In the Court of the Yellow King (40 page)

“They’re still here, most of them, anyway. They’re waiting for something.” Ganz pulled down his glasses with a shaky hand and checked to see if they were being followed. DTs, Bum thought, as he could smell three days of whiskey worming its way out of his friend.

“The dealers went with them. The junkies down in tent city are ready to riot, I hear. Climbing the walls, and each other.”

“There’s a cleansing going on, from the top down.”

“A
cleansing
? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Everyone with a rap sheet longer than my pinky has gone missing.”

“How do you know?”

“Can’t get a hold of any of my snitches, or any of my ‘select group of friends’. All MIA. I checked around online, and no one who knows is saying anything, and those wannabes who
are
keep talking about the masks, about there being a new king in town. Big time OG. Outlawing every gang color other than yellow.” Ganz spotted something — or someone — out the window, and ducked down in his seat. “They know that I know and now they’re watching me. Unblinking eyes burned inside the black....”

Bum glanced over at Ganz. He was talking fast, paranoid, like he hadn’t seen for years. Getting poetic in that weird way of his when he had burrowed down too deep. This wasn’t good. Ganz was slipping backwards into the tunnel, tumbling toward the bottom of the piss bucket where Bum found him. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“Of course not. I got rid of my mattress.”

“Why the hell’d you do that?”

Ganz rifled through the glove compartment. “Bugs.”

“How long’ve you been up?”

“A couple days, give or take. Hard to tell, inside the compound... But it’s good, because I got things to do, people to contact, the ones I can find, anyway. They’ll come if I close my eyes. They’ll come for my books. I’ve got thousands of them, Bum. Fucking
thousands
.”

“Hank, I don’t think anyone—”

“— And you can hear things at night that don’t happen while the world’s awake. The barks, the whispers. But mostly it’s just quiet, which is scaring the proper fuck out of me.”

Bum looked closely at him, with that smile he only created for Ganz that was a mixture of genuine affection and a measure of concern bordering on pity.

“How are you, Hank?” Bum handed him a half full Coffee Bean cup. Ganz took it, popped the top and sniffed the contents, scowling.

“Fucking parched. Pull over at the corner so I can heat this bitch up.”

“First meatloaf,” Bum said, driving past the liquor store, ignoring Ganz’s gestures of protest. “Then refreshments. We gotta get some food in you, get you right.”

“Fuck food. I’m right right now.”

“I know you are, Hank. You’re always right. At least watch me eat.”

“You take me around food, I’ll fucking vomit. I swear to Christ, Bum.”

“That’s fine. Their meatloaf isn’t all that great anyway.”

ignet

Bum drove them to Clifton’s Cafeteria, finding a parking spot right up front on Broadway. Very few cars were parked anywhere on the block. It was a Saturday, so most of the commuters were far away from downtown. Still, the lack of weekend shopping traffic was odd.

“Check us out,” Bum said with a grin. “Rock star parking. Just like the old days.” As he pulled up, a dozen people wearing those same light yellow masks and black featureless outfits crossed the street without stopping for Bum’s car, or any of the other moving vehicles, causing several of them to slam on their brakes. There were a number of other groups of masked people clustered up and down the block.

“Assholes,” Bum grumbled, honking his horn. None of them acknowledged the car. Bum shook his head as he angled his Mercedes to the curb. “One of those nerd conventions in town?”

“No,” Ganz said. “These are local. I’ve seen ‘em all over. It’s in the notes. Have you read the notes?”

Bum ignored his question. “Is this a gang thing?”

Ganz didn’t respond as they both got out of the car and headed toward Clifton’s.

“Maybe a bullshit modern art experiment,” Bum said. “You ask me, art in this city is on the wane. It’s all being painted over.”

“You’ve seen it, too?”

“How can you miss it? Dollars to donuts this is part of the chief’s secret gang injunction or something. Part of these new numbers.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Ganz mused. “All the street art, all the tags, all the gang leaders, all gone.”

“The damnest thing.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. Shit ain’t right, Bum. Something’s happening in this city. Something big and something quiet.”

“But then look at that.”

Bum pointed across the street to a heavily fenced parking lot, one of hundreds that utilized every square inch of unused downtown real estate. The brick wall behind it that served as a graffiti canvas for decades was now painted that same pale yellow a dozen feet up, wiping clean all those years of expression. In the center of the wall was a single black symbol that looked like a distorted triskelion, topped by a crude question mark, with a pincer jutting down on the lower left and a grasping tendril on the right. Not a drip of paint leaked from the emblem. As if it was stamped, or branded.

“That’s new,” Bum said.

“Yes it is.”

lushing Gators

Bum filled two heavy plastic trays with an assortment of gravy soaked entrées and sugary sides, anything to suck up the toxins swirling in his friend’s lower GI tract. He handed a tray to Ganz and they ambled to the back corner of the nearly empty yet still claustrophobic dining hall decorated to look like a forest glade uprooted from the Sierra Madres. They passed under the gaze of a mounted moose head and sat under the shadow of a fake Sequoia that made up the overwrought naturalist décor that was a bizarre cross between a Ranger Rick amusement park ride and a polite 1920’s dinner theatre. Bum always brought Ganz to joints like this, that mixed low economy with high camp. He was a specialist in eating cheap, even though he wasn’t necessarily a stingy person, and was in fact quite well off. He was just nostalgic, and loved these old school Americana joints like Clifton’s, where you could pick up a white bowl of canned corn, tapioca pudding, and grade school green jello with pears embedded inside with your Salisbury steak. In a complicated world, a man tires of caviar and hungers for the simplicity of the grade school cafeteria where everything was still elementary.

“So you read my notes from the Park Plaza?”

“I did, but they didn’t make much sense.”

“They didn’t make much sense when I wrote them, but they’re starting to.”

“Well, I can’t figure any of it out. Lots of gibberish.”

“You’re not concentrating. It’s all in there. It’s all taking shape. Order out of chaos.”

“You wrote something about organized book burnings, about lizards under the city. Fucking lizards, Hank.”

“The Lizard People haven’t ever been disproven.”

“Neither has the Loch Ness monster.”

“Because you can’t disprove an avatar, a metaphor that is more real than the truth. You know the Central Library was the tip of the tail, right?”

“What tail?”

“The map of the catacombs crawling under this city. It’s shaped like a lizard. They’re clever fuckers. Dressing up. Hiding in plain sight. Leaving maps. The head starts in Elysian Park. They’re burning away the body in reverse.”

“The Lizard People.”

“Goddamnit, Bum!” Ganz slammed his fist on the table, spilling his untouched food onto the formica. “The Lizard People are bullshit. Misdirection! A magician’s trick! I’m talking about something real. Something OLDER.”

“Okay, okay, calm down.”

“You think I’m fucking nuts, but I’m not. There’s something happening out there. All around us. A
shift
, that’s been in the planning stage for years. Hundreds, thousands, maybe. I read reports on the ‘net, all of them coming from writers living in neighborhoods orbiting downtown. Reporting the same thing. People disappearing. LOTS of people. They’re taking down this city, remaking it. Burning the outposts of the orthodoxy.”

“Who’s ‘
they
’?”

Ganz was staring out the plate glass windows, at the trio of masked people taping a flier to a lamppost outside. Dozens of others trailed behind, all holding stacks of fliers. “Them.”

Bum decided to humor Ganz, just long enough to get him home, and then call up the best psychiatrist he knew to cash in a favor. “So, Elysian Park... The Police Academy’s over there. Chinatown.”

“Chavez Ravine.”

“You think they’re targets?”

“I think all of us are...” Ganz burrowed down into his thoughts. “The play’s the thing,” he muttered.

A fire truck escorted by two lit up police cruisers screamed up the street outside. The triad of sound was nearly deafening, even muffled as it was amid all of the tacky woodland trappings. After a few seconds, instead of slowing fading away, the sound ended abruptly.

“The what?” Bum said.

Ganz blinked back to attention, having to remember what he just said. “The play’s the thing.”

Bum nodded. “To expose the consciousness of the king,” he said absently, forking a greasy hillock of meatloaf into his mouth.

Ganz looked at Bum, astonished. “Did you read that on the wall?”

“Hm?... What wall?”

“You read any Shakespeare lately?”

Bum snorted. “Yeah right... My kid said that to me two nights ago, before he left for his camping trip.”

“Joseph?” Ganz asked, assuming the more bookish of Bum’s two boys.

“Christian,” Bum said. Christian was a wrestler in junior high, leaving behind athletics and authoritarian coaches as he worked his way through several private high schools. Had a few scrapes with the law, all of them smoothed over by daddy. Christian liked to escape Brentwood and slum it with the low rent thugs in Culver City, Echo Park. Downtown.

“He check in since then?”

“Haven’t heard a peep. I figured he was just unplugging for a while, but he took his phone.”

Ganz’s face blanched. “Vic, I think you need to—”

It was then that the power cut, drowning Clifton’s in darkness. The fake trees sliced weird shadows in the fading light leaking in from the windows.

“Damn,” Bum breathed. “Brown out.”

Ganz peered outside. The masked figures were gone, leaving every lamppost on the block decorated with a poster. Bold letters adorned each one, making an identical announcement.

“Let’s go outside,” Ganz said.

laybill

Outside on the sidewalk, Ganz pulled down one of the fliers, the fading rays of sun peeking over the western horizon, giving last light to those who paid the most for it.

Bum was behind him, looking up and down the street, which was totally deserted. He looked at his watch. It was just a little past 8:00. “Where the fuck is everyone?”

Ganz held up the flier. Hundreds of them in front of and behind him created a repeating pattern of rectangles getting smaller and smaller as they disappeared into the city. The paper was sturdy, like a manila folder. But yellow. The font was fancy, baroque.