Stagger Bay (10 page)

As I opened her front door and stepped out on the stoop, she said, “The couch is yours until Big Moe says otherwise.”

Chapter 21

Those same dozen-odd young hard men were still out there around the porch; maybe they camped out on the lawn or something. This was like a miniaturized fish-bowl version of street life down in the East Bay; it was hard to feel threatened here at all. Hick kids or not though, they sure outnumbered me if I really was a prisoner here.

They huddled around a duct-taped antique of a boom box, listening as a newscaster spoke my name several times. They noted my presence and Big Moe changed it over to the CD player. Dre and Tupac commenced going on and on about ‘California Love’ – given the mood I was in, that sounded like a contradiction in terms.

Looking around at these kids was pretty strange. Here we were in the sticks, in a hillbilly town buried up on the Lost Coast behind the Redwood Curtain, and these young bloods were all dressed up banger style in starter jackets and colored bandanas; many of them wore pants half-mast in baggin saggin style, living large. But they seemed a little awkward about their ensembles, like they knew they were play acting – my take was they’d watched one too many gangsta rap video.

Big Moe came my way; it was hard to reconcile his friendly demeanor with him being my Kiddy Korral prison guard. A skinny white boy walked with him, as close as if they were welded together at the hip. “Hey,” Moe said. “You’re looking almost human today.”

A car pulled up, a Volvo with a couple college students in it. Moe’s skinny little partner trotted over to the passenger door. A transaction took place involving a greenback and a plastic bindle. The Volvo sped off without a word having been exchanged.

“A man’s got to eat,” Moe said, as if defensive.

“I ain’t judging,” I said, wondering why this mopey kid seemed to take everything personally.

“That’s mighty white of ya,” he snorted. “Shit dude, they ain’t even burger flipping jobs in this town. They’s a lot of construction jobs around lately, but I ain’t the right color to get hired even though I was born here. This is it if I want to earn; this is all I got to feed my son and his mama.”

A husky Indian kid with a big, shaved cranium worthy of Lex Luthor came from the direction of the liquor store, carrying an armful of paper bags. He passed out several forty-ouncers and packs of smokes. Then it was apparently his turn to earn and he ran to the curb to deal with a van-load of tweakers.

“Thanks, Mackie,” Big Moe called after him.

Moe offered me a hit off his forty but I shook my head. He shrugged took a healthy swill himself.

Big Moe’s skinny white partner finished his own beer and disposed of it in the garbage can at the end of the stoop. A coffee can was next to the trash, filled with sand and cigarette butts. There wasn’t a speck of litter in front of Natalie’s crib, either on the lawn or in the gutter.

Moe saw my gaze. “Natalie takes care of us, and we make sure nobody litters. We keep the noise down for her too; keep all our biz on a professional level. And as long as the 18th Street Crips are around, both Natalie and Randy will always be well protected. I’d skin a motherfucker alive for either of ‘em.”

“Sounds like a good deal all around,” I said. “The 18th Street Crips, huh? That’s your clique’s name?”

“Yeah,” Mackie the big-headed Indian kid said. “We’ve even got a secret handshake. We’re getting some of those decoder rings made up special.”

He laughed, a jolly shaking sound from deep in his barrel chest. I figured if Mackie lived long enough, when he was older folks would be drafting him into putting on a fake beard and playing Santa every Christmas.

Leo stepped up to us – he couldn’t hold still, like he was ready to jump out of his skin. He looked at me and away, then back at me again; like a stranger dog trying not to antagonize but not really knowing how not to.

“You some kind of killing machine?” he asked. “You offed people before this?”

“That’s no kind of question, son. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. And even if I was stupid enough to answer the way you seem to figure, I’d just be making you an accessory anyways.”

“I ain’t your son,” Leo said. “My daddy’s on death row. They even had him on America’s Most Wanted before they popped him. You wouldn’t know what that’s like.” He twitched his way to the curb to deal with a cowboy in a pickup truck.

“Can I ask you something?” Moe asked. “I know you’re from Oaktown, Karl always made a point of it. That's how you guys roll down there; we’re well aware.”

I was uncomfortable. Just what kind of bull had Karl fed these kids all these years? That him and me just cruised down the block in a drop-top Caddie back in the day, spraying our AKs randomly at all and sundry? It made me wonder if Karl had ever informed these kids that he himself had never done time – somehow he always skated by, and it was inevitably me taking the fall for our shenanigans.

“So how did you take them out so easy?” Moe asked. “You’re not all that big.”

This kid needed reassurance of some kind; he seemed to be in permanent distress. “Do you really think I’m cool, because I killed those men?” I asked him. “It’s certainly nothing to brag of. Do you really think you’re less of a man because you didn’t?”

Before Moe could answer, a cop car rolled through the entrance to the Gardens and pulled up right in front of us. Several customers gunned away from the curb to escape past the cop out the Gardens’ only exit.

Another car entering the Gardens stopped in the middle of the street when the driver saw the black and white. After a few seconds the car backed up, Y-turned, and sped off around the empty development toward the highway.

The 18th Street Crips scattered, walking in different directions without looking back, their backs tight like they were ready to toss-and-run but trying to act casual. Officer Hoffman opened his door and stepped out, adjusting his gear as he stood and stretched. He stood there fussing with his junk as he aimed that handsome mannequin face my way.

“Care to go for a drive?” he asked, fingering the black leather strap running across his rippling chest down to his Sam Browne belt. He turned on that infantile smile and I was forced to smile back almost against my will, at the free ride he offered out of the invisible cage this situation felt to be.

As we left I saw Moe staring after me. I started to give him a grin and a wave over having escaped his clutches. Then I thought about the time and energy they’d expended keeping me alive, and refrained. I faced back forward as Officer Hoffman chauffeured me away from the Gardens.

Chapter 22

This was the first time I’d ever ridden in the front seat of a roller and I’ll tell you, it felt pretty bizarre. As he drove Hoffman sat straight and attentive as if awaiting orders.

“I knew you’d want to talk to the District Attorney,” he said. “I knew you’d protect yourself.”

“Well it was only common sense, Officer Hoffman. You don’t have to read too much into it.”

He studied my face and nodded the whole time I talked, but looked away as he spoke his own words. “Of course it was; you’re exactly right. But call me Rick, please.” There was a sly happiness to him as he shared his Christian name.

When we left out the Gardens sole entrance we had to turn instead of driving straight to the access road that led up out of the lowlands the Gardens nestled in: the new street network and construction layout was in the way, forcing Hoffman to skirt three sides of a huge, empty, cement-rimmed graded rectangle of lots rather than going as the crow flies.

At its top the short, steep access road teed into a well maintained stretch of highway running along the crest of a ridge. To the right the highway led past the hospital to what passed for downtown in Stagger Bay. To the left the highway ran uphill into thickly forested uplands.

There was a sign off the shoulder as Hoffman turned left and began the climb: ‘Moose Creek Road. Residents ONLY.’

We drove uphill, past access driveways to either side every few hundred yards; some gravel, and some poured concrete slab or tarmac paving. Large, expensive looking houses were occasionally visible from the road. All of them stood isolated on their own parcels of land, with plenty of elbow room and privacy.

A roller passed going downhill, Officer Reese driving. Reese and Hoffman made eye contact as they passed but otherwise made neither greeting nor sign of recognition. Moose Creek Road had pretty tight patrol coverage; you’d need a powerful crew to get anything done up here.

We passed other vehicles coming down the hill too; high-end German stuff mainly, with a few SUVs and Hummers thrown in for good measure. I saw that red Cougar on its way down into town, looking bright and shiny as if it’d just been waxed. The long-haired blond driver did a double-take as we passed in opposite directions, I assumed at all the sanitary napkins taped across my face.

The road curved on switchbacks and hairpins, creating striking views: Once I saw a mare and her foal cavorting together on a patch of hillside pasture. Another time I looked out to see the entire Pacific reflecting the sun in a rippling expanse of waves – towards the horizon a pod of whales breached, exhalations geysering up in distant slow motion from their blowholes.

“So what’s going on here, Officer Hoffman?” I asked as we pulled into a gravel driveway.

We parked in front of a rambling Victorian, dwarfed by the stands of old-growth redwoods surrounding it. Its front yard was perfectly groomed and trimmed. But visible in the backyard beyond the house was a disorganized clutter of toys and bric-a-brac: ATVs, a surf boat on a trailer, camper shells, stacks of lumber, and enough other et ceteras to make this very expensive lot look more like a proto-junkyard.

Hoffman aimed that ‘aw shucks’ smile just past me again. “Call me Rick. This is the father of one of the officers that died at the school – Officer Tubbs, the one you watched them shoot execution-style. She was his only child, all the family he had left.”

He almost looked at me now as he spoke. “Listen, Markus, I like you just fine, I’m your friend. But there’s some folks around here you’re not so popular with – bad people.”

We walked to the front door, which opened as we approached. We were expected.

The guy who opened the door was huge, a big hillbilly in a mesh-back trucker’s baseball cap with a neck about as big around as my waist. His identical twin stood a few paces behind, wearing a matching mesh-back cap. One led the way as the other fell in behind Hoffman and me, so they sandwiched us as we walked down the hallway into the living room.

The heat was turned way down like Mr. Tubbs was too frugal to pay out any more than he had to, to PG&E. Stacks of magazines and newspapers in the hallway suggested the current resident might be wrestling with the beginnings of a packrat hoarding obsession.

The living room was dominated by the presence of an old man sitting in an overstuffed yellow leather chair. An overwhelming aroma of Old Spice surrounded him; he apparently doused himself in the stuff. A narrow-brimmed fedora rested on his bony knee, with a green feather in the band. High shiny cheekbones, a balding head of cow-licked white hair that combing would be a waste of time on, and eyes that looked like they could melt holes through titanium. The old man was a real piece of work even though he also looked like death warmed over, like maybe he got his facials done at the undertaker’s.

Officer Hoffman dipped his head to Mr. Tubbs then kept his gaze lowered toward the floor. The Meshback Twins fanned out to take opposite corners of the room behind me, and I wondered if Tubbs ‘boxed’ all his visitors when they came to call.

Tubbs studied me intently. I returned his appraising stare as I took the chair in front of his. I waited but my host was apparently in no hurry to conversate, nor to offer me any refreshment.

He looked me up and down, spending a while on the patchwork of sanitary napkins duct-taped to the left side of my face. His face was deadpan, and I decided right then that this was no man I’d ever play poker with.

He aimed his stare at my stained and raggedy clothes. “You’re not much of a clothes horse,” he observed.

I primped myself defiantly. “This is my lucky outfit,” I said. “We’ve been through a lot together. Besides, I may make it as a male model yet.”

He nodded. “Tell me how my daughter died.”

I took a breath, blew it out. “It was quick,” I said. “She died easy.”

“I didn’t bring you here to be bull-shitted. Kendra wouldn’t have gone quiet.”

“All right,” I said. He was her blood and had a right to know most of it. “I’ll give it to you straight. She knew she was dead, but she didn’t flinch. She looked right in that son of a bitch’s face while he pulled the trigger, and she gave him nothing, nothing at all.”

I shook my head in wonderment at her memory, probing the pain like sticking my tongue into an abscessed cavity. “Mr. Tubbs, I didn’t know your daughter, but it was a privilege to be with her in that moment. She died as well as could be.”

He grunted. “So then a man like you, with a record like yours, he just hauls off and charges into that school unarmed after you watch her die. Why? What was the connection?”

“A lot of people been asking about that one,” I said. “You don’t think the kids were enough of a reason? You don’t think I’d be good for goodness’ sake?”

“Why?” he repeated.

“That’s private,” I said, looking at the floor. “It had nothing to do with Kendra.”

He nodded but didn’t press the issue further. His face squirmed around, and his mouth contorted into what took me a second to realize was a smile, one as warm and sincere as his cadaverous face could approximate. This old man was one tough nut: like daughter like father I supposed.

“That’s about the way I figured, son. I just wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” He stood.

“I’d like you to go with me somewhere,” he said, planting his jaunty little fedora on his head. I had a suspicion the invitation wasn’t a request.