The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  26

  WHEN DIAZ’S DAD CALLED TONY’S MOM, SHE SAID SHE HADN’T heard from Tony in a week and thought he was in Ensenada. This sounded like bullshit to Diaz, like she was covering for her son. Diaz had been uneasy ever since his visit to Tony’s apartment, and getting the runaround put him even more on edge.

  His old bedroom was as cluttered as the rest of the house, filled with more junk his dad had hoarded. Diaz set the stacks of old Playboy magazines that covered his childhood bed on the floor and lay on the bare mattress. He’d shared the room with his two brothers, Carlos and Hector. They both had wives now, kids, problems.

  On a shelf next to the bed were some of the model cars the three of them had built. Diaz picked up a ’49 Mercury coupe and turned it over in his hands while he contemplated his next move. One option was to return to Tony’s apartment, break in, and see what he could see. Another option was to go to the kid’s mom’s store and pistol-whip the truth out of her about where he was. Diaz set the Merc down and grabbed a Camaro. He lifted the hood to examine the engine.

  The house phone rang. Diaz jumped up and hurried down the hall to his parents’ bedroom. The receiver was in its dock on the nightstand, surrounded by empty beer cans. Diaz picked it up and checked the display. Unknown caller. He pushed the Talk button and said hello.

  “Tío?” a voice said.

  “Who’s this?” Diaz said.

  “Tony. Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, bro. Mando.”

  “No fucking way,” Tony said. “You’re here?”

  “I’m here,” Diaz said.

  “Is that why your dad called my mom? I barely got the message now. I forgot to charge my phone.”

  “She said you were in Mexico.”

  There was a long pause. The kid was deciding whether to lie, Diaz knew. He opened a wooden box on the dresser and fingered the costume jewelry inside, took out a red rhinestone rose he remembered his mom wearing to church, pinned to her black dress.

  “Things are kind of fucked up,” Tony finally said.

  “What do you mean?” Diaz said.

  “I mean it’s good you’re back.”

  Diaz pulled his rental car into the parking lot of the motel, a toxic waste dump off Alvarado, where Tony had said to meet him. He wondered what the kid was up to at a crack den like this. Nothing good, that’s for sure. Some cholo, some tweaker, flew out of a room on the ground floor and directed him to an empty space like he was the lot attendant. Diaz ignored him and backed into a spot close to the office. He took the .22 from the glove compartment and put it in his jacket pocket before getting out of the car.

  “Five bucks, ese, I’ll watch your car for you,” the cholo said. “Wash the windows, too.”

  “No, thanks,” Diaz said. “I’ll be watching it myself.”

  “Why?” the cholo said, aggrieved, as if Diaz had insulted him. “I ain’t gonna fuck with it.”

  Diaz climbed the stairs without replying.

  “I ain’t gonna fuck with it,” the cholo said again, shouting this time.

  “Be cool, ese,” Diaz said.

  The cholo bugged his eyes and puffed his chest. “You be cool,” he said and turned and went back into his room.

  Diaz knocked at Tony’s door. His other hand was on the gun. Tony answered right away, threw open the door and said, “Homey! Whassup?”

  They clasped hands and leaned in for a quick bump, chest to chest. Diaz hadn’t seen his cousin since the kid had been wounded. The fake leg, the missing fingers, the scar on his face. They fucked him up real good. He checked the room over Tony’s shoulder, made sure he was alone.

  Tony was nervous, his smile all clenched teeth, beads of sweat quivering on his forehead. He tried to get Diaz to sit but wouldn’t sit himself. He offered beer, he offered tequila. Diaz accepted a Tecate to put the kid at ease. Tony passed him a warm one from a box on the floor and took a gulp off the can he’d been working on. The walls of the room heaved like the ribs of a cornered animal, and a story spilled out.

  Diaz struggled to make sense of the flood of words. Other people knew about the money. A phony plumber had showed up looking for it, and a guy with guns. Tony shot that dude, and he and the plumber, Rowan, buried him in the desert. Then came a threatening phone call, and Tony had decided to take the money from its original hiding places, one of which was Diaz’s dad’s garage, and put it in a storage locker. Rowan had arranged for the locker and given Tony a key, then bought him a ticket to Chicago, where they were supposed to be going tomorrow to confront the dude who was after the money. But now the kid had a feeling that was bullshit, that Rowan was up to something shady.

  By the end of the tale, Diaz’s head was ringing like he’d been hit with a bottle, but he was certain of one thing: Tony had blown it. He’d been hustled hard-core, thoroughly clowned. And that cop this morning—there was no coke; he’d come to the house for the money. Diaz didn’t let his anger get the best of him, though, didn’t go off.

  “What makes you think Rowan’s sketchy?” he said to Tony.

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. “Just a vibe I got. But look, check this out.” He grabbed something off the dresser and handed it to Diaz. It was a cardboard parking pass for the City Center Motel, on 6th Street. “I snatched that out of his car today when he wasn’t looking, so now I know where he’s staying.”

  He was proud of himself and stood there waiting for Diaz to be proud of him, too, like the parking pass changed everything that came before it. Diaz didn’t say anything, and his silence deflated the kid.

  “Okay, I screwed up,” he said. “But we can fix it.”

  Diaz wished he could sit a while and analyze every element of the clusterfuck, but there wasn’t time. He needed to pick one problem, the most pressing, and solve it. And that problem was, obviously, getting his hands on his money.

  “When did Rowan say he’d be back?” he said to Tony.

  “He’s supposed to be bringing me dinner at eight,” Tony said, brightening at the possibility that someone else was going to be doing the thinking.

  Diaz looked at his watch. It was 6:00 p.m. “Give me the key to the locker,” he said.

  Tony took the key out of his pocket and handed it over. “What are you gonna do?” he said.

  “What you should have done a while ago,” Diaz said.

  He drove to SoCal Self Storage on Hollywood Boulevard and took the elevator to the third floor. He walked down the aisle, looking for locker 376. There was no lock on it when he found it. He opened it and looked inside. Empty.

  Tony was watching a basketball game on TV when he got back to the room. Diaz felt like shooting the stupid motherfucker right then and there but again managed to keep his temper under control.

  “You sure that was the place?” he said.

  Tony took out his phone to show him what he’d typed into it. “SoCal Self Storage, number 376,” he said.

  “There was nothing there,” Diaz said.

  “Fuck!” Tony said. He threw his beer can across the room. “I knew that fucker was up to something.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Mando.”

  Diaz let him suffer some, then said, “It’s seven already. We might as well wait and see if he shows up.”

  “And if he don’t?” Tony said.

  “We’ll go from there.”

  “We’ll find him and smoke his ass.”

  “We’ll take care of it.”

  This seemed to settle things for Tony, and he went back to watching the game. Diaz had questions for him but didn’t want to freak him out, so he slipped his queries regarding the money and what had happened to it into the small talk that followed.

  Tony was reluctant to revisit the tale. When Diaz asked him to repeat what happened the day he shot the dude who showed up at his apartment looking for the cash, he had to drag the details out of him. He couldn’t tell if this was because the kid was drunk or because he was stonewalling.

  “So the second guy, the one with
the guns, he knew Rowan?” Diaz said.

  “Not really,” Tony said without looking away from the TV. “But they knew the same people.”

  “Like this Avi, the guy in Chicago you were supposedly going to see?”

  “Definitely him.”

  “Could Rowan have been working with the second guy?”

  “Bro, we shot him.”

  “You shot him,” Diaz said. “Could be they were playing you together, and you fucked up their hustle.”

  “Could be,” Tony said. “But what’s it matter now? Now it’s real simple: Rowan’s got the money, and we want it.”

  The kid raised the volume on the TV, and Diaz gave up trying to pump him for information. Tony was right: the situation was simple, and things were going to be very quick and very dirty from here on out. Diaz sat at the room’s table and pretended to watch the game, pretended to be interested in the player stats Tony shared, pretended to enjoy the kid’s slurred reminiscences.

  “I remember going to see you play ball when you were in high school,” Tony said. “You had mad skills. And then we’d go to King Cole for pizza.”

  “The Chicano special,” Diaz said. “What was it again? Chorizo, ham,…”

  “Chorizo, ham, and jalapeños. That shit was good.”

  “It’s still there? They didn’t tear it down?”

  “Still there, bro, still old-school.”

  As eight o’clock approached, the chatter died out. Tony began to fidget, got up to piss twice. His nervousness made Diaz nervous. They both sat knotted from head to toe, staring at the TV. It got dark, and nobody turned on a light. It got cold, and nobody switched on the heater. Eight ten. Eight fifteen.

  Tony bent suddenly and reached under the bed. He came up with a shotgun, which he pointed at Diaz. Diaz almost pulled his own gun, almost lost his cool, but instead raised his hands into the air.

  “He’s not coming,” Tony said.

  “Don’t look like it,” Diaz said.

  “Like I said before, I know I fucked up, but I’ll do whatever it takes to make things right.”

  “I know you will.”

  “You strapped?”

  Diaz reached slowly into his pocket and used his thumb and forefinger to lift the .22 out and show it to Tony.

  “He had me convinced people were watching me,” the kid said. “He said they were gonna hurt my mom. I was scared to stick my head out the door.”

  “Sounds like some kind of pro,” Diaz said.

  “You’re gonna need me to point him out to you and everything. He’s fucking tricky.”

  “Not trickier than us, right?”

  “No way, man, no way.”

  “He fucked with the wrong people this time.”

  “The wrong fucking people,” Tony said. He lowered the shotgun a bit. “So you forgive me?”

  “We’re family, bro,” Diaz said. “That’s why I brought you into this in the first place. I trusted you.”

  Tony squinted at him, trying to read him, then set the shotgun on the bed.

  “Sorry. I had to make sure we were cool,” he said.

  Diaz tilted his head at the .22. “Can I put this away?”

  “Go ahead,” Tony said. He picked up his beer. “Truthfully, mine’s not even loaded.”

  Diaz returned the pistol to his pocket. He picked up his beer and took things back to where they were before.

  “You still go to El Tepeyac?” he said.

  “Fuck, yeah,” Tony said. “Manuel died a couple years ago, but it’s still good.”

  “I dreamed about their burritos one night in Afghanistan.”

  “They were on TV and shit. Man v. Food. The joint is, like, famous now.”

  Diaz sipped his beer.

  “You ready to get the hell out of here?” he said.

  “You don’t even know,” Tony said.

  Diaz watched Wheel of Fortune while his cousin packed up his clothes and the booze. He knew the answer to the puzzle before any of the contestants: birthday boy. Tony turned on a light, trying to find a missing sock, and the sudden brightness startled Diaz. He’d grown accustomed to the dark.

  “Here,” Tony said. He tossed him two bundles of hundred-dollar bills. “That’s some of the money, at least.”

  Diaz flipped through the stacks, but it didn’t make him happy; it made him even angrier. A perfect plan ruined, and him having to scramble to get back what was his.

  They stopped at Taco Bell for burritos and ate them on their way to the City Center Motel. Diaz parked around the corner. The pass Tony had swiped had a room number on it, 23. Tony thought they should charge up there, break the door down, and take the money. Diaz told him to slow his roll, they needed to check things out first.

  Since Rowan knew Tony, Diaz had the kid wait in the car while he walked back to the motel. He went upstairs and strolled past room 23. The room was dark, its curtains drawn, and there was no sign in the parking lot of the Mazda Tony said the guy was driving, probably the same Mazda the fake cop had used. This worried Diaz. If Rowan had already split with the money, there was a good chance he’d get away with it, as he and Tony had no more clues to his whereabouts.

  Diaz walked into the office, a stuffy little room with two folding chairs and a rack of tourist pamphlets. There was nobody at the check-in desk, so he knocked on the bulletproof glass. A woman in a sari with a red dot on her forehead came out of the back room carrying a plastic bowl of rice and a fork.

  “I’m looking for some friends in room 23,” Diaz said. “They didn’t check out, did they?”

  The woman set down her bowl and consulted a computer. “No,” she said. “They’re still here. One more night.”

  Tony was watching a video on his phone when Diaz returned to the car to grab his jacket.

  “They’re out right now,” Diaz said. “I’m gonna wait for them to get back. Chill here, and I’ll come for you when I need you.”

  “Roger that,” Tony said.

  Diaz walked back to the motel and sat on the bench at the bus stop next to the driveway. From there he could see anyone going into or out of the parking lot. He scrunched down in his jacket, made himself small.

  It was 9:00 p.m., and traffic on 7th Street had let up. A woman approached pulling a cart filled with folded laundry. She took a seat at the other end of the bench. A bus arrived, loud and bright, and the woman got on. The night seemed colder and darker when the bus drove away.

  There was a poster advertising a movie on the shelter covering the bench. Diaz read the names on it a hundred times. At 9:30 a red Honda turned into the driveway of the motel. Diaz stood and peeked over the low cinder-block wall separating the parking lot from the sidewalk. A Chinese woman and two children got out of the car and went into a room on the first floor. Diaz returned to the bench and the poster. Music by Henry Jackman. Art direction by Ryan Meinerding. Two kids skateboarded past. One of them yelled, “Boo!” The shout echoed down the empty street.

  Around 10:15 a silver Mercedes entered the lot. Diaz went to the wall again, ducking so only his head showed. A white guy and a black chick slid out of the Benz. They went up the stairs holding hands. The girl said something that made the dude laugh. Diaz got a feeling. He pulled out his phone. When the couple stopped in front of room 23, under the light, he zoomed the camera in and took a photo before the guy unlocked the door and he and the girl stepped inside.

  Diaz watched the room for another half hour until the glow behind the curtains went out. He then crept into the parking lot and took pictures of the Mercedes and its license plate.

  When he returned to the car, Tony was asleep, his seat reclined all the way back. The sound of the doors unlocking startled him awake, and he blinked and gulped like something newly thrust into the world. Diaz showed him the photo of the man and woman.

  “That’s him—Rowan,” Tony said.

  “And the girl?” Diaz said.

  “Must be his girlfriend. He told me she was black.”

  Diaz started the car.r />
  “We going to get them?” Tony said. He coughed and spit out the window.

  “Not yet,” Diaz said.

  “But we got them cornered.”

  “They’re down for a few hours, and I want to make a plan. We’re gonna get one shot at them, so we need to have our shit together.”

  “We should both have guns,” Tony said. “Do you have an extra? Or shells for the shotty?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll hook you up,” Diaz said.

  Tony thought it’d be best if he went up to the room alone first and talked his way inside with a story about finding the parking pass in the bag with the tequila and beer. After a few minutes Diaz would come up, and Tony would let him into the room. If the money was there, they’d take it. If it was somewhere else, they’d go with Rowan to get it.

  “Are we gonna kill them afterward?” he asked. They were on the 4th Street bridge, headed east. Below, warehouses and railroad tracks crowded both sides of the river’s concrete channel, shadowy and sinister in the septic glow of orange streetlights. A train rolled through the desolation, picking up speed, heading out.

  “Would that be a problem for you?” Diaz said.

  “Whatever you need me to do, I’m down,” Tony said, but Diaz could tell he was just mouthing the words.

  “I don’t think it’ll get that hairy,” he said.

  “Me, neither,” Tony said, relieved. He sat back and scratched his scar, then leaned across to look at the car’s instrument panel. Diaz smelled sweat on him, and stale beer.

  “You know what side the gas tank is on in this car?” the kid said.

  “The gas tank?” Diaz said.

  “Where you put the gas, the hole.”

  “Nah, man. It was full when I rented it.”