Police and Thieves: A Novel (10 page)

“Oh, yeah. Doing what?”

“Routine stuff.”

“I want to know what you’re doing.”

“What’s the point?”

“Oh, you want the point? Really?”

“Really.”

“Doojie’s in trouble with the fucking narcs. Business is falling off, and I haven’t seen your ass in nearly a week. What’s going on? I thought we were in this together!”

“Ain’t nothing going on. You just think with every damn
problem you’ve got, everyone’s in it with you.”

“Where’s your loyalty to me?”

“It’s where it belongs … in my wallet.”

The insult was deliberate. Eichmann’s blood-mottled face registered Bobo’s taunt; his eyes were marinating in an acid rage. Bobo pulled on a brand-new Whole Earth Access down vest; it was a nice vest, costly. When he went café-hopping on Valencia Street, the women would love him in it. Eichmann spluttered, “You don’t give a shit about me, do you?”

Before Bobo had a chance to respond, Eichmann lashed out with his left hand, connecting with the Mexican’s chest, pushing him back a step. Then he socked Bobo again, landing a right-handed punch on the side of his chin. He shuffled his feet, waltzing on his toes, jabbing with his left hand, testing Bobo’s jaw. “C’mon,” Eichmann wheezed. “Let’s fight.” He lowered his head and charged, hitting Bobo in the solar plexus with a haymaker. Bobo just stood there with a sad, wise look in his eyes. Eichmann was practically in tears, sobbing, “Fight, goddamn it!”

He socked Bobo with both hands, trying to get the Mexican to join in. Eichmann’s knuckles were bloody; he kept smearing them against his shirt. “You fuckers just don’t understand! We’re going nowhere, nowhere!” He kicked Bobo once in the shin, then hit him in the balls.

“That’s enough!” Bobo yelled, and he gave Eichmann a resounding slap on the forehead, sending him tumbling to the floor. Eichmann landed on his back, knocking the wind out of himself. He turned green and rolled over on his side, gasping like a fish.

Bobo zipped up his vest and pulled a bandanna over his granulated forehead, then donned his sunglasses, making sure they were perched on his nose just right. He looked down at Eichmann and said with pity, “Let me tell you something. One, you need to relax.
Two, you’ve got to stop thinking about money, because you know, money ain’t shit.”

The fortune-teller had spoken, and all we could do was listen.

The price was high—six thousand dollars in used twenties for a pound of sinsemilla. I asked the dealer if I could bring Eichmann because he had the money; I was just the middle man setting things up. He said that was fine by him. When I got off the phone, I was elated. Nothing could bring me down; not the police, not the heat, and certainly not Eichmann.

Eichmann suggested we’d be safer walking on Mission rather than trying to skulk along Caledonia Alley or Capp Street. Whatever—I just didn’t want to run into Flaherty again. The narc reminded me of the crack hippies I saw partying in the loading dock of the laundry shop on Hoff Street, vampires living in a twilight zone of hunger. They’d hunker over their pipes and howl in a remorseless way that made me think they weren’t human anymore. Eichmann was as spooked as me; his skin was jeweled with drops of nervous perspiration. He’d been up most of the night smoking Marlboros and quarreling with Loretta, wrangling until daylight about moving out of the garage. She said they needed to improve their standard of living. He replied he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Doojie … you okay about doing this deal?”

I heard the doubt in Eichmann’s hoarse voice. It never occurred to me to ask whether I wanted to do something or not. I was an adherent of my grandmother’s doctrine of absolutism: Anything you did, it was because you had no other choice. By needing little or nothing, you saved yourself from loss. But I replied, “Yeah, I’m with the program. Aren’t you?”

“Shit, yeah. I was asking, that’s all.”

“But you sound all worried and stuff.”

“Naw, I got nerves of steel.”

“C’mon, give.”

“It ain’t that. It’s just that I didn’t get no sleep, what with Loretta and shit.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“You want to hear it?”

“I’ll listen if you want me to.”

“Aw, I don’t know. I can’t talk about it. That’d be weak.”

“Sure you can.”

“For real?”

“Go right ahead. You keep it inside, you’ll get ill.”

Eichmann sighed. “It’s like this: I got me a plan. You know what it is. I’m going to make me some money. I ain’t getting any younger wanting it. People tell me, oh, it can wait. You can do it later. Time is on your side. My ass, it is. Fuck, man, this is my time. If it ain’t going to happen now, it never will. But here comes Loretta. She’s got ambitions and she’s got an agenda. She wants me to do this and she wants me to do that. I want a house, she says. I ask her, what kind of house? She tells me she wants to rent a two-bedroom apartment. In San Francisco? It’s going to cost you three grand a month. How’s she going to come up with that kind of scratch? Me, that’s how. I don’t know … she’s got to let me do my thing. What she wants, it ain’t coming that fast. She wants everything. Every damn thing you can think of and she wants it right away. She wants furniture and it ain’t going to be no second-hand goods from Salvation Army, she says. She wants it new from Macy’s. She wants it shiny. You know her friend LaVerne?”

“No.”

“That girl lives down in Bayview and she drives a 1962 Oldsmobile. A total low-rider, hydraulics and everything. It must
be worth thirty thousand. Loretta says she’s got to have that, too. She doesn’t even know how to drive a car and she wants a museum piece like LaVerne has. Between you and me, Doojie, I may have to quit Loretta. I hardly know this chick, and just because we’re having sex, she’s talking about us getting a house somewhere. She’s going to bring out her sick grandma from Texas to live with us.”

“From Texas?”

“Ain’t that a bitch?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I am.”

“Uh … Loretta wants to be with you.”

“Say what?”

“She wants to get on solid ground and feel safe. She wants you to be there for her.”

“Ain’t she too young for that?”

“Not her. Who’s she got outside of you? Ask yourself that.”

“She’s got my aunt. That’s about all.”

“See what it’s coming down to?”

“I don’t like the sound of it. I hear the clink of a ball and chain in the background. I’ll give her some loving and some cash, but that’s all she’s going to get off me.”

Three weeks had gone by since we’d burned Roy. We’d almost forgotten about him. When you were constantly hustling, there were intervals of time, minutes, even hours, when you switched off your brain and went to automatic. We turned left on Twenty-second Street, passing the Wells Fargo Bank and Driscoll’s Comisky-Roche Mortuary and the Polish Club Hall. My new connection was a guy named Chad. We used to be friends before he went to design school in Rhode Island or wherever it was his parents sent him. Those were
the days when being poor was
en vogue
—Chad played the role to the hilt, then left town. We’d fallen out of touch and gone our separate ways. Now he was back in the neighborhood selling weed. Dope dealers came in many stripes and colors, but I never realized he was in the business. This was an oversight on my part, because I heard he was raking in the bucks.

It was just after one o’clock in the afternoon when we got to Chad’s York Street address. His home was a three-storied Edwardian boasting an ersatz-trendy pastel-blue-green paint job, a color scheme favored by landlords in the Mission. A late-model Saab was parked in the brick-paved driveway. A mandarin orange tree was planted in the front yard. If any house could deflate us, this was it. Eichmann squinched at a bougainvillea vine curling around the marble-topped porch steps. “What a place.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Fancy, huh?”

We stopped at a gold-painted wrought-iron gate. An ivory-carved doorbell was set into a recessed wall, and I pressed it. A second later, we were buzzed inside as Chad swung open a solid oak door and exclaimed, “Doojie! Little brother man! Long time, no see!”

I extended my hand and he slapped my palm. Somehow, it didn’t feel that great. The moment was supposed to be heightened by the thrill of our reunion, but it wasn’t. When I didn’t see someone for a long time, I had to get used to them again. I could see I wasn’t going to get used to Chad at all. He looked pretty much the same as he always did, barefoot in a tai-chi suit with his hair shaved to the scalp, a silver stud in his left earlobe. Chad backpedaled a couple of steps, taking in Eichmann’s fish-scaled complexion. “Who’s the homie?”

“This here is Eichmann. Eichmann, meet Chad.”

We were herded into a room that made my self-esteem drop another notch; it was five times bigger than our garage. The carpet was thick enough to leave an imprint in it like we were walking on sand in the French Riveria. Several unframed canvases hung from the whitewashed walls, paintings the size of a freeway billboard. One wall was dominated by a ten-foot-long leather couch that made Eichmann’s eyes goggle. Without waiting to be asked, he jumped on the cushions, happy as a pig in a mud wallow.

Negotiations for the weed had to begin with a dose of small talk. It wasn’t my forte, but for Chad’s sake, I did it: “It’s been foggy in the last week, huh?”

Chad smiled condescendingly and sat down on the couch with us. We made ourselves comfy, setting the stage for the next scene: Enter the dope. Chad pulled out a red sandstone pipe and stuffed it with an emerald-green bud frosted white with resin. Eichmann was studying our host with a hooded stare. “Nice house you got,” he said, and grinned meanly. Eichmann was so riddled with envy and self-hatred, the way he said it, I got the feeling he wanted to slight Chad with the compliment and take the skin off his back with it.

The dealer turned a deaf ear to him and said to me, “This weed? It comes from Kentucky.”

“Kentucky?”

“Ain’t that a trip? Out there in the boondocks near the federal prison at Lexington. The best weed in America.”

“Is it strong?”

“Like a bulldozer.”

We smoked the pipe, passing it around in a counterclockwise circle. The smoke made my lungs hurt as if I was breathing cyanide pellets in a gas chamber.

Eichmann was badgering Chad, asking him about the couch,
wanting to know if he could get one too. “You could have great sex on this thing. How much does it cost? Two thousand? Three thousand?”

Chad said, “You couldn’t afford it. You still want that weed?”

“The Kentucky sinse?”

“You want something else, it’ll cost you more.”

“Yeah, well, see … is the price six thousand for that pound?”

“That’s right.” Chad smiled again.

“Can we talk about it?” I asked.

“Talk about what?”

“The money. Eichmann here, all he’s got is fifty-five hundred. We overestimated how much cash we had. And even getting that was tough.”

“Didn’t I say six thousand on the phone?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’m sure I did.”

“Yeah, I bet you did, but can’t you help us out?”

“I can’t do that. This is business.”

“Not even for me?”

“Not in this lifetime, Doojie. You want the pound or not?”

Two years had passed since I’d last seen Chad, nearly seven hundred and thirty days. God only knew what he’d been doing with his time. The lunarscape of his face made him seem careworn. When he moved his hands, they made me think of mosquitoes, the kind that give you malaria. Before Eichmann could give him any attitude, I said, “We’ll take it.”

Chad went to fetch the weed. He said it would take a few minutes; it could take forever. You never knew what to expect in the contemporary marijuana marketplace. He might be mixing the Kentucky sinsemilla with an inferior grade of pot; maybe he was calling the police on us. Eichmann was on a completely different
wavelength than me, spellbound by the opulent couch.

“What’s the problem, Doojie?” Eichmann said.

“I don’t know. I’m on edge.”

“Ah, don’t give me that. Take a break, enjoy yourself. We won’t be coming here again. You know, this is the kind of home Loretta was talking about … lavish. She’d love it.”

“But you don’t like it, I can tell.”

“It’s okay. But I wouldn’t want to own a house in the Mission.”

“Why’s that?”

“Would you want to live next door to Chad?”

“That bad, huh? What do you make of him?”

“My honest opinion? Where did you come up with the toad? He’s a fucking poseur. Watch him when he gets back in here.”

Forty minutes later Chad returned with a green plastic package covered with masking tape. The time he took, I could’ve been halfway to east Oakland already. He dropped the bundle on the couch with a thud and said, “Sorry, gentlemen, I was on the phone. People from New York were calling me up. I had to coordinate something with them. I didn’t think it would take so long, but hey, here’s the product.”

I picked up the pound and pulled apart the tape after giving the bundle an exploratory squeeze. The weed seemed decent, gray-green, not a lot of seeds and stems, but the buds were small. It wasn’t exciting or anything, nothing to write home about.

Eichmann kissed his teeth and stared pointedly at me. He’d been alerted to something, but he didn’t say what it was. Reaching into his pants, Chad asked, “You like it?”

“It’s okay. We’ll buy it.”

“Great … now give me your money.”

He made the request while pulling out a feminine .25-caliber matte black Beretta from his waistband. I was flummoxed; this was not what I’d expected. The tables had been reversed. Roy was getting his revenge: Chad was stealing from us.

“Chad, wait a second! What is this, man? What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m robbing you, Doojie. It’s my house … I can do what I want.”

“Why? We’re here in good faith!”

“You’re lying. You’ve been a liar since the day I met you.”

“No, no, this is all wrong! We only wanted to make a deal!”

“You keep lying, I’m going to shoot you and bury you in the backyard.”