I ended up going down for the second car I stole. The police lit me up before I’d driven half a block, and I never heard from Kay Jay again, not a “Tough luck, bro,” nothing. It took that to teach me my lesson. I can joke about it now and say I was a slow learner, but it still hurts to think I was so stupid for so long.
When the heat breaks late in the day, folks crawl out of their sweatboxes and drag themselves down to the street to get some fresh air and let the breeze cool their skin. They sit on the sidewalk with their backs to a wall or stand on busy corners and tell each other jokes while passing a bottle. The dope dealers work the crowd, signaling with winks and whistles, along with the Mexican woman who peddles T-shirts and tube socks out of a shopping cart and a kid trying to sell a phone that he swears up and down is legit.
I usually enjoy walking through the bustle, a man who’s done a day of work and earned a night of rest. I like seeing the easy light of the setting sun on people’s faces and hearing them laugh. Folks call out to me and shake my hand as I pass by, and there’s an old man who plays the trumpet like you’ve never heard anyone play the trumpet for pocket change.
I barrel past it all today, not even pausing to drop a quarter in the old man’s case. My mind is knotted around one worry: what I’m gonna say to Leon. I haven’t settled on anything by the time I see him and his boys standing in front of the hotel, so it won’t be a pretty speech, just the truth.
The three of them are puffing on cigars, squinting against the smoke as I roll up.
“Evening, fellas,” I say.
“What up, officer,” J Bone drawls.
Dallas giggles at his foolishness, but Leon doesn’t crack a smile. The boy’s already got a stain on his suit, on the lapel of the coat. He blows a smoke ring and looks down his nose at me.
“I saw them girls in the store today,” I say to him.
“They was doing some shopping,” he says.
“I saw you all too.”
“We was waiting on them.”
He’s been drinking. His eyes are red and yellow, and his breath stinks. I get right to my point.
“Ain’t nothing in there worth losing your freedom for,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” Leon says.
“Come on, man, I been around,” I say.
“He been around,” Bone says, giggling again.
“You’ve got an imagination, I’ll give you that,” Leon says.
“I hope that’s all it is,” I say.
Leon steps up so he’s right in my face. We’re not two inches apart, and the electricity coming off him makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he says.
“Maybe so,” I mumble, and turn to go. When I’m about to pull open the lobby door, he calls after me.
“How much that old man pay you?”
“He pays me what he pays me,” I say.
“I was wondering, ’cause you act like you the owner.”
“I’m just looking out for my own ass.”
Leon smiles, trying to get back to being charming. With his kind, though, once you’ve seen them without their masks, it’s never the same.
“And you know the best way to do that, right?” he says.
“Huh?” I say.
“Duck and cover,” he says.
He’s going to shoot me dead. I hear it in his voice. He’s already got his mind made up.
Youngblood says he knows someone who can get me a gun, a white boy named Paul, a gambler, a loser, one of them who’s always selling something. I tell Youngblood I’ll give him twenty to set something up. Youngblood calls the guy, and the guy says he has a little .25 auto he wants a hundred bucks for. That’s fine, I say. I have three hundred hidden in my room. It’s supposed to be Mexico money, but there isn’t going to be any Mexico if Leon puts a bullet in me.
Paul wants to meet on Sixth and San Pedro at 9 P.M. It’s a long walk over, and Youngblood talks the whole way there about his usual nothing. He has to stop three times. Once to piss and twice to ask some shaky-looking brothers where’s a dude named Cisco. I’m glad I have my money in my sock. I don’t like to dawdle after dark. They’ll cut you for a quarter down here, for half a can of beer.
We’re a few minutes late to the corner, but this Paul acts like it was an hour. “What the fuck?” he keeps saying, “What the fuck?” looking up and down the street like he expects the police to pop out any second. He has a bandage over one eye and is wearing a T-shirt with cartoon racehorses on it, the kind they give away at the track sometimes.
“Show me what you got,” I say, interrupting his complaining.
“Show you what I got?” he says. “Show me what you got.”
I reach into my sock and bring out the roll of five twenties. I hand it to him, and he thumbs quickly through the bills.
“Wait here,” he says.
“Hold on now,” I say.
“It’s in my car,” he says. “You motherfuckers may walk around with guns on you, but I don’t.”
He hurries off toward a beat-up Nissan parked in a loading zone.
“It’s cool,” Youngblood says. “Relax.”
Paul opens the door of the car and gets in. He starts the engine, revs it, then drives away. I stand there with my mouth open, wondering if I misunderstood him, that he meant he was going somewhere else to get the gun and then bring it back. But that isn’t what he said. Thirty years on the street, and I haven’t learned a goddamn thing. I hit Youngblood so hard, his eyes roll up in his head. Then I kick him when he falls, leave him whining like a whipped puppy.
I don’t sleep that night or the next, and at work I can’t sit still, waiting for what’s coming. Two days pass, three, four. At the hotel, I see Leon hanging around the lobby and partying in J Bone’s room. We don’t say anything to each other as I pass by, I don’t even look at him, but our souls scrape like ships’ hulls, and I shudder from stem to stern.
When Friday rolls around and still nothing has happened, I start to think I’m wrong. Maybe what I said to Leon was enough to back him off. Maybe he was never serious about robbing the store. My load feels a little lighter. For the first time in a week I can twist my head without the bones in my neck popping.
To celebrate, I take myself to Denny’s for dinner. Chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. A big Mexican family is there celebrating something. Looks like Mom and Dad and Grandma and a bunch of kids, everyone all dressed up. I’m forty-two years old, not young anymore, but I’d still like to have something like that someday. Cancer took my daughter when she was ten, and my son’s stuck in prison. If I ever make it to Mexico, maybe I’ll get a second chance, and this time it would mean something.
They show up at 2:15 on Saturday. We’ve just reopened after lunch, and I haven’t even settled into my chair yet when the three of them crowd into the doorway. Dallas is in front, a hoodie pulled low over his face. He’s the one who pushes the buzzer, the one Leon’s got doing the dirty work.
“Don’t let ’em in,” I shout to Mr. M.
The old man toddles in from the back room, confused.
“What?”
“Don’t touch the buzzer.”
Dallas rings again, then raps on the glass with his knuckles. I’ve been afraid for my life before — on the street, in prison, in rooms crowded with men not much more than animals — but it’s not something you get used to. My legs shake like they have every other time I’ve been sure death is near, and my heart tries to tear itself loose and run away. I crouch, get up, then crouch again, a chicken with its head cut off.
J Bone tugs a ski mask down over his face and pushes Dallas out of the way. He charges the door, slamming into it shoulder-first, which makes a hell of a noise, but that’s about it. He backs up, tries again, then lifts his foot and drives his heel into the thick, bulletproof glass a couple of times. The door doesn’t budge.