Halfway House (19 page)

For now the best he could do was swear under his breath as Jimmy put the car in gear and guided them to Sunken City, where the confrontation was occurring with MS 13 and his own Angels...a confrontation that could mean the survival of them all, especially if the Salvadoran Gang meant to move into San Pedro territory.

Waiting for Laurie was like waiting for the perfect wave.

In Mazatlan, Kanga had waited three days for the perfect wave, alternately straddling and lying on his board, caught in a barrier reef eddy. He’d drunk from a bota bag and munched on granola kept dry in a ziplock, his belief in the promise of gargantuan Quetzalcoatl waves just beyond the horizon keeping him from getting beat down by the elements, starvation, and the necessities of life.

All up and down the Pacific Coast, the North Shore of Hawaii, the West Coast of New Zealand, and the East Coast of Australia, he’d floated on his board and waited. Good waves had passed, but they weren’t his waves. Sometimes he’d given up and moved on, but most times he’d floated with the other surfers, waiting to dive in and carve that single perfect wave that he knew was meant for him.

So the fact that he’d waited for more than a full day now for the voice of his dead daughter did little to dissuade him from trudging along in front of the halfway house. Once he’d thought he’d heard it, but then it hadn’t returned, and so he’d written it off as a trick of the mind. Still, he continued. The wave was coming, and he was going to be there when it did.

During the night, the gray-clad wardens had split their shift, or so it seemed. Three of them monitored the eleven people in front of the house. Twice they kept drunks from
The Spot
from interfering in the vigils. Occasionally they’d bring a bowl of food, which was hurriedly gulped and chased with a bottle of water so the mourners could maintain their vigils.

The old black woman in the blue dress was escorted inside around 2 A.M. after she’d stumbled and fallen twice. The first time she’d managed to get to her feet on her own, but the second time she’d scraped her knee badly enough for the blood to pool beneath her feet. Two of the wardens had rushed to her aid. When they’d put her arms around their shoulders and taken her weight as their own, they’d called her Maudie, their voices respectful and caring.

Just after dawn, when the coolness of the night was burned away by the sun, Maudie returned to her vigil. Her freshly scrubbed face held a determined grin, her eyes alive with fervent desire. She clapped her hands twice and shouted
hallelujah
, then found her rhythm with the others.

The wardens’ shift changed and all but Kanga were brought a bowl of food and a bottle of water.

The old man in tennis shorts was brought an electric razor, and after he ate, he spent time shaving and wiping a handkerchief across his teeth.

The Hispanic kid still cried, but managed to eat between sobs.

The old man with the missing arm drank coffee from a steaming mug, his circle widening to incorporate Kanga, whom he stared at every time he passed.

The soccer mom was given two bowls, one for herself and one which she placed on the ground beside her as she pretended to eat with her child.

The young black man sporting the
bling
argued for a few moments with the wardens, then shook his head and peeled off one of his necklaces and gave it to them. Moments later they brought him a bowl and a liter bottle of Pepsi.

When they approached the angry Hispanic woman, easily eight months pregnant, she spoke with them for a few moments, then they took her inside.

The Three Blind Mice were given a single bowl and two bottles of water. As they stood in their crazy voodoo circle, heads touching, eyes staring blankly to the ground, they alternated between drinking and eating. One would take a bite while the other two would drink, then they’d pass them to the left and do it again. Sometimes it seemed as if all of them were chewing, even though only one of them was actually eating.

Eventually the wardens approached Kanga, but he maneuvered away from them. He didn’t want what they had to give. What he was doing was private and personal. Their organization seemed corporate and impersonal. It wasn’t until they brought the pregnant woman back outside that they managed to surround him.

“You need to eat something,” said a man with a triangle-shaped scar beneath his left eye.

Kanga tried to move away, but they moved with him, five of them circling in an orbit just beyond his reach. They’d clearly done this many times and knew his first impulse would be to move them out of his personal space. But they stayed beyond it, only coming close enough to get his attention.

“You’ll be no good if you fall out. You’ve been here more than twenty-four hours and haven’t had any food or water.”

“Leave me alone.” Kanga made to step between the wardens, but they were too savvy.

“You can go without eating for several days, but the body can’t go without water for long. You’re already dehydrated. Let us help you.”

Kanga halted. He bit back a retort. He
was
thirsty. He just didn’t want to stop.

 “You have days left before the spirit departs. You need to eat. If you pass out, you might miss her. You don’t want to miss her, do you?”

Kanga turned and glared at the man. What was it they wanted? Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?

As if reading his mind, they retreated then disbanded. He kept his eyes on them as he trudged along, occasionally calling loud enough to hear himself.

“Laurie? Laurie, are you there?”

*  *  *

The sky had brightened and the city was waking. Cars left garages, bound for the commute. Here and there a man stood on his front lawn with a newspaper, his dog fertilizing the earth.

The Mercedes crawled down South Pacific like a cat heading home after an all-night alley fight. Inside, Jimmy V checked three sixty degrees for anything that might be a threat, as he white-knuckle-gripped the wheel.

A cop.

An MS 13 gangbanger.

A lady with a poodle.

Anything could be dangerous.

Paco tapped the dashboard with his right hand. He gripped a .38 in his left and couldn’t wait to use it. His eyes danced above a broken nose. Blood, since dried and crusted around the edges, had dripped down the front of his white
guayabera
. Their tangle with an incursion of MS 13 had left him looking like he’d just eaten a sloppy meal of spaghetti at Marcello Tuscany.

Lucy sat in back. Except for a deep bruise on his right forearm, he’d come out fine. He held a Colt 45 to the blue oval of pain, letting the cold steel soothe his bruise. He’d barely managed to block the
puto
with the copper pipe. He’d taken the full strength of the blow on his arm, then had wrapped his fingers around the pipe and yanked it free of the South American
pujiero
. In no seconds flat he was returning the sentiment like an L.A. Dodger at a Point Fermin homerun derby, swinging for the fences.

Part of him realized that it had only been a matter of time before something like this happened. For a metropolis like Los Angeles, the 8th Street Angels held a pretty substantial plot of land in relation to their size. Over in Long Beach and Compton, where turf was a premium, drive-bys were the rule of the land, invading armies in Monte Carlos firing subsonic 9-mm rounds from cheap Czech knock-offs or Israeli submachine guns.

His Angels rarely had that problem in San Pedro. He’d convinced most of the other gangs in L.A. that San Pedro wasn’t of interest to them through diplomacy, bribery, and on occasion, expert practice in the fine art of murder.

The other part of his success came from the ILWU, the union which owned the port, its workers and the machinery that brought consumer goods from the Far East into Wal-Marts across the land. No one messed with the ILWU and got away with it. They were every bit as bad as the Teamsters in the Hoffa Days; the only difference was that now there was no figurehead to go missing. They were ten thousand strong and wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to keep them and their families from earning their hard-fought wage.

The Crips and the Bloods understood this. So did the Filipinos, with the Real Pinoy Brothers, the Baldwin Park Tropang Hudas and the West Covina Boys. The Chinese with the Wah Chings, United Bamboos and Four Seas got it. The Lao-Cambo East Side Orientals got it. Even the 18th Streeters with their twenty thousand members gave the 8th Street Angels props and respected the turf. So why the hell didn’t MS 13 get it?

MS 13, or Mara Salvatrucha, was the fastest growing gang in America. They’d even made the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
. Although they only claimed about 5,000 affiliated members in L.A., what they lacked in numbers they made up for in violence. Many of the gang members were ex-soldiers from El Salvador who were either escaping a regime or escaping the law. Unlike the L.A. and Mexican-born members of the 18th Streeters, the Salvadorans had grown up using machetes and machine guns to solve everyday arguments. By the time they were ten, arguments were fatal. There were no
save-game
lives in Central America. They didn’t even know what video games were. So when they came to America and were told that in order to survive they had to kill all other gangs, it was just like they were home.

So far MS 13 had been held at bay by the Long Beach and downtown gangs. That they’d decided to spread into San Pedro was bad news. One thing was for sure, Lucy had to get his boys together. Their days of wine and roses were over for a while. They’d have to arm up and hunker down if they were going to survive this. Worst case scenario, he’d have to make a pact and allow another gang to walk in and help them out. The idea made him sick, but it was better than extinction.

“Slow down and let me check this out,” he murmured.

He normally ignored the busy crowd in front of the halfway house, but seeing the old surfer reminded him of Laurie. Dear Laurie. Her death was still a mystery. She’d been mown down by a speeder, nothing more. And here was her father trying to make sense of it all.

Lucy eyed the darkened windows of the house and crossed himself. His grandmother spoke of the place and the old
Bruja
as if it held great mystery and the old woman were still alive, but he didn’t give any weight to her voluminous accreditation of magical mumbo jumbo to the old lady who used to run the place.

Still, Lucy remembered seeing the old lady when he was six and being afraid she was going to cast a spell on him. He and the other kids used to hide in the bushes on Fort MacArthur and try and see into the windows on the first floor. They never did see anything out of the ordinary, partly because the windows were covered with metal grates and partly because there was nothing to see. For as long as he could remember the place had been a home for the unwanted, and in his world, even for a six-year-old boy, drunks, addicts and ex-cons weren’t extraordinary.

But the old surfer...what was his name? He had a name that sounded like an old children’s television show. Whatever it was, Laurie’s death was probably hitting him the hardest. Lucy watched as the sad old man lifted his head occasionally to the sky and mouthed his daughter’s name, as if she’d respond to him.

“Fuck this. Let’s move on.”

The car slipped in gear and purred away.

A while later they pulled into his street. He nodded at the guard sitting on the porch of the Latrillos. When they rolled into his driveway, he found Bobby sipping a forty and watching the game of dominoes between his father and Julio. It was Friday. What was his pops doing still at home? It looked as if he’d been up all night.

As he opened his car door, he noticed his pops’s eyes flick toward him a moment, then return to the dominoes. He slammed down one tile, let Julio smack another, then followed it with his last. The old man grunted loudly, picked up his metal lunch pail, and headed down the sidewalk.

“Hey, Pops.”

His father stopped, looked him up and down once, then nodded as if he liked what he saw, then left. Lucy watched the old man go as he headed for a day on the docks. Like always, he’d waited to make sure Lucy got home okay. Now that he’d arrived, the old man was back to business as usual.

“What’s going on, Lucy?”

He turned to find Bobby descending the stairs, holding out a chilled forty in his hand. Lucy accepted it, popped the top and sucked down some of the cold, ragged liquor.

“Been a long fucking night, Bobby. You get along with Grandma okay?”

“She doesn’t speak any English and your dad isn’t much of a conversationalist. I’m glad just to talk to someone.”

“You won’t have me for long. It’s been a tough night and I need sleep more than I need oxygen right now.” He took another sip of his forty. “What do you mean Grandma don’t speak English? She speaks perfect English. She used to teach it, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t take His name in vain, Louis.” Grandma stood at the door, her eyes haughty in the dim light of the screen. “You never know when you’re going to need Him.”

“Why didn’t you talk to Bobby, Grandma?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I talked to him.”

“I mean in a language he’d understand.”

“It’s not my fault he can’t speak Spanish. He’s in L.A. He should really learn how to speak it, you know?”

Bobby shrugged at Lucy, his hands low and helpless.

Lucy cursed under his breath. “But he don’t speak it. He speaks English, Grandma.” To Bobby he said, “You know, you really should learn Spanish.”

“I heard that.”

“I don’t have time to deal with this now. Can you get a ride home or something, Bobby?”

The white boy stared back for a moment then nodded as his gaze slipped down the street. “Sure. I just wanted to make sure things were cool. You went to Shrewsbury’s?”