Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [26]
Esmeralda did not fire.
Cravitz cracked her stiffly across the jaw. Athena Powers dropped like a stone, through the clouds of golden dust.
“Baby, can’t you save me?” Athena said to Cravitz thirty minutes later as two uniforms led her out to the police van.
“Fresh outta love, boo,” Cravitz answered.
Athena kissed him tenderly on the lips. “You’ll never get me outta your mind.”
“Simone,” Cravitz said.
“How can you do this to me?”
“It’s a gift,” Cravitz said.
That night Cravitz’s dreams were restless reenactments of the murder scene. He imagined his old friend sleeping peacefully on the bed, Esmeralda nearby, Athena working the murdering minds of the Flo Boyz like marionettes, easing them fretfully through the night. His vow of a good deed had failed.
The following morning, before Yippie’s funeral, Cravitz drove to St. Benedict’s. There was one penitent there, an old woman bending over her rosary before the altar in a frayed frock and shawl. A tattered handbag sat on the pew beside her. The pair prayed in silence. Cravitz ruefully promised St.
Benedict that on his next birthday he’d do better with his good deed.
When he was finished, Cravitz stole quietly near where the old woman kneeled and dropped a $100 bill atop her ragged purse. On his way out, he scribbled the name Ramon Calzone onto a Central Detection envelope. In it he placed a tithe of five $1,000 bills and slid it into the collection box.
MIDNIGHT IN SILICON ALLEY
BY DENISE HAMILTON
San Marino
They caught up with Russell Chen as he drove home from work, running his Lexus off the frontage road by the gravel pits of Irwindale. There were four of them, wearing reflective sunglasses and trucker caps pulled low, and for one terrified moment Chen though they meant to jack the car, kill him, and throw his body on the gray mountains of slag.
When they shoved him into a Lincoln with tinted windows, his sphincter almost let go with relief. Then fear throbbed anew as he considered the endgame. The bleakness of his situation mirrored the landscape: industrial parks rising like toadstools from the desecrated earth. In the rearview mirror, Chen watched his computer chip factory shrink to a snowball panorama, then disappear.
“The captured pigeon trembles with fright,” the man in the front passenger seat said in Chinese. He craned his head and laughed uproariously to see Chen squashed between two thugs wearing cheap ties and wool-blend jackets. One of the thugs held a gun to his ribs.
The laughing man was the boss. For weeks his people had shadowed Chen, watching him kiss his wife and children goodbye each morning, clocking his drive to work. Children were good, they liked that and took note. In the evening they watched it all in reverse as Chen’s car left the parking slot that read, Reserved for CEO. The gang had their mole inside too, a low-level employee who kept to himself, ate Hunan takeout each day from the same strip-mall restaurant on Garvey, and gave his fortune cookie away because he already knew the score. The mole had sketched out the factory layout, marking the doors and the alarm system and explaining how many seconds they’d have to disable it. They had the map with them now, singed brown where ash from the mole’s cigarette had fallen as he drew.
Yes, the boss had been patient. And thorough. He knew all about the garden apartment in Arcadia where Chen stashed his mistress and their newborn son. But he’d been surprised to discover the brothel that Chen visited each Friday noon, tucked inside a tract home in South San Gabriel where the scorched lawn fought a losing battle against the sun and polyester lace curtains stayed permanently drawn. He’d dispatched a man to pay the fee and climb the stairs to the rooms where a sad-eyed Mainland teen sat behind every door, brushing her hair and gargling with an industrial bottle of mouthwash she kept next to her Hong Kong magazines, baby wipes, K-Y jelly, and condoms.