Tempted by Trouble (7 page)

“You’re going to shoot her right here?”

“No, I’m going to take her on a date and buy her a drink first. I’ll do whatever needs to be done and you need to do the same. Look, get in the driver’s seat. When I signal, mash on the gas and let the sound of the engine revving cover the shots. Mash hard. Then be ready to roll out.”

I shook my head. “Go. The woman is my problem.”

“Your problems are our problems.”

“If anybody saw me at the bank, and I doubt it, but just in case, they didn’t see you. So think about your kid. I’ll handle it and you go and we’ll connect down the road. You know the drill.”

Without any more hesitation, she raised her hand and extended a disposable .22, handle first.

She frowned. “No witnesses.”

“Okay.”

I repeated what I had said, told Jackie to drive away from this heated area.

She shook her head, sweat forming on her brow. “I’m not leaving you behind. That’s not how this works. You do this and you do this now and then I’ll get you out of here. You do it or I do it.”

Her tone was filled with grief, anger, and angst. Her expression owned the same. It reminded me of my wife’s tone. It reminded me of a cold day in Detroit when choices were made. It reminded me of a day when my manhood was challenged, when my marriage had been threatened. I took the gun and eased it underneath my coat. Guns weren’t my way of life. I went back and stood outside the SUV and spied down on Abbey Rose. She remained reclined with her eyes closed. She had her hands folded across her midsection. Liquid anxiety drained down her face; that trickling had to feel like torture, but she didn’t move.

I took the gun out and held it in my hand.

All sins spiraled and escalated. All sins ended with murder, the crime of all crimes.

When I opened the passenger door to the SUV, Abbey Rose opened her eyes and saw me standing in the door holding a gun. I held the door open but didn’t climb back inside.

I said, “Keep your eyes closed.”

“Please . . . please . . . please . . .”

“Close your eyes.”

Abbey Rose trembled and closed her eyes tighter. I had never seen so much fear.

I wondered what it was like to know that you were about to die and have no control.

Then I looked at the getaway van, made contact with Jackie in the rearview.

I nodded and she mashed the gas, revved the engine hard, made smoke rise.

I raised the gun and fired twice. Those two rapid pops sent energy and regret up my arm.

It was hard to live but so easy to die.

Then I closed the door to the SUV, lowered my head, walked to the van, and got inside.

Jackie pulled away from the curb and drove past the Village Green, then entered an area filled with modest homes. She drove through an alley and came to La Cienega. That was where we were about to blend with what looked like a hundred thousand cars, not many manufactured on this soil. Gray skies covered us as she pulled out on La Cienega. Instead of going straight toward Hollywood and Koreatown, Jackie turned right on Rodeo Road, and that right was taking us back in the direction of the bank robbery.

I asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

“We’re going back.”

“Are you crazy? We’re not going back there.”

“Sammy’s not dead. He can’t be dead.”

“He’s dead, Jackie.”

“I need to see for myself.”

The horrid songs of traffic surrounded us as Jackie sped down the front side of the Village Green in the direction of KFC, then was caught at the light facing a strip mall that housed a shopworn Mc-Donald’s. A torrential downpour of fear came out of my pores like it was hurricane season. There were hundreds of sounds, maybe thousands, but there was only one sound I cared about. The sirens. And those sirens punctuated the crisp air the same way bullets had punctuated the life out of Sammy.

I put my hand up to my head, reached for my fedora. My fedora wasn’t on my head. Again my heart tried to break out of my chest. I had left the fedora inside Abbey Rose’s SUV.

More anger and trepidation manifested inside my gut, became a raging ball of fire that boiled my blood. That fedora held DNA that was better than the fingerprints I had left inside that SUV.

Jackie asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Drive. Slow down, keep to the speed limit, and drive.”

That black fedora had belonged to my father. That had been Henrick’s Sunday fedora.

I had imagined that my father’s most prized hat would one day belong to my unborn son. Now it would end up mutilated and stored inside a dusty evidence room.

Jackie drove back toward the bank, went up the back side of Santa Rosalia.

The closer we were to the bank, the stronger my heart thumped inside my chest. The parking lot had been taped and an officer directed traffic and blocked the southwest entrance to the mall. Two dozen policemen and firemen and medics were in the parking lot.

And at least three local stations were on the ground, one of them a Spanish channel.

One body was down on the parking lot, covered up and waiting on the coroner. That was Sammy. All that could be seen was that the body was facedown, his shoes showing.

There wasn’t a second body. Rick was gone. He had already been transported. Jackie paused and glimpsed the circus, her eyes wide with disbelief as she stared at what she never should have seen.

She said, “That wasn’t Sammy, that was Rick.”

“That was Sammy.”

“You got it wrong, Dmytryk. Rick might be dead, but not Sammy.”

“He’s dead, Jackie. I’m sorry, but Sammy is dead.”

Then she sped away, her lips trembling and tears falling. She made a hard right onto Stocker, then sped uphill doing thirty miles over the speed limit.

My face burned and I felt blood in my nostrils, but I asked, “Want me to drive?”

She mumbled, “You got it wrong. You had to get it wrong. An hour ago Sammy was laughing and joking and we were making plans.”

Hell was a mythical place where people suffered for eternity. But I knew hell was real because I’d been living with the devil’s breath on my neck for a long, long time.

I closed my eyes and went back to then.

I was one of the few men who had worked a white-collar job, then lost that cushy, salaried position and ended up on the assembly line at GM. Working in the offices and working on the line; those had been my jobs for fourteen years strong. My salaried job had topped out in the six figures. After that white-collar job had ended abruptly, I had worked the line, ended up shoulder-to-shoulder with people I’d gone to high school with. I was degreed and working with people who had GEDs. There was a joke in there somewhere. Sometimes my friends on the line teased me about my downfall and tried to help me find the humor in my situation, and many times they made me laugh. Working on the line wasn’t going to make me the next Donald Trump, but it kept me living an above-average lifestyle. But that came to an end. Being laid off twice within a decade, the second time felt like it was déjà vu. One day I was on the line making seventy-five a year and the next I was unemployed and trying to save my home.

The bubble had burst in Detroit; the middle class was being dismantled thousands of jobs at a time. And in a land far, far away, the Japanese smiled. Bailouts and bankruptcies and job losses and foreclosures and exporting one American vehicle for every three hundred that were imported had left Americans starving on the pothole-filled streets.

That was back when it all began, back when I had been susceptible to anything the devil offered. While Jackie sobbed and drove us through L.A. and Hollywood, while we passed tourists and Chinese theaters and dealt with never-ending traffic, my mind drifted.

My mind took me back to the night that I was near Ford Field and the MGM Grand Casino, ten minutes from the airport and less than two miles off I-96 at Michigan Avenue.

It was a gentlemen’s club that had no gentlemen as patrons.

While a dancer named Daisy Chain performed, looking like she was worth ten dollars for twenty minutes, I stood near the bathrooms and searched for a different dancer, one who was too beautiful to be in a place like this. I hid out in the rear of the den of lust, drink in hand and holding up the wall. It was Down and Dirty Thursdays at Club Pasha. The night customers were promised they’d be spoiled the moment they came inside. It was the night that three shots of overpriced Patrón cost twenty-five dollars. A fool’s bargain. There were over forty-five dancers in the room, most already topless. Women were imported from Atlanta, Miami, and California. Most were in heels so tall they looked like their fake hair could touch the ceiling.

Men in sagging pants and shirts adorned with convoluted and outrageous hip-hop and thug-inspired designs competed with each other, moved to the front lines like warriors, and positioned themselves close to the dancers. Tonight men who were behind on alimony and child support were splurging, throwing money at women who were behind on their rent and had small children at home. The customers spanked the women and baptized topless dancers with money.

I’d wanted to become invisible, but everyone noticed me. I was the only man in the club who wore a business suit and shoes by Johnston & Murphy. When I had walked across the room, some reacted like they thought I was an undercover cop; panic sprouted in the eyes of the men who were wanted or on parole. I carried a black fedora and wore a three-button dark gray suit that fit the way a suit should fit, not oversize like the suit of a ringmaster at a circus. That made me feel both out of place and out of time, an anachronism, because all of the other patrons wore outfits so large they hid all of their obesity. Women with cosmeticized faces were swinging from the bars in the ceiling. Others were working the poles at either end of the stage, stretch marks barely noticeable under the dim lights.

Then the DJ announced that the dancer who called herself Trouble had arrived.

I stared at Trouble as she took to the stage. Her beauty was uncommon and her unique appearance drew eyes. She was born in Brooklyn, but going back three generations, she was Dominican, Canadian, Jamaican, Chinese, and a few other exotic lands combined. Her heritage gave her a distinct look. Her hair was dark brown with golden highlights. She had an erotic face that, from some angles, reminded me of Maria de Medeiros Esteves Vitorino de Almeida. Soft, youthful features, round and doelike eyes, making her appear childlike and seductive all at once. Outside these walls the dancer was a conservative dresser, usually wore low heels and had an appearance as innocent and gamine as Natalie Portman, Norah Jones, Robin Meade, and Audrey Tautou.

She was my wife.

The heat in my heart and aching inside my chest confirmed that these were our hard times. The financial pressures we lived under felt like a mountain on our backs. But I was the man in the relationship, so inside I carried the onus of having to live up to being a husband and a provider for my wife.

Society had conditioned me to feel the lion’s share of the shame when things fell apart, and standing in a room that provided entertainment for the lowest of the low put pain in my heart.

Heat raced up my back and across my neck. I held a thin smile but I wanted to scream. Stress and anxiety did their best to break me down and drive me insane.

My wife took to the silver pole with energy, every move reeking of confidence. In her sparkling thong and glittery bra, she went up the pole by spinning in circles, looked like she was defying gravity. In a flash she was upside down in a split, then she took the split to the pole, had her body in a sideways Chinese split. She used her legs to hold the pole and came down inches at a time, flipped before she made it to the floor, then landed in a dramatic full split. She landed so hard it made men groan.

This was the result of her mother struggling to send her to gymnastics and dance classes from when she was a child until she graduated from high school and joined the navy.

My wife saw me lurking in the shadows and lost her painted-on smile for a moment.

I wanted her to see me. I wanted to see how she would react when she saw me.

There was a pause that lasted no more than half a second. I knew my wife. I knew her every expression, no matter how subtle. She wanted me to leave. She didn’t want me there. But I was there.

She could have motioned to a fat bouncer, and the fat bouncer would have asked me to go, but she knew better. She knew me. She knew my every expression as well. She read the look on my face. If a bouncer touched me, we’d come to blows. I’d lose the fight, but there would be a fight.

I backed up a step, but not in retreat. That step reassured her that I wasn’t going to cause a scene. Not that night, but I wanted to. The love inside me made it hard to not hate what I saw.

Each dollar that was thrown her way felt like a flaming whip lashing across my ego.

Women went over to her throwing dollars, ugly women who had girl crushes and let it be known they wanted girl kisses as they leaned over and whispered in my wife’s ear. My wife smiled and flirted. I wanted to hear what was being said. Liquored up, women were as aggressive as men. Some of the women dressed in oversize clothing, talked with their mouths twisted, had hair cut short, and looked like men.

Desperation’s heated breath singed my neck, its jagged teeth prepared to devour my flesh. Poverty growled too, waiting its turn, famished yet patient, a beast that dined on the bones of men.

My wife finished her routine and stopped to gather the dollars that had been thrown at her feet. She bent over and hurried to get her dollars. It looked sad. It looked disgusting, the desperate way my wife picked up the money that had been thrown at her like she was the slave of the moment. She grabbed stray dollars that had fallen off the stage, pulled what she had garnered into one vulgar pile. I saw no dignity in what she was doing. I saw lust but no respect for her as a woman as she left the stage. She held her smile and flirted with customers until she vanished into the dressing rooms. Ten minutes later she came back out and walked over to me. She took my hand and led me to the back, away from all the eyes.