T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

I draw Cañonita at him and he stops. “Hands up, Rorke. Let go of the fucking cart. Now.”

I see the whites of his eyes. He takes his hands off the handle and raises them high. The cart starts to roll toward the water, the back end coming around and one front wheel buckling over and over. It picks up speed. I can see it’s going to hit the water about the time it tips over. So Cart Man makes a move for it.

“Daz all my stuff. Everthin’.”

“FREEZE!”

I look at Wyte but he hasn’t budged. Cart Man actually does freeze, like a kid in a game, one foot in the air and both hands extended toward the cart. I’ve got Cañonita trained on his dark sweatshirt. The cart rolls into an even tighter turn and goes into the river. But the water stops it. It doesn’t tip over. When I turn back to Wyte I can hear the water lapping against the steel.

“Take off that hood then put your hands back up,” I say to Cart Man.

“But I’m gonna fall.”

“Then put down your foot.”

He lowers his foot to the concrete, then slowly pulls back the hood and I see his matted hair, his sunken eyes, the dark patches of beard. I know that Wyte could employ more than one black man but I also know this guy isn’t one of them. I can smell him. I pocket Cañonita.

“Get your cart and get out of here,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am. You sure got the guns.”

He looks at Wyte for the first time, then back at me, then pulls the hood back up and follows his cart into the river. He’s ankle deep when he gets to it. He pulls it out by its front end, leaning back to use his weight. He gets it clear of the water and grabs the handles and looks back once at me then pushes hard into a wobbling walk-run as the lame cart starts veering again.

Wyte looks at me smugly. “Think about my proposal. Take all the time you need. You can use my condo in Maui for a week while you consider. Take your family. Or stay at my home in Mammoth-view of the Sherwins, sunny and light.”

“Nothing in Mexico?”

“I own a casita in Puerto Vallarta, but I’m very sorry, it’s occupied now. Close friends.”

I feel the weight of the Colt that I’ve got aimed at Wyte’s chest. Easy shot. It would make me and my family safer. But I can’t kill him when the scale in my soul says he doesn’t deserve to die.

“My answer is no.”

He cocks his head like a dog toward a distant bark. “No? But why?”

“I have enough bosses. I only do what I do for me. That’s my final answer.”

“I respect it.”

“Slowly take off your jacket and turn around.”

He does. It’s noticeably heavier in the pockets than it should be. He holds it in his left hand as he turns away from me. No back rig. His right hand is still empty and in the open. He looks over his shoulder at me.

I come up behind him, stepping loudly so he knows where I am.

“I have the diamonds,” I say.

“Jacket,” he says. “All three pockets. Forty-five grand takes up some space.”

“Throw the coat away from you, to your left.”

It lands on the channel bottom with a puff of dust. I keep the gun on Wyte as I step to it. The four-by-six manila clasp envelope in the left pocket is taut with used hundred-dollar bills. So is the envelope on the right. And the envelope in the buttoned inside pocket. Two go into my coat pocket and the other into the waistband of my jeans.

From my own jacket I take the twenty-carat parcel of near colorless SI2-clarity round-cut parking lot gravel and toss it on the ground up ahead of him where he can see it.

“You have my number,” he says, looking over his shoulder again.

“Stand right there until I make the railroad tracks.”

“I believe you’ll call me.”

“Believe what you want. Turn back around and stay that way.”

I climb the embankment and jog along the river. The graffiti on the concrete caissons glows softly in the darkness. The last I see of Guy he’s standing down there by the little trickle of the water.

I hop the tracks, cut through the side streets and head for my car, cradled in the night.

I’m just about to put the car key in the door when I hear the sound of a double-action revolver being cocked.

“Don’t move,” says the voice behind me. “Do not move. Do not turn around.”

“I’m LAPD, dumb-ass.”

“There’s a problem with your product, Suzanne. It’s the wrong kind of rock.”

I hear motion behind me then I feel cold steel against the back of my skull.

“To your knees, hands on the ground. Now.”

I do as he says. Rorke. I can smell him, that get-laid cologne he wears. The gun leaves my head. He quickly removes the bulky envelopes. I hear the rattle of a plastic bag.

“Look straight ahead. Do not move.”

The gun pokes the back of my head again. Rorke palms my ass. I feel the bag of money, looped over his wrist, nudging the back of my thigh.

“Sweet.”

I hear footsteps, long and padded, then nothing but the high-voltage thrum in the power lines and the cars out on First Street.

I’m back at Franklin Intermediate on Wednesday, a week before the students arrive. It’s good to see the other teachers, meet the new ones, drink a cup of the bad coffee in the lounge. The teachers are fascinated by what I’ve been through-my brush with Allison Murrieta, my bad arrest. But they’re cool about it, too. They cut me a slightly wider swath than usual and I like it.

Even my principal, a hazy and short-tempered alcoholic, seems slightly respectful. He says he likes me with the cropped blond hair, which I take differently than liking the hairstyle. He is an odd man, a bachelor, and he keeps his job because no one can anticipate him.

I’ve got my old classroom back, and I like it. I hang my matted copies of the Preamble and the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address up on the walls.

I set up my 9/11 display, which is mostly before and after photographs of the World Trade Center. I bought them right there in 2004 when I was one of the teacher chaperones for an L.A. Unified eighth-grade pilgrimage to Ground Zero. Some of my students wept as they read the posted notes saying good-bye to loved ones in the rubble. It made me proud that they could feel beyond themselves.

I also set up my usual display on the history of baseball in America, since September is the playoffs and lead-up to the World Series. I’ll show the students part of Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, though to be frank, eighth-graders are more into hoops and extreme sports than guys spitting tobacco juice on the dugout floor. And black-and-white footage tends to put them to sleep.

Luckily, Franklin is a closed and fenced campus and all visitors have to come and go through the office. The office secretary is Wanda and she can be very unwelcoming. By the end of my first Thursday she’s turned away four TV news crews, the Los Angeles Times, KNX and KFWB radio and a freelancer hoping to land a Good Housekeeping assignment. I’m willing to be temporarily famous but you can’t have reporters dropping in on you whenever they want. Ruth is arranging the really big stuff anyway.

By Friday morning the classroom is ready but I still have meetings with the principal and the district and the PTA and the school board and even an LAPD presentation here on gang activity and what to do about it. They claim these meetings are necessary but they’re agonizing beyond description. I wear my sunglasses and stare out the windows and think of Hood under me on the cushions at the Persian restaurant or sprawled on the bed in the Hotel Laguna looking out at the ocean and muttering something about his world being turned upside down. On a notepad I make a short list of the new cars I’d like to boost, which includes the new Chevrolet Silverado with the six-liter V-8 and 10,500-pound towing capacity, Porsche’s naturally aspirated 415-hp GT3 and a Shelby GT-500, which is only a Mustang but with five hundred horses it’s the fastest pony-155 mph-ever built. There are others.