Thirty seconds later, the Rottweiler was running back to the car with the aluminum baton in his teeth. But when he saw the car had gone, he dropped the baton and chased the black-and-white, howling.
Chuey’s brother and his friends were surprised to see the police car speeding back toward them, and the kid thought he heard a dog barking furiously farther north on the street. The barking seemed to be getting closer. It sounded like a big dog. It sounded like their dog, and he was coming their way.
Flotsam slowed and yelled, “Grab your mutt when he gets here! Your brother’s going to jail for DUI.”
Then Flotsam floored it again and circled the block until he was back to Chuey’s lowrider. They stopped to lock the car and give Chuey his keys.
“I gotta find Excalibur!” Flotsam said, jumping out of the car with a flashlight, searching for his baton.
Jetsam said, “Make it fast, bro, before the dog figures out he’s been gamed and comes looking for revenge!”
Flotsam yelled, “Eureka!” when he found the baton resting against the tire of a parked car. He picked it up and ran to their shop, giving the baton a kiss before putting it in the door rack. Suddenly, he was wiping his mouth on the shirtsleeve of his uniform.
“Gross!” he said. “I kissed dog slobber!”
When they were on their way to Hollywood Station, their silent prisoner made an observation, his first words spoken since being pushed out of his car by the Rottweiler.
Chuey said, “Fernando just wants to chase sticks, man. He can do it all day long.”
Jetsam, coming down from the waning adrenaline rush, said, “Is Fernando the one with two legs or four?”
SIXTEEN
OF COURSE, neither Tristan nor Jerzy needed to watch the apartment of Dewey Gleason during the night. After Jerzy had been dropped off at his car, he’d driven home to Frogtown to smoke some glass and listen to his woman bitch at her brats. There was so much yelling and turmoil in the little house that he’d grabbed a blanket and pillow and gone out to drink some gin and find some peace in his car. The crystal, along with the gin and backseat sleeping, made for a fitful night, and his back was stiff and his neck ached when he woke up at 8:15 A.M.
Jerzy thought of the instructions from Creole to find a place in Frogtown where they could safely hold Bernie Graham’s old lady for however long it might take to get the information. Jerzy didn’t like the idea of keeping the woman in his own ’hood, but Creole convinced him that it should be in an area where people minded their own business, and this was as good as any place.
Frogtown was a strange little chunk of northeast Los Angeles, south of the junction of the Golden State and Glendale Freeways. It was quiet during the day, but at night, Latino gang members often emerged onto the streets like the frogs had done decades earlier, when the amphibians were still able to thrive in the L.A. River bordering on the east. The river in the summer was sometimes little more than a dirty stream running through a monstrous graffiti-tagged concrete trough, and no one had seen a frog in years.
After Jerzy did a gum rub with a few remaining granules of crank, he fixed himself a plate of scrambled eggs while his woman was gone on one of her constant trips to the middle school vice principal’s office because of the latest fight one of her sons had started. Driving and canvassing the area, he spotted a “For Rent” sign in a window over of what had once been a panadería. On the wall of that defunct bakery was a vivid mural of barrio life depicting tattooed gang members alongside the Virgin of Guadalupe, who stood beside a canary-yellow lowrider Chevrolet with chrome spinners. It was the only wall on that part of the street that hadn’t been tagged, so apparently the mural was respected.
What Jerzy liked about the building was that other than the little upstairs apartment, there were only commercial properties for two blocks, and the former bakery was a safe distance away from lofts occupied by the painters and sculptors who nowadays encouraged art walks and daytime visits from prospective clients. Jerzy figured that at night the closest commercial buildings would be empty of people and only occasionally visited by a private security service. There’d be little chance of anyone hearing something like a scream.
And that made him think of Bernie Graham’s woman. It could come to that, a woman screaming. Creole didn’t think so and didn’t even want to plan for it, but Jerzy knew better. If the whole fucking game went sideways, it might come down to forcing the information out of her. He knew that Bernie Graham had the stomach for it even if the little nigger didn’t. He phoned the number on the “For Rent” sign and learned that the tiny upstairs apartment could be rented, first and last month and security deposit, for a total of $2,500. He figured they were in business.
As bad as Jerzy Szarpowicz felt when he awoke that morning, he was in much better shape than Dewey Gleason, who’d slept perhaps two hours all night, in twenty-minute intervals. When he tentatively raised himself on an elbow and slid his legs over the side of the bed, he felt a sharp pain but ignored it and forced himself to stand. After that, he took a few hesitant steps to the bathroom, holding on to his midsection with both hands, as though something might drop onto the floor.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d anticipated, and he even managed to take a shower and dress himself unassisted in a suitable Bernie Graham wardrobe: oxford cotton, long-sleeve shirt, tan casual pants, and Gucci knockoffs. He put the glasses and mustache in his shirt pocket and decided it was too hot and he was too sore to be bothering with a Bernie Graham blazer. When he gingerly entered the kitchen, Eunice was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading the L.A. Times with an ashtray full of butts in front of her.
She glanced up and said, “Well, well, look who’s on his feet and breathing.”
“Only breathing as much as I have to,” he said. “For chrissake, why don’t you open a window and let some smoke outta here?”
“The smoke eater’s on the blink again. You gotta get it fixed.”
“Just open a window, Eunice.”
“Sure,” she said, “may as well, now that you brought Clark here. I guess security doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I’m gonna call Clark today and hook up with him,” Dewey said. “I’ll make sure everything’s cool with the kid.”
Dewey opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of tomato juice while Eunice read silently. Then he opened a box of wheat bran and poured it into a bowl with some skim milk. He took it into the computer room just to get a short distance away from her cigarette, and he sat staring at computer number one. There was a page of indecipherable numbers on the screen and a list of names that meant something only to the woman in the other room.
He ate the wheat bran and fantasized about how, with a few movements and clicks of the mouse, someone with the right information could pull up the name of her bank and maybe transfer the funds to another bank anywhere in the world. If he could do that, his entire miserable life would be changed. Just like that.
Eunice interrupted his thoughts with her chronic morning cough and said, “Where you going today, Dewey?”
“I haven’t seen the Mexicans in almost a week. They should be onto something by now. I was gonna track them down and then I thought I’d go to the second list of foreclosed homes and do the rental gag again.” Lying, he added, “I got a new guy who can change the locks and make me some keys. This one’s not a tweaker.”
When he finished his cereal, he entered the kitchen and started to put the bowl and glass in the sink but then realized it would just give her something else to bitch about, so he put them in the dishwasher, and then went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. By the time he came out, Eunice was sitting in front of computer number three, tapping away with uninterrupted clicks.