by Jack Slater
“Sure does,” Trapp muttered, just to fill the space. How could the Army allow soldiers to end up in a place like this? Hell, how did people stand for it?
“Fancy a beer?” Chino called out, opening the fridge and twisting around.
“Only if one’s going spare. Don’t want to drink you dry, or anything like that.”
The Latino vet grabbed two glass bottles from inside the refrigerator and held them in his left hand. His right held the cane, which thumped against the bare wooden floorboards as he walked over to Trapp, slightly dragging his bad leg behind. “I won’t let it be said that a vet ever came to my door and left without experiencing real Mexican hospitality, you understand?”
“Cheers,” Trapp said gratefully, accepting the gift – and sensing what it meant. He doubted Chino had much disposable income to speak of. It said a lot about the man’s character that he was willing to waste a little of it on a man he had never met, just because once upon a time they’d both shared the same employer.
Chino sat on a wooden chair opposite Trapp, took a long drag of his beer, and settled back. “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”
Trapp took a deep breath, hoping that all of this hadn’t been for nothing. It was just about the only lead he had. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me anything, but I was wondering if you remembered a company called Odysseus.”
Chino straightened up, setting his beer bottle down so hard on the table in front of him a little bit of liquid fizzed out, creating a puddle around the base. “You work for them?”
Trapp raised his hands, shocked at the way Chino’s eyes had shrunk into tiny black orbs on his scarred face. “No. I swear it, man. I’ve got nothing to do with them.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Chino hissed, all his earlier bonhomie gone. There was real anger in his voice now. Not just anger, Trapp realized – but hatred.
“I’ll tell you my story, okay?” Trapp replied, speaking evenly and slowly, knowing that he would only have one shot at this. “And then maybe you’ll help me, maybe you won’t. I’ll leave that up to you.”
Chino didn’t reply, but he didn’t explode again either, which Trapp took as permission to continue.
“Eight days ago, I woke up in hospital with a bullet through my side.” He lifted his T-shirt and showed Chino the fresh white bandages affixed to his torso. For most of the journey from Texas to California, a little spot of blood had sat at the center of the wound, probably from pushing himself too hard. It was now healing up, though it still sent bolts of pain right through him on occasion. “A girl I –”
He paused, wondering how to describe Shea, or his feelings for her, for that matter. Had he loved her?
Maybe it was going that way, but the truth was Trapp had only known her a couple of weeks. He could picture a life with her, settling down in that town, raising cattle or whatever the hell it was they did in Texas. So yeah, maybe one day he would have made a life with Shea. Maybe they would have gotten married, and she would have carried his kids.
Or maybe it was just as likely that he’d been seduced by a glimpse of a life he’d never had. Perhaps it would all have gone wrong some other way. Perhaps they would have just drifted apart.
It didn’t change anything. She was still lying in that hospital bed, and it was still his fault. That was a debt he would carry with him until this was all over, and it was possible that even vengeance wouldn’t wipe it clean, not the whole way.
“A girl I met, anyway, she was there too. She was in a real bad way. They shot her through the lung. The doctors weren’t real sure whether she’d pull through.”
“Did she?”
Trapp shrugged, feeling somehow empty at his lack of knowledge. “I don’t know.”
“You’re saying Odysseus did this?” Chino asked, his voice still demanding – clearly as yet unable to moderate the rawness of his emotions when confronted with this subject. “Why?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“So why you here, man? Why you making me relive this all over again? You want to know something – what they did to me?”
“Sure.”
Chino stood unsteadily, propping himself up on his cane. He paused, then shuffled toward a battered chest of drawers against one wall. He opened it and pulled out a thick manila file, which Trapp saw as he returned was well-thumbed. His host threw it down on the couch.
“What’s this?” Trapp asked cautiously.
“Open it.”
He did as instructed, gingerly pulling the frayed front cover back. A photograph of a young man with thick black eyebrows and a narrow, European face stared up at him. The man was wearing an Army dress uniform. A photo just like this had once been taken of Trapp himself, the day he graduated basic training. “Who’s this?”
Chino lowered himself back down, then looked over through tired eyes. “Miles. Corporal Miles Roth. He was a good friend of mine.”
Trapp turned over to the next page, another shot. He held it up. “And this?”
“The Ox. That’s what we called him. Stan Oxley, Private First Class.”
He set it down carefully but, but before he could lift the third photograph, Chino filled in the details. The Latino was now staring at a point a little over Trapp’s left shoulder and a thousand yards hence. “That one’s the Sarge. Bryan Harper. Motherfucker saved my life.”
Trapp respectfully set the photograph down and shut the folder, closing off page after page of tight-spaced, spidery handwritten notes. He knew they must contain the whole story, but he wanted to hear it from Chino’s mouth.
“What happened out there?” he asked softly.
Chino didn’t turn; he didn’t even blink. “We were transporting cash, man. I don’t know how much. A lot. It was November 2003, so the insurgents hadn’t really got going too much. Not like now, anyway. So they just sent my squad, us and another Humvee to run security for two Odysseus trucks. Guess someone upstairs figured it was better travelling light. To attract less attention or something.”
Over and over, his thumb rubbed against the handle of his walking stick, always brushing against the same spot. “They knew we were coming, man. They were waiting for us.”
Trapp stayed silent until he was certain that Chino had fallen quiet, lost in his own pain. “So what makes you think Odysseus had something to do with it?”
“They killed all my buddies, right?” Chino spat back venomously.
Trapp nodded.
“Well, they didn’t kill the truck drivers. Just tied them up and gave them a beating. A whole load of bruises, even a couple broken fingers.” He jabbed his finger at the folder. “A buddy sent me a copy of the after-action report. It’s all in there. Nothing more serious than that. Makes you think, doesn’t it – they killed all my friends. Did their best to execute me, too. And they let those guys live.”
Trapp sighed. It was slim evidence. Apparently, his host heard.
“You think I’m crazy, right?” Chino asked more softly, his face a rictus of pain. “Maybe I am. But I’ll tell you just the same as I told the Army. The people who ambushed us – they were American.”
25
Trapp exited the used car dealership on South Holly Avenue with a set of keys in his hand.
“Hey, buddy?” the salesman called out after him, causing him to turn back with surprise and watch as the man tossed something at him. “Catch.”
Instinctively, he grabbed at the item now sailing through the air, just barely managing to avoid dropping it. He looked down to see he was now the proud owner not just of a 1995 Toyota Corolla, but also a cardboard box containing 20 car air fresheners, each one Mountain Pine.
“Thanks, I guess,” Trapp said, looking up.
“I figured you might need ‘em.” The salesman grinned back with the broad smile of a man who had raked in a couple hundred extra bucks on a car that was worth at least a hundred below sticker, judging by the condition it was in. “Last owner was a smoker.”
&n
bsp; The man’s smile was almost contagious. He clearly didn’t understand why Trapp had wanted to purchase one of the crappiest autos in his lot, but you didn’t get to the top in his business by getting in the way of a customer making a bad decision. He’d clearly taken that motto to heart.
Trapp shot back a thumbs-up and stuck the key in the Corolla’s door lock. The battery in the key fob remote was dead, and he made a note to replace it.
“Oh, one last thing,” he said before he climbed in. “Is there an impound lot around here?”
“Why?”
“No reason,” Trapp lied. “A buddy’s car went missing last night, he’s hoping it got towed. I said I’d give him a ride.”
“There’s a couple yards round here, but the big one’s up near Burbank. Your friend didn’t get a ticket telling him where it went?”
“I guess not.”
“Huh. That’s the LAPD for you, I guess.”
Trapp shot him a thumbs-up and thanked him for the directions, then slammed the car door shut and started the engine. His nose wrinkled the second he lost his pipeline to the air outside, and he didn’t waste a second lowering the windows. The previous owner of this vehicle must’ve smoked twenty a day just on his way to work. God knows what the guy’s lungs looked like now, or if he was even still alive. It seemed unlikely.
He found the impound lot without too much difficulty, beyond the typical traffic on the I-5. It spread across several empty lots and was ringed with a razor wire-topped chain-link fence that sat on a concrete base several feet high, presumably built that way to stop an enterprising car owner from reclaiming their property with little more than a set of wire cutters.
Several hundred vehicles sat in neat rows under the afternoon sun, and Trapp was pleased to note, after he parked his own several blocks away, that many of them were thickly coated in dust and grime.
He walked once around the lot, hands thrust into his pockets, head pointed assiduously toward the ground. But his eyes darted relentlessly in all directions, committing every detail to memory. The razor wire glinted underneath the beating sun and stretched around every yard of the chain-link fence.
But otherwise, the impound lot appeared mostly unencumbered by forms of security technology any more exotic than blades, walls, and spikes. Barring a single, solitary camera that sat atop a flagpole, just below a limp, ragged American flag, there was no sign of the existence of dogs, floodlights or alarms, the true nemeses of the common thief.
The low concrete wall was broken only by the presence of an admin building and a thick, reinforced steel gate that blocked the road into the lot.
Trapp walked toward the structure, noting as he got closer that the gate, at least, was protected only by wire mounted with barbs, not blades. That was something, at least. He walked past it on his way to the shack and scanned for wires, but it appeared resolutely analog in an increasingly digital world.
As he approached the administration building, he was struck by the solitude of the place. If it wasn’t for the occasional siren in the distance, or the background rumble of traffic, he might almost have convinced himself that he had driven to Utah.
Apparently, the guy working behind the glass screen felt the same way. He was tubby, bald, reclining on his chair – and fast asleep.
“Hey,” Trapp said, raising his voice slightly to attract the employee’s attention. Nothing appeared to happen, so he knocked on the glass and said it again.
The man woke with a start, almost toppling from his wheeled black office chair, and gripped the armrest tightly as he levered himself upright. He made no attempt to apologize for his on-the-clock nap and squinted suspiciously toward his unwanted visitor. “Who are you?”
Trapp ignored the question and said instead, “I got my car towed. Think so, anyways. You the right guy to talk to about that?”
The clerk shrugged, then raised his hand to scratch at a locket of gray hair that dangled free of his right ear and revealed a patch of dark sweat underneath his arm. “Depends. You got a ticket?”
“Not exactly.” Trapp grimaced, artificially shrinking his frame to appear more sympathetic. “I’m hoping the car’s here, but guessing it’s as likely stolen. You reckon you could do me a favor and tell me either way?”
There was little emotion on the clerk’s face as he looked back at Trapp. Clearly not too many heartstrings in that broad chest of his.
“Please, man,” Trapp implored. “I can’t afford a new one. Not right now. Impound fee will hurt enough, but at least I’ll know.”
The guy’s name badge was smudged and faded, showing as much care as the rest of his appearance. Apparently deciding that agreeing to his visitor’s request was easier than shooing him off, he grunted, “Fine. License plate and model.”
“Corolla,” Trapp replied, before inventing a plate number. “Would’ve come in yesterday.”
His counterpart paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “Sure, we got a few Toyotas. But I don’t remember none coming in yesterday.”
“You sure?” Trapp said, affecting dismay. “How many you got back there? Maybe mine slipped through.”
The clerk shook his head doubtfully as he tapped the imagined plate number into his PC. “I was here all day yesterday. Other guy’s on vacation. If I didn’t see it, it’s not here.”
“What about at night?” Trapp asked.
“They don’t bring them in after six,” the clerk replied, looking up from his screen. “And I was right. Sorry buddy, I don’t know where your wheels are, but they sure aren’t here.”
Trapp let out an affected sigh. “No worries. Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot.”
“Uh huh,” he said, already visibly losing interest as he settled back into his chair. “Sure.”
Trapp concealed his excitement as he turned away. He was departing empty-handed, and yet with everything he’d come for.
26
Cherry Street, Chino had explained to Trapp, was nowhere near as dangerous right now, in 2005, as it had been a decade before that, in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic of violence that had swept the West Coast before heading inland.
But as he completed his first pass through the Compton neighborhood, down a street lined on either side by downtrodden one-story residential units, Trapp found that hard to believe. The drug dealers – mostly Hispanic, something else that had changed in the past few years as the Latino gangs had pushed out the Bloods – had a strict system. Young kids, some of whom looked no older than twelve, stood on street corners, often with their pants hanging down low and their tops off in the late afternoon sun, just like the bosses they one day aspired to be.
They got the gig, he knew, because as kids, they weren’t subject to the full force of the law. Sure, they’d get a record, maybe even spend a couple of years in a juvenile institution, but the day they turned 18, their slate would be wiped clean.
He wondered how many would turn their lives around and suspected that of the dozens of teenagers hanging around down the length of the street it was a handful at best.
Mexican rap music drifted out from about every third house, complete with a heavy bass line and lyrics that were delivered at impossible, impenetrable speed.
“Hey, you looking for something?” One of the kids called out, swaggering over to Trapp’s open window with a derisive sneer on his face. He didn’t look much older than 16.
“Not from you, kid,” Trapp muttered through the window, tapping the gas pedal a little bit and eating up half a block, leaving the kid in his wake. He watched in the rearview mirror as the boy tossed a soda can in his direction.
At least, he hoped it was just soda.
Trapp kept rolling down Cherry Street, increasing his speed a little, but never much exceeding the pace that a john looking for a night’s company might choose. As he drank in the last three blocks, the Mountain Pine air freshener bobbing with his speed, the gaps in the structure of the operation the gang bangers were running began to fall into place.
There aren’t any anyway.
Trapp couldn’t prove it, but he guessed he was right. The system the dealers were using was little more than a fig leaf. It probably shielded the older gangbangers from a little bit of legal liability, but it didn’t seem as though they even had to bother.
And they know it.
Once the cash was exchanged out of sight, the kids came back out and handed the drugs over to the customer. The second the exchange was made, the idling car’s wheels began to spin, often leaving a dark rubber stain on the asphalt in their driver’s haste to get home and shoot up.
The men by the houses were all armed. Trapp occasionally caught the flash of a chrome-handled pistol, or else it was obvious just by the way they walked. They were the enforcers, making sure that no customers dared rip off the kids – and in turn, the kids didn’t dare to short them on the deal.
It was smart.
Smart and well oiled. In the twenty minutes he spent observing the setup, passing almost two dozen individual trap houses on either side of the street, over just ten blocks, he saw not a single attempt from the constant stream of customers to cause trouble. Even the junkies knew what stepping out of line meant. He guessed that any one of these bangers could shoot a man dead in the middle of the street, with a hundred witnesses, and the police wouldn’t be able to rustle up a single statement.
“It’s like an ant colony,” he murmured aloud as the last piece of the puzzle revealed itself.
He had been wondering why there were so many trap houses on a single street. It seemed inefficient. The rest of American business was moving toward centralization and big-box stores – so why not the drug gangs? They clearly were not stupid. Hell, he guessed that whoever ran logistics for the cartels would have been able to hold his ground in any Fortune 500 company.