The sweet peace of the pills was beginning to invade my body when I heard the name Laura Barron on the loudspeaker, something that had never happened before. I thought I’d heard wrong and didn’t move until the second announcement, then I went over to one of the internal telephones, dialed reception, and was told someone was looking for me, and it was an emergency. I went out into the hall, barefoot and in a robe, and found Freddy in a very agitated state. He took me by the hand and pulled me into a corner to tell me, out of his mind with nerves, that Joe Martin and Chino had killed Brandon Leeman.
“They gunned him down, Laura!”
“What are you talking about, Freddy?”
“There was blood everywhere, pieces of brain. . . . You have to escape, they’re going to kill you too!” he burst out, all in one breath.
“Me? Why me?”
“I’ll tell you later, we have to fly, hurry.”
I ran to get dressed, grabbed what money I had, and went back to meet Freddy, who was pacing like a panther under the alert gaze of the receptionists. We went outside and tried to get away from there quickly, without calling attention to ourselves. A couple of blocks away we managed to flag down a taxi. We ended up in a motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas, after changing taxis three times and stopping to buy hair dye and a bottle of the strongest, cheapest gin on the market. I paid for a night in the motel, and we locked ourselves in the room.
While I dyed my hair black, Freddy told me that Joe Martin and Chino had spent the whole day coming in and going out of the apartment, talking frenetically on their cell phones, without even noticing him. “In the morning I was sick, Laura, you know how I get sometimes, but I realized that fucking pair of brutes was up to something and I started to keep my ears open, without moving off the mattress. They forgot about me or thought I was high.” From the phone calls and conversations, Freddy finally deduced what was going on.
The men had found out that Brandon Leeman had paid someone to eliminate them, but for some reason that person hadn’t done it; instead, he’d warned them, instructing them to abduct Brandon Leeman and force him to reveal where his money was. It seemed to Freddy, from the deferential tone of voice Joe Martin and Chino were both using, that the mysterious caller was someone with authority. “I didn’t manage to warn Brandon. I didn’t have a phone and there was no time,” the kid wailed. Brandon Leeman was the closest thing Freddy had to family. He’d taken him in off the streets, given him a roof over his head, food, and protection unconditionally, never tried to rehabilitate him, accepted him with all his vices, laughed at his jokes and enjoyed his rapping and dancing. “He caught me robbing him a bunch of times, Laura, and you know what he did instead of hitting me? He told me to ask, and he’d give me what I needed.”
Joe Martin stationed himself to wait for Leeman in the garage of the building, where he would have to put the car, and Chino stood guard in the apartment. Freddy stayed in bed on the mattress, pretending to be asleep, and from there, he heard Chino receive the news on his cell that the boss was on his way in. The Filipino went running downstairs, and Freddy followed at a distance.
The Acura drove into the garage. Leeman turned off the motor and started to step out of the vehicle, but he caught sight in the rearview mirror of the shadows of the two men who were blocking his exit. Driven by the long habit of distrust, with one single instinctive movement he drew his weapon, hit the ground, and started firing with no questions asked. But Brandon Leeman, always so obsessed with security, didn’t know how to use his own revolver. Freddy had never seen him clean it or do any target practice, like Joe Martin and Chino, who could take their pistols apart and put them back together again in a few seconds. By shooting blindly at those shadows in the garage, Brandon Leeman hastened his death, although they probably would have shot him eventually anyway. The two thugs emptied their weapons into the boss, who was trapped between the car and the wall.
Freddy got there in time to see the carnage and then took off, before the racket died down and the men discovered him.
“Why do you think they want to kill me? I don’t have anything to do with that, Freddy,” I said.
“They thought you were in the car with Brandon. They wanted to get both of you. They say you know more than you should. Tell me what you’re involved in, Laura.”
“Nothing! I don’t know what those guys want from me!”
“I’m sure Joe and Chino went to look for you at the gym, the only place you might have been. I bet they got there a few minutes after we left.”
“What am I going to do now, Freddy?”
“Stay here until we think of something.”
We opened the bottle of gin and, lying side by side on the bed, took turns taking swigs until we were plunged into a dense and deathly drunkenness.
I came back to life many hours later in a room I didn’t recognize, feeling like I was being crushed by an elephant, with needles stuck in my eyes, and no memory of what had happened. I stood up with immense effort, fell to the floor, and dragged myself to the bathroom in time to hug the toilet bowl and vomit an interminable stream of sewage. I lay flat out on the linoleum, trembling, with bitterness in my mouth and a claw in my gut, babbling between dry heaves that I wanted to die. A long time later I threw some water on my face and rinsed out my mouth, horrified at the cadaverously pale, black-haired stranger in the mirror. I couldn’t make it back to the bed but lay down on the floor, moaning.
Some time later there were three knocks on the door that felt like cannon blasts, and a voice with a Hispanic accent said she’d come to clean the room. Holding on to the walls for support, I made it to the door, opening it wide enough to tell the housekeeper to go to hell and hang up the Do Not Disturb sign; then I fell to my knees again. I crawled back to the bed with a premonition of immediate and disastrous danger that I couldn’t manage to pin down. I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was in that room, but my intuition told me that it wasn’t a hallucination or a nightmare, but something real and terrible, something to do with Freddy. An iron crown was circling my temples, tighter and tighter, while I called Freddy with a thread of a voice. Finally I got tired of calling him and desperately began looking for him, under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom, in case he was playing a joke on me. He wasn’t anywhere, but I discovered that he’d left me a little bag of crack, a pipe, and a lighter. How simple and familiar!
Crack was Freddy’s paradise and his hell. I’d seen him using it daily, but I’d never tried it because of the boss’s orders, obedient girl that I was. Fuck that. My hands were barely functioning, and I was blinded with pain from my headache, but I managed to get the little rocks into the glass pipe and light the torch, a herculean task. Exasperated, insane, I waited eternal seconds until the rocks burned to the color of wax, with the tube burning my fingers and my lips, and finally they broke and I deeply breathed in the redeeming cloud, the sweet fragrance of mentholated gasoline, and then the unease and premonitions disappeared and I rose to glory, light, graceful, a bird in the wind. For a brief time I felt euphoric, invincible, but soon I came down with a bang in the semidarkness of that room. Another drag on the glass tube, and then another. Where was Freddy? Why had he abandoned me without saying good-bye, with no explanation? I had a bit of money left, so I staggered out to buy another bottle, then came back to lock myself in my hideout.
Between the liquor and the crack I floated adrift for two days without sleeping or eating or washing, dripping with vomit, because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. When I finished off the booze and the drugs, I emptied the contents of my purse and found a paper twist of cocaine, which I immediately sniffed, and a little bottle with three sleeping pills, which I decided to ration. I took two, and since they had not the least effect on me, I took the third. I don’t know if I slept or if I was unconscious; the clock showed numbers that meant nothing. What day is it? Where am I? No idea. I opened my eyes, felt like I was suffocating, my heart was a time bomb, tic-tac-tic-tac, faster and faster, I fe
lt electric shocks, shakes, death rattles, then the void.
I was awakened by more knocks on the door and urgent shouting, this time from the hotel manager. I buried my head under the pillows, crying for some sort of relief, just one more drag of that blessed smoke, just one shot of anything to drink. Two men forced the door open and burst into the room, cursing and threatening. They stopped dead at the spectacle of a crazy, terrified, agitated girl, babbling incoherently in that room converted into a fetid pigsty, but they’d seen it all in that fleabag motel and guessed what was what. They forced me to get dressed, picked me up by the arms, dragged me down the stairs, and pushed me onto the street. They confiscated my only valuable belongings, the designer handbag and my sunglasses, but they were considerate enough to give me my license and my wallet, with the two dollars and forty cents I had left.
Outside it was scorching hot, and the half-melted asphalt burned my feet through my sneakers, but nothing mattered to me. My only obsession was to get something to calm my anguish and fear. I had nowhere to go and no one to ask for help. I remembered I had promised I’d call Brandon Leeman’s brother, but that could wait, and I also remembered the treasures there were in the building where I’d lived for those months, hills of magnificent powders, precious crystals, prodigious amounts of pills, which I used to separate, weigh, count, and carefully place in little plastic bags. There even the most miserable person in the world could have a piece of heaven at their disposal, brief though it might be. How could I not get a hold of something in the caverns of the garages, in the cemeteries of the first and second floors, how could I not find someone who would give me something, for the love of God? But with the scant lucidity left to me, I remembered that approaching that neighborhood would be suicide.
Think, Maya, think, I repeated out loud, as I seemed to do more and more over the last few months. There are drugs everywhere in this fucking city, it’s just a matter of looking for them, I protested, pacing back and forth in front of the motel like a hungry coyote, until necessity cleared my mind and I was able to think.
Expelled from the motel where Freddy had left me, I walked to a gas station, asked for the key to the washroom, and cleaned myself up a little. Then I got a lift with a driver who dropped me off a few blocks from the gym.
I had the keys for the lockers in my pocket. I stood near the door, waiting for the opportunity to go in without attracting attention, and when I saw three people talking to each other approaching, I pretended to be part of the group. I crossed the reception hall, and when I got to the stairs I ran into one of the employees, who hesitated before saying hello to me, surprised by the color of my hair. I didn’t talk to anyone at the gym—I suppose I had a reputation for being stuck-up or stupid—but other members knew me by sight, and several employees by name. I ran up to the dressing rooms and emptied the contents of my lockers on the ground so frenetically that a woman asked me if I’d lost something; I came out with a stream of curses, because I hadn’t found anything I could get high on, while she stared at me openly in the mirror. “What are you looking at, lady?” I shouted and then saw myself in the same mirror she was looking at and didn’t recognize that lunatic with red eyes, blotchy skin, and a black animal on top of her head.
I put everything back in the lockers any which way and threw my dirty clothes in the garbage, along with the cell phone. Brandon Leeman had given it to me, and his murderers had the number. I took a shower and washed my hair quickly, thinking I could sell the other designer handbag, which I still had, and get enough to shoot up for several days. I put on the black dress and stuffed a change of clothes into a plastic bag, but made no attempt to put makeup on; I was trembling from head to toe, and my hands barely obeyed me.
The woman was still there, wrapped in a towel, with a hair dryer in her hand, although her hair was dry, spying on me, calculating whether she should alert the security guards. I tried out a smile and asked her if she’d like to buy my bag, told her it was an authentic Louis Vuitton and almost new, that my wallet had been stolen and I needed money to get back to California. A sneer of contempt marred her features, but she approached to examine the handbag, giving in to her greed, and offered me a hundred dollars. I gave her the finger and left.
I didn’t get far. The top of the stairs looked out over the whole reception area, and through the glass door I distinguished Joe Martin and Chino’s car. Possibly they’d been parking there every day, knowing that sooner or later I’d go to the club, or maybe some snitch had told them of my arrival, in which case one of them must be looking for me inside the building right at that moment.
After a frozen instant, I managed to keep my panic in check, retreating toward the spa, which occupied one wing of the building, with its Buddha, offerings of petals, birdsong, the scent of vanilla, and jars of water with cucumber slices floating in them. The masseuses of both sexes were distinguished by their turquoise-colored smocks; the rest of the staff, almost identical girls, wore pink smocks. Since I knew how the spa worked—that was one of the luxuries Brandon Leeman had allowed me—I was able to slip down the corridor without being seen and enter one of the cubicles. I closed the door and turned on the light indicating that it was occupied. Nobody would be disturbed when the red light was on. On one table was a water heater with eucalyptus leaves, smooth massage stones, and several jars of beauty products. Ruling out the creams, I gulped down a bottle of lotion in three swallows, but if it did contain alcohol, it was a minuscule amount and no relief to me at all.
I was safe in the cubicle, at least for an hour, the normal time for a treatment, but very soon I began to feel anxious in that enclosed space, with no window, just a single exit and that penetrating dentist’s-office smell that turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay there. Putting a robe that was on the massage table on over top of my clothes, I wrapped a towel into a turban on my head, smeared a thick layer of white cream on my face, and leaned out into the corridor. My heart skipped a beat: Joe Martin was talking to one of the pink-smocked employees.
The urge to take off running was unbearable, but I forced myself to walk the other way down the corridor, as calmly as possible. Looking for the staff exit, which shouldn’t be far, I passed several closed cubicles until I came to a wider door, pushed it, and found a service stairway. The atmosphere there was very different from the friendly universe of the spa: tile floor, unpainted cement walls, harsh lighting, the unmistakable smell of cigarettes, and feminine voices on the landing of the floor below. I waited for an eternity flat up against the wall, unable to go forward or back into the spa, and finally the women finished smoking and left. I wiped off the cream, left the towel and robe in a corner, and descended into the bowels of the building, which we club members never saw. Opening a door at random, I found myself in a big room, crisscrossed by pipes for water and air, where washing machines and dryers thundered. The exit door didn’t open onto the street, as I’d hoped, but to the pool. I backed up and curled up in a corner, hidden by a heap of used towels, in the unbearable noise and heat of the laundry room; I couldn’t move until Joe Martin gave up and left.
Minutes went by in that deafening submarine, and the fear of falling into Joe Martin’s hands was replaced by an urgent need to get high. I hadn’t eaten for several days; I was dehydrated, with a whirlwind in my head and cramps in my stomach. My hands and feet went to sleep, I saw vertiginous spirals of colored dots, like a bad acid trip. I lost track of time—an hour might have gone by or several, I might have slept or passed out a couple of times. I imagine staff came in and out to do loads of washing, but they didn’t find me. I finally crept out of my hiding place and with an enormous effort stood up and walked with leaden legs, leaning on the wall, feeling faint.
Outside it was still daytime. It must have been about six or seven in the evening, and the pool was full of people. It was the club’s busiest time, when office workers arrived en masse. It was also the time when Joe Martin and Chino should be getting ready for their nocturnal activities, so they had most likel
y left. I fell into one of the reclining chairs, taking a deep breath of the chlorine-scented air. I didn’t dare dive in; I needed to be ready to run. I ordered a fruit smoothie from a waiter, cursing under my breath because they only served healthy drinks, no alcohol, and charged it to my account. I took two sips of that thick liquid, but it tasted disgusting, and I had to leave it. It was futile to delay; I decided to take a risk and walk out past reception, hoping that the rat who’d alerted those villains had finished his or her shift.
To reach the street I had to cross the parking lot, which at that hour was full of cars. I saw a member of the club from a ways off, a fit guy in his forties, putting his gym bag in the trunk, and I walked over, blushing with humiliation, to ask him if he had time to buy me a drink. I don’t know where I got the courage. Surprised at this frontal attack, the man took a moment or two to classify me; if he’d seen me before he didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t fit his idea of a whore. He looked me up and down, shrugged, got into his car, and drove away.
I had done many imprudent things in my short existence, but up to that moment I had never degraded myself this way. What happened with Fedgewick was a kidnapping and rape, and it happened because I was reckless, not shameless. This was different, and it had a name, which I refused to pronounce. Soon I noticed another man, fifty or sixty years old, big paunch, wearing shorts showing his white legs with blue veins, walking toward his car, and I followed him. This time I had more luck— or less luck, I don’t know. If that guy had turned me down too, maybe my life wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails.