Dog Eat Dog (12 page)

“Let’s listen to the news,” Troy said. Although he had read voraciously in San Quentin, the day-to-day news held little interest for him. What does a convict in the belly of the Beast care for a flood in Tennessee, or a hurricane in New Orleans, or how the dollar fluctuates in currency exchanges? It might be of academic interest, like Pompeii in 79 A.D., but true concerns were more primal: If the race war breaks out again, I gotta walk between those honkies on the tier to get to my cell. For many in prison the world’s horizons stopped at the prison wall. The only thing they wanted to hear from out there were baseball scores, horse race results, and what the Vegas point spreads were for the weekend games.

Troy was less indifferent than that extreme, but time had added to the natural insulation, so he had paid little attention—until they said he was going free, whereupon his mind suddenly hungered for knowledge of all that was happening in the world that he would enter once more.

“… for NAFTA creates strange bedfellows. The spokesmen for extreme right and extreme left both decry free trade with Mexico, and billionaire dilettante Ross Perot says the sucking sound we hear is jobs going south of the border …”

“You pay attention to that political bullshit?” Diesel asked.

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Most of the time I don’t know who the fuck to root for. They all say all kinds of shit. They lie! Goddamn, they lie!”

“Yeah,” Troy agreed. “Sometimes they lie when the truth would be as good.”

“You know what, man, I think I’d rather be a thief than a politician. That way at least I know what I am. Some of them got identity problems.”

“No bullshit about that,” Troy agreed, and to himself he added that so many men are hypocrites without even realizing what they are. He put hypocrisy among the most contemptible of vices.

“I’m gettin’ tired,” Diesel said when they reached the outskirts of Bakersfield. Downtown L.A. was less than two hours away, and L.A.’s northern boundaries in the desert were half that far. You could drive through L.A. and take all day if you stayed off the freeway.

“Sure, man, lemme push this sucker.”

“Watch out for the highway patrol on the Ridge Route. They stay up there a lot.”

On the side of the highway, Diesel stretched out on the back seat and Troy took the wheel. The night was warm and they left the top down. As the car began to climb the grade through the mountains with the San Fernando Valley on the other side, Troy looked up at the canopy of night filled with stars, his body full up with the glow of amphetamine high, and he felt wonderful. His thoughts followed the joy of his body. He thought about his plan to specialize in ripping off pimps, bookies, wannabe gangsters, and drug connections. The victims would be enraged. They would want to kill him—but how would they know who he was, or how to find him if they did learn his name. Besides, all of them could bleed, too, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of them. He might be afraid of the police and of going back to prison, but he didn’t give a shit about an illiterate Compton dope king or all the crippled niggers in the world. They were predatory, sure enough, but he was the predator they had never imagined, coming suddenly from nowhere. Afterward, they would never imagine the truth … It made him laugh as he thought about it. If Compton aroused no fear, he was almost licking his chops as he thought about the soft white boys pushing keys on the Westside or with the Pacific sloshing in the background. He would outthink the baaadass niggers, and outtough the white boys. The danger was that one might have a corrupt cop as an ally, which might become risky. Ah well, nothing worthwhile in life was without risk. What had Helen Keller said? “Life was a dangerous adventure—or nothing …?”

Robbing drug dealers had other advantages, not the least of which was the amount of the possible score. It was very possible that they could take off a million-dollar drug score. It was most unlikely that they could steal a million dollars in cash from a bank, or even an armored car. Even if that were to happen, there would be legions of FBI agents assigned to the case. The other ways to rip off big scores, diamonds and computer chips, had their own problems. Both were easy to sell, but the knockdown on the price was itself robbery. He’d taken a jewelry store and the papers proclaimed 1.3 million was the estimated loss. That was 1.3 retail. Wholesale was half of that, six hundred and fifty grand. The standard price for stolen goods is one third wholesale, two hundred grand and some change. Split three ways, his end came to near seventy thousand dollars. Not bad for ten minutes in a jeweler’s, but terrible if he went to prison for ten years. Ten, shit, twenty-five. He was prime third strike. He had a better idea for crime than fancy jewelers or armored cars. He also had an alliance with one of L.A.’s best drug lawyers, and the lawyer would send word about the who, what, and where of big drug dealers. Unlike diamonds, heroin and cocaine depreciated very little when they were stolen property.

When he piled it all on the scales of decision, he preferred to risk death than go back to prison. Maybe he would win the game, take the big score, and spend the rest of his life on a sunny beach in a faraway place, play Gauguin or Rimbaud. He realized that at thirty-eight he was worn in many ways. He had burned the candle as if it were a blowtorch. He had been distorted by his experiences, so although he spoke the common language, he lacked some common traits. One of them was fear; his threshold for fear was many times higher than average. Around him, all he felt was fear—fear of violence, fear of censure, fear of rejection, of disapproval, of poverty, of everything. But he who survives a decade in San Quentin can attain a stoicism beyond fear. He’d taken blows that drive men to madness, suicide, or Jesus Christ. It had made him hard. He did fear death, or at least the dying part. Afterward was easy. Indeed, at some point, death was sure escape from pain. But if he could salvage a few years of peaceful solitude, maybe even find a sweet-natured brown-skinned girl to warm his feet, it was worth sitting down in the game of crime for the last time. “Deal the cards,” he muttered to God. He would play whatever came off the deck. It was two decades too late to quit the game now.

It was the darkness before the dawn when the Mustang came off the Ridge Route onto the L.A. freeway system. Diesel sat slack-jawed and bleary-eyed beside him. The usual torrent of vehicles was a trickle, a handful of automobiles and a greater number of giant trucks timing themselves to arrive early in the morning. When he had gone to prison, L.A.’s vast sprawl ended at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. A few outposts of civilization, Magic Mountain among them, were in the desert beyond the rim around the valley. Now that was the Santa Clarita Valley, and it covered the desert with tract homes, Arco gas stations, and Denny’s coffee shops. The sight astounded him.

As they whizzed along the fast lane, the terrain became more familiar. Troy felt excitement in his gut. He was coming home. Off to the left he could see the cross atop the mausoleum in Forest Lawn where movie star cadavers were entombed. Griffith Park bordered the freeway. It was ten times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. As a boy, Troy had rented saddle horses to ride the myriad bridle trails of Griffith Park. As a man, the body of a friend had been found with a bullet in his head on a park road. The murder remained unsolved. A sign read G
ENE
A
UTRY’S
W
ESTERN
H
ERITAGE
M
USEUM,
R
IGHT
L
ANE.
That was something new. Then another sign stirred the emotions of memory: D
ODGER
S
TADIUM,
1 M
ILE.

Interstate 5 angled left, cutting through East L.A. Troy held to the right, up a slope onto the inbound Pasadena Freeway. It sliced through the hills of Elysian Park, home of the Police Academy, and when it came out of the hills it looked at the downtown L.A. skyline two miles away. What Troy saw was totally different from his memory. All his life the twenty-five-story City Hall had risen high above the low L.A. skyline. Now it was nearly hidden amid a forest of tall skyscrapers, nearly all built while he was gone. Had his city changed as much as the skyline?

At 4th Street, they got off the freeway. The Westin Bonaventure was near the bottom of the ramp. Despite the hour, the Mexican doorman and bellhops pounced on their meager luggage and were grateful for the tip.

When they were in the elevator, Diesel closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, and as soon as the room door was open, he fell out on the bed and started to snore. It reminded Troy of a little boy. He, too, wanted to sleep, but he had things to do first. He had no direct phone number for Greco, but he knew where to leave messages. He called the number Greco had given him. After two rings, “Sherry’s lounge,” a voice answered. “Alex the Greek told me to call here.” “He did, did he?” “Yeah. Let me leave a number where he can reach me.” “Sure. I don’t know when I’ll see him, but when I do …” “That’s all I can ask. I’m at the Bonaventure, room eight-seventeen.”

After the phone call, Troy went to sleep. Two hours later the phone rang. He rolled over and picked it up. “If this is a goddamned Greek fascist—”

“Hey … a
liberal
Greek fascist … When’d you raise, fool?”

“When yo’ mama lemme out, sucker.”

“Your mama’s my mama. Wanna talk about her?”

They both laughed. “Hey, man, good to hear your voice,” Greco said. “I was wonderin’ if you were ever gettin’ out.”

“How’re you doin’?” Troy asked.

“Chicken today, feathers tomorrow. Fuckin’ lawyers get all the money.”

“I heard they busted you.”

“It won’t stick. The search was so bad they can’t even lie out of it. Of course, they overrated me again—two hundred grand bail. Plus the fuckin’ lawyer already got a chunk. The lawyer and the bondsmen are pimping me. Ha, ha, ha … You’re at the Bonaventure, huh?”

“Me and Big Diesel.”

“You got that crazy motherfucker with you, huh? He’s a big old tough guy.”

“Where are you? When’re we gonna get together?”

“I got some business ’til maybe noon. You gonna be there?”

“I’ll be in and out—but I won’t be gone more’n half an hour at a time.”

“Do you need a little dough?”

“If the lawyer left you anything.”

“I always got a little money for my ace. I got a good one for you.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll run it by you when I see you. You’ll be around.”

“Yeah.” To himself, Troy added that he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Alex Aris, aka Greco. Alex was notorious for being late. Once the police had a motel staked out, waiting for Alex to arrive. He was so late the cops gave up and closed the trap on those who waited. Alex drove up as the bust was going down. Instead of turning in, he kept going. The event had not added to his punctuality.

Troy and Diesel slept till noon, ordered breakfast from room service, and showered and shaved, all the while waiting for Alex Aris to call. Troy wanted to go out. “I gotta look at my city,” he said. “I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

“What about the call?”

“He’ll be here when he gets here. I don’t wait for him.”

“He’s not gonna be hot if you’re gone?”

“Hell, no! How the fuck can he be indignant?” Troy called the hotel switchboard. “Tell anyone who calls that we’ll be back about six-thirty.”

Troy and Diesel rode the elevator in the glass tube outside the building from the sunlight down to the shadowed canyons below. Figueroa’s sidewalks teemed with business-suited men and tailored women. It was a different street than he remembered. It seemed that every building had risen during his absence—thirty, forty, fifty floors high, and as beautiful as any skyscrapers he’d ever seen, even if many of their names were Japanese. He’d read that half the downtown office buildings were owned by Japanese companies. That didn’t bother him; nobody was going to move the buildings across the Pacific.

“Which way we goin’?” Diesel asked.

“Turn left. We’ll go over to Broadway.”

Broadway was several long blocks to the east. When Troy was a child, it had been L.A.’s main street. Back then, yellow streetcars ran down the middle. Sometimes several yellow streetcars backed up at the intersections, loading and unloading. The red streetcars of Pacific Electric ran to the outlying areas. Troy had read that General Motors, Firestone, and others got control of the streetcar companies to deliberately liquidate them so they could sell tires and buses to the public. What was more immoral, that or robbing drug dealers?

“You know something, Big D, a dude can justify just about anything to himself … and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? I don’t think anybody does evil in their own mind.”

“Don’t ask me, brother. I don’t think about shit like that. I think about makin’ some money. I mean, there’s things I won’t do, but they get fewer and fewer when the money gets bigger and bigger.”

Troy laughed and clapped his buddy on the back. It made Diesel feel good. What Troy thought of him was more important than what anybody else thought.

As they crossed 7th and Olive, Troy remembered the furrier who had once been on the corner. One rainy night when he was a teenager, he’d tossed a cinder block through the display window. Amidst howling alarms he had reached inside with a broomhandle and pulled a mink coat through the window. The furrier was long gone, and any business that had merchandise of value now had steel shutters and folding steel gates.

Each block they walked had fewer business suits and more signs in Spanish. Every corner had a panhandler, mostly unkempt black men extending Styrofoam cups, with an occasional white guy mixed in for leavening. It was something new to Troy. When he had gone away it hadn’t been like this. A mile to the east were the rescue missions for homeless men. At that time those who availed themselves of their services seldom ventured very far, and certainly not toward the office buildings to the west. A bleary-eyed black man sat in a doorway with a dog at his feet. Troy felt his pockets and turned to Diesel. “Gimme some ones.”