Police and Thieves: A Novel (11 page)

I racked my brains to figure a way out of our bind. I catalogued my assets: I wasn’t too nervous, and my hands were dry. The situation was so bad, I derived a certain enjoyment out of it. A tangy light-headedness that could be described as insanity. The deficits? Chad had pulled a swift one on us.

Eichmann said to him, “Why don’t you give us the weed and we’ll leave the money with you.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“We can do business again.”

“Why should I do that when I can take your money and keep the pound? I get to have everything.”

“Only a punk would do that.”

Chad snuffled, “Who asked you?”

“Your mama did.”

That was enough speechmaking for Eichmann. He leaped at Chad, grabbing a fistful of his tai-chi suit, wrestling with him for the gun. Eichmann threw Chad against the couch, using his superior height and weight as a lever against the smaller man, forcing him to drop the Beretta. He backhanded Chad in the face until the
dealer’s nose came apart with the wetness of an overripe tomato. Chad swooned, crashed into the granite coffee table, then sprawled on the carpet.

Chad’s mutiny was over. He was so quiet, it scared me. Eichmann prodded him with a toe and trilled, “He’s out cold! That’ll teach him! What a nebbish, thinking he was going to rob us!”

I retrieved the gun, unloaded it, then tossed the bullets into the next room. The pound was resting on the couch, lying there like a baby waiting for adoption, making me feel quite paternal toward it. Who did it belong to?

“Let’s take the thing and get out of here,” Eichmann said.

When it came to sex, Eichmann was fussy, had always been. At first, screwing with Loretta had been intense and shallow, the way it was for most couples just getting together. He only liked several positions, and he stuck to them. Eichmann came slower than Loretta did and sometimes he didn’t come at all. He was afraid to get her pregnant, mortally afraid of having children.

I knew all this because Eichmann was telling me everything.

Later, their balling became more infrequent, but more passionate. Then they stopped having intercourse altogether. Eichmann didn’t know what caused the lessening of his sex drive. Maybe it was boredom with her, and a premature disillusionment with life in general. Eichmann said he didn’t feel anything below his waist. He was numb. I told him it was anxiety. Six days went by; Loretta was at the end of her rope with him.

Everything crystallized the night after we plundered Chad. Eichmann was going through Loretta’s purse searching for a pack of matches when he found a Polaroid snapshot of some guy with a mustache in her wallet. It was an old picture, brown and frayed. A chilly, nonverbal knowledge wound itself around Eichmann’s nervous system, burying its teeth into his ego. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked over to Loretta and flung the photograph in her face.

“How did you get this picture?” Eichmann seethed.

“Where did you find it?”

“In your purse, darling.”

The remoteness in Loretta’s sleepy green orbs was similar to soft-boiled eggs turning cold on the stove. Eichmann should’ve known she had a history before him. He sat down on the couch next to her and said in a completely fraudulent, placating whine, “Please tell me. I promise I won’t raise a fuss.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

“C’mon,” he begged, half out of anger and half out of repulsion.

Loretta rolled her eyes at him, hiding her defensiveness behind the gesture. “That’s Tony. I was going to marry him … he’s the reason I came out here, to get away from him.”

When Loretta said that, Eichmann blanched, his face going morgue white. He sighed and asked her the only question a boy can ask a girl at such a time. “Did you fuck him?”

Loretta mocked him, waving a dismissive hand. “God, how ridiculous. Is that the only thing you can think of?”

“No, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind. And it’s important, if you know what I’m saying.”

She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and pouted prettily. “Yeah, well, we did. We were going to get married. What do you expect?”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. We broke up. I don’t even know why.”

The thought of Loretta alone with Tony in Oklahoma floored Eichmann. A tidal wave of nausea channeled through his guts, weakening his bladder. Helplessly, he said to her, “You don’t know why?”

“Me and him? Oh, God, it was over something silly. We argued. But he was nice. He was tender with me.”

Eichmann pointed at himself, saying, “And I’m not, huh?
Should I have personality-transplant surgery or something?”

Loretta sidled up to Eichmann on the couch while he stared morosely into space. He was toying with his Swiss Army knife, testing the blade’s sharpness on the upholstery. He said to her, “Damn, I can’t make no headway. Everything’s too fucking complicated. If I want to do anything, I have to jump through a million hoops to get there. If it ain’t you, it’s the fucking business. What a mess.”

She put her hand on his leg, and before she could say anything to soothe him, like it was sorcery, Eichmann was erect. He looked down at his cock, then back up at her, quite pleased with himself. Loretta pulled him on top of her, sticking her tongue in his ear and saying, “I’ve missed you. It gets lonesome when you don’t want to be inside me.”

Eichmann flushed and unzipped his pants so she could grope him. “Ah, I’m just tired.”

“Can’t you take it easier?”

“You know I can’t.”

He looked at himself again. His paunch was hanging over Loretta’s stomach like a cow’s udder. Her waxed legs were up in the air, slightly bent at the knees. Her skin was so much smoother than his—she wasn’t afflicted by any of the scaly patches he had on his legs and back. Her breasts were perky, confident, so he took one brown bullet-hard nipple into his mouth, and then the other, sucking on both of them until she groaned.

“Be with me,” she murmured. “Always be with me.”

Eichmann thought about Tony, or whoever the fuck he was. If dope dealing didn’t finish him off and send him to an early grave, his insecurity about Loretta would take care of the job. The look in his eyes suggested a stifled scream, but he replied, “Anything you want, baby.”

Doojie Sr. was the youngest person ever sent to California’s adult state prison system, and that was for stealing and selling guns. For me, family has nothing to do with blood relations. Though we don’t share the same genes, I inherited his predilection for bad timing anyway.

It was another one of those freezing wet San Franciscan nights in July when you can catch pneumonia just by breathing the air. The fog moved into the Mission from Noe Valley after sundown, bringing with it a wetness that drenched everything on Mission Street in a salty dew. On my way back to the garage, I spied Flaherty frisking a vato and his girlfriend in front of the McDonald’s on Twenty-fourth Street. He had the homeboy down on the ground, and he was rifling through the kid’s pockets, getting into his wallet.

Flaherty’s partner saw me and yelled, “Hey, you!”

I was rooted to the sidewalk; I couldn’t move an inch. My bowels loosened: My instinct for disaster is uncanny. Once you get onto paranoia’s treadmill with the police, it is impossible to get off. I poked a finger at myself. “Who, me?”

“Yeah, you! C’mere!”

Most citizens, when they hear the cops shout at them, disintegrate. They think things will go better for them if they cooperate with the police. It’s a free country, and people have the privilege of believing what they like. I started to run, knowing I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting away.

I sprinted east on Twenty-fourth Street, trying to get to
South Van Ness and the Cala supermarket parking lot, hoping to lose the cops there, but I tripped over the curb, and Flaherty snatched me from behind. I flung out my hand, stabbing him in the eye. His partner slammed into me, throwing a body block at my midriff. I sidestepped the blow and he screeched, “Flaherty! He’s getting away!”

It was too late for them. I tore down the sidewalk, the wind hitting me in the face as I ran past the Mission Presbyterian Church to the next corner where El Trebol’s awnings glimmered under a copper-colored halogen streetlight. Should I go to South Van Ness or north on Capp? Both streets were potential avenues of escape. Both streets looked inviting to me.

Before I made up my mind, the narcs tackled me—Flaherty plowed into me with a head-butt on the chin. He hit me upside the nose with both fists, then made my ears ring with a kick in the nuts that dropped me to the pavement. Devastated, I curled up on the cold cement and gazed at the inky sky. No stars were up there, nothing but a jet plane flying south. Flaherty stepped on my face with his Adidas running shoes, and everything went dark, sending me spinning. I thought about the laws of entropy, how things had a way of always falling apart.

Flaherty nudged my mouth open with one shoe, saying to me, “You saw that shooting, didn’t you?”

I looked at his malevolent eyes. His unshaven neck resembled the back of a wild pig. His face was a dead planet, gray and pitted. He shook his hair at me; beads of his mossy sweat splattered my cheeks. Did he expect an honest answer? Maybe. But silence was the number-one rule in the game of fear; I’d already said everything I was going to say in this life.

Flaherty wagged his furry head and guffawed, “You’re an asshole, aren’t you?” A bubble of laughter exploded from him. To illustrate what he meant, he lifted an Adidas—bits of dog shit and
chewing gum were stuck to the tread—and drop-kicked me in the jaw with it. My eyelids screwed shut with the impact. If my skull hadn’t been attached to my neck, my noggin would have gone bouncing down the sidewalk like a soccer ball.

While Flaherty booted me in the chops people were coming out of El Trebol to see what was going on. Someone yelled at the cops in machine-gun-fast Spanish, which flustered them because they didn’t understand the language.

Then Louis emerged from the bar armed with a pool stick. He began to shout, “Them cops are fucking with that boy! He needs some help!”

Louis told me later he’d been drunk and packing a piece. So he said. Whatever he was trying to do, it worked. The crowd became uneasy; the narcs turned on their heels and left, brandishing their guns. The guys closing up the Laundromat at the corner found us a taxi, and Louis shepherded me to the hospital. During the ride he was jubilant. “It was them! Flaherty and that other freak! Did you see how scared they got when those Salvadorenos surrounded them? Yes, siree, that was beautiful!”

After getting my chin stitched up in the emergency room at General Hospital, I went back to San Carlos Street and crashed out on the couch. Eichmann joined me, making a clatter on the bare concrete floor with his Tony Lama cowboy boots. He’d gotten them at Community Thrift for twenty bucks, and as fate would have it, they were the wrong size. Too small. He took hold of my hand, burbling, “Shit, you’re like an iceberg. Why don’t you move over and I’ll keep you warm.”

Eichmann lay down by my side, spooning me, and without really knowing it, I burrowed my nose into his armpit just to get
some sheer animal warmth out of him. After Loretta covered us with an army-surplus mummy sleeping bag, we dozed side by side for the better part of an hour. I was so weak, angels could have flown away with me and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

When we woke up from our nap, I felt refreshed. Eichmann torched a stale menthol and said to me, “This might make you feel better—the money’s beginning to come in. More than I can comprehend. We’ve got a few thousand, easily.”

Pain or no pain, any talk about an upswing in our economy fortified me. The mere mention of cash, a large bundle of it, was melody to both of us. It was for all of us. Even my head stopped thrumming for a second. When Eichmann suggested we go to a party he’d heard about in North Beach, everyone was up for it, including me. A girl he knew when he was selling joints in high school—this was before he dropped out—was throwing a fiesta at her parents’ house on Grant Street. “She’s all right,” he told us. “Her mom and dad are out of town at their other place in Napa. We can do what we want. She don’t care.”

“How come she don’t care? It’s her house.”

“Ah, they’ve got these other houses. One in Sonoma. Another in Humboldt. This is just one of them.”

“Who’s going to be there?”

“I don’t know. All kinds of people.”

“How’re we getting to North Beach?”

“We’ll take BART to New Montgomery, then get the Stockton bus up to Chinatown. We can walk from there.”

The party was at a Cape Cod condo on top of Telegraph Hill. It was the kind of place most real estate agents would die for. Lots of redwood beams, spacious rooms and floor-to-ceiling windows, a
football-field-sized lawn with a three-car garage, and a view of Coit Tower, Washington Square, St. Mary’s Church, and the restaurants on Columbus Street. From where I stood, North Beach’s lights glimmered from Fisherman’s Wharf at Pier 39 south to the strip joints on Broadway.

About a hundred people, mostly dudes looking for women, were milling around in the street out front. No one was wearing any gang colors, for which I was grateful, even though, at the end of the paved path leading into the condo, these guys from Bryant Street checked out Loretta. Like us, they were far away from the Mission. Eichmann flung an arm around Loretta’s shoulders, immediately establishing that she was under his jurisdiction. This delighted her—she snuggled happily by his side.

We squeezed in through the front door just as a window on the second floor shattered, sending glass flying down onto the front porch. The floorboards in the condo were rumbling from the music in the basement. I had a white-gauze bandage wrapped turban-like around the upper half of my face, and I was receiving a lot of queer looks because of it. A big brown girl in khakis came over to me and said, “Whoa, what happened to your mouth?”

“A narc beat me up.”

“How awful. Where at?”

“Near Capp Street.”