Flat Spin (24 page)

“This is Marko. My nephew. He is here to visit from Omsk.”

The kid didn’t respond, transfixed as he was by the TV.

“His English is no good,” Anya said, eyeing me through a tobacco haze. “You look familiar to me.”

“I used to come in once in awhile. Years ago.”

“Would you care for cocktail?”

“Alas, those days are behind me.”

“Too bad for you.” She inhaled what was left of her cigarette, blew the smoke out her nose, and dropped the butt into a Diet Pepsi can, which hissed, then poured three fingers of Absolut into a crystal tumbler.

“So,” she said, “I call Laz, but he has heard nothing.”

“Nothing about what?”

She looked at me like I was a slow learner. “Laz. I call him. ‘Have you heard from Gennady?’ He tells me no. He says, ‘I will make calls.’ This is yesterday. Now, you come. So, you tell me, where is my husband?”

I explained that her brother Laz and I hadn’t spoken in a few years. My visit and Gennady’s apparent disappearance, I said, were mere coincidence.

Anya Bondarenko slumped into the chair behind the desk and looked down at her glass mournfully. “I thought my brother sends you. Now I am thinking my husband has left me for another woman.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“I have not seen Gennady for five days.” She lit another Virginia Slim, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. “You have business with him?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You work for government?”

“Used to.”

She shrugged. “What is it you do now, your job?”

I gave her my business card.

She squinted at it through the smoke. “Cordell Logan, CFI. What is this, CFI? You are on TV?”

“Not CSI,” I said, correcting her. “CFI. It means I’m a certified flight instructor.”

“You are pilot?”

“According to the FAA.”

“What is FAA?”

“The sorriest excuse for a bureaucracy on this or any other planet. Listen, Mrs. Bondarenko, if you see your husband, tell him I need to speak with him. It’s important.”

“If I see him,” said, “the first thing I will do is give him the back of my hand for scaring me this way. Then I will tell him.”

“
Spasiba
.”

“
Puzhalsta
.”

She walked me to the door.

“
Dasvidaniya
, Marko.”

Anya Bondarenko’s nephew fired a chilly glance over his shoulder at me, conveying his displeasure at my interrupting his TV-watching. I understood his annoyance. That Jerry Springer is quality entertainment.

S
avannah was sipping an apple martini at the bar. The same gym rat who’d backed into me on the dance floor was putting the moves on her. She was doing her best to ignore him, but he would not be ignored.

“One drink. It’s not like I’m asking you to blow me or something.” He was leaning into her, shirt unbuttoned, giving his pheromone musk a chance to work its seductive magic.

“Having fun?” I said as I walked over to her.

“Thank God,” Savannah yelled at me over the music. “Where’ve you been?”

“Playing Kojak.”

The trip was a bust, I told her. The man I’d come to see wasn’t in.

“So what do you want to do?” she said.

“Go back to your place and regroup.”

“She’s with
you
?” the gym rat said, like he couldn’t believe it.

“For the moment, anyway,” I said.

Savannah shot me a disdainful look as I followed her out.

The gym rat grabbed my arm. “The chick’s into me, man. I can
feel
it. If she’s really not with you, why don’t you just be cool and step off.” His cologne smelled like something a wolverine might excrete in the middle of mating season.

“Trust me, my friend,” I said, “on your best day, you couldn’t handle it.” I tried to go around him, but he wouldn’t let me.

“Dude, nobody walks away from me. We’re talking here.” He was suddenly in my face, shaking out his arms, like we were about to go three rounds. His glowering eyes and cold, Mike Tyson-like smile were meant to convey the potential for unbridled mayhem. I noticed he was wearing braces on his teeth. Difficult to sell the stone cold-killer persona when your mouth looks like Radio Shack.

“Nice grillwork,” I said, unable to hold back. “What kind of reception do you get with those bad boys?”

“You come in here and make jokes about me? Dude, you got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. Have a nice day.”

I tried to go around him once more. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward him, looping a sloppy roundhouse punch that I slipped easily. I rotated left and fired a shovel hook to his left ear that sent him crashing back into the bar, knocking another guy and his date off their stools like they were bowling pins. The pulsing techno music suddenly stopped. The gym rat was out cold on the floor.

The bouncer came sprinting over. “Everybody cool it!”

Savannah was incensed. “We’re here twenty minutes and you get in a fist fight?”

“The term ‘fight’ conveys fighting. This was more self-defense.”

She didn’t buy it. Neither did the two people I’d knocked from their barstools.

The guy wore glasses and a rayon aloha shirt with little woody wagons on it. A CPA’s version of Sunset Boulevard chic.

“What is your fucking problem, buddy?” he wailed at me, struggling to help his woman off the floor.

His date was a powerfully built woman with stringy brown hair who outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. In her right hand was a nine-millimeter pistol, which she pointed in my face. In her left hand was a six-pointed gold star that said, “Deputy Sheriff, Los Angeles County.”

“Turn around,” she said, her lower lip bleeding, “and put your filthy hands on your head.”

C
ompared to military MREs, dining at the West Hollywood jail is
haute cuisine
. My fellow inmates and I enjoyed well-seasoned, perfectly breaded fish sticks for supper and scrambled eggs for breakfast with Tater Tots cooked just right. Even my amiable cell mates, the outlaw bikers Bad Dawg and his brother, Mad Dawg, both agreed that when it came to in-custody meals, West Hollywood rated four stars.

“LAPD, you get powdered eggs,” Bad said.

“That’s cruel and unusual punishment, right there, Dawg,” Mad said.

“No, Dawg. Cruel and unusual are them mystery meat sandwiches LAPD feeds you for lunch.”

For habitual recidivists who looked like charter members of the ZZ Top fan club, the Dawg brothers could not have been more hospitable. That I’d been booked into their cell on suspicion of assaulting a peace officer only upped my personal stock as far as they were concerned.

I asked them what they were in for. Their tag-team explanation took nearly an hour to tell, a rambling tale about an abusive father and a drug-addled mother, dirt-bag running buddies, cheating women, evil cops, crooked attorneys, corrupt judges, and how never to rob a Wells Fargo bank located across the street from an FBI field office.

“Especially on FBI payday,” Bad added.

“Good to know,” I said.

We spent the night debating why Johnny Cash always wore black and dozed on stainless-steel cots under fluorescent lights, while some guy two cells down kept screaming that Dick Cheney was trying to kill him. Shortly after breakfast, one of our jailers appeared and informed me that I was to be released forthwith without bail. The Dawgs called me a lucky sumbitch and told me to keep in touch. I promised them I wouldn’t.

The jailer escorted me to the booking cage just inside the rear door of the sheriff ’s station where I signed for my belt, cell phone, keys and wallet. I was made to count my money to make sure it equaled the amount I’d been booked in with, and then escorted to the station’s main entrance.

Savannah was waiting for me in the lobby. She was with Detective Czarnek.

“I called him,” Savannah said, “like you asked.”

I thanked them both for coming.

“You lucked out,” Czarnek said, chewing nicotine gum. “My captain and the under-sheriff played basketball together in high school. Got him to drop your case as a favor. That lounge lizard you decked? He had a warrant outstanding out of Long Beach. Failure to appear on a moving violation. Long as we make that go away, he never saw you.”

“And the deputy who took a tumble, she’s cool with that?”

“Aside from you fucking up her love life. The guy she was out with didn’t know she was a cop.”

“What did he think she was—a Romanian weightlifter?”

Czarnek grinned. “Tell you what, I certainly wouldn’t mess with that chick. She could kick
my
ass in a heartbeat.”

“You guys are awful,” Savannah said.

We walked out of the sheriff ’s station and onto San Vicente Boulevard. The morning air felt heavy and smelled of rain. A rare treat in Los Angeles. Czarnek’s plain-wrap Crown Vic was parked in a red zone at the curb. He’d looped the microphone cord of his police radio over the rearview mirror to let the meter maid know the car belonged to a detective, but either the meter maid didn’t see it or didn’t care. A parking ticket was wedged under the left wiper blade.

“Fuck.”

Czarnek snatched the ticket off the windshield and stuffed it in his sport coat. He was wearing a different coat than when I saw him last. This one was brown.

I asked him why he was so willing to help me get out of jail.

“Quid pro quo,” Czarnek said. “I need you to take a ride with me.” He got in his car and cranked the ignition.

I told Savannah I was sorry for my behavior the night before. She made a remark about me not being a very good Buddhist. I agreed.

A city bus roared past, racing to make the light at Santa Monica Boulevard. The slipstream mussed her hair a little. I reached out impulsively and tamed a wild strand. She didn’t stop me.

Czarnek lowered the passenger window and said, “Take your time. What the hell. I got nothing else to do.”

Savannah was looking at me. She was too beautiful and I was a damn fool for feeling what I was feeling at that moment. I told her to go home and lock her doors. I’d be there when I could.

She said, “Is that a promise or a threat?”

I smiled.

W
e turned at the light and drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard. It started raining. Big, greasy drops smeared the windshield, just enough to leave a blurry film whenever Czarnek worked his wipers.

“That’s the problem with Los Angeles,” Czarnek said. “Either it rains too much or not enough.”

“LA can be accused of many things,” I said, “but moderation is not one of them.”

We passed a bus stop where two elderly African-American women sat with plastic grocery bags over their heads. Impromptu foul weather gear. I asked Czarnek if he’d seen the poem Micah Echevarria had posted on YouTube about his father. Czarnek hadn’t. He said he’d check it out when he got a chance.

“Maybe it’s just me,” I said, “but who drives 400 miles on their motorcycle to shoot their father, then turns around, drives back and waxes poetic in cyberspace about how much they’ll miss not having the chance to know him better?”

“People do all kinds of crazy shit,” Czarnek said. “I had a lady once stabbed her husband twenty-two times with a steak knife—I mean, sliced and diced this guy—then rents a billboard on San Vicente with their wedding picture on it that says, ‘Beloved Marvin, the best of the best.’ ”