Pound for Pound (19 page)

“If the bread’s all here, it’s already done.”

“Nobody gets hurt on this, right?” Toby asked nervously.

“Only Garza, unless I don’t get my other twenty-five.”

“You’ll get it, so long’s we don’t get let down.”

Trini smiled. He’d have his dick in these white-bread
bolillos’
ears for the next five years.

Trini drove off in one direction, Seth and Toby in another. Heading for home, Trini pushed the two buttons on his cell phone.

After quite a few rings, a sleepy, pissed-off voice on the other end said, “Yeah, who is this?”

Trini said, “Me.”

“Why the fuck you callin me? I got to get up early.”

“It’s bidness. You gon be five hundred dollars richer tomorrow. And ‘at’s it. Don’t push me, or it goes down to two-fifty.”

Eloy came to in the dark, then saw the faint gleam of light through the blinds. It took him a few minutes to figure out where he was. He crawled over to the bed and stretched out on it. Sweat seemed to be oozing from every pore and his hands were shaking so much that he could barely punch in the number on his cell phone.

Trini knew who it was, decided to let it ring forever. But he’d done good with the
gabacho licenciados,
the white-boy lawyers, his
partners
in his five-year plan, and changed his mind. Besides, he’d just had himself a
little taste, so for old-time’s sake he could afford to be nice to his good
cuate,
his buddy the Lobo, who’d be down for the count soon enough. Trini pulled a Marlboro butt from the coffee lid, lit it, and picked up the phone. “My nigga.”

Eloy was counting his money. “Tell me you got it.”

Trini sucked through his teeth. “The best, man, it’s the most righteous shit like you never seen, like it was first processed in Switzerland, man, before it was packaged here, but like I said, you know.”

“How much?”

Trini’s eyes fluttered, but he could still think, he could always think. He’d piece Eloy off with 20 milliliters, 200 milligrams. Divided by fifty or even 60 milligrams, it was enough for three or four good pops at most. By Sunday night, he’d have sweat dripping from Eloy’s dick again.

This here’s like things is supposed to be, carnal.

Eloy said, “You still there?”

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t desert my friends.”

“How much? How much you got, and how much it cost?”

“Well,” Trini said, pronouncing it
oowehl,
“sorry to say, just enough to get you through the next day for now, but I gots a ton coming in on Monday, Monday’s my delivery day,
formal,
depend on it.”

“So, how much more does it cost, goddamnit?”

Goddamnit? He talks like that to me, this scum?
Trini kept his cool, but he bubbled inside. “Oh, that, yeah, I lucked out, this load I got it for
tantito más,
for a little bit more than normal, so for you it’ll still be cheap, like always, like you’ll only be doin say eighty or ninety or maybe a hundred a day from now on, that’s all, you’re my Lobito,
ése,
and if that gets to be too rich for you, all you got to do is cut yourself back down on your own, and then you’re down to forty or fifty a day, no big thing.” Trini knew a junkie cut
up,
not down, knew Eloy’s eyes rolled when he heard
cut back on your own.

Eloy didn’t like having to pay more, but he was grateful, “I owe you, Trini, you don’t know how sick I got.” He cleared his throat. “How soon, pods?”

“Whatever time is comfortable for you,
mano,
my brother,” said Trini, sounding like a counselor at Planned Parenthood.

Eloy said, “I’m on my way now.”

“Ride, cowboy.”

Eloy counted his money again, his palms wet. He thanked God he still had plenty of cash left, but when would this shit end? He knew for sure that one day it must, that he must die like the crud he was, but he couldn’t imagine how or when. The sooner the better, he thought.

D
an put his cut kit together before he drove the pickup to the hospital. The “local” fight was to be held outdoors during the Del Mar Fair at the Del Mar Racetrack, ninety-five miles south of Los Angeles and located between the 5 South and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Dan’s kit contained tape and gauze and grease, as well as stainless-steel tools and ice bags that kept swelling down. Dan usually stuck with a vasoconstrictor, adrenaline chloride
1:1,000
for cuts. But as a backup, he also brought along a form of thrombin, a freeze-dried white “bovine” powder and a dilutent of 10 milliliters of sodium chloride, each in small vials to be mixed together before use. In surgery, thrombin is used on big bleeders, things like livers and spleens, to cause hemostasis, clotting. With adrenaline
1:1,000,
it is the effect of vascular constriction that stops the blood flow. If a sizable vessel was severed, Dan would sometimes use both in hopes of stopping the blood flow.

Stopping blood is a precise skill, one that makes a cut man feel like a champ. Adrenaline was twenty dollars and change for 30 milliliters. If any unadulterated solution is left over, and if stored in a refrigerator, it can be used subsequently. Thrombin costs sixty plus for what amounts to 10 milliliters, and can be used only once. Dan would use adrenaline in
Del Mar, since Momolo was in a four-round fight. Bad cuts are usually stopped by the ref in preliminary fights as a matter of course, so Dan would probably not have reason to mix the thrombin. Were this fight a ten- or twelve-rounder, Dan would have the thrombin ready by fight time, mixing the two vials in the dressing room. Because adrenaline is cheaper and the leftovers can be used again, some cut men mix their own concoctions, say equal parts of
1:1,000
and its illegal counterpart
1:100.
This makes a more potent solution than the straight
1:1,000,
but it can sometimes sizzle tissue and cause serious scarring. Stopping blood is battlefield business, where every second counts, and is not meant to be anything more than a stop-gap procedure. Even so, Dan never went on the cheap, and none of his boys ever lost fights or had slabs of scar tissue because of him. If Momolo needed thrombin, Dan would mix it ringside.

Dan checked into Cedars-Sinai at four-thirty
p.m.
His carpeted room felt more dead than alive. It looked clean enough, but it felt a long way from antiseptic. Dan didn’t like having a carpet, preferred tile or hardwood floors in hospitals, saw hospital carpets as germ farms. Jails had better TV sets. His prefab meal was served in individual containers, had a metal taste, had been nuked into tasteless slop.

It had been the same for Brigid in the cancer ward. “And at these prices, shouldn’t there be some Frenchy Jean-Claude himself dishin up the biscuits?”

Except for the watery applesauce, Dan left it all on the plate, and then called Earl about the angiogram. Earl stopped by at seven-thirty to give Dan a rundown on the shop and gym. He said, “You know, I can get someone to work the corner with me in Del Mar if this mess is a problem.”

Dan said, “Naw. Kogon said I’ll be out by tomorrow afternoon.”

Earl said, “I only said something because me and Momolo got to show by eleven tomorrow morning for the noon weigh-in.”

Dan said, “You two go first. I’ll take the pickup and meet you at the hotel.”

Earl said, “You’ll be okay?”

“Piece a cake,” said Dan. “What time’s the fight go off?”

“Fight time’s two o’clock, outdoors. No TV.”

A Filipino male nurse fussed in at eight o’clock with water and a pill. He sized up Earl. “Mr. Cooley needs quality-time rest, so you’ll soon have to say bye-bye.”

Dan said, “What’s this pill?”

“For seepy-seepy night-night.”

Dan didn’t like the idea, but he took the pill. Earl smiled, shook hands, and said he’d see Dan at Del Mar.

Dan was starving by nine-thirty. Bum TV made things worse. He wasn’t one to read magazines.

“Screw this.”

He waited until the nurses were away from the desk down the hall, then unhooked himself from the heart monitor. He dressed quickly, slid into an elevator, and went down to a Japanese restaurant on Third Street for sushi, hot sake, and a bottle of cold Kirin. He got back to his room at ten-thirty. The male nurse was pissed off. Dan told him to get the fuck gone.

Early the next morning, Dan had the right side of his groin shaved, and was then wheeled into a pale gray, high-ceilinged room. There were several pale gray machines. Electrical cables dangled from overhead, connected to the machines, which silently moved in and out of position. Dan had been medicated slightly with Valium, but he was alert.

A dimly lit screen covered a large portion of one high wall, and a technician operated controls from inside a glassed-in booth. Two nurses slid Dan from the gurney onto the operating table. He could see the screen and the technician, who sat like a pilot in the green light of the booth. Nurses in blue scrubs moved about, each with a task, each as silent as the moving machines.

Kogon, also in scrubs, came in and went to work. “See that screen?
We’ll be doing echocardiogram imagery during the procedure, and I’m going to put you on the silver screen, just like in the movies. We need you conscious so you can talk. Once we’re inside, and we inject dye through the catheter, you’re going to feel like your name is in lights.”

A faint network of bones and other things came into focus on the dim screen.

Dan said, “That’s star quality if I ever saw it. Me and Marilyn Monroe.”

Kogon said, “Three things. One, stretch your arms back over your head, and keep them there unless I tell you to move them. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Two, you will experience slight discomfort in your chest, but you’ve been through worse, so I don’t want to hear you bitch. Three, if you feel significant pain, I want you to tell me.”

“You said not to bitch.”

“There’s bitchin and there’s bitchin.”

“What’s this balloon doohickey again?”

Kogon said, “The greatest thing since penicillin for clap. Once inflated, it depresses any collection of cholesterol, plaque, and fat against the walls of coronary arteries. Removed, it allows blood to flow properly, and you’re back in business.”

A nurse dabbed alcohol at the right side of Dan’s groin. Dan felt a needle prick.

Kogon said, “That’s to numb you locally before we make the small incision to go inside.”

“Do you ever have people jump off this rack halfway through the deal and run screamin out the door?” Dan asked.

Kogon nodded. “A few have tried. That’s why we have restraints, and why that IV’s in your arm. Two milligrams of Versed does the rest.”

Dan perceived rather than felt something move up and through him. It made him gag, but not throw up. This wasn’t something he’d ever felt, and he didn’t like it at all, not at all, but he wasn’t about to go dog—the time to haul ass had been back at Kogon’s office. Dan focused on breathing, and waited to see if he’d die or pull through.

Kogon said, “You doing all right?”

“Spinnin like a top.”

Dan felt more movement inside his thorax. At first, he imagined the catheter as a metal caterpillar maneuvering the twists and turns of his circulatory system. Onto the screen came what looked like a cheap gray ballpoint pen that was inching through him. A misstep that punctured an artery would mean death in quick time. He wasn’t sure if he’d care one way or the other. You slipped the shot and countered, or you didn’t.

Kogon said, “Watching the screen?”

“I’m watchin, but there’s not much to see. What’s the dye all about?”

“It will show blocked coronary arteries,” Kogon explained The dye hit the screen like a whip, and Dan’s arteries suddenly looked like black spiderwebs in a winter tree.

“Yow!” Dan said.

Kogon jimmied out the catheter. “Three bad arteries, as I thought. You game for the bubble?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Kogon said, “Not unless you want me to tear up the release form you signed.”

“What’s this going to feel like?”

“A little more in and out, that’s all.”

“You mean you’d tear up the release if I told you to?” Dan asked.

“No. But I won’t proceed if you say to stop.”

“That means I’d have to go dog.”

“Precisely.”

Kogon finished the angioplasty quickly, with the nurses and another doctor backing him up. He stood beside Dan. “The blocked arteries are absolutely clear. We’ve placed sandbags on your groin. It’s standard. The weight will cause the femoral to close. I slipped you a little hop so you don’t move around and paint the walls red.”

“How long with the sandbags?”

“Each case is different.”

“Doctors bullshit worse than lawyers,” Dan said. “Ballpark.”

“An hour, anyway, maybe a little more to make sure you’ve closed properly.”

Dan said, “Will you be around?”

“Your nurse will be watching you carefully,” said Kogon. “I’ve got some more procedures to do down the hall.”

Dan wanted to ask another question, but he faded to black before he could put the words together in the right order.

Woozy, Dan awoke in some kind of storeroom lit by overhead fluorescent lights. A still body rested on another gurney across from him. Hand movement. A sigh. Stacks of long, gray cartons two inches by six inches by forty-plus inches leaned against two of the walls. Nurses entered by two doors. They selected different cartons, then departed, sometimes by the same door, sometimes through the other. It took Dan a while to remember why he was there.

His head was not entirely clear when a nurse entered and lifted one of the sandbags and moved the other. Dan could see that the bags were covered in canvas, and slick from use, and looked like small pillows. The nurse replaced the sandbags.

“Not yet.”

She was out the door before Dan could speak.

An older man, who looked like a doctor, entered and checked the other patient. “Good, very good. Now it’s back to your room.”

Dan waited patiently, thinking he’d soon be rolled to his room. He became aware of severe groin pain caused by the two eight-pound sandbags. He wanted to move them, but thought better of it. He spoke to the next nurse who came in for cartons.