L.A. Rotten (3 page)

“That's fine.” I validate him once again and scribble my name on the back of the check, signing it back over to him. This is another arrangement he's orchestrated in his quenchless thirst for profit. He has me on his payroll only because hiring a parolee gives him a tax break, or he would unquestioningly pay me under the table. So every two weeks I get a paycheck, but in lieu of me having to take it to the bank and deposit it myself, Harold “lets me” sign the check back to him, and he pays me cash then and there. Minus a ten-dollar convenience charge on my end. I always do it because, in the end, what fucking difference does it make? Harold lays out twelve hundred dollars in hundred-dollar bills in a stack on the desk before me, and the last ninety is paid in tens. He doesn't count it and neither do I; he would take such a gesture as an insult.

“Thanks.” I pocket the cash and return to my work.

“Do you have your cell phone turn on?” he checks, always worried that I might have forgotten, though I've never given him reason to be nervous.

“Yes.”

“Good, good. Hope for a busy weekend. Expect call.” With that, he exits back out into the warehouse, nodding pleasantly as he goes.

I leave the office in my personal car, a newer-model, glossy coal-black Dodge Charger, and head down Lankershim Boulevard until San Fernando is well behind me. Here I have limited options: Friday afternoon and I can't get my fix on because I am now in detox mode for the monthly check-in with my PO on Monday. I can eat, I can go to the library, or I can hit up a strip club. My hands already making the turn for me, I wheel in the direction of the Electric Candy Factory. This is most definitely not the library.

When I was a kid, my mother used to go out to a bakery over in North Hollywood for fresh Dutch Crunch rolls, and, invariably, our drive would take us past the Electric Candy Factory, which, with its neon-Vegas exterior, seemed like the most mind-boggling, amazing place ever—Willie Wonka's factory in midtown NoHo. Needless to say, my mother never took me there. About ten months ago, I found my way back and have become something of a regular.

Royal, the bouncer, waves me past without charging the daytime cover, and I step through the beaded curtain and on into the club. The innards of the Electric Candy Factory are much more like a run-of-the-mill strip club than the exterior is, but the adult in me has long since made peace with that fact. Instead of whistling elves and all the candy under the sun, I get velvet, pleather, and a B-squad girl flossing her ass with the dance pole. I hope Charity is working the early crowd, but I doubt it. She'll likely be on later, though, if I care to stick around.

I take a seat away from the tip rail so as not to give the girl false hope, and settle into the scene. The Electric Candy Factory has an eclectic soundtrack, which works in its favor. The DJ doesn't just hit the repeat button on a Lil Wayne CD; no, they branch out to German oompah music during Oktoberfest, patriotic standards, movie tracks (yes, including
Flashdance
), and heavy metal, depending on the dancer. Also, the girls are healthy (well, the one on stage isn't so much) and friendly, but this is likely because I visit often, tip well, and don't talk much.

“Whaddya want?” a female to my left asks, and I look to find the waitress, a pretty, petite girl with overly inflated breasts and a colorful sleeve of tattoos covering her right arm. I know most everybody here, but not her.

“Cherry Coke.” I mimic her not exactly sweet demeanor, and she doesn't appreciate it.

“Don't mind Ivy, she's a cunt,” a voice just above my right ear breathes sultrily. I glance up to find Bianca, a tall black girl with cornrow braids, leaning over me, letting her tits graze my shoulder. “How you doin', sweetie?”

“I could be doing better.”

“Tell me all about it.”

“Nah, it's bullshit—whining mostly.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“How are you doing, Bianca?”

“You're the only one who ever asks me that anymore.” We both pretend I mean it. She perches her toned ass on the side of my chair, and hers is the light, sweet scent of baby oil. “Do you want a dance, Tommy?”

I look to the stage and see that Chilia, a Hispanic girl, has taken over on the pole. She's energetic, but not suiting my current mood. “Take care of me?” I ask, distracted.

At first, Bianca shakes her head, “I'm raggin' it. Aunt Flo.”

I decide I really want to, though, and am persistent. “I got dark pants on—I'll live.”

“You got a condom?” she sighs. When I shake my head, she flicks her braids. “Let me take out my tampon, I'll meet you in back.” She leaves and I get up to go find Zeus, the bouncer for the private booths.

“Hey, Slick!”

I glance back, not believing this comment is directed at me, and lock eyes with the slim server that Bianca called Ivy. She also called her “a cunt.” Ivy holds up my cherry Coke, which no longer seems appetizing. “Forgetting something?”

“Cancel it,” I say, dismissive.

“That's not how it works, Diamond Joe—you order it, you bought it.”

“Just set it on the table then.” I hand her a five quickly from my wallet.

“Six,” she corrects me.

“What's that?”

“Two-drink minimum—two three-dollar Cokes, that's six.”

“I'm just going to get a dance, I'll be right back.”

“If you're going to be back, you shouldn't have a problem paying up front for your two drinks.”

Biting my tongue, I take back the five and lay a ten on her serving tray. “Make sure you bring me change.”

“Don't piss yourself on my account—the dancers hate a wet lap.”

Ivy marches off to set the drink at my table, and I continue to stare in her wake, irked. I was used to the unwarranted lip from cops and prison guards, but not little blonde waitresses in titty bars.

I find big Zeus and pay forty bucks for two “private dances,” and another three hundred will go to Bianca personally for the extra service. Still pissed, I keep looking around for signs of Ivy even as Bianca pushes me down into an armchair and begins her grind against me. Bianca, Cassidy, Sin City Sue, and Charity will all perform this service for me if I pay for it, and I frequently do. Like my heroin fix, they provide me with instant gratification and save me from the misery of trying to meet girls and date. Strippers are interested in my money, not my past.

“You know I'm taking your money whether we fuck or not,” Bianca informs me when I fail to get hard.

“Sorry, it's that waitress. Ivy. She irritated me.”

Bianca slides around on my lap so my face is buried in the mounds of her dark breasts, and then tilts my chin up to meet her eyes. “Fuck that bitch, I'll take care of that. The club can't have its favorite customer distracted.” She invites me to suck on a nipple, which I do. To my immense relief, it does the trick. “Mmm, that's my baby,” Bianca says, and reaches into the front of her thong to produce a condom.

I'm preoccupied with her tits, but I'm pretty sure the brand is Love Sock. Keeping an eye out for Zeus, Bianca rips the package open and precisely glides it down over my exposed cock, which she's worked out with her other hand. Balancing her thighs perpendicular to mine, she brusquely works her clit, quickly lubricating. Wet, she lowers herself, and, without use of her hands, absorbs me into her. She moves quickly, tightening her PC muscles with each lift—in effect, milking me. This is a trick she's evidently learned from Charity, who can get me off in record time. I don't mind a “quickie,” as none of the girls ever have the intention of cumming themselves, and the moment they feel me release, they are off and done with me. This doesn't bother me either. Halfway through the second song, with Bianca bucking my thrusts, her hands gripping the back of my head pulling me into her while she moans like a porn star, I cum hard. In spite of my knowing better, I actually think she might be into it and not just play-acting, but when I warn her that I've popped, she immediately stops, clambers off me, and adjusts her thong back into place with one deft twitch of her fingers. She then tousles my hair, murmurs, “Thank you, baby,” and takes her leave of me. I zip back up, ditch the soggy condom, and wait till the song is over before I stand. The front of my jeans feels wet and warm, and my time at the club is complete. All in all, it's not a bad life I've carved out for myself these days. If only I could get the Offramp Inn out of my head, I'd be in business.

Harold puts me on notice Saturday for a possible cleanup at Disneyland. A woman jumped off the big hotel they have down there, and somehow Harold is certain we'll get the call. We won't. Disneyland has their own team for such activities—like when those people died on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, or when the mooring pylon ripped loose from the steamship and sheared most of some guy's head off, the cleanups stayed in-house and very under wraps. I wasn't with Trauma-Gone at the time of those accidents, but I know we weren't called for either of those jobs then, so I'm not holding my breath for this one either. Instead, I go to the beach and spend the day sitting alone in the sand at Leo Carrillo, watching the waves. I don't bother entering the water with the other frolickers and sun worshippers; I'm not even particularly dressed for a hot summer day at the ocean, but it feels good just the same. The tumultuous Pacific is the thing I found myself missing most during my stretch in prison, and nowadays I make it a point to come out and just appreciate its accessibility. After paying the twelve-dollar parking fee, of course.

A line of dead seaweed on the hard-grit sand looks ominous and shakes me back to the swaths of blood on the ceiling in my last 236 job. Lately, I've found horror in the most innocuous of objects. Thinking of the unlucky Annie, I wonder, Why the homeless lady, though? Was she involved in something bigger? Why weren't the other victims from the other 236s stabbed? Or even murdered? Little Annie was filleted like a salmon. The victim in the 236 before that one had been a male—as had the other one where I'd found a Bible with a condom. So, guys/girls, it doesn't seem to make a difference to the killer…or killers. Someone with consistency is easy to diagnose. They establish small, traceable details that give hints to the sort of personality type they have. With consistency, I'd be able to tell whether this was one person or different people each time. If they'd only regularly use a knife, like they had at the last 236 job, I could likely tell their height and, possibly, their build.

Of course, considering that they are changing things up, I can deduce things from this as well. Nothing concrete yet, but if it keeps up, I can begin to draw a picture. I hadn't been smart enough on the initial jobs to reference the page number in the Bibles, but I have to believe it is always the same one. It certainly had always been early on in the book, I do recall that. Also, the book is routinely beneath the bed, no matter where the death occurs. That is important too. It shows that whatever the killer's intent, the book is not essential to it. The book is incidental, a subtext—a commentary on the scene at large. If the killer, who is almost certainly a male, Caucasian probably, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, had intended for the book to be “the message,” he would have implanted it into the midst of every scene. Perhaps placed it into the hand of every victim? But the killer doesn't want to be caught—or for the crimes to be linked. He wants a bizarre sort of near-anonymity. But why? There's no fame or celebrity or ego involved in this…he doesn't get the joy of watching his crimes played out on the evening news…Maybe it's an anti-ego? Maybe his real joy is in eluding the police—the very joy he partakes in all of this—if it is even a thing—is in not being discovered? Admittedly, that seems to make him more deadly. If he even exists, that is.

He exists
, my brain finishes for me.
Or is it they?
These are all questions that won't get answered while I'm sitting at the beach. Someone in some 236 somewhere could be getting knocked off right now, and if I'm not telling the cops about any of it, I don't have a good reason to be fucking about out at the ocean. I suddenly don't feel like relaxing anymore.

Sunday night around 10:30, I get a text message. It is for an address on West Lime Street in Inglewood. The message directs me to park in the driveway and
only
go into the garage, which will be unlocked. Leaving my white Trauma-Gone polo hanging in the closet, I dress in dark clothing and quietly take the stairwell down to the street exit—no sense in letting my landlord know I am going out.

Driving the Charger south on 405, I toy with the idea of taking the license plates off. In the end I don't, only because it might make me look even more suspicious. I am equal parts nervous and excited about this text message—I'd once wondered if it would ever even come, but now that it has, my brain is overrun with calculations.

The text has come as a result of a conversation I'd had during the cleanup of a Hispanic kid killed during a drive-by in South Central, some weeks back. The kid was an innocent bystander, popped once in the neck as he was eating a strawberry Charleston Chew outside a liquor store. I know this because I had to pick up his bloody, half-gnawed candy bar and toss it in the bag labeled “biohazard.” As I'd been working, a bald thug in a pinstriped jersey bearing the word socal across the chest in Kelly green approached me for a chat. Among the host of prison tattoos that adorned his hands and arms identifying him as a Sureño Lowrider, he had three teardrop tattoos beneath his left eye, all of them filled in, so I knew to at least listen to what he had to say. He'd started off in a general manner, just asking about my job and how I'd gotten into it. Then he mentioned how he remembered me from time served in Norco. I didn't recognize him, but then there were a lot of guys who looked like him doing time in Norco, and relatively few who looked like me. It bothered him some that I didn't know any of the names he was dropping, but apparently not so much, because his questioning took on the line of whether I would ever do side work and if I could stomach dealing with actual bodies. I was weary of the conversation from the get-go, and could see it moving in that direction, but when he finally came out and asked if I would maybe work freelance as a “cleanup man” for his crew, I shocked myself a bit by saying, “Is the pay decent?” He took my number and gave me four hundred dollars as a partial down payment “for supplies” on my first job—if they decided to call on me. If not, he said, forget his face. I'd managed to do that in the weeks since, and might not have even thought the text was coming from him, but I hadn't given anyone my phone number before that or since, and neither Harold nor the answering service would ever send a text message. I don't even try to kid myself that someone has sent this text to the wrong number and I will walk into said garage only to ruin a child's surprise party. Now, as I drive out there, I realize I don't feel any different about saying yes. I'm not exactly excited about the opportunity—I think I just welcome the break in the monotony. And even if I had been against my newfound situation, I don't think I'd have been dumb enough to ignore the text.

I pull onto Lime and am met by lines of houses with tall spiked fences and bars thatched across windows. Tenement-style apartments sully the far end of the block, and, farther still, I can see the chain-link walls of Sentinel Field at Inglewood High. Ominously, the rolling gate used for barring the driveway is hanging open at the shack-style flat house matching the address on my phone. Nobody would just happen to be that careless here. I creep up the bump-lip curb, willing the big Hemi engine in my Charger to idle quieter. If anyone is home at the house, the lights don't show it. And no neighboring curtains have moved at my arrival in the neighborhood, so I take that as a good omen.

The garage is straight ahead, with its large, wooden pull-up door acting as a barrier that separates me from whatever threatens beyond. It and the house could be any color in the dark just before midnight, but on closer inspection they are a badly flaked blue. The summer heat hasn't done the paint any favors. Here, the night is as hot as the day—92 degrees according to the Charger, and I feel every bit of it as I walk past the grime-streaked windows of the old house. The hairs on my neck climb upward like caterpillars investigating the growing beads of sweat back there, and I swat at them as if they were just such things. It is the kind of heat that normally keeps me awake in bed until my eyes drop shut from sheer exhaustion somewhere near dawn. I shoot a glance around the neighborhood once again, seeking out movement and parked vans that could be filled with undercover police officers. Anyone who might be watching me is doing a damn good job of hiding it, though.

The green side-access door does not fit its frame properly, nor the paint scheme for the rest of the garage, and appears to have been wedged into its hole, with hinges added as an afterthought. A simple hasp with a dangling nameless padlock flipped open greets me and coaxes me onward. I set the lock on the soft earth of the dead back lawn, careful to not use my fingertips in the movement. Everything here has to be considered and careful if I am serious about not going back to jail. The door, with its useless knob, scrapes open against the interior concrete, but I am just thankful it opens at all.

Fairly certain that I am going to earn a case of tetanus for my effort, I nonetheless drag my wrist along the interior wall of the pitch-black entryway, seeking out a wall switch. I must hit something in my search because, after a moment of flickering struggle, twin overhead tubes beam on to bathe the contents of my evening in a soft, fluorescent glow.

A man—a boy, really, probably sixteen and Hispanic—lies centered beneath the fluorescent bulbs, flat on his back, arms akimbo and his white Adidas low-tops touching at the heels to form a V. It isn't hard to discern the dual gunshot wounds where bullets have cut through his once yellow flannel shirt and punctured his chest. The glossy off-color residue nesting atop the thick red blood haloes out from his head, indicating he's probably been shot up there too, in the parietal. Likely he'd been shot twice in the chest, and when he'd fallen forward, they, whoever “they” was, shot him in the back of the head, execution-style. Then they kicked him onto his back and let gravity take over. He is fresh too—only a couple hours ago he'd probably been begging for his life, but now he is the textbook definition of dead.

Near him, on an otherwise empty worktable mounted to the wall, sits a cardboard box about the size of a lunch pail. It is addressed to “Mr. Clean.”

I unfold the flaps of the box to find a note and a fresh stack of hundred-dollar bills clipped together. The note reads:

Mr. Clean. $5000 (minus the $400). If that's good for u, take the money, do the job and shut up about it. If it's not enough, leave the money, do the job for us as a favor, and we will leave u alone forever. Use whatever tools u need, cut the body into small pieces and bag 'em. Dig out the bullets. Scrub everything. Leave bags. There's a hose in the side yard if u need water. Be smart, homey. Prob u want to be done before the neighborhood start wakin' up.

I set the note back on top of the money and leave the box where it is, deciding to see how the job goes before I do anything rash. Back at the trunk of the Charger, I take out my
other
milk crate. This is a personal one—one I created expressly for the indeterminate day when I would receive said text message. Much like the milk crate of cleaning supplies I utilize in my day-to-day work, this milk crate has bleach, Simple Green, paper towels, Tyvek suits, and scrub brushes, but it also has a few additional supplies, which I'd purchased with my down payment monies. Dremel, Sawzall, bolt cutters, handsaw, scalpel, cleaver, and a long, rounded butcher knife with a finely sharpened, serrated edge. Also, I'd thrown in a whole shitload of trash bags and day-old editions of the
L.A. Times
I'd collected from a vending machine. The way I figure it, things are gonna get a whole lot more messy before they get cleaner.

Suited with gloves on, I immediately set the Sawzall and Dremel off to the side. The last thing I want is to be in there, buzzing away, separating the kid's humerus from his scapula, bone dust clouding up the joint, and have Inglewood PD roll in on a noise complaint.

Conveniently, there are several empty metal trashcans against the furthest wall of the dingy, mostly barren garage, and I take advantage of these, fitting black plastic bags inside, and relocating them to beside the body. Next I lay out my tools, readying my workspace for operation. I've got roughly six hours to sunrise and, without use of the electric tools, a shitload of work ahead of me.

I begin, first mopping up the wet blood surrounding the corpse, not worrying so much here about being thorough, just getting enough of it out of the way to keep it from soaking up through the suit and onto my knees. I have to roll the body up on its side, and it takes a considerable bit more work than I expected, as the onset of rigor mortis has made some parts of him stiffer than others. A fresh trickle of hemoglobin slimes from the wound in his skull—from the chest wounds too, I imagine, though they are faced away from me. Much of the blood has already spilled out of the boy, but reddened lividity marks show in the visible part of his back, below where his shirt has bunched up. Grabbing newspapers with my free hand, I line them down two deep on the clean area of concrete where the weight of the body has prevented seepage. For the head wound, I set a folded cloth towel to it, and drop the head back down, leaving the cloth to catch the draining fluid. The newspapers will collect the remaining blood, which I need to expel from the body before I can begin my dissection. I scissor away the fabric of the shirt and toss it into the trashcan farthest away, deeming this the can responsible for the fabrics and saturated newspapers. The closer trashcans will collect the various chunks of meat. Using my scalpel, I slit incisions across the skin along the boy's back where pockets of dark blood have pooled. The boy is not fat by any means, but there are natural fatty deposits interspersed throughout the musculature of his lumbar and thoracic areas, and I have to push the scalpel deep. Blood squirts from deeper reserves like burst acne, and I yank my hand back, momentarily forgetting I'm wearing gloves. The newspapers do their part, though, sucking the blood up into their pulpy, block-print headlines with reassuring stories about how L.A. crime is on the decline. When the bottom newspapers are saturated, I stuff more beneath the boy, and dab, not blot, at the overrun areas with a chamois cloth.