He pushed me hard. “Don’t get fuckin’ funny with me, Jewboy. I don’t like your fuckin’ face.”
“Yo.” Stormy tried to intercept and he moved her hard with his arm. She went stumbling back into the rubble.
“Fuck you, asshole!” she howled as she pulled herself up.
Now the guy was revving, walking me backward over piles of garbage. “Don’t fuckin’ come around here looking for shit, Holmes, stay in your fuckin’ lane.”
Jordan said, “Dog, you need to get a grip.”
But this psycho wasn’t listening. “I want my fuckin’ money, little bitch. You find Sandoz, you tell him I’ll get paid or I’ll shoot the both of you in the fuckin’ head. Bam! Bam!”
“If I find him, I’ll—”
“Shut up, bitch.” He pushed me again. He liked pushing me, it made him smile. “Lotta people can’t stay in their lane. Learn to stay in your fuckin’ lane, bitch.” To accent this concept, he almost gave me a fast elbow to the chest but I dodged it, which sent me backward and I fell over some kind of concrete stack. Now he was standing over me. He put his gray-sneakered foot on the slabs of concrete to demonstrate its proximity to my face.
“You can’t stay in your lane, you get stomped, bitch.” Then he reached down and pulled me up by my sweatshirt. The junkies looked at the two of us like together we were a unicorn or some other half-mythical creature they didn’t yet believe in. I was trying to raise my hands, to say something like “I’ll leave,” but the wind was knocked out of me and I hadn’t even taken a punch. This crazy fuck wasn’t finished; he was positioning himself to give me a beatdown. Trying to come to my aid, Jordan almost blocked him but this only sent the guy into gonzo fury. He started ranting about how Sandoz had burned him and how he knew all kinds of shit about Sandoz that could put him back behind bars forever where he’d be somebody’s bitch and about how he was gonna kick my face in tonight if it was the last thing he did, maybe right this second.
I saw a pyramid pile of thick pipes, and in one swift move I scrambled to grab one, stood and held it out—it was heavier than I expected.
Jordan groaned.
Stormy said, “Put that down, idiot.”
But I ignored her. I said, “Let me outta here, dude. I don’t have any beefs with you. I just came here to tell Mickey Sandoz some bad news.”
“What kinda news is that?”
“His good friend is dead—was killed.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Who?”
“Hawley.” And then I looked at the pipe in my hand and lost a breath and trembled, and it dropped to the ground with a clank. “Devon Hawley.”
For a still moment, my attacker and the homeless posse behind him stood frozen. And then he buckled, half-lunged at nothing, balanced on a metal beam and vomited, long and hard.
When he lifted his face, he was pale as death and bawling.
Stormy put her arms around him. “Oh, Mickey, I’m so sorry.”
16
It took Sandoz about an hour to piece himself together, hunched over on a concrete slab with fits of shivering and tears. The muscles, the tattoos, the hard leathery shell had released, gone slack, and he looked weak, disoriented, in the throes of sudden mourning and maybe also some kind of drug comedown. He tried to apologize for what he called “rassling” me, said he’d thought I was a debt collector, said incarceration had turned him into a monster, that he hated himself.
Then he said, “Is he really gone?”
I nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Ah, Dev cut me off a few weeks ago.”
“How come?”
“Usual arguments, stupid shit. He was always on a mission to straighten me out.” Sandoz bristled, clutched himself. As the wayward crowd around us finally dispersed, he looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You don’t think I’d hurt him, do you? That why you’re here?”
I spoke in a terse whisper. “I don’t know, man. You tell me.”
He stared at me through watery eyes, rocked with pain, gasping jagged at the unleaded night air. “I could never hurt Devvy, man. That’d be like killing myself. Worse. I…Dev was my brother. And we didn’t even say goodbye.”
The tears started streaming again, and I felt compelled to put an arm around him—this strange, wizened tough guy that had only just threatened to shoot me in the head.
He looked up at me, emptied of life, corpse-like. “The dream is gone, man.”
I took it in and said, “When was the last time you ate something?”
We drove down Santa Monica toward the ocean until we reached a revolving sign—Rick’s Charbroiled: Burgers “is” us. We ordered and I picked up the tab. Then we took our grub to a dirty, scratched-up, blue-green Formica picnic table outside the shack, surrounded by bumper-to-bumper drive-through, late-night burger freaks. Between bites of the greasiest chow on Planet Earth, he said, “I just don’t see who would do this.”
“I need to tell my lawyer about the band and everything,” I said. “He’s not sure it lines up.”
“And you are?”
“I don’t know. But two weeks ago, Hawley went to Emil’s dad, saying he could prove Emil’s innocence. And then…this?”
Sandoz morphed for a third time before my eyes. First, he’d been rough street animal, a chain swinger. Then, suddenly, he was broken, the aging addict, a wreck. Now something else came through, somebody who still cared about something.
I said, “Mickey, I want to understand exactly what happened to your band. To Emil and Reynaldo, all of it.”
