Beautiful, Naked and Dead mm-1 Page 16

  “Fuck it, you’re right. I’m out of line. I’m sorry I asked,” I said and started to turn away.

  “Slow down, big guy. Have I ever refused you anything, have I?” Leaning up she gave me an almost sweet peck on the cheek. “There’s something about you, I don’t know what it is, but you got me. Now let’s go before I change my mind and have Turaj kick your ass out of here.” That image was enough to make me smirk. Grabbing her bag from the dressing room locker we went out the back door, then down the thin staircase and into the parking lot. Piper stopped cold at the foot of the stairs.

  Across the parking lot she saw my car with a pair of clearly female legs hanging out of the window. Piper spun on me, her face hardening, “You want me to take in your strumpet, you got some balls Moses.”

  “It ain’t like that Piper, she’s a friend, and she’s in trouble,” I said.

  “A friend you’re fucking? Huh, Mo?”

  “No baby doll, I ain’t fucking anyone. Getting fucked pretty hard.” I shot her a feeble wink. She stared hard at me for a long moment, then a smile crept onto her face and I knew I was home free.

  “God damn you, Mo.” Hooking her arm into mine we strolled through the parked cars to the Crown Vic. Cass sat up, looking at Piper and her arm on me, it was subtle but I could see her eyes flicking back and forth.

  “Piper, this is Cass, she needs looking after,” I said. Piper studied Cass’ face with growing shock.

  “Kelly?” she whispered.

  “Her sister,” I said.

  “It’s like looking at a ghost.”

  “I’m not a ghost. Ok?” Cass said climbing out. “This your girlfriend?” she looked Piper up and down. I was saved from answering by Angel jumping out of the car and bouncing up to Piper.

  “No, no no no, Mo! I told you how I feel about dogs,” she said.

  “Just one night, that’s all I’m asking,” I said, flashing some uneven teeth.

  “Fine, whatever. But if it pees on my carpet I’m making it into slippers. That’s right little fur ball welcome to Cruella DeVil land.” Whoever said all women loved puppies had never met Piper. Getting Cass into Piper’s powder blue ‘65 Ford Falcon I sat Angel on her lap and told her to keep the pup out of trouble. As they drove away, Cass watched me through the window. Somewhere in her heart she believed every goodbye might turn out to be permanent.

  When I got back to Highland Park the streets were quiet. I parked around the corner from my house, jumped the fence and entered through the back door. With my.45 in hand I moved through the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and then the living room. Content that I was alone I pushed my club chair into a corner. From this position I could cover the front door and the kitchen. I left the lights out, waiting with the Mossberg riot gun on my lap. Patience was never my long suit, I would rather rush forward then lay in wait. I could hear the treads on every car as they rolled past along the pavement. Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to bark, first one then joined by many. I tensed, ready for the door to fly open. One of the dogs let out a painful yap. A slight odor of a skunk drifted through the window. Somewhere down the block a dog had been sprayed. I drifted off sometime after midnight.

  In my dream, Cass and I are living in a house on a Mexican beach. She is dressed in a flowing kimono with gold braid dragons climbing up her breasts. She is feeding me slices of mango while we watch Angel playing in the surf. She kisses the back of my neck. Someone is knocking at our door. I hope they will go away.

  I was awake in time to hear the second knock. The street light glowed through my shabby curtains, silhouetting a hulking man on my front porch. I hefted the shot gun to my shoulder and aimed at the door. I could hear the scratch of metal against wood. A quick crack and the door jamb gave way as the door popped open. Two shadowy men stood outlined against the streetlight. I held my breath. They moved into the dark room, pulling the door closed behind them. I racked a shell into the shot gun and watched their eyes pop.

  “Sorry, wrong house,” a beefy man in a jogging suit said.

  “Right house, wrong day.” I aimed at his gut. His buddy wore pressed jeans and an argyle sweater vest. “Kick your guns over here, before I get nervous and bad things start to happen.” They weighed their odds and came up short. They might have been able to drop me, but one of them was going to lose his life in the transaction. Slowly they dropped their pistols and kicked them over in my direction. Sweater boy kicked short so the chrome automatic lay on the hardwood between us. He was a leap away from it. Getting up I kicked the gun under my sofa.

  “Now comes the real fun part,” I said, drifting the shotgun barrel from one to the other for emphasis, “the part where I ask you who sent you, and you play it tough, so I start blowing off parts of your body. And one of you plays it real tough so I kill him and the other of you looks down at his missing leg and ruined arm and decides it can still get worse so he talks.” If I was getting through to them it wasn’t clear from their black eyes. “Now we can skip all that messy bullshit, or I can go to work. Honestly I don’t give a fuck which way you want to play it.” I heard a rush of wind behind me, and felt the thud of a black jack hitting the base of my skull. The world went sideways. My knees buckled and I fell, I waited for the impact of the floor but I just kept falling into a big black hole.

  CHAPTER 12

  Tumble and twist, drifting down through oblivion. No guilt for those I’d hurt. No guilt for those I couldn’t save, just rich warm black rushing past… Memory was a foggy distant thought lost in the haze…There was something I was supposed to do but it was all behind me now, lost… out of the black cotton came a growing pain. A pin point at first, then it sped at me, trying to catch me like a cop car in hot pursuit. Bam! My head exploded into sixteen different colors. I could feel pain so I wasn’t dead. Pain equals life, it’s a shitty conclusion to a fucked equation but there it was. My eyes fluttered and rolled open only to find more darkness surrounding me. My arms were pinned behind my back and bound by duct tape, ghetto cuffs also taped my ankles together. My rather large frame had been crumpled and folded nastily into a small dark space. My tiny prison bumped and rumbled with a rhythm I couldn’t place but knew was familiar. I tried to sit up and hit my head on padded sheet metal inches above me. It snapped into focus, I was in a car trunk, and that was a freeway rumbling beneath me. Muffled rap music thumped from the interior, keeping beat with my pounding brain. I was being taken for a ride, as they say in the gangster flicks. Only these were real gangsters and it wasn’t going to end with a pretty fade-out or the cops rolling to the rescue. Dumb bastard, I’d let them take me and now I was going to pay big. Odds were these were the same punks, or ones like them, who had done Kelly. And now it was my turn to go down ugly. One more useless corpse. One more unsolved murder for Lowrie. And like a big death machine they got to keep rolling along, unthinking and unstoppable. Fuck them. I squirmed onto my back. The speed shifted, we were pulling off the freeway. With every bit of strength I had I kicked at the side of the trunk. “What the hell!” came from the cab of the car. I kept kicking, it was an outside shot, but maybe someone on the street would hear me. Suddenly the car ground to a stop. I heard the doors open and kept on kicking like my life depended on it, which it did.

  The trunk popped up, flooding me in the yellow light of a street lamp. The beefy guy in a jogging suit jumped in on top of me. I flailed and tried to fight, but with my hands behind my back and legs jammed in I couldn’t have bested a crippled midget. The thug grabbed my hair, covering my face with a sweet smelling rag. I twitched and jerked but couldn’t get free. When I could no longer hold my breath I inhaled… The world blurred, growing soft at its edges. The pain in my head evaporated into a descending fog and I was lost once again to the darkness.

  From a great distance I could smell someone barbecuing. A searing pain came with consciousness. A thin cigar tip pressed into my chest. The burning I smelled was me. A scream crawled its way out of my throat.

  “I’m sorry, did that hurt y
ou?” The preppy boy in his argyle was kneeling down pressing the ember into my flesh. Lifting the cigar to his lips he sucked in, the tip glowed red. He jabbed the ember back down. I clenched my jaw so tight I almost broke a molar. I squashed the building scream down into my gut and forced a smile. “Tough it all you want, sooner or later you’ll beg to talk.”

  “You haven’t asked him any questions.” An older man in an immaculate suit moved into view. “What do you expect him to talk about, the weather perhaps?”

  “He knows what we want, trust me he knows.”

  “Please, go see if you can find me a chair. I’ll have a little chat with Mr. McGuire.” Following orders, sweater boy stood up. He gave me a quick loafer to the ribs and walked away chuckling at my torn gasp.

  “This is building up to be a very long night. Now I’m sure you have no desire to prolong this little dance, so why don’t you tell me where the girl is.”

  “What girl?” I wheezed.

  “Please, tell me or not, but don’t infer I’m stupid.”

  “Perish the thought mother fucker!” I said. His kick landed hard to the side of my head. I rolled away, trying to protect myself from the next blow. Instead I heard him stepping out of the room and down what sounded like wooden stairs. Rolling over, I scanned my surroundings. I was in a small bare room, through grease streaked windows I could make out the tower of the downtown train yard. From the view I could tell we were on the second floor, probably of a warehouse, not that this information did me a damn bit of good.

  The two younger grease-balls clattered into the room dragging an office chair and a gym bag. While the man in the running suit lifted me into the chair his young friend opened the bag lifting out a cordless drill.

  “Hey, you ever see that show, This Old House?” sweater asked his partner.

  “Yeah that Bob Villa is one smart wop. He must’ve saved me a grand around the house, you know, doing fix it myself stuff.”

  “You think they’d want to do a show on me and my use of tools?” he said fitting a drill bit into the head and keying it down. “You want to pick which leg I start on?” he asked me with a stupid smile. I locked my jaw and grinned up at him. “Ok, left it is.” He revved the drill up several times like a street racer getting ready to launch. With a slow arc, he moved the spinning steel down into my thigh. As the bit dug into my flesh I jerked my legs up knocking the drill from his hand. I kicked out at his chest with a strength meant to kill. Instead of knocking him over the force sent me speeding backwards on the chair’s castors. They both looked shocked and amazed by what they saw next. I felt my back slam into something solid that gave way with the sound of glass breaking. I tilted violently back and saw the stars above as I fell through the night. Wood snapped against my back shattering the chair as I landed on a pile of discarded pallets, breaking their cross braces like they were matchsticks. A sharp spear of broken board pierced my leg.

  Pieces of the broken window rained down around me. Somewhere above me the greaseballs were screaming. The familiar pop of small arms fire echoed just before the wood around me started to splinter from wild rounds. I had darkness on my side. But even idiots get lucky sometimes. Reaching out behind my back I found a long piece of glass and sawed at the tape binding my wrists. The glass cut my fingers but it also sliced off the duct tape. Freeing my ankles, I pulled the wooden spear from my leg and ran limping for the cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse.

  A square of light spilled out of the warehouse as the door slid up and three silhouettes charged out. I jumped onto the fence and started to climb. As I hit the top a pistol cracked and a bullet whizzed past my head. I pulled myself up and over, falling hard on the other side. I was on a thin strip of pavement on the bank of the LA River.

  The dark forms hit the fence as I rolled down the embankment, bouncing over the moss slick cement I splashed down into the river. Above me the mob boys topped the fence. Pulling myself up I fought the current and ran for cover. I lost my footing on the rocks, went down, got up and kept going. I pulled myself onto a small sand island covered in bamboo and scrub brush. Hunkering down in the brush I lay silently. Past the branches I could see Sweater Boy and Running Suit on the top of the bank looking down. They walked back and forth, searching. After several long painful minutes they turned and disappeared back towards the warehouse.

  I lay still for another half an hour just to be sure. I stayed in the river working my way north for a couple of miles before moving my way up the bank. I was wet and cold, my body ached and my left leg was having trouble holding my weight. I pulled myself up onto the street. I was in frog town, a small Latin neighborhood tucked between Riverside Drive and the River. Luckily this is LA, where people are used to seeing torn and battered homeless people, a town full of averted eyes and empty hands. I stumbled into a gas station on Fletcher. I thought I would call Piper, but I didn’t know her number. A gang-banger in a slammed Impala looked me over while he filled his tank. “You don’t look too good, ese,” he said.

  “I’ve been shot at, beat up, burnt, drilled and almost drowned. So whatever you’re going to do, just get to it and put me out of my misery.” I slid down to sit on the pavement.

  “Shit, homes, what do I look like to you? I ain’t going to rob you. I thought you was a drunk. I was going to take you to a meeting.” He leaned down to look me over. “You need to have a doctor look at that leg, homes.”

  “No doctors.”

  “Too many questions, eh, ese? Too many cops at the ER?” Leaning down he started to lift me up.

  “What the…” I tried to resist but his grip on my shoulders was massive. This man was prison buff and I was weak as a wet kitten. Looking down at the arm that clamped on to me I saw his history in prison ink. Tattoos ran all the way up under his muscle shirt. Pancho Villa stood on his arm next to the Virgin de Guadalupe, in blue ink a low rider rolled and a sad man stood locked behind bars… On his shoulder hands intertwined in prayer while a dove flew from them up into his tee-shirt. Helping me walk he led me to his Impala.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Ese, I leave your ass out here, the piranhas will pick your bones clean in two minutes flat.” The car doors had been shaved and filled leaving a clean line with no apparent way of entry. He clicked a remote and the door opened with a deep pneumatic whoosh. It was all rich brown tuck and roll, I could see the marks my muddy pants were tracking onto the seats as I sunk in.

  “Sorry,” I said looking down at my boots on the shag carpet.

  “Relax, this is only stuff, it cleans,” he said and meant it. “Now where am I taking you?” I told him a cross street near Piper’s place. As we drove he glanced over at me. “I been where you are, guns in my face, guns in my hand. Done a lot of shit I’m not proud of loco, but you don’t have to keep running so hard. There’s an easier softer way.”

  “Yeah? Move to Jamaica and forget this crap ever happened?” I said.

  “No, you’d just make a mess there, trust me I tried pulling a geographic,” he said sliding smoothly though traffic. “Ten years ago I was doing a stint up at Pelican Bay, best thing ever happened to me.”

  “Main line, huh?”

  “Yeah, crazy right? I met this old time drunk, he showed me a new way to live. You ever hear of the Big Book?” he asked.

  “You think I’m a drunk?”

  “Normies don’t get into the kind of shit we do, ese, know what I mean?” he said with a slight smile.

  “Look pal, I don’t need a fucking meeting unless it’s a Psycho-mob-hit-men-are-trying-to-kill-me Anonymous meeting, you got one of those?” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said with a laugh, “but this is LA so who knows, we got every other kind of meeting, shit I heard they even have one for owners of co-dependent pets. Look, straight up, if I’m wrong no problem. But if not, I’ll save you a seat, down front.”

  I had him pull up two blocks away from Piper’s place, sure he seemed on the up and up, but trust no one fully and you don’t get bur
ned fully. As I got out he passed me a simple card with his name and phone number, he said to call if I ever needed to talk or whatever, and then with the deep rumble of glass packs he motored off down the street. I started up to a stranger’s house until he was around the corner, then backtracked to the sidewalk and stumbled up to Piper’s. Every step took my full concentration. Don’t fall or you may never get up again.

  Slipping into a warm bath I felt a million years old. Piper sat on the lip of the tub, a worried expression on her face. She had almost bit my head off for waking her, but when she saw my condition she kicked into mother hen mode. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?”

  “Be the first place they’d look. First place I’d look.” She washed away the dirt from around the cuts, and bathed them in hydrogen peroxide. Cass had been asleep on the couch when I came in.

  “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” Piper asked, scrubbing a bit rougher than necessary.

  “Same old, same old,” I said, trying not to wince too bad.

  “Bullshit, what has that girl got you tied into?”

  “You don’t want to know about this one, sweetheart, trust me. When it’s cleaned up I’ll tell you all there is, but ‘til then forget you ever saw her. Got it?” I looked into her deep green eyes holding them, letting her see into mine, past the shield and into the real danger of the situation. After a moment, she gave me a slow blink of agreement.

  “You’re the boss, Mo.”

  “That’s all I want to hear.”

  “That little girl is in love with you,” Piper said as she started to bandage my leg.

  “That little girl is very confused.”

  “She’d have to be, to be in love with a tore up old man like you,” she said with a deep throaty chuckle. “Now let’s finish getting your tired ass patched up and in bed. Momma still needs her beauty rest.” She helped me into her bed and lay down beside me.