Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [1]
We got off the freeway around Vermont and Manchester and headed west to the Mariposa address. I checked the repo order: a 1978 Chrysler Cordoba, loaded. $185 a month. License number CTL 412. Irwin turned north on Mariposa, and in a few minutes we were at the 6300 block, I fished out my master keys and detached the ’78 Chrysler’s. 6318 was a two-story pink stucco multi-unit dump, ultra-modern twenty years ago, with side entrances, and an ugly schematic flamingo in black metal on the wall facing the street. The garage was subterranean, running back the whole length of the building.
Irwin parked in front. I handed him the original of the repo order and tucked the carbon into my back pocket. “You know the drill, Irwin. Stand by your car, whistle once if anyone enters the garage, twice if the fuzz show up. Be prepared to explain what I’m doing. Hold on to the repo order.” Irwin knows the procedure as well as I do, but even after five years of legalized ripoffs, the whole deal still makes me nervous, and I repeat the instructions for luck. Strange things can happen, have happened, and the L.A.P.D. is notoriously trigger-happy. Having been one of them, I know.
I dropped down into the garage. I expected it to be dark, but the morning sunshine reflecting off the windows of the adjacent apartments provided plenty of light. When I spotted CTL 412, the third car from the end, I started to laugh. Cal Myers was going to shit. Leotis McCarver was undoubtedly black, but his car was a full dress taco wagon: chopped, channeled, lowered, with a candy apple, lime-green paint job with orange and yellow flames covering the hood and sweeping halfway back over the sides of the vehicle. Black enamel script over the rear wheel wells announced that this was the “Dragon Wagon.” I got out my master key and opened it. The interior was just as esoteric: fuzzy black and white zebra-striped upholstery, pink velveteen dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, and a furry orange accelerator pedal in the shape of a naked foot. The customizing must have cost old Leotis a fortune.
I was still laughing when I heard the scrape of a footstep off to my left near the back end of the garage. I turned and saw a black man almost as big as I am striding toward me. There was no time to avoid a confrontation. When he was ten feet away, he screamed “Motherfucker” and charged me. I was in the walkway now, and just before he made contact I sidestepped and tripped him with a kick at his knee. As he struggled to get to his feet I kicked him once in the face, once in the neck, and once in the groin. He was moaning and spitting out teeth.
I dragged him over between two cars near the back of the garage and patted him down for weapons. Nothing. I left him there, got into his chariot, and pulled out onto Mariposa. Irwin was still standing there by his car, as if nothing had happened. “He tried to jump me, and I waxed him. Get out of here. Tomorrow, same time, my place.” Irwin turned pale. This was the first time anything like this had happened. “Didn’t you hear anything?” I yelled. I jammed on the gas, peeling rubber.
I looked in the fur-bordered rear-view mirror. Irwin was just starting to get into his car. He looked like he was trembling. I hoped he wouldn’t quit me.
I turned left on Slauson and right on Western, half a mile later. I had been driving for five minutes or so when I discovered that I was trembling. It got worse, so bad that I could hardly hold the wheel steady. Then I felt my stomach start to churn and turn over. I pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store, got out, and vomited on the pavement until my stomach and lungs ached. My vomit tasted like coffee and sugar and fear. After a few minutes I started to calm down. A group of gangly black youths lounging against the liquor store wall and passing around a bottle of cheap wine had watched the whole scene, laughing at me like I was some