by Scott Frank
“I’m curious.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I spent a large chunk of my life yesterday looking at LAX security footage of Mr. Cooper. I got him coming off the plane carrying the duffel. I got him getting into a shuttle. Ten minutes later he shows up at the Payless counter. They got six cameras on the lot, two on the counter, four on the parking lot, and the exit booth. You can watch him as he writes down the directions, then follow him outside as he walks to the car and puts the duffel in the trunk. He sits there a minute, adjusts the seat, whatever, then he backs out…drives to the booth, hands over his agreement, and goes left out of the lot onto Century Boulevard.”
Kelly shrugged. “Okay.”
“Freeway’s to the right.”
Kelly remembered the chicken-scratch handwriting and thought of Roy Cooper lying in bed, talking about The Kid.
She said, “Maybe he got confused.”
“He not two minutes earlier got directions on how to get to Martin Shine’s place in North Hollywood. First thing the clerk tells him, would have to tell him, which he writes down is to go right out of the parking lot to the 405. The entrance is right there. You pull out of the lot and go left, you see right away you’re heading back toward the airport.”
“So what else is to the left?”
“Lots of things,” he said, “but most notably a FedEx Office Center.”
Kelly looked up at him.
“Like a block away.”
“And you got him there.”
“Picking up a package. Just the right size. From guess where?”
“Gold Shield Security. College Point, Queens.”
“How ’bout that?”
Kelly shook her head. “Jesus,” she said. “He really made it easy for you.”
“In all fairness, he wasn’t supposed to get mugged.”
“Now all you gotta do is find him.”
“And I will,” he said. “While you go look for the other three tiny Gs.”
She sipped her coffee for a moment and just looked back at him.
He smiled. “What?”
“Why haven’t you said anything to me about my little rant?”
He didn’t move, just kept smiling at her.
“I would think that you might have had some reaction.”
“Do you care what I think?”
“More than what anyone else thinks.”
“That’s funny.”
“How’s that?”
“If that were true, you would have said something to me. You would have told me what the fuck was going on inside you.”
“So I hurt your feelings?”
He looked around the room.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can take it, whatever it is you have to say.”
He said, “All right,” and then leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and said, “I think you embarrassed yourself.”
She laughed. “I’ll say.”
“I get that you were pissed off about Steven leaving you. I get that you went and got drunk and said some shit about shit that you weren’t really mad at, but was easier to be mad at than deal with your own shit. And I don’t even care about how racist it was because, to be honest, part of it was true, but most of it was just stupid. At first I thought it was just exactly what it sounded like: the ranting of a fuckin’ drunk.”
“Okay.” That one hurt.
“But what it really was, was suicide. And I never saw you that way. I’m sitting next to you, day in, day out, and you never say a word to me.”
“You said that.”
“I’m saying it again.”
“So you are hurt.”
“I’m not through.”
She shut up and waved him on.
“What hurt me, what broke my heart was realizing that you didn’t take yourself seriously. That you figured that you were enough of a joke that you could actually say that shit and get away with it. That you didn’t care if you were remembered as just another asshole.”
She nodded, wondered why she opened this door. She didn’t want to hear any of this. She already knew it.
“But,” Rudy went on, “if what you say is true, that you don’t care about the job anymore, then, by all means, stay here and get drunk and stoned and scissor your cute neighbor all day, I don’t give a fuck. Just tell me now so I can stop taking you seriously and start forgetting about you.”
“Jesus, fatso.” Kelly realized that her hand was shaking and carefully put down the coffee cup. “Wow.”
They sat in silence for a while. Well, not complete silence as the gardener was out in the courtyard with his leaf blower. Kelly caught a glimpse of him through the blowing curtain, had been wanting to go out there and tell him that all he was doing was blowing dust and shit particles into the air, making everyone’s unit smell like diesel and dirt, when she realized that she’d just completely tuned out Rudy. Shit. How often had she done that before? She turned back to him and saw that he had been watching her the entire time.
He finally shook his head and got up.
“I have to go. I’m catching a plane to New York.”
“What for?”
“Go see Mr. Cooper’s place of residence. If it exists. And pay a visit to Gold Shield Security.”
He started for the door.
Kelly said, “Hey.”
He turned back to her.
“The other kid in the video, the pretty one, I don’t know who he is, but he looks a lot like a kid I remember, got shot in the back a few years ago, at a basketball game downtown. Cole Bennett, I think his name was.”
“You think that’s him?”
“Cole’s in a wheelchair,” she said. “But I seem to recall he had a little brother.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe I’ll start there.”
She felt Rudy looking at her to see if she was for real and lit another cigarette and sat back. She could quit her job later. What she couldn’t do was fuck over Rudy, the only person left in her life that actually cared about her.
Rudy knew better than to make a big deal and said, “Sounds good,” and reached for the door, but then turned back and added, “I don’t like it when you call me fatso.”
She looked at him.“It’s ironic.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“You’re skinnier than me, for fuck’s sake.”
“Whatever. I’m asking you to stop.”
“Anything else?”
He thought about it. “No,” he said. “I think we’re good.”
“Phew.”
“But just so as you know—”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“If I come back here and I find a bong or a bottle of anything stronger than breast milk, I’m going down the hall and busting your girlfriend.”
When Science was eight or nine, he used to listen to his brother talk about “putting in work for the set.” Cole would say something like “Banging ain’t no part-time thing. It’s all day every day. It’s a life.” At night, Cole would lie in the bed across the room from Science and tell him, “You need to be down even when ain’t nobody else down with you. You get caught, you don’t ever tell. You ride the beef like a good soldier.” When Cole got his driver’s license, he’d drive Science to the park and sit with him and tell him, “You gotta be ready to kill and not care. You gotta be ready to die and not care. Only thing you care about is your set. You love your set and you hate your enemy.”
Then their older brother, Guy, joined the Navy and then Cole got shot in the back. And then Cole’s best friend, Levon, got shot in the stomach and would have a bag strapped to his hip for the rest of his life. And while Cole kept up a good front, said that it was all just a test, he pretty much stopped talking about “banging as a career” after that.
Science felt like he was being tested right now. He was on his own, fully on his own, with nobody out there to help him. But that was how he wanted it. He had stood up to Mr. Freeze and come off like a real soldier. Go ahead, shoot me
, motherfucka. Less than twenty-four hours later, it was all over YouTube and Science was an instant Ghetto Star. No way he was gonna wallbang his life away like all them other clowns. Run around tagging walls proclaiming other OGs or, worse, some lame-ass rhyme somebody thought up while smoking a bowlful of weed.
No, Science had real shit to do.
Those first few hours, he had to admit, he missed Truck. He felt scared, way out of his depth. So after a long night of hiding in the back of a car, he walked home, only to find a sedan parked out front of his house with city plates. He went around back and could see his mom talking to a lady cop, the same one he’d seen on TV, the one that fucked up that Whitsett Ave homie with a chair and a phone book.
So he kept on walking. And after two full days on the streets by himself, like Moses wandering the desert, he had a vision. All at once, he knew exactly how he would parlay his big play with Mr. Freeze into something way bigger.
The vision came to him at about three a.m. Science had been walking along Vanowen Street for the better part of an hour, was thinking about where he might get something to eat, when the sidewalk began to rise and fall in long waves.
Science stood there riding the heaving cement as the few cars on the street at that hour all came to a dead stop. One woman got out of her Kia, took one look at the power lines overhead swaying forty-five degrees in either direction, and started screaming.
But Science stayed calm. Cool as Mr. Freeze, and for the first time all night, he realized that he wasn’t afraid. Somehow, he knew, he just knew that he was fine, that this was actually the beginning of something, not the end. And when that feeling still hadn’t left him another twenty-four hours later, Science knew that it never would.
This was his moment.
He would create his own set—the Vanowen Shakers, or the VShakes, he hadn’t decided which—and take over all business in the ’hood. He would do it without any sanctions from Vineland, because, fuck it, now that the Marcus twins had been conveniently pushed off the planet, there really wasn’t anyone left to get in his way. The twins were the real soldiers. Everyone else was rapping on YouTube.
The problem was, without Truck, he had no lieutenant. No road dog he could count on. He had L, but that dude spent most of every day baked. He wasn’t so much scary as skyed up. Plus, Science heard through L’s shorty, Keshawnda, that L was right now lamming with his cousins somewhere in Northridge. No doubt laying low. Science wasn’t worried about him, though. Dude was straight up, he’d never say a word to anybody about that night in the alley.
But Shake? Science wouldn’t steal a fuckin’ hat with that fool. Not anymore. Not since last night, when he went by his house and saw him getting sweated by that same lady cop. Science peeping through the front window this time, Shake sitting there on the couch and looking like he was bawling. Science knew there was no way that fat-ass buster would ride any kind a beef. It came down to it, he would for sure give up everybody. So soon as he possibly could, Science was going to have to put that homie down, hopefully in front of a few people.
But right now, he needed a strap and a place to stay. He knew where his brother had stashed a little deuce-five back home, but after seeing the cop at his house and then again at Shake’s place, there was no way he could ever go back there. But then, a few hours later, as the sun came up and he found himself walking along a now quiet Dehougne Street, he was suddenly visited with the most bugged out idea ever as to how he could maybe kill two birds with one stone.
Or one bullet.
Albert Budin’s Alaska Airlines flight finally took off for Burbank Airport a full three hours late, after Albert had sat in a vinyl chair at SeaTac for almost as long as the trip itself. He hated flying, and, to make matters worse, had the misfortune of being assigned a center seat at the very back of the plane. So for two hours he sat wedged between a surly, headphoned kid in a U of W T-shirt who reeked of alcohol and garlic and slept through the entire flight with his body hanging over what should have been Albert’s armrest, and a sixty-something nun whose vigorous needlepointing left him battered and bruised from the sharp elbow jabs he received every time the sister pulled her needle through the fabric. Albert was so miserable that, at one point, he thought about making himself vomit into the air sickness bag, just to see if that might motivate either of his seatmates to get up and seek comfort elsewhere. But, thankfully for all concerned, Albert nodded off before he could bring that idea to fruition.
Before he left Seattle, Albert called Bob Spetting, currently in residence at Pelican Bay State Prison for one offense or another, though Albert was pretty sure that whatever crime it had been, it had probably involved some sort of arson mixed with loss of life, ensuring that Bob would in all likelihood breathe his last demented breath inside steel-reinforced walls.
“He’s alive,” Albert said as soon as Bob fished his contraband cell phone out from behind the toilet and got on the line.
“Who?”
“My old friend,” Albert said. “The one I wake up every morning thinking about.”
“How do you know?”
“Same way I know everything. CNN.”
“Harvey said he was dead.”
“Yes, well, he looked pretty healthy to me. Before he got shot anyway.”
“Someone shot him?”
“A little gangster, in L.A. somewhere.”
“You positive?”
“There isn’t a doubt in my mind.”
“Fuckin’ A.” Almost a whisper.
Albert knew that Bob couldn’t talk long so he quickly got to the real purpose of his call. “Listen,” he said, “I need a couple of guns.”
Bob laughed and said, “Yeah, you do.”
“Something big and loud like a .45, will scare people away when they hear it, and something small like a .22, can hold a silencer, which I’ll also need, and a car, something invisible.”
“Who do we know in L.A.?”
“Jesus, Bob,” Albert said. “Why the fuck do you think I’m calling you?”
—
Less than an hour after he landed, Albert took a Super Shuttle to an auto body shop in Lawndale where, for three thousand dollars, he secured the requested hardware and the use of a six-year-old beige Toyota Camry. His next stop was Valley Presbyterian Hospital, the place he’d seen on TV, but after chatting up a young Chinese nurse, Albert learned that Roy was no longer a patient there, and that no one had the faintest fucking clue as to where he was now.
Albert had to admit that he felt some mild sense of pride at Roy’s disappearing act, as he drove the mile or so to LAPD’s North Hollywood Division on Burbank Boulevard. He found a spot across the street from the station giving him a solid view of the building. Albert found the structure to be one of those modern pieces of shit that went up all over the country in the nineties, looking like something his kid would make with blocks as soon as she could sit up. A square shape here. A cylinder there. No windows. Every pod painted a different color. It agitated him just to look at it.
The goal here was to pick up the lady cop he’d seen on TV. He had been reading up on her and knew she worked out of this building, so it would only be a matter of time before she showed up. Albert would then sit her down and ask her what leads she might have on her now vanished star witness. Of course, this wouldn’t be as simple as smiling and complimenting her lovely braid, as he had done with the nurse at Valley Pres. If he was to get this one to give up anything about Roy, things would have to get wet.
To be sure, this Kelly Maguire fascinated him. He had enjoyed reading online about her episode with the gang kid. She seemed broken and fucked up and Albert wondered if, like Danny Leone before her, Roy hadn’t bared his soul to her, too. Perhaps he had mentioned Albert in one of their conversations. He might have even told her their whole story. In which case, she’d see Albert and think she was seeing a ghost. He knew that’s how Roy would react. Roy had underestimated Albert, had forgotten the golden rule of killing: you point a gun at another man, yo
u pull the trigger and you keep on pulling it until you’re sure that the other man is dead. Albert had said it often enough. You kill him, and then you kill him again. You don’t walk away until you’re beyond a doubt certain that whoever caught your bullet or knife blade will never get up. Ever.
And yet Roy still made the mistake. Though Albert was fairly certain that he wouldn’t make it again. But this time, Roy would be the one on his heels. Roy would be the one who didn’t see it coming. And if, by chance, he somehow managed to get off a shot, he’d find that he was facing a very different man than the one he faced all those years ago. For if Albert had once merely been invulnerable, the years in the slaughterhouse had now made him invincible.
There was a golden rule in that place, too: The chain will not stop. No matter what happens, the chain will not stop. Nothing was to ever stand in the way of production; not mechanical failures or breakdowns or accidents, not forklift crashes or overheated saws or dropped knives. On more than one occasion, Albert had seen workers lying unconscious on the floor as the dripping carcasses overhead kept on swaying right on past.
The chain will not stop.
Over the past decade, Albert had, himself, suffered injuries that would have crippled or killed anyone else. He had been struck by a falling ninety-pound box of meat and pinned against the steel lip of a conveyor belt. He blew out a disc on that one and had back surgery that kept him from walking for six months. He once inhaled too much chlorine while cleaning out the blood tanks and spent a month in the hospital, his lungs scorched, his body covered in blisters. He damaged the rotator cuff in his left shoulder when a ten-thousand-pound hammer mill dropped too quickly and pulled his arm straight backward. He broke a leg when he put his foot in a hole in the slaughterhouse floor. He most recently got hit by a slow-moving train behind the plant and got knocked out of his boots. He spent a mere week in the hospital before coming back to work, his shattered ankle still held together with four steel pins.
But the most common little mishap was when workers accidentally stabbed themselves or, worse, stabbed the guy working next to them. The struggle to keep up with that chain was hard enough, but add power tools, saws, knives, slippery floors, and falling carcasses, and the chances of something going bloody wrong quintuples. Of course, when the company started bringing in Mexican labor in an effort to bust the union, Albert made sure that he was always stationed next to one of the newcomers. And, in the end, he alone among the white workers had lasted.