It was around 6 o’clock on a Thursday. Ginger had just finished stocking the fridge for the night rush, which she figured would be pretty significant. She wanted everything just so before heading back home. She pulled out a small cutting board and a knife and started quartering limes. She was good with a knife. She understood that piercing the tough hide of the fruit was not so much a matter of strength, but rather finesse. She didn’t stab at the lime. She drew the blade over the skin as if she were caressing it, which was the key to splitting it neatly in two. After that, she could flip the flat side of the fruit on its belly and quarter it with two quick strokes. She could move through a five-pound bag of limes like this in ten minutes.
Between two mirrored pillars, she could make out Sophie, chatting it up with Luther and one of his pals, a big handsome Serbian named Terry who liked to do blow with all the girls. So, of course, he was tight with Sophie. Ginger had always thought he was really attractive, but because of the company he kept, she had always maintained a certain distance.
Better that way, she told herself.
Ginger was about halfway through the limes when Sophie motioned at her to come and join them at their table. Ginger pretended not to notice, so Sophie got up and strolled over to the bar.
“What’s up?” said Sophie.
She grabbed a maraschino cherry from the condiment tray. She popped it into her mouth, and when she bit into it, juice dribbled all over her chin and she started to giggle. That perkiness really annoyed Ginger.
“What does it look like?” answered Ginger, holding up the knife.
Sophie sat down on a barstool.
“Wanna make some money?”
Sophie lingered coquettishly over the word “money,” exaggerating the stress on the first syllable.
“Just what have you gotten yourself into?” asked Ginger.
“Relax,” sighed Sophie. “You know I’m selling that oxy for Frankie, right?”
“So?”
“So Frankie’s not here,” she said. “He’s down in San Diego with your hubby. I never re-upped. Luther and Terry are asking for forty tabs. That’s more than a grand.”
Ginger set the knife down.
“You know I don’t mess around in Eddie’s business,” she reminded her.
Sophie reached for another cherry. Ginger remained silent, and Sophie started to squirm in her seat like a bored teenager.
“C’mon…” she begged. “These guys are cool.”
Just then, Ginger noticed Terry making his way over to the bar. Her heart started beating more rapidly.
“Hey, Ginger,” said Terry.
He had a thick Serbian accent that made him sound like a Russian gangster. It made him sound dangerous. Ginger liked that, regardless of the fact that she didn’t particularly like him.
“Terry,” she said, very matter-of-factly.
He took a seat next to Sophie.
“So maybe you can help us out of this jam?” he asked.
Ginger really didn’t need the money. Still, she knew she was going to say yes. She just didn’t know why. Someone or something distant and inarticulate was knocking at the back door of her subconscious, getting ready to tell her that this was a stupid idea. Whatever that thing was, she ignored it.
“I’m finished here,” she said, tossing the last of the limes into a big glass jar. “If you pay me up front…”
She paused for a moment and looked over at Sophie.
“If you pay me up front,” she continued, “I guess you can follow me to the house. Then in and out with the oxy. Quick.”
“In and out,” promised Terry.
Ginger and Terry stared at each other for about seven seconds. Ginger reached down and grabbed her bag, then said to Sophie:
“Get Fabiola over here to see to the bar. I’ll be back at nine, like usual.”
Terry followed Ginger out to the parking lot and they got inside her car. Terry pulled out a little vial of coke.
“Don’t do that here in the parking lot,” she chided him. “Jesus Christ...”
It reminded her once more what a particularly reckless cokehead Terry really was. Nevertheless, things kept moving ahead at a steady pace.
“It’s twelve hundred,” she said.
“Right,” said Terry.
He handed her a stack of fifty-dollar bills.
“Follow me over to the house,” she said. “It’s just five minutes from here.”
“Can’t I just ride with you?” he asked.
“I’m on my break, Terry,” she told him. “You’re not going to just hang out at my house for three hours. Fuckin’ in and out, remember?”
He smiled and got out of the car. He walked over to a meticulously restored 1972 Pontiac GTO and started up the engine. Ginger pulled out onto Avenue 26 and took it straight up to Figueroa. She turned right and headed east for a couple of miles. It was just a matter of minutes before she pulled up to her Highland Park home. Terry was walking up the driveway before she had even gotten out of the car.
“C’mon,” she said to him curtly, slamming the car shut behind her.
He followed her up a little walkway and she opened the front door.
“Have a seat, there.”
She pointed to the coffee table where Frankie and Eddie had transacted their earlier business. Terry sat down and Ginger walked back to the rear of the house. While waiting for her to get back, he did a big, fat line of coke.
Ginger returned with his merchandise.
“Here,” she said, tossing him the forty oxy that she’d slipped into a Flintstones vitamin bottle.
Terry’s eyes were starting to light up from the cocaine.
“Sure you don’t want a bump?” he asked her.
Ginger hesitated for a moment and then moved over to the sofa and sat down next to him. Her heart was starting to race again.
“Just a small one,” she said, nervously. “Then you gotta fuck off outta here.”
Terry just smiled. He drew out another fat line and Ginger leaned over the glass tabletop and took it in one neat blast. She hadn’t done any cocaine in a while. She was getting an enormous rush and she started to giggle.
“What?” laughed Terry.
“Nothing,” she smiled.
She reached over and ran her index finger along the length of his thigh. Terry playfully tugged at the top of her jeans and unfastened the top two buttons.
Ginger offered no resistance.
****************************************************************************************************
On the way down to Tina’s house, Eddie found himself being tailgated by some hostile jock in a colossal pickup truck, one of those obscenities with huge monster-truck wheels and fog lights mounted under the grill. He was hauling a jet ski, too, evidently driven by some mad desire to recreate. He pulled right up on Eddie’s rear bumper and flashed his headlights. Frankie, in the passenger seat, was none too happy about this, and he stuck his head out the window of the moving town car. He flicked his lit cigarette behind him and into the jock’s windshield, prompting the lunatic watercraft aficionado to overtake them on the right. The madman’s hair was cropped real close – a Marine, most likely. He was wearing an Oakland Raider’s jersey. Had this been transpiring in the South, he would have had a Confederate flag hanging in his rear window. But this was an urban hick. Although technically the same species as their southern brethren, they mark themselves with an altogether different set of signs. Especially the Southern California types, like this guy, who was blasting an old Rage Against the Machine CD full tilt through some very expensive speakers.
Eddie, not wanting to let the situation escalate any more than it already had, slowed the Town Car and made a swift move over to the next exit.
“You should have seen this guy,” said Frankie. “Big mutant jarhead fucker. He was all bent out of shape…”
Eddie was in the toilet at Tina’s apartment in Chula Vista. He was listening to Frankie describe the incident to Tina, who was doubled over in laughter. He finished his business and stepped out into the sparse little studio space that Tina occupied. It was like one of those places you see on top of a garage, but this one was actually perched atop a liquor store on the corner of H Street and Magnolia.
“Yeah,” said Eddie. “That was a riot. What would be really funny is if you could somehow manage to draw that same sort of unwanted attention our way when we’re motoring back with a shopping bag full of pills and a big chunk of heroin.”
Eddie looked out the window and examined the intersection around the liquor store. An eighty-year-old lady was pushing a shopping cart filled with aluminum cans and plastic Coke bottles.
“Relax, man…” sighed Frankie.
Frankie and Tina were sharing a chunk of tar. Frankie took a big hit and then looked over at Eddie and pointed down at the aluminum foil.
“What do you think?” said Eddie.
Tina looked over at Eddie.
“You mean you never imbibe?” asked Tina.
“Not that shit,” he said. “Not if there’s anything else within arm’s reach. That crap is full of formaldehyde and kerosene and rat droppings. I’ve seen how those freaks cook that stuff up down south of Oaxaca. Not exactly a lot of quality control.”
Tina, a plump, pleasant, butch, blond lesbian, was very relaxed and thoroughly unconcerned about Eddie’s exhortation. He had known her since the early 1990s, when she was a make-up artist in Los Angeles. He somehow lost track of her, and she somehow discovered that it was pretty easy to make a living by simply parking her ass on the border and employing a cohort of old doper friends and a couple of Mexicans to hustle pharmaceuticals and other contraband over from Tijuana.
“So you guys wanna hang out?” asked Tina. “Go get some Mexican food? I know this place with Mariachis.”
“Maybe,” said Eddie. “Let’s finish up this business first.”
Tina walked over to an ugly blue and orange circular table in the corner of the room. She pulled a bunch of plastic bottles out of a paper supermarket bag.
“A thousand codeine, three hundred oxy, three hundred 10 milligram Valium,” she said. “And dessert.”
She slapped a chunk of tar on the table. It was at least as big as a tennis ball.
“I can’t believe you still move so much codeine,” she said.
“Are you kidding?” said Frankie.
“What do you mean?” asked Tina.
“That stuff,” said Eddie, “is like the slot machines in a casino. My bread and butter. I can always sell that. All these grad student types, professionals, they don’t think twice about the fact that they have a codeine habit. I don’t know what the fuck they tell themselves, but for some reason they don’t see themselves as junkies.”
Eddie checked out his merchandise and then tucked it back into the shopping bag. He tossed Tina a big wad of bills bound together in a rubber band.
“Thanks,” said Tina. “Now let’s go get some enchiladas…”
********************************************************************************************
After finishing up his examination of/with Dr. Tsu, Fat Tommy Pander got back into his police issue blue Ford Taurus, the inside of which was littered with empty bags of trail mix and crushed-up cans of Bud Light. Wedged under the windshield was a little Styrofoam spit cup that he used for his chewing tobacco. The dashboard was covered in a layer of pungent, brownish grime from the cup’s numerous capsizings, and the residue formed a sandpaper-like patina underneath the windshield – a tiny topographic history of the fat man’s sloth. He grabbed his cup, spat into it, and started driving west on Colima, parallel to the freeway, in the direction of Los Angeles. After passing Asuza Avenue he could make out the neon sign of The Lucky Strike in the distance. As he drew closer, he was able to see Marcheta, who was slipping something into the trunk of a chewed-up 1982 Mazda. He pulled into the bowling alley parking lot about fifty yards away and dimmed his lights. He watched as Marcheta got behind the wheel. She packed a load of weed into a little glass pipe and took a big hit.
Marcheta started her car and drove out of the lot, heading north on Asuza with Tommy Pander hot on her tail. Even though he had the air conditioning going full-tilt, fat Tommy still felt flush and clammy inside his vehicle, and his respiration – typical of the corpulent and unhealthy – was labored and nostrily, like the panting of a big, lumbering, sweaty beast on the verge of collapse, like a diseased cow or a bloody bull dying on the hot red dirt of a Tijuana stadium. He waited impatiently for just the right moment to pull her over. After about a mile and a half, Marcheta started to make her way past a massive, abandoned business park. Tommy flipped the switch for the red and blue lights mounted on the windshield behind his rearview mirror and directed Marcheta to pull off the highway and onto a deserted little side street next to a huge warehouse. The sun had set over an hour ago, and it was plenty dark now for what the fat man had in mind.
Tommy came over and knocked on the driver’s side window. Marcheta opened the door and stepped out.
“What the fuck are you doin’ Tommy?” she said . “Jesus Christ, I thought it was a real cop.”
“I am a real cop, baby,” he said.
She rolled her eyes at him. He leaned back and dropped his right arm like Jack Johnson and steered a powerhouse uppercut into the gut of the tiny little Mexican woman. The force of the blow lifted her a foot and a half off the ground, and on her way to the pavement her body spun around and two of her front teeth were ripped out by the edge of the Mazda’s door handle as her face collided with the side of the car.
One of the teeth landed on fat Tommy Pander’s worn-out burgundy loafers. He picked it up and placed it in her quivering palm.
“You might wanna hold on to that,” he said. “These hotshot dentists today can work wonders.”
The fat man walked over to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. He reached in and popped the trunk, then walked to the rear of the vehicle and started fishing through the contents of the Trader Joe’s bag that she had placed there just a couple of minutes ago. He walked back over to Marcheta, who was still squirming in agony on the asphalt.
“This looks like methamphetamine,” said Tommy, holding a little rectangle of paper between the middle and index fingers of his right hand. “I thought you’d stopped messin’ around with this shit?”
“Fuck you Tommy,” she said. “You know that ain’t mine.”
Tommy started to laugh, sarcastically. He stood over her, picking his nose for a few moments, and then he reached own and unzipped his trousers. He pulled out his flaccid penis and began to urinate on the woman. When she was finally drenched in piss, he spat on her and reared back with his right foot and swung his ugly burgundy loafer down hard into her rib cage four times. Marcheta started to vomit – a pus-colored emission mixed with blood from the lining of her hemorrhaging stomach. She lay there in the effluent of her own violated self, convulsing and weeping, wondering if it was her time to die, thinking about her children, thinking about the fact that if she didn’t die she would have to hump it into work tomorrow morning, about the fact that she didn’t even have enough money to pay for a visit to urgent care and that her boyfriend had gobbled up all her Vicodin and she had nothing for the pain. She thought about all of this for a moment – no longer – and then considered whether or not it wouldn’t be better if the fat man simply killed her on the spot, right there, right then.
“Let’s get this over with, Tommy,” she moaned.
The fat man stuck his head inside the Mazda and pulled her pipe out of the ashtray. He grabbed a lighter off the dashboard and took a big hit off the pipe. He stood under a dim streetlamp, exhaling pot smoke and laughing.
“You got a prescription for medical marijuana?” he said. “Cuz’ if you don’t, that’s some more trouble you’re looking at.”
He laughed so hard he farted. Marcheta looked up at him and tried to say something, but another stream of vomit turned her speech into an incomprehensible gurgle.
“What’s that you say?” said the fat man.
He reared back and kicked her in the ribcage once more. Marcheta gasped for air, tried to stagger to her feet, to face him with the last bit of rage and dignity left in her broken little frame. As she struggled to stand up, fat Tommy grabbed her by the hair and sent her head smashing into the rear passenger window, which cracked neatly in half but didn’t shatter.
“You can probably have that fixed,” said Tommy. “The window, I mean. Your face is most likely beyond salvaging.”
Marcheta coughed and spat up some more blood.
“This might be a bad way to die,” she gurgled, “but the way you live, Tommy, it’s worse than dying.”
The fat man laughed.
“Oh, I’m not gonna kill you, honey,” he said. “I just want you to have a few scars to remember me by. Unless you’d like to grab your cell and call the cops, who’ll just be friends of mine anyway, and who’ll end up finding weed and meth in your car and assume that you just had a nasty little spat with your pimp.”
“Fuck you, Tommy,” she said, “you evil motherfucker.”
Tommy stood over her pummeled body.
“I’m a nasty piece of work, baby,” he said. “That much is true. But at least I ain’t some used-up piece of beaner trash that’s fucked her way through half of Duarte. You’re a fuckin’ disgrace, you filthy tramp. And you’re an uppity cunt to boot.”
Marcheta lay there wailing, the pain and grief of an impossible and unfair existence having come to a head in this moment of pitiless and unmerited chastisement. It was a churning wail that throbbed and ebbed and manifested itself as an ugly truth that was starting to make the fat man uncomfortable. He needed to bury that feeling, so he went back to the trunk, which was still open, and grabbed a tire iron. He took it and walked past Marcheta up to the front of the car and slammed it down hard into the Mazda’s headlight.
“That’s a violation, you dumb bitch.” He said. “You should care more about the safety of other drivers. Have that fixed, or else I’ll be ‘round to pay you another visit.”
He dropped the tire iron at her feet and said:
“You’d best pick up a box of bandages on the way home. You look a fright…”
He laughed and got back into the Ford. It seemed to Marcheta that he sped away rather hastily, which he did: he had just seen Dr. Tsu’s Mercedes pass by, and he hurried to follow it onto the 60 westbound.
Marcheta watched as the Ford disappeared down Asuza Avenue. She reached over and grabbed the tire iron and then struggled to her feet. She looked down at where she had been lying and noticed an outline of little red drops, kind of like a chalk outline at a crime scene, only drawn in blood, a little bloody red halo that formed in the place where her head had been resting. She tossed the tire iron into the trunk and got back behind the wheel. She stared in the rearview mirror and noticed that the lid of her left eye was so badly lacerated that it resembled nothing more than the remains of a bulldozed cherry tomato. For four or five minutes, she simply sat there, weeping, and after she was all cried out, she reached for her cell phone. For a second, she actually considered calling the cops. Then, thinking the better of it, she set the phone down and started the Mazda and drove home in the early evening darkness to cook dinner for her two kids, one of whom was autistic.