Don checked himself. Could it be that he was jealous of Bob? After all, Bob had been Maura’s boyfriend. She had chosen to move in with him. They lived together. Something Don had not yet managed to accomplish. She must’ve loved Bob at some point. Don realized that he didn’t know her that well. She had shared her life with Bob, a man who couldn’t be more different from Don. If she’d done that, what did she see in Don? Maybe she had matured. Learned a lesson living with a slacker gadfly like Bob. Maybe now she wanted a grown-up man. Stable, honest, and hardworking. Yeah, that was it. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But Don was annoyed. His feelings for Maura had put the whammy on his instincts. He reminded himself that he’d worked too hard to let this investigation get away from him. He needed to be fully focused. He needed to scrutinize every detail. Look for inconsistencies. Make connections between disparate incidents. Piece the puzzle together.
Don’s fully focused, steel-trap policeman’s mind drifted for a moment. A flash of Maura’s breasts, golden in candlelight and heaving in unison, shook him. He needed another doughnut.
Bob walked out of Parker Center and into the deep orange glare of a Los Angeles sunset. He felt great. Energized. On top of the world. He’d survived a police interrogation and actually pulled it off. God, was it making him horny.
He couldn’t wait to tell Esteban how he’d handled the cops. Expertly, in his opinion. They didn’t have a fucking clue. His story was believable, he told the truth, it hung together. In frustration, they’d tried to sweat him in a holding tank filled with hardened and dangerous criminals, but they didn’t crack him. In fact, he’d earned the respect of his cellmates with his prodigious pissing ability. He was tougher than they thought, smarter than they knew. His cock stiffened slightly in his pants. A call to celebrate.
Esteban had made him memorize a special number to call when he got out. He was supposed to find a pay phone and dial the number, say his name, and then hang up and wait. Esteban said he’d return the call in less than five minutes. It was some kind of satellite deal. Untraceable. Or if it was traceable it would only lead back to some pay phone on the street somewhere and not to Bob. Bob knew he should call Esteban, but something else was on his mind. He found a pay phone and called Felicia.
The can of Comet and scrubby sponge were still in the bathtub. So was the bloodstain. There’s no fucking way it’s coming out now, Norberto thought. But he realized he wouldn’t want to take a bath in the tub if he could still see the stain, so he got to work. He ran cold water and scrubbed as hard as he could. It was like sanding porcelain, but it was working. The stain was lifting.
Norberto thought about what Martin had said. The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. Did he really believe that the other crews in La Eme would just sit around with their thumbs up their asses while he and Martin took over Esteban’s powerful and lucrative enterprise? Why wouldn’t someone from another crew move in? Someone like Jared Samuel or Tomás Hernández would pounce on their operation so fast they wouldn’t have time to grab their cocks and pray.
If he were really going to try and take power from Esteban he’d need someone like Amado, someone whom everyone respected. He’d need that or he’d be fucked. That, and a whole lot of guns.
Norberto shook his head in disbelief. He was glad he’d come to his senses and told Martin to forget about it. But how did he let Martin talk him into it in the first place? How could he be so stupid? He must’ve been high to even think it could work. Then he remembered.
He was high.
Martin turned off Ventura onto Laurel and began the drive up the canyon. He was heading over the hill into Hollywood. He figured he’d drop the arm off at the police station in West Hollywood. Let the LAPD and the West Hollywood police fight over jurisdiction. Create a bureaucratic clusterfuck.
The arm was resting on the passenger seat. It jiggled and bounced and, at least to Martin, seemed to become uncomfortably animated. It was starting to creep him out a little. Even in the plastic he could see the fingers moving, reminding him of a horror movie he’d once seen in which the hand of a murderer acted on its own, killing anyone who got near it. Amado had murdered people. This was definitely the arm of a murderer.
Martin stopped at a light and put the arm under the seat.
The light changed and he continued up, leaving the Valley behind him. When he reached the ridgeline of the mountains and saw the view, Martin made a quick right turn and pulled over. He got out of the car, away from the arm, which was still making his skin crawl, and stood looking at the vista as twilight descended.
All of Los Angeles, the great grid, stretched out in front of him. It carpeted a vast basin, going off in every direction as far as he could see. The city twinkled in its own atmosphere, the lights looking like strangely vivacious galaxy. Overhead, jet streams caught the last rays of the sun and glowed pink in the darkening sky.
Martin liked Los Angeles. It offered such a plastic facade. The sunshine and palm trees, convertibles and blondes. We love it. But if you really looked at the city, if you dug beneath the ever-tightening facelift it showed the world, you’d find that it was a much more complex, much more sinister, place.
On the surface you had one layer. The layer of people doing their daily things. Working. Shopping. Going to school. Dating. Mating. The obvious layer. Under that you had another layer. An invisible subculture that trades with the obvious layer. Money for drugs. Money for sex. Money for bootleg DVDs. Money for the things that make living in the obvious layer bearable. Money paid by hardworking people, struggling to get by or struggling to pay for their new BMW, desperate for any small pleasure that would take them away from their pain and make them feel special. Billions of dollars sucked into a dark labyrinth in the name of fleeting pleasures. More money than the fucking IRS will ever collect, circulating in an invisible world.
And beneath that world, another invisible world. And another. Like those Russian dolls that nestle inside each other, getting smaller and smaller.
Martin was skilled at taking the money from the invisible layers and, like a Las Vegas magician, making it real. Making it part of the obvious layer. It was a good trick. But he’d been doing it for others, and now it was time to become entrepreneurial.
Martin began to roll another jumbo. He was surprised to discover that he was almost out of weed.
Don had finished typing the request for a search warrant. He’d been informed that the courts were backed up today and that if it was an emergency they could push it through; otherwise, wait until tomorrow. Normally Don would’ve tried to push it through, making some kind of claim that Larga might still be alive inside his house and they needed to rescue him immediately. But Don was pretty sure that Larga was dead and his body wasn’t going to decay that much more in the next twelve hours. Besides, he had a date with Maura and wanted to get out of there as fast as he could. So Don had left the request with the DA’s office and jumped in his car.
As he was making his way toward Hollywood and Maura’s apartment, he suddenly pulled over and went into a bookstore named Book Soup.
It didn’t take him long to locate the works of Max Larga. They were all clumped together. Sophisticated Cooking, More Sophisticated Cooking, and the best-selling Sophisticated Cooking Made Easy. Don picked up a copy and studied it. Larga’s face, smug and arrogant, his hair styled in a way to make him look hip, graced the covers of all three books. How did this guy get mixed up with Esteban Sola? It just didn’t make any sense.