But I hadn’t come here to talk about old times. “Arne—”
“No questions, Ray. You don’t have the right.”
“Yes, I do. I’m in this car. I came down here to find you, and I can help, maybe.”
“Maybe,” he said. And laughed to himself. “Do you know why I asked you to go to the bar with Mouse that night?”
That startled me. I’d forgotten that he’d asked me to watch Mouse’s back. “No.”
“Okay. Do you know why I paid that protection money for you while you were inside?”
“Because you thought I would try to make a deal for a lighter sentence.”
“Ray, Ray. You’re such a beautiful idiot. And now I’m glad you took off for Seattle. At first my feelings were hurt, but now I think it’s better you weren’t around when everything went to shit.”
He wanted me to ask him about Mouse and the protection money, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “How did things go to shit?”
“We got old,” Arne said, sounding annoyed. “When you’re stealing cars and getting high at sixteen, it’s like an adventure. Hell, even when you’re twenty-two you can tell yourself you’re a hard and dangerous dude, out on the streets taking what you want. But as you get older, it changes. The life starts to go sour. Even I wanted a house, a wife, and a kid, Ray.”
I noticed he said
“Well, here I am,” he said. His tone was difficult to read. I’d always found Arne hard to read; maybe that was why I’d always been willing to follow him.
“She said it was my fault.” But I’d said this already, and it didn’t pry the truth out of him this time, either. Arne stared into the harsh desert sunlight, staying with traffic. He never drove faster or slower, preferring to hide in the crowd.
We were heading east. Las Vegas? But he’d said three hours at most, so it couldn’t be. “Where are we going?” I asked again.
“Ray, have you noticed that I’m not answering your fucking questions?”
I looked over at him. He was shorter than me and built heavier, but he was quick. And I knew he was tough, but I was a wooden man with the Twenty Palace Society. I’d faced scarier things than Arne Sadler. “That’s why I have to keep asking.”
He smiled at me then, and I truly couldn’t read his intent. Then he turned his attention to the road. We drove in silence for a while.
For more than ten years, Arne had been the most important person in my life.
I met him in juvie, when I believed I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. He was three years older, and while he wasn’t the first person to tell me that the shooting wasn’t my fault, he was the first one I believed even halfway. And he told me to come find him when the time was right.
I did. Arne taught me to steal cars, to fight, to live as a criminal without being an asshole, to tell victims from non-victims, and how to treat them both.
But I’d turned my back on him. When I walked out of Chino, I couldn’t go back to that old life. I just couldn’t. I wouldn’t have chosen the society in its place, but that didn’t change how I felt about being in L.A. again.
And yet, here I was. Worse, I had already gotten swept up into one of Arne’s jobs.
I was seriously considering cutting him with my ghost knife—he’d tell me whatever I wanted to know after that, and he’d apologize for making me wait, too—when he suddenly sighed.
“Ray, how about this? You help me finish this job, and I’ll help you with your thing. Okay? Melly was right. Things are in a bad way for me, and for Robbie, Summer, Lenard, even Bud, if that matters. But this job we’re on is too important, and if I start talking about this shit, I’m going to lose my game face. You get me, don’t you?”
“I get you.”
He smiled at me. “Thanks, man.”
We cruised the freeway eastward. The houses and strip malls gave way to warehouses and industrial, which eventually gave way to rough, low desert hills. The car was silent. Arne hated to play music when he was on a job.
The hum and movement of the car had lulled me to a dreamless sleep. I heard the tires roll over gravel and jolted awake. “This is it,” Arne said. The sun was in my face; we’d turned around, and I’d slept through it.
Arne pulled off the highway onto a flat gravel path. There was a dry streambed directly beside us—if the car swerved a foot to the right, we’d tumble into it. Directly in front of us was a low hill, no different from any other low desert hill in Southern California. I honestly had no idea where we were, or even if that was the 15 back there. The gravel gave way to a dirt track as we drove northwest, following the trail around the hill.
At a wide part, nearly out of sight of the freeway, Arne did a quick two-point turn. “Get behind the wheel and wait here for me,” he said. “I have to pick up a ride from just around the bend there.” That meant he was about to steal a car. I held out my hand. Arne smirked at me, then took out his key ring. He had dozens of keys, along with a little flashlight, carabiner, Swiss Army knife, and who knows what else. He detached the Land Rover key and gave it to me.
He got out of the car into the scorching desert heat. The Land Rover was pretty roomy, but I was too tall to climb over the shifter. I got out, too, and walked around the front. “Expecting trouble?” I asked.
“We’ll see.” I must have reacted to that, because he smirked again and said, “The place should be empty. It’s a hell of an August out here. But if someone’s home, it won’t be a problem. Wait here and be ready to pull out fast, just in case.” He turned his back to me and walked away. After a few steps, he glanced back. The expression on his face suggested I was not doing my job. I climbed into the car and shut the door.
