I put the fog lights on and looked in the rearview. Coming up behind me was a white SUV. I nudged the roadster and it rose like a bird. I lost them momentarily, but at the same time I couldn’t risk hitting eighty or ninety on those twisting curves, blinded as I was by the fog. Headlights were creeping up again-it was the SUV and it didn’t look like it wanted to pass me. It wanted to ram me.
We were going uphill but would soon come to a peak that flattened out before dropping again. With the SUV a few feet from my ass, I revved the roadster and flicked on the bright lights, creating a mirror effect, then snapped them off and did a hard brake onto the narrow right shoulder. The SUV had a choice: Pull over and smash into me, sending us both over the three hundred foot cliffs, or pass me by. It passed me by, but not without a burst from an Uzi.
“Duck!” I shouted, and pushed Sofia down. The windshield broke into spider webs, the impact of each round making the roadster tremble. Then I heard the SUV fade. I stayed down till several more cars had passed. In case there were more than one of them.
That’s when I saw the blood. Sofia had been hit. The bullet had missed me but had found her right shoulder. She was bleeding in a bad way and her eyes were frightened.
“I’m going to get some help,” I said through clenched teeth. I pulled out her little cell phone but there was no signal in this area, cut off by the sheer mountains. With my coat, I made her as comfortable as I could, but I knew she was in terrible danger.
I found a flare in her trunk and sparked it. Since the roadster was close to the cliff’s edge, I walked back toward the oncoming traffic so I could be seen in the fog and drizzle. Then headlights approached, a car with two guys bullshitting instead of paying attention. And me out there swinging the flare at them in the middle of the road. Till at the last second, the driver saw me and swerved suddenly to the right, onto the shoulder; lost control, bounced fifty feet, and smashed broadside into the roadster.
The rest of my life I’ll remember that sound, metal against metal, heart against heart.
I ran to the edge and watched as the two cars went over the cliff, tumbling down together and bursting into a single fireball whose heat singed my face. I screamed, I howled, I don’t know, it made no difference. I knew at that instant this would be the deciding moment of my life; the before and after that would scar whatever life I’d lived and whatever I have left of life now.
I started walking away. I didn’t want to be around when the ambulance arrived. Didn’t want to be anywhere near the scene. If someone figured that I’d been killed in the crash, so much the better. One day, those who did this would pay, and I wanted to be around to see it.
When I got back to La Mission I discovered my loft had been torched. A warning, I guess. The spray-painted graffiti,
Obviously, I never went back to the job. I’ve stayed under the radar ever since. Gave up that whole other life to stay alive. But the circle scar on my forearm from Sofia’s cigarette reminds me every day of the dead I carry.
The newspapers and the Fox Channel all played it another way. A niece of a prominent Mission district real estate matron killed in a tragic car accident with another vehicle on Devil’s Slide. I guess the bullet holes on the roadster were caused by metal-eating termites.
Once the dust settled, so to speak, the Planning Commission approved the permit for the new building at Sixteenth and Valencia, and Callahan’s outfit built it. That’s what you see there now-that chrome shit glass monstrosity. But for a long time there was just a big gaping hole at the intersection, like when you have a tooth pulled. Arson as a cause for the fire at the Apache Hotel was in fact never investigated by the D.A.’s office, the Department of Building Inspections, or anyone else. But the word in the neighborhood is that the new building is haunted by the
And the big woman, Felicia Delgado, the one who profited from the insurance scam? She didn’t fall. Just too many layers between the hirelings and herself. And too many people owed her. But she’s old and sick, and her greedy heart can’t last much longer, miserable with her bloody money…so it doesn’t really matter. One way or the other, sooner or later, she’ll get her ticket to the other barrio.
PART III.
GENESIS TO REVELATION BY PETER PLATE
It was ninety-six degrees on Market Street the day before Christmas. Holiday decorations graced the windows of the check-cashing store at the corner. Weary junkies in goose-down parkas congregated around the Stevenson Alley methadone clinic. Teenaged hookers wearing rhinestone-trimmed spandex capris and halter tops loitered at the Donut Star coffee shop. Pigeons drunk on heatstroke were falling off the telephone lines.
In the 1940s, Market Street had been a constellation of movie houses. Blue-collar entertainment seekers flocked there for the vibrant nightlife. Nowadays the avenue was a forest of abandoned buildings. Under the old Strand Theater’s marquee, homeless men and women had turned a fleet of shopping carts, suitcases, clothes, tarps, and strips of cardboard into a shanty fort.
A pale, unshaven twenty-four-year-old Slatts Calhoun, three days out of San Quentin Prison, stood near a pay phone at Seventh and Market. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit stolen from a Salvation Army volunteer. To go along with the costume he had on a fake white beard and an ill-fitting stocking hat. A tarnished blue.357 Smith and Wesson revolver was stuck in his belt.
He reconnoitered the medical marijuana club up the street and cursed. Ever since weed became legal in the city, pot stores were everywhere. They were a venereal disease. It was impossible to get away from them. This one was squeezed in between a dentist’s office and a sandwich shop. It had a brick facade and a single barred window emblazoned with graffiti. A bored surveillance camera was mounted above the security gate. The place resembled a police station.
Slatts limped over to the dope shop, stopped in front of the steel gate, posed for the camera, and buzzed the doorbell. Nothing happened. He waited a second and repeated the procedure. A thin Mexican hippie in paisley surfer shorts and a vintage Clash T-shirt came out to inspect him. “Hey, Santa, how the fuck you doing today?”
Keeping the gun concealed, Slatts said what came to mind. His first forty-eight hours out of the penitentiary had been a hassle. One night he slept in a garbage dumpster behind the new federal building. Then he got into a fight with a hooker and was jacked by her pimps. He didn’t even have enough money to take the bus to the welfare office. As a bonus, the beard was making his skin itch. “I’m cool, homeboy. What’s up with you?”
“The same bullshit. You got your ID for me?”
To gain entry into the club, a customer needed a physician-approved Department of Health identification card. Private doctors were handing them out at two hundred dollars a pop.
Slatts didn’t have a card, no place to live, or any food in his belly. He rasped, “Yeah, well, there’s a problem, see? Can I come in and talk to you about it?”
The pot worker’s smile faded into a cynical tic. He was prematurely aged by the needs of dope fiends. “Hell, no.”
“C’mon, vato, give me a break.”
“I can’t do that, dude. It’s against the law. You’ve got to have a card to get in.”
“Listen to me, asshole, I want some fucking weed.”
“Too bad, home slice. I don’t give a shit.”
“Fuck you, man. It’s goddamn Christmas, you know what I’m saying?”
Slatts lost his cool in a delicious surge of adrenaline. It was time to introduce his revolver into the
