One thing about this gang life was certain: if you waited long enough, an opportunity always presented itself. Hector had learned this from his mentor, Curtis Ruvelcaba, who had drawn a life sentence up in San Quentin. On the streets of East LA? Curtis was a legend, and he’d taken Hector under his wing from almost day one. Once Hector had asked him why, and Curtis had smiled, taking a puff of his joint before he replied, “Because you, my little homie, are a special kinda ruthless.”
Hector would never forget that line. It had made him so proud. So brave.
And it was Curtis who had taught Hector to wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . in any and every situation, until the moment came. Patience was what separated you from the pack. Not cajones, not rage and not pride. No. Patience.
Hector rolled his head against the tension in his shoulders, gave the girl in the red blouse a mischievous smile—which got him a small smile back—then ordered another shot. The bartender, with his clean-cut beard and thick glasses, didn’t hesitate to pour it, his white t-shirt glowing brightly under the black light over the bar that gave the whole place a blue tint.
The rest of the crew were spread out, their short-sleeved colored shirts, some plaid, some plain, forming a section of the bar that was walled off from the rest. Down on the dance floor a dozen or so people were mulling about, doing a little dancing, yeah, but mostly chatting.
“Watcha thinking, jefe?” Chico asked.
Hector looked over at him and to the barstool beyond him, where Bennie was passed out against a nearby post.
“What’s with this shit?” Hector laughed.
Chico shrugged and smiled. “I tol’ him . . . no shots when you’re on all those pain meds.”
“Shots? With his mouth wired shut?”
“Fool used a straw, man!” Chico said, with his trademark big smile. Huge smile. Loveable Chico, who had already killed two people in his life. One before he’d joined the gang and one right after, on Curtis’ orders.
Hector laughed.
As a song by The Weeknd came over the speakers, it happened. His moment came. As if directed by the hand of fate, Burro had decided to try and make time with the girl in the red blouse. This could’ve been because he’d seen her and Hector exchange glances, but probably not. That would have been too brazen a move this early in his little Julius Caesar plot. More likely it was by pure chance alone that this had happened, and Hector wasted no time capitalizing on it, just like Curtis had taught him.
“C’mon,” he said to Chico. “My six. The whole time.”
Chico looked around, stunned. Not seeing any obvious threats, he appeared to be confused but complied immediately.
Hector still held his shot glass and he rolled it around in his fingers like a baseball as he walked up to Burro. He’d give him one chance. That was code. But dummy wouldn’t take it and he knew it.
“What’s you talkin’ to my girl for, homie?”
Burro looked surprised. The girl in the red blouse looked pleased. She was a few ticks below cute and probably not at all used to boys fighting over her. For a split second, Hector remembered beautiful-beyond-belief Marisol. Bitches. Ugly. Beautiful. They all played games.
“What’s up, jefe?” Burro said.
“I said she’s with me, man,” Hector said, a little too loudly. On purpose.
The bartender stopped making drinks. A few people on the dance floor looked over. The room froze.
The audience’s attention now captured, Hector waited. As expected, instead of backing down instantly, as he should have, Burro hesitated. A full second too long.
Hector brought the shot glass up, open palmed, and smashed it against the right side of Burro’s head. Burro shouted out in pain and stumbled backwards against the bar as the girl in the red blouse got up suddenly to leave. “You. Stay,” Hector said. She complied, fear in her eyes now.
Hector grabbed Burro by the shirt and punched him in the mouth. Then he did the unexpected. He dragged him down to the floor, beneath the bar, where they could have some quiet time together.
Burro was panicked. Benito and Jose were like ghosts, nowhere to be seen. Surprise, surprise. “What’s wrong, Hector? I’m sorry, man! I didn’t do nuthin’, man!”
On the ground now, Hector leaned over and put his lips to Burro’s ear. “You try and dis me, man? Talk shit about Marisol? About what she done to me . . . man . . . right?”
“No. I—”
Hector thumped the back of Burro’s head against the wooden floor, dazing him before punching him in the nose. Not enough to break it. Just enough to cause a river of blood. Lying down like this, it would all go back into his throat, making him feel like he was suffocating. The gangster version or waterboarding. And it did. He began to struggle against Hector’s grip, but it was no use. Hector pinned him by the collar, with both hands, and glared into his face.
“Look at me, homie,” Hector commanded. When Burro didn’t comply, Hector banged his head against the floor again. “I . . . said . . . look at me.”
Burro, eyes wide with terror, did.
“You see that in my eyes, homie? You see my eyes?”
Burro nodded.
“You see who’s there?”
Hector shook his head.
“That’s the devil himself, you puta, looking right at you.”
“I’m sorry!” Burro choked out the words, blood spilling from his lips.
“Yeah? You better be. You ever bad-mouth me or mine again? I’ll gut you and then rape your mother, you understand me?”
The rest of the crew was collapsing in on the scene, and suddenly Burro went from looking like a wounded wolf to looking, at best, like a terrified poodle. Choking even more on his own blood, all he could do was nod. Vigorously.
Hector stood and motioned at Chico. “Get him out of here. Two weeks off. No benefits. No cut.”
Chico motioned his head and a half-dozen other members grabbed Burro and dragged him out of the bar.
Then Hector looked at the girl in the red blouse, who looked half repulsed and half turned on. Of course. He grabbed her hand and walked her to the car, where he pulled her into the back seat and made her his.
Because he had to. To save face. To move on.
And because he was a special kinda ruthless.
Chapter Twelve
Parker wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that nobody was home at Amy Kim’s flat in the Arts District, and based on Campos’ big sigh, neither was he. They could’ve bothered the neighbors but they didn’t want Tic Toc to know they were looking for him just yet. If he did, there was the very real risk he’d be even harder to find than he already was now.
The building was like many in this area of Los Angeles: an old warehouse that had been remodeled, retrofitted and brought up to code for residential use. This one was a four unit, with Amy Kim’s being on the second floor, facing the street. After sitting outside for a few hours, hoping to catch her coming home and watching for a light to come on in her darkened window, all for naught, they decided to call it a day. They’d just crossed the twelve-hour mark on duty, and it was time to take a breather. They agreed to pick things up where they’d left off, early the next morning.
After saying goodbye at the station house, the drive home for Parker had seemed longer than usual. Not just because he was depressed or frustrated, either of which were his usual passengers at the end of most days, but because he was sad for some reason.
He wanted a drink and tried pushing the urge aside with talk radio, but the sound of people arguing over nonsensical bullshit proved to be a poor distraction. He couldn’t shake the blues. Why? What was he so sad about? The question swam there, like a lazy koi in the pond of his mind, as he made his way down the 210 Freeway to his apartment in Pasadena.
The storm had waned but now returned. The first splatter of raindrops fell across his windshield as he turned off the radio and turned on his wipers. Traffic around him slowed, as it always did in LA when it rained, as everyone panicked in the face
of actual weather.
He eased into the fast lane and kept his pace, not allowing himself to think about how good a cold beer would feel right now. It really was the best way to forget. About a lot of things.
It would help him forget about that grass too. Fresh cut. On a warm day. Splattered with a tragedy that didn’t seem real, couldn’t be real. It could’ve been such a beautiful day, if not for the panic and gunshots; even once the firing had ceased, the sounds somehow still echoing around the park and between his ears. Bad sounds, yes, but not loud enough to drown out the worst sound of all: the wails from Napoleon’s little nephew, Efren.
He hadn’t had a drink in a long time. But one, just one . . . it’d be okay. Trudy would understand. Trudy would . . . Parker shook his head and swore against the urge, wanting nothing more than to get home now. He’d fought that demon before, in country, when four or five beers a night was the only way to get any semblance of sleep or forget what the day had brought. No. He had to get home. To bed. To Trudy. He’d talked to her briefly on the phone before he left the station and she’d sounded tired.
“I miss you,” she murmured. “I’ve got some left-over beef and broccoli. Do you want me to warm it up for you?”
He’d said yes, but in a detached sort of way, his attention still lingering on the fact that she missed him, actually missed him, this amazing woman who had picked up and moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. At first this had been to help her best friend Tamara through marriage counseling, which had proven to be hard but successful, before Tamara and her husband, Kyle, decided to start over and move themselves and their kids to Fort Collins, Colorado.
By then, though, there was no question Trudy was going to stay. She and Parker were officially a “thing.” They tried to keep it evenly paced, but before long, his apartment in Torrance and her apartment in Toluca Lake had become their apartment in Pasadena.
It was Trudy who had often driven him to his therapy appointments right after Napoleon died, when Parker had been placed on paid leave and his PTSD had become worse than ever. When he would yell at her for no reason sometimes, or go from happy to depressed from one breath to the next. Thanks to the police union he was able to label his therapy “grief counseling,” thereby keeping the process out of the hands of the department shrinks.
Three nights a week, Trudy would pick Parker up from the station house and drive him to his therapist’s office at Eighth and Figueroa, then sit and wait for him for over forty-five minutes while Parker worked at flushing out the part of him that had gone down some sort of mental spider hole.
As the rain came down harder on the roof of his car now, Parker fought against his sadness with the memory of Trudy sitting in that waiting room, her red hair falling over her face as she read a book or magazine, and how she would look up at him with such a big, encouraging smile each time he came out, often exhausted, sometimes shattered. Her smile seemed to say, “You’ll be okay.” And it was because of that smile, he was sure of it, that he eventually was.
That smile, and of course, little Efren, Napoleon Villa’s nephew.
Parker wasn’t sure about a lot of things in life. About wars or the people who waged them, about the logic behind good and evil and how he’d seen it play out in the past year, but he was sure about one thing: honor. A man’s word was his bond. And whether that word was given in a foxhole ducking crossfire in Fallujah, Iraq or in the driveway of a mansion in Monterey, California made no difference whatsoever.
He’d promised Napoleon that he’d watch over Efren, while he was away and even if he never came back from that place he’d gone in pursuit of Kyle Fasano. Parker smiled momentarily, noticing his own thoughts. “That place he’d gone.” Parker still couldn’t get himself to admit—no, to accept—that it was hell. The actual place. How could that be? It wasn’t fathomable, and completely beyond reason.
In the same way, what had happened just before then was beyond reason. The words of that glowing angel—no, it was a man, it couldn’t have been angel, that wasn’t possible, was it? No. That glowing man in gray that night in the driveway, as he spoke to Mrs. Fasano, trying to answer her pleas to know just what was going on. He’d told her—in a deep, authoritative voice as Parker was lying on the ground nearby, looking up at him in awe—that her husband was some sort of “one,” chosen to save other souls that had committed the same sin as he had.
Or like that feeling—pervasive, creeping regret—Parker had gotten in front of that motel in Los Feliz, after they’d chased Ben Weisfeld down just in time to see Trudy blow him away, and Napoleon had fled to go protect Efren from the forces of evil that were descending on him at a little league baseball game.
“Forces of evil,” Parker whispered, almost scoffing, not calling himself crazy but wanting to as he exited on Seco Street. How many nights had Parker laid awake and wondered at that sensation he had, standing with Murillo at the motel, which felt almost . . . outside of himself. As if someone were whispering an ominous call to action, right in his ear.
That he’d heeded minutes too late, leaving him with a dead partner and that promise to watch over little Efren. A promise was a promise.
Efren was doing better now and Parker knew his visits helped in that regard. Every other Saturday, without fail. Sometimes Trudy came along, but more often than not she let it be a “guys’ day”—to a Dodger’s game, or the station house to look at the squad cars, or The Getty, where Efren would stare in awe at the Rembrandts. Parker was going to keep his word, one way or another, all the way through high school and beyond. In many ways, Efren was his nephew now.
The night around Parker seemed to adjourn his thoughts. It was time to stop thinking, to will himself to be home, and leave the rest of the world behind. Before long he found a sense of peace in the mesmerizing dance of the wiper blades and the storm inside himself began to calm. After parking in front of his apartment building, he took a second to let the rain fall on his face. It was cool and forgiving.
After punching his security code into the call box, he made his way to his apartment and found her there, sleepy eyed and, of course, smiling. “You’re home,” she said softly. “Yay!”
He passed on the beef and broccoli and instead scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom, loving the unspoken permission of her silence the whole way there. Then, with the sounds of the rainy night just outside the window, they made love with their foreheads pressed together, the cotton sheets getting tangled around their legs, and at some point, amid the watery fury outside, he found himself . . . aware of . . . her.
Closer to her with every whisper.
And mercifully, further and further from himself.
The Uber ride home had been cheap and so short it was almost embarrassing. Even though the driver tried to refuse his tip, Father Soltera had insisted. “You spared me from the rain!” he said with a smile, before getting out of the car and scrambling to the side door of the church, using his hands like an umbrella to at least partially cover his head.
Once inside, he took off his jacket, shook it out and stood quietly in the foyer and listened to the downpour as it pelted the city and the stained-glass windows of the church. The night muted the radiant colors of the windows, but not the images they portrayed. From where he stood he could see two of the windows, one depicting St. Thomas on a hillside and the other, St. Jude among a flock of sheep. They looked down on him and he could not help but look away.
He stepped partially into the sanctuary, the confessionals—where his day had begun, seemingly ages ago—were to his right. The church was still and quiet as shadows from the ficus trees outside swayed back and forth across the windows, stirred on by the wind outside.
According to the news he’d watched earlier that day, this wasn’t even the biggest section of the storm, just the leading edge, with a lull to follow tomorrow before the heaviest stretch. It was good, if inconvenient, news. Los Angeles, and most of California for that matter, was in the grip of yet another drought.
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Without meaning to, he let his eyes wander to what used to be her spot: the far left aisle, second pew, right on the edge. He used to tease her that this was because she was a constant flight risk, and she used to laugh, her lips tight, her eyes always turned to the ground, as if what was being said was true, and who was saying it was most likely the cause.
Don’t look there. Don’t. Look away. Because if you do—
He could see her, seated, the hymn book clutched in her lap, her brown eyes looking at him. Asking him. Wanting—
“Stop it!” he said loudly, his voice echoing through the empty darkness of the sanctuary, off the walls and back at him. His voice sounded afraid, and why shouldn’t it. First Guero Martinez. Then dealing with Felix. Then those men without faces. Now these memories.
He bowed his head, desperate for help, and began to whisper scripture, using it as a shield. “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
His emotions shook at the whispers in him, until his words were like the shadows of the ficus trees, erratic and lonely. He didn’t want to lose control, not again, so he steeled himself and pressed on.
“Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.”
In the last words of this scripture he found the strength to get himself together. In small, shuffling steps, he made his way to his room, his hand shaking as he opened the door. After stumbling inside, he got a glass of water from the sink and downed it in one gulp, the water cascading into his empty stomach, causing it to churn with hunger.
There was no getting around it; those men did not have faces. Those men were not of this world.
But he wouldn’t think of that. No. Instead, he forced himself to focus on heating a left-over piece of pizza from a few nights before in the toaster oven. As it warmed, he went to his room and undressed wearily, changing into his pajamas while the smell of cheese and pepperoni began to fill the living room.
The Parker Trilogy Page 12