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  Speedy said, “I need to bring him with us to Humboldt. He can’t stay here without me.”

  Carmel nodded, understanding completely. If Speedy left Little Willy unattended down here in Oakland, in only a short time Willy’d be gone like he’d never existed.

  “All right,” she said. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  Carmel looked at the Thompson with loathing, lying there lewd on her table still half exposed. Speedy had presented it to her like a bouquet of flowers, as if it were a courting gift – but as far as Carmel was concerned, the gun was a porn star and a busted out one at that.

  “You say you have some sort of affair to wind up,” Carmel said. “Is this part of it?”

  Speedy nodded. “I need her or I wouldn’t ask you to stash her here. I know this is a major imposition.”

  “Promise me that it’s gone as soon as you don’t need it anymore.”

  “I promise.”

  “I mean it,” Carmel insisted. “When the time comes you choose. This monstrosity . . . or me. Swear to me that you’ll drive a stake through this thing’s heart. Swear you’ll lay it down like it’s a mad dog.”

  “I swear,” Speedy said.

  Chapter 28

  Carmel had been doing her Psychic Friend thing for the last few hours. Speedy was sipping wine and practicing smoke rings, watching her with the silent patience forcibly taught to anyone who’s done time.

  Speedy couldn’t hear the other end of the conversations, had to close his eyes and imagine just who was talking on the other end of the line – but filling in the blanks was something he’d always been pretty good at. From what he could hear, this was actually a pretty interesting gig – he could understand why Carmel eyes lit up every time the phone rang, however wary that excitement simultaneously seemed to be.

  He’d listened to her working – listened to the helpful, comforting things she told these people living on the ragged edge – and found himself liking her more and more. He reminded himself once again that maybe he had been lucky to come across her.

  While Carmel was taking one of her (frequent) smoke breaks Speedy asked about something he’d been noticing: “Some of the calls you lay down a bunch of cards, others you just glance at a card or two out of your deck. What’s that all about?”

  Carmel shoved the headset back off her ears so that it hung around her neck. “Some people, I really have to dig to get to the bottom of who they are. Other people I can look at their Significator card one time and see everything there is to know about them.”

  “Significator card, huh?” Speedy thought about it. “Okay, what card would Fat Bob be?”

  “His Significator is easy,” Carmel said, and thumbed through her battered deck until she came to The Chariot, which portrayed an arrogant looking stud driving some kind of war wagon pulled by a couple of sphinxes. “Bob’s a juggernaut, unstoppable, full speed ahead until he hits his dead end.”

  “How about Little Willy?”

  She found The Fool, which showed some loopy looking guy about to step off a bottomless cliff while a little dog laughed gleefully at his feet. “He’s a dreamer, not of this world, walking solitary even when he’s with other people.”

  “And me?”

  The phone rang, and Carmel put her headset back into place before picking it up. No way was she going to share the King of Swords with him. It wasn’t time to confess her childhood dreams just yet, even if she was bringing this man home to Humboldt like some sort of Oakland souvenir.

  “I’m not sure there is a Significator for you,” Carmel said, poising herself to answer the phone and get back to work. “You’re a wild card.”

  Chapter 29

  The trio had agreed they needed to case the Mexicans a bit before making the score, scope out the house’s patterns of movement and get an idea just how much of a money train flowed through it. For the past few days they’d been doing shifts keeping their numbers different, either alone or by twos. Getting to West Oakland on the bus or by BART or being dropped off to watch on foot, and staking it out from different locations.

  The whole chaotic ambience of the neighborhood was a freebie, making it easier to do their posts undetected. There was, of course, the loud nightly dog slaughter at sunset up in West Clawson. The Bottoms had several ‘pocket parks’ that were basically large scale homeless encampments.

  West Oakland had a porous feel to it, and people made a habit of coming here from other parts of the East Bay to do illegal dumping; to drop off busted fridges or bodies rolled up in carpets and such. With all the sketchy traffic rolling through, even being white our trio didn’t stand out at all.

  Little Willy wasn’t allowed to pull any watches alone, however. Speedy and Bob had reached that unspoken decision the first time they watched a passed out junkie twitching in the gutter across from Alliance Metals, whilst behind him in Fitzgerald Park a woman sat Indian style in a shopping cart, giving blow job after blow job to all comers. It’d be too tempting for Willy to just stroll over and cadge some crack.

  Speedy was lounging with Carmel tonight (‘Do Not Disturb’) so Willy and Fat Bob were lurking together in the Valiant. Little Willy had parked the car down the block from that scabrous drug house, between streetlights to make them a little less noticeable.

  At first these plants together had been uncomfortable for both Willy and Bob, like the Coyote and the Road Runner out on a blind date – but by now they’d settled back into the old groove as the boredom of the stakeouts seeped in.

  “So what you going to do with your cut?” Bob asked, already having a pretty good idea.

  “Buy books,” Little Willy said. “Carmel says I can have as many as I want in my room when we get up to Redway. I’ll never have to give none of them up anymore, cuz we’ll never have to move again.”

  Bob gritted his teeth, a little bit tired of hearing about Humboldt County. “There’s that big Mexican again, going out for munchies and 40-ouncers like clockwork,” he rasped as Oso clumped down the porch steps.

  The neighborhood mom n’ pop market was right down the block from the drug house. Instead of heading directly toward it, however, Oso walked in the opposite direction around the block, like he had each time they’d seen him come out. After a few minutes they saw him reappear at the far corner of the block and enter the store.

  “Fucker sure likes the long way around,” Fat Bob observed.

  “He’s patrolling his perimeter,” Willy said.

  A second went by while Bob felt stupid, as he did so often with Willy. “Yeah,” he agreed, as if reluctantly. “Yeah. This Oso guy’s sure bright-eyed and bushy tailed. I wonder if he’s the honcho?”

  “No,” Willy said. “I think we’ll know the boss when we see him.”

  This shift they’d seen maybe a dozen mid-level people come and go at the house – not street addicts, but people that looked quite a few links up the food chain. This house was a fat wholesale distribution center, well plugged in; there was a lot of ducats going in and out of this place.

  A little after Oso returned to the house with the day’s supplies, they saw him come out again with two other men. Oso stumped down the steps next to a smaller, trimmer Mexican, who was dressed in an old school zoot suit. A kid followed the two, wearing a purple tracksuit with yellow trim; he had a pained expression on his face.

  The zooter didn’t look to the right or to the left as he walked to the Coupe De Ville parked at the curb. He had one of those aluminum valises like on Miami Vice clutched in his right hand. He carried it like it was heavy but he still managed an arrogant dip to his gait.

  “That one don’t think much of himself, does he?” Fat Bob asked as he looked at Beau’s flashy clothing, watched him strut like the cock of the walk, hating him reflexively for the success those threads represented. “Ooh, look at me,” Bob sneered. “I’m a fancy pants.”

  Willy snorted: What? Bob thought the guy was a snob because he wiped his ass and shined his shoes?

  Oso and Kid Esteban scan
ned their surroundings for threats while Clotheshorse Beau climbed into the front passenger seat. Once Beau was safely in the car Oso got in back, Esteban got behind the wheel, and the Coupe de Ville surged away from the curb.

  Little Willy pulled out and followed gracefully as the Coupe de Ville got on the Nasty Nimitz headed south. They followed the car past the Coliseum and the Drive-In. All four movies screens were blazing and alight at the Drive-In, but Bob only recognized one of the films playing: the new ‘Ghost Busters’ thing starring those two guys from Saturday Night Live.

  Willy exited the freeway behind the Mexicans at 98th Avenue, down East Oakland way. The Coupe de Ville led them to a pale slat-sided single-story motel in the heart of the Grimy 90s, where he pulled up at the curb. Little Willy drove half a block past and hung a quick U-turn, parking in turn across the street.

  Oso and Esteban climbed out to flank Beau, guarding that precious valise as the trio walked past the motel’s bar-covered windows and through the privacy-guaranteeing gate in the spike-topped black wrought iron fence surrounding the entire compound. Willy and Fat Bob watched their prey proceed to a room about halfway down the motel’s length.

  The room the Mexicans were headed to had its door open, the interior gaping and lightless. Two huge brothers flanked the open doorway with Popeye forearms folded, both wearing mirror shades, both with their skulls shaven – they resembled a matched set of big ebony golems, or maybe twin genies on the lookout for Ali Baba.

  The only difference between them? The brother on the right had more of a cauliflower mug than the brother on the left, while the face of the brother on the left appeared like it had had a few more divots knocked out of it from time to time than the brother on the right.

  Fat Bob figured neither of these bloods went to his skinhead bars much despite their choice of hairstyles. If Bob remembered correctly, this was also about the neighborhood where Alvin and Remo had gotten their fool selves killed in their final, fatal drug robbery.

  As he watched the three Mexicans disappear into the motel room with no visible reaction from either of the brothers bookending the door, Bob wondered if this was indeed the exact place Alvin and Remo had tried to rip off; wondered if one of the two muscle-heads up there had helped kill his friends. Feeling a jinx coming on, Fat Bob put that thought away.

  “I’m sorry I blew it like that, going crackhead and all,” Little Willy said. “You were right to stay away, I had nothing coming.”

  Fat Bob flushed, actually irked. “Listen to you, talking like you’re no more than a piece of shit. What, you’re the one down on your knuckles, but you gotta be the one to apologize?”

  Bob twisted his blunt mug into a mockery of the wistful sadness Little Willy’s face always wore, accomplishing a surprisingly good impression of Willy: “I’m sorry for being a speed bump in everybody’s way,” Bob said, in a gravelly approximation of Willy’s higher pitched voice. “I didn’t mean to trip anyone up.”

  Willy giggled as if against his will, and Fat Bob threw him a wink.

  Bob’s round face instantly morphed into an expression of significance and concern. “It wasn’t about you, Willy. You started doing that shit, it flashed me back to when we was kids on the block. You remember that old junkie we used to see stumbling and mumbling around, nodding out on doorsteps and shit? That old junkie I used to drub on whenever I saw him?”

  Willy nodded. “Sure. Didn’t you spray paint him red when he was passed out that one time?”

  “Yeah. Remember how he laid there while I rattle-canned all over his face, how he reached out both hands to me whining ‘Help, help’?”

  They both laughed merrily at the memory before Bob got serious again – Little Willy smelled a revelation from a mile away.

  “He was my old man,” Fat Bob confessed, voice low and conspiratorial. “The son of a whore spiked his whole life away into his arm. He turned his back on everything – on me, on Miranda, on everything and everyone.”

  Bob grimaced, remembering the things that had happened to Miranda about then, feeling rare sympathy for what his kid sister had gone through even though he’d never express it out loud to her.

  “I couldn’t be around you,” Bob said, flicking a sidelong glance as if to gauge Willy’s reaction to this startling confession.

  Fat Bob neglected mentioning that every time he looked at Willy while Speedy was inside, Bob had been reminded unbearably of just how much he missed Speedy – no way was Bob going to give Little Willy that kind of ammo.

  On Willy’s end, he didn’t mention that everyone had known from the first that the old junkie was Fat Bob’s dad. The family resemblance between the two had been so close that every time Bob walked up and clocked the old druggie, it had been like Fat Bob was thumping on a smack-ravaged older mirror-image of himself.

  “I understand,” Willy said, remembering the expression on Fat Bob’s face the day they’d stumbled across Bob’s junkie dad dead of an OD in an alley.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, Willy,” Fat Bob growled. “I’ll never let you down again brother.”

  “I’ll never put you in a position you have to.”

  The Mexicans filed out of the motel room a few minutes later, the two door guards still too chill to react – they might as well have been ornamental statues. Little Willy watched the three dealers walk back to their car, Beau now carrying a suitcase. It looked like there was a lot of something-or-other in it.

  “So you don’t like drugs, but you always smoke and drink,” Willy said slowly, as they watched the Coupe de Ville pull away from the curb.

  “That’s different,” Bob stated firmly. He turned as Little Willy pulled out to follow the Coupe de Ville back home. “You think we’re gonna make enough off these assholes to swing it?”

  “I think these boys are the mint,” Willy said. “I think this is the one.

  Chapter 30

  The next night Speedy was taking his turn staking out the Mexicans, waiting for Fat Bob to show from the West Oakland BART Station and relieve him. Speedy and the boys were giving it about a week to be sure they had a solid feel for the rhythms of the house, as they wanted to hit these guys when they were fat and profitable.

  The last couple of days they’d been staggering up their watches, though, and had stopped trying to watch the house round the clock. Like any other target neighborhood Speedy had ever worked, the Bottoms and the Mexicans’ house had rhythms that quickly became apparent.

  The ‘mad minute’ of gunfire each sunset up in Dogtown was now mundane with familiarity. The migration paths between the recycling centers at the Embarcadero and Alliance Metal – along which the neighborhood’s homeless daily pushed their stolen shopping carts of cans and bottles in quest of money to drink and drug themselves into oblivion – were clearly marked by snowdrift trails of Styrofoam containers and food wrappers courtesy of city and church ‘free meal’ handouts.

  The trio also become accustomed to West Oakland’s general similarity to those old World War Two newsreels depicting bombed out European cities – though of course the creatures skulking about this devastated cityscape weren’t technically ‘refugees,’ and there was no Marshall Plan in the works for these people or their homes.

  As for the target house itself, most of the lower level dealers came and went from about late evening to maybe 2AM, stocking up for the wee hours when their customers were jonesing the hardest. The honcho’s runs to that apartment down in the Grimy 90s took place every other day, mid-evening. The Mexicans in the drug house were obviously mobbed up deep to occupy the spot they did in the marketing flow – but they’d also revealed themselves to be complacent and predictable, a weakness Speedy and crew were about to educate them on, hard and happily.

  As Speedy sat there in the Valiant – alternately scheming in his head and steamily fantasizing about Carmel – a black-and-white parked behind him, filling his rear view mirror. It was Officer Louis behind the wheel; Officer Louis getting out of the roller to stand ther
e next to his OPD cruiser.

  “This is District Four, are you sure this is even your assigned beat?” Speedy called out his open window to the approaching cop. “Hell, we’re coming up on end of watch Officer – you even in the mood to do the paperwork?”

  “I’m Tac ‘Wild Car’ these days, I rove where I please,” Louis said, tossing his scarred head with lofty pride. “When your bosses hate you as much as mine do, you can do whatever you like and it doesn’t really stand out.”

  “Now get out your vehicle,” Officer Louis commanded, with no friendliness at all.

  Speedy obeyed, conscious of his sawed-offed’s weight dragging down the right side of his field jacket. He felt naked under Louis’s penetrating gaze, like Louis had X-ray vision and could see the piece where it lurked in his pocket.

  Officer Louis opened the back door to his roller. “Get in,” he ordered.

  Speedy stood by the Valiant, indecisive. “Am I under arrest, Louis?”

  “Not unless you don’t get in.”

  Speedy slowly walked past the old cop and started to climb in, then leaned over toward Louis. “You going to guide my head, make sure I don’t accidentally bump it over and over again on the door frame?”

  “Just do as you’re told.”

  Speedy reluctantly got into the backseat cage and Louis closed the door, which made a very final, decisive *clunk* as it latched. Speedy sat there on the hard backseat of the cop car, not cuffed or Mirandized, with a shotgun in his pocket that he could pull out and aim at the back of Louis’s head whenever he wanted to. He looked through the mesh of the cage separating him from Louis as the fat old cop slid behind the wheel, and saw Louis’s reflection staring right back at him in the rear view mirror. The keloid burn scars on the side of Louis’s neck, face and head shone in the dimness of the car’s interior.