The Parker Trilogy Read online

  The Parker Trilogy

  Books 1 - 3

  Tony Faggioli

  Atticus Creative, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  (c) Tony Faggioli July 2019

  Atticus Creative

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Tony Faggioli

  Another One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Tony Faggioli

  One Way or Another

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tony Faggioli

  One Gray Day

  Quote

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Also by Tony Faggioli

  About the Author

  Another One

  The Parker Trilogy Book 1

  Tony Faggioli

  For Anthony…thanks for being the son

  that I always dreamed of having

  Chapter One

  Hector Villarosa walked out of the men’s Twin Towers Jail in a t-shirt, jeans, black Vans and an LA Dodgers baseball cap flipped backwards over his shaved head. A beige Chevy Impala sat idling in the long driveway, Chico behind the wheel and Bennie standing next to the open passenger door with a wide smile on his face.

  “¿Qué onda, jefe?” Bennie said through gritted teeth, his mouth barely moving and the words coming out stifled.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Hector asked with a chuckle. He’d been glancing over his shoulder the whole distance from the building to the car, and now he did so one last time, to see if The Smiling Midget was behind him. He wasn’t. But since he could appear out of thin air and disappear just as suddenly, almost at will, Hector took little comfort in his absence now.

  Chico laughed from inside the car. “Dumbass took a baseball bat to the face last month. His jaw’s wired shut.”

  Bennie shrugged, looking embarrassed. “F-forry, hefe.” He was of average height with a stocky build and had full sleeve tattoos that ran up his arms and disappeared underneath his blue short-sleeve shirt, which was ironed stiff as a board.

  Hector scowled. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Wif I was,” Bennie replied, wrinkling his nose.

  “Oh man! It kills me every damn time,” Chico said with another laugh. “The ‘s’s get him worse than anything, man.”

  “Fut up, puto!”

  More laughter.

  Hector shook his head. “You Vatos, man . . . I swear. I go in for three months on some bullshit charge and it all goes to hell, huh?”

  Chico, rail thin with a lean face and multiple ear piercings, stopped laughing. His smile curved away to a nervous line.

  “So, who the hell cranked you with a bat, dumbass?”

  “Fome Central Flats fool. At a party, over in Montebello for my little coufin.”

  “Montebello?”

  “You want me to tell it, Bennie?” Chico asked, looking like he felt a little bad for his friend now.

  Bennie nodded as Hector motioned for him to hop in the back seat. Once he did, Hector jumped in the passenger seat and closed the door as they pulled off the curb and headed down the street.

  “So,” Chico began, “we go to his little cuz’s graduation party—”

  “Fe just finished up at East LA College. Goin’ to nurfing fchool now.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Whatevs. She’s so fine she gonna be a baby mama in no time, man. Especially if I get ahold of her, fool!”

  “Fhut up, affhole!”

  Hector shook his head. “You two, man, I swear . . .”

  They came to a stop at the intersection of Bouchet and Vignes. “So, anyways, we go to the party and she got friends of friends and shit, and one of them brings a little posse of Central Flats boys. I dunno. Maybe five or six. One of them was kinda ghosting his friends so it was hard to tell if he was with them or not. Anyway, they start throwing glares and shit. We outnumbered, and they knows it! I tell Bennie we best call for backup but he don’t wanna start nothing at his family’s party. A lot of them are out of the scene or trying to be legit and all that, no one wants no trouble at the aunt’s house, there’s a cop lives five houses down, blah, blah and shit.”

  They made a left on Vignes and headed toward East LA and home. Hector was listening to Bennie but barely. His thoughts were absorbed by Marisol. Three months was a long time, and she hadn’t answered any of his calls for the past two weeks.

  “So, anyways. We decide to bail and they follow us out to the street. Bennie and this Central Flats fool named Jimmy, they have some words. Jimmy goes back into the house. We start makin’ our way to the car, I got my
nine under the front seat and I wanna get to it, jus’ in case. Instead? The other four dudes surround us, talking trash, get us spun around. Our backs are to the house and then this Jimmy guy, he comes outta nowhere with a bat that he got from inside, someone said he saw it in one of the bedrooms. It’s autographed by Steve Garvey or something.”

  “Who?”

  “Some old dude that played for the Dodgers who Bennie’s uncle worships. I dunno. I guess he—”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . cut the shit, man,” Hector said with a sigh. It was a gloomy-ass day and his stomach was nervous.

  “Anyways, he smacks Bennie right in the face.”

  “Woulda bufted out all my teeth—”

  “Yep. If you hadn’t turned your head at the last second.”

  “Bufted my jaw instead. Little bastard.”

  The term made Hector think of The Smiling Midget again, there in his cell, every night, with those beady red eyes, whispering hurts and insecurities. At first Hector thought he was just a figment of his imagination, an evil totem he’d generated to torture himself with. Until the fight in the yard one day between Hector and a rival gang member named Boxer, who’d backed Hector down and threatened his life.

  The same Boxer who was found dead in his cell the next morning, smothered to death, with his eyes carved out. That’s when things got real. Because Boxer’s cell was in “transition”, one of his two cellmates having been discharged and the other in the infirmary.

  Meaning Boxer had been sleeping alone that night.

  They were still investigating it but Hector knew they’d never find the killer. You didn’t find The Smiling Midget. He found you. As he had found Hector a day later, when he’d appeared and told him not to worry about it, that this was something friends did for each other. And, like it or not, he was Hector’s friend now. For life.

  As the Impala made another left, this time on to Cesar Chavez, Hector forced himself back to the present. “So, what’d you fools do?”

  “Nothin’. We were ready to throw down, even got a few swings in, when out comes Bennie’s uncle from the backyard with a bunch of old dudes and they break us up. They made me take Bennie to the hospital and chased those other punk asses off.”

  The sidewalk was a slow blur of trash and weeds as they made their way by some abandoned businesses and a PS Storage facility with a front wall that was tagged from end to end. Hector was happy to be out but not happy to be back. Not to more of this drama, which seemed never ending. He had enough on his mind.

  During his short stay on the inside he’d managed to forget some about Hymie, but not much. Instead, he was still dragging around the memory of that night, of getting word that Hymie had been gunned down outside that liquor store in Koreatown.

  His family didn’t much like Hector. Not anymore. When he was small time they had, but when he moved his way up the ranks and started calling shots, they’d slowly begun pushing him away. Like a leper, he brought something to every event that no one wanted to see or deal with. Not at birthdays. Not at Christmas. And though no one confronted him about Hymie’s death, they didn’t have to. Their eyes did all the accusing at the funeral. They knew Hymie was trying to make his way into Hector’s world, and they knew there was no way Hymie would’ve been holding up a liquor store all the way across town unless Hector had sanctioned it.

  Hector sighed again, this time heavier. Gray day. Darker thoughts. What the hell was he supposed to do with the situation? Hymie had done this to himself, cousin or no.

  As they made a right onto First Street, Hector made a decision. “Take me to Marisol’s house.”

  The car grew quiet. Bennie shifted in the back seat. Chico grew stiff, then nodded a bit too rapidly, like he was suddenly nervous. “So. Maybe we could just grab a few beers first, ya know? Just chill out.”

  “No, man. After three months? I wanna see her. I need a little taste.”

  More silence, like the clouds had fallen out of the sky and smothered the car.

  “Hey, man,” Chico said, biting his lip, “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you . . .”

  Hector squinted at him . Hard. “Tell me what?”

  “She’s with some fool now. A bouncer at The Mayan.”

  A car driving the other way was blasting a Tupac song. Old school.

  After a few seconds Bennie chimed in. “Forry, jefe.”

  Hector could feel him before he saw him in the right corner of the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat, right next to Bennie. The Smiling Midget was sneering at him, his eyes widened in a mocking gaze. Hector tried to look away, but it was impossible.

  I told you that you’re too weak, those eyes said. I told you she’d get it from someone else, you fool.

  Hector said nothing. Instead his mind, which was already a dark shade of gray on any given day, went totally black.

  Detective Evan Parker sat at his desk, images of the grass at Evergreen Park four months earlier still intermittently coming to the front of his mind. He tried again to chase them away.

  Green grass on a sunny day. But blood, too. Lots of it.

  Around his partner, Napoleon Villa, dead and buried now.

  He sighed and shook his head. Focus. He had to focus. He was back on the job now and they were watching, he was sure of it, to make sure he hadn’t cracked entirely.

  Looking down at the open file before him, he studied the tragic crime photos of an old man lying behind the counter of a liquor store, his dead eyes gazing up into an endless sky beyond the ceiling overhead, his face written in resignation, as if to testify to anyone that found him that he’d taken his last breath wondering how in the world this had happened to him.

  Outside the store the little gangster everyone called Hymie the Stump, because even at eighteen he was still barely five foot four, was in a pose no less desperate. Face down with his arms forming a crooked “c” and his legs a lazy “h,” he’d have almost looked as if he were taking a nap if not for the dozen or so bullet holes that riddled his body in sporadic dots of red, the blood stains having already dried into little disks that made the fabric of his shirt dent at odd angles.

  The old man, the victim in this case, had gone out in a blaze of glory just after midnight trying to protect the business he’d owned for nearly forty years. A lot had changed in Los Angeles during that time. What used to be purely Koreatown was now a jigsaw puzzle piece shaped neighborhood that shared uneasy space with Little El Salvador.

  Hymie, the perpetrator in the robbery, had been gunned down by Korean gang members who were right outside when he’d tried to flee. After the shootout with the business owner inside that left multiple customers wounded, Hymie ran outside, somehow unscathed, only to be looking down the end of two Glock pistols with loaded clips. Wrong place, wrong time, and all that. Except for Hymie it really was the wrong place. A long way from his turf in Boyle Heights, he’d evidently been earning jump points for the gang his older cousin was a major player in. So much for family pride.

  It’d been four months since the crime had gone down, and little had been done to investigate it. Yoon Sun Kim and Hymie the Stump had been unfortunate enough to have their murders happen barely a week before a girl named Caitlyn Hall had fallen to her death from the twenty-third floor of the Los Angeles Hilton and a man named Kyle Fasano had become the lead suspect in a manhunt that would explode across the entire department and use up so many resources and man hours, first to find Fasano, then to find Parker’s ex-partner, Detective Napoleon Villa, and then to find a psychopath named Troy Forester.

  Yoon and Hymie became two cards of low face value, lost in the shuffle. Parker sighed. The file in front of him was almost sacred. It was the next-to-last case that Napoleon had been working on before his death.

  Another tragedy in a string of them that had Parker wondering if he shouldn’t just cash out, swoop up his girlfriend and move to Costa Rica. But it wasn’t likely. Even though Parker hadn’t been Napoleon’s partner for very long, a strong bond had been established
between them. There was Efren, Napoleon’s beloved nephew, to watch over—a promise Parker had made and intended to keep—and then there was this file. This case.

  Because Napoleon had a reputation in the department as being obsessed with solving things, and nothing would’ve bothered him more, if he were still alive, than the fact this crime remained unsolved and justice had still not been done.

  Somewhere out there, the two Korean gang members who so ruthlessly gunned down Hymie were still at large. It was easy to want to write it off as gang on gang nonsense, good ol’ fashioned “you reap what you sow” stuff, but try telling that to Hymie’s mother, who’d been coming into the station once a week, all this time, in anger and in tears, begging for justice.