Police and Thieves: A Novel (7 page)

On one hand, I had to question what I was doing; stealing was for losers. A thief who stole from the poor was anathema to me. But an outlaw who took what he needed from the fat of the land, like from Roy, this was marginally acceptable. On the other hand, we had engineered an entrepreneurial coup that would bring us the joy of money and the contamination of added strife. In summation, we were winners.

An afternoon in the sun at Ocean Beach had been Eichmann’s idea. He said ripping off Roy called for a day of rest, a sabbath from the usual scuffling. So we hopped on the N Judah Muni bus at Market Street. Two hours later we got off at the last stop on Forty-eighth Street, a little worse for wear. Ocean Beach was a mile-long strip of sand frequented by low-income San Francisco residents, such as Bayview welfare mothers, Sunset District surfers, and South of Market bike messengers, and we fit in perfectly.

Bobo was down at the water’s edge getting his feet wet in the surf, yelling at some kids to stop throwing rocks at the seagulls. The Mexican looked naked in a pair of too-tight Speedos that accentuated the tree trunk size of his legs and the cantaloupe plumpness of his stomach. To round out the picture, Eichmann was sitting at my side and Loretta was dozing on a tattered space blanket by our feet.

Eichmann was the man Loretta wanted, but his love for her was questionable. They’d been together for a month and Eichmann was already getting tired of her demands, the things she wanted. He couldn’t afford an apartment or to get out of town on a vacation, and Loretta was quite sore about it. In her eyes, he was becoming a portrait of lessened expectations. In a symbiotic response, Eichmann had turned into a dynamo of ambition since we’d robbed Roy. He said better days were coming. It sounded like he was getting religious. Or maybe he was going crazy, I didn’t know. He rubbed his belly and looked fondly at Bobo, saying to me, “What do you want to do about Flaherty?”

“Got a plan?”

Eichmann lifted a beer to his mouth and swallowed once. “The way I see it, he needs to get rid of you. He can do it by intimidating you, by driving you out of the city. I don’t know how far he’s willing to go and you don’t either.”

“What about you and Bobo?”

“It ain’t got nothing to do with me. You saw what went down with him, not us.”

His stance was obvious: he wanted to separate himself from my troubles. He finished his beer, threw it on the oil-stained sand, then reached into Bobo’s Igloo chest cooler for another Budweiser. Loretta heard our quibbling and stirred, shaking herself awake. Her plain black one-piece bathing suit showed her freckled cleavage. Her legs were getting burned despite the colossal amount of sunscreen she’d slathered on them. She asked us in a timorous, drowsy voice, “What time is it? It seems late.”

Eichmann consulted his watch. “It’s three-forty. You okay?”

“God, I don’t know. It’s terribly hot, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s bad. You want to go swimming?”

“The water’s dirty, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, so? That never stopped me.”

Whenever I was around Loretta, I couldn’t take my eyes off her body. She had more flesh on her bones than I did and I was interested in that difference, her being larger than me. Sometimes I’d watch Eichmann as he gazed at her, trying to see what he saw. What she felt for him, Loretta was never one to say, though I had a strong suspicion she admired Eichmann. He said to me, “Why don’t you take your clothes off, you goon.”

I was dressed in my jeans, army coat, and Red Wing boots; the last thing in the world I wanted was a suntan. I didn’t want to look like a Los Angeles television drug overlord. I was a San Franciscan nickel-bag dealer, and most of the other sunbathers at
Ocean Beach resembled me. No one was tanned or buffed. I didn’t see any weight lifters or beach bunnies. The men were hunchbacked and pale from their day jobs. The women were blanched and wrinkled, and their children were anemic, weedy creatures that puttered around the shoreline, tossing seaweed at each other.

As a rule, I stayed away from the water. The one time I went swimming, the tide took me out farther than I wanted to go. I was underwater, sinking. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see anything. Air bubbles trailed from my mouth, disappearing over my head. The currents under the surface alternated between tepid and cool; the warm water made me drowsy, but the cold water frightened me, amplifying the ringing in my ears. Clouds of air bubbles swirled around my face; my lungs were torqued to bursting. I asked myself, If I drowned, who would care?

Bobo stumbled over the sand to us and threw himself on Eichmann, baying happily. Loretta sat up, adjusting her sunglasses. She rose to her feet, brushing sand away from her swimsuit. She looked at Bobo, Eichmann, and me, then sashayed over to the waterline. Eichmann didn’t want her straying off too far; he was about to yell at her when Bobo cautioned him.

“Let her be. Can’t you see she’s having a hard time?”

The Mexican’s off-key suggestion stung Eichmann. He was so used to everyone giving in to him, letting him say whatever he wanted to, he couldn’t believe Bobo’s impertinence. It was one thing if Eichmann brought up Loretta in conversation, but it wasn’t anybody else’s place to do that. And I never did. Loretta was off-limits to me. I just thought about her, that’s all. Eichmann’s retort to Bobo was succinct and charged with animosity.

“Stay out of my business.”

“Aw, c’mon, I’m your friend.”

“Oh, yeah? Wonderful … and how long has that been going on?”

“Slow down. What’s with you?”

“What’s with me? Everything you say stinks, you know? Have I ever told you that? And you want to tell me how to talk to my girlfriend?”

“Don’t get ugly with me.”

“Don’t get ugly? I don’t need nothing when it comes to me and her, you hear?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Doing what?”

“Being nice to her.”

Eichmann looked at Bobo, throwing spearheads of scorn at him. “Yeah? Tell me what to do, bright eyes.”

“You’ve got to be more tender with her, you hear?”

Normally, Eichmann would have laughed at Bobo, knowing he was talking through his hat. But this time, he responded to the Mexican in a low, homicidal undertone, hissing, “Shut up.” Eichmann wanted to acknowledge the accuracy of what Bobo was saying, but something in him refused to let it happen, and for good reason: He’d been constructing walls around himself ever since I met him. He couldn’t get through to Bobo, Loretta, or me. His whole body shook with agitation as he mumbled, “Don’t tell me nothing. I know more about women than you ever will.”

After our expropriation of Roy’s sinsemilla, we didn’t waste time maximizing our retail operations. The day after our visit to Ocean Beach, the dope was broken down into eighths—one hundred and twenty-eight of them—at the house of a girl we knew who lived behind the Valencia Street funeral homes. Her name was Randi, and she was maybe five inches taller than me; a baby lesbian who wore low-slung Ben Davis jeans and smoked cigarettes like a man. I had a crush on her that was going nowhere fast.

Bobo and I trimmed the buds with a pair of nail clippers. The task required dexterity and patience, the same traits you needed when you were an inmate doing art therapy in a mental institution. I wasn’t so great at it. I butchered the buds, making them cosmetically undesirable. Eichmann felt he had the right to scold me about my lack of productivity. “Hurry up, will you? We ain’t got all day.”

“I’m doing what I can.”

“Don’t give me that shit. What do you think I am, a cretin?”

“No, you’re not a cretin.”

“We’ve got to be out of here by four. Distribution is going to take all evening. Bobo, you almost done?”

“Give me another minute.”

“A minute you get. And by the way, everything’s been sold.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Our customers made presale orders.”

What did I think? We were moving up, cresting a wave. We’d come a long way in the past two weeks, fueling me with bittersweet
hindsights about the previous summer. Back then, other dealers had been disrespectful of our enterprise, letting us know we were strictly cannon fodder.

Bobo had stolen a case of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from a delivery truck at the Safeway near Thirtieth Street. If it weren’t for him, we would’ve gone hungry. As it was, my teeth were getting soft and my gums were going bad. We were hurting something fierce and so Eichmann got on the horn to Maurice, a dealer who owed us seventy dollars.

At half past nine there was a hostile knock on the garage door. Eichmann opened the gate, and Maurice ambled into our hovel, projecting his pseudocoolness five feet in front of him like an invisible force shield. It was obvious he was rolling in money. Slim and ethereal, he was decked out in red leather from head to foot, and it wasn’t discount third-world cowhide either. Maurice had on a custom-made North Beach Leather suit that must have set him back a grand or more. He strolled over to the coffee table and sat himself down in our beanbag chair, letting his eyes wander over the garage. He smirked at what he saw, remarking with a fleer, “You homies aren’t exactly living high off the hog, are you?”

For as long as I could remember, I’d been swallowing other people’s insults. I was a verbal garbage dump. It was phenomenal—someone who had more cash than you had to rub your face in it. No sense in letting things be when you could point out the differences, right?

“You come over here to pay up, dude?” Eichmann asked.

The question made Maurice chuckle heartily. His freon-blue eyes glittered at the absurdity of giving us our seventy bucks. He looked at me and shook his thinning pompadour. “Money, money, money, that’s all you pitiful fuckheads think about. I’ll tell you what … here’s some advice.”

“I don’t want your hot air. I want our cash.”

“Whoa, listen to him. Let me enlighten your ass.”

“What’s that? You’re going to say something brilliant?”

“I am. Check this … why should I give you the money? I use it better than you do. It’s wasted on you.”

Eichmann started to boil. “No shit?”

“When I see how y’all are doing, living in a garage, I feel like a character out of Horatio Alger.”

“Who’s that?”

“You ignorant sap, he wrote rags-to-riches stories.”

Maurice crossed his legs and settled back in the chair, mighty pleased with himself. A smug and contentious smile was glued to his thin lips. He unbuttoned his leather jacket, revealing an older-model Colt automatic in a nylon-mesh shoulder holster. He stifled a bored fake-yawn. “You should consider the money you gave me as an investment that’s still in progress.”

I didn’t know who Horatio Alger was and I didn’t care. At my grandma’s house, we only read the television guide, a paperback book of collected stories by Alexander Pushkin, Bernard Malamud’s novels, the earlier work of Cynthia Ozick, and anything by I. J. Singer. Maurice noticed the poisoned grooves around my mouth and eyes, how the hate on my face made me pale. He said, “What’s with the twerp?”

Bobo offered our nemesis an explanation. “Doojie’s upset because you won’t pay us.”

Maurice pulled out a five-dollar bill from his coat pocket, crumpled the note into a ball, and tossed it at me. The five spot caromed off my head and fell to the floor. My pride was so far gone, I had to stop myself from getting on my knees and taking it. Maurice snorted at me, “What? You don’t want it? Give it back, then.”

He bent over to retrieve his money, getting hinky and cursing
under his breath. I took the opportunity to exploit his distraction by reaching into his holster for the automatic. My reflexes were good and my fingers were nimble; you put those attributes next to an ice-cold rage, and I was unbeatable. I had my fingers wrapped around the Colt’s checkered plastic grips before he could stop me.

Eichmann enjoyed the interplay that accompanied the turn of events, and he applauded me. “Bravo! Well done, Doojie!”

Maurice, no less theatrical than his enemy, narrowed his eyes, and affected a tough guy’s speech pattern, slurring out of the side of his mouth, “Give me back my gun!”

The price of punishing him for his bad manners wasn’t worth going to jail for. Maurice misinterpreted my resignation as an act of submission. His baby face lit up, regaining its peachiness. “That’s more like it,” he snickered, getting smart-alecky. “You ain’t got the balls to hurt me.” He got up from the chair and brushed a speck of lint from his red leather jacket, surveying the three of us. Then he snapped his fingers at me like I was his servant. “Give me the pistol.”

He’d stretched my patience as far as it could go without tearing. I pulled the trigger, and a bullet flowered out of the Colt’s muzzle with an orange burst. It zipped by Maurice’s ear, ricocheting off the floor, then up into the rafters, shaking the cobwebs. Dust fell on all of us, causing Bobo to sneeze. Maurice spun around like a top, flinging his arms in the air, mewling, “Don’t kill me!”

Eichmann took advantage of the commotion by slugging our guest in the ribs to pacify him. “Horatio Alger, huh?” A bleary-faced Maurice doubled up and landed on his side, winded. He wretched once, then collapsed into a fit of prolonged tubercular coughing. Eichmann squatted alongside him, relieving our foe of his Kenneth Cole boots, his silk Versace socks, and his cash. He briskly counted the money, yipping, “I’ll be damned!
Look at this! Maurice has a hundred and ten bucks here!”

We didn’t discuss the backlash that would come from running off with Roy’s pound. We were being vigilant, but nothing had happened. Perhaps Roy was one of those Pacific Heights people who had so much surplus cash, he was dealing drugs to do something risqué. If he got his hands bloody, he’d move on to another sport, something less demanding, such as windsurfing. Eichmann had his calculator out on the kitchen table and he was hitting the buttons, tallying the numbers. He said to me with a concentrated intensity that could fry an egg, “We’ve got to sell this dope like pronto.” Then he proclaimed with no uncertain wisdom, “If we sell these bags at seventy-five apiece, that’s some beaucoup money. Are you ready for this?”