She changed the subject. “He wanted to, like, give me a ride back to Anaheim. He tried to talk me into going back to my grandma. I wasn’t having that.”
“Why not?”
“She’s a bitch. My mom’s okay but she’s in Anchorage. I’m not going back there. If I die homeless, I’m gonna do it in the sunshine—Jordan. Jordan.”
A bloated, shirtless older Black man came out from behind an adjacent silver tent. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and his teeth were crooked. He had some kind of lesion near the center of his belly. I tried not to stare.
“What this guy want?”
“He’s bugging me,” she blurted. “He tried to molest me.”
Jordan stepped to me—way too close. He almost pushed my shoulder. “Where the fuck you think you are.”
“I’m kiddeen. He’s looking for Mickey.”
“Check the gallery.”
“Where’s that?” I said.
“Take the motherfucker there.”
She said, “I’m not going in there alone!” and he shot her a look.
Stormy stood up—she was slim, still brimming with vitality in her black windbreaker and torn jeans, but her fists were permanently balled up like a tae kwon do student. Jordan led and she followed, turning back to me.
“Just…follow us, dork.”
I followed. Jordan and Stormy led me through the tent village out to under the off-ramp and down a narrow side alley. The more alone we got, the more my heart thumped, stepping around the alky puke, bologna wrappers, nasty hypos. They ducked into the mouth of a construction site—rusty infrastructure, crisscrossing metal behind black netting caked in spackle.
“What’s in there?”
“You wanna see Mickey or not?”
I pushed through a rip in the fence and followed.
“Watch out,” Jordan said as we entered the guts of the unfinished apartment building. “Some of this shit is loose. I saw a beam come down and almost hit a dude.”
“We’re fuckeen idiots for even being here,” Stormy said. “They haven’t worked on this place in, like, years.”
All around us were stacks of metal planks, tiles, drywall panels piled on high.
Jordan put his knuckles to his mouth and whistled once, loud and swift. Grumbles returned from a dark corner.
Two skeletal white guys were nodding off under an open purple single-person sleeping bag. One was barefoot, his filthy blackened feet creeping out from the far end of the crumpled gold zipper.
“Where Karaoke at?”
No answers, just dead eyes.
“Well, when was he here last?”
Half a shrug. “I heard he went clucking.”
“Where, though?”
“Sorry, boss, he didn’t leave no forwarding address.”
Low laughs, two or three stragglers came out of the shadows.
“This guy’s looking for Mickey.”
“Mr. Karaoke?”
“Skinny motherfucker, Rock and Roll Mickey, he up in here somewheres?”
“White Flight’s hidin’ like a bitch.” The guy laughed—his front tooth was gold. My pulse was just lowering to almost normal when a super-tough-looking, tattooed and aged Viking, shaved head, gray tank top, stepped from the shadows.
“Whose this fuckwad.”
“He’s with us,” Stormy said. They exchanged a knowing look.
“I don’t care who he’s with, who the fuck are you.”
“My name’s Adam,” I said. “I’m looking for Mickey Sandoz.”
Stormy and Jordan went tentative—they were no match. The guy was a motorhead or batshit or both; he went right up to me like we were already mid-brawl. “I don’t like your face.”
“I’m not crazy about it either,” I said. “But it’s the only—”
