Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [58]
Danny took to greeting everyone, all the time, with an angry gaze and found himself losing his patience for the routine and rhythms of the school day. By late morning, he was already squirming in his seat, daydreaming about fistfights, doodling pictures of fanciful weapons. On the bus home, he looked at the other passengers and wondered which one would challenge him, and how he would strike back with balled-up fists and kicks. He always won these imaginary fisticuffs, standing triumphantly over his bleeding adversaries. Finally, and without any good reason, he found his real-life self decking a tenth-grader named Pedro Carrillo in the cafeteria. The guy ran off, sobbing, and for the first time in his life Danny felt like a stupid bully.
In the days that followed, Pedro walked around the school with one eye swimming in a purple cloud of cracked veins. The word on campus was that there would be a settling of accounts with Pedro’s older brothers, a portly senior and even more portly dropout who held court several hours each day in front of a tattoo parlor on Vine Street, next to the star on the Walk of Fame honoring Rin Tin Tin. It was said that one of the Carrillo brothers would jump Danny on the football field during PE, or ambush him in the cafeteria, or that the other would shoot him on Wilton Place after he stepped off the bus. Danny was one young man against three brothers. Asking Elliot for a gun to even the odds seemed like the logical thing to do. Elliot produced one two days later, a snub revolver that bore no resemblance to the sleek weapon Danny had shot himself with. “I got it from a guy on Western, a guy my brothers told me about.”
Danny was headed home one Friday, walking past the elementary school, walking almost at a trot because he was going to pick up Sandra and take her to his room, when something cut past his ear. A half second later he heard the unmistakable report of a gun. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, looking up to see the largest of the Carrillo brothers walking toward him from across the street, a gun at his side, trying his best to assume the fierce and demented look of an actor shooting his way through an R-rated thriller. Danny stood up, quickly grabbed his own weapon from his backpack, and pointed it at Pedro’s brother, stopping him in his tracks. For a moment, the two gunslingers looked at each other with childlike befuddlement. Then Danny began firing, squinting his eyes against the explosions of his gun. Pedro’s brother started running, across the street and into the construction site, where he jumped into a ditch lined with metal rebar. From just a few paces away, Danny fired again, not squinting so much now and sure he would hit his target, but instead he felt a burning pain in his back. He fell, as stiff and heavy as a downed tree, and plopped down into a pile of earth, face first. A woman screamed from across the street. Pedro’s brother moaned from the ditch, calling out, “You shot me, you shot me,” in a pleading voice that seemed to belong to a five-year-old. Danny moved his head, an act of will against the currents of pain that ran up and down his spine, and looked into a deep hole carved into the soil. He saw chunks of mud floating about a pool of black water, and wanted to cry because he knew he would be buried soon, dressed forever in wet earth.
The daylight around him dissolved quickly. He entered a self-conscious dream, lifting himself from the ground and beginning to run through a dark corridor, stumbling toward home and his room, to the bed his mother always made for him. If he could lose himself under the blankets, his mother would kiss him goodnight. The dream ended and he was vaguely aware