No Angel (12 page)

“I got this too.” Mark faced a low counter and his back blocked what was on it. He wheeled around, brandishing an AK-47.

Carlos, who was off to Mark’s side, said, “Whoa!” and grabbed the rifle’s wooden grip. I put a hand on the rubber stock of one of my Glocks, but didn’t draw.

Mark said, “Chill! It ain’t loaded!”

Carlos pointed the barrel up. “Yeah, heard that before. It’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out.” I released my pistol.

Mark said, “I thought you guys might be interested in this. Damn. That’s what you do, right? Buy guns?”

I said, “We buy certain guns, dude. Let’s have a look.”

Mark handed it to Carlos, who exited the apartment to inspect it in the remaining sunlight. It was Chinese, no serial number, no magazine, nothing in the chamber. It was in bad shape and probably hadn’t been fired since before it left Beijing on a cargo boat.

“I’ll give it to you for a hundred dollars. That’s a hell of a deal.”

“We know what’s a deal and what ain’t,” said Carlos. “This is shit, a relic. Mount it on your wall and tell people your dad was in Korea or something.”

I said, “There you have it. We’ll stick with the shotgun. Anything else?” I wanted to get out of there.

Mark said, “I don’t think so. Let’s go ask Nathan.” We humored him. All of a sudden I wanted a taco. Good taco stands in Apache Junction.

When we got back to the trailer’s living room, Sharon and Nathan were on the floor. Nathan moaned and Sharon appeared to be trying to help him. Rudy and Iwana were nowhere to be seen.

Timmy asked what happened.

Sharon looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were wide and desperate, like she’d just flung herself off a balcony. “He fell down.”

Nathan said, “Fuck that.”

From a back room a woman screamed, “Yes. Fuck. Oooh, yes. Yes. Yes! YES!”

The kid wandered into the room and stopped in front of me. No one said anything to him. He was bored. He’d seen it all before.

I felt filthy. I moved out of the boy’s way. He passed, leaving the room.

Nathan still lay on the ground. I pointed at the pentagram on his stomach. “What’s with the tattoo?”

He sat up. “This?” He grabbed his belly with both hands and shook it like a Jell-O ring. “I’m the fucking devil, man.”

“Really?” asked Carlos. Timmy huffed. “Well, you got any guns you want to sell us, Beelzebub?”

“I got a pistol in the car. Shit, I’ll give it to you.”

Mark said, “Fuck that, Nathan. These guys deal.” He turned to us. “I’ll go get it.” He left. Timmy took a knee next to Nathan and asked if he had to go back to the hospital. Nathan said fuck no. I asked him if he was hungry. He said you got a line for me? I didn’t say anything to that.

Mark came back holding a greasy rag. He unwrapped it, careful not to let his fingers come in contact with the pistol, which was a very small, battleship-gray.22 derringer. Carlos took it, unloaded and inspected it. Carlos said, “This isn’t a gun, it’s a paperweight.”

Timmy looked at it and laughed.

“How much you want for that?” I asked. It wasn’t worth more than ten bucks.

Nathan said, “Twenty.”

Sharon said, “Fuck that. Just take it.”

Nathan said, “No, Mark said these guys deal.” He looked at me. “Twenty bucks.”

Sharon got up and pleaded, “Please, take it.” Apparently she didn’t want the devil to be armed. Timmy helped Nathan to his feet. He took two steps toward Sharon and slapped her hard across the face. “I’m selling that fucking gun if they want it, OK?” Sharon started hitting Nathan on his shoulders and chest with both hands. He reeled back a little, but was otherwise unfazed. Timmy got between them. They calmed down just as quickly as they’d started up.

I lit another cigarette and took a deep pull. The thought drifted through my mind of my blue pool in my shady backyard with my great kids playing in it before they ate the dinner their mom had cooked for them.

This was bullshit. I started to leave.

I didn’t see Carlos give Nathan twenty bucks in exchange for the derringer. I addressed Mark. “Well, that about takes care of everything. We’re gonna wait outside for Rudy. Nice doing business with you, dude.”

“You too.”

As we were leaving, two small girls appeared in the adjacent kitchen. Neither one was older than four. They both looked scared and hungry. The younger clung to the older, who clung to a naked, hairless plastic doll. I wanted to take the kids outside, call social services, come back inside, and beat all of these people to a pulp.

As I stood staring at these little creatures, Nathan and Sharon started to get into it again. Apparently, Sharon didn’t want Nathan accepting any money for the gun. I asked Carlos if he’d paid for it, unaware that he had. Carlos said, “Sure, I gave him the money, it’s only twenty bucks.”

I said, “Fuck that, if she wants us to have it, then we’re just going to take it.” I took the twenty dollars that clung to Nathan’s fingertips. I didn’t want to give these assholes any money to blow up their noses so they could not feed their children. I pointed at the two girls, whom Carlos hadn’t noticed. He looked at them, looked at Nathan, looked at Sharon, and said let’s get the fuck out of here. Timmy was already opening the door.

We went to the bikes. When we were out of earshot I said, “Jesus Christ.”

“Motherfuckers.” Carlos rubbed his cheek.

Timmy leaned against his bike. We were all pissed. We weren’t here to stand by while Rudy fucked a meth whore. Minutes passed.

Timmy said, “Sun’s still strong.” It was almost six, but it didn’t matter. He took out a tube of sunscreen and placed it on his handlebars. He took off his T-shirt, squeezed some cream into his hand, and started rubbing it into his chest. “Got aloe in it. Cools you off.”

Carlos asked, “Really?” and peeled off his shirt too.

I took off mine. We all started to rub it in. Carlos asked if I’d do his back. We laughed uneasily. We’d seen it all before too, but that didn’t make it any easier. We still wanted to forget. I did his back. He did mine. We laughed a little harder, a little easier.

Rudy walked out of the house, buckling his belt. Iwana stood on the porch, waving like a wife whose husband was off to work. He walked up to us—three bikers rubbing sunscreen into each other on a hot Phoenix night.

“What the fuck?”

I asked, “What the fuck with you?”

“Had to get a piece. You know how it is. These hens can’t get enough of this old rooster.”

I didn’t like Rudy’s behavior, but I couldn’t call him out on the spot. I had to maintain the appearance that he was the president of my club. I wanted to tell him he had to stop acting the way he was acting. I wanted to push him out of the way, march back into the trailer, and arrest the losers we’d just dealt with. But I couldn’t. An undercover constantly trades his or her ethics for the greater good of a case.

I knew this kind of thing wouldn’t stop on its own, though. Barely two months on the job and Rudy needed to be reined in. Old dog, old tricks.

New problem.

AUGUST 2002

THE NEXT DAY
was Saturday. I went home. I needed to.

When I pulled into the driveway, my job was jammed inside me like a kidney stone.

It dissipated quickly.

I was greeted at the door by a postcard: my wife, my children, a dog. Smiles and waves and hugs. The weekend passed in a blissful flash. The kids laughed around the pool, Gwen pointed me to the yard work. I love yard work. Everything is self-evident and rewarding. The lawn needed a trim, I trimmed it. There were flowers on the verge of the backyard that needed pruning, I pruned them. I put some of the clippings in a Southwest-style vase—red desert pottery painted royal blue with yellow sun discs—and put them in the middle of our heavy oaken table. I played flashlight tag with Jack and Dale on the golf course, we went to the movies, we played chicken in the pool. That weekend the heavyweight burdens of the job succumbed to the featherweight joys of home life.

Gwen’s birthday was coming up, and we knew I wasn’t going to make it—I had to go to San Diego for an ATF training session—so one night all the grandparents came over for dinner. Gwen broiled shrimp and I grilled T-bones. We talked about Jack starting slow-pitch baseball that fall. No more T-ball. My dad said I’d teach him all about getting it going under pressure. I said hell yeah, I would. We talked about what I’d do in San Diego, and I said aside from listening to lectures and hanging out with my partners, I was going to surf.

At night, in bed, I’d run through the case in my head. We’d made good progress, but I was still insecure. The fear I’d felt as we rolled up to Mesa was subsiding and beginning to congeal into confidence, but I still wanted to take it pretty slow. We’d go full-bore later, once we knew that we had a reasonable chance of getting away with riskier questions and activities. If you don’t wait until you have enough credibility, then cases can go bad fast.

My most recent bad experience was on a Sons of Silence case. The Sons were a minor biker gang in Colorado Springs. We were running around as a made-up club called the Unforgiven—all the members were cops, our center patch was Saint Michael—and we wanted to further demonstrate that the Sons used intimidation and the threat of violence to maintain their turf. If we could do this, we could roll it into the RICO case being built against them. We wanted to do it that night by putting the screws to them, by hanging out in their place and showing them up. They were small-time and my confidence was high.

My partners, John “Babyface” Carr and Chris “Chrisser” Bayless, accompanied me to their bar. We sat in their place and drank and waited. We didn’t have to wait long.

A guy asked me who I was and I told him I was the Unforgiven, who the fuck are you? He said he was the Warlord for the Sons of Silence. I lied and told him I’d never heard of them. He knew I was full of shit. He said we needed to take off our cuts, sit tight, and wait for the ass-beating that was on its way from his brothers. I told him fuck you, we stay or leave when I feel like it, not when ordered.

That was stupid. The place was suddenly pin-drop quiet. The only sound was the deadbolts turning on the front door.

Most of the time, after taking a beating, a man will bullshit about how big the other guy was, how he didn’t have a chance in hell. I’m no small fry, but this guy was legitimately huge. According to the marshal’s processing, he was six foot six and a shade under 300 pounds.

He reeled back and hit me with a no-shit-for-real knockout punch. My head whipped like a rag doll’s. Babyface later told me that as the guy hit me he watched my eyes roll into the back of my head. I fell, and the only thing that kept me on my feet was a column in the middle of the bar.

Not five seconds later, Babyface was chicken-winged while Chrisser and I fought for our lives as the whole bar whaled on us—guys, chicks, everyone. Pool cues, shot glasses, steel-toed boots, flashlights. We had a couple guys locked outside who eventually came in and helped put a stop to it, but we took a licking. We’d made such an impression that when the Sons’ president learned of the fight, he said, “I don’t know who those dudes are, but they should be in our club.” The only price I had to pay for that kind of respect was pissing grape juice for about a week.

That’s why I love yard work, and I had plenty of it that August weekend.

But the weekend had to end, and as I loaded the Merc, Jack ran up to me. He looked up and held out his hand, giving me a small, smooth rock from the backyard. He placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. He held my fist in his hands. It was a mature gesture for an eight-year-old. I wondered what exactly the rock was for as I smiled at Jack, but I didn’t ask. I pocketed it and kissed his hair and left.

THE TRIP TO
San Diego was a week away, and before we left, I had to see Smitty.

Throughout the Riverside case I’d run with Sugarbear, I’d maintained that I was
not
a One Percenter. As far as Smitty knew, I was a freelance roughneck. I was afraid he’d be suspicious when I revised my line and told him that I’d been a Solo Angeles Nomad all along.

I knew Bad Bob had called Smitty and told him that the Solos were a new club with permission to fly their colors in Arizona. When Smitty told Bad Bob he knew who I was and that I was no One Percenter as far as he knew, Bad Bob assured him I was on the level. He agreed with Smitty that I should’ve told the truth from the beginning, but he vouched for me in the same breath, saying that my dishonesty would be compensated for by my loyalty. Smitty told him fine, but he still wanted to talk to me.

On August 9, Carlos, Timmy, Pops, and I met Smitty, his wife, Lydia, and Dennis at the Inferno in Bullhead. We were led upstairs to a private room that had been set up with empty glasses and a few bottles of Crown Royal.

I apologized quickly and said I’d lied out of necessity and respect. I said, “I held out so long because the last thing I wanted to do was challenge the Hells Angels. I’m sorry I wasn’t honest, but, hindsight being twenty-twenty, I think it was best for everyone.”

Smitty mulled this over. Lydia and Dennis sat off to the side whispering to each other. After a minute or so Smitty cracked the seal of a bottle of Crown and poured out half a dozen shots. When he was finished he looked at each of us with hard eyes. He lifted his glass and indicated we should do the same. We did. He took a sip. As he removed the glass from his lips, he cracked that mile-long grin of his. Even his beard got happy. Smitty put a hand on my shoulder. He wagged his finger at all of us like we’d been bad, bad boys. Then he said, “You did all right, Bird. Not
right
, mind you, but
all
right. From now on you be on the up-and-up with the Eight-Ones and all is forgiven.” Eight-Ones was another of their nicknames, referring to the eighth and first letters of the alphabet: H-A.

I choked back my Crown and said, “No sweat, Smitty.”

Smitty then launched into his welcome-to-Bullhead speech. He said do your thing. He said I have guns if you want them. Said I got guys all over the state with guns for you. Said I got chicks with guns. To that Carlos cupped his hands and jiggled them in front of his chest and said I hope so! Smitty laughed, his grin never breaking stride, and said not just those kind, but the kind that go pop, too! Carlos said that he’d once had a pair of titties go pop on him. Said it wasn’t pretty. We all laughed. Lydia laughed the hardest.