This Wicked World (7 page)

He hisses when he sees that it’s Spiller and rolls his eyes.

“You’re a funny motherfucker all right,” he says.

“Why so jumpy?” Spiller asks as he climbs into the truck. “Back on the pipe?”

This is a sore subject with T.K. While attending college in Kansas City, business school, he developed a nasty crack habit and ended up dropping out. Having studied various martial arts as a kid, he spent the next few years as a rock-smoking, fire-breathing, neck-breaking enforcer for local dope dealers and loan sharks, a complete animal serving up eternal woe to those who crossed his bosses. Eventually, he was saved by a jailhouse preacher and managed to quit dope, but any mention of those days still makes him squirm, and Spiller loves to make him squirm.

“Talkin’ about being on the pipe,” T.K. says. “Who lets some motherfucker named Dr. Tat B. Gone shoot a laser at him?”

“That’s just the name of the business,” Spiller replies. “It’s a chain. They’ve got real doctors and nurses inside.”

“So if you get cancer, you going to Dr. Tumor B. Gone?” T.K. switches to a TV announcer voice and says, “ ‘The cancer specialists. One eight hundred CHEMO. Call for a location near you.’ ”

“You been working on that the whole time I was in there?” Spiller asks.

T.K. starts the truck and turns the air conditioner on high. He’s six foot three and sheathed in slabs of muscle. Not high yellow, exactly, but not superblack either. Half and half. Got his Chinese momma’s eyes and his daddy’s kinky hair. Spiller, at five four and one hundred and twenty pounds, with his pale, freckled skin, invisible eyebrows, and thinning red hair, always feels like a grub next to him.

He tried to convince Taggert to give him another partner, saying he and T.K. stood out too much as a team, saying, “For fuck’s sake, when bullets fly and the cops work bystanders afterwards, who’s not going to remember a pair like us?”

But all Taggert said was, “So you’ll have to be smarter then, more strategic.”

Spiller shakes a Camel from his pack and lights up.

“Roll down the goddamn window,” T.K. barks.

Spiller hits the button, then touches the bandage on his neck, pressing it until it hurts.

A silver Rolls darts in front of them on its way to the left-turn lane. T.K. leans on the horn and throws up his hands. “They got the worst fucking drivers in the world here in Beverly Hills,” he says as they cruise down Wilshire, past Tiffany and Barneys and Gucci. “All these old Mr. Magoo Jews with their handicapped passes.”

Spiller is watching a man on the sidewalk — expensive suit, expensive shoes, sunglasses, phone stuck in his ear. He looks like he should be in a magazine ad, selling something. Probably some movie homo, some producer, never suffered a day in his life. Savage fantasies bloom in Spiller’s mind. He makes the guy beg for his life, then shoves a gun past his perfect teeth and blows his smirky face off. No, no, he fucks the guy’s movie-star girlfriend in front of him, cums on
the guy’s
face, then guts both of them.

Spiller grimaces, shocked once again by his own daydreams, how they always end in bloody mayhem. If he ripped open someone else’s head and looked inside, would he see the same things there? He doubts it. Something in him got broken along the way, or maybe he was born like this. He can never decide which, and in order to keep from obsessing about it until he’s sick to his stomach, he picks up T.K.’s magazine and flips through it.

“ ‘The Black Hand,’ ‘The Way of the White Dragon,’ ” he scoffs. “Oh, look here, ‘Seven Star Praying Mantis.’ Man, this is such horseshit. I could beat any of these guys in a bar fight.”

“Is that right?” T.K. replies, looking down his nose at Spiller, trying to come off laid back and superior.

“I mean, I know you’re all into it,” Spiller continues, “but you’ve got to admit kung fu’s a racket like everything else. Look at these ads in here. It’s all about selling crap to kids — cheap swords and ninja outfits.”

“I had no idea you were an expert in martial arts,” T.K. says.

“I’m not,” Spiller says, “but I
am
an expert in bullshit.”

Spiller’s second stepfather, Jack, claimed to know karate, said he learned it in the army. He used it to beat up on Spiller’s mom until Spiller, barely twelve years old, snuck up on him one day while he was napping on the couch and bashed him in the face with an aluminum baseball bat, breaking his jaw in three places.

Things didn’t work out like they were supposed to though. Spiller’s mom chose Jack over her son, packing Spiller off to Grandma’s house, where he stayed for two long years, until Jack finally left Mom for a waitress at the bowling alley where he worked. Spiller has never forgiven his mother for this. In fact, on a few occasions it’s taken everything in him not to lash out at her and get a little payback.

“Well, my system ain’t horseshit; it’s deadly,” T.K. says.

“Your system? You got a system?”

“It’s called ‘Killer Instincts: Way of the Ghetto Warrior.’ It’s a self-defense and fitness program combined. I took a little bit from all the disciplines and blended it with my own techniques.”

Spiller raises his eyebrows and flicks the ash from his cigarette out the window. “What kind of techniques?” he asks. “I’ve seen you fight. You ain’t nothing special.”

“I’ve created unique combinations of punches, kicks, and blocks,” T.K. says. “And then there’s the Southside Sledgehammer, my patented move, which is guaranteed to stop anyone in their tracks.”

Spiller laughs. “That I got to see,” he says. “The Southside Sledgehammer. Is that what you used on those two Russians who beat you down and I had to jump in and save your ass?”

“You know what happened then,” T.K. says, narrowing his eyes, getting hot. “You know I had the flu.”

Spiller’s phone rings. He shushes T.K. and answers.

“Are you done with your manicure?” Taggert rasps. Someone slashed his throat in Folsom, and it messed up his voice for good.

“You mean my doctor’s appointment?” Spiller says. “Yeah, I am.”

“Good, because I have a thing for you two. Some junky defaulted on a loan, and now I get his house. You guys are going to go over and help him move.”

“We don’t have to stop at U-Haul or anything, do we?” Spiller asks.

“Nope, the furniture’s mine too,” Taggert replies. “Just put his ass out on the street.”

“Okeydokey, boss.”

Spiller writes the directions Taggert gives him on a parking stub, then hangs up.

“We’re going to Echo Park, over by Dodger Stadium,” he tells T.K. “Gotta toss some doper out of his house. Maybe you can use the Sledgehammer on him.”

T.K. is back to being above it all. He raises his hand to indicate that he’s about done with this subject and says, “Laugh now, motherfucker, but wait till the DVD comes out.”

“Oh, now you’ve got a DVD too?”

“I met a producer down at the club who did videos for Busta and DMX, all those cats, and he’s going to hook me up. It’s going to be bigger than Tae Bo.”

It cracks Spiller up how every nigger in L.A. is one miracle away from being a millionaire. He lights another Camel. They’re stopped at a red light, and a little kid in the backseat of the car in the next lane is making goofy faces, staring at his reflection in the Explorer’s tinted glass. Spiller thinks how he could put a bullet right through the brat’s eye from here, open a fist-size hole in the back of his head, and spatter his brains all over everyone else in the car, really freak their asses out.

B
OONE LETS HIMSELF
into Amy Vitello’s bungalow and walks back to the bedroom. He sets his red plastic toolbox on the floor and takes out a hammer and screwdriver. A few taps and a little prying, and he’s able to remove the wooden stops from the window frame in one piece. The sash lifts out easily after that.

As he suspected, the wire that raises the sash is tangled on its spool. Luckily, he bought a few extra replacement units the last time a tenant had this problem, so he doesn’t have to make a trip to Home Depot.

He removes the old spool from the frame, puts in a new one, attaches the wire to the sash, and reseats it. In less than half an hour the window slides up and down smoothly again.

On his way out Boone notices a collection of framed photos on Amy’s dresser. Even though he’s pretty sure it’s crossing the tenant/property-manager line, he pauses to look them over.

There’s an old black-and-white with scalloped edges, probably Grandma and Grandpa, and a color one of a naked baby on a blanket, probably Amy. Everybody’s smiling in the family portrait. Mom, Dad, a couple of brothers, a couple of sisters. It’s easy to pick out Amy. She’s ten or eleven, cute even in braces. There she is in a graduation gown; there she is in front of the Eiffel Tower; and — what’s this? — there she is in a police uniform, LAPD, an official portrait.

Damn! It figures that the first woman he’s had eyes for since getting out of prison is a cop. At least he found out now, before he did anything stupid. It’s not like he was planning to make any big moves on her anyway. Let’s be realistic: He’s an ex-con surviving on tips and charity, a man who’s blown every chance he’s been given, whose life seems to be moving backward instead of forward. Now is not the time to be chasing a girl like Amy. He’s got to hunker down and stick to the basics, like he did after Lila left him. Look what one moment of weakness, agreeing to help Robo out, led to: he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get his ass shot off tonight.

In a dark mood, Boone stashes his toolbox in the little shed where he keeps the lawnmower and paint and plumber’s snake and returns to his bungalow. He collects his dirty clothes and shoves them into his old seabag, then sets out on foot for the Laundromat in the minimall a couple blocks away.

The jacaranda trees are in bloom, and the sidewalk is covered with crushed purple blossoms. An old man pushes a paleta cart down Franklin, the tinkling of its little bell no match for the whoosh and roar of traffic in the street. He looks like Oscar’s grandfather. Boone buys a mango popsicle from him and eats it on the way, his bag balanced on his shoulder.

At the Laundromat, Boone divides his clothes into two loads, one hot, one cold, whites and everything else. The only other person in the place is a fat homeless man who is standing around in a Hawaiian-print bathing suit while he waits for the rest of his clothes to dry.

“How you?” he asks Boone.

“I’m all right.”

“You see that on the news about those bombs?”

“Sure did,” Boone says, with no idea what the guy’s talking about.

“Fucking bombs.”

“Fucking bombs.”

The Laundromat’s air-conditioning is on the fritz, and Boone is sweating by the time he gets his washers going. His phone rings. Berkson, his lawyer. He steps outside to take the call, squeezing past the homeless guy’s shopping cart, which is piled high with newspapers and aluminum cans.

“How’s tricks?” Berkson asks. “The job? The apartment?”

“Good,” Boone replies. “Everything’s good. Weinberg’s son, the kid who runs the restaurant, is a real tool, but I can deal.”

“If he’s giving you trouble, I can talk to his father.”

“Nah, it’s just that I thought my past was going to stay between me, you, and Weinberg.”

“And so it has,” Berkson says, sounding surprised to hear differently.

“Well, someone told Simon,” Boone says. “He made a crack about it last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Something about how I fucked up as a bodyguard.”

“Ahh, Jimmy, I’m truly sorry,” Berkson says. “You think you can trust someone. Weinberg promised, but we both know what that’s worth. I’ll talk to him this afternoon.”

Boone tilts his head back, feels all the little bones in his neck pop. “No, no,” he says. “Let it lie. It’s irritating, but it won’t kill me.”

“There you go. That’s the right attitude.”

“I mean, the kid’s right. I did fuck up.”

“But you had honorable intentions, Jimmy, and that makes all the difference. Always remember that.”

Boone adjusts his sunglasses and says, “That’s sweet of you, Danny, but I’d rather forget the whole thing.”

“If you figure out how to do that, let me know,” Berkson replies. “I have a few things that need forgetting too. But, look, I gotta run now. Call me if you need anything.”

“Will do, buddy.”

A car alarm goes off, startling Boone and a couple of pigeons tearing into a half-eaten bag of potato chips sitting in the homeless guy’s cart. The owner of the car, an Asian woman, runs out of the nail parlor next door, barefoot, caught in the middle of a pedicure. She aims her remote at the silver Mercedes and thumbs the button repeatedly until the screeching stops.

Boone steps back into the Laundromat. The homeless man is moving his head in time to a Muzak version of Elton John’s “Daniel,” a dreamy look on his face.

“How you?” he asks Boone.

“Not so great.”

“You see the bombs on the news?”

Boone checks his watch. Four hours until he’s supposed to pick Robo up at Denny’s and accompany him to Oscar Rosales’s last known address. Four hours to kick himself for looking for trouble again.

T.K.
PARKS IN
front of the hulking Craftsman-style house in Echo Park, a couple blocks up from the lake. The place looks to have been neglected for a long time. It slumps defeated in the perpetual shade of two shaggy firs, weighed down by the dusty ivy that covers one wall and is now spreading over the roof like a dark green claw. Most of the windows are boarded up, and the last of the paint is peeling away.

“Who’d you say we’re putting out?” T.K. asks. “Herman Munster?”

Spiller shrugs and opens the door of the truck. He reaches into the glove box for his pretty little Hawg 9 and slips it under his belt at the small of his back while T.K. retrieves his gun from between the console and the seat.

“I don’t see why Taggert’s interested in this wreck, unless he’s doing the neighbors a favor,” T.K. says. “You know what a shithole like this does to property values?”

“Could be a principle thing,” Spiller replies.

“Principle. Yeah, right.”

The picket fence surrounding the property is also in bad shape. Most of the slats are missing, and the ones that remain are broken or barely hanging on. The gate lies rotting in the waist-high weeds that have taken over the yard.