Flat Spin (21 page)

The Full House had changed little over the years since I’d been there. I ordered my eggs over easy, called Buzz and asked for another favor.

“I’m still waiting on that gift certificate,” he said.

“It’s in the mail.”

“Like I’ve never heard that before.”

I gave him Micah Echevarria’s cell phone number. I needed a corresponding address, I said, and any other readily available information that might offer me relevant insights as to what made the kid tick. I also wanted to know if there was anything in any intelligence files implicating Harry Ramos, Janice Echevarria’s second husband, whose interests in Kazakhstan oil seemed to coincide with those of my former father-in-law and his prospective Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov. Buzz said he’d have to call me back.

I was finished with breakfast and working on my third cup of coffee when he did.

There were abundant references to Ramos on file, Buzz said, mostly having to do with his many overseas investments, but nothing to suggest that he, either personally or by corporate DBA, had ever been associated with any known intelligence operations, foreign or domestic. Nor had he ever been implicated in any criminal investigations. Computerized link analysis failed to connect him even remotely to Tarasov or, for the matter, Gil Carlisle.

Echevarria’s son came out clean, too, Buzz said, at least as far as intelligence activities were concerned. The kid’s arrest record was another matter. Buzz had run his name through the FBI’s NCIC database. Micah Echevarria and California’s penal codes were hardly strangers: two citations for a minor in possession of alcohol, one misdemeanor shoplifting charge reduced to an infraction, and one third-degree assault charge as a result of a street fight for which he’d spent a month in the San Jose County Jail. In the three years since being issued a driver’s license, he’d chalked up three moving violations, all for speeding. He rode a Harley.

I thanked Buzz yet again for his help, and told him I owed him big-time.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “the check’s in the mail. Spare me.”

S
ome say the West Oakland neighborhood known as Ghost Town derived its moniker from the two casket companies that once competed for business there. Others say it’s because of the killings that have plagued the area for decades. One thing beyond debate is that Ghost Town is the kind of place where even the police don’t go at night unless they’re obligated to—and only then with overwhelming backup. Just my luck that Arlo Echevarria’s son resided in the heart of Ghost Town.

The address Buzz provided was off of 30th and Union streets in the shadow of the 580 Freeway, a bedraggled duplex sandwiched between two small warehouses. There were steel burglar bars bolted to the windows and gang graffiti splashed on the clapboard walls. A Chevy Caprice Classic, its hood and trunk open to the sky, sat rusting on the dirt amid a sea of calcified dog poop that passed for a front yard.

I observed no motorcycle as I cruised past. I drove around the block, parked my rental subcompact four houses up the street, and waited for Micah Echevarria to come home.

The first gangster, a lookout, showed up within five minutes of my arrival. He was pedaling a tricked-out bicycle absurdly small for his lanky, sixteen-year-old frame, checking me out as he rolled past—ridiculously oversized blue jeans bagging, boxer shorts showing, wearing a black, oversized Raiders hoodie with the hood up, and sucking on a Tootsie Pop. He coasted down the street, glanced at me over his shoulder once more and veered around the corner, out of sight.

Another ten minutes passed and there he was again, still on his bike, this time escorted by five other homeboys on foot. They strode all big and bad toward my car with their hands shoved menacingly in their pockets. I rolled down the window.

“What’s up, gents?”

The oldest among them was also the biggest. He was about twenty. He looked like a cross between Tupac and the left side of the Raider defensive line.

“Where you from, man?” Tupac demanded.

“A better question might be, ‘Where am I going?’ Or, ‘How can I change myself to become a happier and more compassionate human being?’ Or, ‘How can I find common ground between my spiritual self and my ever-growing understanding of the natural world?’”

The homeboys looked at each other.

“No, man,” Tupac repeated, “I mean, like, where you
from
?”

“Oh, you mean, like, where am I
from
? Like, am I from county probation and am I here to violate every one of your sorry asses for carrying concealed weapons and associating with known felons? Or am I, like, a decoy cop, sitting here waiting for some little shitheads to try and jack me, so that my SWAT backups, who are all camped out right around the corner and just dying to kick your sorry asses, can come flying in here and make it on to the next episode of
Cops
? Is that, like, what you mean?”

A couple of the ’bangers glanced over their shoulders, looking for the Oakland SWAT team, wiping their mouths anxiously, blinking a little faster.

“He ain’t nothin’,” the kid on the bike said to Tupac.

Tupac grunted contemptuously and spit sideways, eyeing me the entire time. “Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,” he said, and walked on, a kiss-my-ass, Snoop Dog hitch in his get-along. The others followed after him like he was the Pied Piper.

I uncocked the revolver in my hand and stuffed it back in my belt. Nobody bothered me after that.

M
icah Echevarria thundered home on his Harley hog around eight P.m. wearing a crash helmet reminiscent of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and a Marlon Brando leather jacket with a “California Mongols” patch stitched across the back. He rumbled into the front yard and up the porch steps, unstrapped his helmet, and lashed the bike to the railing with a padlocked chain looped through the front forks. Then he unlocked the door and started inside. I went in right behind him.

“Welcome home, Micah.”

He tried to fend me off, but I already had a solid arm bar on him. He was face down on the living room floor before he knew it, his wrist twisted behind him, my knee in his back.

“What the fuck!”

“Relax, buddy. I’m Logan. We spoke earlier. I just want to talk.”

“I told you! I got nothing to say to you! Now, get the fuck outta my house before I fuckin’ call the cops!”

I patted him down. He had a Rambo-style hunting knife in his right boot. I tossed it on the carpet, out of his reach.

“I’m going to let you up now, OK? Nice and easy. Just talk, that’s all.”

Slowly I eased my grip on his arm and backed off. He laid there on the carpet trying to catch his breath. I’d last seen him when he was in elementary school. Arlo was hosting a Super Bowl party and had rented an ocean-view suite at Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel on the government’s dime. Select members of Alpha were invited with their significant others. Savannah and I went. It was the only time I ever saw Echevarria interact with his son—if you can call giving an insecure kid twenty bucks and telling him to go hang out at the pool by himself interaction. I didn’t pay much attention to Micah Echevarria that day, either, I’m ashamed to say. Nor did I pay much attention to the moves Echevarria was putting on my wife. I was too busy watching the game and slamming down free liquor. Micah was a gawky fledgling back then. He’d grown into a slender, handsome young man, with a face predominated by his mother’s sharp features and his father’s dark-hued skin tone. His hair was straggly and clung to his face in long, sweaty strands. He had a wispy Fu Manchu moustache.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

He sat up, rubbing his wrist. “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

“I’m trying to find out what happened to your father, who killed him.”

“I don’t give a shit what happened to my father.”

I went to help him up. He pushed my hand angrily aside, stood and walked into the kitchen. The place was a pit. Filthy pots and dishes piled in the sink. The trash overflowing with empty beer bottles. Motorcycle parts strewn about the greasy linoleum floor. A bong shaped like a skull resting on the counter. Micah opened the refrigerator and uncapped a Corona.

I asked him what he was doing when he got the news that his father had been killed.

He took a long swallow of beer. “I don’t fucking remember.”

“How did you find out he was dead?”

“My mother called. Look, there’s nothin’ I can tell you, OK? I didn’t know the dude. I can’t remember the last time I even fucking saw him. So why don’t you just fucking leave.”

He walked past me and back into the living room. Posters of Hendrix and Che Guevara were tacked to the wall. He plopped down on the futon, jammed his knife back inside his boot, grabbed the TV remote and started watching Animal Planet. A bunch of meerkats were running around. I sat down beside him.

“My cat loves this show,” I said. “What he really loves, though, is Sponge Bob.”

Micah wouldn’t look at me. “Look, I don’t know who shot my old man,” he said. “If you’re thinking it was me, it wasn’t, OK? I was in school when it happened.”

“Your old man was killed a couple of hours before midnight. Must be night school.”

The kid changed channels. A professional wrestler dressed like Zorro was bashing his opponent across the back with an acoustic guitar.

I persisted. “What kind of school meets that late at night?”

Annoyed, Micah dug through a jumble of junk mail heaped atop an overturned cardboard box that doubled as a lamp table. He found what he was looking for and tossed it in my lap: a brochure for something called Oaksterdam University. I glanced through it while wrestlers beat the pretend tar out of each other on TV.

Oaksterdam University was a trade school that gave new meaning to the expression, “higher education.” The school prepared its students for positions in California’s booming medical marijuana industry. For $200 tuition, you could learn all about how to grow your own weed, which strains work best on which ailments, and how to open your own pot dispensary. You could also learn ways to minimize the chances of the DEA raiding your dispensary and sending you to prison for violating federal narcotics regulations.

“Must be a total trip,” I said, “going to Oaksterdam home football games.”

The front door opened. A young woman walked in toting a twelve-pack of Coronas. She was Asian. Petite. Pretty. Doc Martens boots, camo cargo pants, tight-fitting black tank top. There was a small silver hoop in her lower lip and matching rings in each nostril. Both eyebrows were similarly pierced, as was the cartilage up and down both ears. She paused, surprised, with her hand on the knob, like she was interrupting something important.

“Come on in,” I said, standing. “We were just finishing up, weren’t we, Mr. Echevarria?”

“He knows my old man,” he said to the girl, then corrected himself, “or did.”

“Cool.”

She shut the door, walked into the kitchen and stashed the beer in the refrigerator.

I left my card on the TV and walked to the front door. The girl sat down close beside Micah on the futon and fired up a Marlboro light. I told him I was sorry about what happened to his father. I wished they’d enjoyed a closer relationship, I said, but that sometimes, that’s how it goes between fathers and sons. I quoted William Penn, about how a child taught to live on little owes more to his old man’s wisdom than the kid whose old man gives him everything.

“Who’s William Penn?” the girl said.

“A lot of people think he’s the guy on the Quaker Oats box, but Quaker Oats says the resemblance is merely coincidental. By the way, Micah, before I forget, your mother said to tell you she still loves you.”

He stared at the TV and pretended not to hear me.

I left.

Two pit bulls were playing tug-of-war in the yard across the street with what was left of a lime-green bra. They forgot the bra and started barking and snarling at me through the chain-link fence as I walked to my car.

“Hey.”

I turned. Micah’s girlfriend bounded out the front door, down the steps after me.

“He’s really a very sweet guy,” she said. “Sweetest guy I’ve ever known. He’s just a little freaked out right now.”