Avalos stood back, ignoring Rocky but regarding young Victorio. He walked around the boy like a man assessing a horse.
“ Culiche, man?” Avalos asked.
“Yes.”
“Herredia’s top-of-the-line best?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak more than one word of English?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck, you’re only a child. A child. Would you like a drink of reposado, my boy?”
Victorio nodded and Avalos went behind the bar and poured four shot glasses of the tequila. He carried one to Victorio and held on to one for himself, jerking his head for Draper and Rocky to get their own.
Draper noted that the luggage was in its usual place by the bar, four rolling bags with their handles upright as always, as if skycaps were about to race in and claim them.
“Where is Camilla?” asked Draper. The crude dogfighting arena seemed even more charmless without Camilla, whose strongly perfumed, expensively dressed, snake-haired, big-butted presence Draper had always looked forward to. It was a shame. Business was often a shame.
“Shopping. Shopping! Why do you ask?”
“Simple good manners.”
“Nothing good is simple.”
“Fire is good and simple.”
“Fire! Who cares about fire?”
Avalos dropped into his recliner and Rocky stood by the sliding glass door that could be opened to let in the cries of the crowd and the snarling of the fighting dogs and the waft of various smoking substances on fight nights. Draper and Victorio got the couch across from Avalos. Avalos brought a pipe and a small glass jar from the cigar box on the coffee table and jiggled a rock into the blackened bowl. He used a lighter in the shape of a miniature flamethrower to heat the rock. Then he reached out and handed the pipe to Victorio.
The boy took a huge hit and coughed hard and gagged, then his body shuddered and he handed the works back to Avalos.
Avalos burned the rock again and sipped the smoke, then looked at Draper and proffered the pipe.
“No, thank you. I enjoy having brain cells.”
Avalos looked at Rocky but proffered nothing.
“Show Victorio the cash,” said Avalos. “Show him the scales and the vacuum sealer. Show him how we do our part of El Tigre’s business here in beautiful Southern California.”
Draper rolled one of the suitcases to the bar, flipped it over and unzipped the main compartment and hefted the loose bundles of bills to the bar top. He turned on and reset the digital scale, making sure the plate surface was clean and properly affixed. He turned on the vacuum sealer to give it plenty of time to warm up, and made sure there were plenty of bags. He waited for Rocky’s phone to ring but it didn’t.
Victorio hovered and watched. He seemed both alert and disinterested and Draper wondered at his fine acting skills. He was playing his part well.
Rocky stood unmoving with his back to the sliding glass door, arms crossed, seemingly caught in the net of his own tattoos.
Avalos stood and lumbered drunkenly to the bar.
“In the beginning there was loyalty,” he said to Victorio.
“Yes.”
“This is no place for selfishness. The selfish will rot. You can ask Senor Coleman about that on your long drive south.”
Victorio looked at Draper with eagerness on his face. Draper looked back down and adjusted the bag feed on the sealer and whistled quietly.
“Look at me,” said Avalos. “Do you believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost?”
“Yes, mucho. ”
“You’re not a citizen of the United States.”
“I have good papers.”
“You’re not the kind of man who should be traveling across the border. You look suspicious, even to me. You look guilty. You look like the unholy ghost.”
Draper looked up at Avalos and saw the drunk belligerence in the man.
Rocky’s cell phone rang.
Avalos showed no reaction. “There are dollars for us all,” he said to Victorio. “Week after week, and year after year, more and more. But only for the loyal.”
Rocky held the phone to his ear for a moment, then lowered it. “There are no problems,” he said.
Draper looked at Victorio with something new in his eyes.
“What problems would there be?” asked Avalos. “I said what problems?”
The revolver was almost touching Avalos’s stomach when the first shot scorched through him and shattered the sliding glass door behind him. His knees collapsed and Victorio shot him twice more in the chest and when Avalos slumped over, Victorio tried to put a bullet in his head but the gun clicked loudly, then again and again.
Victorio looked up in confusion. Rocky blew him through the window with two deafening blasts from a sawed-off ten-gauge and the heavy steel shot carried Victorio out into midair, then he descended in a bright shower of glass and landed dead, faceup in the fighting pit.
Draper pushed Avalos with his toe and a lifeless arm flopped to the bloody carpet.
In Draper’s mind, time did something funny-it stuttered or snagged or maybe just jiggled a little. Then it was right again.
“We did it,” he said.
“We’ll burn in hell for it, but that’s a while from now.”
“Camilla?”
“We have no idea where she is.”
“That’s a good thing. I’m happy to be in business with you, Rocky. We will prosper.”
In silence they finished the weighing and the sealing, then they began packing the bundles of cash back into the suitcases with some old clothes. Draper looked once at Avalos and once at Victorio, mainly to be sure there were no miraculous recoveries in progress. But he enjoyed the insult, too, the disrespect of working so close to the dead that he could smell their blood.
One of Avalos’s gunmen came into the arena when they were almost finished packing the cash. He looked into the fight pit, then climbed the stairs and looked at Avalos and the money and the men.
“Can I get a drink?” he asked.
“The bar is open,” said Rocky. “I’ll have a beer.”
A few minutes later another trusted Avalos lieutenant came in, and he did almost exactly what the first had done-he stopped and looked at the young Sinaloan in the middle of the fighting pit, then he went up the stairs and looked down at his old boss with amazement and disgust.
“Get him a drink,” Rocky said to the first.
Then another man came, then another.
By the time the last suitcase was packed and the equipment was put away, four more former Avalos soldiers had made their way up into the suite. Roughly half of Avalos’s top men, thought Draper. The smart half. The half that chose life at all cost. He knew he’d never see the others or Camilla again and that was the way it had always been and always would be.
Rocky poured drinks and handed one to each of his men. “The killer from Sinaloa murdered Hector,” he said. “So I closed his eyes. This is the truth. Tell everyone you know. Coleman and I will make the delivery to El Tigre tonight. You’ll clean up this mess. Make sure that Hector will be found so we can have a good funeral. Make sure the others are not.”
23
Hood picked up a Friday graveyard patrol shift for some OT but mainly just to drive. It was a solo run and the minutes dragged but the hours flew.
After clocking off shift at five-fifty Saturday morning he drove his Camaro up to Bakersfield and stood awhile by Allison Murrieta’s grave. It was her birthday and she would have been thirty-three. Hood reflected that she had had big appetites and never apologized for them. These were largely why she was no longer among the living. But he hadn’t come here to analyze her or to affix blame, only to pay respect and to remember the way she carried herself through this world. He could still taste her breath.
When he was done he drove back to L.A.
Sunday morning at six Hood’s old boss on the Bulldogs called. His name was Bill Marlon and he was still running the homicide show out of LASD headquarters in Monterey Park.