Pain Killers (34 page)

“Must be tough,” I said. “Feds put a gang injunction on the Avenues in ’ninety-nine, right?”

“Gang injunction is bullshit,” Carlos said. “I bump into my cousins at a birthday party, they take us in ’cause we’re not allowed to meet in groups. You think they ever pull that shit on white people?”

“White people weren’t your problem, Carlos. You were trying to keep blacks away. Mengele help out with that?”

Carlos hung his head.

“How many?” I asked him.

“I’m sick.”

“I know, I got a nose. How many?”

Carlos groaned. “Three.”

He opened the door and slid off the seat again. I held him up by one ear and rolled down my own window.

“How many?”

“Four…Five,” Carlos squeaked. “I’m the one who told him.”

“Told him what? Talk normal.”

“About killing the
mayates.
The blacks. The old man said he knew a better way. He said we wouldn’t have to worry about them tracin’ the bullets, finding the knife. And no bodies. He told me about the war. Them concentrated camps—”

Carlos strained to stay awake and stave off the projectile diarrhea.

“Old man said, before they opened the big joint, Ouchwiz, they drove around in vans, pickin’ up retards and Jews. He got real scientific. Hemoglobin and shit. How the fumes fuck up your oxygen, so—”

“Forget the science. How could you stand it, hearing somebody suffocate five inches behind you? Didn’t they scream? How many did you kill again?”

“Six, all right? Seven.
Seven!
I don’t know, I was high!” he shouted, and clutched his guts. “I had to be high, man. They fucking screamed.” His voice grew quiet. “But that wasn’t the worst.”

I stuck my hands between my knees to keep them from hurting him. “What was the worst?”

“The worst was their lips.” Carlos’s eyelids drooped. His voice went dreamy. I spotted the nail, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, slowly slicing his arm from the top of the elbow down the wrist. “I’m tellin’ you, mang. When we opened the van, their mouths were open, like this”—he pushed his own cracked lips into an exaggerated kiss—“and they were super-red, like they had lipstick on. That hemoglobin thing. It was like, these two niggers didn’t just die—they died and went gay. We did a gringo after that. I guess it was a contract, I don’t know, but it was even worse. We put him in, he’s some regular jim; we take him out, his face is the color of a chili pepper and he got a mouth like a tranny. Like them dead motherfuckers put lipstick on.”

“But,” I croaked, building a wall between that visual and the rest of my brain, “you did it again.”

“One time, I had to—
Ooooofff
…”

Carlos clawed his stomach and angled sideways, seizing up. His face mashed on my shoulder as he farted helplessly.

“You had to what?” I shoved him back to his own side, trying to speak without breathing. “What did you have to do, Carlos?”

Carlos jerked back the plaid shirt collar, exposing a tattooed “13” I hadn’t spotted at the pound. He saw me eyeing it.

“You know what that is?”

“Thirteenth letter of the alphabet. M.”

“We gotta keep going over this, motherfucker? La Eme runs the Avenues. Just like they run forty-seven other gangs.” His voice sounded like it was squeezed out of a small animal. “FL thirteen? Florence and Normandy? They’re the ones took out a buncha Crips in ’ninety-nine. It’s all prison gang bullshit. The order came down from Pelican Bay. KBOS.”

“Kills blacks on sight.”

“That’s what I said, fool. Straight-up NHI. No humans involved.”

“I bet the old guy really loved that concept.”

“Matter of fact, he smiled.” Carlos broke it down—sitting in his own shit, explaining gravity. “Mexican Mafia same as the ALS same as the Black Warriors. Don’t matter if I think it’s penetentiary bullshit. I’m just a soldier. They wanna put that race bullshit in the hood, to make a point inside, you gotta show scalps or get scalped.”

I was still thinking of those red lips.

“Your pal, his real name’s Mengele. I met him up at Quentin.”

“You were inside.”

“I was there. And believe me, the color brown is scum to him, but you know that, right?”

“Whatever. He like the color green. Shot callers want all the
negroes
”—he pronounced it “nay-gross”—“out of the hood. But see, that’s a hate crime. That’s federal. The German, he knew all this shit. He’s like, ‘Why shoot the schvartzes’—he always called ’em that—‘in front of witnesses?’ We put them in the van, we can gas them while we’re going through a McDonald’s drive-through, buyin’ Quarter Pounders. We did, too, man. Every time, we’d go get food. He even took care of the bodies. So what the fuck you gonna do, shoot me?”

I was easing the .38 into his neck.
Never pull a gun out unless you don’t plan to use it.
I just wanted to scare him. When he kicked the door open, trying to jump, I dove across the seat and grabbed his collar. But he wasn’t trying to run. He was ripping his pants off, bowels spray-painting his thighs. I plucked out a wad of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and KFC napkins jammed between the seats and threw them at him.

“I guess you’re not lying about the fast food. What aren’t you telling me?”

“You think I’m leaving shit out?”

I let the barrel nuzzle his ear like a friendly pony.

“Okay, there was some drugs.”

“What kind?”

“He say it was crank. But I don’t know…it ain’t like normal
bombita.
One hit and you start running like your fucking heart is pulling you down the street. I remember once, this
hyna
was suckin’ my dick…. My homegirl, you know? And right in the middle, she’s like, ‘What’s up with that?’ So I check out my cojones and they’re all, like, boom-
BOOMP,
boom-
BOOMP
. Like I had a fucking alarm clock in my sack.”

“What was it?”

“It was my
balls,
man, they were like big ol’ jumping beans.”

“I meant what was the drug?”

“He called it, like, ‘dreen’ or some shit.”

“But not methedrine?”

“No, man, I know methedrine.”

“Of course you do. What about…Adrenaline? That sound familiar?”

“Adrenaline?” Carlos tried to clean himself, then splattered the ground again. “Oh, Mama…Yeah, that’s it! He said it was all natural. But I don’t…It’s like the crank was on crank, you know what I’m sayin’? And the shit made you hungry. We go down to IHOP and put away two, three plates of them Belgian waffles, with whipped cream and all that shit.”

“You on it now, Carlos?”

“Ask my PO, motherfucker. I fill a cup whenever my number comes up.”

I figured he had to be on
something.
Either way, how could you not respect a man who could still give attitude half-asleep and blowing his insides out of his sphincter?

“Just curious,” I said. “Let’s get to work. How do you unlock the back of the van?”

“Below the blinkers. Orange toggle switch.”

I flipped a switch and an ominous clacking filled the cab, as if the van had backed into an MRI machine. The soles of my shoes vibrated.

“Not that!” Carlos darted a hand under the steering wheel to flip it off. “That’s the floor sealer. It’s sheet metal.”

“Floor sealer?”

“Keeps the fumes in, man.”

He bit his lip, reached back under the wheel and hit another switch. This time there was a simple click.

“Just unlock the fucking back door.”

“Gimme a second,” Carlos said in a choked voice. He unbuckled his pants and shoved them down to his ankles. Then he opened the passenger door and clung to the armrest, covering his package with his hand and making his own little mountain. I stepped out of the van, facing the other way when I talked to him.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said with no conviction whatsoever. “Walk it off. Come on, open up the back.”

I helped Carlos to his feet. He doubled up and farted, groaning as though passing chunks of his own flesh. He was in bad shape. But I couldn’t pop down to the twenty-four-hour Sav-on for Kaopectate and man-Pampers.

I helped Carlos to the back of the van, zigzagging the shrubs and blue-tarped construction site with the flashlight. I didn’t see anything, but I knew. The way you know somebody’s watching, when the bad dog tongue of intuition laps the back of your neck.

Carlos bunched the sweatshirt over his flat belly in pain, trailing liquid panic. By now I was used to acrid odors. They followed me like dolphins behind yachts.

Then that dog on the back of my neck threw open its jaws and bit. The thought almost made me bleed: if all the animals in the pound were dead for the night, that meant somebody had to have dosed them. And, according to Carlos, nobody did the dosing but Mengele.

“Open it,” I said, willing my voice calm.

Carlos dug a hand into his stomach and muttered. “I ain’t your bitch, bitch.”

I let it pass. If this was a setup, I did not want to be the one standing in front of that van door. Backpedaling as Carlos stepped forward, I felt a tingling in my head wound. Maybe I’d suffered a cerebral hematoma. Or maybe I’d become clairvoyant.

A second before he grabbed the handle I turned and dove.

My face crashed into branches. The van door swung open and somebody fired a gun. The bullet ripped Carlos’s ear from his skull. It clung to my pants like a feral scallop. Carlos froze. He touched the spot where his ear had been with an expression of vague confusion, as if he’d misplaced his cell phone. Then he screamed, whipping his head back and forth, giving the clump of dying grass beneath his feet red highlights. “Fucking
cabron
! I knew you were a pig!”

I’d barely made it to a gully five feet from where Carlos was screaming. I wanted to scream back at him:
“It wasn’t me!”
If I did we’d both be dead. If I didn’t, whoever shot him would figure out who he was screaming at.

Another blast spun him around. It looked like a dance move. Dead man’s salsa. A black car roared around the curving drive, lights sweeping the trees. It parked hard, twenty feet away, aiming its lights at us. Carlos stumbled a few steps into the high beams, in my direction, one arm coiled over his shoulder as if trying to scratch his back. Then he uncoiled. He studied his bloody fingers like he’d never seen them wet and fought his way out of his sweatshirt.

Shirt off, lit by headlights, Carlos was so skinny he looked two-dimensional. The second bullet had punched a smoking nipple over his ribs. Exiting, it blew out a ragged pancake of back. Carlos was liver-shot, bleeding brown. It looked like he was hemorrhaging A1.

Two more shots tore through the meat of his right and left palms, leaving matching stigmata. The bullets were a smaller caliber. A .22. I wondered if the palm shots were a fluke or the shooter was a dead-eye who hated hands. All speculation, however inane, was preferable to focusing on what was right in front of me.

Carlos dropped to his knees. He laid down on the side of his torso that had not been ventilated, one bleeding finger uncurled and pointing to my right. I couldn’t leave him there. His eyes were rolled back in his head. Somebody killed the headlights and I grabbed his arm and dragged him out of harm’s way. I figured whoever opened up on Carlos would want to know what happened to him. When they came looking, I could double back and get to the van.

This wasn’t much of a plan. It needed fleshing out. But before I could start fleshing I scrabbled backward, then tumbled down a gully into a muddy storm drain, slick as a toboggan chute. Carlos and I slid downhill for what felt like half a mile but may have been fifteen feet. We stopped when we hit a giant metal screen, the kind they put in to keep small dogs from washing down the storm drain out to the ocean. The impact stunned us both. We came around at the same time, blinking into the floodlight drenching us from a nearby house. The lights went out in thirty seconds, which was long enough to take in Carlos’s drooly grin. “That was just like the Matterhorn!”

“Just like it,” I whispered, amazed he was still alive and chatting. But glad he was happy. Maybe I’d misdiagnosed the severity of his wounds. I couldn’t tell if he was still bleeding. We were submerged in a puddle of wet leaves. Carlos grabbed my shoulder and squeezed, proving the palm shot had missed his tendons. I expected the shooter to come screaming down the chute, guns blazing. But Carlos had this thing he needed to tell me. How do you tell a corpse to shut up?

“My best friend, Lazy, he tol’ me dyin’ was just like Disneyland.” Fighting for breath, Carlos giggled and blew a taffy apple blood bubble. Red and sticky. It burst and he squeezed my shoulder. “He got it in the neck two blocks from school. Drive-by. We were nine, man. Lazy, he was lying on my foot. I was afraid to move, so I just stood there. I asked him what it was like, and he said, ‘It’s just like the Matterhorn, Carlito. Just like at Disneyland.’ I thought he was bullshittin’.” He grinned through bloody teeth. “I guess he wasn’t.”

Now I felt like the nine-year-old Carlito, with Lazy on his foot. I didn’t want to move but I couldn’t stand still. As gently as I could, I eased him off my legs and out of the wet onto a bed of plastic bags and beer cans, site of some long-ago party.

“Carlos,” I whispered, just to see if he was live meat or dead.

“Sí, señor,”
he said, mugging feebly up at me. Dead man mocking.

I didn’t know what else to do. Carlos was humming. Until now, I’d managed to compartmentalize the fact that the Boy Scout beside me had helped to run a mobile ethnic-cleansing operation. I’d even managed to put Tina’s behavior on a shelf. But you couldn’t compartmentalize bullets—or playing human luge in an L.A. storm drain, pursued by the famous, mysteriously undead Holocaust doctor.

Carlos stared up at the smog-tinged stars.

“How you feelin’?” I asked.

“Oh, mang, I am beautiful.”

I picked a twig off his face. Dying seemed to agree with him. “What I don’t get,” I said, “if you had this successful gas thing going, why would you run over an old woman? It doesn’t make sense.”