Deadly Lullaby (3 page)

Chief pauses and lifts an eyebrow that breaks into two pieces from the scar tissue that has formed there. “They plan to kill me, too?”

“Not you specifically, no. But all persons on the premises are potential witnesses. So, bottom line is I am sparing your guinea ass,” I say, and shrug.

Chief shakes his head, grins sheepishly. “Guess that don't leave me a lot of room to haggle over what you're gonna pay me to work for you, huh?”

I put my hand on Chief's shoulder, say as gently as I can, “Chief, my friend, I do not remember offering to pay you shit.”

I shut the front passenger door to find Leo gripping the Caddy's steering wheel for dear life, his eyes burning yet another metaphorical hole through yet another windshield. We stew in silence a few seconds before he speaks. “I'm a cop, and just held a weapon on three men while you bound and gagged them. That makes me an accomplice to you and to whoever the hell is comin' over here to murder these guys. A total of at least seven felonies that could get me life in prison without parole—
if
I get lucky and don't get a jolt of Jesus juice along with you.”

“Quit acting like a Boy Scout. You work for Joe Sacci, and lost your cleanliness and reverence months ago.”

“What I do for Sacci is like boosting candy compared to what you just did, to what
I
just did.”

“And you'll get paid in proportion to the risk you are taking.” I reach into my breast pocket to remove the envelope of cash I handed Macky earlier, extend it halfway across the cab to him. “Will this make you feel any better?”

His expression is one that can only be described as avaricious. He licks his lips and works his mouth as if to think it over, says, “Yeah, it will,” and reaches for the envelope.

I withdraw it beyond his reach.

He flushes and talks through clenched teeth. “Old man, you shouldn't fuck with me like that.”

I ignore the death wish that tinges that statement. “You'll get the money after you agree to some conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“We'll talk about it at La Parrilla, over lunch.”

“You really think I'm gonna eat lunch with you now?”

“You promised.”

“Tell me what your conditions are and give me the fuckin' money. I'll find a way home.”

“You
promised,
damn it.” I look out my window and work my jaw so hard my molars hurt, then give him my best
Fuck you
glare. “Turn me in if you want, go ahead, but you don't get one dirty dollar unless you eat lunch with me.”

As we drive through the heart of Boyle Heights, a liquor store appears ahead to my right and the thought that hits me is tequila…I need a bottle of tequila. The only question is: Would I drink it or smash it over the old thug's skull?

Achieve two objectives in one stop, shit, buy
two
bottles of tequila….

That thought flies away when sweat drips into my eyes, and when I take my eyes off the road to cuff them dry, the front tire scrapes the curb as I'm hanging a right from Soto onto Cesar Chavez.

“Damn, kid, those are brand-new tires.”

I don't even look at him.

Every time our eyes have met since leaving the warehouse parking lot I've seen Macky's face, purple and distorted, eyes set to rocket from their sockets any second.

Don't get me wrong. I don't give a rat's ass that the fucker's dead. When death began to glaze Macky's bulging eyes, I realized the world's going to be a better place without the disaster of this man's life in it, and I deleted all sympathy for him the instant I'd processed the thought.

The thing that jammed my circuits was the sheer magnitude of my old man's criminal insanity.

Look at him there in the passenger seat next to me, digging the street scenery and humming along with a
Cranberries
tune on the radio. Relaxed, happy, your basic SoCal businessman on lunch break.

And he slaughtered a man forty-five minutes ago.

A complete absence of shame or remorse, of any concern whatsoever.

My knowledge of psychology is pretty basic in the academic sense, but you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to conclude that what sits before you is a criminal sociopath.

It occurs to me that I never really knew him until I watched him waste Macky. Not that I knew him before then—at least not since I was a kid—but I've kept tabs on him. Have had his rap sheet at my fingertips since I joined the force seven years ago, and even got my hands on some old files through a back door of Organized Crime and Vice that detailed his movements for days on end. So before today I knew my father was as street-smart as any hood to ever have preceded him, could be a charmer when it suited him, and could be your basic bad motherfucker when that suited him.

But I never really knew him until I witnessed his profile spring to life in that singular act of cold-blooded murder.

I look up to see La Parrilla restaurant, just where we left it a hundred years ago. I curb-park just west of the place, exit the car. Loud, pastel paint and neon trim deck the façade of the restaurant and make me feel like a kid again, set off a shitstorm of memories. This place is near my childhood home, one of the prime venues for the sporadic periods of normalcy me and my father spent together—some edgy times, too, often coming here to dodge my mother when she was bingeing on booze and downers and reds, or when she was just flipping out for no apparent reason.

We approach the restaurant entrance and images of her are fast-forwarding, looping, fading in and out.

My mother, god, talk about a Subject To Be Avoided.

Maybe there's a self-help manual on the subject
(Dysfunctional Family Relationships for Dummies?),
but, really, how do you deal with your father after you find out he whacked your mother?

And after he finds out you found him out?

Times like this make me wish I hadn't ditched psychotherapy.

As nervous as a feral cat, I glance over at the old man, who opens the restaurant door for me and says, “Brings back memories, doesn't it, kid?”

Uh, yeah.

Inside, he enchants the hostess, a cute, young Latina. Flat overwhelms her with his smile and a whispered comment that has her giggling and hanging on his arm like a paid escort. She clutches his hand and leads him through the crowd to a booth in the southwest corner, and I roll along behind them like the third wheel he's reduced me to, wondering if she'd keep his hand tucked against her breast like that if she knew it had the residue of death on it.

We get to our booth, and as if he's read my mind, the old man says, “I'm going to hit the men's and wash up.”

I slide into the booth, my back to the wall, the crowded main dining room spread out before me, check out the assortment of piñatas that dangle from the ceiling and the murals painted on the walls. This décor's been in place here since I was a kid, and it's making me feel weird, small and naïve, transported back in time.

A Chicano waiter appears and takes my order for a pitcher of beer and four tequila shots, nods when I tell him to come back when my father does.

The old man returns sooner than I thought he would and pauses at the head of the booth. “I would like to sit where you are, with my back to the wall. Since it looks like I'll be doing most of the talking, it will give us more privacy.”

I let loose an exaggerated sigh and slide from the booth, stand and nudge past him to climb into the opposite seat.

My sense is that his request to have his back to the wall has less to do with a desire for privacy than it is a defensive tactic, a product of his institutionalization. Ex-cons are notoriously paranoid, having learned to be hypervigilant for signs of threat in stir. Very rational behavior when you're in constant danger of catching a shank in your back, and impossible to modify in a week.

The waiter sets mugs of beer, tequila shots, tortilla chips, and three little clay pots of salsa before us. The old man places his usual order, a steak burrito with all the fixings, then crosses his arms on the table. You can't help but notice how fucking huge his hands and forearms are. Bigger than mine since he's had so much weight-throwing time on the prison yard, but there's not much else different about us. We're big men, both square-jawed Italians with deep-set black eyes, jet-black hair, and full lips. We resemble each other so completely my Aunt Connie, my mother's sister, used to say we were the result of a mad obstetrical experiment, test-tube twins born twenty-four years apart.

The old man finishes ordering and I flip down a shot of tequila and chase it with beer. “This is all I'm having,” I say to the waiter when he turns to me, “so keep 'em comin'.”

“Yes, sir,” the waiter says with a goofy grin, and leaves.

The old man sips beer. “No appetite?”

“I haven't had anything to eat in over twelve hours and it may be another twelve before I even think about it.”

He frowns. “Was it that bad?”

“Compared to
what,
for Christ sake, a chainsaw massacre?”

He's silent a few seconds. “I am sorry. I really am.”

This gives me pause as I inhale a second shot.

Arriba abajo,
senor.

This one doesn't burn my throat as much as the first one and is beginning to warm the capillaries in my fingers and toes.

I slap the glass on the table, slide it against the other one. “For the life of me,” I say, “I can't remember those words ever coming from your mouth.”

“It was easier than I thought it would be.”

“I've got to hand it to you, it's not a bad icebreaker. Now what, you plan to ask me for an introduction to the chief of police so you can strangle him to death?”

“Know anybody with a lot of scratch who wants him dead?”

With a shake of the head, I burn the third shot.

I'm getting smashed in a hurry, and this could be a good thing to do or a very bad thing to do.

Savoring the warmth, I run the cuff of my shirt across my mouth. “Old man, don't you feel anything?”

“Spare me the high and mighty attitude. I spent the last eight years in prison on a manslaughter beef that you and everybody else knows should have been life or the needle for murder one. Yet you accepted how much money from me while I was away—thirty, forty grand, all in hard cash? Forget what I doled out before that for college tuition, your cars, clothes, everything else. You knew beyond doubt where all that coin came from. Why do you complain now about how I earn my money?”

I lean in to him and respond in a low hiss. “Because the way you earned it today can land my ass in prison.”

“Never happen.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

I lean back. “Somehow I'm having a hard time buying that prediction from a man who's spent a third of his life behind bars.”

He actually chuckles. “Now, there's the mouthy little bastard I remember. Hard to believe I have missed your insults these many years, but I have, I really have.”

His smile fades away, then returns just as gradually. He copes with my stone-cold stare by leaning back to take in the entire room—the crowd behind me, the walls, the ceiling, seemingly everything. The seconds tick by like hours. “This is nice,” he finally says. “Being here with you, having a conversation. Like old times.”

“That's the worst thing you could say.”

“Hey, we had our moments in this place. We had your birthday parties here.”

“Your goin' away party is the one I remember.”

Which went down when I was eight, and was hardly what you'd call a party. He brought me here to give me a little heads-up that he'd be going away for a while.

On business.

A long while, as it turned out: nine years.

At the time I idolized my father the way eight-year-olds do, and it flat broke my heart to think I would only be able to see him once, maybe twice a month. I threw an out-and-out tantrum that ended with me throwing a plate of food at him. After he went away, mostly due to my whacked-out mother, our relationship slid straight downhill. We saw each other once a month for a while.

Then once every two or three months.

Twice a year.

Our best years lost, I was seventeen the first time he was released, the day after I played the last football game of my career.

My mother disappeared barely a month later.

He killed her. This, this I know.

And
he
knows I know this.

A month or two after that, I was coming out of Botach Tactical store on Broadway, a boxed-up set of night-vision goggles in my hand (don't ask me why I bought them), and ran smack into him. At first he looked at me like I was serving him with an arrest warrant, though I wasn't a cop yet, and we regarded each other in awkward silence for a brief few seconds.

“Hey, how you doin'?” he eventually said.

I turned on my heels and walked away.

He called over the years, and sent money, but I would never agree to see him face-to-face until today, when I had little choice.

Now he says, “That time I broke the news to you about prison was a real bitch, yeah. A rare occasion, so why not forget it? Try to think positive for a change, give me a hand. It is difficult enough as it is trying to reconnect with you after eight years.”

What?

After a comment like that, all I can do is shake my head. Finally I say, “Old man, if there was a way you could reconnect with me, you missed it by a million fuckin' miles.”

This gives him pause.

He reaches across the table for my fourth tequila shot, holds it up to the light, inspects it, drinks slowly, savoring every drop. “Ahh,
Patrón
, made from pure agave, premium stuff,” he says, and dabs his mouth with a napkin. He sighs. “You know, exactly one week and one day ago I had my chow in the sour innards of a prison mess hall with a bunch of smelly losers. Guards marched me there and told me where to sit, what to eat, and when to leave. Now, just look around.”

No reason to look around, having already scoped out the main dining room behind me. The Giants are in town and Dodger Stadium is about three miles down the street, just beyond where Cesar Chavez turns into Sunset. The restaurant's buzzin' with pregame energy and the people wearing Dodgers caps and jerseys are hustling out the door to get a jump on game traffic.

He says, “You don't have to look because you've never been deprived of this. But me? It flips me out.” He gazes wistfully over my left shoulder. “The women are chattering and flashing cleavage and leg. The men, they are all speaking in normal tones and dressed in clean clothes. Nobody stinks or acts afraid. Nobody hocks and spits. Nobody farts….This is paradise.” He leans forward. “And I don't want it to end, especially—”

“So seven days into paradise you whack a notorious hood
and
arrange to have a cop witness it. You keep that MO going, old man, you better not get too accustomed to nice tits and good food.”

He leans forward again and places his elbows on the table. “You seem to forget the cop I had at the scene happens to be my
son.
”

“No, I haven't forgot that, not yet. I'm only on my third tequila.”

I gesture to our server for another round.

Wincing with that
Goddamn you
look of his, he leans even farther in to me. “There is absolutely no way I could pass on this Macky thing; the money was too good. And, I repeat, we won't get caught.”

“You can't be sure of that.”

He shakes his head and lowers his voice even more. “Nobody will ever be able to prove Macky and the bodyguards are dead. Some guys are on the way now to pick up the bodies and incinerate them and—”

Jesus.

I halt him with a show of my palm. “I could've lived happily for a hundred more years without knowing that.”

“Yeah, you say that now, but you'll be happy you heard it when you wake up in the middle of the night, sweatin' your ass off with worry. If you want the money I offered, shut up and listen to what I have to say. It's for your own good,
and
mine.”

I redirect the stone-cold stare at him,
griiiit
my teeth.

He doesn't flinch. “News of Macky's ‘disappearance' will leak out fast, but his crowd ain't the kind to file a missing-person report. Cops will catch wind of it sooner or later, but do you guys ever get bent out of shape when a bad guy disappears? I mean, why complain when somebody disposes of your trash for you, right? Cops won't pursue any lead that somebody doesn't shove in their faces, and nobody will do that.”