dry, and beautiful lighting that made the buds look like diamond bracelets at Tiffany’s, and it was all enclosed by soft plum painted walls, a plush sage-colored carpet, and a Bose sound system.
Vincent sat down in one of the plush leather smoker’s chairs he’d imported from Spain and sighed. This was how marijuana should be sold, like rare wine or Cuban cigars.
But neighborhoods were still nervous about having dispensaries opening. The first few Compassion Centers didn’t even have signs—you had to know about them, find the address online, to know where they were. Some areas were less picky and allowed him to put up a sign, either the Compassion Club logo or a simple green cross. But this store? Nobody would complain about this. This was the crème de la crème. This would be the model he’d use for future expansion.
Vincent realized that what this particular Compassion Center needed was a party, a gala, a grand opening. Something special to put it on the map. And if he could offer an exclusive preview of the current Cannabis Cup winner, well, that would be the cherry on top.
He pulled out his iPhone and dialed an event planner he knew.
…
Ted put the key in the lock. Fran had given him a key to her apartment a year ago when she went to Club Med in Ixtapa with an officer from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and needed her plants watered. Ted hadn’t heard the particulars of how the vacation went, he just knew that Fran had gotten a sunburn and a series of wicked hangovers and that the deputy had assumed that daily oral copulation was part of the resort’s all-inclusive policy. Whatever relationship Fran had with the deputy had ended in Mexico.
Ted turned the key, felt the bolt slide back, and opened the door.
Once he was inside he realized he’d made a mistake. The air in the apartment was alive with the smell of mold spores and the rusty tang of dried blood. Ted noticed that the large painting of Jesus and his disciples was missing from the wall—he could still see the outline where the painting had hung—but otherwise the living room looked exactly the same as it always looked: like no one lived here.
He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was what he expected. Beer and condiments in the fridge, a one-month supply of microwave dinners in the freezer. He realized that he’d never seen Fran eat an apple or a banana or a salad.
Ted took a beer and twisted off the top. He didn’t know why he did that. He wasn’t thirsty and it felt weird to drink a dead person’s beer, but Fran would’ve offered him one if she’d been there. She would’ve wanted him to have it.
He suppressed a burp, waiting for some kind of sign or omen or something to give him the courage to go into the bedroom and look at the murder scene. He’d hadn’t seen the photos or read the police report. They didn’t share that kind of stuff with ambulance drivers and he didn’t want to see it anyway. In his line of work he’d seen plenty of dead people. It wasn’t one of the highlights of the job.
He went back into the living room and stared at the wall. Why hadn’t the police said anything to him about the missing painting? Did they know it was gone? Maybe it was a robbery that went crazy. And what was all that talk about drugs? Fran didn’t take drugs. At least she never talked about it to him and he didn’t think it was something she’d get mixed up in. She was pretty straight for someone so kinky.
Of course, the police wouldn’t notice a painting missing if they didn’t know it had been there in the first place. This, he realized, was why he’d come to Fran’s apartment. To look for things that might’ve been overlooked. Ted took out a scrap of paper and his pen and started a list. He wrote, “Painting of Jesus at the beach.”
He put the beer down on top of the TV set and walked into Fran’s bedroom.
It didn’t look like how a crime scene should look, not like the crime scenes glamorized on TV. There wasn’t any yellow “Do Not Cross” tape rolled around the perimeter, there was no moody blue light streaming through the miniblinds, and no soundtrack shimmering in the background; it was just Fran’s bedroom. The only difference he could see was a couple of rusty stains on the mattress and powdery splotches around the bed and windows where the crime scene investigators had dusted for fingerprints.
Using the bottom of his T-shirt, Ted opened the top drawer of Fran’s dresser. He pulled out a tube sock and put it over his hand. He didn’t know why. He had nothing to hide. But then he thought he didn’t want to contaminate the scene, he didn’t want his prints mixed with anyone else’s. Besides, what would he tell the police if they asked why he was in her apartment? He didn’t have a good answer.
Using the sock like a mitten, he went carefully through Fran’s dresser drawers. There was not a lot to discover. She didn’t have any jewelry—he’d never seen her wear any—and all her clothes consisted of the dark blue of their EMT uniforms or blue jeans. She wore dark cotton socks and white cotton underwear, although he did find a couple of bright pink thongs. Maybe those were left over from the trip to Ixtapa.
Ted shifted through the medicine cabinet and the drawers in the bathroom. Fran didn’t have a lot of makeup, certainly not as much as Ted’s ex-girlfriend used to carry in her purse, but judging from a few half-squeezed tubes of cream, she suffered from the occasional yeast infection.
Ted found her birth control pills by the bedside table. He knew she was sexually active. It made him wonder why he wasn’t. But he saw no evidence of kinky behavior. No tubes of lubricant, no anal beads or latex gloves. He’d never heard about her strap-on thing until the police told him.
Ted looked under the bed. He found a metal box and pulled it out. He knelt on the floor—there was no way he was going to sit on the bed—and opened it.
Inside were a couple of handguns, a few extra clips, and a box of ammunition. He wondered why the police would’ve left these here, then realized that they weren’t illegal and they weren’t part of the investigation, so of course they’d leave them. They were Fran’s personal effects, after all.
Fran had never mentioned owning a gun but Ted wasn’t surprised to find them. He supposed most single women living alone in LA had guns under their beds.
Ted pocketed the small Glock and the clips that went with it, closed the box, and slid it back under the bed. Ted wasn’t prone to compulsive acts, and it wasn’t something that he gave a lot of thought to until he got home; he just did it, as if he was responding to some primal impulse.
He left the apartment without finishing his beer.
…
The Pacific Surfliner rattled south toward LA, the ocean glittering obsidian out the right side, the lights of small seaside towns flashing by on the left, the buildings and people and their stories frozen in velocity-bound dioramas as the train hurtled past.
As he looked out the
window, watching other people’s lives flicker and fade, Miro felt his chest tighten, causing little twinges of pain to go pinging through his body. Things, it seemed, really weren’t going his way. This wasn’t how he’d planned his life. Not at all.
When he got back from seeing Amin, his mother informed him that a couple of detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department had come looking for him. There had been two more shootings, both with the same gun that shot him. The detectives had stressed to her that he wasn’t in any trouble but they had some questions, there was some new evidence related to his shooting that they wanted to discuss. Miro made an educated guess and decided that this new evidence probably had something to do with his involvement in the cannabis business, and that was a subject he definitely didn’t want to talk about with law enforcement.
But the news made his head spin. Two more shootings? What the fuck was that about? He was a gentleman farmer, a lay botanist. He wasn’t a gangbanger or a narcotraficante. He was just a mellow guy who grew some herb.
But that’s what it was about, he was sure of that. The Elephant Crush was the cause of all this mayhem.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that it wasn’t just the cannabis business, it was business in general. These kinds of things happen all the time in the business world; pick up the paper and it’s all hostile takeovers, bankruptcy, bailouts, layoffs, purges, strikes; the world of commerce was a vicious, violent place. Maybe Guus was right, America should smoke a little Elephant Crush, it would take the edge off.
Miro felt around inside his backpack and checked to see if he still had the gun. Not that he was going to go all gangsta on somebody. He wasn’t stupid; he realized he was in over his head, and besides, he wasn’t sure who exactly he was looking for. But if he had to mix it up with organized crime, with La Eme from Tijuana or the El Salvadoran MS-13 or the Crips and Bloods or Chinese Triad, whoever was behind this, well, what choice did he have? They started it.
He’d come up with a half-assed plan on the drive back to his parents’ house. He couldn’t even call it a plan, not really; it was more of a gambit, a ploy, a hail Mary. It was about as smart as poking an alligator with a stick to see if it’s interested in eating you. But despite the utter stupidity of his scheme, he thought it just might work.
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