Pain Killers (35 page)

“She dissed him.” Carlos pulled himself up by my shoulder. He spoke with mild surprise. “S’funny, mang, in the movies, guys who get shot always say ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ My legs feel fucking fine, man. So I can’t die, right?”

“Right,” I agreed, feeling a pang of guilt that maybe I should have called an ambulance. I thought he would be dead by now. If he lived, I’d apologize. “Carlos, maybe I should—”

“Fuck that,” he said, “ain’t nothin’ you can do now.” He sneezed blood and continued. “We were in the Superior Market on Avenue Forty-five. It’s this cheap-ass discount supermarket. You know the kind, big as a football field, where you gotta bag your own groceries? Hombre Viejo, he don’t know this. He standing there, holdin’ up the line, waitin’ for some bagger to bag him up. So the checker, this middle-aged white lady, a real
gordita,
she say to him, like, ‘This is a megastore, sir, we keep prices low. You have to bag yourself,’ the lady says, real slow, like he’s retarded. ‘Is there someone outside to drive you home? Did you come in a senior van?’” He laughed more blood spray, then passed out, coughing.

I crouched there, cradling him…. Cough. Blood. Barking. Mengele in a Hispanic discount market. I raised my eyes, hoping to see something that would make sense. The sky looked like it was painted with lead.

“Wait,” I said suddenly, “
gordita.
What is that?”

“Fat. Big, white and fat. That’s the thing.”

Visions of Walburga swam before me.

“Two minutes later, we’re at the train crossing. Waiting for the Metro Rail to pass. The gate was down. This fat Mexican lady, I don’t know if she’s homeless or what, she pushes this shopping cart in front of us. He starts wigging, spitting all this crazy shit. ‘I’m sorry, you blubber bag. You cow! But I have to kill you.’ I’m like, ‘What?’

“Then the old man hits the gas. Knocks her down, and the whole time he’s screaming, you know? Really goin’ off.
‘You fat cow…You stinking sofa!’
Stuff in German, I don’t know what the fuck. I couldn’t believe it, then he backs up, watches her struggling to get all her shit back in the cart. And when she gets back up, he starts screaming, ‘See, see! She’s a parasite. Look how she won’t stay down!’ And as soon as she pulls herself up he hits her again, mang. Before this, I never seen this side of the dude, you know?”

Carlos coughed, blood staining his hand. “Then—this really freaked me—the old man looks over and goes, ‘Do you believe I can roll over her head without putting a scratch on her body?’ And I’m like, ‘Chill, Doc, there ain’t no hit out on the bag lady.’”

“What did he do?”

“What do you think? He slams it in reverse, knocks her down again and guns it—so you can feel this
wa-BOMP,
like the opposite of when you drive into a pothole. I felt sick, man.” Carlos coughed and channeled Mengele. “‘This is a skill I developed at Auschwitz. If I needed a jaw, I could back a Mercedes up over a forehead, not even scrape the probiscum bones.’ That’s what he say, mang,
‘probiscum.’
”

“You’ve got a great ear,” I said to him. “You could do dialect in voice-overs….”

“‘You could do dialect,’” he mimicked, talking white before going East L.A. again. “Next thing, we hear the sirens. All I’m thinking is if cops check the van for DNA, that’s it…. Game over. I’m gonna be playing handball with Richard Ramirez. So I say, ‘C’mon, Doc, she’s still alive, let’s throw her in the back and take off.’ But the old man, he’s like, ‘We’ll have to drive halfway to Vegas to gas her fat ass….’”

Carlos burped exploding cherries and barked out a bloody last laugh. That was it.

I had heard that a man’s spirit flies out when he dies. If this was true, Carlos’s flew into a storm drain. And he died laughing.

I couldn’t cut through yards. Dogs would bark. Lights would go on. The sidewalk was out of the question. No one stole the copper out of the streetlights in Mount Washington, so they worked. I hugged the storm drain, moving low, following the concrete gully back up the hill to the rear of the museum.

At the top, under a streetlight, was a distinctive silhouette. You don’t see many profiles missing half their profiles. It was Zell’s other twin boychick, Davey.

Either no one had told him about Dinah or he was taking his mind off his loss doing muscle work for Mengele. I wondered what he and bro Bernstein would do when they found out that Tina and I had rearranged their stepmom’s corpse to make it look like she died having Sabbath sex with a Chasid. If I were a praying man, I’d pray that my driver woke up and got out of her bedroom before he was arrested for strangling her. I didn’t expect God to do much for me, but what had the driver ever done?

The family Zell had enough juice inside San Quentin to arrange conjugal visits, plastic surgery, L.A. getaways. God knew what they’d do to my driver if he got sent up for doing Dinah Zell. Assuming he lived long enough to get sent anywhere. If anything happened to Russian Jack, it would be on me.

Davey leaned on a utility pole tagged top to bottom. He scratched his head with the muzzle of a Beretta.
For Christ’s sake!
I wanted to shout at him.
Didn’t you learn the last time you put a gun to your head? Accidents happen!

I found a rock the size of Davey’s missing jaw and thought about braining him. I’m not a tough guy, but I watched a lot of violence on TV as a child.

I knew men on the force who spent years learning martial arts, each with its own particular philosophy of Tao or Chi or harnessing the flow of the universe against your opponent so that he ultimately defeats himself. My approach was more basic: sneak up from behind. You could do anything to a man if he didn’t see you coming.

A gun butt to the head would have done nicely. But my gun—a sturdy and inelegant .38—had popped out of my hand in the storm-drain slalom. It wasn’t registered to me, but still, we went back a long time. This being America, the gun would no doubt wash up next to a grade school where a twelve-year-old would pick it up at recess and shoot his cousin. Then again, things never fuck up the way you think.

I had a dozen attack-from-the-back moves, all variations on “sneak and strike.” One involved the guitar string garrote in my sock. But garroting could be tricky. Once, in Manhattan, I’d tried to wrap a wire around the throat of a crackhead who had half a foot on me. He must have been six-six. Instead of killing him, I got my finger caught under the wire at his throat and I rode him from Eighty-sixth and Broadway to Eighty-third, where he knocked me off trying to get on the number five bus. I’m still missing the tip of my right middle finger, forever ending my chances at becoming a Mason—they only take “whole men”—and denying me the chance to give anyone the two-handed finger.

I couldn’t decide whether to move in on Davey or sneak around to see who else was behind the museum. I just hoped they didn’t have night vision. I crouch-walked a few feet left, trying not to break any branches. From this angle, I could make out the car: a 2002 Cadillac DeVille. Room for six. The perfect vehicle if my whole drug class decided to take a school trip to L.A. to kill me—and wanted to travel in style.

Then Davey made things easy. He ducked toward me into the bushes, glanced over his shoulder and opened a prescription bottle. He tipped his head back, tapped a few pills into his lipless mouth, and started to gobble them dry. No doubt it hurt being him.

I waited until the first pill hit his gullet. Then I jumped up, palm raised, as though planning to spike a volleyball, and popped the plastic bottle down his throat. A prescription bottle cap had been enough to take out Tennessee Williams, so I pulled my spike. I didn’t want to kill anybody, just put him out of commission. That’s why I only shoved the bottle midway down Davey’s esophagus.

Davey reeled backward, choking louder than I’d expected. Now I’d have to do something else to shut him up. I snatched the gun out of his hand and swung it off his temple. He crumbled. We were already in the bushes, so I didn’t have to hide him. But I didn’t feel good about any of it. I pulled a thin wallet out of Davey’s pocket. It was still stiff and shiny. The kind somebody’s grandparents would give a ten-year-old before he needed a wallet. Touching. Until I opened it up and saw the twin lightning bolts embossed on the pocket. Maybe it was a gift from his brother.

“Must have been exciting,” I said to him, “getting to use your wallet and all.” For the moment, he wasn’t responsive.

The only card, a driver’s license, said “David Zellkoff.” How many names did these people need? His twin brother was Bernstein, he was Zellkoff and his daddy was Zell. On his license, Davey stared at the floor like he couldn’t meet the camera’s eyes. I looked down at him. Even out cold, he radiated pain. “It’s hard, huh? Some days you wake up and say ‘Why fucking bother?’ Believe me, I’ve been there.”

Nobody listens better than the unconscious. Except for the dead.

I pocketed the license and slid the wallet back in his pocket.

Walk a mile in another man’s chin…

Locking the safety on Davey’s nine, I took off at a low trot around the perimeter. Somebody lit a cigarette in the cab of the van. They must have gotten out of the car and hopped in. I stayed in the shadows, angling toward the van from the right. I was holding the Beretta with both hands. Before taking off again, I checked myself for red dots. Halfway there, I had to stop and check again. One of my biggest fears was spotting the infrared dot from a sniper’s sight on my torso. I’d only seen them in movies, but that didn’t make my fear less real. What could you do if you
did
spot the dot on your crotch? The instinct was to strike a defensive posture—cover the spot—thereby explaining the high percentage of sniper victims who die with bloody paws. My plan was to keep low to the ground until I was directly behind the van, where I wouldn’t show up in either side mirror. I didn’t want to end up in dead man’s Disneyland with Carlos.

When I saw the van’s back door was slightly ajar, I eased the barrel of Davey’s Beretta inside. Slowly pulled it back. Nothing. Darkness. I didn’t realize my flashlight was gone until I reached for it. “You fucking idiot,” I said, louder than I meant to.

“Who you calling an idiot?”

I recognized the reverend’s Isaac Hayes drawl, then his hand snatched the gun out of my hand and the door flew open. Perfect.

“Reverend! What the fuck? I was talking to myself.”

A gun barrel gently introduced itself to my forehead. “Nice piece,” he continued pleasantly. “Bad day, huh? We all have ’em.”

That was the definition of a hustler—stick a gun in your face and still sound like the best friend you ever had.

“Man named Jesus Christ had a bad day,” the reverend continued. “He ended up on a cross. You look like shit, my man.”

“Spare me the fucking sermon,” I said. “I go all to hell when people shoot at me.”

“You wet yourself?”

“No, why? You want to get that on film? You branching out? You could put a robe on me and call it Paul pissing his pants on the way to Damascus.”

“I was shooting at you, you’d be shot. How about you get your drug-counseling, talk-it-like-he-walk-it white-boy ass in the van?”

“Who
were
you shooting at?”

The reverend laughed and showed off his gold grill. “Whoever got hit.”

As soon as we stepped in the van, the interior light went on. The van’s walls glistened like shiny tin, with burnished whorls of blue and green like you’d see in a puddle of gasoline: beautiful enough to be what gassed souls left behind. I was sure if I stared long enough I’d see faces in the whorls.

Sitting stiffly, in the exact middle of a bench that ran along the back wall, was Mengele. He was in full SS wear, from the insignia on his SS-
Hauptsturmführer
cap to the shiny black boots. His skin looked remarkable. There was none of that Dick Clark Naugahyde vampire bloat you see on old men who’ve had “work done.” (I saw the real Dick Clark once in an elevator at Sony, and his skin had the sheen of a hydrated car seat.) Mengele’s face actually glowed, which only made his rheumy eyes more unsettling. His mustache grew in a doggy pewter, contrasting strangely with his Billy Idol hair. The fresh air outside of prison seemed to agree with him.

The reverend nudged me with the gun and pointed at him. “Check it out. Looks like an aging leather queen, don’t he?”

But my attention was drawn to the figure beside him. It was propped against the wall, wrapped head-to-toe in a blue blanket. I had a feeling about who was under it. I could have drawn Tina’s silhouette from memory: hair, shoulders, waist, hips, off-kilter breasts. Or maybe it was some extra sense that lets a man know when his wife is under a blanket. He can’t see her, but he knows.

Mengele raised one hand, as if he’d rehearsed, and slowly peeled the blanket down from the top. Just far enough to reveal Tina’s face. I willed myself still. Studying her there-and-not-there gaze.

I thought,
Don’t show him you want to kill him. Wait
. Mengele smiled like a celebrity backstage, a man used to having the right props at the right time. “Former policeman Rupert. Good to see you again.”

“So what is it?” I said, peeling my eyes off of Tina. “If you had a drug problem, you could have called a hotline.”

“You Americans. Always tough. Germans are not tough. Germans are strong.”

He tilted his head toward Tina. “An attractive woman. Experienced.” I vowed again not to show him what the sight of her in this condition did to me. Power to generate fear was all he had. Zell had mentioned how much he wanted respect. But the doctor, apparently, did not just want it for his scientific prowess.

“You can touch her if you like,” he sneered.

“You mean if
you
like, don’t you?”

Reverend D muzzle-tapped a warning on my back, but I kept going. Disrespect was the only weapon I had. At the moment.

“Pretend it’s an experiment so you can watch us fuck. That’s your thing, right? Like when you’d mate brother and sister twins. Or make starving Gypsies copulate in a freezing room to measure how much heat they could generate before their hearts gave out?”