by Sean Dexter
I should go home, I thought. I could have a couple beers, watch Movies 'Til Dawn, I'd be fine and dandy.
I felt I stood out. Hell, I thought, I wouldn't stand out more if I were buck-naked blindfolded holding a handful of hundred dollar bills. Christ, I was about as subtle as a blowtorch lighting a bowl of rock cocaine.
I didn't look like a potential crack customer. No, I looked like a sucker. A dumb jerk saying, steal my car and dump my body in an alley kind of sucker. These jokers here could kill me and never remember me in the morning.
I should just drive off and forget everything. I reached down and twisted the ignition key, and my car started right up. I should throw 'er in gear and get the hell outa here. Then I had another thought. If I leave my car here, it might not be here when I come out. If I came out. A C note says you won't, I told myself.
I remembered the last time I had been here. A red Eldorado had been parked in front of those front doors to hell. It had a busted right taillight. I stared at the memory of that Eldorado and saw again the two bodies thrown inside its trunk like golf bags.
Why should I enter Visitacion Towers?
I shouldn't. It would be like walking into a dragon's mouth. But I kept thinking about how Mario Rosales was the only eyewitness to whatever had happened here five nights ago.
Suppose I did go inside the Towers. Whatever happened in there was final. There was no way out. I could expect no help. Paramedics wouldn't go in there. The Fire Department would let it burn. The cops left their cruisers locked and wore bullet-proof vests when they swept the building with their riot guns and their pepper sprays. The crews on the city garbage trucks wore bullet-proof vests until even they refused to come down here.
Together, my Browning 9 and I went in Visitacion Towers. Smashed and ravaged and charred and splintered and gutted and burned out and looted. Doesn't even matter when all this was done here, I suppose. That this housing project from Hell would end ruined like this was a foregone conclusion the day the cornerstone was set in concrete.
I don't know why the electricity was still on; maybe some squatter had reconnected the disconnected. There were still electric lights in a few hallways, though most hallways were dark from stolen bulbs and broken fixtures. Gang graffiti was scrawled on every surface. Plaster hung in shreds from the ceiling.
The elevator was out, of course, and it stank like somebody had recently taken a dump in there. I took the stairs as quietly as I could. I went up slowly, checking out each floor, one at a time, and made my way up toward the penthouse suites.
Broken glass and garbage were littered in every corridor and entirely filled some rooms. In some corridors there was a foot of rubbish, and I had to kick my way from one end to the other. Target practice with automatic weapon fire had put bullet holes in many of the walls and doors.
As I walked, I saw my breath coming out in front of me in little icy clouds. This hell on earth was ice-cold. There was a natural break in the coastal range here, and the same icy summer winds that made Candlestick Park world famous blew through these broken windows first. Fog was actually visibly curling in some corridors like wraiths from the netherworld left behind to haunt the living.
On the third floor I heard a woman's low voice. She was wheeling and dealing with a dealer. She had a hand gun to trade for a rock of cocaine. She told him she had found it behind an after-hours bar twenty minutes ago. The dealer wanted to know how hot the gun was. When she couldn't tell him, he told her to dump it in a storm drain. I kept prowling onward because these two weren't my prey.
More signs of squatters on the fourth floor, on the side away from the street. The toilets had long been smashed or stolen, and now people shit where they could here. I was careful where I walked.
On the seventh floor I heard a woman's shrill voice. She was angry. I crept close and saw a mother berating her mentally retarded daughter for wasting all the mayonnaise. The mother must have weighed a hundred pounds. Her daughter was in her late forties, was weeping, and must have weighed three hundred.
I reached the ninth floor. Down at the end of the hallway a luminous glow came from a Coleman camp light. A shadowy figure was lighting candles. I saw a cooler near the window. Beside it was a stained foam pad big enough for two sleeping bags. On the other side of the pad, a small microwave oven sat on an overturned cantaloupe crate.
I saw Mario Rosales. I came closer, and I saw the fresh stitches on the ugly red wound on his neck from the bullet that had narrowly missed his jugular vein. He was wearing a T-shirt under an oversized flannel shirt, and baggy pants he could hide a litter of puppies in. I see kids like him hanging out in the malls and movie theaters all over California. Good kids, all of them, or almost all of them. Restless and eager, they had wants and hopes. And I hesitated.
I reminded myself that Mario Rosales was all punk. That he was a fugitive and the cops wanted him for murder. That he had no conscience and was all trouble. I tightened my grip on my Browning, took a deep breath, and steeled myself for trouble.
I saw Cheryse Geneva up close. Her blue zombie eyes and her corn-silk hair were in my face, breathing hard on me, and my Browning was useless with my wrist grabbed like this and stretched out away from her.
“Que pasa, hombre?” she said. She was pale and tight-lipped. She smelled of fresh strawberries.
I made no move against her. She held a stun gun inches from my face. She punched it for several seconds, and a blue arc of electricity streaked out of the dark.
“You're the boss,” I said.
She took my Browning. She held it like a brick and smashed me in the side of the face, and when I jumped for her throat, she zapped me down to the concrete. I stayed down because for the longest time I couldn't breathe. I told myself I'd pitch her out an open window given half a chance. We were nine floors up. That was high enough.
Once I was okay again, she held the gun in one hand and the zapper in the other, and I rose to my feet like a ballerina amid broken glass. She pushed me into the camp light's glow. Mario Rosales heard us coming. Startled, he jumped to his feet.
Mario hissed. “What's he doing here?”
Cheryse frisked me, picked my pockets, field-stripped my wallet, and stole nearly two hundred dollars of my money. “He saw me downtown working,” she said. “He must of followed me.”
He was bigger than I had remembered. His shoulders were broader and his chest was deeper than I had remembered. Lots of red meat and vitamins keep making the next generations bigger. Hell, he was fourteen, but he looked seventeen, maybe eighteen. Maybe he just had a growth spurt.
Mario Rosales swallowed hard and steeled himself to do harm. He stuck a shiny new Glock 17 in my face. “I should blow you away,” he said. That's when he actually thought about what he was saying. “I didn't want to blow away nobody,” he regretted. And his voice cracked. Nothing like puberty in a gunman to make me tread more cautiously.
And yet…and yet I thought I saw him differently, with new eyes. The kid was standing in front of me, but his eyes were huddled in a corner, like a pile of dirty laundry that missed the hamper toss, like a homeless woman huddling in a sleeping bag to stay warm.
No one who has ever known me has ever accused me of being a pollyanna. I've worked the streets long enough to know pollyannas on the streets die quicker than first lieutenants on the battlefield. And yet…
He was still a kid. He still had the wide eyes of a young boy who was now neck-deep in more trouble than he had ever been in before. He was scared shitless.
I'm the father of two boys. I looked at him—into him—and I saw my boys. In both cases, I saw boys growing up without a father in the house. I pushed aside my own regrets and pushed aside my own better judgment and concentrated on the boy at hand.
“What's the real story, Mario? What happened outside here?”
“We gotta blow, Mario, 'fore someone else finds us,” she said.
I got bold and up-front with him. “I came to help you, Mario. Help you see why you gotta tu
rn yourself in, before some nasty cop with a hard-on for you blows away you or Cheryse.”
She banged me across the back of my head. I think she wanted to bang some sense into my head. Thank God she didn't have the same upper body strength as Mario. She could have killed me if she had the strength to do what she wanted done.
“We got to take care of you, Mario,” I said, not daring to slow down the jive.
“Your grandmother made me promise to get hold of you and save your ass.”
“My grandmother,” he said. His eyes said he didn't trust me.
“She loves you and wants you home.”
“I ain't going home to her!”
“Don't you want to think for a moment about going back home?”
He thought I was nuts. “Fuck Rehab,” he said. “I been there three times.”
“What do you got here that's so much better than home?” I dared.
Cheryse rolled her eyes. She knew I was a fool. A growl came from her throat. She wanted me circumcised with a chainsaw.
His jawline went stubborn and set. “It's okay here.”
“I talked with your grandmother,” I said. “She loves you.” Watching his disbelief grow, I felt my spirits sink further. But I pressed on. “She doesn't want you dead, Mario. She wants you alive and smiling and healthy and sitting beside her even if it's just Visiting Hours. She doesn't care if you're wearing a red jump suit and shackles. She loves you and wants you alive and wants to fight for you. You stay here, you get cremated by Welfare money and your ashes get dumped in Potter's Field and all she gets is a lousy photograph on top of the TV set to remember you by, and she wants more than that, Mario. She loves you.”
He flinched. For an instant he was a kid in pain getting chewed out by an adult, and he blinked fast, and the kid in pain was gone, replaced by an android's smooth features, the kind I saw all the time in Juvenile Court.
“What about his mom?” Cheryse Geneva asked.
“His mom's in jail for a two year old burglary charge for which she failed to appear.”
Mario didn't seem to care about that. “You don't know my grandmother.”
“You live by Point Avisadero. On a clear day you got a view of downtown. You got a rusty bike with two flat tires chained to her front porch, and your grandmother's got a plastic leg that screws on and off.”
Cheryse was taken aback. “Gross!”
They didn't exactly release me. More like, they stopped holding me so tightly. I had a chance to take a closer look around their scatter. They were camped out in a squatter's apartment. I thought about what it must be like coming down from a drug-high and finding yourself here. Being straight here was like living in the House of Usher on a bad day.
“Why here?” I asked.
He gestured behind him. “That toilet still flushes.”
I was sympathetic. Mario Rosales was a fourteen year old who had lived too hard and seen too much. Ambushed by drug dealers. Patched up and then snuck out of the hospital. On top of all that, now he was a cornered fugitive living on Vienna sausage from a can and cold PopTarts while his girl friend had to go out hooking. Ask him what he was most afraid of. A gang out to get him? The cops who wanted him? T'aint easy being Mario Rosales today. No wonder he had holed up here, exhausted.
I looked at his lady love Cheryse. Like most teenagers, she acted sullen, and she reminded me of a gargoyle on a ledge above a cathedral. I had no problem with that. Teenagers are small children with big hormones.
“Do you get coked up here?” I asked her.
“Can't get it,” Cheryse said. “No money.”
I didn't bother asking if they'd get cracked up if they could buy some. Crack would make anybody forget how ugly and short their life looked here.
I was suspicious. “Why did you shoot those two white guys?”
I saw the flesh whiten on Mario Rosales's throat wound.
“He didn't kill nobody!” Cheryse said.
“I was set-up.”
Yeah, you and everybody else.
“Who hired you to shoot 'em?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Mario said.
“Who hired you to shake down the old man and his kid?”
“Nobody!”
“Who was the boss?”
“You talk about Mad Dog,” Cheryse told him.
He wet his lips. “He's dead. I saw him buy it.”
“Who was Mad Dog?” I asked.
Cheryse told me, “Mad Dog was a bastard man. He killed a man with a runny nose for snorting his powder. Let that fucker die forever!”
“He sold rock all over the City,” Mario said.
“But he bought it here at the Towers,” I said.
“Yeah.” His eyes backed away from me.
I surprised him. “I don't give a shit who sold it to him, or who he turned around and sold it to.” I gave pause, to start another angle. “What went down outside here?”
“What went down . . . “ He swallowed hard, not wanting to confess more than what he needed, but wanting desperately to get it all out. The effort to both spill his guts and keep his yap shut left him speechless and frustrated.
“--was a carjacking?” I asked
“The car was free to us, man, so we took it!”
“You were just out scoring rock,” I disbelieved.
“Yeah!”
“You're not straight with me,” I threatened.
“I swear, yes.”
“Why did you kill the old dude in the trunk?” I asked.
“Never knew he was in the trunk, man.”
“Who hired you?”
“I got no job,” Mario Rosales said. “I wasn't doing nothing!” he insisted. “I was following Mad Dog. I was there to look big, look tough. I wanted to sit in the car, play with the buttons on the dashboard. He made me come upstairs here and watch him buy rock.”
“You were s'posed to look like back-up muscle?”
“Yeah! Everything inside goes down cool. We make the buy, they're all friends, high-fives and see ya soon, bro. We get outside, and the air lights up with bullets flying at us. I got shot, he gets killed, I go to SF General.”
“What was Mad Dog's real name?”
“I don't know. He liked being called Mad Dog.”
What can you say about anybody who likes calling himself Mad Dog? The dumb fuck defames himself. Just asking to be shot down in the streets.
“Who drove the Eldorado to the Towers?”
“I did,” the boy said.
“Is that how you got involved?”
“I'm the one that parked it there.”
I grinned. “Wrong spot, right?”
“I didn't know the space was reserved,” Mario Rosales swore. “I would never park there, 'cept it was empty.”
“How come you drove?”
“I was the designated driver.”
“Fourteen years old, right?”
He had a lopsided grin. “I don't do rock when I drive. Mad Dog and the guys can get fucked up and still get home okay. Somebody gotta make sure we get home okay.”
“Where did you start off from?”
“From the Sunshine Apartments.”
I kept cool. “Mad Dog lived there?”
“That's one place where he sells. He got a place there, another one on Rose Alley, and another on Dolores.”
“How did you get the Eldorado?”
“We found it. It was double-parked in front of Mad Dog's car with its windows down, the key was still in the ignition, the engine running. There was a raggedy twenty dollar bill on the floor mat. We check it out, shit, we took it for a ride.”
The equation was simple, in his mind. “Free car. Free ride.”
“Did you know the old white dude who owned it?”
“I seen him at Sunshine Apartments. Old white dude.”
“Did he ever talk to you?”
“Never.”
“What did you think when you saw his Caddy there?”
He puzzled over that. Finally: “Free
car. Free ride.”
“Did you check the trunk before you drove it?”
He scowled like I was crazy, but he spoke wistfully. “You always check your trunk before you drive a car?”
“Did you shoot him?”
“Never!”
“Do you know who did?”
“No.”
I thought back to the first time I came down here, the scene of the crime that it was, walking through it with Captain Banagan. The red Eldorado with the two bodies in the trunk. I kept seeing that busted taillight in my mind. Let the cops pull it over. And I saw how the deal went down. It was all slicker than ice on glass.
“You were set up,” I said.
He agreed. “I was set up.”
Why did I believe they were set up?
The busted taillight.
Cops love busted taillights. A busted taillight legitimizes stopping John Q. Public and checking him out. Ted Bundy got caught because cops stopped him for his taillight. The busted taillight is probably the most cost effective piece of cop equipment cops got in the never-ending fight against crime.
The rockhounds were just patsies. Too stupid for words and therefore dumb enough to take a fall. They went joyriding in a stolen car. They were supposed to get stopped by the police. Did you know you had a taillight busted? May we see your registration please? Please step out of the car. Pop that trunk, son. And then they would go away to prison forever. A deaf, dumb and blind DA could put those fools away. Who would believe them? Even the Public Defender's Office wouldn't.
“Why did you run from San Francisco General Hospital?”
“The electric chair,” Mario said.
“It's the gas chamber in this state.”
He knew it was something evil. “I'm sitting there, and nobody told me nothing. They told me who I was, and I was in trouble. A million dollars bail! I told them they was wrong. They said I was lying. I was causing trouble. They know what I done. They wasn't listening when I said I didn't do nothing.”
Cheryse was watching him, her chin trembling, fighting back the tears, having a cigarette.