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Three cups of coffee, but I can’t clear my head
from what went down last night.
—Blue Morning, Blue Day,
FOREIGNER
SLEEPYTIME TRAILER PARK,
LAKESIDE, CALIFORNIA
6:02 A.M. PDT
[PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS CHAPTER ONE AND OUT OF SEQUENCE TO CHAPTERS 13 AND 14]
THE NUMBER DISPLAYED on Jimmy’s cell was unfamiliar but not so the voice.
Elmond Winkle saying, “Been a long time, James. How you doing?”
Jimmy fumbled with an instant coffee packet in the early-dawn gloom of cousin Frankie’s travel-trailer, one that stank of fish and saltwater but was free and all Jimmy’s whenever Frankie was out on the tuna-boat. Running warm tap-water into the cup, Jimmy said, “You get my number from Coolidge?”
“Yeah. Can’t believe they made a guy like that your P.O. He treating you okay?”
“I’ll live.” Jimmy sipped the coffee, nasty with undissolved instant coffee-crystals. Crossing the two feet of space that comprised the trailer’s kitchen and dining room, he unlocked the door and cracked it an inch ajar and cautiously scan the dried-up junipers for a bouffant hairdo and cat-eye glasses peeping round a tree limb—
“Yo, Jimmy, you still there?”
“Hold on a moment.” Jimmy quietly descended two short steps to wheel and peer beneath the trailer . . .
Nothing. Nothing but spider webs and two-by-fours. Of course, ever since Doris learned to hide in the frame beneath Frankie’s trailer and render herself invisible to casual observation— unless you crawled beneath to investigate, which was never gonna happen— it had become a clever game of cat-and-mouse.
“Yo, you gonna talk or what?”
“Dude, you wanna just chill a sec?” Jimmy retreated from the trailer enough to give himself room to react should Doris suddenly appear. “Alright, so what gives? You call at six in the morning, we haven’t talked since I went away, you got a reason.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. “So what’s the reason, El?”
“Listen, for the record, I expected to get your voice-mail— heard you was doing the musician deal again, I figured you’d be sleeping til noon and I’d leave a message.”
Jimmy said nothing, feeling no need to explain that, per his parole conditions, he needed a job and playing in a band counts with neither parole officers, creditors nor ex-wives and that the only day-job his felonious ass could get was as a carpet-cleaner for a dirtbag carpet cleaning company like ChemSteem. Elmond wanted to know that, he could call the Coolie.
“Yo, all bullshit aside,” Elmond said, “I called cause I think you know a stiff we got in last night. Mij Poopikov?”
Jimmy knew him. Mij Poopikov was the owner of DreamCircus, one of San Diego’s main venues for up-and-coming bands. Panorama Love had played it just last week, a showcase gig for a Pacific Records A&R guy named Lance. Of course, even following a showcase, Mij tried shorting them on the door.
“Tortured,” Elmond said, “then two in the head.”
“Well, Mij always did have a knack for pissing people off.” Jimmy flicked his cigarette into the narrow, trailer-park lane, clearly courting danger; if the citizens’ council of the Sleepy Time Trailer Park Estates found out, it’d be another fine for cousin Frankie. So Jimmy found himself in the lane and policing up the butt— head swiveling, alert for Doris— saying, “El, you really called me after six years to tell me something I can read in the paper?”
“Five years, yo. And what I know you won’t read in the paper.”
Jimmy took a seat at the picnic table, the filthy red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth strewn with a variety of large, rusted fish hooks. He fingered a hook, saying, “Alright, El, enough chit-chat. What’s up?”
There was a pause. “Rudy Juarez found a carpet fiber that’s got certain unique characteristics that match another case. There’s blood on the fiber that’s not Poopikov’s.”
A crow fluttered down on Frankie’s mailbox, a box built like a seahorse, yellow-and-blue paint now cracked and peeling with a mane carved of wood to resemble seaweed. The crow perched atop the mane, its feathers black and glossy and its beady eyes on Jimmy.
“Who’s blood’s on the fiber, El?”
“Rudy says the DNA’s not entirely conclusive so we have to wait til—”
“Who’s blood?”
A pause at the other end of the line. “It’s Evie’s.”
When Jimmy was little and got terrible news— like the day Aunt Gloria got run over by the acid-head in the Buick— he’d climb into the back of his closet and try thinking good thoughts like the day at Disneyland when he was five and they rode the Matterhorn 11 times. In the days following the discovery of Evie’s body and that bloodied bit of carpet fiber, Jimmy had slipped into a darkened closet called whiskey. When he finally climbed out, nothing remained but primal thoughts of revenge . . .
But that was six years ago. Now, the crow was bobbing and cawing again so raucously, so brazenly, that it occurred to Jimmy a rock would be handy, something throwing-sized, and though the citizen’s council of the Sleepy Time Trailer Park Manor Estates would surely fine him— or Frankie, it being Frankie’s trailer— the fine would be worth silencing that mocking crow. “Where’d they find Mij’s body?”
“Avocado grove out by Beeler Canyon,” Elmond said. “Guy’s out walking the grove about one in the morning when he sees flashlights. Says at first he thought it somebody stealing his avocados, so he fired a round in the air and called out that the cops were on their way and whoever was back there’d best get the hell off his property.”
“He get a look?”
“Just one of the cars, a black Hummer. Couldn’t get the plate, but he did find empty jugs of muriatic acid, kind you put in a pool. Neil Finnerty says it was somebody closing out a contract on Poopikov and trying to hide his identity.”
Jimmy frowned. “Then why not drive two hours east and plant him in the desert?”
“Crossed my mind, too. Maybe they didn’t have time.”
Jimmy glanced at his watch. If he didn’t get going, they’d get in late, which at ChemSteem earned Evil Roscoe’s wrath and the day’s shittiest jobs— El Cajon, Logan Heights, Escondido and the other dreg-burbs of San Diego. “I gotta get ready for work.”
“Okay, but before you go, you hear? Bobby Falcône got caught busting butt with a some male prostitute. All over the news, yo. Underage kid, too.”
Wow. As a kid, Jimmy’d stayed up late listening to Bobby Falcône records with his dad
long after Mom thought she’d put him to bed. Now Bobby was a pedophile? The world was a truly fucked up place. “Wow. Media’s gonna go nuts.”
“Bro, you have got no idea.”
BEFORE GOING OUT THE DOOR, Jimmy took from behind the travel-trailer’s stove an unregistered Czechoslovakian .40 caliber. After checking the magazine, he climbed into his GTO and slipped the pistol beneath the seat, then backed out of the driveway and turned up the lane. The last thing he saw was Doris staring out the window of her double-wide like a sad old basset hound, her elderly lips done in brightest red as she held open a bathrobe to reveal ancient sagging breasts. Over those breasts, Doris’ expression was a mix equal parts melancholy and lust.
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