it.
'Larry, I don't know who set off what. So far as Stevie goes, he's brave, cool and tough as nails. He didn't shed a tear. But his old man did when he got Stevie back, is what I heard.'
'I'm sure you know that his father is a convicted felon. A former member of the violent prison gang La Eme?'
'I've never met him. I'd guess that even gangsters can love their children.'
'How's your chest wound, Deputy Jones?' 'Oh, yes, gangsters love their children!' said Rocky Carrasco. 'You're quite a philosopher for being a dumbass cop!'
He smiled as Bradley walked into his El Monte lair an hour later. They bumped fists semi-elaborately. Bradley went to the fridge and got a cold Pacifico and plopped down on the leather sofa in front of the big-screen TVs. There were three of them, each tuned to picture-in-picture mode, which, when coupled with Rocky's digital recorder, gave him all the Mexican football matches and Pimp My Ride and Wild Planet and Simpsons he could handle. Rocky pulled a remote from the waistband of his baggy Lakers shorts and muted all three monitors.
Bradley had shed his uniform and sling and now wore plaid shorts and a white Lacoste tennis shirt and flip- flops and a narrow-brimmed hat. He raised his left arm gingerly to the sofa pillows. The little bayonet of a potato peeler had gone in two full inches, the doctors had told him, and it had sliced through a goodly portion of pectoral muscle but stopped short of the major blood vessels that lay deeper. They'd cleaned it out but left it unstitched so the wound could drain and heal. They'd given him twenty thick, sterile adhesive pads and pumped him full of antibiotics and told him to take a week off from any demanding physical work.
Which was fine with Bradley because he had plenty of non-physical work to do tonight.
Rocky sat at the other end of the sofa. He was a small knot of a man, muscular, covered in tatts and the scars left by various enemies. Shirtless, and wearing the oversize basketball shorts, Rocky appeared gnomelike. His skin was pale from years at Pelican Bay and years of indoor living. As the linchpin of Carlos Herredia's L.A. franchise Rocky liked privacy and anonymity. He rarely left this compound. He was the opposite of the showy gangsta and he claimed that his quiet life would allow him to live a hundred years, as his father had. The old patriarch had been gone a year now.
'I hear El Tigre might have a deal for you,' said Rocky. 'A proposal.'
'Carlos always has something cooking.'
'You're gonna like it. Mateo told me not to tell you so I'm not telling you.'
'No.'
'He says it's a good thing. I say it's kinda like this Larry King deal, but bigger.'
'What could be bigger than Larry King?'
Rocky laughed. 'You will be seeing what I mean.'
Bradley checked his watch. 'How'd we do this week?'
'Three hundred fifty plus some.'
'Down again.'
'I don't get it,' said Rocky. 'In a bad economy people need to get wasted even more. You know they're getting their kicks somewhere, man.'
'Maybe from the Mara Salvatrucha-Armenta's hired cutthroats. I hear his product is terrific. Well, let's get this thing done, Rock. I have a long drive.'
'Yeah, man. You rest. I got cut four times in a fight and they took me to a horse doctor 'cause nobody knew a real doctor that wouldn't call the cops. It was one shit feeling when I woke up the next day. I killed the boy, too. Stupid. We knew each other. Fuckin' Mexicans. I'll get the stuff ready.'
'Thanks, Rocky.'
'Hey, amigo. Just in case I didn't make it clear to you, I'm thankful for what you did for me. For Stevie. I'm thankful to you and God Himself.'
'I'm proud to have you as a friend, Rocky.'
'You're gonna have me for a friend for another fifty years, man.'
Rocky walked over to his game room. He grabbed the cue ball on his way past the pool table and backhanded it sharply into a corner pocket. In the corner was a large wall safe. A moment later Rocky swung open the door and stepped inside.
Bradley went to a window and looked out at the compound. Rocky owned two adjacent homes on Gallo Avenue, which Bradley found amusing because gallo meant rooster in Spanish and it was slang for marijuana, of which Rocky moved tons throughout his So Cal network every year. Not to mention the heroin, cocaine and meth. The homes were old and two-story, and the lots were large. Rocky owned two more homes one street over and directly behind the Gallo Avenue houses, and these faced the opposite direction, so that after Rocky removed the fences, all four spacious backyards formed one big space. Rocky had walled off the front yards as close to the street as municipal setback codes would allow, giving the four-plex a fortresslike attitude. He and his wife and six children lived in the house in which Bradley now stood, while his brothers and sister and their families occupied the other three homes, along with countless children, stepchildren, relatives and friends. Rocky's father, the hundred-year-old George Carrasco, had lived out his last quiet years shuffling from home to home, sipping tequila mixed with vitamin water, bearing gossip and news and describing the visions for which he was known.
Bradley looked down on the central backyard. In the bright security floodlights he could see the little Mexican village/playground that Rocky and his family had established: the palapas and concrete tables and benches, the big freezers with the Pacifico and Corona and Modelo ads on them, the grills made from split fifty-five-gallon drums. There were dozens of tall palms and bird of paradise and plantain, and big pots of mandevilla and plumeria plants now dying back for the season, and succulents overflowing their pots and barrels. There were brightly painted plywood shanties for the kids to play in, a hoop and half-court for basketball, and a foreshortened football field with its one goal and a wall of upended pallets forming one out-of-bounds line. There was a chicken coop and a screened-off garden and an aboveground kiddie pool and bikes and scooters and skateboards and pit bulls lounging everywhere Bradley looked.
He joined Rocky in the game room, where four large suitcases filled with cash now waited on the pool table. The cash had been separated by denomination and rubber-banded into blocks that a man could just get a hand around. Rocky had set the digital scales up on the bar counter. Bradley could smell the vacuum sealer warming up down by the jukebox. Two hours later they had weighed the cash and pressed it into tight bundles and sent them through the sealer. There were too many bills to count by hand, so they went by weight instead: exactly one pound of twenties contained four hundred eighty bills worth $9,600; a pound of fives was worth $2,400; a pound of hundreds, worth $48,000. The sealing machine was made for game meat but the thick plastic discouraged the ICE dogs from smelling the one-pound bundles. Bradley pictured a German shepherd with a forty-eight-thousand-dollar brick in its mouth, and this did not amuse him.
He picked up one of the bundles and read the denomination through the plastic. All of this money was only about half the California profits for Carlos Herredia's North Baja Cartel, he knew-four hundred grand plus for the week. Another hundred grand had gone into the pockets of Rocky's hundreds of young pushers who worked the So Cal streets, and into the pockets of dozens of middlemen, and more to the lieutenants and captains he knew. And of course another fifty went to Rocky himself, some of which was shared with his Eme equals, most of whom could only dream of it from their prison cells. And this did not include the fabulously lucrative markets of the Bay Area and San Diego, also serviced by the North Baja Cartel, and by others. Bradley looked at the bundles and shook his head.
'What a fucked-up country we are, Rocky.'
'Yes, but we make a good living fucking it up.'
'If we were smart, we'd just make it legal. You know, legal to have some for yourself. Legal to grow some or make some for yourself. Let the junkies kill themselves off. Let the crack and meth heads do the same. So people get stoned more. So what? It's no worse than booze. Then there's no market for us. We have to find other things to do.'
'Americans won't give themselves freedom like that. It would make them feel bad about themselves. It would hurt their self-esteem. And jobs would go away.'
'No. It won't happen.'
'No. I'll live to be a hundred and it won't happen.'
They put the money into one rolling suitcase and filled two others with new clothing, the store tags still on.
