Pain Killers (33 page)

On the way out, I stumbled over something—an Adidas tennis shoe. Odd. But, in the grand scheme of things, not worth noting. Not then.

Back out front, I hopped over the counter first, accidentally switching my light on when I landed. The beam caught a tacked-up flyer for Reconcile, a canine antianxiety drug. In the photo a golden retriever gazed sadly by a picture window.
Reconcile—because pets have stress, too!

“He said
man
in the oven?”

Carlos averted his eyes. “Yeah.”

My nerves were on red alert. I craved a little Reconcile myself. I swept the flashlight over the wall of caged, unmoving animals, then forced my attention back to Carlos. One nightmare at a time. “All dead,” I said. “It’s unbelievable. Why does he kill all the dogs?”

“Not all. Some are drugged. He gives them another injection in the morning and they’re usually okay. Unless they’re crippled up. Or dead.”

“So they’re knocked out at night? Cranked up in the morning? If they’re not…”

“Dead or so fucked up you know they wished they were.”

“You think animals get suicidal?”

“When the doctor gets through with them? Fuck yeah. I seen this one kitten, nothing but a head on a pink tube…”

I wondered if Carlos was completely out of his mind, maybe hallucinating the whole thing. I drifted to the nearest cage, reached in and poked at a reclining mutt. Cold dog belly. It felt like a cement bag with teats.

Carlos was getting squirrelly.

I tried to keep it casual, as casual as you can be when you’re discussing rolling pet genocide.

“Did the old Hun say why he wanted to kill the strays before bringing them back to the shelter?”

“Hell yeah.” Carlos bent to adjust his socks. “He wouldn’t shut up about it. He was runnin’ his mouth ’bout Darwin. Like, the dogs that got caught deserved to get caught or some shit. And what’s the other fuckin’ word he always sayin’? Oh yeah, ‘ecology.’” Carlos did his best Mexican-tinged version of a German accent: “‘This is ecological.’ Fuck, the dude was freakalogical. Freak-tagious. Freak-tagious,” he repeated, pleased with himself. “Damn, I should write that down. I rap, you know? Kinda like Lil’ Cuete or Kemo the Blaxican.”

“Kemo, yeah,” I nodded, like I knew what the fuck he was talking about. “How ’bout you gimme your CD later, okay? Finish what you were saying.”

“About what?”

“Jesus, Carlos! About the German.”

“Yeah, yeah. Right. He said it saved energy. He’s a weird dude. Can we get some food now?”

A few cages were stored by the door, on top of a minifridge. An overweight basset hound lay on its side, one plaintive eye open, following us. I had a feeling the hush puppy knew something I didn’t. Right before the double doors I stopped. There was something else that bothered me even more. One specific thing. I was about to say something when Carlos spotted me grabbing a mint from a bowl between the employee log and plasti-glove dispenser. “Oh shit,” he cried, pointing at my hand. “They’re for dog breath.”

“In that case it’s probably not strong enough.” I tossed the mint back in the bowl. “But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. Why do they let him do this? The pound people.”

Carlos grabbed a handful of candy and tossed it into the cages. “Something they can take to heaven,” he said, which made me like him.

“That’s nice, man, but the people who run the pound, who are they?”

“It’s a lady. But she don’t know. Nobody knows. Old dude’s last out, first in, you know? Plus I think she likes the old fucker. He’s dapper, you know. Mrs. Gutierrez is forty or somethin’, but I think he’s fuckin’ her. He’s, like, a hundred and seventy-five or some shit and he still fucks.”

“Guess he takes his vitamins.”

“He calls them ‘formulas.’ He says he can extend life. But what he mostly do is bitch. And brag. Whatever it is, he can do it better. Like when we transition, you know, when we bring the dogs from the van into the pound? He’s always bitching. Like, why do we go to all the trouble of getting them out of the van and inside the cages? Transition’s the most dangerous time, ’cause you just took an animal used to roamin’ free, then cooped his ass up in a broiling tin can with a bunch of other animals. Think about it. After a couple hours, you don’t know what you gonna get when you open the doors. I seen chihuahuas lunge out the van straight for a motherfucker’s juggler.”

“Bad way to go,” I said. “Killed by a chihuahua. Nobody’d be able to keep a straight face at the funeral.”

“Ha-ha-ha. Laugh laugh. You ain’t seen what I seen. He retooled the dogcatcher vans. So when you get back all the dogs and cats are already
muerto.
”

Carlos stared absently at his now-clean hands.

“Used to be you hear their claws and shit, scrapin’ the floor, slidin’ around when we took a curve. I used to imagine, you know, what if
I
was the animal? I’d think about skidding across the van floor in the dark. Every time the driver makes a turn or stops your little paws just slide. You and the other cats and dogs are all slammed into the wire mesh…. They’d be barking like crazy, whimpering, meowing, howling like you wouldn’t believe. Then he rigged the van. Had me solder all the cracks, made it airtight. Now we don’t gotta worry ’bout getting bit or clawed. We just empty ’em out.”

The vision was grim. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Carlos yawned and grabbed his stomach and muttered, “Fuck.” I heard volcanic rumbling. Maybe he’d dipped back into the Chico’s party bag. Maybe I’d used too much lax in the Somi-lax. There was an audible
blurp
from Carlos’s pants. He gritted his teeth. “You ain’t a cop, right?”

“No.”

“And you can help me get this old dude off my back?”

“Yeah.”

“The first time, after he rigged the hose? After ten minutes, all we hear is bodies clunkin’ in the back. No barks, no meows. Nothin’. So quiet, it scared me, homes.”

I checked my watch. Carlos saw me and said, “What?”

“We need to go. Don’t worry, I have clean clothes.”

“I don’t know, man,” Carlos mumbled as I followed him back through the swinging double doors to the reception area.

At the front door, I spotted that keypad again and thought of baby Hitler. Born 4/21/05.

“Gotta reset the security code,” Carlos warned. “Let me do it.”

“Be my guest.”

The street was dead. I waited until Carlos pressed the last number. He said, “Okay.” I opened the door. Five different kinds of floodlights blasted on. The alarm was so loud it hurt my hair.

Carlos froze. “Guess I fucked up.”

“You think?”

The Lincoln was backed to the shelter door. I popped the trunk, moved some crap around, found a pair of U Miss sweats and threw them at him. They’d come with the car. Then I grabbed the enchiladas. Once Carlos had them in his hands, they were gone in under a minute. While he scarfed, I slid the .38 in my waistband. Then I slammed the trunk and unlocked the car.

“Shit, man. Where we goin’?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we stand here and talk about it until the cops show and you get that third strike you been dreamin’ about?”

“Don’t fuck with me, homes.”

I rolled us down the street with the lights off, giving it enough gas to slink onto Avenue Fifty just as the blaring cherry-tops nosed off Avenue Fifty-one into the alley. I cut ahead of a line of cars, made a left onto Figueroa and swung right again, onto Avenue Fifty-two, down the ramp feeding the 110. The avenues were numbered like that up to sixty. I slipped south to the on-ramp and steered my mushy tires onto the freeway.

“You shouldn’t make fun of me,” said Carlos, fighting off a yawn.

“I’m not. I’m trying to save your ass,” I said as he tugged on the sweatshirt. “Jesus, Carlos, are you that sensitive when you’re doin’ drive-bys? Now where’s the van?”

A trio of black-and-whites raced past us in the other direction. “I never did that shit. That’s been all blown up by the media. Avenues got a bad rap.”

“Whatever you say. Just tell me where the van is.”

“You’re going the wrong way. Go back and get off at Avenue Forty-five. The Southwest Museum, where they keep all that Indian shit.”

I checked the rearview. Nothing. The good thing about driving a thirty-year-old car was that it looked like it belonged to somebody in the hood. It would have been a problem in Beverly Hills.

We crossed the tracks at the top of Avenue Forty-five, then made a hard right beside a big art deco building flying a U.S. flag—the Southwest Museum.

A row of sawhorses and NO ENTRY and CONSTRUCTION VEHICLES ONLY signs blocked the entrance. The winding driveway curved behind the museum, up the steep hill beyond.

“Van’s up there.”

“Then get out and move the fucking signs.”

Carlos jumped out and did what he was told. As he moved the last NO ENTRY out of the way I imagined what would have happened if the cops had caught us in the pound. With enough dead dogs to make Michael Vick look like Saint Francis of Assisi. I could almost picture the public defender’s face when I gave her my alibi.
Josef Mengele did it.

I always get nervous
after
things go down, when the adrenaline curdles to strychnine retro-panic. I kept the motor running. Carlos stopped to admire the Kennedy-era Lincoln.

“Qué coche más chingo!”

“Say what?”

“Cool ride. I love them suicide doors.”

I slapped the Lincoln into drive. “But we’re not talking about suicide, are we, Carlos? We’re talking about homicide?”

Carlos gulped audibly and clutched his stomach. He licked his cracked lips as we crept up the closed-off road. He pointed when we came to a weedy dogleg. Beside the husk of an old truck, under a ramshackle lean-to, was the animal protection vehicle. I killed off the ignition, waiting for Carlos to speak.

“S-s-s-so,” he stammered after a little while. “You know?”

“I know everything,” I lied, and held out my hand. “Keys to the van?”

“Under a rock,
hijo
….”

Carlos bent forward as he walked, clutching his stomach. It had startled to drizzle again.

“S’matter, Carlos, you scared ’cause you gave him up?”

He stopped so suddenly I slipped on the wet mud trying not to bump into him. Carlos caught me before I fell.

“You don’t know shit, do you? You know if I’m a stereotype to you, you’re a stereotype to me, fool!”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you don’t know shit!”

He could have let me go down, kicked me in the head and stolen my car keys. Instead he held me up and laughed in my face. “I’m scared cause I
didn’t
give him up,
whetto
! I told the cops about the hit-and-run. I didn’t say nothin’ ’bout the other stuff.”

“So now you can tell me about it.”

We huddled behind the van, under a big leafless tree that dropped some breed of itchy fluff down the collar of my shirt. The shelter van looked normal enough, a battered gray box roughly the size of four porta johns stacked two on two, a single door in back and no windows.

Carlos kneeled down and groped under a clump of leaves and branches. He scooped up a key and got back on his feet.

“Tell me about the other stuff, Carlos.”

This time, by way of reply, he just pointed down, under the bumper. The hose, painted the same drab gray as the van, snaked from the exhaust pipe up under the back bumper and into the container like a wily boa. “You know, homes…The gas.”

Carlos doubled up. Maybe from the bad dog paste, maybe from the memory of what he and his shelter buddy had done together, in this vehicle. A Santa Ana blew scratchy fuzz down from the tree overhead and I thought, inanely,
If they give the wind a name, why not smog?
Something to make airborne particulates—the local brew that turned L.A. babies into adorable asthmatics—sound really exotic. On very rare occasions, the Santa Anas actually brought rain. And this was a very rare occasion. “I think I gotta shit,” Carlos groaned. He fought back serial yawns.

“Unlock the van first.”

“I only have the key for the front.” Talking was a strain. “Can’t hold it, mang.”

For his sake, I hoped Carlos passed out before he soiled himself. I took the .38 out and jammed it in his back.

“Unlock it, now.”

“Damn, mister!”

Sweat beaded on Carlos’s shaved skull, so it looked like the eyeball on the back of his head was crying. He lurched forward, arms coiling his waist in pain. “Why you pointing that thing at me? For serious, I can’t hold it, mang.”

“You’re gonna have to,
mang.
”

“Yeah?” Fighting cramps, Carlos straightened up and hissed at me. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with. I could green-light you, too, you know.”

But there wasn’t much heart in it. He grunted and squirmed sideways, squirming between the van and the tin wall of the lean-to. I aimed the flashlight at the door. He jerked the key back and forth, then yanked it out, wiped both sides on his pants and tried again. This time it opened.

“You ride bitch,” I said, grabbing the key and muzzle-shoving him. I waited until he got in before hoisting myself behind the wheel.

I didn’t need to hold a gun on him. Carlos jerked forward and grabbed the dashboard, grunting. I yanked him back in the seat by the collar. “I’m sorry,” he squealed, “I can’t—”

The wave passed. I needed him to relax.

“It’s okay, Carlos. The
pistola
’s for insurance. Just tell me what you two did in the van.”

“It wasn’t my idea, I swear….”

“So what happened? He hear how your homeboys like to do their own racial cleansing?”

“You better watch it,
cabron.
”

“What’s your crew?”

“Avenue Forty-three, Tiny Locos.”

“No shit? I remember when your homeboys made the headlines: ‘Street Gang Race Murder.’ Blowing your African-American neighbors away in broad daylight. Keeping Highland Park brown and down.”

“Street cleaning.”

Race murder—what the hell else were an SS doctor and a Mexican-American gangbanger going to talk about?