60 – Can’t you smell it?
"Griffiths Park!
What a trip!" Dan said laughing as they danced down the street. "Boy
is he going to be peeved at you when he finds out you lied."
"He already
knows," Bobo said, his puffy face stiff with concentration.
"What do you
mean he knows?"
"He read me,
Dan. He might even have known where the meeting was before he asked me."
"Then why did he
let us go?"
"Because he
knows I owe Jake for this. He's giving me my shot."
"You're
crazy."
"You explain it
then."
"I can't. Nor do
I know what to do next."
"That part's
easy," Bobo said. "We go find the other stash."
"Then you have
it, you son of a bitch!"
"Yeah,"
Bobo said with a sigh. "I have it."
Dan stopped and
grabbed Bobo by the arm. "No more games, Bo," he said.
"No more
games."
Too late for games
now. Too late for anything but paying back his debt to Jake, and even that
might not come out the way he expected. This Buckingham was a tricky son of a
bitch.
***********
He let the cab go,
watching its yellow trunk shrink in the shadow of dawn, East Los Angeles
stretching its heavy arms around his shoulders like a shroud. Rain. He felt
rain, a misty, frustrating, end-of-winter rain that would do little to break
the heat or humidity. Yet he liked the feel of it on his face.
"Well?" Dan
asked, looking nervously around, as out of place here as he had been in
Phoenix. Too much Wall Street to ever get along in Chicano town. "Where's
this girlfriend of yours?"
"Not a
girlfriend, Dan, just a friend."
Though wife might
have fit better. Or the hippie "old lady." It felt odd to have
either.
"I don't care
what you call her," Dan said impatiently. "Let's just get it over
with. I don't like this part of town."
"That way,"
Bobo said, pointing towards the string of houses that lined both sides of the street, stucco
rat-traps stinking of rice, beans and hot peppers. He stopped in front of one,
concrete stairs rising up towards a splintered porch. Several of the lower
windows had been boarded over or pinned shut with burlap. He climbed, fishing
in his pockets for the keys. The stucco had long smoothed down into streaks of
grey dust. He'd asked the landlord to paint but had been laughed at.
You want to paint,
mister, you paint.
Or perhaps paint
wouldn't have cured the building ills. The steps sagged with rot as he climbed
to the porch, and the beams of the porch itself crumbled under his step,
threatening to fall through. He avoided the front door and moved towards
another set of stairs at the far right, a narrow, steep climb along the side of
the house-- something added later therefore in better shape. The door on top
had many more locks than those below, installed by Bobo for added security. He
fitted the proper key to each, snapping them back, half expecting them not to
turn. The romance had been precarious lately as his attention focused more on
business than her.
Once I get things
settled, baby, he'd told her. Then we can settle down.
But the door fell in
on foul air. Gun smoke and Blood. Vietnam right here in his own little
hide-a-way. "My God!" he moaned.
"What is
it?" Dan asked, pulling up short on the stairs behind him, wood creaking
under his heals.
"Can't you smell
it?"
Dan sniffed.
"No, not really."
Gunpowder and blood!
Not very fresh, but there, taking its time to settle in the sealed apartment.
He reached in and
flicked on the light to wreckage and ruin-- the kitchen a shambles of spilled
drawers and emptied cabinets, broken dishes and empty silverware laying in the
center of the floor.
It had the feel of
rage like a trapped animal tearing at the bars of its cage.
"What the
hell...?" Dan mumbled as Bobo stepped inside.
"Stay
here," Bobo told him and moved through the hallway to the rest of the
apartment, finding more the same in the other rooms. He found the bodies in the
bedroom. His woman and another man shot to death in the act of love-making.
"What is
it?" Dan asked when Bobo stumbled back to the kitchen bearing an unbroken
bottle of whisky from the ruin.
"Disaster,"
he said, twisting off the seal from the bottle and taking a long, hard pull. He
handed the bottle to Dan.
The scene had
Buckingham's touch written all over it-- and he would be waiting with more of
the same at Echo Lake.
***********
Dan pulled the car to
the curb. He hated driving a dead woman's car, and couldn't shade the image of
the eternal embrace from his head. It felt like an early warning for the gas
chamber.
No officer, we didn't
kill them. We just took their car.
Sure, sure, Dan
thought, but expedience was expedience and they needed transportation.
"I don't see the
van," Dan said, staring up at the hill and house, bass notes flowing down
through the ground like an earthquake.
"Are you sure
they said here?"
"Yes, I'm sure.
I might be crazy, but I'm not deaf. They said they had to dump the stuff from
the apartment. I'm not sure whether they figured on staying or not."
"Where else
could they go?"
Dan shrugged.
"God knows. But the racket coming out of this place, I don't think Mike
would hang around."
"I suppose we
should check just the same," Bobo said, yanking back the door handle with
a thud. "Mike might have left word for us."
Dan nodded and exited
his side, gravel grinding under his heals. The stairs rose like chunks of
cliff, unevenly spaced, and they climbed it with difficulty, Dan wheezing half
way up.
"You all
right?" Bobo asked, pausing beside him, his bruised eyes still reflecting
the apartment's death scene.
"Are you?"
Bobo shrugged, but
the earlier anger had converted into something sad and lost, the child coming
to the surface after a trip through hell. And how could Dan blame him? Bobo had
lost an old lover and a new in the space of breath.
The continued up, the
music growing more unbearable as they climbed. Dan didn't bother to knock, but
pushed the door in. Sprawled naked limbs blocking its passage on the inside. He
had to shove it hard to get them to move, and even then they merely rolled to
one side, their stoned faces grinning up with invitations to join in.
"They're out of
control, man," Dan shouted to Bobo, who nodded, staring down at the orgy
circle with clear disgust.
Dan stepped over and
around the wreathing bodies. Bobo pointed towards the urn-sized candy bowls in
the corners of the room, each full of pills. Dan ran his fingers through them
as if they were precious stones.
"Is this the
Denver stuff?" Dan asked, his throat pained from shouting.
Bobo lifted a pill
and squinted at it, then nodded. "It's got the company logo on the
downers."
"How the hell
did it get here?"
"Maybe we should
ask Dale," Bobo said, a fire in his eyes. He stepped towards the inner
curtain and tore it aside. Less sex here, Dan thought, the crowd of swaying
bodies chanting the lyrics to the playing songs. Dale's deep voice screaming
above them all.
"Just feel it,
people! And you will see the door!"
The big man's twisted
and turned as if in convulsions, naked except for dayglo paint, most of which
colored his genitals. He danced and shouted and banged on the tops of the
speakers.
"Ahhhhh!
Yiiiiip! Yeahhhhh!"
He might have been
imitating a paper-back indian or some National Geographic interpretation of a
savage. The women swayed at his feet, their hands waving up at him.
"Fuck me!"
each of them yelled. "Fuck me!"
"Jesus
Christ!" Bobo said-- just barely loud enough for Dan to hear. "Who
the hell does he think he is?"
A cult leader, Dan
thought-- the latest fad in a generation of fad followers, all of whom had
stepped over the line-- Leary and others had started it with the idea of being
free. He had seen their kind back east. But the west had always taken things
too far. Like the acid tests. And Manson. He closed his eyes and tried to make
it go away. It wouldn't. No more than Bobo's lover's death scene would.
And Dale's expression
said they had come at a bad time, some intricate moment in the transition of
worlds when leader and followers needed no interference from the outside. They
were strangers. Dangers to the quest. And Dale glared at them through the haze.
"What do you
want?" he asked as someone cut the music. The sudden lack of sound hurt
Dan's ears. The participants stopped in place, staring at them, like puppets
frozen on their strings.
Dale's sharp gaze
eyed them with the clarity of a straight-- the drunken, staggering stupor of
the McCadden apartment gone, replaced by something darker and more calculating.
Dan might even have called it evil had he been religious.
"We're looking
for Mike," he said, his own voice suddenly weak in the vacuum.
"He's not
here," Dale said coldly. "If you doubt me, look around."
No Mike, Marie or
Lance. Only Sarah. A naked hypnotized Sarah staring without recognition up at
Dan, spittle at the corners of her mouth, a vapid look in her eyes.
Poor Lance, Dan
thought. If Mike and him had come this way he'd have seen her this way.
"Look,
Man," Bobo said, shuffling his feet from side to side as if something
stuck to the heals. "It's important we find him. He said he would be
coming here."
Dale's gaze shifted
toward Bobo, the nostrils flaring in and out as he breathed. He studied Bobo's
features with a slow disgust, seeming to evaluate the man behind them.
"He might have
been here," Dale said finally. "I seemed to recall seeing his face
sometime tonight. Something about dumping furniture in my garage."
The tightness eased
in Dan's chest, escaping with a short laugh. "Thank God," he said.
"Did they say where they were going."
"I don't
remember," Dale said. "And I wouldn't have listened in either case.
They are not taking our journey and it is the only one I care about."
The King of Love
turned his attention away from them as the music started again, the dance of
waving arms and fingers rising up around his legs like flickering human flames.
He had dismissed them. He no longer knew or cared for their existence either.
Bobo tugged on Dan's
sleeve, motioning him towards the door. "Time to go," he shouted in
his ear.
Dan didn't move. He
owed Lance and leaving Sarah with these people struck him as wrong. He could
feel the rising electricity in the air, the throb of something ugly beginning
here.
"I don't want to
leave the girl," Dan growled an inch from Bobo's ear.
"You mean you
want to take her?"
"She's Lance's
old lady."
"Then let Lance
rescue her," Bobo said. "We mess with her now, there's no telling
what these people'll do."
The exchange did not
go unnoticed-- Dale's dark gaze turning towards Dan like a tank turret, the
mouth forming the words telling them to go.
"Dan, come
on," Bobo said, yanking his coat sleeve. "We'll get Lance and come
back."
"It may be too
late then," Dan said, stepping towards the girl, drawing up Dale's heavy
brows.
Again the music
ceased.
"I just want to
talk to Sarah," Dan said, daring another step forward despite the
infuriated eyes. This time the puppets stirred around him, their eyes as hard
as his, waiting on some signal from him...
"Speak to her
quickly," Dale said tersely. "Then leave."
"You're crazy,
Dan," Bobo whispered, but took the next step with Dan, protecting Dan's
rear, his hand deep in his pocket. He had dug up pistols from the East L.A.
apartment. Dan's weighted heavily in his belt. But both pistols and the
shotguns in the car would not free Sarah if she didn't want to come.
"Sarah?"
Dan said, leaning towards her naked form. She quivered, cringing away from him,
her face crinkled with lines of horror. What did she see? A frankenstein?
Certainly no savior. "Do you want to come with us to find Lance?"
Her eyes widened as
the horror deepened and spread. "NO!" she shouted and clutched Dale's
leg.
"But Lance will
be worried about you," Dan said, moving closer, feeling the mood of the
room grow more tense like the string of a bow waiting to launch itself upon
him.
Enemy! Outsider!
Infidel!
Those were the terms
their kind used for people like Dan and those were the words silently screaming
in Sarah's eyes. "Go away," she moaned. "Leave me alone."
"Come on,
Dan," Bobo hissed through clenched teeth. "These people aren't happy
campers any more."
Dale waited, his
hands gripping the chair arms as if to tear them loose. Dan sighed and rose
from his crouch. He took a long step back, Dale and his kingdom shrinking back
into the frame of a single room. No messiah. No New Testament. Just another
insane man in a world of insanity. He coughed. The incense made it hard to
breathe. He could see Lance's aching eyes in his head.
"Let's get the
fuck out of here," he said and pivoted away from the woman, the man and
the scene, slamming his fist into the door frame as he moved through the black
curtain, the pain helping to cure the ache in his head-- the music rising
behind him like a laughing voice.
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