Halfway House

by Weston Ochse

  Oh no. Not now. Please God, not now.

  Then he felt himself falling, but instead of hitting the floor, he went right through it into a leopard skin bed slowly rotating. All around him stood Elvii, a hundred impersonators of every shape and size. Black, white, Hispanic, Japanese...even green-skinned alien Elvii. Fat. Thin.

  The midget from beneath the woman’s dress peeked out with an Elvis head. As one, all of them reached toward him and in a single Elvis stereo voice said, “We’re your father, Bobby. Stay with us. We love you.”

  * * *

  Split was positioned on the Welcome to San Pedro pedestrian bridge that spanned Gaffey Street where the 110 ended and began. The sides and roof of the bridge were completely enclosed, encasing the pedestrian walkway in a wire mesh cocoon. The only ways in or out were the entrances on either side of the street. These he watched as closely as the street beneath him. The last thing he needed was to be trapped like a rat. All he had was a lock blade knife. He’d never used it in a fight and hoped he’d never have to, but if it meant living or dying, well, that would change everything.

  Lucy had positioned lookouts at all the entrances to San Pedro. He wanted to know when MS 13 arrived. There was no mystery whether they were going to come or not. It was only a matter of when. After last night, they’d be wondering where their boys went. They could wonder all they wanted. The three gangbangers were buried in the crevices of Sunken City and would never be found. Even so, that wouldn’t stop the Salvadorans from looking.

  A silver Lexus with white undercarriage lights rolled to a stop at the light. It had no front plates. Split tried to make out the driver and passenger, but the tinting was too dark. They were just darker shapes. The car fit the profile, though.

  He was prepared to thumb the telephone when the light changed. As traffic entered San Pedro, Split took a second and stepped to the other side of the bridge. The rear window had the same tinting as the front, but the license plate caught his eye. Arizona. He relaxed a moment. The Salvadoran’s could be using out-of-state cars, but the chances were low. They liked flashy foreign rides and pickups and didn’t usually try and hide their plates.

  Like the Acura from last night.

  After they’d called Lucy, their intention had been to cordon off exit streets and wait until the boss showed, but the Salvadorans weren’t willing to play along. At about 13th Street, they’d spotted the tail. After a high-speed chase through side streets, ramming the sides of cars parked on either side of the road, the Acura crested 25th Street. Here they could see ships moving through the port. Rows of cranes lit by a thousand bulbs each leaned toward the horizon like mechanical fingers pointing to where the sun had gone. All else was black.

  The Salvadorans tried to turn right to get access to Lomita and all points north, but Split and Blockbuster, who were following behind in the Chevy, had called ahead. A garbage truck had pulled across the road, blocking it to anything but an M1 Abrams tank. The Salvadorans had no choice but to head left, which would take them back to Palos Verdes and the ocean.

  Within minutes, the Angels had cars on parallel tracks. They herded the Acura like a cowboy would an errant steer, until they finally came to the cracked earth which marked the end of South Pacific Avenue. The Acura skidded sideways to a stop, coming to rest against the flashing Dead End signs.

  One of the Salvadorans got out of the car with nines in each hand. Jose G. opened fire and blew him backwards against the fence with a double-ought shotgun round to the chest. The driver was frantically trying to dial his cell phone, but the combination of adrenaline and fear made the task impossible.

  Paco walked up to the window and fired three times, the first round shattering the glass and slamming into the man’s head. The next two shots were more reflex, and only served to push the man down in the seat so it looked like he was just sleeping.

  The man in the backseat struggled to unjam his machine gun and had begun to bang the weapon against the inside of the car. Trujillo leapt atop the trunk, used his boot to smash the rear window, then reached in and jerked the man out. He threw the guy to the street and the weapon went skidding into the weeds.

  The Salvadoran tried to stand, but Trujillo landed on his chest with a knee. Before he’d been caught stealing cars, Trujillo had had a promising Golden Gloves amateur career. Five short punches to the mouth and the Salvadoran was spitting teeth.

  The interrogation began as Trujillo pressed a thumb into the man’s left eye.

  “Who sent you? Why are you here?”

  Sirens sounded in the distance. They only had a minute or two. Trujillo jerked a knife free from a sheath on his calf and was about to apply it to the man’s throat as a last minute attempt to get the Salvadoran to talk. But the man’s eyes shot wide as he glimpsed something over Trujillo’s shoulder. The Angel turned to see just as Blockbuster fired a single round into the Salvadoran’s head. Blood splattered Trujillo’s face.

  “Come on. Vamanose!” Blockbuster jammed the gun into his waistband and got back into the car. They were gone by the time the police arrived.

  The light changed again. Split watched carefully as traffic rolled by. Taking out the Salvadorans was an act of war. Normally things were handled differently. Telephone calls were exchanged. Second-in-commands went to meet. Sometimes there was a rendezvous of the principals at a neutral location. Then compensation was offered.

  But MS 13 was different.

  They didn’t respect tradition or law. They did things their own way. Split could feel it in his gut. This thing was going to end badly.

  “Mira!”

  He spun and saw a man at the end of the bridge nearest him. Dressed in gray pants and a black shirt, he blended into the shadows perfectly. All Split could make out was a pencil-thin mustache above a sneering grin.

  “Find another way across,” Split said in low, mean Spanish.

  “But I want to go across this way,” the man answered in accented Spanish. He hadn’t moved. Split took a step closer to get a better look.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No,” the man said, stepping from the shadows. “You don’t understand.”

  Who the fuck did this guy think he was? Then Split recognized the accent. Salvadoran. Something struck him in the back with enough force to make him stumble. A hollow agony pierced his chest, only to be replaced by the wide-barbed head of an arrow. Split watched his own blood drip from the silvery metal. He turned and saw a man approaching him from the other end of the bridge, an empty spear gun in his hand.

  What the fuck?

  He tried to breathe but couldn’t find any air. Bubbles popped from his mouth, filling it with the taste of blood. He needed to tell Lucy that the Salvadorans were here. He raised the cell phone to his ear, then felt another slash of incredible pain. He started to scream when he saw the hand that had held the phone lying on the ground in front of him.

  He turned and saw blood pumping from the stump where his hand had been. Through the mist of his life’s essence he watched as the man with the sneer swung a machete toward his neck. Split managed to block the first blow, losing another section of his arm.

  The pain rendered him immobile. He fell to his side and stared at the tail lights of the cars entering San Pedro. Red lights moving down the road. Red lights everywhere. Red everything. Red the color of neon blood.

  He barely felt the blow that severed his head.

  Chapter 19

  Since ten P.M. Lucy had been getting reports of things happening all over San Pedro, and it wasn’t looking good. There were fires along 6th Street started by someone throwing Molotovs at a row of derelict apartments. Three alarms had gone out and a hook-and-ladder truck had been deployed. Two carjackings and a robbery had taken place along Gaffey Street. There’d already been one running gunfight along 25th Street when his boys had encountered a black Honda v6 scoping out a Laundromat. Reports were coming in of harassments and slow-moving vehicles everywhere. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think he was
in the middle of a wholesale invasion. Even his grandmother had been called by a host of abuelas complaining and wondering if her grandson had a handle on things.

  There was danger staying put in one place. Lucy didn’t want to be a target. He also didn’t want to be in a place where there’d be collateral damage. The Angels expected to get shot at and were prepared for that. Civilians, on the other hand, were either oblivious to what was going on or expected Lucy and the Angels to protect them.

  So the Angels had mobilized the command center and set up at a picnic table in Point Fermin Park. Not only were they far enough away from the street to not be a target, but there were only three ways to get to the park, and all three were being watched. Lucy felt confident that nothing short of an ICBM would be able to get through his defenses, and the last time he’d checked, the Salvadorans were fresh out of nuclear missiles.

  He had six of his men at his disposal. Jose G. coordinated things on the cell phone, taking in reports and addresses. He sat right next to Lucy, who occasionally took his phone to choreograph a particular event. Perez sat one table over and wore headphones attached to a police scanner. As reports came in, even if they were just a routine traffic stop, he marked them down. The L.A. police department, like a lot of police departments around the country, had tried to do away with brevity codes. So things like 11-27, 11-28 and 11-29, which were more or less checks conducted by a policeman with a stopped motorist for wants and warrants on both the car and the individual, were becoming more clearly stated. But those events that created havoc within the police department, such as an 11-98, were always encoded. It was this last “Officer Needs Assistance” message that let Lucy know the shit had truly hit the fan. Not only was MS 13 attacking the population, but they’d fired on a cop as well. Unless the cops knew what was going on, they’d think it was the Angels gone insane.

  A monopoly board lay upside down on the table. If they needed to they could flip the board over and pretend to play, but Lucy doubted they’d need that pretense. A map of San Pedro had been affixed to the back where red, green and black markers had been placed to note different events. The red markers indicated fires. The green markers indicated where MS 13 had been spotted. The black markers showed encounters between MS 13 and the Angels.

  At Lucy’s urging, they added another color, blue, to show where the cops were. He also put in a call to a friend of his on the force, Captain Fiesler, a tall blonde woman who lived across from Fort MacArthur and with whom he’d always had an understanding. She wasn’t on the phone but ten seconds before she agreed to meet with him. Lucy cleared her approach with his boys. Perez told him when she called in the 10-62 and gave the address of Point Fermin Park. No other information passed, so at least she hadn’t told them who she was going to meet. So far, so good. He was counting on the trust they’d built to get him through the night.

  But when she arrived, she was anything but calm. Her Crown Victoria squealed to a stop at the curb with the light bar flashing. She got out, slammed the door, adjusted her nightstick on her belt, and strode across the grass toward him.

  Not a good sign.

  At least she was alone.

  Lucy first met Fiesler when she was a sergeant and he was a fifteen-year-old delinquent. She’d arrested him for tagging, something she didn’t ordinarily bother with, but he was so brazen about it, applying the finishing touches as she sat at the curb in her Crown Vic with the lights flashing. Once he’d finished putting his sigil on the metal sign announcing the entry ramp of the Vincent Thomas Bridge which connects San Pedro and Long Beach, she’d arrested him, put him in the back of her patrol car, and let him ride around in the back for the next four hours.

  Lucy had found it interesting in a Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom sort of way. He didn’t want to be a cop, but he grew to appreciate everything they had to deal with. He even found himself chuckling when he saw some of the boys his own age trying to get the attention of the Angels. She’d roll up behind them as they tagged or broke into a car, then watch as they turned spazmodica when she spun up her lights, scrambling like rats into the alleys. But his smile faded as she kept letting each of them go, not even trying to run them down. After the fifth such occasion, when she scared Tino Trevino from where he was trying to bust into a letter box with a crowbar, he asked her why she’d taken the time to arrest him when she was letting everyone else go.

  “Respect.”

  “What do you mean? Respect what?”

  “Respect for authority. They have it. You don’t.”

  “You mean when they’re running? They’re just scared. That isn’t respect.”

  “Call it what you will. There’s not that much difference anyway.”

  “Do you mean that if I would have run, you wouldn’t have arrested me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  They were stopped at a light and she regarded him in the rearview mirror. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Yes, I would,” he insisted.

  “Okay. Let’s see if you can try this on for size.” She pulled away from the light. “Criminals have existed in societies since the very first crime. You’re nothing new, Louis Cabellos. What keeps societies from falling apart are the rules. Not that everyone follows them, but that everyone respects them. Tino knew he wasn’t supposed to be stealing Ms. Humphries’ welfare checks, but he was doing it anyway. When I rolled up on him, he took off, proving he knew it was wrong. You, on the other hand, weren’t smart enough to run. See, running shows us respect and lets us know that you know what you’re doing is wrong.”

  It’d taken him a few years to understand the devious truth behind her convoluted logic. He’d eventually come to understand that crime and criminality wasn’t such a bad thing. Society needed some of it. Crime was like a natural check on success. It was necessary but should occur in the background. And as long as he showed he understood that, he was allowed to continue.

  But the look on Captain Fiesler’s long Scandinavian face as she strode purposefully across the grass said she thought he’d forgotten that lesson. The dark blue uniform fit her snugly. Her large breasts, regular-sized waist, and wide hips would have been a turn-on had it not been for the gold badge, 9-mm pistol, and the two-foot length of billy club bouncing against her thigh.

  Trujillo began edging away, but Lucy murmured for him to stay put. He held up a hand to order the rest of them to remain calm. To keep the operation continuing, Lucy stood and met her halfway across the park.

  “I would have run from you out of respect, but I didn’t do this thing.”

  Her eyes flashed toward him, then went to his men. By the way she was examining them, he could tell she was remembering their criminal jackets, flipping through the mental catalogues of their crimes.

  “Your men are out in force.”

  “We thought it best in case we need to do something.”

  “I swung by your house. Your grandma says to come home.”

  “I’ll come home when it’s safe for them.”

  “Your dad was on the porch playing dominoes. I didn’t go up there.”

  Lucy’s old man wasn’t a stranger to such events. He probably had his shotgun in his lap, watching the street more than the black and white tiles.

  “I appreciate that.”

  She shrugged off the thanks. “Tell me, Louis. What the hell is going on?”

  He wanted to tell her everything was under control, but that wouldn’t fly. He also couldn’t tell her that they might have thrown gasoline on a match when Trujillo took out the three MS 13 bangers last night. He also couldn’t come on out and just tell the truth like a scared little chupaverga, or else his boys would wonder who was really in charge. All he could do was play the game.

  “Nothing too much. I thought maybe it was an early Halloween.”

  She glared at him. “So it’s going to be like that?”

  “How else could it be?” He bowed his head, but managed to look into her face.

  “You
know I could take you in right now.”

  “That would be a waste of time.”

  She shrugged. “It would make it look like I’m doing something.”

  “Maybe so, but then I’m not the one you want.”

  “Who do I want?”

  He waited until she was about to ask again, then: “The puto who caused the 10-98.”

  “What do you know about that, Louis?” Her voice dropped an octave.

  Suddenly a commotion hit everyone’s cell phones at the same time a report came into the Captain’s portable radio. They locked eyes.

  “Damn.”

  “You know who that was?”

  “Split.” Lucy spat on the ground.

  “What was he doing on the bridge?” she asked.

  “Looking out.”

  “For what?”

  “The Salvadorans.”

  “MS 13?” She stared into Lucy’s face. “They’re involved in this?”

  “Up to their wet-fucking-backs. All that noise on your radios is nothing but MS 13. It isn’t us pissing in our backyard.”

  “What are they doing in San Pedro?”

  “They’re making a run. How the hell do I know?” He turned to go, but paused a moment as he hung his head. “You watch yourself, Captain.”

  “You watch yourself, too.”

  She started back across the park.

  Lucy headed back to the map. He needed to get a sense of what was going on. Things suddenly felt out of control. But before he got ten feet, police radios and his cell phone erupted again. Perez let out a strangled cry.

  “Lucy!” Captain Fiesler yelled from across the park. “It’s your dad! They attacked the house!”

  A hole opened up in Lucy’s chest. He remembered the last words he’d said to his father. Be careful. There’s some serious shit going down out there. And he had left the old man alone to protect the family home.

  He turned and saw the expressions on the other bangers’ faces. Fear... no, terror. MS 13 was hitting too close. Each of them was thinking about their own families. Were they alive? Were they in danger?