by Ryan Gattis
I’m watching him walk his way toward us, trying a story about his car running out of gas on an office lady with her hair up, and then on a girl with arm tattoos that came out of the diner and went his way.
Both don’t say nothing. They just keep walking.
What I do when he gets closer is, I put myself between him and Rooster. He sees me do that and changes direction. He goes straight for the car instead, straight for Terco, his arm hanging out the window.
Up closer, I see this guy is missing the top of his right ear. It’s squared off on a angle, clean, like prolly a good knife did it. He’s short like me, couldn’t be more than a hundred pounds. And he’s light-skinned black like that manager lady at the bank. Mira something.
“Good-looking gentleman like you,” the guy says to Terco, “I know you got change.”
Lonely looks to the man before looking to me to see if I want him hurt. I shake my head. Lonely sees this and sits still where he is.
Terco brings his arm back into the car and puts on his best tough-guy face. “Get the fuck out of here, mayate.”
The guy ignores the slur, or don’t even know it is a slur, and keeps pushing. “C’mon, I know you got money for hair cream, so you got some for me.”
I want to smile but I don’t. Even if he’s ripping Terco, I can’t be having that out on the street, so I step up behind him all obvious. I want him to know I’m there. When he feels me get close, he turns quick.
I say to him, “Hey, I need you to keep walking.”
He hears in my voice how there’s command, like military or cops, except he’s smart enough to know we don’t have to wear uniforms or worry about holding up any laws. I see this guy look at himself in my sunglasses before he turns and goes, past the CAN. Towards Sixth.
When he’s gone a few steps but not so far away he can’t hear, Terco laughs after him and says, “See ya! You have a delicious day.”
I guess Terco didn’t realize how Rooster’s beside me now too, not looking in the window no more, and he says to Terco, “Get out.”
Meaning, get out of the car. Terco does it, but his look shows anybody looking how much he don’t like doing it.
Rooster lets him stand there and wait for what’s coming before he says, “I know you got more class in you than saying ‘delicious’ to somebody that probably doesn’t get enough to eat. What’s your problem?”
“Nothing’s my problem,” Terco says, sounding like everything is.
It don’t help that he tries putting his comb away in his back pocket before deciding to stick it in his front instead.
“Apologize to him.” Rooster holds out a twenty-dollar bill to Terco and makes him take it.
What the best part is, is that Terco actually tries to argue. He says, “But that hype’ll just put it in his arm!”
At that, Rooster just leans in close to Terco. “Then we get it right back.”
Rooster leaves it there. He’s not the type to ever tell somebody to do something twice. Terco knows this. He’s just trying to swallow his pride. I can see it stinging in there behind his eyes.
What I’m hoping is, this’ll teach him something, but I know it won’t. He’s not the learning type. Still, I’m about to enjoy the sight of Terco apologizing. Already he’s walking stiff and fast, going after the guy, trying to catch up before the crosswalk goes for Sixth Street.
But what happens then is the phone I’m carrying rings when it’s not supposed to. Rooster hears it and shoots me a sharp type of look, the type I feel in my chest, the type that reminds me how real he is.
Me and him, we both know this call’s bad news. So I cross the sidewalk to the car, open the door to the backseat, and get in before I answer.
14
What I’m thinking first when that phone rings is Prolly something’s off with the money I set up. My guts know it.
I let it keep ringing. That it’s going now means a problem is finding us, one that’s about to be Rooster’s to fix. They don’t call unless they messed up or need something big. Or both.
Hey, I don’t have to tell Lonely nothing. He’s already getting out the front and taking a short walk to the curb by the time I pick up the line. I don’t say hello.
I say, “Bueno.”
That’s it. Nobody says names. If you know the number, you know who it is you’re calling. On the other side, it’s just a guy like me in another crew confirming the connection.
“Yeah,” he says, and that just means we’re here. We’re ready.
I move over, making room for Rooster to get in on the near side and sit beside me in the backseat. When he’s settled, I put it on speaker.
He don’t carry a phone, so I carry it for him. I run all the phones. This one is in Leya’s cousin’s friend’s name, and I give her cash flat, plus a little extra, to pay the bill each month when I take it.
I say phones since I rotate them. Single women are best. They use their phones a lot. The world is a scary place. It makes more sense for them to request blocked numbers and use them.
I run about thirty lines at once, borrowing them a week here or a few days there, picking them up, taping camera lenses over, until I drop them back off with people that use them like everyday phones.
When there’s no dedicated line for business, not even a prepaid, it’s like putting a bunch of little toys outside in a snowstorm. They get buried. What I like to call it is random layering, since I’m hiding a few short calls from blocked sources in plain sight every second month or so on a law-abiding citizen’s bill.
Rooster don’t know I copy down the call log dates and times before I hand the phones back so I know exactly what call came or went when, and then I make notes on who got called and for what. If I know where it happened, I write that down too. He wouldn’t like that if he knew. He’d hate it.
Rooster never talks on any phone about business, on the chance it’s recorded. He listens. He uses American Sign Language to tell me what to ask back. This is so he’ll never be on paper.
It’s the same on the other end, but I don’t think they use sign. More than likely, they’re writing stuff down for the speaker to say. This way, if someone DEA like Collins was overhearing this call right now, he might think it was two people having a conversation, me and the other guy, not four.
Even if he thinks it’s more than two, it don’t matter. He can’t prove it. There’s no words on tape to use as evidence.
This call kicks off with us getting told what we already knew was coming. DEA came, busted everything up. They got in the safe, but, and here’s where everything got messed up, they didn’t confiscate all of the 920 gees that was in it.
Rooster’s calm but inside he’s tripping out. I can see it in his eyes. He signs, Why not? So I say it.
There’s not much of a pause before the answer comes in, so I’m thinking they’d worked out a few things to say before they called.
“Because the money was gone. We saw paperwork. Thirty-three thousand, it said. We know the safecracker took it. We got somebody saying she saw him walk out and put some bags in his Jeep before the dog came back.”
Dog’s DEA. What my first thought is, I can’t put down without cursing. That’s all Leya’s fault, getting me to tone it down for the kid. My second thought is what type of idiot gets seen like that?
Rooster’s already thinking what I’m thinking. He signs, No.
It’s shorthand. What this means is, don’t repeat on the phone what I’m about to sign to you. Then he signs, Nothing organized. This clown not planning to steal.
There’s not really a sign for clown. It’s peabrain, like stupid. But if we were talking, he’d say clown. So that’s what I hear in my head.
There’s so much tone you can put on sign, so much body language and flavor if you want to. It can be the most emotional language on earth if you let it be. Rooster’s super calm, super reserved when he says it. Precise, I’d say. Monotone hands, if that makes sense.
I agree with him, but I’m more agita
ted. I sign back, He sees money, he takes. The way I sign this says I think this thief’s greedy and stupid.
Rooster raises his eyebrows, but don’t disagree, so I speak up and ask for everything they know about the safecracker. I need a description. As soon as they say it, I memorize it.
Rooster signs, What else? So I ask it. What comes next is a bad surprise.
We get told about two holes and dynamite dust that got poured down inside the door of the safe. Even I’m not cool enough to keep my scoff from coming out when I hear that news.
That was definitely not something I seen when I was there. Rooster looks at me and I look at him at the same time, both of us super pissed off. That wasn’t the deal.
Rooster signs, Who did it? I say it.
“I just found out,” the guy on the other end says.
There’s no way this’s true, but we have to act like we believe him.
Again, Rooster signs. No. Then he signs, Safe. Later tell me how we got it.
This time, anger jumps in his fingers, like he’s knifing words into the air. As he’s doing that, I’m thinking how I definitely don’t want to be the guy that got this safe for us. We knew his cousin got shot through the spine and paralyzed by some sheriffs on a wild bust in Hawaiian Gardens last year.
If anybody put the powder in there, it was him trying to do some type of random payback on anybody with a uniform, is my guess. That’s gonna haunt him and the dumbass deserves it too.
Rooster’s signing again. Anything else? Basically, he’s wondering if there’s any more we need to know before we handle this.
When I ask it, they say, “No.” I say, “Okay.” And that’s the end of that. No goodbyes, just a click.
Rooster needs thinking time, so I step out of the car onto the sidewalk. Terco’s back and looking like a wet cat, so I send him into the diner to get one of every pastry type so Rooster can do his tasting later in private.
Terco likes taking orders from me about as much as he likes getting told to apologize, but he does it without acting like a little kid so I’m good.
Outside’s hotter than I remember it being, and my stomach don’t like that. It don’t like that Rooster’s not happy with what he heard either, but even when things go good, he’s not happy. You don’t get to be Rooster being happy.
You get to be him by being unhappy, by whatever he has never being enough. He’s always after ways for things to go smoother. He’s always after ways to get more.
But I’m angry. I put Rooster’s ninety-two gees in the safe with my own hands. If I’d known there was something stupid going on, I never would’ve done it. How this whole thing happened was Rooster sent me down to negotiate. We knew DEA was coming since I told them to come.
When I stacked that money in the safe, I knew it was never coming back. That was the plan. It was meant to get taken, to buy us time. DEA could take what they wanted. It was for them.
How much, we couldn’t say. It was an offering, almost cariño. They could skim however much they wanted to at the scene or Collins could find some paper way to add it to his budget down the road, however they do that.
Rooster has always known I kick Collins scraps. He put me up to it. A lot of times, I give Collins wrong information before something goes down for us, or I give him right information but too late. I tip him to Rooster’s enemies too.
Sometimes, we even have to set up a bust, like this time. It was supposed to be a big one and now it’s not. That’s a problem.
Rooster organized it so nine of the other crews would put in 10 percent each. The idea in pooling is to keep losses down by going in together to make something big enough to satisfy the DEA since they need their dope and cash on the table from time to time.
What Rooster calls that is feeding the dog, and this safe was supposed to be a little feast. It’s the type of thing that makes them proud and sluggish.
The safest and best time to move something is after DEA has a big bust and they’re all congratulating themselves on TV about keeping streets safe for kids. That’s when you run it hard and quiet, when they’re full and slow.
You feed them an offering to move much bigger shipments somewhere else. This type of thinking is why people talk criminal business like it’s chess. But it’s so much bigger than that. Not even watching a grand master playing eight games at once against eight opponents comes close. It’s bigger than that too.
Hey, in our world, every small game is linked together into a larger one. Except with this, there’s no such thing as boards with squares. There’s only a map of the land and a mess of pieces.
For Rooster, his whole crew is split up into different parts, all going at once. Lynwood, Cudahy, South Gate now, and a chunk of Long Beach too. In all of those places, there’s pieces moving all the time, doing work, and there’s no maximum to how many he can have.
What I mean is, there might be forty pieces in one city and thirty-two in another, all linked up by orders they might never understand all the way, but they do work anyway. Where it gets crazy is, you have to bring in the idea that there are other people with the same rank as Rooster all over the city, like in Rancho San Pedro for example. And when you add more people, you add more places, and all of these things impact on each other. It’s not anywhere close to chess then.
What it is, is territories and war zones. It’s strategy. Troop movements. It’s straight-up Risk, but with chess pieces. It’s giving up lil homie pawns in one neighborhood to move three bishop lieutenants anywhere you want. It’s picking up a caballo from one zip code and putting him on another by sending him on an errand, like when me and Big Danny get sent out to put ninety-two gees in a safe.
That’s the only way it’s explainable, and now one greedy little weasel just stirred himself into the middle of this business like he matters.
He don’t.
15
I get a couple tabs of orange chewable antacid going and hope they can get this stomach thing settled. The holes in the safe door, that’s information we can use. I just don’t know how yet. What’s messing with me now is, did the safecracker know about the money? Did he just open it, see it, and decide it was his day to break on it? Did somebody tell him about it or was it just dumb luck?
I don’t believe the dumb-luck thing, but right now there’s no telling how he knew, and the only thing that matters is finding him. The key to that is not caring what happens to him.
Hey, the easiest way to survive in the drug game is never catch a conscience. I think there’s some real truth in how that’s said. It makes it sound like your conscience is something outside of you, not part of you. It’s basically like a cold, something that can make you sick. Something that can even kill you.
It’s not like it isn’t true. When I was young, it didn’t matter. Drugs were something that always happened to someone else, somebody far away. Once it was out of my hand, what somebody did with it was on them.
What my problem with growing older is, is that you realize you’re tied into something bigger than yourself. Your actions have consequences, and even sometimes nonactions have consequences.
It’s possible to hurt somebody you never even met that way, hurt them pretty bad. The biggest problem with putting off a conscience for years is when you finally do catch it, it comes back in the door with interest. Bad interest.
It gives you a rash of sores on your chest that a doctor says isn’t psoriasis but presents “psoriasis-like symptoms.” I didn’t realize until then that I’d actually have something real to get off my chest.
Nobody but Leya knows that whenever I put money in safes like that, I get wild thoughts. She calls them “get-out thoughts” since they’re about me getting off this track I’ve been on almost my whole life and running free, not being tied to nobody but her and our little man.
If you want the truth, I’m more jealous of the safecracker than I’ll ever say. I mean, if he’s smart, he’s gone. I hope so too. Man, I don’t want to have to see his face. I don’t want to
have to handle things if he gets caught when I’m still around. That business of sorting him out will fall on me, and I don’t know if my body can even take it anymore.
I didn’t always run numbers for Rooster. I did other things too. There was the Cuco thing, but there were others. I pointed a gun and I used it when I got told to.
Those things, they add up in you. They do. They got a weight you can’t move. If it’s not some sores over my heart, it’s my stomach.
Before Leya, it was about me being ready to do whatever at any minute, but being with her and having Felix, seeing my face in his little face, that makes me want to get old. It makes me want to get out.
I turn back to the car and show Rooster with my hand that I’m gonna call Collins. For Collins, the sign we use is dog too.
Normally, I’d make a d with my index up and my middle finger on my thumb, then I snap those before I make a g, but we’re in public so I pat my leg twice and act like I’m just looking for my keys. That means dog too.
Rooster’s only rule with sign is never show it in public in case you’re being watched and taped. Never let anyone know you even know it. Only do it if you play it off like it’s something other than sign.
Rooster nods up at me when he sees this. He knows it needs to happen, but that means do it and be quick.
The sign language thing was Rooster’s idea from years ago. We use ASL but he’s thinking of changing it up to the español LSE. His daughter’s deaf, so he had to pick it up, and once he did, he knew it could change the game by taking him off the map completely.
She’s thirteen now, sharp in science and funny as hell. And no one even knows her dad exists, so I’d say it’s working. He turned what so much of the hearing world calls a disability into a serious criminal ability. I respect the hell out of that. I always will.
I switch phones to call Collins on the special number, but I don’t dial yet. What’s difficult here is, Collins didn’t know how much money was in the safe before his guy ripped it, so prolly with all the heroin involved, he was thinking it was a decent bust and it didn’t raise any red flags for him at all.