Blueblood (11 page)

He got out of the car and sauntered over to the little group. There were four kids altogether, all of them girls. They wore nearly identical combinations of skin-tight jeans and pull-over tops. Two sat on the curb, one checked out something through the window of the store, and the last leaned against one of the pillars holding the veranda roof up. The first two noticed Rhee as he got close, but there was none of the scrambling around or straightening up that I was used to seeing when cops made contact with gangs. Or kids, for that matter. They seemed relaxed, chatty even. The girl who’d been looking in the window turned around and walked over to join them, popping gum.

Rhee’s body language was confident, cool. He slouched, his hands in back pockets, while he talked. He must’ve led with a joke, because the girls all started to laugh. He made some kind of gesture to go with the joke and the girls all laughed again. He talked some more, then listened, asked a question and got some nods, then fingers pointing out towards Seven Corners. Another question, then shy nods. He turned towards me and made a “hold on” kind of motion, then went inside the store. The girls looked over at the car with idle curiosity, then went back to staring at nothing.

Five minutes later, Rhee came out with a plastic bag ready to burst, which he handed to one of the girls. He waved and said something, but they’d already torn into the bag, spilling sodas and chips onto the ground.

Rhee got into the car. “Okay,
las chicas
didn’t know for sure, but they think Rico actually is at a Motel 8, the one off Columbia Pike. So, that’s where we’re heading.”

“What was the joke?”

“Huh? Oh, you know, the usual. Talking smack about how bad their guys are in bed. They love it. I was lucky it was all the girls, though. If there’s even one macho asshole there, they don’t say a word. You never deal with the ladies if there’s a dude around. And you can’t joke with most of the homies. They think they’re in a war or something. Gotta stay
strong
. Can’t laugh at a joke or you look weak.”

“And the little bag of goodies?”

Rhee waved dismissively. “Thirty bucks. Junk food. Keeps them happy, saves them three or four hours of panhandling at the malls. These kids are so poor, most of them don’t eat but once a day anyway. And they’ll remember me for it. Next time I come around, they’ll give me Rico’s shoe size if I ask. As long as I don’t tell
him
where I got it.”

“Don’t a bunch of Latinas think it’s weird to trade jokes with a Vietnamese cop who’s trying to pump them for intel about their
jefe
?”

He grinned. “We’re all outsiders, man. As long as I don’t look like a gringo or flash a badge, I’m in tight.”

We joined the line of traffic heading down to Columbia Pike, passing the area known as Culmore. This was ground zero of the Salvadoran population in Virginia and pretty much the whole DC area. Business signs were in Spanish first with English, if it was listed at all, below.

“We didn’t see any of this coming,” I said, looking out at the run-down neighborhood. “We all thought the black gangs had dibs on the worst of the drugs and the violence.”

“The pulse of history, man,” Rhee said. “Someone else gets on top, once in a while. You know how it started? Why the Salvadoran gangs are so prevalent?”

I shrugged. “A little bit. You probably know it forwards and backwards.”

“Want to learn?”

“We got time. Lay it on me.”

Rhee grinned. “In 1980, while you were busting crooks in DC and my older sister was falling in love with Duran Duran, El Salvador has itself a twelve-year civil war. Bunch of people get killed, even more get the hell out. They trickle north, but Mexico isn’t much better than home. And LA is just over the border, looking pretty good to a bunch of people who live on five bucks a month. But LA ain’t ready to welcome a bunch of piss-poor Central American refugees with open arms. The Blacks and the Mexican gangs start pushing the Salvadorans around.”

“And they push back,” I said.

“Right. Now, normally, these refugees would get their asses handed to them by any number of gangs in LA that would line up for the pleasure. But these fuckers weren’t bean farmers, man. They’re rebels, army deserters. They got five, ten years of combat experience in the
jungle
. They’re not going to take shit from anyone. People learn real quick not to mess with the Salvadoran
maras
, the gangs, and pretty soon we’ve got a real success story, the American Dream come true. The gang carves out some breathing room, starts to spread, and puts down roots.”

“What about recruitment? Some of those ex-rebels have to be out of the picture by now, right?”

“Sure. That was in the early ’90s. But there ain’t never been a shortage of poor, displaced Central Americans, homie, especially around here. And, even the ones who are trying to be decent can be part of the problem.”

“Like?”

“One scenario, happens all the time. Mom and Dad immigrate from El Salvador to make money in the U.S., leave their kid back home with Grandma. The parents work their asses off. Ten years later, they finally get enough cash to bring him along, but now their cute five-year-old is a surly teenager who doesn’t know a lick of English. He’s supposed to fit in overnight. And maybe he has a new little brother or sister half his age who speaks the language and acts American and is the apple of Mama and Papa’s eye. Now the first kid’s pissed off. He’s a second-class citizen in his own family. He’s got no identity. He finds the gang, or the gang finds him, and they’ve got a new recruit who doesn’t have the first idea about the Salvadoran civil war and wouldn’t care if he did. He’s just mad and wants to make somebody pay.”

We spied the motel a minute later and Rhee pulled into the parking lot. We sat and took stock of the place, a two-story, run-of-the-mill flop house.

“Which one?” I asked.

Rhee puffed his cheeks, then blew out a breath. “I could ask the front desk, but the clerks get a little skittish if they think the gang might take it out on them for ratting to the cops. Let’s try something else.”

He got out of the car and I followed, adjusting my jacket. Rhee noticed and said, “You packing?”

“Yeah.”

He looked troubled, but just said, “This isn’t a bust. Just an info session, okay?”

“I’m not here to put holes in anyone.”

He nodded, then motioned for me to follow him. We walked along the cracked and weedy pavement slabs that fronted the first-floor rooms, heading for an external second story set of steps. Rhee took them two at a time and we followed the platform balcony around until it turned a corner, putting us in the rear of the building. The back of the motel overlooked a lonely patch of asphalt populated by two Dumpsters and bordered by a chain-link fence. On the other side was a used car dealership partially hidden by its own chain-link fence and that strange plastic curtain stuff that they weave in between the links.

At the end of the balcony, in front of the door to what must’ve been the last room in the place, was a pile of cans and pizza boxes. A mountain bike hung half over the concrete knee wall, its front tire missing. As we got closer, I could see a grubby denim jacket on the ground with a battered Washington Nationals cap nearby.

“What do you think?” Rhee asked, nodding at the mound of garbage. “Think we found our party?”

He walked up to the door and tried it. Finding it locked, he cupped a hand and squinted through the window, then went back to the door and banged with his fist a half-dozen times.

“Rico!
Vámonos, hombre
,” he yelled, kicking the door. Another three or four minutes of this and eventually the door cracked open. A creaky voice asked in Spanish what the hell we wanted. Rhee ignored it and pushed his way in. I followed a few steps behind, wanting my eyes to adjust.

It was my nose that needed the adjusting. The smell of days-old pizza, beer, puke, and sweat hit me like a hammer. I took shallow breaths and waited while my eyes got used to the dim light.

What I saw wasn’t anything to write home about. A typical crummy motel room. Two twin beds, a cheap table with two chairs, and a TV bolted to a faux-wood credenza that was, in turn, bolted to the wall. There were beer cans and cardboard Budweiser boxes everywhere. Two open pizza boxes decorated the table where a family of flies landed on and contaminated what remained. The TV screen was smashed and there were small shards of the glass on the floor. The AC fan was on, but it was broken, so the only noise was a low buzzing sound not unlike the flies on the pizza.

A guy and a girl were still fast asleep in the bed nearest the door. A guy was passed out on the floor. A girl in biker shorts and a halter top had answered the door and backed away, standing bleary-eyed by the foot of the second bed. Rhee opened his mouth to ask her something when at that moment the toilet flushed and a guy in jeans and no shirt walked out of the bathroom.

He was a scrawny, pock-marked sort of kid, with skinny arms and a pot belly. About five-eight and a hundred and nothing pounds, with black hair and black eyes. A tremendous scar ran along the right side of his scalp, white against his skin and dark hair. But the most arresting detail was on his face. Across his forehead, in large block letters, were the letters “MLA.” Several black teardrops were inked below his left eye. Tattooed Gothic script flowed around his nose and cheeks, with stylized skulls, women, and numbers dripping down his neck where they joined a score of others on his chest and stomach. I’d seen gang members proclaim their loyalty before, but never like this. He could’ve been wearing a mask.

Both Rhee and the tattooed dude froze. The scene seemed to crystallize and slow to a crawl. The smell and the heat faded away, but the buzz from the broken fan seemed to get louder. My arms and legs felt leaden, even though my pulse jumped up a notch. I was very careful to keep my hands motionless and visible.

“This isn’t Rico, I guess,” I said after a second.

“Nope,” Rhee said, not taking his eyes from the other guy. He said something in Spanish, very fast, too fast for me to follow. The tattooed guy watched us, his liquid black eyes moving slowly back and forth. There was casual menace in the set of his face, but he was as still as a stone. After a second, he replied, in a soft voice completely at odds with the body it came from. Rhee said something else and got a shrug in return. There were a few more exchanges where Rhee did most of the talking and the other guy said very little, if anything. Then Rhee nodded, and stepped back, away from the door. I followed his lead. The tattooed guy very deliberately reached down and picked up a grimy t-shirt from the floor, slipped it over his head, and walked out the door without looking back. The deadbeats in the bed and the guy passed out on the floor slept through the whole thing. The girl who’d answered the door watched us.

Rhee seemed pretty cool, but I let out a shaky breath. “Who was that?”

He shook his head. “Never seen him before. I asked him his name. He said Cuchillito. Chillo for short.”

“‘Little Knife’?”

“Yep. Well, kind of. Chillo actually means snapper, like the fish. But in this case, it means knife.”

“Chillo a first or a last name?”

“More like a brand name, I think,” Rhee said.

“I’m guessing from his ink that he’s not one of the benchwarmers you’re looking for?”

“Fuck, no. That’s the real deal, a dude from the
mara
. Wasn’t expecting that. Maybe this was just a party, but I doubt it. My boy Rico has some explaining to do.”

Rhee went over to the bed and slapped and poked the guy in it until he groaned and sat up. It was another skinny Hispanic kid, but without Chillo’s tattoos and menace. Rhee handed the kid an opened beer and started to pepper him with questions, but the kid was hung-over and sullen and eventually stopped talking altogether. The girl began to snore. The guy on the ground moaned and rolled over onto his back. Rhee tried a few more times to get Rico to talk, his voice going from wheedling to flat and threatening. I heard him say the name “Chillo” several times. But the kid just sat propped against the headboard like a lump.

Rhee swore and straightened up. “This piece of shit isn’t going to give us anything. Rico, I’m telling you, you start playing with those guys and you’re going to end up deader than dirt. Or in jail for life. You understand,
chico
? You know something you better tell me. I’ll be around, okay?”

The kid watched us, resentful, as we walked out of the room and into the cleaner air of the parking lot. Rhee closed the door behind us and, this time, did blow out a breath.

I looked at him. “‘Deader than dirt’?”

He shrugged. “All I could think of.”

We headed back to his car and got in, but Rhee sat without starting it. “This is weird,” he said.

“Which part? I thought you said the gangbangers came around once in a while.”

“Yeah, but after they leave, punks like Rico can’t shut up about how they’re going to be in the real
mara
now and how things are going to change. They puff up like a blow-up doll until a couple weeks go by and they realize the only reason their homie came around was to score some dope for the night.”

“Rico didn’t look forthcoming.”

“No, he didn’t,” Rhee said.

“And the Illustrated Man wasn’t exactly, uh, voluble.”

“No, he wasn’t. He was as surprised as we were. But he could tell it wasn’t a bust. Either that, or he’s stone-cold inside.”

“Both,” I said. “That piece of work could pull your heart out without blinking.”

“Rico knows that better than we do.”

“So Rico is scared,” I said.

“Or we’re hassling him just as he’s making the grade. Maybe he got the call-up to the big leagues. And we made him look bad by showing up,” he said, thinking out loud. “Can’t help his case if they know we can find Rico anytime we want.”

“That would explain the pouty face.”

He sighed and started the car. “Any of this help you out?”

“No, not really,” I said. “But it’s been fun.”

Chapter Fourteen