Naomi Hirahara - Santa Cruz Noir

I tried to make a joke and said, “I’ll take it!” and grabbed at his crotch, but Ricky didn’t seem to like that.

He put his arm around my shoulder when we walked back out to the truck, though he had turned quiet again. I took a swig out of the bottle he offered from under his seat. We stole looks at each other. Or maybe he was checking to see if I was still staring at him? Honestly, I tried to be cool, yet it wasn’t my nature.

When he said he had to make a quick stop, I knew I should get back to Marta, but I didn’t say anything.

“It’s fine,” he said, “I’m fast.” And it was. We drove to this residential neighborhood in Freedom, boring but nice, and left one of his coolers on the doorstep and brought what I assumed to be an empty one back. And that was it. I didn’t think anything of it.

He dropped me back off at work and Marta was really weird to me right away. I apologized for taking so long, but it was like she could tell I’d just bagged Ricky in the landslide cabin.

I slept one more night in my car out at the beach, and then Saturday I bought some cleaning supplies and went up there to see what I could do. Ricky came by just before nightfall and we screwed again. At least this time I had made a bed of sorts out of my sleeping bag and some blankets. The candlelight softened the dankness. I tried to make some small talk with him afterward, but he wasn’t having it.

Instead of seeming hot and mysterious, it just seemed rude. Do I feel used? I asked myself. And then a few minutes after he left, I remembered that I had wanted and enjoyed the sex, and I now had my own place to live for the first time in my life. Be that way, I thought. I’d be fine.

When I came to work on Monday, Marta was standing on the porch waiting for me. She said that she didn’t need me anymore. “Go,” she said. “You’re finished.” I hated how cold she was. I tried to talk to her, but she walked in her house and shut the door and I knew that was it. The kids would start showing up any minute and I couldn’t make a scene. There’d been enough of that in my life anyway. Marta had so much dignity that it made me want to leave with some of my own. But what was it? Had she been in love with Ricky? Weren’t they related?

Marta wasn’t returning my calls. Ricky wasn’t stopping by. I needed a new job quick if I was going to stay at the cabin for another month. I started working at a “private entertainment” company, promising myself it would be temporary. Twice while I was driving around I thought I saw Ricky’s truck, once taking the on ramp toward Monterey, and once in the bakery parking lot.

That second time, I circled around and parked on the opposite end. I got out with no plan. As I drew closer, I saw the old coolers in the back. My hands were shaking when I reached for them. I could hear Ricky yelling from the bakery. I lifted the Styrofoam lid and pushed back the bag of ice, and there were shiny vials full of dark liquid. The fuck were these things? Ricky was walking right at me. “You whore!” he shouted. “Get away from my life, you whore!”

I turned and ran back to my car while he stood there, arms folded across his chest, watching me. I should have let it go, but I rolled past him on the way out, slow enough to look him in the face. I kept my voice calm, the way I did when I was working. “I wish I had a dollar for every man who’s called me a whore ,” I said.

I drove off and grabbed everything I needed from the cabin in three minutes flat. I found a new spot at a new beach. That look in Ricky’s eyes? I never wanted to see him again.

Almost a year later, the story came out. I was working in a real day care by then, a licensed place, living in a nice house near Struve Slough with one of my coworkers and her girlfriend.

It was in all the papers. Marta and Ricky had been arrested for trafficking.

They’d been extracting the kids’ plasma and blood and urine, and selling it to a research start-up. Some tech crew over the hill had formed their own biotech company and needed raw materials. How they found Ricky and Marta, I’ll never know.

The case didn’t end up going to trial. The children didn’t matter. That company is listed on the NYSE today.

I had to quit my job after that, stop working with kids. Marta had been the only contact on my resume and my employers couldn’t risk it. Oh well, there’s always “private entertainment.” I don’t live by the ocean anymore — but I always go to sleep where I can hear it.

Watsonville

I’d picked out the shooter’s car by the time I hopped out of my Plymouth and crossed the dusty parking lot toward the front of the two-story building. It was the rust-speckled Studebaker, backed in against the head lettuce field dotted with thousands, maybe millions, of tiny, shiny green shoots sprouting from the chunky black soil of the fertile fields just outside Watsonville.

Out here, row crops planted since the war had pushed the valley’s once-ubiquitous apple orchards back to rolling acres and narrow barrancas where the steep slopes of the redwood foothills began to flatten into furrowed farmland, better-suited for irrigation ditches that watered endless rows where leafy greens were bringing in more bucks per acre than Bellflowers and Newton Pippins and Granny Smiths ever would!

For one thing, the Studebaker was clean, if a bit rusty around the chrome, with no telltale smears of the region’s rich topsoil spattered across its fenders. For another, like all gunmen, this shooter had parked facing out; he could make a speedy getaway from here or from anywhere else he’d ever parked his automobile. If he had business to attend to here at the bar below Hildegard’s whorehouse, or in one of the rooms upstairs, it wouldn’t take him half a minute to run to his car and hit the road.

He’d missed the weekend carloads of soldier boys getting trained how to shoot North Koreans — they’d all headed back toward Fort Ord: loud youngsters, always drunk, pimply, stopping for a quickie if they’d failed to find any gash. They’d all leave Watsonville to weave down the dark and narrow Coast Highway toward the army base built on massive dunes just northeast of the Monterey Peninsula.

I spotted the shooter as soon as I walked into the joint, even before I took a seat at the end of the bar near the front door. He was a Mexican, of course, like almost everyone else in the room, but he was wearing neither the dungarees nor the overhauls of the campesino, nor the dusty white outfit sewn from flour sacks sported by los viejos, old men, single old-timers too bent and broken to chop lettuce anymore or work at any of the other stoop labor that the growers depended on.

Much of the campesinos ’ meager haul, of course, eventually crossed this polished slab in front of me where the stocky gal pouring drinks — Hildegard herself — slapped down a shot of Four Roses and a glass of whatever was on tap before she grabbed a few quarters from those I’d dug out of my pocket before I’d parked my butt on the stool.

Take it easy, Nelson, she mouthed at me.

I wouldn’t say the guy I’d tagged as the shooter was dressed like a pachuco — for one thing, he wasn’t flashy; he wore a suit that didn’t make him look any sharper than the fieldworkers standing or sitting along the bar. But the tan gabardine outfit with draped trousers pegged at his ankles did cover a smooth leather holster. I could tell it sat against his white shirt where the fabric was bunching beneath the lapel of his jacket.

Also, his two-tone Western boots, shiny brown-and-white leather, were luxuries none of the farmworkers in the place would have wasted money on. Cash like that could buy some necessary relaxation down here in the barroom or some relief upstairs with the chamacas whom Hildegard’s customers kept busy from sundown to almost midnight — and even later on weekends.