Immortality Is the Suck (9 page)

53

Chapter Seven

What followed was one helluva night. And this is coming from me, who's

been through more bad nights than you can count.

The minute I saw the lights of Peter's Mustang sweep over the buildings at

the end of the block as the car turned onto Lincoln, headed toward the freeway,

I ran back to the garage and popped the trunk on the Cadillac.

I'm no doctor, but I figure blood can't sit in a hot car for too long, even in

insulated containers.

I crammed the two containers into a vegetable bin, under a head of

lettuce. I was mildly tempted to open the sealed top on one of them, and drink

a little, but that same urge that made me feel possessive and secretive about

the blood cautioned me about overindulgence. So, I set the thirst aside for the

moment. I had other things on my mind anyway.

I'd left the gun in the car. I gave the alleyway a quick look-see before

pulling the Caddy out of the garage.

I know, I know, Peter told me to stay put. But I'm not the type who likes to

be confined in a small space with only myself for company for very long. Myself

being not one of my favorite persons. Especially when there's someone out

there who thinks he got away with my murder. I take a thing like that

personally.

The Caddy's turning radius was so long I went up on sidewalks as I

maneuvered it down the narrow alleyway known as “Speedway” and parked it

in a red zone, finding Peter's LAPD visor card and popping it onto the front left

windshield to dissuade towing.

54

A. M. Riley

Venice at four a.m. is dead the way an empty house full of rats is dead. I

could hear them in the walls. I could smell them. But the streetlights showed

clear circles of damp on the asphalt and very few windows had lights on.

Betsy's apartment was one of the old brick buildings about a block from

the beach mostly held up by cockroaches and the creaking fire escape stairs at

the back. There was no answer when I pounded on the main door and the box

holding the residents' names was so dirty you couldn't see the names, so I just

pressed buttons until some pissed-off asshole buzzed me in.

Betsy ignored my knocking. Some creep down the hallway opened his door

and stepped out onto the greasy threadbare carpet for a few minutes. “Betsy,

we need to talk,” I said to the door. I gave the guy a smile. Then I heard her on

the other side of the peephole.

“I'm a friend of Freeway's,” I said to the peephole. “He needs your help.”

I heard the chain moving on the door and it opened four inches. I could

see one eye, outlined heavily with black, and a pierced eyebrow.

“Something happened to him last night,” I said, low, so the neighbor

wouldn't hear. “The same guys came after me. Maybe you know who they are.

Maybe they'll come after you next.”

“I don't make trouble for nobody,” said Betsy. “Why would they come after

me?”

“Maybe they think you know something,” I said. “Maybe you do. Let me in,

Betsy.”

The eye at the door sized me up and down. You know, there are criminals

and there are victims. But mostly there's a combination of the two. I'd busted

Betsy a couple times for possession, but let her talk her way out.
Give me a

name and you can go home, honey
. She was always banged up and bruised.

Betsy was maybe 10 percent criminal, and 90 percent victim. The kind of girl

who lets big, ugly, messed-up Narcotics officers into her apartment, so I wasn't

Immortality is the Suck

55

surprised when she let the door swing wide, then just went off to a chair in the

corner and lit a cigarette.

I closed the door behind me. The room was about ten by ten, with the

bathroom showing through the only other doorway. A radiator spat in an

uneven rhythm onto a patch of carpet, and the room was oppressively hot. It

reeked of cheap perfume, cigarettes, and the bug spray with which they'd

probably habitually sprayed the building since before Betsy was born. The

room was taken up by a chair and table and a king-size futon with stained

sheets. A smell of mold seemed to rise from it. Betsy had turned the door to the

bathroom into a closet. A rod hung in the space, loaded with clothes.

There was an unused-looking stove in one corner. Shelves on the walls

above held a jar of instant coffee and a roach trap.

Betsy exhaled smoke and picked at her spiked black hair. “What's

Freeway done now?” she asked.

“He's dead,” I told her.

She didn't react much, but then Betsy probably didn't react much to

anything anymore. It was a measure of her grief that she smoked in silence for

a minute. Then she shook out a cigarette and offered it to me. She lit a match,

and when she held it under the end of my cigarette, I could see her hand was

shaking. But that could have been from speed.

“Who?” she asked around a plume of smoke.

“Don't know. Maybe the Mongols.”

“Fuck,” she says. “I don't know nothing about
that
.”

“He talked to me about the deal, so don't bother lying. Somebody had to

have leaked to the Mongols that he was dealing on their turf. I figure his buyer

set him up. You have his name?” I saw her gaze slide just over my left

shoulder. Aha.

“You know, I remember you,” she said, stalling. “You aren't bad for a cop.”

“I'm glad I meet with your approval,” I said.

56

A. M. Riley

“Freeway was good to me,” she said. “But I don't know nothing about him

screwing the Mongols. I mean, that's stupid, right? Those guys'll kill you if you

fuck with them, right?” She crossed one skinny white leg over the other. She

wore a tight red knit skirt and thigh-high leather boots with about half a dozen

buckles up the sides. The treads looked brand-new.

“That's right.”

She frowned and nodded and mashed out her cigarette. “Stupid,” she

pronounced. She gave me a hard look.

“You're not stupid,” I said.

“I'd better not be,” she said.

I looked around the tiny, one-room place. “Maybe you're dating one of

them,” I said. “Maybe you've heard who killed Freeway.” I looked her up and

down. “Nice boots,” I said. “They new?”

She glanced at her boots, then licked her lips. “I liked Freeway. He was

good to me.”

I took a paper and pen out of my pocket and wrote down my prepaid cell

number. “In case you think of anything,” I said.

Smirking, she slipped it in the bodice covering her bony chest. I figured it

probably slid straight to her navel. “Maybe I'll just call you because you're

kinda cute.”

“Yeah, you do that,” I said. She walked me to the door.

The nosy neighbor was still standing there when I stepped into the

hallway.

“You making trouble, Betsy?” he said.

“Fuck off, Barney,” said Betsy. And slammed the door. I heard the chain

latch.

“Hey, Barney,” I said. “You and Betsy been friends long?”

He looked startled and retreated into his apartment, hurriedly latching the

chain as I walked by.

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57

Outside I climbed a fence, jumped onto the roof of a bungalow next door,

and sat and waited like a big Italian gargoyle on the roof until Betsy came down

the fire escape, her heavy boots ringing out on the stairs as she descended.

I followed her from a couple of blocks away down the seeping back alleys.

It was fairly easy. Those boots made a racket, and I was hyperaware, it seemed,

of the night sounds around me.

She stopped in front of one of the old garages that had been converted to a

studio. “Murch Galleries” was the name on the sign hanging out into the

alleyway. Betsy took her cigarette out of her mouth and pounded on the door

for several minutes.

Finally I heard the screech and scrape of an old metal door being opened.

Betsy was let in and the door slammed shut.

I ducked down an alley and circled the building, looking for a way in. It

seemed the door Betsy had entered through was the only one. A row of

windows shone on the second floor though. There were no stairs or ladders,

but I found a trellis on the back of a house next door. It was surprisingly easy

to climb. I felt like a monkey moving through the trees, swinging myself up

onto a wall and looking down at the roof of the building that Betsy had just

entered. The perimeter was lined with barbed wire, and beyond that someone

had strewed the flat roof with about a ton of shattered glass.

More effective than a burglar alarm in an area where police are sometimes

slow to arrive.

I ran along the wall and could see no way over from here. So I slid down a

fire escape, dropping off with ten feet of air beneath me and landing with all the

grace and control of a gymnast off the uneven bars. My bad knee didn't even

twinge. Then, I ran along the alley the next block over and came at the building

from another direction. I faced a three-story sheer wall with an anime graphic

painted over its entire face. No way up or through here, even in my

miraculously altered state.

58

A. M. Riley

Blood was hot in my face, my arms, and my legs. It felt like I'd put a gallon

of high octane in my tank and I could hear my own breathing, long deep

powerful breaths, none of that wheezing that came with the lifestyle I'd been

living.

I pulled out the cell and my thumb hovered over the buttons. I wanted to

call Peter. Tell him the address; ask him to run it against any known meth labs

or dealers. Or, maybe I just wanted to call him. Hear his voice.

How fucked up was that?

One thing I've learned is it's better to be addicted to things than people.

You get hooked on a
thing
and if someone takes it from you, you can find

another source. Only people can really hurt you. Only people can push you out

into the cold permanently.

So I didn't call Peter. Instead, I hunkered down in the seeping, stinking

wet behind a trash container, waiting to see who might come out of the

building. You know, I've spent most of my life in some pretty ugly places and

after a while you get so you block out what you don't need to know about. But

that dumpster stunk worse than any garbage I'd
ever
smelled.

I didn't have to breathe the stink long. The screech of the metal door

echoed down the alleyway. The triangle of yellow light shot across the cement.

Betsy's silhouette appeared in the doorway, another silhouette merging with

hers as their heads pressed together in, apparently, a kiss.

A heavy slap of feet on pavement. I turned. The muzzle of a .45 was a foot

from my face.

“
Hola
, cop,” said a thickly accented voice.

“He's blood,” called Betsy from the doorway. “Be careful.”

“Blood or not, he's still a cop. I can smell it.” The gun didn't waver, so

close I could smell the oil it had been cleaned with and the residue that was

proof it had been fired recently. The man holding it didn't look like the type

that would hang out with the likes of Betsy. Thickset, a little short, but massive

Immortality is the Suck

59

in the shoulders. A round head covered with a mass of black curling hair. A

thick spiderweb tat on his fat neck. He held the gun steady, looking me up and

down, and I didn't need to see the teardrop tat at the corner of his eye to know

this was a man who killed men. “We should pin him,” he said. “I never pinned

no cop.”

Betsy's new boots squeaked slightly as I heard her come closer to me and

the man with the gun. A scuff of grit under another set of feet, and from the

corner of my vision, most of which was totally dominated by the barrel of that

gun, I saw another figure joining her over there on the sidewalk.

“Pin?” I addressed the muzzle of the cannon he held. “Is that like going

steady?”

“He knew Freeway, Aybie,” said Betsy. “He did me a favor once or twice.”

Whether I'm dead or alive, I figure a .45 millimeter bullet, at this distance,

would make a pretty big mess of my brains. The man cocked the trigger and I

heard a bullet enter the chamber. “So what?” asked Aybie.

“I'm not a cop anymore, Aybie,” I told him. “They took my shield.”

“Too bad for you,” said Aybie.

“I'm just trying to find out what happened to my friend Freeway,” I said.

“I heard some shitbag cop killed him,” said Aybie.

“Let's wait for Ozone,” said Betsy. “He told us to wait.”

“Who's Ozone?” I asked.

“I heard this same shitbag stole something that weren't Freeway's,” said

Aybie. I wondered how long his thumb could hold the trigger back without

releasing the bullet, still trained on the middle of my skull. “Something that