Fields Where They Lay, page 7
“Awwww, come on,” Louie said. “So she fibs a little.”
“It’s not so much that she fibs,” I said. “She just refuses to talk about anything that happened before she came to California. But to hear her tell it, she was born in three cities.”
“Little mystery,” he said, “it’s a good thing in a woman.”
“Maybe. I’m not being very gracious about your invitation, am I?”
“Nope, but what else is new? Come on, think about it. Alice and me, we really do Christmas. Cook from scratch and everything. I told her about your attitude problem, she said I talk too much, I could never talk you into liking Christmas. She said it’d be like trying to talk someone into voting different and you know how that always comes out. What we should do, Alice said, is show you Christmas.”
“Wow,” I said. I’d never seen this particular Louie before. “I’ll talk to Ronnie and get back to you. And thanks for the invitation.”
“Hey,” he said. “It’s overdue.” He disconnected, and I suddenly felt lonelier.
Western was coming up, and just as I went to signal for a turn, an icicle drove its way into my solar plexus. I had left the Edgerton Mall and gone straight to within a mile from where I lived with Ronnie, and I’d barely glanced in the rearview mirror.
And I suddenly remembered the horns two or three cars back when I made my diagonal charge for the off-ramp. That should have been enough all by itself: I’d been dragging someone behind, someone who knew how to tail. And I was about four minutes away from taking him home with me.
The apartment I shared with Ronnie was the deepest secret I had. It had come my way during a tense three or four minutes when a friend of mine, a Korean confidence woman named Winnie Park, had faced the worst possible outcome of having transferred a huge sum of money to her own account from one owned by a corrupt and heavily armed LA cop. Somehow I’d persuaded the cop to give Winnie seventy-two hours to round up the money, plus 20 percent interest, and Winnie had used the time to get herself to Singapore and to pay me off with an unwritten and completely illegal sublease on an apartment.
And what an apartment. It was in one of three radically dilapidated adjoining buildings built in the 1920s and bought entirely for cash by an anonymous Korean syndicate who had restored the units inside to their art deco glory while completely ignoring the exterior conditions. The result was like wrapping the first class decks on the Queen Mary inside a facade that said Rats check in here but they never check out, creating the perfect shelter for those with large amounts of unreportable income and people who might as well have been wearing okay to kill signs on their chests.
Nobody except for Ronnie and me knew about it, and here I was, on the verge of hanging out the neon. And oh, yeah, Irwin Dressler, the legendary king of Los Angeles crime, now in his nineties, but Irwin and I were getting along. For the moment.
I signaled for the right onto Western, which was reasonably busy, dropped south a couple of blocks, watched the follower make the turn a few car lengths back, and took an aimless right onto a quiet street of apartment houses, all gleaming with seasonal cheer. I slowed as though looking for an address. In my side mirror I saw one pair of headlights, and then another, make the turn behind me. And realized I’d gone wet beneath the arms.
Moving at a crawl, I pulled as close to the parked cars as I could, and the driver two cars back swerved left and passed. It kept going, so scratch one. But the other one stayed back there.
A parking spot came up—a gift, in that neighborhood, rare enough to have come from the jolly old elf himself—and I stopped and put the car into reverse, brightening my taillights, and waited politely for the car behind me to go by so I wouldn’t come too close to it when I backed up. After a moment, undoubtedly swearing beneath his breath, the driver passed me.
Whoever he was, he was big enough for his squarish head to brush the inside of the car’s roof.
As he moved slowly down the block, I began the pantomime of backing up. I intended to make four or five hapless passes to get into the spot in the hope that the giant tail would realize he couldn’t just sit around without attracting attention and would take a turn around the block so he could come up from behind me again.
I pushed the button that would call Louie back and said, “You got anybody in Koreatown?” By anybody, I meant anyone who had rented one of Louie’s legally clean cars to do something nefarious.
“I ain’t got trackers on them.” There was a pause while he did something. “I got four out but no idea where. Lemme get off the phone so I can call. Is this dangerous?”
“What do you think?”
“Okay. Hang on.”
The tail made the first right, which gave me a minute or two.
I had only two choices that I could see: One, pull away from the curb as fast as I could, hoping either to get out of sight before the follower made it all the way around the block or two, get out of the car and try to hoof it back to Western and maybe duck into a restaurant or something. I wasted twenty or thirty seconds trying to decide and then I figured, the hell with it, grabbed a third choice that had just presented itself, cut the wheel, and gunned it. Plan three was to follow my pursuer around the block, come up behind him with my brights on, and worry him for a while, during which he would ideally not turn and shoot me.
Three, despite what everybody says, is not always the charm. As I began the right-hand turn, I registered the car sitting there facing me, diagonally blocking the street, headlights out. And then, just when I squinted at it like a complete duffer, he hit the high beams and blinded me completely. Seeing nothing but the ghosts of his headlights, I hauled the wheel left to get out of the turn and back onto the straightaway, scraped some chrome and paint off the car parked at the corner, and accelerated to what I figured was the safest speed for a guy who felt like he’d just been caught staring at a supernova. Meanwhile the follower screeched around the turn behind me and bumped me, ever so gently, on the tail of the Toyota.
This was unexpected. I’d been assuming the objective was to tail me home and see where I lived in case Vlad eventually decided he needed to come after me. But it appeared that logic hadn’t been the best tool for the situation. Either the guy had been sent to do damage or he simply had a tenuous relationship with his masculinity and was unable to accept the fact that things hadn’t gone his way. He bumped me again as I tried desperately to clear his high beams from my retinas and get a look at the street in front of me.
It wasn’t going to happen soon enough. So moving at a decorous pace, I got a couple of car lengths in front of him, braked suddenly, dropped it into reverse with the clutch down, redlined the engine, popped the clutch, and slammed backward into him.
We both shot back a couple of feet, me bouncing around beneath my seat belt, and his horn began to blare. My vision was returning, so I threw it into first and hauled ass as fast as I could. His left headlight was out, which would make it easier for me to spot him if he was stupid enough, or steroidal enough, to follow.
And here he came, one eye blazing, dragging the noise of his horn behind him. My inoffensive-looking little Toyota has a giant Detroit engine shoehorned under its hood by Louie the Lost, via Pete at Pete’s Putt-Putt Hut, so I accelerated like I’d been launched out of a slingshot, but it didn’t leave him anywhere near far enough behind to give me confidence. And the question occurred to me: I mean, hadn’t Detroit gone bankrupt? Why did I have all this faith in—
And then two things happened at the same time. My phone rang, and a bullet punched a hole in my rear window, whistled past my head, and spiderwebbed my front window.
I thumbed the phone frantically and shouted, “Hold on,” then took the right coming up.
I was going so fast I left part of my tires scrawled over the pavement like charcoal. It was a relief to see the cyclops unable to make the turn until he was five or six car lengths back, but then he began to close the gap fast. I grabbed the right coming up, heading back toward Western, just barely avoiding some law-abiding Korean carefully turning her Lexus left into her driveway and then nearly sideswiping the car that had been a couple of lengths behind her. Somehow I threaded the needle and then I blew through the stop sign at Western and powered right, joining the southbound stream of traffic.
“What?” I said into the phone as the car with the single headlight narrowly avoided hitting a car as he made his own turn. His horn was still braying.
“Where you at?” Louie said.
“Western heading south, half a mile north of Wilshire.”
“Got one on Wilshire, going East, at—what cross street did you say?”
I said, “I didn’t,” and Louie said to me, “Not you, shut up, I’m listening here.”
Behind me, the cyclops’s horn finally cut out. The traffic in the lane to my left was going faster than I was, so I angled into it, watching One-Eye try to follow, only to be greeted by someone flicking his high beams several times at remarkable speed, and Louie said, “Car’s at Lucerne.”
“Strapped or not?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Is this the kind of joke I make? Would you put up with me if this was the kind—”
“Hang on.” The cyclops made it into the left lane, and I went back into the right as I heard Louie say, “He wants to know, are you strapped.” Then to me he said, “Strapped it is.”
“Okay. I’m going to drag myself along on the right until I cross Wilshire. He should be there a minute or so later and he should make the right onto Western. He’ll spot me because once I’m across and I know he’s behind me, I’ll turn on my hazard lights and drop to about fifteen miles an hour.”
“What do you want?”
“I want a bullet through this asshole’s back window, not to hit him because I don’t want to make that kind of trouble for your person. I just want this clown to think I’m on a team.”
“You do realize that sticking a gun out the window and firing that shot on a crowded street during the Christmas shopping season isn’t a great plan.”
“Okay, hang on, Wilshire coming up. As soon as he or she sees my hazard lights he should flick his brights once and I’ll turn into a side street as soon as I can. Your guy can come up behind him then and take the shot when no one’s behind him or out on the sidewalk.”
Louie grunted, said, “Hold on,” and repeated what I’d said. In the meantime, the light at Wilshire went red, the person coming up behind me hit the horn, and the cyclops sandwiched itself diagonally in front of him, blocking both my lane and the one to the left. Then, in case I hadn’t noticed him, he bumped me again, just hard enough to push me into the crosswalk, which had a lot of Christmas pedestrians in it.
By the width of a couple of shirt buttons I missed a young Korean couple. The guy, who had made something of a production of snatching his honey out of harm’s way when she’d already done it herself, started shouting at me. I put down my window and called, “Get out of here. Guy behind me has a gun,” and the crosswalk cleared as though by magic. I sat there with both feet on my brake pedal in case he decided to knock me into the oncoming traffic on Wilshire.
“Still there?” Louie asked.
“Stuck at the light,” I said. “I think he’s going to try to push me—”
At that moment, the cyclops’s engine emitted a roar, I felt a jolt, and then I was pushed out, my wheels locked and motionless, onto Wilshire Boulevard, one of the busiest streets in the entire city. Tires squealed all over the place, and I heard one car slam into another, but I cut my wheel so tight, turning my front wheels almost perpendicular to the rear ones, that my car started to turn right rather than be shoved farther forward. My phone slid off my knee and onto the floor, ending my contact with Louie. The moment I felt the cyclops ease off, I spun the wheel left and accelerated between cars—traffic had essentially stopped—across Wilshire and headed south.
By now the cross traffic on Wilshire, in my rearview mirror, might as well have been the Petrified Forest for all the movement that was going on. What sounded like the 1812 Overture, rescored for automobile horns, was filling the night. Traffic on Western wasn’t exactly zipping either, so I was able to see the cyclops nose its way through and start to gain on me. I slowed down, popped my hazard lights, and drifted along at the approximate speed of a parade float.
The problem with my plan, I reflected as he bumped me again, was that Louie’s person, like everyone else, was jammed into that stationary welter of cars on Wilshire. Surely, I thought, this clown isn’t dumb enough to keep ramming a car that’s doing twelve miles an hour on a major north-south street and blinking like a portable Christmas display.
Then he hit me again. Harder.
The first cross street, Ingraham, came up and I glided a little faster, half-aware of the car waiting there to turn right behind us as the tail bounced off my rear bumper again. I had barely passed Ingraham when I registered that the car waiting there had hit its high beams for a second, and I swear that the melody to “Joy to the World” bloomed in my ears. Then, in time to the music like a star soloist in some vehicular Christmas dance, the new player turned onto Western right behind the cyclops. I sped up some more, cut the hazard lights, skipped Seventh, which was too commercial and too busy, in this season, for bang-bang, and made a right onto Eighth. Eighth was crowded, too, but I knew these blocks and I increased my speed again and made a right onto South Manhattan Place, which was perfect: ugly 1980s apartment houses on the right and, just ahead on the left, a long, blind stretch of windowless wall, apparently blocking something even uglier. I made that wall home base and drove toward it at an indolent pace until he was close enough to hit me again, and then I slowed further, which seemed to surprise him because I saw his brake lights flare, even as the other car practically drove up his exhaust pipe, and I had the sense to duck down just as a second bullet punched holes in both my windshields.
But this time it wasn’t his bullet. It took a quick count of two or three for him to figure it out, and then he surged around me on the left and took off toward Seventh like he was trying for a sonic boom, the jagged edges of the bullet hole in his back window catching the streetlights like a sparkler. I slowed and stopped and watched almost neutrally as he shot past the stop sign and into the now-moving traffic and was clobbered from the left, in a satisfying explosion of breaking glass, by an LAPD black-and-white.
10
Zero to Fifty
Almost before the noise of the collision had come to an end, the driver of the car behind me and I, in perfect unison, turned off our headlights in case the sound had drawn eyes. There was no parking on the left side of the street, so I swung as far right as I could and then crimped the wheel left. I hit the left curb and hopped it, finishing the U-turn with two wheels on the grass, but without any brake or backup lights. The car behind me pulled to its right as I went slowly by and then made its own slow, lights-free turn.
At the corner of Eighth I put my arm out and signaled left. When I had a nice, big gap in traffic, I turned on my lights and headed east on Eighth. Traffic was light, and I was able to slow in the right lane without setting off anyone’s anger management issues until I knew I was being followed, and then I led us eight or nine blocks to Catalina, where I signaled, turned right, parked, and waited. When the other car was behind me at the curb, I opened my door, put both hands out, and followed them into the street. My palms were toward the waiting car, my fingers spread wide. I was the picture of harmless; I’d done everything but roll up my sleeves.
“Skip it,” said a voice from the car, a clear, musical contralto, not precisely the kind of voice I’d expected. “Louie says you’re okay.”
The driver’s window slid up and the door opened, and a woman unfolded herself out of the car: nearly as tall as I was, slim as a thread of smoke, with skin of the color you might get if you mixed a creamy Thai iced coffee with a lot of cinnamon: a smooth, sweet-looking brown with a lively spark of something almost reddish underneath it. She had cheekbones as symmetrical as parentheses, a lavish lower lip, and bone structure that would have sent a sculptor fumbling for his clay. She was draped from shoulders to ankles in a gleaming black leather coat.
I said, “Um.” Then I said, “I owe you.”
“You do,” she said. There was a little something in her speech, not in the pronunciation so much as the intonation. “But I’m patient. When I need it back, I’ll expect it with interest.”
“I’m Junior Bender.”
“I know,” she said. She stuck out a hand almost as big as mine but a lot better shaped. “Francie DuBois.”
We shook, and eventually I let go. I said, “Do you eat Korean food?”
“Put some in front of me and see.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just hold on a minute. I really need to take care of this.”
I scrolled down the recent calls on my phone and hit the one I needed. When he answered, I said, “Listen to me, you jumped-up pirozhki, you just broke it and you can’t fix it. You try to get near my family and you’ll walk into the St. Valentine’s Massacre—”
“Wait,” he said, “wait.”
“And you can’t find me because that golem you sent lost it and took a shot at me, and—”
“You are knowing—” he began, bits of the thin husk of Tip Poindexter flaking off with each syllable, “you are not making the sense. I nid—I mean, I need you—”
“And I’m not going to wait for you to come looking. I know where you chase your tiny little balls around outdoors all day, and in that window in the dining room, you might as well be standing in front of the fucking Hollywood sign. So look for me, because if you don’t see me first—”
“You are not—” he said and I hung up.
“He’ll call back,” I said to Francie DuBois. “This isn’t really a restaurant conversation.”
