“I hate you,” Lisa kept screaming. “I fucking hate you.”
We stood there, engulfed in anger, separated by glass like wild animals at the zoo, breathing like dragons, frowning and cursing each other down while cars zoomed by. Both sides of La Cienega were nothing but rows crammed with overpriced apartments, a thousand windows and twice as many eyes facing the streets. But this was L.A. Nobody gave a shit.
“Yeah, open the door, Miss Badass. I’ll show you who hates who.”
She pointed her Glock at me, her scowl exponentiated by rejection and betrayal.
My chest stuck out like my flesh was covered in Tenifer, the same indestructible material that coated her burner. I didn’t back down. Anger brought out the stupidity in most men.
She tried to run over my feet, then backed up and tried to side-swipe me. I threw a hook, tried to knock off her side-view mirror. Damn thing folded in, was collapsible. She revved up her gas-guzzler and bullied me out into the street. A thousand headlights sped toward me going seventy miles an hour. I jumped out of the way, horns blared and I took to the curb.
Lisa bogarted her way into traffic, accelerated, screeched away.
My heart pounded. Fear was in my chest begging me to let it out. Sweat rolled down my face, stung my eyes. Head was glazed with a thin sheen of piss-tivity and perspiration.
I yanked my suit coat off, but it was too late to keep it from being soiled with my blood. My suit pants were ruined, a hole in the fabric from when I had gone down hard on my knee.
I headed back home, cursing, limping, trembling.
4
Blood drained down my back as I sped up Genesee. Not the Genesee in Hollywood, but the narrow street that had been carved and curved into the urban hills in Baldwin Vista, the homes resting high over La Cienega and Rodeo. I rode Genesee until it changed to Carmone.
My head throbbed with every heartbeat, pain level a six moving toward seven.
The house I was looking for might’ve been sitting on the largest lot in the area. Up here, with real estate priced out of control, the better part of a million dollars bought you a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot crib and a two-car garage. But that’s what you paid for three bedrooms and three baths in this part of town. L.A. was an expensive and greedy bitch. Years ago houses up this way weren’t worth half of that. Fuck stocks. Property was the best investment in the West.
Blood was running down my neck. I needed medical help, but I didn’t have insurance. The only person that I knew who had some bootleg medical skills was waiting for me.
I found the house that I was looking for. The wrought-iron gates opened up before I could blow my horn. He must’ve been alerted when my headlights flashed across the bay windows. The plantation shutters were open and I saw his lean silhouette. He looked like a prisoner.
I parked next to a convertible sports car, a BMW Z4. Rufus was at the front door before I made it up the stairs. He was a tall man with a broad nose, white skin, and gray eyes. Contact lenses made his red eyes look gray. His thick locks hung down to the middle of his back, honey blond with red streaks here and there. Colorless goatee. At least four silver earrings in each ear. I’d seen the eyebrow ring before. The nose ring and the one in his lip were new to me.
Always trying to draw attention to himself.
He had on faded jeans and a light-blue T-shirt with the picture of the new ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN dead center. A novel was in his left hand. Comic or novel, I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen him with some kind of a book in his hand.
He frowned and shook his head. “Lights didn’t come on.”
“What?”
“Motion sensor’s not working. Lights didn’t come on.”
I didn’t care. “Rufus, need you to look at a cut behind my ear.”
Rufus was fidgety, too nervous for me to play it off. Whenever he saw me his eyes turned into dull stones, then misted up with bad memories. My eyes became harder, darker.
Sirens. Drug-sniffing dogs. Handcuffs. The memory of being driven away by the police. Talking to Momma on the phone from behind bars. Writing my ex-wife and praying to hear from her. The fights. Being in The Hole. All of that came back in a