Wrong Thing (17 page)

T
he place Vanjii moved into was in an apartment complex on Phoenix's west side. There was a public phone in the street outside the complex, with a sign hanging above it that said, in Spanish, you C
AN
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ALL
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EXICO FROM
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ERE.
There was nearly always someone using it. Most of the people in the complex had jobs, some had phones and some didn't, and none of them had any money.

Vanjii shared the place with two other people. Carlos, who'd been introduced to her by an old high school friend, had come to Phoenix from Santa Fe to learn to be an auto mechanic at a school there. He was hardly ever home. School and work kept him busy during the days and evenings, and he spent many of his nights at his girlfriend's place.

The other roommate was Louise. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she'd suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn't be hard to find a job, but she didn't have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from Christown Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

The walk to work seemed dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast and loud to be real. The cars blasted by her, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. The cars, and the life they contained, seemed far away from her, like a movie she was watching. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless people, and they always came up to her and said the same thing. “Hey. Hey, I ain't panhandling. It's just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and . . . ” Vanjii had nothing she could give them.

The heat didn't seem too bad while she was walking. But when she walked into the mall, with its air-conditioned chill, and sat down, the sweat came out so fast she felt like it was spurting out of her pores. She'd go into the restroom, take off her shirt and wipe herself down with paper towels, then put on some deodorant. She'd work all day, stopping to have lunch at one of the restaurants in the mall. When she walked back home, it would be getting dark and she'd be nervous, but she knew it wouldn't be long until she'd have saved a few hundred dollars, and she'd be able to buy a car.

There was a dumpster near the entrance to the complex, and a wooden post stood near it. Every day when Vanjii arrived home, she'd see a little girl playing tetherball—only she wasn't playing it with a ball, but with a plastic bag full of garbage she'd tied to the post. She always played by herself.

Vanjii wondered about the Kid, but it all seemed so far away that it didn't hurt as much as she'd thought it would.

The Kid was in a bar on Cerrillos Road, talking to a guy about maybe selling a little pot, something to make a little money in the short term, to keep eating and maybe pay next month's rent. It was about seven in the evening, and it was happy hour in the bar. The place was crowded, and the parking lot was full, so the Kid had parked in a small lot across the street. The lot was owned by a security firm, though the Kid didn't know that.

The Kid crossed the street in the darkness and walked into the lot. When he reached his car, he saw that it had been wheel-clamped.

He stood and looked at it for a moment, just not believing it. He got in the car and sat there, just taking it in. He spoke out loud, he said “Fuck!”, and the word came out on a breath of laughter, but his face was wet with tears. He wiped his face with his hands, and sat breathing quietly, trying to get a hold of himself. Then he got out of the car and walked around the building, hoping that it was still open. It wasn't.

As he walked back to his car, he saw someone else walking through the lot, a white man in his early thirties. “Is this your car?” he asked the Kid.

“Yeah.” The Kid pointed to the clamp. “I don't get this.”

“I did it. I'm Dan Ward, I'm a partner in this company . . . ”

“What company?”

He pointed at the building. “This company. We're a security patrol firm. This parking lot's private property.”

“I didn't know . . . Sorry. I didn't see no sign.”

“It should be obvious that this isn't public parking.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I had to meet a guy in the bar over there, I couldn't find a place to park. I didn't see nobody here, so I thought it'd be okay.”

“Well, you can see it's not.”

“Can you take that thing off my car and I'll go?”

Ward nodded. “Sure. If you want to pay me your fine now.”

“What?”

“There's a forty dollar fine for parking here.”

“Bullshit. You can't do that. You can't just decide to fine somebody. You can tell me to get out of your parking lot, that's all.”

“I'm not interested in a legal debate. I'm telling you there's a clamp on your car, and it's not coming off until you give me forty dollars.”

“I don't have forty dollars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest to God, I got about twenty, and I need that. It's all the money I got.”

Ward looked at him and said nothing.

“Look, how about if I give you my address and you can . . . ”

“Yeah, sure.” Ward laughed. “How about if you come back here when you've got the money, and you can have your car back.”

“Okay,” said the Kid. “Okay. I'll give it to you now. Here . . . ” He reached inside a pocket of his jacket.

When he had the knife out, the Kid swung it in a big circle, holding it with both hands, like someone swinging a baseball bat. It went into Ward's body with such force that the Kid felt the impact like a car hitting a wall. The Kid felt himself being thrown to the ground by the momentum, and he held on to the knife to steady himself, but it tore across Ward's lower abdomen and then slid out, and the Kid fell on his side. He jumped back up, still holding the knife, and saw that Ward was running away from him, letting out a noise that sounded like a donkey braying. Ward on made it a few steps, trying to ignore the things that were spilling out of him. But some of his intestines were trailing on the ground, and when he stepped on them his head seemed to shatter in a scream that never made it to his lips as he fell and the pain swallowed him.

The Kid stood over Ward, raised the knife, hammered it into his spine and left it there. Then he walked to the car, unlocked the door, got in. Blood was dripping from his hands. His body was shaking but he felt calm. He opened the glove box and took out some of the things that were in it—sunglasses, the letter from Vanjii, the Bulldog 44 he had used on Crowley. He put the sunglasses and letter in his jacket pocket, and stowed the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

He walked out of the parking lot into the street. As he walked, he felt his blood-soaked shirt chafing his skin. There was a 7-11 a couple blocks away. It had a phone outside. The Kid dropped two quarters into the phone and dialed Miguel's number.

He got the answering machine, and talked to it. “Hey, it's me. Something just happened . . . You'll probably hear about it. If you can, come and meet me tomorrow morning at the place where you hurt your ankle that time. Bring me some clothes. Come at around nine o'clock. If you don't want to, that's okay, I understand. Later.”

He hung up the phone and walked away. After a few minutes he stopped, turned around, and walked back to the 7-11.

The guy behind the counter was named Randy. He was twenty-two. There were no other customers in the store when the Kid walked in, trembling, clothes bloody, blood in his hair, head swiveling, looking around the store.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Randy said. “You need an ambulance or something?”

The Kid pulled the Bulldog and pointed it at him. “Open the register. Give me the money. Don't touch an alarm or I'll fucking kill you.”

“Please don't fucking kill me.” Randy opened the register, started taking the cash from it and putting it on the counter.

“Hey! What the hell!”

The voice came from behind the Kid. He turned, saw a young woman who had come in the door and was now on her way back out. Her name was Laura, and her two-year-old daughter was outside in her car, fastened into the child restraint seat. The Kid pointed and fired. The sound of it concussed the air in the room. The bullet propelled Laura out the door, went in through her lower back, tore through her bladder and went out through her side. She lay on the asphalt and cried for her child as the life poured wet out of her.

“Please don't fucking kill me,” Randy said again, but he was leaning over the counter, terrified, pawing at the gun in the Kid's hand. The Kid fired again, and most of Randy's face came apart.

The Kid pocketed all the bills from the register, and walked out of the store. He knew where he was walking to, but he didn't know if he would get there before a cop got him. It would depend on how long it took before somebody found the bodies at the 7-11, or the body at the parking lot. Even if that happened soon, he might still make it. He would have to elude the patrol cars, but there was a strong wind blowing, so there would probably be no police helicopters cruising tonight. But it was out of his control, so there was no use in worrying about it. Better just to keep walking, stick to the dark residential streets wherever he could, just keep walking, and either he would make it to Hyde Park or he wouldn't.

The stew was bubbling on the stove. Vanjii stirred it with a wooden spoon. It contained beef, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes, and was seasoned with pepper, garlic, and cumin. The Kid had shown her how to make it.

Carlos was out with his girlfriend. Vanjii was going to share the stew with Louise, who was in the living room taking a phone call that had been forwarded by the sex line. Vanjii could hear her talking in a put-on, lisping, little-girl voice. “Yeah, honey, feel me contracting my ass around your cock . . . Oh, yeah . . . ”

Vanjii stuck her head in the living room, looked at Louise and mouthed, “Contracting . . . ?” Louise grinned and shrugged. She had been watching TV when the call came, and she was still watching it, though she had muted the sound. The show was
Beavis and Butt-Head.

Curled under a bush in Hyde Park, the Kid thought it would be funny if he froze to death during the night.

The place was a preserve of mountain and forest right there in the city. The Kid had made it there without seeing a cop and had spent an hour hiking up the mountain in the dark. He stopped near a spot where Miguel had sprained his ankle while walking with the Kid about a year earlier. He hoped Miguel would understand his message and show up there in the morning.