Last Call for the Living (7 page)

Hicklin entertained the idea of raping him, but his attention drifted. He stumbled to the couch, suddenly very drunk. He moved the shotgun, laying it across the floor next to him, thinking if anybody—the law, some disgruntled co-conspirators—came through that door, well, he'd be in deep shit. But they didn't know about this place, Hicklin reminded himself. They didn't know.

Outside the cottage there were chirps and cries, the world rallying around another morning.

 

We are caged men, ready to watch each other die.

The thief is in your spotlights.

Come and get me you righteous pigs!

 

FIVE

Nathan Flock turned
up the volume on the radio. He was driving his Chevy Silverado, heading west on I-285, skirting traffic as it backed up near the exits. The lighter popped. His passenger cracked the window and lit a cigarette.

“It's a brand-new truck, Preach,” Flock objected.

“You smoke, don't you?”

“Yeah, so?”

Leonard Lipscomb pulled a soft pack from the breast pocket of his work shirt. Shook out a cigarette. Nathan glanced at the filtered tip, then took it.

He tried to keep up with a brunette in a convertible. She wore a visor and was talking on a cell phone, a wake of hair flapping in the breeze. Nathan could see her painted nails. She wore a blue tank top and white tennis skirt. She looked rich and well put together, but he'd already convinced himself she was dirty in bed. Probably liked to be choked or cut or both.

He couldn't keep up with her, though.
Bitch must be doing ninety.

“Why don't you turn this nigger shit off,” Lipscomb said, yanking Flock from his fantasies. It wasn't a suggestion, either. In the joint Lipscomb had been known as Preacher. He had a way with words, his musings and philosophizing as legendary in facilities like Hays State Prison as was his ruthlessness.

“What's wrong? You don't like rap?” Flock said.

“I said turn it off.”

“Ain't you ever listened to it, though?” he argued. “Not like we haven't done plenty of business with the spooks inside…”

Lipscomb pulled a Randall knife from a scabbard and pressed the tip against Flock's jeans just above the femoral artery. Flock flinched and swerved across the next lane, eliciting a chorus of horns before regaining control of the pickup. A tractor-trailer blasted its air horn. Flock turned the radio down, then flicked off the trucker. Lipscomb put the knife back in the scabbard. Not a hint of humor on his face.

“Jesus Christ, Preacher!”

“You don't know nothing about the inside.”

A long silence followed. Lipscomb produced a folded sheet of paper. Studied directions written down for him.

“It's the next exit coming up,” he said.

Flock threw his cigarette out the window. He glanced at the radio.

“Well? What you want to hear then?”

“How about some Jimmie Rodgers.”

“Huh?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Flock abruptly drove his pickup between an 18-wheeler and a limousine before exiting. They came to a stop at the top of the off-ramp. Traffic blocking the intersection. Afternoon rush hour around Atlanta was notorious. Flock could burn half a tank of gas getting anywhere. Lipscomb just stared straight ahead. Nathan didn't remember him disposing of his cigarette.
Crazy asshole probably ate it.

Nathan made a left and crept toward a bus stop packed with Mexicans and blacks. They were stopped momentarily near the crowd. Lipscomb rolled down the window and spit. Looked around. Everyone with a lick of sense averted their eyes.

Flock drove past a gas station and liquor store and taqueria. Hung a right on a street with the whimsical name Wispy Willow Court. Women walked with their children along the sidewalks, pushing strollers, everyone carrying grocery bags.

Flock turned left into an apartment complex, the parking lot full of vans and used compacts. Work trucks with ladder racks. Imports with tacky paint jobs. Little decorative flags hung from the rearview mirror of almost every vehicle, announcing their owners' origins. Mexico. Nicaragua. El Salvador. Guatemala.
A community of illegals,
Lipscomb mused.
Left alone by the cops until somebody got mean drunk or a wife got battered or a drug deal went sour. Then the cops show up and try to recall their high school Spanish.

“Who we meeting again?” Flock said.

“Hicklin.”

“I heard about him. Y'all did time together, right?”

“Ten years,” Lipscomb said.

“What's he like?”

“Ask him yourself if he don't shoot you first.”

They got out and walked. Lipscomb led the way up a staircase. The walls of the complex were peeling and cracked.

“So you trust this beaner?” Flock said.

“Yeah, we do.”

It was Friday afternoon and a group of day laborers piled out of a mini-van. Cases of Budweiser, Pepsi and fast food in tow. They'd been on a roof all day, Lipscomb figured. In some tony neighborhood, skin sun bronzed, hands hardened from years of hammering and hauling and sanding and gutting and mowing. Denim jeans flecked with concrete dust and paint, their shirts tar stained and stinking. Some wore their hair in ponytails. Others wore hats from sports teams for which they had little concern. None of the workers acknowledged Flock or Lipscomb.

But Lipscomb admired the work ethic of folks like them—at least
they
worked, unlike those welfare zombies—even if these wetbacks were what he'd deemed the racial equivalent of a fruit fly.

Rich smells wafted from open windows as dinner was being prepared in a dozen units. A dirt lot doubling as a courtyard served as the recreation center for the neighborhood. Teenagers kicked a soccer ball around while younger kids amused themselves along the sidelines. Some of the children tended to infants in strollers.

A couple of young thugs on the second tier had been watching Lipscomb and Flock since they parked. The thugs hung over the railing and smoked, the sort of cocksure posturing corner kids assumed when they were trying to impress their superiors. One of them sent a text message on his cell phone. The other, brown and stout, turned to face the two white men as they approached. He wore khaki Dickies and a wifebeater, Chuck Taylors. A protégé of some Southern California sect, getting a B.A. in gangbanging, apparently.

“Yo!”

“Yo, yourself,” Lipscomb said. He and Flock stopped five feet away.

“You got business here,
Abuelo
? Better hope you do.”

Flock flexed some attitude, locking eyes with the mouthy gangbanger. The kid looked not a day over sixteen. Lipscomb stood his ground, clearly not impressed. For sure the boy was strapped. Maybe even fired his little popgun once.

“Lose the attitude,
Hay-soos,
” Flock said, then complaining to Lipscomb, “This place is a day-care center.”

“I don't want you to talk,” Lipscomb said over his shoulder. He turned to address the sentry, saying more with his six-foot-four frame, the hard fat and muscle, than any words could. Body language that suggested he was the type of man to lift a burning car with his bare hands, only to drop it on the trapped victim for laughs.

He noticed the kid glancing at the tattoos that unwound down each forearm. Lipscomb held up his palms like he was trying to coax a kitten from a tree.

“Now listen here, Jorge or Javier or…”

“My name's Paulo, motherfucker.”

“So it's Paulo. Tell Cueva we're here. I'm expected.”

“And who the fuck are you?” Paulo chirped.

Lipscomb glanced over the railing to the parking lot below, as if judging if the fall would kill a man. Then he smiled.

“Somebody that doesn't give a shit if you live or die in the next ten seconds.”

Paulo elbowed his buddy. Another text message was sent out on the cell phone. Then Paulo looked up nervously at Lipscomb. The smile hadn't left the ex-con's face, like a used-car salesman with a secret.

“Make that five seconds, Paulo. My watch is fast.”

Someone cut the music inside a nearby apartment. A door opened. The two Hispanic kids walked away. Flock could smell rice and chorizo. He was hungry. Wondered if dinner was part of their deal.

*   *   *

Nathan Flock followed
Lipscomb inside the apartment and shut the door behind him. The main room included living space and a side kitchenette. Sitting on a couch was a stocky Salvadoran wearing khaki work pants with a white T-shirt. The slippers on his feet were the kind the state issues, known as Nikes by the boys in county lockup. There was a black polymer handgun resting on his knee. A boom box thumped softly on the floor. Flock hesitated near the door, tickled by the fear they were about to be ambushed.

Cueva and a woman sat at a table in the kitchenette. Fifty or so money orders were neatly arranged in front of the woman, a bookish pair of reading glasses on the end of her nose. A menthol cigarette smoldered in an ashtray.

“Thought you'd have guards posted,” Lipscomb said. “What about the pigs?”

Cueva smiled. He rose, raised his arms and turned around. There was a pistol snug in the small of his back. An A4 .223-caliber rifle was within his reach, propped in a corner.

“I only use this place a couple hours at a time, Preacher.
Policia
know better than to come around without an appointment.”

The man on the couch chuckled. The woman did not look up from the money orders. Somewhere a fire truck siren blared.

Lipscomb noted the black rifle cases stacked six high next to the couch. One was open. Custom interior. Military green ammo boxes. A rucksack with spare magazines pushing against the canvas.

Cueva offered Lipscomb a chair at the table. Flock stood behind them, finding himself ignored now by all in the apartment. He studied Cueva. The Mexican gave up a couple inches to Lipscomb but was no less wide. Cueva's face was pocked around the neck and ears with scars like the chewed-up face of a pit bull. Indeed, the Mexican's eyes had the ferocity of a fighting dog. The potential for reckless abandon. That fearless extra gear inside him that fascinated criminal profilers and penologists.

His body was adorned with prison-gang tattoos. Flock recognized the call signs.

There were hands clasped in prayer, Aztec warriors, naked
mamacitas
with long black manes and pear-shaped breasts. Roses and skulls and the word
Esperanza
from collarbone to collarbone. An ominous blue-green handprint the centerpiece.

Mexican Mafia.

“Hicklin in the shitter?” Lipscomb said.

“Your homeboy came by already,” Cueva replied.

Lipscomb reacted with disbelief.

“Say again.”

“Yeah, man. Homeboy, eh, Hudson?”

“Hicklin.”

“Yeah, Hicklin. Came by late. Two nights ago. Lucky he found me here. This is just temporary 'cuz all the cholos round here lookin' for peashooters to avenge the honor of their old ladies or some shit. That's why I'm relocatin' up-country, where I can move the heavy shit to all you Aryan militia end-of-the-world
pendejos—
”

“What about Hicklin?” Lipscomb said. He was squeezing one hand into a fist like a junkie trying to produce a vein. Flock thought any second Lipscomb would start destroying furniture.

“Came by early Friday. Said he couldn't make it today. The score was set up on the inside, so everything was taken care of. I was paid in advance for the steel and ammo, the Kevlar. Everything else is your business, Holmes.”

Cueva sensed something was seriously wrong, Lipscomb's eyes betraying any comfort at this recent development. The Mexican looked to Flock, then addressed his confederate on the couch and his female companion.

“Ustedes me esperen en el cuarto.”

The woman took her cigarette but left the money orders. She and Cueva's partner walked down a hall to a bedroom. Flock inched forward but continued standing. Lipscomb lit a cigarette. He couldn't suppress his anger anymore.

“You catch the news today, Cueva?”

“Nah, man. Don't watch TV.”

Lipscomb took a couple of deep drags on the cigarette, his mind working to grasp the unbelievable.

“Give us the rest of our gear and we'll be on our way,” he finally said.

Cueva shrugged and without a word gestured to the ammo boxes and rifle cases by the couch.

“It's all there, homey. I cleaned the pistols for you, too, 'cause I believe in good customer service.”

Cueva pointed to the rucksack, said, “Two HK USP .45s. Nylon holsters and extra mags. Kevlar in that black duffel. I stripped the two Mossys so you could get in and out of here without looking like Special Forces.”

Lipscomb and Flock gathered up the duffel bags and left. Neither of them said a word in parting to Cueva. The Mexican sat back down, watching from the table in the kitchenette as the door shut. He picked up the rifle. Fingered the trigger guard of the A4, stroking it as he would a house cat in his lap.

“Vayan con dios, Ministro.”

*   *   *

Lipscomb and Nathan
loaded the truck and Nathan drove them back to the motel. At a gas station Lipscomb bought a newspaper and a carton of cigarettes. Back in the pickup he flipped through the “State/Metro” section and found what he was looking for.

“What is it, Preach? Why did Hicklin pick up his guns before us?”

“Because he jumped the score.”

“What?”

Lipscomb folded the paper in half and pointed to the single column of coverage on page 1.

“He jumped our fucking score.”

“But we still had a week?”

Nathan cracked the window and lit a cigarette. Both men were silent for a while, Lipscomb smarting from Hicklin's betrayal, Flock taking stock of their situation.