A Little Too Much

by John Shannon

  H8 WAITIN-No shit L8r

  They went back to watching and fretting. Stoney wondered if his on-board Torrance cop was selling him out. Why now? And if it was some kind of sellout, he sure hoped for a no-show from the Colombians, not an ambush. From time to time he turned to look at the Green Valley Circle entrance to the cemetery. It was above them, where they’d walked in after parking outside, making their way part way down the hill between the Garden of Sarah and the Garden of Leah. The entry gate had maybe thirty feet of elevation advantage on them, not much, but enough to make things a mess if the Colombianos came in that way.

  In the end, though, the Colombianos came in down below off Centinela exactly where he’d figured, though not in the Lincolns and Caddies he’d expected, or the exotic Maybach they’d flaunted at Costco. They looked like stolen cars, random street rubbish. That was his first sign that something was going wrong. It meant they had allies here to get them what they wanted – probably Eighteenth Street, the biggest Latino gang in the world. Eighteenth Street wasn’t like the usual smalltime local gang. They had scores of affiliate gangs, at least twenty thousand members in the L.A. clikas alone, but more important, they had colonized their home countries in Central America and then allied with the Colombian cartels. They had the resources of a medium-size army.

  Wakey soljers!

  The message probably wasn’t necessary. The five old cars below had arrayed themselves in the wide spot of the entry road like military vehicles about to swarm a hostile village. When the car doors came open, Stoney could see it wasn’t just the black Colombianos coming out. They had allies now, bronze-skinned Latinos, and every one heavily armed. He saw AKs and Uzis and a street-sweeper shotgun, and then a long fat olive-colored tube that he didn’t like at all. He heard the sound of an explosion at least a mile away. He had no idea what it was, but he guessed with a chill that it was a diversion, meant to keep the cops busy elsewhere. Then a second explosion far to the east. They were up against real pros now, and there were a lot of them, with heavy weapons.

  Retreat he keyed in, but when he looked uphill, a supermarket eighteen-wheeler truck was parked hard across the Green Valley gates to block the exit. Shit, he thought, why didn’t I hear it? Just as another explosion went off in the distance. There’d be no help from cops.

  Go! Get out alive he texted.

  WHASSUP?

  2 much 4 us!

  An old beat-up panel van started up the hill fast. A tall Latino standing at the edge of the parking circle down below was looking straight at Stoney’s roof with big binoculars. Did they have satellites? Drones? The van stopped just below them and Latino foot soldiers fanned out of it, reminding him of red ants swarming a mound of weaker black ants. A couple of his Squad B soldiers across the road broke discipline and began firing bursts at them, and whoever had the grenade launcher over there tried to take out a second oncoming car but hit only road with a useless orange burst. We’re amateurs, he thought.

  The Colombian team seemed to have plenty of RPGs, and three of the missiles smoked their way across the afternoon straight for Squad B’s columbarium. The explosions sent thin marble and metal urns flying everywhere. The third blast, slightly delayed, brought much of the roof caving in, and the freestanding walls soon came after. These damn things weren’t nearly as substantial as they looked.

  ‘Go for home!’ Stoney shouted to his own squad, and he was one of the first to dive off the back side of the roof. Luckily he knew how to fall and roll, and he did no damage to his ankles. He headed due east, uphill, to the nearest perimeter wall and the supermarket truck, until he saw muzzle flashes ahead of him, left and right – Jesus, they were there, too! The whole of L.A.’s Latinos had come down on them! He did a quick U-turn downhill. A big concussion punched him in the chest before he even heard it. Something more powerful than the RPGs had hit the columbarium he had just leapt off, and the building was now collapsing like a wall of mud bricks.

  How could this be happening in the middle of a big American city? Surely, we have law and order here. He almost laughed aloud at himself – remembering that not long ago he’d thought he had the Colombians outgunned. He loped downhill across grass and grave markers toward the little temple and waterfall, while all the gunfire seemed to be still above him and east. He heard two more explosions behind him, probably grenades, and then another of the really big bursts, which seemed to stop most of the answering fire as definitively as pulling a plug. Shit, guys, run! Rule one of the ghetto is never kick a bear if you can’t kill it. But he knew some of these guys lived in a tightly wired world of their own self-respect, where you had to guard your props every minute. Some of the Rollin’ Seventies would rather die than look gutless.

  He stumbled over a brass vase planted in the earth and heard individual gunshots not far away, then the crackles of high velocity bullets passing near his ears. All his attention was on attaining the little temple below, though really, it was no more than a low wall and skinny columns, probably no more substantial as refuge than the columbariums, but it offered some kind of irrational escape from the madness.

  ‘Stoney!’ a magnified voice called from down the hill. ‘Come to papi, now! Medicine time, amigo!’

  He thought of the big Desert Eagle pistol, in his coat pocket now and banging his hip, but knew it would do him little good. It was just a dead weight. He’d lost the submachine gun in his jump from the roof a long time ago. Just as useless. He felt the sun on him, the light breeze as he ran, the smell of mown grass, and wondered if he’d ever experience these wonderful things again. He knew he couldn’t be taken alive.

  There were a few more isolated shots from uphill, not at him but far behind, terribly like a ruthless platoon finishing off the wounded. He leapt the low wall into the temple, and before he could brake himself, he almost ran straight into a two-thirds size metal sculpture of Al Jolson on one knee with an insipid smile, his arms outspread as if welcoming the sudden embrace of something terrible. Who the hell was Al Jolson, he thought. A singer, back in the mists. The word ‘Mammy!’ swam in his near-consciousness, from long ago, and a sense of early talkies. A gunshot pinged crazily off the bronze sculpture.

  ‘¡Alto! ¡Pare disparar!’ He knew enough Spanish to figure that one out – Stop shooting. The asshole wanted him alive. Gunfire began to taper off and then sputter out.

  It had been Oreteguaza’s voice, all right, but the cheap megaphone sent so much reverb off the surrounding hills and structures that Marcus Stone couldn’t make out where the man was standing. The parking area below was filling up incongruously with a tangle of shiny new cars with stickers on their windows, the black sedans and limos of a genuine funeral.

  ‘You my fre-en’, Señor Estooone! Come to my arms for mercy! We can make us a new treaty.’ The voice, overamplified, was almost impossible to decipher, but he could just make it out. Fat chance he’d surrender with the image of Li’l Joker fresh in mind.

  There were sirens all over the map, and some of the cop cars had to be coming their way – the first time in his life police sirens had been welcome. ‘Law and order is near!’ he shouted.

  ‘In Los Yunaites? You make a joke!’ A crude and humorless laugh hawked and hawked, like a donkey braying into a bucket.

  Below him, Stoney saw a large Jewish burial party in homburgs and sidecurls accumulating around the mortuary and chapel near the biggest pool – the bottom of Al Jolson’s stepped waterfall. The more recently arrived cars were parked anyhow, jammed at angles into the driveway and lot, and dozens of dark-suited men were getting out and standing beside their cars trying to decipher what had gone on up the hill. The men all had baleful looks, and a few women who had stepped out had full-cover black dresses. Those near the street jumped back into their cars and backed away, but most stood transfixed, as if witnessing some odd but possibly explainable ceremony. Maybe it was a movie being shot.

  ‘Come out, Señor Estone! We know right where you hiding.’

  Stoney was starting to feel f
aintly sleepy, and he knew that was a really bad sign. He should have taken the dex. He tried to get a glimpse of his arch-enemy, looking down over the wall and then toward the jalopies of the enemy brigade, and what he saw gave him a chill. Two men knelt just off the roadway with RPG rocket launchers; their bulbous olive noses aimed straight for his little sculptural hideout.

  ‘Shit!’

  Just as smoke trails closed on the tiny round temple, he leapt over the far side out on to grass. He flattened to the ground as the explosions went off and hunks of stucco flew everywhere, but still his lucky shield held. A big section of column flew past him, and the domed temple roof crashed straight down, the sound like a huge jaw biting through a thousand stale crackers. Stoney raised his head an inch and saw – only a few inches away – the head and shoulder and one outstretched arm of the bronze statue of Al Jolson, wide-eyed with surprise. Bye-bye, dude, whoever you were back in the day.

  There was only one way out of here now that might protect him. Water still splashed down from one pool to the next, disturbed a little now by clots of debris. Fortunately, there was a lot of foggy concrete dust in the air. Stoney jumped into the first pool without even thinking, took two steps on the slippery concrete and leapt over the weir. His front foot skidded and he came down on his ass in two feet of water.

  Some of them had seen him, and bullets made that nasty bullwhip crack near his head. He jumped to the next pool, landed better, and then the next. Two more pools to get to the bottom, to the parking lot.

  There was another blast, far up at the columbarium where he’d started out, and he assumed someone else was still alive up there, or had been. Stoney felt bad for Harper and his crew, but only momentarily.

  As he jumped the next weir, he heard a quiet sizzling go by his ear, and he guessed someone had a silenced rifle, not too far away. Subsonic rounds from a silencer didn’t give off that signature shock wave, the snap-pop. He’d been around long enough to know that.

  He jumped into the the big round pond at the bottom, caught himself on spread feet that slipped a little on the algae-slicked cement and immediately took two steps and jumped out and ran across a few feet of grass toward the crowds of men in black suits and homburgs in the parking lot. They cleared a path as if he had the plague. The cars were so jammed in now that he gave up the idea of stealing one of them. Cars were backed out double on to the street, and he’d never get a car out the gate. The firing seemed to have stopped for the moment, as if someone had decided that accidentally killing these weird-looking Jewish civvies was a bad idea.

  ‘I mean you no harm!’ Orteguaza’s braying voice called.

  ‘What’s going on?’ a man nearby asked him, plucking at Stoney’s coat.

  ‘They love to kill!’ he shouted. ‘Drug lords!’

  The words were black magic, and people started diving back into their cars or into the mortuary for safety. He ran through those who were too stunned to move, and they still parted for him like the Red Sea.

  One man stood his ground and held out both hands toward him, with his fingers spread. ‘Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha-olam …’

  ‘Thank you, man,’ Stoney mumbled as he dodged hard past him, hoping it had been a blessing, and headed toward the front gate. A few gunshots crackled past. He could tell that the tangle of cars in the entrance would keep anyone from coming after him, at least for a minute or two. Bless you all, Jews!

  Outside the gates, he ran to the left so the stone walls around the cemetery would give him cover, then he jumped into the street, across a lane, to where a woman with her hair in curlers slowed her station wagon full of children for him, startled. He banged his huge pistol against her window. ‘Move over, ma’am! I won’t hurt any of you. I need your car now!’

  Everyone inside the car screamed at once.

  SIXTEEN

  A Beet on Fire

  Jenny fed Gloria tiny dribs of rich beef broth, letting her sip it off the tip of the spoon. They’d given her one of the doc’s syringes of morphine eight hours back, before she was fully alert and able to refuse, but she was adamantly refusing the second shot even though her face contorted now and again with pain.

  ‘Should have taken your morphine, officer.’

  ‘We’re very tolerant of pain,’ Gloria said, her tight expression saying otherwise.

  ‘You mean we as in women or we as in Native Americans?’ Jenny asked.

  Teelee Greene was still in the corner of the room with her napping child, rocking a little on her heels where she squatted barefoot, watching only nominally, her eyes in fact fixed on some place on the far wall, like a cat’s, like a shaman seeing some other thing entirely.

  ‘We made of cast iron,’ she said, without specifying further. ‘Are the cops in Bako looking for me?’

  ‘Sonny is out trying to find out our situation. If the doc hadn’t told us not to move you yet, we’d have you back in L.A. and out of their reach.’

  ‘Those two cops …?’

  ‘They’re dead, hon. Don’t talk about it unless you need to.’

  ‘Umm.’

  Which could have meant anything.

  ‘Never been …’ Gloria said, and then took a very long time puzzling over the next words. ‘So powerless. Such hopeless rage.’

  ‘Hush. Life can hand you too much sometimes, honey.’ Jenny rested her hand on the woman’s cut and swollen hand on the blanket.

  ‘Mortification,’ Teelee enunciated all of a sudden. As a child, she’d been a Catholic, and maybe that was a word out of some deep recess of bygone beliefs.

  They both looked at the small fragile woman hugging her sleeping child, but her eyes were still off somewhere else.

  ‘What does Jack know?’ Gloria asked. In speaking, she was moving her jaw as little as possible.

  ‘Not much. But he calls and calls.’

  ‘Keep him away. Don’t tell him a thing. Or make something up. They’d really hurt him.’

  ‘We know that, hon.’

  ‘Spoon me some beer. I command it. I need to relax to think.’

  Jenny chuckled. ‘Then I obey. Teelee, honey, could you get a Heineken from the fridge and pour it into a soup bowl?’

  Teelee came to life and rose gracefully to her feet, clinging hard to her groggy child as if something unspeakably evil might pop out of nowhere at any time to claim the little girl. ‘And one for you, love?’ she asked.

  ‘No. You’re bananas, Gloria.’

  For all the pain she must have been in, Gloria offered a weak smile. ‘Don’t worry. My only mission now is trying to keep L.A. macho men with too many weapons from coming after Bakersfield macho men with too many weapons. Jack could be pretty hard to deal with, but think of LAPD SWAT declaring war on Bakersfield. Sixty-seven Rambos in 3D!’

  ‘We’ve envisioned all this, hon. It’s never tidy with men.’ Jenny Ezkiaga moved her hand to the woman’s forehead, felt the fever. ‘Women together can tame this.’

  ‘I wish it were always true.’

  ‘We make it true.’

  Teelee brought in the opened beer bottle and a bowl and fresh teaspoon.

  ‘This home right here, your home, is a holy place,’ Gloria declared.

  Jack Liffey and Winston Pennycooke sat on the uncomfortable Adirondack chairs that had been provided outside the motel rooms for those who wished to watch the Pacific Ocean sunset and weren’t very particular about the unsightly scene intervening – the parking lot and busy highway, plus a row of beachwear shops on the far side. The mock Sputnik on its steel pole, leaking glimmers from dozens of pinholes, pretty much ruined the sky, too. It was actually the kind of memorably trashy L.A. vista that Jack Liffey usually saved up to share with Maeve. Beyond all imagining. They hadn’t had the TV on and knew nothing of the shooting war going on at the cemetery.

  ‘I hate feeling like a fifth wheel,’ Jack Liffey said.

  ‘I-an-I don’ know what dat mean,’ Winston said.

  Jack Liffey noticed that he’d reverted all the way back
to his comfortable vernacular, but always with a bit of a cocky grin.

  ‘A third tit when you have twins.’

  ‘Ah – wurtless. Can we help Ty someway? Him OK in my esteem.’

  ‘Mine, too. When Stoney’s man hired you to chase Ty off, did he take you to meet Stoney?’

  ‘No, but I seeit. Over de hills in dat big valley dere, in a bunch of rich-man houses. Wood … lawn?’

  ‘Woodland Hills?’

  ‘Dat it!’

  ‘Some of that’s big money.’

  ‘Not dis guy. He live in de servant house, out by de swim pool. Nice servant house, but him not stoosh with no easy money.’

  ‘OK, let’s go talk to Stoney, or look at the house, if you can find it.’

  Winston puzzled a moment, blocking out with a palm the last of the blood red sunset light. The sun was just touching its burning disc on to the black ocean, visible between two shops. ‘I know there a reason we gwine talk to de mon, but I don’ overstan’ what it is,’ Winston Pennycooke said. There was no expression at all on his face.

  Jack Liffey looked up at the bogus satellite, as the entire sky reddened over their heads. He smiled. He might have been smiling at anything. ‘I don’t know either, my friend. It’s a rare damn day when I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘Tennessee Williams is so hard to get your head around,’ Bunny complained. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not PC to say it, but he’s so damn gay. Even some of his women have the sensibility of gay males.’

  ‘Which one are you doing?’

  They were outside on the narrow rock patio, facing the coming sunset and drinking Bunny’s favorite cocktail, a Cosmopolitan, mainly vodka plus cranberry, lime and bitters, which Maeve figured Bunny had picked up from some trendy bar.

  ‘We only do scenes. It’s just a workshop.’

  ‘You’ve never had a gay experience?’ Maeve asked vaguely. She thought of her own brief but all-consuming passion for Ruthie Loew in her last year of high school. Ruthie had been a notch or two up the social register, had lived in the richie-rich Palos Verdes Hills, and had taught her how to drink absinthe – dripped through a sugar cube that rested on a special perforated spoon – while most of her classmates were still learning to drink beer without making a face.