She was maybe ten.
East pushed off. Casually he loped down the yard. Sony was already bristling: “Get back up the street, girl.” East flattened his hand over his lowest rib: Easy.
The girl was stout, round-faced, dark-skinned, in a clean white shirt. She addressed them brightly: “This a crack house, ain’t it?”
That’s what Fin said: everyone still thought it was all crack.
“Naw.” East glanced at Sony. “Where you come from?”
“I’m from Jackson, Mississippi. I go to New Hope Christian School in Jackson.” She nodded back at the neighborhood kids. “Them’s my cousins. My aunt’s getting married in Santa Monica tomorrow.”
“Girl, we don’t give a fuck,” said Antonio, up in the yard.
“Listen to these little gangsters,” the girl sang. “Y’all even go to school?”
Probably from a good neighborhood, this girl. Probably had a mother who told her, Keep away from them LA ghetto boys, so what was the first thing she did?
East clipped his voice short. “You don’t want to be over here. You want to get on and play.”
“You don’t know nothing about what I want,” boasted the girl. She waved at Antonio. “And this little boy here who looks like fourth grade. What are you? Nine?”
“Damn,” Sony cheered her, chuckling.
Somewhere fire engines were gunning, moving again; East stepped back and listened. A woman and a daughter walked by arguing about candy. And the helicopter still chopping. It tensed East up. There were too many parts moving.
“Girl, back off,” he said. “I don’t need you mixed up.”
“You’re mixed up,” said the girl. She put one hand on the wall, immovable like little black girls got. A fighter.
“This kid,” East snorted. The last thing you wanted by the house was a bunch of kids. Women had sense. Men could be warned. But kids, they were gonna see for themselves.
—
A screech careened up the flat face of the street, hard to say from where. Tires. East’s talkie phone crackled on his hip. He scooped it up. It was Needle at the north lookout. But all East heard was panting, like someone running or being held down. “What is it?” East said. “What is it?” Nothing.
He scanned, backpedaling up the lawn.
Something was coming. Both directions, echoing, like a train.
He radioed inside. “Sidney. Something coming.” The helicopter was dipping above them now.
Sidney, cranky: “Man, what?”
“Get out the back now,” East said. “Go.”
“Now?” said Sidney incredulously.
“Now.” He turned. “You boys, get,” he ordered Antonio and Sony. Knowing they knew how and where to go. Having taught them what to do. Everyone on East’s crew knew the yards around, the ways you could go; he made sure of it.
The roar climbed the street — five cars flying from each end, big white cruisers. They raised the dust as they screeched in aslant. East thumbed his phone back on.
“Get out. Get out.” Already he was sliding away from the house. His house. Red Coke can on its side in the grass, foaming. No time to pick it up.
Sidney did not radio back.
How had this gotten past Dap and Needle? Without a warning? Unaccountable. Angry, he slipped down the wall to the sidewalk. The smell of engine heat and wasted tire rubber hung heavy. The other boys were gone. Now it was just him and the girl.
“I told you,” he hissed. “Go on!”
Stubborn thing. She ignored him. Staring behind her at the herd of white cars and polished helmets and deep black ribbed vests: now, this was something to see.
Four of the cops got low, split up, and gang-rushed the porch. Upstairs a window was thrown open, and in it, like a fish in rusty water, an ancient, ravaged face swam up. It looked over the scene for a moment, then poked out a gun barrel. East whirled then. The girl.
“Damn!” he yelled. “Get out of here!”
The girl, of course, did not budge. The pop-pop began.
—
East hit the sidewalk, crouched below the low wall. Beneath the guns’ sound the cops barked happily, ducking behind their cars like on TV. Everyone took shelter except the copter and the street dogs, howling merrily, and the Jackson girl.
East fit behind a parked Buick, rusted red. His breath fled him, speedy and light. The car was heat-blistered, and he tried not to touch it. Behind him the air was clouding over with bullets and fragments of the front of the house. Cop radios blared and spat inside the cruisers. The gun upstairs cracked past them, around them, off the street, into the cars, perforating a windshield, making a tire sigh.
The girl, stranded, peered up at the house. Then she faced where East had run, seeing he’d been right. She caught his eye.
With a hand he began a wave: Come with me. Come here.
Then the bullet ripped into her.
East knew how shot people were, stumbling or crawling or trying to outrace the bullet, what it was doing inside them. The girl didn’t. She flinched: East watched. Then she put her hands out, and gently she lay down. Uncertainly she looked at the sky, and for a moment he disbelieved it all — it couldn’t have hit her, the bullet. This girl was just crazy. Just as unreal as the fire.
Then the blood began inside the white cotton shirt. Her eyes wandered and locked on him. Dying fast and gently.
The talkie whistled again.
“God damn you, boy,” Sidney panted.
The police in the back saw their chance, and three of them aimed. The gun in the window fell, rattling down the roof. Just then the four cops on the porch kicked in the door.
“You supposed to warn us,” crackled Sidney. “You supposed to do your job.”
“I gave you all I got,” East said.
Sidney didn’t answer. East heard him wheezing.
He got off the phone. He knew how to go. One last look — windows blown out, cops scaling the lawn, one U stumbling out as if he were on fire. His house. And the Jackson girl on the sidewalk, her blood on the crawl, a long finger pointing toward the gutter, finding its way. A cop bent over her, but she was staring after East. She watched East all the way down the street till he found a corner and turned away.
2
The meet-up was a mile away in an underground garage beneath a tint-and-detail shop with no name. The garage had been shut down years ago — something about codes, earthquakes — but you could still get a car in, through a busted wall in the lot below some apartments next door. Nothing kept people away from a parking space for long.
East took the stairs with his shirt held over his nose. The air reeked of piss and powdered concrete. Three levels down he popped the door and let it close behind him before he breathed again. A few electric lights still hung whole and working from a forgotten power line. Something moved along a crack in the ceiling, surviving.
East wondered who’d be there. Fin had hundreds of people in The Boxes and beyond. After things went wrong, a meet like this might be strictly chain-of-command. Or it might be with somebody you didn’t want to meet. Either way, you had to show up.
Down at the end he saw Sidney’s car: a Magnum wagon, all black matte. Johnny reclined against it, doing his stretches. He squared his arms behind his head and curled his torso this way and that, muscles bolting up and receding. Then he bent and swept his elbows near the ground.
Sidney stood away in the darkness with his little snub gun eyeing East’s head.
“Failing, third-rate, sorry motherfucker.”
East went still. They said that down here people got killed sometimes, bodies dropped down the airshaft into the dark where nothing could smell them. He looked flatly past the gun.