Say you gonna take my kids. That ain’t right. Why you so cold?”
I walked across the room, said, “Seven o’clock,” and slammed the door.
My stomach was rumbling and I had a few hours to kill, so I blasted north on the Harbor Freeway, exited at downtown, and parked in front of a Chinese market on North Broadway. I walked up a staircase to Pho 79, my favorite Vietnamese noodle shop. The decor was modest and utilitarian-Formica tables, gray carpeting, and paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling-but the food was excellent. I squeezed through the packed restaurant and found a table in the back. I ordered a large bowl of pho-aromatic meat broth with strips of charred beef, laced with onions and thick with rice noodles-which was served with a plate piled high with bean sprouts, stalks of Vietnamese basil, and slices of hot chilies, which I dumped into the bowl. Slurping the noodles and sipping the broth, I thought about that woman from Watts, and how I’d threatened to take her children. Then I thought about Latisha, her arms around my waist, whispering, “You’re my protector.” Fuck that woman from Watts. If I had to jam up and threaten every female associate of the Back Hood Bloods to get what I wanted, I would.
I left the restaurant, spent a few hours back at my desk, and returned to Watts at dusk. At seven fifteen, I knocked on the woman’s front door. But there was no answer. I pounded. Still, no answer. Finally, I pressed my ear against the door. Silence. I walked around the side of the apartment and squinted through the window. The woman and her kids were gone.
“Damn that bitch!” I muttered to myself.
I decided to return to the squad room, run her, and see if I could find any other addresses from her arrest reports. I walked back to my car, climbed inside, and smacked my thigh in frustration. She’ll probably put the word out that I was looking for the shooter. What if the shooter is in the wind now, too? I realized that I just lost the element of surprise. What kind of leverage would I have now? How would I force any of the gangsters to talk?
My reverie of self-recrimination was interrupted by a banging on the passenger door. I saw the woman’s face, pressed to the window.
Relieved, I followed her into the house. She sat in one of the metal chairs; I remained standing.
“If I give you what you want, how you gonna p’otect me?” she asked.
“I’ll put the word out that I got the information from a jailhouse snitch.”
She looked up at me, eyes hooded, smiling ruefully. “What’s the biggest problem a black woman have?”
“I don’t know,” I said impatiently.
“A black man,” she said, tapping her improbably long pink fingernails on the metal chair. “If I hadn’t got wit P-Rock, I wouldn’t be in this predic-o-ment. You feel me?”
“Who’s P-Rock?”
“Curtis Pemberton. When I saw that he hard with them Back Hood fools, I shoulda run. Instead I got wit him. Got one of his babies too. Somehow, you know I be with him. I guess you got yo record keepin’. So you know where I stay. You come after me to get what you can get.”
“Something like that,” I said. “So what do you have for me?”
“Okay now. It like this. They a nigga, name of Rip. He a youngster. He been puttin’ a lot of work in to get his respect. I never met the dude, but my girlfriend say he either got that tat you describin’ or he know who has. He a very active Back Hood. He know both the youngsters and the O.G. s.”
“I asked you to identify the guy with the tattoo. I didn’t ask you to identify someone who may have the tattoo or may know the guy with the tattoo.”
“You gimme short notice. That the best I got.”
“What do you know about Rip?”
She pursed her lips. “My girlfriend say he a bonehead. All balls, no brains.”
“What does he do?”
“My friend say he bang, sometime he slang.”
“What does he sell?”
“A little rock, a little weed.”
“What’s Rip’s real name?”
“Don’ know.”
“What’s his address?”
“Don’ know.”
“What’s he look like?”
“My friend say he a little dude. Kind of on the frail side.”
As I walked toward the door, the woman called out. “Ain’ you gonna make it right?”
“What do you mean?”
She rubbed her index and middle finger against her thumb.
“If Rip is the guy with the tat, then you’ll get your money.”
From my car, I called a clerk at PAB, and she traced Rip’s name through Cal-Gangs: Orlando Houston, age nineteen. I called an after-hours number for state parole in Sacramento and jotted down some background on Houston and his latest address. For the past six months, since he was released from a prison near the Oregon border for assault with a deadly weapon, Orlando had stayed with his mother, who, fortunately, lived in South Central, only a few miles away. I cruised by the house, on a street of modest, but well-kept clapboard bungalows with small front lawns and wooden porches.
To avoid spooking Orlando, I parked down the street and walked up the sidewalk. When I passed a preschooler peddling a tricycle, the kid announced in a taunting, singsong voice: “Here come the po — lice, here come the po — lice.”
I quickly hustled down the sidewalk and bounded up the front steps to Orlando’s mother’s house. Standing on the front porch, I could hear rap blaring from the radio. I rang the bell.
When the door opened, I spotted a short, skinny teenager wearing oversized jeans and a white T-shirt. When he saw me, he crossed his arms. “I got a little surprise for you- detective. ”
Damn, I thought. The woman from Watts had warned him I was coming.
As I reached for my Beretta, a stocky black kid with a wispy goatee walked through the kitchen door aiming a. 357 Magnum Colt Python at my head.
CHAPTER 36
“Get your hand off your holster or I’ll blow your fucking dome off,” the kid with the. 357 said. His pinkie and ring finger were missing from his left hand. The flesh was jagged and scarred, like the fingers had been sawed off in an industrial accident.
Slowly, I put my arms to my side
He motioned to the little guy, who I figured was Rip, and said, “Tape him.”
Rip walked into the kitchen, and I could hear him opening and closing drawers.
“Where you put the tape, Li’l Eight?”
“On the kitchen table, you dumb ass.”
I pointed to his left hand. “I see where you get the name.”
He gave me a cold smile, revealing a top row of very white buck-teeth. “You smart. But not smart enough.”
Rip returned with a pair of scissors and gray duct tape.
Both were wearing oversized jeans and white T-shirts that were so baggy I couldn’t check out their upper arms for the Crip Killer tattoo.
Eight pointed to Rip and said to me, “Follow him.”
He led me to a musty back bedroom.
“On your knees,” Eight commanded.
“So far, you guys aren’t in real trouble. You tape me up and they’ll nail you for kidnapping. That’s a life sentence. Get smart. You should-”
“Nobody going down for kidnapping,” Eight said. “’Cause ain’t gonna be no witness.”
Before I could respond, Rip covered my mouth with a strip of duct tape. Then he reached inside my coat and
