by Ron Carpol
“Yeah,” Rawlings answered and the ashen-faced girl slowly walked back into the room.
About fifteen minutes later while everybody was downstairs, Dung pointed out the front window, “Look out there. That’s the NEWSTIP van.”
“Where’s the cops?” Rainey asked me. “When did you call?”
“Right before I told you what happened. You saw me on the phone.”
He nodded a little. “Yeah.”
“Maybe I better get rid of the news people,” I said walking to the door.
I went outside and over to the two guys who were standing at the curb next to their white van. “Sorry. False alarm,” I said to the blond guy who was the same guy who tried to interview me after the robbery at the check cashing place. The other guy with him was real thin and looked like a half and half mulatto, carrying a big video camera on his right shoulder. “But we’ll call you if we see or hear anything,” I added.
The zebra guy reached into his shirt pocket and took out a silver business card holder. He handed me a card.
“Here’s the number for our direct line. Call it and get your anonymous code number. We pay up to a thousand bucks for something good.”
“How good?”
“An exclusive,” the blond guy interrupted in a big stage voice. “Preferably visual violence.”
“Like what? A murder in progress?”
“Something like that.”
25
LETHAL TARGET PRACTICE
4:55 P.M.
HECTOR’S SMILE WOULD GET MOST GIRLS’ PANTIES STICKY. “I’m taking over tonight as the manager of an adult motel in Venice, not too far from here,” he told us in the front room of the Shelter. “You guys can hide in the walkway and see lots of pussy.”
“What do you mean?” Rickshaw Boy asked, almost drooling.
Hector was still wearing the same white, neck collar that some quack provided to beef up his fake accident claim. He kept smiling absent-mindedly like he was watching on a TV monitor what he was about to tell us.
“The owners of the motel have this walking space behind the wall facing the bed in every room. And without the people in the room knowing it, they video the couples having sex through a corner of a two-way mirror hanging over the chest of drawers across from the bed.”
“No shit,” Dung asked, with a dreamy look in his eyes.
Hector was salivating too. “Yeah. So if you guys come over tonight I’ll let you in the walking space and you can inspect the Poon Tang Palace.”
“That’s really the name?” Lyman asked.
“No. The three brothers who own it, they named it THE PALACE but we call it the Poon Tang Palace since getting poon is what’s happening in the rooms.” Hector thought about something and laughed. “Originally they wanted to call it THE BEARDED CLAM but the city wouldn’t give them a business license in that name.” He handed Grossberg a pussy-pink colored business card. “Here’s the address. Any time after nine.”
“We’ll be there tonight,” I answered. “Guarantee it.”
_____
7:00 P.M.
“My tongue reaches my forehead,” Parker said into the phone in his bedroom following another random call where he’d ask any girl who answered the phone, Do you fuck? “That’s all you need to know about me,” he continued conversationally as if he was dialing 411. “What do you look like?…Sticky wet cunt?…Great….Yeah, I can bring some guys over. How much?…Fifty’s too much….Thirty-five each?…OK….Yeah, I know how to get to Torrance. Give me your address.” He scribbled it down on the back of an envelope. “It’s near LAX, right?…I know where it is. We’ll be there around nine. Oh, what’s your name?…OK Bonnie. Stay moist….I’m Brad Pitt.”
Parker hung up and looked over at me and Rawlings who were straightening up his room.
“You look like shit in that hat,” he muttered to me.
Strong and muscular from working out and taking steroids, he had a hair-trigger temper that nobody wanted to mess with. That’s why I made sure to wear that Marine cap every time I was in the house.
Parker looked at Rawlings. “You can come tonight but I don’t know about Stafford.”
“Why can’t I go?“
“Cause I can’t stand the sight of you.”
Rawlings started laughing. I looked back at Parker blandly.
Parker was silent for a few seconds checking my reaction. “OK, you can come. I guess it doesn’t matter. All the pledges can come. Be inside the truck at eight-thirty. Then the Trojan Horse will race away!”
_____
The truck bed was full of pledges and a few actives. Adams was looking up at us, with one hand on one of the back doors ready to slam it shut when he stopped. “When we get back later tonight, all the actives will be at the house to vote again,” he said.
“No,” Stovepipe interrupted. “We already voted out the pledge for tonight.”
Adams shot him a look that screamed shut up!
“I mean we’re going to vote when we get back,” Stovepipe mumbled feebly, convincing nobody.
“No we’re not,” Adams answered. “Stovepipe’s right. We voted earlier today since a lot of actives couldn’t be here later.” The silence in the truck was creepy as his soft voice bounced loudly off all three walls. “There’s a pledge in here that’s already been voted tonight’s dead man.”
_____
“There it is!” Parker pointed triumphantly, like Columbus sighting land, to a run-down, gray house whose owners never knew that paint was invented. “I’m first,” he screamed, sprinting across the street with the rest of us chasing him like lunatics.
Most of the houses on the street looked like the ones National Geographic photographed of slums in Haiti.
We got to the rickety wooden porch that luckily didn’t cave in from our combined weight. Immediately Parker banged his right fist on the chipped, wooden front door. Nobody answered.
“Over here!” a girl’s voice called out from the side of the house.
“Remember I’m first!” Parker yelled, pushing past us back down the stairs.
He rushed around to the side of the house with the rest of us still right behind him. Then he banged on the side door that had a dirty uncovered window in the center. The door opened in a second.
A pimply, heavy-set girl about twenty-five, at least as tall as Parker, stood in the doorway, with stringy, copper-tinted hair that had three inches of dark roots crawling out of her scalp.
“You Bonnie?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
She smiled, probably relaxing from her night job as a Roller Derby blocker, while exhibiting at the same time every make-up product that Revlon made. Then she opened the door fully, standing there wearing only a knee-high pink nightgown and purple stiletto heels.
“Come on in,” she said enticingly.
We followed her inside, through a tiny bedroom with its unmade bed, down a small hallway cluttered with dirty clothes on the floor, and into the dingy living room that smelled of incense.
“Please sit down,” she said to the nearly two dozen of us, pointing to a small, purple, velvet-looking couch that would barely seat three midgets.
The whole place looked like it was furnished from Salvation Army rejects. It had probably been a while since this house was featured in Town&Country.
Nobody sat down. Bonnie stood in front of the fireplace that looked like a home-made altar of some kind and pointed to the worn purple couch that was probably sperm-infested.
“Please sit down,” she repeated in a deep voice that sounded like it began at a truck stop somewhere between the Texas and Oklahoma border.
Dung and Bones risked getting leprosy and sat on the tiny couch. Stovepipe plopped down and surrendered to a big, red, overstuffed chair in the corner. The rest of us optioned out for the threadbare, green rug.
We were facing Bonnie, whose back was to the fireplace, while she faced the front door.
“Want to check me out?” she asked like a used-car salesman
.
“Yeah!” me and my horny pledge brothers screamed out, clapping and cheering like sex-starved sailors returning from year-long submarine duty.
She stepped out of the nightgown, standing there in her high heels completely naked. She tossed the nightgown to Dung, who immediately started sniffing the crotch.
As bad as she looked, I was starting to get aroused.
“Let’s see your snatch up close,” Parker called out lustily.
“Sure, honey,” Bonnie said, walking up to Parker and thrusting her pussy at his outstretched, quivering tongue.
He lurched forward to try to kiss it but she jumped back and laughed. “Pretty soon,” she said, before walking around and giving everybody else the same close-up view of the furry-covered merchandise.
Her twat had such a magnetic effect on us that nobody noticed anybody coming in the front door and standing behind us until it was too late!
“Don’t fucking move!” an angry-sounding, high-pitched voice ordered.
We whipped our necks around and saw some tall, pockmarked-faced guy wearing a brown, Harley-Davidson tank-top pointing a revolver at us with a barrel that looked as big as a trash can laid on its side!
“Now!” the guy with the gun snapped at Bonnie. “Move!”
She quickly left the room.
Still naked, she returned a minute later carrying a rusty green wastebasket.
“Money and jewelry,” the guy ordered.
I’ll bet his name was Clyde. It had to be. He rested the gun under his steady, open left palm and cocked the hammer with his right thumb.
Fuck! We were getting robbed by Bonnie and Clyde!
“Wallets, too,” Clyde ordered. “Keep anything and you die.”
Bonnie probably thought she was an exhibit at a gynecology convention the way she pranced around the room holding the wastebasket while her pussy gyrated. She stopped in front of each guy and like a consolation price for being robbed, she spread her legs during the donation.
When she got everybody’s valuables, Clyde snapped, “Search them!”
Bonnie walked around the room again, checking everybody’s pockets while Clyde followed her, resting the end of the fucking gun directly on the forehead of each guy who was being searched. Fortunately, nobody held out anything.
“They ain’t got nothing,” Bonnie said.
I hoped that she’d use some of the stolen money for grammar lessons.
Bonnie dumped the wastebasket upside down on the rickety coffee table, letting the valuable contents spill out. There was plenty of money, enough credit cards to deal fifty hands of blackjack, and everybody’s watch but mine, thanks to Chesterfield.
Clyde checked the loot, almost salivating before he looked over at us.
“Out you dumb fucks,” he ordered, smiling with two missing upper side teeth. “We got everybody’s ID. Call the cops, I’ll come to your house and kill you!”
We tore-ass out of there and the second we scrambled back into the truck, Parker floored the gas and we shot away like a drag racer, laying at least a hundred feet of rubber down that chewed-up, asphalt street.
_____
Less than five minutes later Parker jammed on the brakes, bouncing the tires against the curb causing us in the back to fly around like falling bowling pins.
Adams opened the back doors and we stumbled out. The continual roar of airplanes was overhead. Parker slammed the back doors shut so hard that I thought they’d come off the hinges. He stood on the sidewalk seething, breathing as heavily as after a marathon run. He seemed to go into a robot-like state, with his eyes glazed and his jaw tightly clenched.
“Those motherfucking, goddamn, cocksuckers!” he thundered. “I WANT MY FUCKING WATCH BACK!”
“Was it valuable?” Batman asked.
This question infuriated Parker even more.
“My grandfather was wearing it when he was killed at Guadalcanal!” Parker screamed like a psycho. “The Marines shipped it to my father with the folded American flag and my grandfather’s body!” Parker’s breathing leveled off a little but he was still gasping for air. “And I took it off my father’s wrist while he was laid out in his casket!” He looked at Batman. “You’re asking me if it’s valuable?” he yelled. “What the fuck do you think?”
“Goddamn right.”
There was lunacy in Parker’s gleaming eyes as he looked around at all of us. “I’m going back to get my watch! Anybody coming with me?”
“They might kill you,” Adams pointed out sensibly. “The guy had a gun.”
“I don’t give a shit!” Parker screamed. “Then I’m going back alone and get those fuckers even if nobody else is coming!”
“I’ll go with you,” I blurted out, desperately needing as much future loyalty as possible.
He looked shocked. “You, Stafford?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Never thought I could count on you. Nobody in the house does either.”
“Well you can,” I boasted, with a heavy, lumpy feeling banging around in my stomach again.
“Um, all the pledges will go too,” Grossberg mumbled unenthusiastically.
“What’re we going to do?” I asked Parker.
“Let me think.”
He was looking around. Then he started sniffing like a bloodhound. The smell of gasoline was in the air. Parked in front of the Ryder truck was a dented pick-up with gray primer spots giving it the look of a pinto horse. Parker walked over to it, bent down under the back bumper and looked closely at something. He walked back to us with a smug look.
“What’re we going to do?” I asked.
He pointed to the truck and smiled. “It’s leaking gas.”
His refocused-eyes scanned the gutter where there was a forty-ounce St. Ides bottle lying there next to a dirty diaper. He picked up the bottle and raised it towards the gray, cloudy sky.
“We’re celebrating the Russian Revolution!” he yelled dramatically. “I’m making a Molotov cocktail and blowing up their fucking house!”
Right then, Stovepipe shocked us with his ability to ask an intelligent question.
“How’s that going to get your dad’s watch back?”
Parker didn’t answer. Instead he looked over at some chocolate-brown kids playing baseball on a lawn a few doors down. Slowly, he walked over to them but as he got closer, the kids must’ve thought he was from Immigration and ran away. Parker picked up their baseball bat and carried it back to us.
He handed the bat to Rawlings. “Here’s the plan: I’ll smoke them towards the back of the house and when they come running out through the back door, you bash their brains out.”
“And I’ll run in the side door and get the stolen shit back,” I blurted out, even surprising myself with this idiotic way to die for thirty three dollars and some credit cards that I could report stolen before they could even be used.
Parker looked at me with renewed respect. “Goddamn,” he said smiling, shaking his head a little. “I always thought you were a punk. Sorry. I guess I was wrong.”
“Working for a common goal,” I answered. “Isn’t that what fraternities are about?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I guess so.”
“Hey,” Grossberg called out. “What the hell’s the matter with us? Everybody, right now, call the credit card companies and report the cards stolen.”
“They probably already used them on the Home Shopping Network,” Dung said, “to buy Joan Rivers’ jewelry.”
That was so stupid that nobody even answered.
Everybody was clustered together on the sidewalk and the curb using their cell phones.
“I got a lousy signal,” I said, walking away from everybody.
Calling American Express first wouldn’t get my D in Econ turned into an A or B. But maybe calling NEWSTIP would. I fished out their card from my front shirt pocket. Quickly I dialed their direct number. Some grandmother-sounding lady with a New York accent answered, snapping her gum like a machine gun.
&nbs
p; “A house is going to be firebombed in the next five minutes,” I whispered hurriedly.
“Where?”
“Wait a minute. I’m calling for my mother. What’s her anonymous code number?” I pulled out a pen from my pants pocket ready to write the number on the back of their card.
The woman paused for a few seconds before her voice came on the line. “H like Harry, R like Rabbit, zero, four, nine, seven, one.”
I scribbled it down.
“Got it?”
“Yeah.” I read it back.
“When and where’s the bombing?” she asked anxiously.
“In five minutes. Near LAX. Wait a minute. I’ll get the address.”
I went back to Parker. “What’s the robber’s address?”
He looked at me suspiciously. “Why?”
“American Express wants to know where it was stolen from?”
From his back pocket, he handed me the folded envelope that he wrote their address on. I walked about twenty feet away from them again and read the address into the phone.
“How fast can you get here?” I asked.
The phone connection was lousy and the gum snapping even made it harder to hear her. “We’ve got trucks all over town. There’s one not too far away now. At a shooting in Inglewood.”
“Hurry! You got to be here before somebody calls the fire department and the cops!”
Parker was under the truck trying to unscrew the bolt at the bottom of the gas tank. “Anybody got pliers?” he yelled angrily.
“On my survival knife,” Rainey answered, walking over to the truck holding one of those gadgets that had a dozen tools in a leather knife case.
Parker had the St. Ides bottle filled with gas in seconds.
We got in the truck again and Parker made a screeching U-turn, slapping us against the side of the truck before it righted itself and sped onward.
A few minutes later the truck skidded before it bumped to a halt against the curb. Groggily, we tumbled out across the street from our destination.
_____
“Let’s go!” Parker said, leading me and Rawlings across the street to the house.
The rest of the guys had more sense and stood around the truck, watching what could be a double-murder about to happen.