Norberto drove the Golf. He let Esteban’s Mercedes whip past him and lead the way. A disco beat was softly pumping on the radio. Norberto turned it up. Although normalmente he preferred salsa, he thought the old-school disco was muy curado. Girls liked it and Norberto was savvy enough to appreciate whatever drove girls to get up off their butts and shake their bodies. Norberto liked the song that was playing. I will survive. That’s me, he thought. Not only will I survive, cabrón, but now that I’ve shown Esteban that I am loyal, I will prosper.
Esteban felt a dull pain in his lower back. Carajo. He used to be able to chuck a jodido pendejo like this gringo into the trunk without even breaking a sweat. Now he felt like he’d thrown out his back. And Martin. He wouldn’t shut up.
Esteban wondered how this happened. How did everything turn to gazpacho? Then he remembered, Amado. Fucking Amado fucking up. Well, he wouldn’t be fucking up for much longer, would he? He would miss him. Amado was a good gangster. A gangster’s gangster in some ways. But he’d fucked up. Left his arm at the scene of a crime and endangered the entire family. He had to be dealt with.
Esteban’s plan was simple: kill Bob, kill Amado, and burn the evidence. Hell, maybe burn everyone up in a car. Take it out to the desert or up Angeles Crest, light it up, and push it off a cliff. Let the forensic pathologists sift through the ashes for some evidence.
Martin was frustrated. Sometimes these fucking mobsters were so thick. There’s a problem, you kill everyone. What kind of logic was that? Were those corporate guidelines? Was that any way to run a business? Martin didn’t like the idea of murder. It seemed extreme to him. He really didn’t like the idea of being prosecuted as an accessory to murder if they were somehow busted.
He tried to calm himself as he rolled a jumbo. His hands were shaking, making the process more difficult. Why did everything have to be so hard? They didn’t need to waste the delivery guy just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Martin wanted to convince Esteban that they needed the guy in the trunk. They couldn’t just whack him and dump his body, then the cops would know that something was up. They’d know that the evidence had been tampered with and they’d start nosing around until they found something. Esteban’s point was that they wouldn’t have the evidence so… they could go fuck themselves.
Martin got the cigarette paper to stick, and fired up. He held a massive hit in his lungs until they burned and he could feel the air pressure behind his eyes begin to drop. He exhaled a plume of smoke and felt his muscles go lax. Then it came to him.
Martin suddenly realized that what they needed to do was find another arm, switch it with Amado’s, and have the guy make the delivery like he normally would. It was crazy. But it was clean. Nothing would be suspect. They would get away with it. How they could convince the guy to do it was another story.
He pitched the idea to Esteban. Esteban told him he was full of shit. He didn’t trust the delivery guy, and why should he. They’d send the guy in to Parker Center and next thing they know, they’d be in a lineup. Besides, where would they get another arm? Esteban thought Martin’s plan was tonto, and he didn’t have time for that. Esteban always switched to Spanish when he was annoyed with Martin.
Martin considered it; perhaps Esteban was right. Kill the guy, burn the arm, end of story. But what if they could find an arm easily? Then they could figure something out. Maybe pay the fucking guy. Leverage him somehow. He made, what? Not that much. Slide him ten grand, he delivers the new arm, and call it even. Martin realized he was expending a lot of nervous energy trying to keep the delivery guy from getting whacked. He had his reasons. Bad karma being one.
Don came to work as he always did, walking into the Criminal Intelligence Division with his double cappuccino with nonfat soy milk extra foam, a copy of the Los Angeles Times tucked under his arm. Only today there was something different about Don. He always had a spring in his step, but today he had just a little more bounce than usual. He stopped at the little makeshift coffee bar and did something he never did. He took a Krispy Kreme doughnut out of a box. He bit into it and was surprised at how good it tasted. Sweet and yeasty. No wonder they were always lying around the station. Cops love doughnuts and Don loved being a cop.
Don sat down at his desk, licked the sugar glaze off his fingers, and shuffled some papers around. A middle-aged and thick man with dark brown skin and Central American features sat down at the next desk. A plaque indicated that he was Detective Sergeant Flores. Flores noticed the flakes of sugar on Don’s desk.
“I thought you didn’t eat that shit.”
“I eat all kinds of shit.”
“That’s what happens when you start kissin’ ass. You eat all kinds of shit.”
Ah. Wisdom. Don didn’t respond. He could’ve said something about Flores being known as the biggest ass-kisser in the department, or Flores constantly flaunting the fact that he was a Latino, using the race card to get promotions. But Don didn’t want to start a ruckus, he wasn’t going to let office politics ruin his day. So he changed the subject by getting down to business.
“That arm here yet?”
“The loose limb?”
“Yeah.”
Flores looked at some papers as if the answer to Don’s question was printed on them.
“Not yet.”
“Got an ETA?”
Flores shook his head.
“Sometime today.”
Don nodded. That was good. It gave him time to do some paperwork. Don prided himself on his paperwork. He’d seen too many crumbs get off because of some technicality in the way the forms were filled in. Like that fucking mattered. Some guy drives by your house and opens fire with a machine gun. He freely admits that he did it. But then the judge lets him off because some retard fills out the form wrong? It pissed Don off. So he had trained himself to be ferociously anal when doing paperwork. When he took somebody down, they were going down and staying down.
Max Larga stirred the wire whisk around quickly, attempting to get as much air into the egg whites as possible. They needed to be stiff, but not rigid, to add the right amount of fluff. He needed to keep it simple, something that anyone could do. Simplicity was the key to writing a good cookbook. It was one thing to describe, in excruciating minutiae, a rigorous and demanding sequence of complex tasks, but that kind of writing didn’t sell cookbooks. In fact, that kind of writing was the problem with his last two cookbooks. It scared people away. His editor had jokingly referred to him as the James Joyce of cookbook authors as he dropped Larga’s latest book from the release schedule.
Larga had reacted by decrying his readership as philistines. But the truth, and it just burned him up, was that people preferred Martha Stewart and her quick-and-easy gourmet recipes. Martha called it simple elegance. Larga laughed bitterly at that. What did the average housewife in Connecticut or New Jersey know about elegance? He’d been around the world. Eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. Sampled every edible concoction known to man. He’d even ordered the weird dish where they press a roast duck through a device more commonly used to juice apples and serve what comes gushing out in a little silver cup. Now, that was elegant.
He checked his notes. He’d gotten this recipe from a friend, a famous chef, because those were the only friends worth having. Friends who would treat you like royalty and suck up to you with expensive wines and fabulous food. Friends who would make you feel special, part of an inner circle of people who were in the know. In return, all Larga had to do was drop a mention of the chef or the restaurant, to illustrate a point, in his weekly column.