How did you keep upright when the ground kept sliding away beneath your feet? Two days after Raymond discovered his ostensible boss Kevin Murckle was a drug dealer, which meant Raymond himself had been unwittingly slinging, Murckle dispatched Hu to call him and Bill into his office. Raymond stuck a smile to his lips and nodded.
"I'll be right there."
It was one thing to have wanted to sell a couple ounces of weed to his friends. Murckle deceiving him into delivering bricks of God knows, coke or heroin or meth, that could get him locked up for years. It was the lie as much as the crime that bothered Raymond. Murckle could've hired any number of couriers who'd have no qualms making dropoffs for a payday. Instead, he'd turned to the desperate, exploiting them for twelve bucks an hour. Raymond walked into the office ready to resign.
From the far side of the sun-bright room, Murckle held up his palm. "You two just stick right there, why don't you." The white of his surgical mask stood out from his tanned orange skin. "These carpets are too nice for me to start upchucking blood on them."
Bill smiled tightly. "What's up?"
"I've got something here that needs to be in the city. Here isn't the city."
"My goodness."
"That's what I said. But then I thought, Hey, I've got you two. You two can take it into the city for me."
"Today?" Raymond said.
Murckle wagged a finger. "Tonight. The recipient is a night person."
"I have plans with my wife."
"Do those plans include explaining how you got fired less than a week after you got hired?"
"That would be a crummy idea of a date."
"Then take her out tomorrow instead. Problem solved." Murckle shook his shaggy head. "See why I get the big bucks?"
He turned to his computer, tilted back his head to see through his reading glasses. Bill and Raymond shared a look and saw themselves out.
"What do you think?" Raymond murmured in the hall.
Bill rubbed the stubble on the back of his head, lips pursed. "Nighttime delivery to east LA? Can only be one thing: bibles."
"What do you think he'd do if we said no?"
"Fire us for sure. Possibly frame us. Or hire some boys off Craigslist to shove a boot up our ass."
Raymond frowned at the abstract painting down the hall, as if expecting to spot Hu's eyes blinking behind two holes in the bright splashes of color. "Maybe we should think about calling the cops."
"With my record, man? We might as well cut out the middleman and drive straight to Lompoc." Bill folded his thick arms. "Look, guys like Murckle, you don't walk out on them with a handshake and well-wishes for your future endeavors or some shit. You got to leave with enough leverage so they don't hit back."
"So we take pictures of where we're going and who's picking it up."
"For a start. I'm going to let Craig know what to do if we don't come back."
"Does he know?"
Bill's chest bounced with laughter. "You kidding? If Craig knew the details, he would kill that man. Not over the dirtiness of the deed, mind you, but because Murckle's not giving us our cut."
Raymond came back that night with the revolver and a digital camera. Hu pulled a seal-sleek black sedan up to the gates and repeated the address. Bill got in behind the wheel, grinning as he closed the door.
"What do you bet this thing's registered to somebody's grandma in Arizona?"
Raymond shook his head. "I'm so far out of my element right now I'm expecting to see fish any minute."
The ocean roared in the dark behind them. Bill wound down the cliffside road, city lights twinkling from Malibu to Long Beach, and cut through town to the 110. The freeway was wide open as Montana, sparsely dotted with headlights. Abandoned cars gleamed from the shoulder.
"I never seen it this empty," Bill said. "Place is deader than my dachshund."
"I heard they're mobilizing the National Guard."
"What do you think? This the end times we got here?"
"During World War I, an outbreak of the flu killed like fifty million people."
"Jesus. We're talking about like the Black Death here."
"The thing about diseases is the deadly ones burn themselves out." Raymond fiddled with the camera, checking the zoom, its light levels. "A strain can't pass itself on if it kills its host too fast. AIDS used to kill people in months. Now nobody dies from it."
In the dim light of approaching headlights, Bill smiled with half his mouth. "Not here where we got money. But tell that to Africa."
He switched lanes, peeled down an offramp. Two- and three-story apartments crowded the lots. Silhouetted men crouched on stoops, metal glinting in their hands. In an Albertsons parking lot, people slept on rows of cots under plastic tarps, attended to by men in masks and white coats. While Bill idled at a light, a man pulled a windowless van into the lot, hopped out, and snapped a pair of rubber gloves past his wrists.
Bill whistled. "Be grateful you live in your little beach world, kid."
"What's going on out here?"
"If some too-big-for-its-britches flu can kill fifty million people before we put a monkey into space, why can't its great-great grandson take out a billion?"
Sirens bayed. Raymond gripped the camera in his lap. A cop car tore down the boulevard, whooshing through the intersection. The light changed and they rolled on. Chain link fences bordered weedy lots. Smashed windows gaped from storefronts, some covered by taped-down tarps. Garbage spilled from corner bins. Upstreet, a man jogged across the empty lanes.
Bill swerved around a burnt-down couch, cursing under his breath. Debris caltropped the outer lane, toppled chairs and busted bottles and sharded plates, funneling the car to the turn lane. Ahead, a metal gate stretched across the middle of the road.
"What the hell is this?" Bill slowed. Beyond the gate, a man in a leather jacket stood with his feet apart, a rifle angled over his shoulder. "You got your piece?"
Raymond touched the bulge in his waistband. "Maybe we should turn around."
"Hang on. Stay frosty."
The car rocked to a stop. The man strode around the gate, keeping the rifle shouldered, and approached the driver's side. From five feet away, he bent at the waist and rolled his hand in the air. Bill cracked the window a couple inches.
"What's up?"
The man leaned closer. "What's your business in the neighborhood?"
"My business?" Bill cocked his head. "I got a delivery for one of your villagers, man."
"Who you going to see?"
"I'm just a pizza boy, I'm not the Godfather. I got his address."
The man glanced past the gate while Bill recited their destination. He nodded absently. "You get in and you get out. Any problems, don't expect to leave."
He strolled toward the gate. A radio crackled on his hip. He mumbled into it, eyeing the car, and swung the gate back with a rusty creak. Bill edged forward. Raymond smelled smoke. Two blocks on, a bonfire gushed flame and smoke in an empty lot to their right. Beside it, two men with white rags over their mouths swung a long, heavy bag between them, building momentum, then chucked it into the fire and stumbled back. Plastic melted away. An arm flopped between the timbers. The men walked to a pickup with its tailgate down and hauled another body off the bed.
Bill leaned forward and squinted through the tinted glass. "Should be that apartment block up there."
"You mean the one with the skull and crossbones spraypainted on the doors?"
"That's the one." Men watched from the opposite sidewalk as they pulled into the lot. Bill let the car idle, glancing front and back. "This is a dumbass plan. Just sitting."
"Repeat after me: twelve bucks an hour. Twelve bucks an hour."
"Take this shit for ourselves. Find some palace on a lonely Mexican hilltop until this thing goes away."
Raymond unbuckled his seatbelt. "Why haven't you left town?"
Bill shrugged his big shoulders. "Where am I going to go? At least here I know my way around."
A man wal
ked out from behind the apartment block, hands in his jean pockets, shoulders drawn tight. Raymond sat upright. "Suppose that's him?"
"See if he responds to Murckle's Bat Signal." Bill flashed the headlights, twice short, once long. The man bobbed forward and leaned down to the window, toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah what?" Bill said.
"You my guys?"
"Guess so. Stuff's in the—"
Raymond elbowed Bill in the ribs. "He wasn't supposed to speak to us."
Across the street, a man hollered, "Don't you open that door! You keep your sickness in there!"
"What?" Bill said.
"He's supposed to go straight to the trunk," Raymond said. "That's the routine."
"We got a problem?" the man with the toothpick said.
From the apartment stoop, an old man with a crown of white hair waved his fist at a small crowd that had pulled up in the middle of the street at a safe distance from the plague-house. The man gritted his teeth and took a gingerly step toward them.
"Not another step, old man!"
"What did you say your name was?" Bill said to the man beyond the window, one hand drifting toward his waistband.
The toothpick-chewing man beat him to it. The streetlamps gleamed on the sight of his black semiauto pointed at Bill's face. "It's Mister Hand Over Your Fucking Shit."
Raymond's heart roared. Bill slowly raised his hands. "It's cool, man. Stuff's in the trunk."
"So open it before I open your skull."
"I have to reach for the button. Be cool."
Flame sparked from the street. Two men jogged toward the old man, burning bottles in hand, and slung them through the ground-floor windows. With a deep whoomp, fire blossomed inside, lighting the faces of those in the street. The man with the toothpick flinched, glancing toward the flames. Bill swept out his own pistol. The window shattered; three ear-cracking bangs roared from the gun. Raymond smelled spent gunpowder. Beyond the broken window, the man with the toothpick stumbled back, air leaving his lungs in compressive grunts, and dropped to the grimy asphalt.
From a dark window on the third floor, a gun flashed and popped. The people in the street screamed and scattered. Two retreated in a crouch, going for guns, firing back. Smoke gushed from the downstairs windows. A young couple piled out the front door dragging two young girls behind them, their free hands pressing bloody handkerchiefs to their mouths. Gunfire erupted from the far sidewalk, pummeling the family down in the doorway.
"What the fuck," Bill said.
"Go!" Raymond found his revolver. His hand shook too hard to aim. The car jolted backwards, tires whining. Something ripped into the rear door with a great metal clunk. "They're shooting at us!"
"Get your fucking head down."
Glass sprayed inward from the rear window. In the street, a young man in a white wifebeater went down hard, spurting blood. The car chunked over the curb, jolting Raymond's spine. Smoke clogged the street, lit by irregular flashes of gunshots, pierced by screams and sobs. Bill tore down the middle lane. Before the gate, he swung right, hunched over the wheel, hunting for an unblocked route back to the freeway. Beyond terse directions, neither of them spoke until they were back on the wide empty lanes.
"I am not one to pass judgment lightly," Bill said, knuckles clinching the wheel, "but fuck that."
"That was crazy. That was more East Berlin than East LA."
"I'll tell you this. Murckle's smarter than he looks. He saw the writing on the wall."
Raymond shoved the revolver back in his waistband. The cold metal stung his skin. He wanted suddenly to be away from it, to pitch it out the window. He'd been pretending at this for reasons he didn't completely understand—as if he needed to prove he could be as scary as the world was quickly becoming—but now all he wanted was to be home.
"I'm not coming in tomorrow. I'm not a guy who shoots people. I thought I could do it to protect myself, but that family on the stairs—"
"I am a man who'll shoot a man, and none of us are coming in tomorrow." Bill wiped sweat from his chin, glaring past the steering wheel.
Raymond leaned his elbows on the glove box. "I just need the money so bad."
"You got a family?"
"A wife. We're about to go under."
"We'll get paid. This is no time to be broke."
Raymond sat back and took a long breath. "What about you? You got a family?"
"Yeah. I got someone."
"She's lucky."
"And jealous," Bill grinned. "So don't start crying on me. Those types can smell the tears, you know."
They flew down the barren freeway. The meaning of the violence at the apartments eluded Raymond, as half-glimpsed as the dim cars left along the sides of the roads. And who decided to walk away from their cars mid-freeway? Had their drivers left them in the midst of a jam to be hauled off the road by the city? Where had all the passengers gone—the sunset? Had some of them died, coughing and puking, blood dribbling from their tear ducts, behind the wheel? There was no longer any sense that Raymond could see.
But sense was what you made it. That was the lesson of life, repeated in every tragedy, every windfall, every mystery of a long-lost city or a whale washed on the beach. He would get his money. If Mia was the only thing that mattered, the only plan that made sense was to go home to her and stay with her until things got better.
On the PCH, he could smell the sea blowing in through the empty window. Bill snaked up the steep cliffside to Murckle's estate. From inside the control room, Craig rolled open the gate, then met them at the door. One look at Bill and he cocked his big stubbly head.
"What happened out there?"
Bill glanced upstairs. "Where's Murckle?"
"Out. With Hu."
"Establishing an alibi." Bill bared his teeth. "Murckle's slinging."
Craig snorted. "He's a fucking Hollywood hack."
"You think that makes him less likely to be in the shit?"
Craig leaned forward, brow beetling, and sniffed Bill's shirt. "You fired a gun."
"Damn right. I'd be dead if I hadn't." In quick, specific strokes, he relayed the relevant details, starting from Raymond's trip to the Torrance parking lot, where he discovered he was couriering drugs, to their eastside delivery-turned-battle. Craig paced the room, face red as raw steak. By the end, his hands dangled by his side, still as a dog that's heard a distant bark, his back turned, ears burning, a vein squiggling on his neck.
"Still got your piece?" he said softly.
Bill nodded. "Going to need to ditch it, though. Murder weapon."
"You." Craig jammed a thick finger at Raymond. "Get up to the control room."
Raymond glanced at Bill. "What's going on?"
"Shut it off. All of it. Cameras, alarms. I want this house as dumb as a dropped baby."
"I'm about to be involved in a crime. How about you at least let me know what it is?"
Craig stepped so close Raymond could smell the musk of his skin. "Heavy burglary and vandalism, all right? Now get your fucking ass upstairs."
Raymond jogged up the cushily carpeted stairs and installed himself in the sterility of the control room. Things were happening too fast again. As fast as the looting at the grocery store, the shootout at the apartments. His fingers pounded the keyboard, shutting down cameras. The screens winked off one by one. He unplugged what he could, then wiped the keys down with the hem of his shirt and ran to the landing. In the foyer, Bill tapped his palm while Craig shook his head, skin bulging on the back of his neck.
"Cameras are down," Raymond said. "Still don't know how to shut off the alarm."
"It's okay," Bill waved. "We'll be out before they're back."
Craig strode straight for the paintings, shoes thumping tile. He yanked the frames from the walls, spraying paint and plaster, tiny nails clicking off into corners, and leaned the pieces beside the front doors. Bill hefted a bronze statue of a stylized penguin and set it in the foyer with a tile
-chipping clunk. He raised his black brows at Raymond at the top of the stairs.
"Come on, kid. Steal till you can't steal no more."
On moving to the house in Redondo, Raymond had imagined he'd be able to build a fat financial cushion selling off his mom's old things. After a few weeks of cleaning, sorting, and combing the internet, he sold a box of long-limbed, creepy-eyed boudoir dolls for $100. Drunk with Mia, he'd rifled the silverware drawers, peering at the backs of his grandmother's Depression-era spoons and forks for the names of their manufacturers, grinning like a fool when he found the silver alone was worth thousands, that a set of the right sterling could hold them afloat for a good six months. The next morning, he called an antiques dealer. Scheduled a visit later in the week. Inside their living room, the dealer pursed his lips, mustache fluffing, and told him it was nothing but plate.
In the house of Kevin Murckle, Hollywood producer, drug-runner, Raymond went straight for the kitchen.
The silverware disappeared into his double-layered trash bags with an avalanche of screeching metal. He twisted the bags' necks, tied them off, walked them up front. Craig and Bill lifted the flatscreen from the wall, sweat beading their brows, and deposited it by the door. Raymond bounced upstairs, heart racing, and opened Murckle's bedroom door.
He could hear the breakers curling in the dark, their breath-like advance and retreat on the rocks below the cliff. He clicked on the light. The bed was a round red lozenge, maroon silk sheets puddled at its foot. Bamboo shades covered the windows, flanked by vents that let in the smell of salt and seaweed. In the teak dresser, Raymond found gold watches that weighed as much as his foot. Small gem ear studs. Rings of a strange deep silver. He stepped back, pockets sagging. Was it okay for him to take this just because Murckle was an asshole? Amendment: an asshole who owed him money. And had put his freedom and life at risk without informing him of those risks. Too, some unknown quantity of the man's money was earned through drug sales. Like Raymond's dad had said, when you try to take advantage of someone, you open yourself up to be taken advantage of.
He rubbed three of the five rings off on his shirt, returned them to the drawer. Replaced all but one of the watches. His pockets felt lighter.
A man shouted from downstairs.
Craig and Bill held guns on Murckle and Hu. Around them, the foyer and front room were piled with paintings, electronics, statues, upturned cushions, toppled chairs, bunched rugs, strewn papers.
"I'll tell you what's going on here." Craig's voice echoed through the vaults, the fine glass of the chandelier. "You hired us on to watch the place, then used us to deliver coke."
Murckle laughed. "That's anything new to you two?"
Craig muscled his pistol into Murckle's face. "How about a new hole through the back of your head?"
"No, I don't think so. My stylist is out of town."
"I only want to hear two more things out of you: where's your money, and where's your stuff."
Murckle laughed again and rolled his eyes. "If I had money, you think I would hire you three?"
Hu watched, stony as the cliffs below, while Craig leveled the pistol at the assistant's face. "Give it up or he gives up the ghost."
"Go ahead," Murckle shrugged. "Would you be kind enough to shoot him in the chest instead? I always thought I'd have him stuffed."
Raymond started down the steps. "Craig—"
Craig clicked back the hammer. "Give it up, you inscrutable fuck."
Hu flinched, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. "There is a safe beneath the third stone of the path in the back yard."
"You son of a bitch," Murckle said through a disbelieving grin.
Bill pointed the gun at the ceiling. "What's the combo?"
"36-24-36," Hu said.
"I'm taking anything they steal out of your pay," Murckle said.
Craig swiveled the gun to Murckle's face, his triceps swelling like an incoming wave. "You think you can take and take and take and the money will keep you safe. You know what the best part of this is? Everyone's too busy dying to give a fuck."
Murckle's jowls sagged like a shirt in need of a wash. The crash of the gun pounded from the high, bare walls. Murckle's head snapped back, exit-blood fanning the white carpet, a limp stream gushing from the hole in front. His legs folded beneath him with a wet pop. Raymond tried to step backwards, caught his heels on the stairs, and thumped to his ass. Hu shuddered away, blinking and licking his lips. On the floor, Murckle's left hand wiggled like a shoelace being drawn across a carpet.
Hu let out a long, shaky breath. Craig turned and shot him three times in the chest.
Bill threw up his hands. "Craig!"
"What? He was Murckle's right hand here. Guilt by association."
Bill shook his head at the floor and put away his gun. "What if he was lying about the safe combo?"
"Oh. Shit." Craig wiped his nose, jerked his chin at the piles of paintings and TVs and laptops. "Well, we'll still have all that."
Bill considered the paintings. "Least it's abstract. They won't even notice the blood."
The step creaked under Raymond's descent. Craig's shiny scalp swiveled. "Where you going?"
"Home." Raymond's chest felt filled with motes of painless light. "To my wife."
Craig shook his head. "See, the problem is I can't let you do that."
"It's all right." Raymond took another step. Craig raised his pistol.
"What the hell you doing?" Bill said. "You think he was in on it, too? He's the one who tipped me off."
"I know he's fine on that. I also know he witnessed us kill three men tonight."
Raymond gave his head a tight shake. "I'm not judging."
"That's comforting, but you know who will? The judge you're put in front of."
Bill lifted his hands to his waist, palms down. "Craig."
Craig's eyes flickered and his jaw hardened. "I'm keeping us safe, Bill. It's all right."
"You shoot that boy, I will leave you. This is no joke."
Craig's mouth drooped open, slow as a sunset. "You kidding me?"
"I just explicitly said it wasn't a joke. Do you ever listen to me?"
His jawbone bulged the thick skin beneath his ear. "You're willing to put us at risk over this guy?"
"Murckle could have landed me in jail," Raymond said. "He almost got us killed tonight. You think I care if he's dead?"
Bill smiled with half his mouth. "I wouldn't say there's any 'if' about it."
Craig craned back his neck, teeth bared, and stuffed his gun in the back of his pants. He closed on Raymond. His stubble looked like it could scour pans. "Your word. Give it to me."
"It's yours."
"Come on, kid, convince me. Tell me you won't tell a soul. Not your wife. Not Jesus Himself if he took you out for a beer at Dodger Stadium."
Raymond raised his right hand. "No one."
Craig drew back, giving Bill a look. "This lands us in jail, I'm finding me a nice Aryan boy."
"Thanks," Raymond blurted. He stepped over Hu's silent body, smelling copper and feces. "I'm going home. Good luck."
Bill waved. Craig stared at nothing. Raymond opened the front door. Fog wisped from the ocean, slicking the rails along the porch steps. On the way to his car, Raymond had to fight to keep from running. He drove downhill at a crawl, lights blooming the fog, imagining his brakes would fail at every stop. He parked at the esplanade and took the ramp to the beach where he watched the breakers until his shoulders quit shaking.
"Where have you been?" Mia said when he stepped through the door. She grinned from the recliner, lit only by the pale blue light of the television. "It's past midnight."
"The boss kept me late."
"Hunting the undead? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"No," he said. "But I may have seen a few get made."
She grinned again, mistaking it for a joke. As he stood silent, she covered her elbows with her palms. "What are you talking about?"
"We just needed money so
bad."
"What happened?"
He closed his eyes. "I don't want to tell you. But if I don't, that will it easier for me to make the same mistakes again."
He gave her the broad strokes—the inadvertent drug-dealing, their plan to extricate themselves, the chaos in LA and then in the mansion in Palos Verdes. Confessing felt like a breeze through his body, like the events he described had happened to someone else.
After he finished, Mia stared at her hands for several seconds. "But you didn't kill anyone?"
He shook his head hard enough to dislodge a tooth. "No. Of course not. I was just there."
"That's crazy. That's crazy, Raymond."
"Should I have done something to stop them?"
"What could you have done?"
"Gone to the police. Or quit going in to Murckle's before it got that crazy. We could have picked up and driven to Albuquerque. I could have done a million things different."
She sniffled, steepling her fingers over the soft point of her nose. "It's different when you're living it, isn't it? I think it's a lot easier to know what you should have done after it's happened."
"Yeah," he said: but wasn't that just another excuse? He felt better, though, like he always did when he spoke up, when he confronted feelings and doubts; he always felt stronger, capable of grappling any problem; if nothing else, of resolving to do better next time. And Mia, she still loved him. She stared at the TV a minute before unpausing it. A cartoon kid made a fart joke.
She glanced at Raymond. "You know what I read today about how it got its name? The Panhandler?"
"What's that?"
"It nickel-and-dimes you. Drop by drop—your blood, I mean. Once it's weakened you far enough..." She spread her hands in front of her in a gushing motion.
He told her he needed to go to bed, but he thought maybe that was how you lost yourself, too: bit by bit, by nickels and dimes, until one day you look inside and there's nothing left at all. But money, you could always earn more. If you lost what was inside, could you save it back up?