Breakers (11 page)

He switched lanes, peeled down an offramp. Two- and three-story apartments crowded the lots. Silhouetted men crouched on stoops, metal glinting in their hands. In an Albertsons parking lot, people slept on rows of cots under plastic tarps, attended to by men in masks and white coats. While Bill idled at a light, a man pulled a windowless van into the lot, hopped out, and snapped a pair of rubber gloves past his wrists.

Bill whistled. "Be grateful you live in your little beach world, kid."

"What's going on out here?"

"If some too-big-for-its-britches flu can kill fifty million people before we put a monkey into space, why can't its great-great grandson take out a billion?"

Sirens bayed. Raymond gripped the camera in his lap. A cop car tore down the boulevard, whooshing through the intersection. The light changed and they rolled on. Chain link fences bordered weedy lots. Smashed windows gaped from storefronts, some covered by taped-down tarps. Garbage spilled from corner bins. Upstreet, a man jogged across the empty lanes.

Bill swerved around a burnt-down couch, cursing under his breath. Debris caltropped the outer lane, toppled chairs and busted bottles and sharded plates, funneling the car to the turn lane. Ahead, a metal gate stretched across the middle of the road.

"What the hell is this?" Bill slowed. Beyond the gate, a man in a leather jacket stood with his feet apart, a rifle angled over his shoulder. "You got your piece?"

Raymond touched the bulge in his waistband. "Maybe we should turn around."

"Hang on. Stay frosty."

The car rocked to a stop. The man strode around the gate, keeping the rifle shouldered, and approached the driver's side. From five feet away, he bent at the waist and rolled his hand in the air. Bill cracked the window a couple inches.

"What's up?"

The man leaned closer. "What's your business in the neighborhood?"

"My business?" Bill cocked his head. "I got a delivery for one of your villagers, man."

"Who you going to see?"

"I'm just a pizza boy, I'm not the Godfather. I got his address."

The man glanced past the gate while Bill recited their destination. He nodded absently. "You get in and you get out. Any problems, don't expect to leave."

He strolled toward the gate. A radio crackled on his hip. He mumbled into it, eyeing the car, and swung the gate back with a rusty creak. Bill edged forward. Raymond smelled smoke. Two blocks on, a bonfire gushed flame and smoke in an empty lot to their right. Beside it, two men with white rags over their mouths swung a long, heavy bag between them, building momentum, then chucked it into the fire and stumbled back. Plastic melted away. An arm flopped between the timbers. The men walked to a pickup with its tailgate down and hauled another body off the bed.

Bill leaned forward and squinted through the tinted glass. "Should be that apartment block up there."

"You mean the one with the skull and crossbones spraypainted on the doors?"

"That's the one." Men watched from the opposite sidewalk as they pulled into the lot. Bill let the car idle, glancing front and back. "This is a dumbass plan. Just
sitting
."

"Repeat after me: twelve bucks an hour. Twelve bucks an hour."

"Take this shit for ourselves. Find some palace on a lonely Mexican hilltop until this thing goes away."

Raymond unbuckled his seatbelt. "Why haven't you left town?"

Bill shrugged his big shoulders. "Where am I going to go? At least here I know my way around."

A man walked out from behind the apartment block, hands in his jean pockets, shoulders drawn tight. Raymond sat upright. "Suppose that's him?"

"See if he responds to Murckle's Bat Signal." Bill flashed the headlights, twice short, once long. The man bobbed forward and leaned down to the window, toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah what?" Bill said.

"You my guys?"

"Guess so. Stuff's in the—"

Raymond elbowed Bill in the ribs. "He wasn't supposed to speak to us."

Across the street, a man hollered, "Don't you open that door! You keep your sickness in there!"

"What?" Bill said.

"He's supposed to go straight to the trunk," Raymond said. "That's the routine."

"We got a problem?" the man with the toothpick said.

From the apartment stoop, an old man with a crown of white hair waved his fist at a small crowd that had pulled up in the middle of the street at a safe distance from the plague-house. The man gritted his teeth and took a gingerly step toward them.

"Not another step, old man!"

"What did you say your name was?" Bill said to the man beyond the window, one hand drifting toward his waistband.

The toothpick-chewing man beat him to it. The streetlamps gleamed on the sight of his black semiauto pointed at Bill's face. "It's Mister Hand Over Your Fucking Shit."

Raymond's heart roared. Bill slowly raised his hands. "It's cool, man. Stuff's in the trunk."

"So open it before I open your skull."

"I have to reach for the button. Be cool."

Flame sparked from the street. Two men jogged toward the old man, burning bottles in hand, and slung them through the ground-floor windows. With a deep whoomp, fire blossomed inside, lighting the faces of those in the street. The man with the toothpick flinched, glancing toward the flames. Bill swept out his own pistol. The window shattered; three ear-cracking bangs roared from the gun. Raymond smelled spent gunpowder. Beyond the broken window, the man with the toothpick stumbled back, air leaving his lungs in compressive grunts, and dropped to the grimy asphalt.

From a dark window on the third floor, a gun flashed and popped. The people in the street screamed and scattered. Two retreated in a crouch, going for guns, firing back. Smoke gushed from the downstairs windows. A young couple piled out the front door dragging two young girls behind them, their free hands pressing bloody handkerchiefs to their mouths. Gunfire erupted from the far sidewalk, pummeling the family down in the doorway.

"What the
fuck
," Bill said.

"Go!" Raymond found his revolver. His hand shook too hard to aim. The car jolted backwards, tires whining. Something ripped into the rear door with a great metal clunk. "They're shooting at us!"

"Get your fucking head down."

Glass sprayed inward from the rear window. In the street, a young man in a white wifebeater went down hard, spurting blood. The car chunked over the curb, jolting Raymond's spine. Smoke clogged the street, lit by irregular flashes of gunshots, pierced by screams and sobs. Bill tore down the middle lane. Before the gate, he swung right, hunched over the wheel, hunting for an unblocked route back to the freeway. Beyond terse directions, neither of them spoke until they were back on the wide empty lanes.

"I am not one to pass judgment lightly," Bill said, knuckles clinching the wheel, "but
fuck
that."

"That was crazy. That was more East Berlin than East LA."

"I'll tell you this. Murckle's smarter than he looks. He saw the writing on the wall."

Raymond shoved the revolver back in his waistband. The cold metal stung his skin. He wanted suddenly to be away from it, to pitch it out the window. He'd been pretending at this for reasons he didn't completely understand—as if he needed to prove he could be as scary as the world was quickly becoming—but now all he wanted was to be home.

"I'm not coming in tomorrow. I'm not a guy who shoots people. I thought I could do it to protect myself, but that family on the stairs—"

"I am a man who'll shoot a man, and
none
of us are coming in tomorrow." Bill wiped sweat from his chin, glaring past the steering wheel.

Raymond leaned his elbows on the glove box. "I just need the money so bad."

"You got a family?"

"A wife. We're about to go under."

"We'll get paid. This is no time to be broke."

Raymond sat back and took a long breath. "What about you? You got a family?"

"Yeah. I got someone."

"She's lucky."

"And jealous," Bill grinned. "So don't start crying on me. Those types can smell the tears, you know."

They flew down the barren freeway. The meaning of the violence at the apartments eluded Raymond, as half-glimpsed as the dim cars left along the sides of the roads. And who decided to walk away from their cars mid-freeway? Had their drivers left them in the midst of a jam to be hauled off the road by the city? Where had all the passengers gone—the sunset? Had some of them died, coughing and puking, blood dribbling from their tear ducts, behind the wheel? There was no longer any sense that Raymond could see.

But sense was what you made it. That was the lesson of life, repeated in every tragedy, every windfall, every mystery of a long-lost city or a whale washed on the beach. He would get his money. If Mia was the only thing that mattered, the only plan that made sense was to go home to her and stay with her until things got better.

On the PCH, he could smell the sea blowing in through the empty window. Bill snaked up the steep cliffside to Murckle's estate. From inside the control room, Craig rolled open the gate, then met them at the door. One look at Bill and he cocked his big stubbly head.

"What happened out there?"

Bill glanced upstairs. "Where's Murckle?"

"Out. With Hu."

"Establishing an alibi." Bill bared his teeth. "Murckle's slinging."

Craig snorted. "He's a fucking Hollywood hack."

"You think that makes him
less
likely to be in the shit?"

Craig leaned forward, brow beetling, and sniffed Bill's shirt. "You fired a gun."

"Damn right. I'd be dead if I hadn't." In quick, specific strokes, he relayed the relevant details, starting from Raymond's trip to the Torrance parking lot, where he discovered he was couriering drugs, to their eastside delivery-turned-battle. Craig paced the room, face red as raw steak. By the end, his hands dangled by his side, still as a dog that's heard a distant bark, his back turned, ears burning, a vein squiggling on his neck.

"Still got your piece?" he said softly.

Bill nodded. "Going to need to ditch it, though. Murder weapon."

"You." Craig jammed a thick finger at Raymond. "Get up to the control room."

Raymond glanced at Bill. "What's going on?"

"Shut it off. All of it. Cameras, alarms. I want this house as dumb as a dropped baby."

"I'm about to be involved in a crime. How about you at least let me know what it is?"

Craig stepped so close Raymond could smell the musk of his skin. "Heavy burglary and vandalism, all right? Now get your fucking ass upstairs."

Raymond jogged up the cushily carpeted stairs and installed himself in the sterility of the control room. Things were happening too fast again. As fast as the looting at the grocery store, the shootout at the apartments. His fingers pounded the keyboard, shutting down cameras. The screens winked off one by one. He unplugged what he could, then wiped the keys down with the hem of his shirt and ran to the landing. In the foyer, Bill tapped his palm while Craig shook his head, skin bulging on the back of his neck.

"Cameras are down," Raymond said. "Still don't know how to shut off the alarm."

"It's okay," Bill waved. "We'll be out before they're back."

Craig strode straight for the paintings, shoes thumping tile. He yanked the frames from the walls, spraying paint and plaster, tiny nails clicking off into corners, and leaned the pieces beside the front doors. Bill hefted a bronze statue of a stylized penguin and set it in the foyer with a tile-chipping clunk. He raised his black brows at Raymond at the top of the stairs.

"Come on, kid. Steal till you can't steal no more."

On moving to the house in Redondo, Raymond had imagined he'd be able to build a fat financial cushion selling off his mom's old things. After a few weeks of cleaning, sorting, and combing the internet, he sold a box of long-limbed, creepy-eyed boudoir dolls for $100. Drunk with Mia, he'd rifled the silverware drawers, peering at the backs of his grandmother's Depression-era spoons and forks for the names of their manufacturers, grinning like a fool when he found the silver alone was worth thousands, that a set of the right sterling could hold them afloat for a good six months. The next morning, he called an antiques dealer. Scheduled a visit later in the week. Inside their living room, the dealer pursed his lips, mustache fluffing, and told him it was nothing but plate.

In the house of Kevin Murckle, Hollywood producer, drug-runner, Raymond went straight for the kitchen.

The silverware disappeared into his double-layered trash bags with an avalanche of screeching metal. He twisted the bags' necks, tied them off, walked them up front. Craig and Bill lifted the flatscreen from the wall, sweat beading their brows, and deposited it by the door. Raymond bounced upstairs, heart racing, and opened Murckle's bedroom door.

He could hear the breakers curling in the dark, their breath-like advance and retreat on the rocks below the cliff. He clicked on the light. The bed was a round red lozenge, maroon silk sheets puddled at its foot. Bamboo shades covered the windows, flanked by vents that let in the smell of salt and seaweed. In the teak dresser, Raymond found gold watches that weighed as much as his foot. Small gem ear studs. Rings of a strange deep silver. He stepped back, pockets sagging. Was it okay for him to take this just because Murckle was an asshole? Amendment: an asshole who owed him money. And had put his freedom and life at risk without informing him of those risks. Too, some unknown quantity of the man's money was earned through drug sales. Like Raymond's dad had said, when you try to take advantage of someone, you open yourself up to be taken advantage of.

He rubbed three of the five rings off on his shirt, returned them to the drawer. Replaced all but one of the watches. His pockets felt lighter.

A man shouted from downstairs.

Craig and Bill held guns on Murckle and Hu. Around them, the foyer and front room were piled with paintings, electronics, statues, upturned cushions, toppled chairs, bunched rugs, strewn papers.