Draper said he’d love to work homicide but reservists were out of their league in that game. He was volunteering two shifts a week now, sometimes three. He told Hood he’d also been doing some recruiting things for the LASD-fairs, campus career days, things like that. He said he was a people person. He said he thought that getting the right people was the key to good law enforcement.
Draper told Hood about a girlfriend in Azusa and another one in Laguna. He said he’d like to settle down and have a family. Maybe even two, or three. He smiled. He was twenty-nine now, thought it was just about time for all that. He was only working one or two days a week at Prestige, just keeping the books and doing payroll and purchasing, and “keeping the Germans in Beck’s.” He had a small apartment building in Bell that was bringing in steady money.
They pulled over a drunk driver around midnight, their one arrest. She was too drunk to stand up on her own. By the time they booked her the shift was up and they clocked off. They shook hands in the vehicle lot and Draper walked away toward a well-kept but older black BMW M5.
Hood opened the trunk of the cruiser and pretended to be checking the contents.
When Draper’s car growled down the street and out of sight, Hood climbed back into the car and retrieved the voice recorder from under the seat.
22
The next evening Draper steered his black M5 down a Cudahy side street. He looked out at the troubled city, a city eaten alive by corruption and gangs and drugs. It was now spottily patrolled by the Maywood PD, which was contracted to fill the shoes of the recently fired Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. But Draper knew that it was really Cudahy’s mayor-and Hector and Camilla Avalos-who ran the place. More or less together, thought Draper, in wicked harmony.
It was Friday, and Israel Castro’s gunman sat beside him. He was slender, with calm eyes and a recently barbered head of thick black hair. He was younger than Draper had wanted but now he was stuck with him. Draper had given him a stolen stainless steel Smith. 357 Magnum revolver and the kid had thumbed open the cylinder, spun the loads and slapped it back into the frame. Just like a gunslinger, Draper had said. The boy had smiled and jammed the gun into the waistband of his Wranglers. He had beautiful teeth.
Now the gun was still in the boy’s pants and the boy was in the car with him and, as usual, Avalos’s sullen gunmen coalesced on the dark Cudahy streets to direct the car into the sprawling, shabby lair.
Friday night, thought Draper. There’s life and there’s death.
“Victorio, I ask you once again to keep your mouth shut,” said Draper. “You are Herredia’s man. You are loyal to Herredia. You are only with me because he has ordered you to be with me. You are to be my new partner.”
“ Si. Yes.”
“Do not show me respect. Avalos doesn’t respect me and you must not respect me either.”
“I no respect.”
“Kill him only when I tell you to. Only then. I will say it with a look, not with words. You must understand this perfectly and do it perfectly. Then the other five thousand will be yours.”
“ Si. Herredia has gueras putas?”
“I have no idea if he has blond whores.”
One pistolero directed them through the sliding metal door and into the warehouse. Another waved them through the vast dark space. The big M5 engine grumbled and Draper could hear the sound magnified by the walls around them and see the dust rising in the beams of his headlights.
Two more gunmen waited for him at the far, weakly lit end. When Draper and Victorio got out they were frisked and their weapons were taken away. Draper saw that Victorio had been hiding a fat black-handled switchblade in one boot and a one-shot derringer in the other. Victorio gave the men a contemptuous stare as they confiscated his things, and he gave one to Draper, too.
Then one of the men pushed open a heavy metal door and led them out to a courtyard, down a pathway worn in the near-dead grass, and into a large metal building. The second pistolero brought up the rear. Draper walked and looked at the old tables and benches, the rows of industrial overhead lights. He had always thought of this big room as a former machine shop, or perhaps an ancient assembly line. Then they all stepped into the groaning old elevator that would take them down two stories and into the warren of rooms that was Avalos’s headquarters, and of course, the dogfighting arena.
Draper stared straight at the floor as the elevator lowered. No one spoke. When the car rumbled to a stop, another one of Avalos’s men slid open the door for them. Draper stepped out and was surprised to hear the two gunmen getting out behind him. They usually rode back up and he never saw them again until after the weighing and pressing and packaging.
He turned and looked at one of them. The gunman was a culiche -old-school Sinaloan-creased Wranglers and ostrich boots and a white yoked cowboy shirt. He reminded Draper of Victorio, and Draper conceded that if Ostrich Boots and Victorio knew each other, then this was likely his own last day among the living.
“Extra security tonight,” he said.
“Rocky says.”
“Rocky should know,” said Draper.
Ostrich Boots spoke rapid Spanish to Victorio, who looked bitterly at Draper before he answered. Draper only caught a few of their words: Los Mochis, Tijuana, El Patron and, of course, gueras putas.
They walked through the room with mullioned windows and the one that smelled of creosote, then down the hallway with the high ceiling trailing cobwebs. Draper wondered how many years they had been there, lifeless shreds swaying in the currents.
Then they came to the entrance of the sanctum and Ostrich Boots knocked on the door.
Rocky opened it and the gunmen folded back into the shadows. Draper heard their steps diminishing, then a door clanging shut and then only silence.
They stepped inside without speaking and Rocky led them to a small room that contained apparently empty beer kegs and a large, carnival-style popcorn maker with the image of a clown etched onto the glass. Draper introduced Victorio to Rocky. Rocky seemed to stare straight through the boy as he listened to his name and the way he spoke. Then Rocky told him to take off his shirt. Victorio stood bony and half naked as Rocky handed him the neatly folded guayabera shirt and told him to put it on. It was crisp and white and hung loose, cut for tropical heat. Then Rocky handed Victorio the stainless steel revolver that had with seeming magic transmigrated from Draper to Victorio to the distant gunmen to Rocky and now back to Victorio again. Victorio accepted the gun with a small nod and then the weapon vanished under his shirt. Draper saw that Victorio was so slenderly built he could have concealed a sleeping bag under the guayabera.
“No existen balas capaces de matar nuestros suenos,” said Rocky.
There are no bullets that can kill our dreams, thought Draper.
Rocky led them from the small room to the entrance of the fighting arena. He used two keys to open the scarred and dented steel door. His hands were steady. The welds were still shiny on the newly added lock flange.
Draper stepped in and saw the familiar fight pit, and the seats raised up around it on three sides, and the glass-walled box where Hector Avalos paced, not slowing as he looked across the arena at his closest lieutenant, his gringo cop courier, and Herredia’s new boy.
Draper climbed the stairs to the suite. He smelled spilled beer and cigarette smoke and the underscents of blood, shit and fear. Avalos pulled him in for a punishing hug and Draper could feel his power, drunk and unsteady as he was. Avalos had never so much as touched Draper, who wondered at the increased security and Avalos’s sudden affection. Avalos crushed half of Draper’s air out of him and pushed him away, his teardrop tattoos riding the wrinkles of a crooked smile.