The Parker Trilogy Page 10

  “Oh yeah?” Felix said, taking a step forwards.

  Father Soltera’s fighting days were long gone, and to be honest, he’d never had any use of them since joining the priesthood. That anyone would hit a priest was beyond the pale, much less one in his fifties. But Felix’s eyes seemed to say that he was thinking about it. It was completely irrational, unless . . .

  “You almost had her convinced to do it, didn’t you?” Father Soltera said flatly, as he lowered his gaze.

  Luisa again. “Father. You should go. He’s not—”

  “I’m not what?” Felix growled as he glared at her. She shrunk backwards to her spot on the small porch, the screen door behind her tattered with enough holes to make it hardly a challenge for any flies that wanted to get inside.

  That’s when Father Soltera understood: Felix was high. As a kite. Probably meth. Great.

  “You come here to try to tell her to be a mom or something?” Felix sniggered.

  “No. I came to talk about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  The irony was not lost on Father Soltera: he was about to use the name of someone who had scared him near to death to scare someone else. But he figured it was his best chance to get Felix to stand down. “Her uncle. He came by to see me.”

  Silence again.

  “You do know who her uncle is, don’t you, son?” Father Soltera pressed.

  Felix nodded and took a step back.

  My Lord, he probably thinks I’m friends with Guero Martinez now.

  “What did he want, Father?” Luisa asked in a scared and tiny voice that revealed exactly how she felt about her uncle.

  “I would prefer to talk inside.”

  “He’s not allowed inside the house, Father. My mother will freak if she finds out he’s here, and there’s a nanny cam hooked up to our computer.”

  Felix laughed. “You kiddin’?”

  Luisa shook her head. “Pointed right at the front door. She’ll lose her mind completely if I let you in.”

  Father Soltera saw the answer in Luisa’s face already, but he asked anyway. “You told her?”

  The tears welled heavy, like they always do in the eyes of the young. She nodded and spoke to the ground. “Right after I saw you. Before she went to work. I wanted her to stay home with me but she got so upset. She started crying, said she needed time to think, that we would talk more when she got home, then stomped out.”

  It was all coming together now. In her anger, Luisa’s mother must’ve called her brother on her way to work, not thinking things through all the way, and started the dominos tumbling, which explained how Guero knew Luisa had come to the church this morning, which prompted his visit.

  “You see there, Father? Even more proof.”

  Father Soltera felt the irritation in him go off like a grenade. “What proof?”

  “That nobody wants this baby,” Felix said. Looking at Luisa, he added, “She should just get rid of it!”

  Luisa’s tears could not extinguish the fire of pain that spread across her face.

  Father Soltera sighed against his growing temper. Patience. “And that would solve the problem?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For you, maybe,” Father Soltera scoffed. “You just get on with things. She has to live with that decision for the rest of her life.”

  Felix twisted his face up in mock dismay, as if what he was hearing was so far from anything he could ever care about that he didn’t even know why it was being brought up. It was clear that he was only here to hurt Luisa as much as he could. “Man. Don’t know why I’m gettin’ caught up in all this shit, anyways. This kid probably ain’t even mine.”

  His words were like fists, forcing Luisa to recoil.

  Father Soltera prayed, then said, “Son. You need to leave. Before her uncle gets here.”

  No need to use evil to intimidate evil this time. It was the truth.

  Arms folded, tilted back at the waist now. Back to being a tough guy. “Shooooot.”

  “Felix. Just leave,” Luisa murmured. “He’ll kill you.”

  “Uh-huh. We’ll see about that,” Felix postured. “We’ll see who kills who.”

  A man with bed head and a ruddy face had just walked out of his apartment across the hall with a bag of trash. Luisa glanced over at him worriedly, as if she were afraid he’d heard what Felix had just said.

  With a resolve that Father Soltera didn’t think she had in her, Luisa stomped a bare foot into the floor, and through gritted teeth let loose. “Get the hell out of here, Felix. Now!”

  The gangster tough guy wanted to hit her, but even in his drug induced state he evidently knew that would be a bad idea with Father Soltera and the neighbor both present now. “Okay, girl. I hear you. Ya need some time. Fine. I’ll call you later. Remember what we talked about though.”

  With one last nasty look at Father Soltera, Felix strutted out of the complex.

  Luisa was shaking. “Lo siento, Padre.”

  He noticed that she always went with “Padre” when she looked like the child he’d watched grow up over the years and switched to “Father” when she was trying to act like a woman, and this broke his heart.

  “No apology necessary. But we really should talk, Luisa. Let’s go inside and warm up. Maybe you have some tea?”

  She nodded grimly, but he made her laugh a tiny bit when he added, “And I will wave into your mother’s nanny cam to say hi to her as well.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Smiling Midget had followed him from the shower, through the shop and into the main office. At the back of the office was a small room that was Hector’s, which contained a desk, a half-dozen chairs for meetings and a fold out leather couch that was still open now, as he’d left it the day he was arrested. He noticed that even the sheets hadn’t moved, tossed sideways and forming a long “S,” just as they had fallen when he’d gotten up from his last good night’s sleep as a free man, four months earlier.

  A jab of pain hit him as he also noticed the light blue blanket, Marisol’s, balled up near the pillow, the smell of her never far from him.

  Someone else smelling that pretty perfume now, The Smiling Midget said with a sad chuckle as he hopped up onto the desktop.

  “Shut up,” Hector whispered in reply, barely able to speak, his heart aching so hard that he had to sit down in one of the chairs, his towel wrapped around his waist as water dripped off his head and down over his chest.

  What you wouldn’t give to have her back, right, Romeo?

  Sometimes, if Hector didn’t engage with him, the little bastard would go away. So instead of replying, Hector thought more about that day. The day he’d been arrested.

  Marisol hadn’t stayed with him the night before because she’d gotten up early with her aunt to drive down to TJ to shop and stock up on meds at the farmacia, which had them at half the price they were in the States. He and Marisol had spoken briefly, by phone, and got into a squabble about plans for that night; she wanted to go out, he wanted to stay in, an argument of comfortable lovers who knew there would be no lasting repercussions.

  At least you hope she was in TJ with her aunt. The whore might’ve just spent your last night of freedom pretzeled up in bed with someone else.

  Hector looked up at him. The Smiling Midget had dry skin, yellow as dirty piss, and a bulbous nose over small, tight lips. Even with the smile he sometimes looked like he was in pain, and that’s how he looked now for sure, air wheezing in and out of his lungs before he spoke. Hector ignored him and turned his thoughts back to that day.

  Later, he and Reuben were stopped by a black-and-white outside a YumYum Donuts on Washington Boulevard. Cops. Both Latin sellouts, which only made it worse. Holier-than-thou-I-broke-the-pattern-why-couldn’t-you cops. Truth be told, they were worse than the white cops.

  Of course, Hector was wearing his jeans from the night before, too lazy to dig out a new pair when he’d gotten out of bed, and of course he still had a dozen ecstasy pills and a
dime bag of weed in his front right pocket. He was lucky. Sales the night before at the Grand Avenue Club downtown had been very, very good. He could’ve been caught with a lot worse.

  Still, it was enough to get him stretched over the front hood of the car like a pig at a luau and cuffed.

  Reuben was clean, so he was sent on his way, looking over his shoulder sadly as Hector was loaded into the back of the cruiser.

  Simple bust, but it was his second for the same offense, and the judge was a particular kind of dick with a hard-on for gangsters, so Hector got jammed up with a one-year sentence that everyone, even his shitty public defender, knew would be more like six months, tops. In the joint, Hector had kept his nose clean, mostly because his contacts on the outside wanted him back on the streets as soon as possible. His crew, the Fresno Street Vatos, was a productive subsidiary of the East Los Vatos, the larger gang they served, and that was largely due to Hector’s leadership.

  That’s not what Burro thinks, though, huh? The Smiling Midget asked. There was an empty Folgers coffee can on the desk, full of pens and other office supplies. He plucked a pair of scissors from it and began using them to pick at his teeth, which were mostly fangs, really, stained light brown and clogged with heavy plaque.

  It was Hector’s turn to chuckle. No. Certainly not. Burro had always been a cocky bastard, even when he was first jumped in three years ago on his fifteenth birthday. But he was smart too. Hector always caught him watching, studying, learning. Every deal or decision that Hector made, Burro was always the one to cautiously ask why and what for, never disrespectfully, but always out of line. Running the crew was so far below Burro’s pay grade that it was laughable.

  But a threat’s a threat!

  “I hear you, you little shit. I know. And I’ll deal with him in due time.”

  You mean, while there’s still time.

  “Whatever.”

  The Smiling Midget gouged a long, thin line of plaque out from between two of his teeth and spat it to the floor. Wiping his mouth with one, pudgy hand he glared at Hector. You’re goin’ soft.

  Hector removed his towel and dried off. He pulled out a clean pair of underwear, a white t-shirt and a pair of black jeans from a nearby cabinet. He’d asked Chico to get him one thing just before he was released: a new pair of sneakers, white with white laces. They were inside a box at the foot of the bed.

  When he looked up, The Smiling Midget was standing on the desk with his back to him, looking out the window to the city beyond. He’d somehow changed clothes too and now wore gray khakis and a stiffly starched gray shirt, his hands folded behind his back like a military man.

  “Nice look,” Hector spat.

  The Smiling Midget turned and Hector recoiled. His face had changed again, as it had a few times in prison, from human to that of some sort of dog or coyote. In some odd way, his face seemed to fit his teeth more now, and a long tongue lolled out the left side of his jaw. Hector stayed focused on the tongue, avoiding The Smiling Midget’s eyes at all costs, which burned him on the inside somehow, like two little magnifying glasses diverting heat right into his soul.

  The room was still. Just the two of them, the furniture and the moment, until Bennie shouted out from beyond the door. “We’re ready when you are, jefe!”

  “Be there in a sec,” Hector shouted back.

  You really gonna go get drunk and party while this David guy is giving it long and hard to your girl?

  Hector closed his eyes and shook his head.

  You’re a disgrace of a man. This is why no one ever really loves you. Why even your own mother or father never loved you.

  Rocked with a wave of nausea and nerves, Hector took a few deep breaths. He couldn’t go out there like this, looking weak and feeble. When The Smiling Midget was on him like this, relentless and cruel, there was only one thing to do to make him go away. Hector opened his eyes and scrambled across the room to a bankers box in the corner, where he hid them.

  What are you doing?

  Popping off the lid, Hector looked down at his books. Some he’d bought at garage sales and others he’d outright stolen from the library. There was only about a dozen but they were some of the best. Steinbeck and Hemingway, of course, but also Bradbury, Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and a really cool fantasy book about a tesseract by a French lady whose name he didn’t know how to pronounce that well.

  It was the one thing that worked. Reading always made The Smiling Midget go away.

  Don’t you dare, you little shit. I’m warning you, I’ll—

  Hector grabbed the first book he could, opened it and read the opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

  The Smiling Midget blinked away.

  Hector never knew where he went off to, but whatever the cause and effect, it didn’t matter. Sometimes he took hours to come back, other times it was days.

  His hands were trembling, so Hector put the book down and stumbled weakly back over to the bed. He knew what he wanted to do, but he knew better than to actually do it. Nothing good could come of it. Nothing but more pain and a reopening of his wounds which were still fresh and bleeding.

  If he did it then he might lose it, and the homies might hear him and that wouldn’t be cool. Not one bit.

  So he wouldn’t do it. No. No way.

  But then he caught sight of Marisol’s blue blanket, and he just couldn’t help himself. Feeling like a little boy with no love or mother or hope left in the world, he laid on the bed and buried his face in the blanket, hoping that after all this time it surely wouldn’t still smell like her.

  It did.

  So, Hector Villarosa pressed his face as hard as he could into and beyond the blanket, deep down into the mattress.

  So the homies wouldn’t hear him crying.

  After lunch, it was a short drive to the station, where Campos split off to talk with Murillo and Klink about a separate case they had worked on the prior month. Parker sat at his desk and worked the details on a few other cases before turning his attention back to the Villarosa case.

  He did a property search and learned the liquor store was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Dun Su Yeong. The title hadn’t been changed since the old man’s murder. Parker focused on the surrounding properties. They owned none of them. Then he did a property search by name: nothing except for a small house, eight miles away, which they’d owned for a little longer than the store.

  That was good. If a liquor store owner owned multiple properties, say, across the city, then it would be highly likely that they were more than servants to the gang. It would also flag other properties as sites for surveillance, as they might be storage spots for the drugs being imported.

  He’d been waiting four hours for the Gang Unit to call when the phone finally rang. He picked up. It was Fisher. They exchanged hellos before Parker got to the point. “What we got?”

  “Not a whole helluva lot.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah. You’d think we’d have more. The Asian Soldiers are one of the last remaining groups that are operative over there. But, not a lot of action.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Used to be a number of Korean gangs, but they were all small, mostly splintered, and La Marea forced them out based on sheer numbers alone.”

  “How big are the Asian Soldiers?”

  “Maybe twenty-five members, tops. Mondo Rhee is the big boss. This guy Jin? Full name is Jin Yeung. Far as we can tell, he’s moving up the ranks . . . but that don’t mean much with such a tiny group. Anyway. They have some connections with the Triad over in Chinatown, but they’re weak.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Besides the cultural differences? Same problem; they’re too small to be much good to the Triad. From what we can tell, they’re used only as local muscle and drug running for La Marea.”

  “That’s what we’ve figured out so far from our shooting.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The liquor
store may prove to be a significant drug front, if our informant’s info proves to be correct.”

  Fisher sounded interested. “If that’s true, they were flying under the radar. We don’t have anything on that store at all.”

  “How’d you guys read the shooting?”

  “Well, like a burglary gone bad, plain and simple. We had nothing further on it because—” Fisher stopped short and then cleared his throat, sounding suddenly uncomfortable.

  “It’s okay to say it, Fisher. Because Napoleon didn’t have time to dig any further.”

  “Yeah. Everything that happened . . . happened. Then the chaos of the cap’s, um, retirement . . .”

  “Which we all know was really a force out.”

  “Then the new cap coming in. Shit got shuffled, reshuffled and then never dealt back out.”

  “That’s why we’re on it now.”

  “You don’t know me that well, Parker. But, for the record? Balls.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We were surprised when you called in as the lead with Campos on this. Can’t be easy.”

  “No,” was all Parker could say.

  “Well. We did our best. Gonna send a file your way. It’s sparse. We had to go into the field to one of our informants to get the ID on this Tic Toc kid. Real name is Danny Noh. Kind of an enigma. Our person tells us he’s a real prick.”

  “How so?” Parker asked, immediately picking up on Fisher’s use of the word “person” instead of “guy” or “man.” He was deliberately being gender vague, which meant two things: one, his informant was probably female, and two, important enough to be held close to his vest.

  “Has a switchblade. Likes to chop fingertips off people who upset him.”

  “That’s original.”

  “Yeah. He’s probably carrying too. Likes his Glock. Has a damn poem verse engraved on the barrel or some shit.”

  “I’m getting the feeling this guy has seen too many movies. I mean, please don’t tell me it has an ivory handle now too.”

  Fisher chuckled. “No joke. But I think you’re right on the mark. See what I mean about small time? A real gangster ain’t gonna mark up a weapon that can easily be tied back to him. Quite the opposite. He’s gonna file off the serial numbers. If he uses it he’s gonna ditch it, or take a steel wire brush to the inside of the barrel to screw ballistics, so getting attached to any gun is stupid.”