A second passed. Then two more. For whatever reason the Mexican didn't shoot him. The hubbub subsided and was forgotten when the stranger disembarked from the bus at the next stop just as Lonely Boy boarded the tram by himself.
The
vato loco
was wearing a Dallas Cowboys warm-up jacket, a dark blue baseball hat sat on his shaved head and a filigreed crucifix hung from a twenty-inch gold chain around his neck. He recognized Durrutti and greeted him with a jiggle of his chin, then bounded into the seat across from him.
The bus spurted through the green light at Duboce and rolled up Mission Street, braking for a cop car. A fire engine swerved around the corner onto Fifteenth Street pealing its bells. Next to the Fida Market a band of crack hippies bungee-corded their shopping carts together, building a fortified kraal for the afternoon.
Durrutti said to Lonely Boy, “I've been hearing things about you.”
The
loco
crossed his arms and pulled the baseball cap over his runny nose, hiding his eyes. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. “Who you talking to? Me? Are you sure you even know me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“So?”
“So what about it.”
“What about what?”
“You smoking the cop. That sort of stuff.”
A nerve on Lonely Boy's cheek twitched like someone had set off a firecracker under it. His mouth froze with
tristeza,
the sickness of sadness. He flared his nostrils and said, “The hell. Who's saying that? Because it ain't fucking true. What the fuck would I do that for? It's bad for business.”
“Certain people are saying it.”
Lonely Boy laughed without pleasure. “People always talk. You see this?” He gestured out the window to Mission Street and Walgreen's Drugstore, the Yangtze Market and the Krishna Hotel. “This is it. The
locos
. The
viejos
with no homes. The dead palm trees.
Mira,
it's mine. Ain't no two ways about it. The fucking cops will have to bury me before they can have it.
Chinga los puercos.
But you know
what? It ain't got nothing to do with you so stay the fuck out of it, okay?”
The warning was explicit. Durrutti pretended he hadn't heard it. “I wish. But the police are twisting my arm about it. They ain't gonna let go of this and like I said, people are talking.”
“You-you-you mean that Jimmy Ramirez, don't you?” Lonely Boy stuttered with fury. “Admit it. The fucking little parrot. He's the one, ain't he?”
Lonely Boy was distaught. He adjusted the bill on his baseball hat and said, “Man, that dude is a looking for a bruising. You act like a friend to him and you get reamed in the booty. You know that car of his? He's been going around ripping off parts for it. He's big into hubcaps. The steering wheel he used to have in his Chevy, all tired and worthless and shit? He got himself a new chrome suicide wheel. The only thing is, the
puto
stole it from my brother-in-law's garage.”
Durrutti's heart bulldozed into his mouth. He put one and one together. Jimmy wasn't in the East Bay. He was in San Francisco. The jolt of unexpected information gave him a boost. “Jimmy's here? In the Mission? I thought he was in Oakland.”
“No way. Oakland?” Lonely Boy was dubious. “What's that fool gonna do over there? It's too far from home. Ain't no action for him, no scene. The
pendejo
has been hanging out in a garage on Bryant Street working on that
pinche
Chevy of his. That's how I know, because my brother-in-law was renting out the space next to him.”
A light bulb went on in Durrutti's sleek head. Bryant
Street was a ten minute walk from where he was. He could be over there in a jiffy. It was too good to believe. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Who? Jimmy or my brother-in-law?”
“Jimmy, goddamn it.”
“You mean, like now?”
“Yeah, right now.”
Lonely Boy rewarded him with a wince. “What's with the tension? How would I know that? I just woke up. I ain't even had no coffee yet.”
The news changed Durrutti's plans and saved him money. If Jimmy was in the Mission, then he didn't have to cough up the change to take the AC bus to Oakland to find him. This was a minor breakthrough. One that he reveled in. The likelihood of tracking down the Mexican had greatly increased. The percentages were in his favor.
“You know, I've been hearing shit about you, too,” Lonely Boy said with a forced laugh. “Weird things.”
The rapid shift in the
vato's
tone had Durrutti on edge. Not only was he reluctant to talk about himelf, he also detected an undertow in Lonely Boy's laugh. A subterranean wash that spelled trouble. “Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“You know that Fleeta Bolton?”
One of Durrutti's talents was lying at the wrong moment. It was algebraâhe could do the math, but couldn't get the solution to the problem. Like the truth, dishonesty only worked when you had a motive and a strategy. “No, not really.”
Lonely Boy didn't swallow the fib and he didn't reject
it. He left it where it was. “You sure? I thought you said you knew him. He says he knows you.”
“Maybe he does. I get around. It don't mean I know him.”
Lonely Boy pondered the riddle. He chewed the nails on both hands. The bus stopped again and emptied out on its way toward Hunt's Donuts. “Well, that Fleeta, he was at a party we had on Shotwell. We had us some
carne
on the grill and we were in the backyard, you know, with a kegger and some dynamite
mota
from Texas. My mom was in the kitchen helping out my girlfriend Spooky and the others. Everything was laid back.
“All of a sudden Fleeta comes barging in with this funky looking white lady. She was dressed like a probation officer. Got the polyester pants. The blouse with the flowers on it. The Gap blazer. The brown shoes. The twenty dollar perm. She steps in the house, the whole vibe changes. People be looking to see if she's got handcuffs with her. And she was loud like a hurricane, just sucked the atmosphere up. Fleeta was no better. He helped himself to the beer and smoked all the weed we had. Got all red-eyed and talked too much. Then he started coming on with this shit about you.”
Durrutti was instantly worried. The lackadaisical sing-song pitch in Lonely Boy's voice was leading up to something he didn't want to know about. Namely himself. “He was talking about me?”
“You the one. Goddamn right about that.”
“He say why?”
“Yeah, well, first Fleeta's lady starts up. She asks me
if I know you. We're all standing around the keg and she's got these blue eyes. I say to her, who are you? She says, I'm Sugar. I go, whoa. Everybody was looking at her. Spooky didn't like it because she's getting real pregnant. Fleeta says to me, you know Durrutti? I tell him, uh huh. That let him know, I might know you. Then again, I might not. He say, you and this other white dude robbed somebody.”
Durrutti gazed at Lonely Boy as the bus alighted to a stop on Eighteenth Street next to the New Mission Cafeteria and the Wang Fat Fish Market. That Fleeta was spreading rumors about him robbing Ephraim Rook, this was deplorable. That Sugar was involved made Durrutti a little mad. Maimonides wouldn't be happy when he heard it. He said to Lonely Boy, “I don't know what this Fleeta guy is talking about. I'm not even sure if I know him anyway.”
“The
chica,
what's her name, Sugar?” Lonely Boy chittered. “What a
loca
. She said the guy you robbed was someone close to her. Someone she loved. She was in tears. There we were drinking beer, kicking it and toking up and eating
carne.
But her shit? It made my homies nervous, this white broad freaking out in the backyard. Nobody talked to her or nothing. You know this chick?”
“Who?”
“Don't be an owl. I'm talking about this here Sugar.”
Durrutti thought about the day he was born and wished it had never happened. He deadpanned, “I've never heard of her.”
Aside from the driver, Durrutti and Lonely Boy were the last two passengers on the bus. The marquee of Hunt's
Donuts was visible in the distant smogged out haze. Lonely Boy went, “No? She was like you guys had fucked or something. You know, she had that signature on her face.”
“What's that?”
Lonely Boy lamented for his naivete. “You dumb shit, like a woman who's been with a man. It's an imprint. You don't know this?”
What Durrutti knew was none of Lonely Boy's business. Sugar had never been touched that deeply by him. When he'd held her in his arms, she discussed the weather. How hot it was in Texas and how cold it got in Minnesota. She said springtime in Maine was muggy. When they had sex, she kept her eyes shut. Always somewhere else with her fantasies and her emotions, even when she was climaxing.
“She was saying things,” Lonely Boy continued. “How you come across friendly, but it ain't real. That you're just fronting. Because you ain't deep. And how you never had no money when you was with her.”
“She said that? I don't even know her. What's she look like?”
Lonely Boy was succinct. “Like a white girl. Even if I was into caucasian women, which I ain't, she would not be my first choice. You seen that bumper sticker, the one that says, âJesus loves you: everybody else thinks you're an asshole.' That's how she made me feel. But the one to watch out for is Fleeta. He kept talking about the cash you guys got from robbing that dude. The more beer he drank, the better he made it sound. I could tell he was interested. He got me interested too.”
“You?”
“Fleeta wanted to find you and ask you about the money.” Lonely Boy reached across the aisle and gave Durrutti a resounding whack on the thigh with the palm of his hand. A blow which left the Jew wondering if his leg was broken. “But I got to you first.”
Blinking through the pain, Durrutti grinned crookedly at Lonely Boy. His blood was singing with delight. His nerves were undiluted jazz. How he loved to lie. There was nothing in the world sweeter than prevarication. It was a healing elixir. He said, “There ain't no cash, man. I didn't commit no robbery. People are bullshitting you. You think if I had money, I'd be riding this fucking bus? I'd be in a limo and you'd be with me.”
Lonely Boy gave him a stare which could have reduced the walls of Jericho to rubble. Dishonesty was a cardinal sin in his book. Homicide was written all over his aggrieved face. “Swear?”
Better Durrutti should croak than tell Lonely Boy about the money. Better he should commit hari-kari with a pencil. He stared him in the eye and said, “I swear on a stack of Bibles.”
The declaration placated Lonely Boy. He turned his baseball hat backwards on his head. “Good. And you know the thing about the cops? That killing?”
Durrutti's stomach dropped through the floor. “Yeah?”
“Just forget about it. It's under control. Everything's been taken care of.”
How he said it made Durrutti believe the opposite. He was dreaming of Kulak even when he wasn't sleeping.
Lonely Boy said no more and made it obvious that was all he was going to say. He scrooched deeper into his warm-up jacket as the bus tore through a red light and hiccuped to a stop at Twentieth Street by Hunt's Donuts. He uncoiled from his seat. “This is where I get off,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-one
H
ordes of blackbirds glided over Mission Street toward San Bruno Mountain all day long, flying into the polluted brown clouds south of the city. It was an omen. Five days had come and gone since the robbery. Durrutti wasn't unduly surprised when Ephraim Rook came into Hunt's Donuts that same night to retrieve his money.
Ephraim was dressed in his second-best suit, a plum-shaded Armani outfit. His orangeade hair had an icy patina. To give himself street cred, Rook wore a black Hanes pocket T-shirt under the suit. A pair of brown patent leather English jodhpur boots rounded off the ensemble.
If Ephraim's entrance was supposed to be a commando raid, nobody could see the gimmick. The accountant was on his own and he wasn't even carrying a weapon. Rook leaned against the grungy front counter and cased the bakery with a neutral glance, taking in the Salvadoreños, the potted plants and the cigarette burns on the linoleum floor. He purchased a doughnut and a cup of coffee, thanked the cashier and tipped him with a twenty, which was Ephraim's superior way of telling you how prosperous he was.
Rook sauntered toward Maimonides and Durrutti,
who were sitting off to one side. He made like he didn't know they were near him. He was feeling wrathful and insecure and didn't want to get into a brawl. He just wanted the money.
Maimonides said, “Now we get to observe Ephraim in action. This will be a treat.”
Their archenemy stopped three feet way from their table and gobbled his doughnut. He scrunched his face, directing a peevish remark at them. “For crying out loud, what do they put in these things? This ain't no doughnut. This is a goddamn piece of cardboard. You can't get fresh ingredients in nothing these days. Fuck me, what's the world coming to?”
Maimonides was content to let his clothes speak for him. His Florsheims were burnished to a brilliant purplish finish. His hair was washed and gelled. His face was shaved and powdered. Ephraim's Gucci fit him like a gloveâhe'd paid a tailor on Twenty-second Street to alter the suit's waist and sleeves. He made an elaborate show of ignoring Rook and said to Durrutti, “Do you know this guy who's talking? I've never seen him before in my life. Tell him it's a lovely night. Tell him to go walk off a pier.”
Ephraim Rook uncannily duplicated Maimonides's utterances note for note. “Oh, yeah? Tell him to eat his heart out. This guy wants to have a discussion, you schmuck. So don't be rude. You'll live to regret it. Enough trouble you have, believe me, I know.”