IQ(26)
Fluke was disappointed. Drive-bys were boring. He liked to be creative, do new things, surprise his clients; get that holy shit reaction. You did what? Then they’d laugh or shake their heads or look like Kurt did when the corn dog blew up. Fluke used a tactical crossbow on a whistle-blowing bureaucrat. Put a titanium hunting bolt through the guy’s neck while he was washing his minivan. He set a bear trap for a gourmet lawyer who liked to go mushroom hunting in the woods. When the jaws of the trap snapped shut on the lawyer’s leg he went into shock, blacked out, and bled to death. Another one of Fluke’s targets was an elderly Japanese woman. Her son was into the yakuza loan sharks and he needed his inheritance a little early. Fluke backed her into her koi pond with a samurai sword and she drowned.
Fluke picked up a rock and flung it down at the cars.
“What are you doing? You could hurt somebody,” Kurt said.
“When do you want this done?”
“The sooner the better.” Kurt gave him the details and paid him the deposit. “What if you can’t pull it off?” he said.
“Basically?” Fluke said. “That’s never happened.”
CHAPTER FIVE
That’s Where the Best Dreams Are
May 2005
Everything Dodson owned was in three garbage bags and a cardboard box. “You need to travel light when you homeless,” he said. “I almost got me a shopping cart.” Isaiah gave him some bedding and space in the closet and Dodson was officially a tenant. He lay out on the sofa, his hands behind his head like he was at the beach getting a tan. “Home sweet muthaf*ckin’ home,” he said.
The money issue resolved, Isaiah got his first decent night’s sleep since the accident, but when he woke up the next morning he couldn’t believe he’d done something so stupid. Let Dodson, a bona fide gangsta, stay in the apartment Isaiah had shared with Marcus since forever. And it was Saturday. Isaiah had to work at Manny’s until six and Dodson would be here alone. Isaiah sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “What did you do?” he said. “What did you do?”
All day long Isaiah scraped gravy and potato salad off the plates and racked them in the dishwasher, imagining Dodson and his gangsta friends turning the apartment into a shambles. After he got off work he ran all the way home and bounded up the fire stairs. The hallway smelled like fried meat but he didn’t hear rap music or the TV when he got to the door. He made extra noise with the keys, afraid he might surprise somebody and get shot. “Hey,” he said.
Everything was the same as when he left this morning. Neat as a pin. Nothing missing, nothing broken. He could smell fabric softener, Dodson’s T-shirts and underwear were folded neatly on the sofa. A frying pan and some dishes were in the drying rack but the kitchen was spotless. So was the bathroom but it was disturbing, smelling a different shampoo, the air humid from a stranger taking a shower. Isaiah checked the drain, not a hair in it. “Well I’ll be,” he said.
Isaiah had gone to work by the time Dodson got up. He felt good, his life settled for the time being. He took a shower and put his dirty clothes in the machines downstairs. He decided to make breakfast and went to Vons for groceries.
Dodson grated some potatoes, melted butter in a pan, and got the hash browns going. Then he fried some ham and scrambled three eggs the way Lupita taught him. He remembered her in those panties that said CASH ONLY on the back, whipping the eggs so hard she jiggled under her T-shirt.
“You have to get air in them,” she said. “That’s what keeps them light. Stop looking at my ass, pendejo.”
Dodson’s eggs came out moist and fluffy. By then the hash browns had a crust on them, the ham was still warm, the sourdough toast slathered with butter. He took a moment to admire the plate. “Like the cover of a Denny’s menu,” he said.
Dodson ate slowly, shaking his head with pleasure, timing it so there was just enough toast left to wipe up the last bit of egg. After, he watched some classic Mike Tyson fights on TV, clipped his toenails into a wastebasket, and thought about calling Kinkee and them. Get them to come over, see the new place, smoke some weed, play GTA. But Kinkee and them would raid the fridge, spill their drinks, drop their joints between the sofa cushions, miss the toilet, and piss on the wall. Better to leave the fellas out of it, tell them he was staying with a girl somewhere.
Dodson and the fellas dealt drugs out of an apartment on the backside of an old commercial building. The landlord had cut the building up into individual units, eight or ten people living in a tiny room, two bathrooms per floor. They called the apartment the House. They moved it every few weeks for security reasons but no matter what the location it was always the same. Cavelike and musty, windows too milky to see through, the drapes in shreds, black patches on the floor where the linoleum was torn off, the walls covered with gang signs and pictures of big dicks. The bathrooms were always terrifying. The rent was shared by Dodson, Kinkee, Sedrick, and Freddie G. Everybody strapped. Get bold enough to try a robbery and you’d be hard-pressed to get out alive.
Dodson got his dope from Kinkee, who got his dope from Junior, top of the food chain. Nobody knew if Junior was the name on his birth certificate or if there was a Senior Junior running around somewhere. Junior didn’t come to the House much and seemed to spend most of his time getting chauffeured around in a massive white Navigator with blacked-out windows, gold BBS rims, and a sound system you felt through the sidewalk before you heard it. Junior liked to use big words to make himself sound smart but it usually had the opposite effect. Once Dodson heard him say: “This female had the most magnanimous titties I have ever substantiated.” Michael Stokely was his wheelman, Booze Lewis rode shotgun, both of them looking like their mug shots and armed like SEAL Team 6.