T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

Ruby was the manager, and she was usually in a good mood even though her sons were in Tehachapi Prison and her husband had a bad heart. She’d go out and get us Taco Bell for our dinner because we all ate so much K FC we got tired of it, though I still think their original recipe chicken and coleslaw are particularly good. Anyway, Ruby rocked, and knew I was fourteen, but then corporate KFC sent us Victor and Ruby trained him and we tolerated his little yellow smile. He set his hand on my fanny once and I let it go, then he did it again a few days later and I turned and slapped him once hard, but none of it mattered because corporate fired Ruby like we knew they would and Victor became the new manager. When they announced it, the whole crew quit and took Ruby out for steaks and too many drinks at the TGIF, and it really was a Friday and we really were thanking God we didn’t have to work for that prick Victor.

So I rob KFCs pretty much every chance I get.

This one is down in Long Beach. I’ve cased it three different times. I like the parking lot out back and the fact that the entrance is on the side, not facing the main street. No drive-through, which means at least one less set of eyes on you, and no pain-in-the-ass Joe Heroes already saddled up for a chase. I like the quick access to the boulevard and an on-ramp for the 405 a quarter mile east. Two signals, no U-turns necessary. The nearest police substation is two miles away. Fast-food outlets aren’t wired into the cop houses like banks are, and the FBI sure doesn’t come after you, so if you time it right you’re good for eight hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe two thousand bucks. I can use two thousand bucks but I’m doing KFC a favor, too-I truly hope the shortfall will cause corporate to be just a little more careful about who they accept into the management program instead of blowing money on guys like Victor.

It’s dusk now. Most of the dinner business has been done because this is a working-class neighborhood and these people eat on time and get to bed early. They’re more likely to pay cash than to use a card. In the parking lot I check my wig and put on my gloves, then slide Cañonita into one side pocket of my black leather vest and my crystal studded mask into the other. I breathe deeply, check my look in the mirror one more time. I can feel Allison Murrieta being born inside me. I can understand her thoughts and hear her voice and I ignore the last little whispers from departing Suzanne. I’ll come back to her. I see Allison now. I see as Allison now.

I move as Allison, head up and eyes level as I count my steps from the car to the door. A family comes through it and I turn away from them and put Cañonita to my ear and start blabbing loud like anyone else on a cell phone. When the family passes I get a look inside: a girl and a middle-aged woman working the front, a young Paki and his girlfriend ordering and behind them a couple of brawny dudes who look like longshoremen off shift from the Port of Long Beach.

I put on my mask, throw open the door and aim my gun straight into the face of the biggest longshoreman.

“Hi, cutie,” I say.

“Oh, shit.”

“Come on, smile for me.”

He does, so I swivel Cañonita to his smaller buddy.

“You too, Hot Rod. Give me a smile.”

His buddy just stares at me.

“Behave yourself,” I say to him.

The Paki man is already backing away with his hands up and his girl is hiding behind him, so I step right to the front of the line.

I point Cañonita at the young clerk, then at the woman, then at the security camera behind them up by the ceiling, then safely down at the ground.

“No bullshit, ladies. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

The woman has that indignant look that only a good and honest person can get. She’s disgusted that I would take what belongs to someone else. She’s offended. From the right-side periphery of my vision I can see Hot Rod hitching up his shirttail. It’s exactly what an off-duty cop would do to pull his sidearm-an off-duty cop being my worst nightmare except for two off-duty cops-and all I can do is draw down on him.

“What are you going for, Hot Rod?”

His hands freeze and he looks at me. “Phone. Picture?”

My heart is beating so hard in my ears I can barely hear what he says. And I can barely hear what I say next:

“Just don’t mess with my stickup.”

“No. Not me.”

By then the middle-aged manager and the young girl are chattering away in Spanish and the Pakis are wide-eyed and silent, but the register is open and the girl is downloading the cash into a white K FC bag with the Colonel’s face on it. The woman won’t look at me and she’s muttering mainly to herself, but the girl loads the bag in a quick, helpful manner. I tell her not to forget the rolls of quarters. I see over eight hundred dollars go into that sack. I set one of my cards on the counter.

Less than a minute and I turn to go. Hot Rod has his cell phone camera aimed at me and I brandish the weapon and the bag of money. Cutie steps in front of me then kneels facing the camera. I can’t resist this kind of publicity. So I set a friendly hand on his shoulder-the money hand, not the gun hand-while Hot Rod clicks another two pictures.

I flick a card to each of them.

YOU HAVE BEEN ROBBED BY

ALLISON MURRIETA

HAVE A NICE DAY

“For the next ten minutes the first person through that door gets shot,” I say.

By then I’m heading back to the airport Marriott, the northbound traffic light and the Mustang burning through the fuel which is a feeling I love. But I’m strictly speed limit now. Suzie Jones, citizen, teacher of history. My feet have gone cold and my hands are shaking because all the concentration and calm I force upon myself during a holdup dissolve when I’ve gotten away, body and mind suddenly able to admit what a scary dumb-ass business this is, pointing guns at people you don’t want to shoot while you take someone else’s money. Pulling a job is the best-well, second -best feeling in the world. But the comedown-these jittery minutes when your heart pounds in your eardrums and you can hardly draw a full breath-man, that I can live without. So I do the speed limit and watch the rearview mirror and turn on the news and think about Joaquin because Joaquin makes me calm and proud.

Lots of legends sprouted up around him. One was that he became an outlaw because a group of Anglos raped his wife and made him watch. Another was that he became an outlaw because his brother was hanged for stealing a horse he didn’t steal at all. Another was that Joaquin became an outlaw because he was whipped. I have his leather-bound journal so I know what’s true and what isn’t. The journal itself is only eighty-one pages long because he died when he was twenty-three. The pages are small, yellow and brittle. The handwriting is neat but fading. The journal won’t last forever, just as Joaquin’s head will not. They rest next to each other in a secret room in my barn in Valley Center.

Interestingly, all three of those legends are true, and they all took place on the same day outside of Coloma, California, in 1849. Gold had been found at Sutter’s Mill. In the Sierra foothills you could pick it right off the ground, pan it right out of the rivers and streams. Talk about a rush.

Joaquin had a claim and a camp with his wife, Rosa, and his brother, Jesús. Joaquin was nineteen years old. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a beautiful woman-a girl, really, just seventeen-and like Joaquin she was educated at a Jesuit school down in Ala mos, Mexico. She was three months pregnant on that day outside Coloma.

They were panning the creek, doing well. Their claim was legitimate, too, because the foreign miner’s tax-which pretty much made it legal to shoot non-Anglos mining for gold-wasn’t enacted until 1850.