Halfway House (26 page)

Lucy rolled down South Harbor, then hung a left onto Signal Street. He followed this past the reefer trucks stacked along the road and waiting to be filled with fish, past the Merchant Marine Terminal, to where the pier was blocked by a fence with a guard shack manned by ILWU security.

He pulled to a stop, showed his face, and was allowed through by a man he recognized from the union front office. His name was Gerald Bouldin and he was known for his unflinching stoicism in the face of police, especially at the strike they’d had in 2003. Although a small rail of a man, his profile was razor sharp, his eyes close together like a hunter’s. Gerald had been the ILWU representative to the L.A. Times and was able to orchestrate events because of his intelligence and unwillingness to give information without the benefit of cooperation.

The gate closed behind Lucy.

Gerald’s presence promised that Lucy would have privacy for what was about to happen, for what
needed
to happen. Even if his father lived, Lucy’s emotions were enflamed. He didn’t trust his judgment. His heart ruled him too much right now. But he needed a release. Whether or not the Salvadoran had any real information, the man was going to be an outlet for Lucy’s rage.

Such was the way of the world.

Such was his need.

He followed Signal Street to the end of the pier, past containers, loaders and boxes of used banding materials. Here and there a streetlight lit the road in a solitary, glowing pool. At this time of night, the place was a dead zone.

At the end the pier made a
T
. The right pointed north toward the lights of San Pedro. The left pointed to the Queen Mary and Long Beach. Lucy took a left and followed the lights from the cars that had already arrived. By the looks of it, Trujillo was here with six Angels. In the headlights of an Impala and two other cars knelt a thick Hispanic man wrapped in a long length of chain. His face had been split in a dozen places, and gleaming red blood coated the chain and the wife beater beneath. A gash stood out on his head, the pink and brown edges peeled back.

As the lights of Lucy’s car swept the scene, everyone turned toward him. Within moments he’d parked and was striding toward the group. Trujillo met him halfway. Blood speckled his own wife beater. His gray pants held grass and dirt stains. A handkerchief was wrapped around his left hand, and blood seeped through along the line of knuckles.

“Tell me.”

“Cheche Violande. Enrique and Todo caught him trying to torch an empty house over by Weymouth. They knocked the shit out of him and threw him in the trunk.”

“What happened to his face?”

“It kept attacking my hand.”

“How’s your hand?”

“Better than his face.”

Enrique and Todo stood to his left in front of their lowered green Bronco. They each wore black pants and wife beaters. Enrique was the taller of the two with a Mohawk he’d worn since he’d played basketball at San Pedro High School. Todo had short red hair and tattoos of snakes running up the sides of his arms and down the back of his neck.

Gorgi, Jose and Manolo leaned against a silver Chrysler 300, tricked out with chrome and spinners glommed from an Escalade. Gorgi was the fat one of the lot. At three-fifty, he weighed more than the other two put together. Jose was a pretty boy with a pencil-thin mustache above full lips. He wore his hair long and constantly combed it. Manolo was one of Lucy’s oldest friends. They’d played together in his backyard when they were five, racing back and forth like cowboys and Indians on their Big Wheels until they found out they were Mexicans.

“
Mijo
. Glad to see you here. What’s up?” He shoulder-hugged Manolo then stepped back.

“Sorry about your dad, Lucy.” Manolo crossed himself, as did the others, and stared at the ground.

Lucy nodded and bit his cheeks to hold back the emotion. He turned to Enrique. “Good Job,
mijo
. I heard you caught him torching a house.”

Enrique took a step forward, automatically bending at the knees and waist to reduce his height. “Sorry about your dad, Lucy.” He paused a moment to cross himself again before continuing. “This
maricona
was about to lay waste to that gray house over on Weymouth, the one that the one-armed man used to live in before he got all crazy and started hanging out at the halfway house. We saw him stuffing some cloth into a bottle of gasoline. We didn’t have time to do much, so we ran him over.”

“You ran him over?”

“Yep.”

“He went
bloop
.” Todo laughed, his head nodding like a window Chihuahua. “We thought we’d wrecked the undercarriage. We just put in new cruising lights, but they were okay.”

“What about the gasoline?”

“Broke all over him.”

“And then?”

“Enrique beat the fuck out of him. Every time the guy tried to get to his feet, he got a boot in the face. When he finally stopped moving, we threw him in the trunk and called Trujillo.”

“Who called me?” Lucy finished, glancing at Trujillo who stared back impassively. By Lucy’s account, they’d had the Salvadoran for two hours before he was notified. What had gone on then, he could only guess. Check that. Looking at Trujillo’s handkerchief-covered knuckles explained much of it. “So what do we have planned?”

“Dunno, boss. It’s your show.”

Lucy looked up at the cranes hovering above the harbor. The air was heavy with the weight of the ocean. The scent of seaweed, dead fish and gasoline pulled him to the water’s edge. He looked back at the hillside of San Pedro then out at the ocean. Even though they were less than half a mile from one of the houses, the place felt isolated and out of time. As if it only existed because he stood there, and if he were to move, it would disappear in the mists of the ocean. This was a place where anything could be done. That it didn’t exist meant that consequences didn’t exist. He didn’t really believe it, but he was almost there. All his conscience needed was a little push and it would fall into the dark Sargasso of his unreason.

“Remember what they used to do back in the day with the strike jumpers when they caught them? I’m talking back in the early 1970s when Chucky Freed was the chief ball buster.”

“You mean the Electric Eel?”

“Yeah. That’s the one.” He walked around the prisoner, his gaze slipping across the man like his hand would if Lucy dared trust himself to touch. “I was thinking that it would be the perfect reward for this
maricona’s
good deeds. What do you think?”

Trujillo waited until Lucy made eye contact before responding. When he did, he spoke slow and low. “I think you should let me take care of this, but I know you won’t. I know why you won’t, too. I can’t say he doesn’t deserve it, but the reason you have people like me for this is to keep your soul clean.”

“My soul is far from clean.”

“You’re clean compared to me, Lucy. I was made for things like this. You know what your
abuela
says, that because I was born in the tunnels beneath the mountain I was hidden from God’s gaze. I am free of grace and hell-promised.”

Enrique, Todo, Manolo, Gorgi and Jose glanced at each other. This was the most anyone had heard the Angels’
devil
speak at any one time, and his choice of subject was making them nervous. Lucy had stopped pacing to regard the man as well.

“You might be hell-promised, but you are a dear Angel,
mijo
. Let me do this. It’s time my soul is blackened a bit. It’s time yours is allowed to rest.”

“You’re sure?”

“As I ever was.”

Trujillo nodded once, then spun and began to give orders, sending each of the other bangers on specific tasks. He went to the nearest electrical junction box and traced the wires. He wiped the back of his hand across the dirt encrusting the thick feed wire revealing a red horizontal line. Then he jogged down a hundred feet to a junction main, pried free the lock with a crowbar and pulled the lever. The power went out on the light poles nearest them, but stayed on everywhere else.

When he came jogging back, Todo arrived with an axe. Trujillo took it and after a pair of practice swings, cut the cable in two where he’d marked it. Gorgi peeled back the hard rubber edges with an eight-inch blade until the thick copper bands were exposed to the air. With the help of Jose, they jerked free a thirty-foot length of cable and dragged it to the metal ladder nearest them.

Meanwhile, Enrique and Manolo manhandled the gangbanger to the edge of the dock. He tried to struggle but ceased once Manolo reminded him that, with all the chain wrapped around him, he’d sink like a Buick if he slipped from their grasp.

They unwrapped all the chain except one loop, and with Todo’s help, lowered the Salvadoran down the metal ladder until he was almost in the water. Then they surprised the gangbanger by flipping him one hundred and eighty degrees so his feet pointed to the sky, his head mere inches from the warm harbor water. After a minute, he was once again wrapped in the length of chain, this time affixed tightly to the metal ladder, his face carved into a reverse pumpkin frown.

Things were finally ready.

Lucy approached the ladder, where Trujillo handed him the electric cable. He grabbed it about twelve inches from the end. The heavy hard rubber felt like the body of a python. He nodded and Trujillo waved to Jose stationed at the main junction, who then lifted the lever and brought the cable to life. As the lights atop the poles returned their welcoming light, the cable bucked and straightened and fought him for a moment.

“We call this the electric eel,” he said to no one in particular. “Back in the day, those scabs who’d cross picket lines to go to work, those lost brothers who decided to fuck the rest of us for an average day’s pay, would be tracked down and punished. Early in the morning, we’d go into their homes and pull them from their beds and bring them here, where they’d be punished.”

He adjusted his grip on the cable and it spit sparks. “I heard stories.” He stepped to the edge of the pier so he was standing over the Salvadoran. “They were the kind of stories that when you heard them you knew they had to be a lie, but the more you thought about them the more they seemed real until they left you in awe, thankful that you weren’t a dirty fucking scab.” He paused. “Take off his boots and tape his ankles to the ladder.”

Manolo and Gorgi grabbed the man’s feet, jerked out the laces and tossed the boots in the water. The guy’s eyes became frantic, as if he just now realized that he was really and truly fucked. As the silver duct tape affixed his ankles to the pipe, he began to undulate, throwing his hips as far out as he could and jerking them back. No matter. The chain held him fast. He wasn’t going anywhere unless Lucy wanted him to.

“I’ve heard that the pain is tremendous. There were tales of blackened corpses floating across the harbor, so burned that even the fishes left them alone. That grossed me out as a kid, but didn’t bother me as much as the melting.”

He leaned down and peered through the horrific look on the man’s face. “Do you have any fillings? I can’t tell from here. What about caps?” He shook his head. “For your sake, I hope you don’t have either, because I hear that after a while, the silver fillings and gold caps get so hot that they run molten metal into your nose and across your face.” Lucy shuddered. “Something about the metal from my teeth melting into my nose just shrivels my balls.”

Then Lucy grinned from ear to ear as he looked up at the sky. He didn’t feel as bad as he’d thought he would. On the contrary, he felt invigorated. Part of him was jealous of Trujillo. If this was how it felt to wield this kind of power, he wondered why he hadn’t done it more often.

“Okay. Question and answer time. The way this works is that I ask a question and you give me the answer. If you hesitate or if you lie or just won’t cooperate, then I’ll touch the cable to this ladder and we’ll see how well the Pacific Ocean conducts electricity. Do you understand?”

The man glared back at him. After a ten count, Lucy touched the cable to the metal. Twin arcs of electricity shot down the ladder to the water and danced across the Salvadoran. He tried to scream, but his face was drawn too tight. He thrashed his body straight. From the tips of his toes to the top of his head he shook like a martini tumbler. Lucy relented and the man returned to normal. “You’re not doing this right. I ask the question and you give the answer. Do you understand?”

“I-I didn’t know you’d started,” the prisoner stammered.

“Do you want a sign? A green light? A starter pistol? Semi-fucking-phore? Pay the fuck attention,
Pendejo
!”

The man swallowed hard, then gasped.

“What’s your name?”

“Che-Che-Cheche.”

“Sounds like Chitty Bang,” Todo laughed.

“Cheche what?”

“Violande.” He inhaled deeply, the mucus and liquid trapped in his throat, making it sound like a sick vacuum cleaner.

“Very good, Cheche. Now who do you work for?”

The Salvadoran spit and seemed to gain a little strength. He glared up between his legs at Lucy hovering over him. “You know who I am.
Mara Salvatrucha
. You see my colors. Look at my tattoos.”