what if it was locked?
She jumped four feet straight up when the alarm on her watch went off.
It was toward the end of their second shift after returning to the Safeway that the Animals sobered up. Lash was sitting by himself in the wide backseat of the Hummer limo, his head cradled in his hands, hoping desperately that the despair and self-loathing he was feeling was only the effect of a hangover, instead of what it really was, which was a big flaming enema of reality. The reality was, they had spent more than a half a million dollars on a blue hooker. He let the hugeness of it roll around in his head, and looked up at the other Animals, who were sitting around the perimeter of the limo, similarly posed, trying not to make eye contact with one another. They'd had nearly two semi trucks of stock to put up that night, and they'd known it was coming because they'd ordered it to make up for the time they'd been away and Clint had let the shelves get low. So they'd sobered up, put their heads down, and thrown stock like the Animals that they were. Now it was getting close to dawn and it was dawning on all of them that they might have severely fucked up.
Lash risked a sideways glance at Blue, who was sitting between Barry and Troy Lee. She'd taken Lash's apartment on Northpoint, and made him sleep on the couch at Troy Lee's, where there were about seven hundred Chinese family members, including Troy's grandmother, who, every time she passed through the room during the day, when Lash was trying to sleep, would screech, "What's up, my nigga!" and try to get him to wake up and give her a pound or a high five.
Lash had been explaining to her that it's impolite to refer to an African American as a nigga, unless one was another African-American, when Troy Lee came in and said, "She only speaks Cantonese."
"She does not. She keeps coming in and saying, 'What's up, my nigga? "
"Oh yeah. She does that to me, too. Did you give her a pound?"
"No, I didn't give her a pound, motherfucker. She called me a nigga."
"Well, she's not going to quit unless you give her a pound. It's just the way she rolls."
"That's some bullshit, Troy."
"It's her couch."
Lash, exhausted and already hungover, gave the wizened old woman a pound.
Granny turned to Troy Lee. "What's up, my nigga!" She offered and received a pound from her grandson.
"That shit is not the same!" Lash said.
"Get some sleep. We have a big load tonight."
Now half a million dollars was gone. His apartment was gone. The limo was costing them a thousand dollars a day. Lash looked out the blackout windows at the moving patchwork of shadows thrown by the streetlights, then turned to Blue.
"Blue," he said. "We have to get rid of the limo."
Everyone looked up, shocked. No one had said anything to her since they'd finished stocking. They'd brought her coffee and juice, but no one had said anything.
Blue looked at him. "Get me what I want." Not a hint of malice, not even a demand, really, just a statement of fact. "Okay," Lash said. Then to the driver he said, "Take a right up here. Head back to that building where we went last night."
Lash crawled over the divider into the front passenger seat. He couldn't see shit out the blackened windows. They'd only gone about three blocks into the SOMA district when he saw someone running. Running way, way too fast for a jogger. Running - like he was on fire - running.
"Pull up alongside of that guy."
The driver nodded.
"Hey, guys, is that Flood?"
"Yeah, it is," Barry, the bald one, said.
Lash rolled down the window. "Tommy, you need a ride, man?"
Tommy, still running, nodded like a bobble-head on crack.
Barry threw open the back door, and before the limo could even slow down, Tommy leapt in, landing across Drew and Gustavo's laps.
"Man, am I glad you guys came along," Tommy said. "In about a minute, I'm going to - "
He passed out in their laps as the sun washed over the hills of San Francisco.
Chapter Fifteen
Broken Clowns
Inspector Alphonse Rivera watched the broken clown girl - black-and-white-striped stockings and green sneakers - come out of Jody Stroud's apartment and head up the street, then turn and look back at their brown, unmarked sedan.
"We're made," said Nick Cavuto, Rivera's partner, a broad-shouldered bear of a man,