Hi Five Read online

  The Cambodians dispersed into the store. There were fish-eye mirrors everywhere but these guys were past shoplifting. They had money. They still made Beaumont nervous but he wasn’t afraid of them. He’d been in Vietnam and had seen action that would have these punks crying for their mamas.

  They came back with a pile of junk food and dumped it on the counter.

  “How you doin’, Chief?” Chubby said. He was the leader for no apparent reason Beaumont could see.

  “I’m doing just fine,” Beaumont said.

  “I been meaning to ask you. What do you do with yourself all day besides sit back there and jerk off?”

  “And I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Beaumont retorted, “what do you do all day besides lie around being an asshole?”

  Chubby slow-blinked twice. “You know, one of these days your store might burn down.”

  “And one of these days your mama’s house might catch on fire. I know where she lives, son.”

  Chubby tightened up and let one shoulder sag like he was going to throw a punch. Beaumont put his hand under the counter. He hadn’t fired the .45 Colt Commander since Phnom Penh but the gesture made Chubby hesitate. The moment teetered on the edge of violence.

  One of the other guys said, “Hey, fuck this guy, Lok. We got shit to do.”

  Chubby had his eyes locked on Beaumont’s. “I’ll be back, Chief.”

  “And I’ll be right here,” Beaumont replied.

  Beaumont thought he might clean the gun, see if it still fired when he heard a big engine revving and the Cambodians shouting get down! The salvo of bullets came through the window like copper hornets, spider-webbing the glass, exploding the tiny boxes of Tide, cans of chili and SpaghettiOs, the coolers shattering, the whole candy section blasted apart, a confetti of paper towels and toilet paper fluttering in the air.

  Beaumont couldn’t get down fast enough. He’d barely bent his knees when he was hit in the shoulder. “Oh God, I’m shot!” he shouted. Then the second and third bullets struck him in the chest. He twisted around, grabbing at the shelves and sliding to the floor, dragging bottles of Smirnoff and Early Times down on top of him, a fleeting, silver moment of consciousness streaking past as he closed his eyes and the world was gone forever.

  Isaiah was on a case and didn’t hear about the shooting until the next day. Dodson came over to tell him.

  “Beaumont?” Isaiah said. “They shot Beaumont?” Dodson looked the same, maybe a little heavier, but the same. Homeboy uniform, short, cocky, swagger in his chromosomes.

  “I talked to his son,” Dodson said. “He said Beaumont’s hurt bad, doctors don’t know if he’s gonna make it. You want to go to the hospital?”

  “No, the store first.”

  Isaiah and Dodson hadn’t worked together since the 14K Triad case. The partnership had gone bust, but since then they’d fallen into an easy comradery that Isaiah cherished. It was the most solid, reassuring thing he’d had in his life since Marcus was killed. As long as he and Dodson didn’t spend too much time together, the relationship worked fine.

  “I’m telling you, this gun shit is getting out of hand,” Dodson said. “I was over at Raphael’s crib buyin’ some weed? Three of them East Side Longos was there and check dis. They all had brand-new Berettas, that compact model? Julio said the whole damn gang has them. They bought them like team jerseys.”

  “How’s Micah?” Isaiah said.

  “He’s doing aight,” Dodson said. “Big-head boy thinks he can walk, stumbling around with his feet all wide apart, little hands up in the air, and making goo-goo noises that Cherise says are words. That’s a fortunate lil’ muthafucka, growing up proper-like. Got love all around him, don’t have to worry about nothin’.” Dodson’s face didn’t match the words. He seemed far away and brooding. Strange for him.

  “You okay?” Isaiah said.

  “Yeah, I’m cool. I think I’m coming down with a cold.” Isaiah didn’t believe him. Dodson’s gears were grinding on something too private to talk about.

  Isaiah had heard about him only sporadically. After the Walczak case, Grace’s mother had given Dodson a not-so-small fortune. That was a while ago and he hadn’t mentioned it since. A couple of times, Isaiah saw him driving a tow truck. Dodson had seen him but pretended he didn’t. Isaiah wondered what that was all about and whether his friend was hustling again.

  The police had come and gone. Beaumont’s store was boarded up, yellow tape hanging loosely across the open door. Isaiah and Dodson had known Beaumont since they were kids. The crotchety old man was one of the good, hardworking people who made up most of the neighborhood. He’d never hurt anybody or caused any trouble. He ran his store, loved his family, smoked a cigar in the park on warm evenings and went fishing with TK and Harry Haldeman. Now he was dead for no reason at all. Isaiah hated the term “random violence,” as if it were an anomaly, worrisome only if you were unlucky, and not a plague on the community that infected everyone with the belief that killings were an ordinary part of life.

  “This is bullshit,” Dodson said, shaking his head in disgust. “Muthafuckas ain’t got nothin’ better to do than kill people minding they own business?”

  Isaiah said, “Do you know what happened?”

  “Drive-by. Around one in the afternoon,” Dodson said. “No witnesses.” The bullet holes in the store’s façade were large, wood splintered around them. “Big-ass bullets,” Dodson noted.

  “Could have been nine-millimeter but I’m thinking .45s,” Isaiah said. Dodson looked at the splotches of dried blood on the sidewalk where a gangsta had been hit.

  “I hope he died,” Dodson said. “Lok’s people were the ones that got shot at. Cops haven’t identified the shooters. They were on the news asking for help, which means they don’t know shit.” Isaiah shook his head. One third of the murder cases in the US go unsolved and he was fiercely determined Beaumont’s wouldn’t be one of them. He put his hands in his front pockets and looked off a moment. “Let’s talk to Mo.”

  Across the street from Beaumont’s was a vacant storefront that used to sell vacuum cleaners. A wino named Mo camped out in the vestibule for part of the day. He used to hang with another wino named Dancy but Dancy died of liver cancer. Nobody knew he had it until the coroner found a tumor as big as a fist. None of the other winos could remember saying Mo’s name without saying and Dancy. Mo still said it, though his friend had died months ago.

  Mo was sitting on a greasy sleeping bag with his back against the door, eating noodles from a Styrofoam cup. His shopping cart full of overstuffed garbage bags was parked beside him. He’d probably tried to flee when the shooting happened but it was a drive-by, over in seconds.

  Isaiah and Dodson approached him.

  “Hey, Mo,” Isaiah said.

  “How you doin’, Isaiah. Is that you, Dodson?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Bad day,” Mo said, shaking his head. There was lint in his gray hair, hands as dirty as the sidewalk, his layers of clothes stuck together with grime. “Beaumont was a good man. I cried like a baby when I heard he was dead. Seems to be goin’ around. Wasn’t no cause for that. No cause at all.”

  “You saw the whole thing, didn’t you?” Isaiah said, going right at him.

  Mo choked on some noodles and wiped his mouth on a sleeve infested with every germ in the world. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t see nothin’. Wasn’t even here.”

  “Mo—” Isaiah said, a warning in his voice.

  Mo slurped down the last of the noodles. “I see no evil, hear no evil. That’s the only way to get along out here.”

  “You saw everything, start to finish.”

  “Imm-possible,” Mo said with a sharp nod. “I wasn’t even here.”

  “Stop lying, Mo. In the morning you hang out around the Coffee Cup because Verna passes out leftovers, and then around lunchtime you come over here because Beaumont gave you a free beer if you swept the sidewalk and kept the trash area clean. You were here, Mo.”

&n
bsp; “How you know all that?” Mo said. “You been followin’ me?” Isaiah glared. Mo cringed. “Okay, okay. Y’all don’t need to be like that. Ain’t much to tell no ways. Some thugs went into the store, came out again, and then this pickup goes by, somebody on the passenger side started shooting. Br-d-d-d-d-d-d-it! Just like that.”

  “Was it loud?” Isaiah asked. “You’ve heard gunshots before.”

  “Shits yeah it was loud. Almost broke my hearin’ system.”

  “What kind of truck was it?” Dodson said.

  “You mean the brand? I don’t know. Ain’t had a car since I drove through a fence and landed in some lady’s fish pond. Big fish in there, orange and white. When the lady stopped screaming at me, she said some of ’em was a hundred years old. You believe that?”

  “Color?” Isaiah said.

  “Like I said, orange and white.”

  “I mean the truck.”

  “Black.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “He went by real fast,” Mo said. “But it was a white boy, had a cap on backwards, you know how they do.”

  “You sure it was a white boy?” Dodson said.

  Mo nodded adamantly. “Positivity,” he said.

  “Anything else stand out to you?” Isaiah asked. “Anything at all?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You believe that lady’s fish was a hundred years old?”

  Intensive Care was a familiar scene to Dodson. He’d been here many times in his gangsta days, the room dim, his homeboy diminished and frail no matter what his size, the badass bled out of him, lying there in a mess of tubes, white tape and catheters, family members crying and solemn, like the boy’s life meant something, the slow beeps and barely oscillating lines warning you the end was near. Save for the medical equipment, Beaumont might have been lying in state.

  Beaumont’s son, Merrill, was there. The old folks described him as a nice young man; a ranking just below TV star in the hood. Merrill was standing next to the bed. Dodson and Isaiah shook Merrill’s hand. The only things Dodson could think of to say were clichés. Probably the same with Isaiah.

  “He respected you, Isaiah,” Merrill said. His eyes were bloodshot and brimmed with tears.

  “And I respected him too,” Isaiah said.

  “I appreciate you coming, Dodson,” Merrill said. His tone suggesting Dodson’s presence was as unexpected as it was unnecessary.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Merrill,” he said. “Beaumont was a good man.”

  Glints of anger sparked off Merrill’s eyes and he turned away. Dodson knew why. He was one of the kids that stole from Beaumont’s store and told him he charged so much he must be a Jew and painted graffiti and pictures of big dicks on the walls and said shitty things about Camille when she was bald and stripped down to the bone with cancer.

  Merrill said, “Dad is gone and he won’t recover. I’m waiting for his sister to arrive before I pull the—” He wiped the tears off his face with his shirtsleeve. “Before I end it.” He took his father’s hand.

  Dodson, Merrill and Isaiah had known each other since middle school. Merrill and Isaiah were good students and hung out with other good students. Dodson was on the other side of the playground, smoking weed with the fellas and trying to convince girls to meet him in the bathroom.

  Dodson lived across the street from Merrill. They’d watched each other grow up with the wary, amused contempt of rival religious groups. Dodson and his crew taunted Merrill at every opportunity; about his pastel polo shirts and his fucked-up haircut and his lame-ass backpack. They would have beat him up for sport if Beaumont hadn’t known all their parents.

  Dodson’s father threw him out of the house when he was seventeen. Nobody would take him in and he was living in Lateesha’s car with the Saran Wrap windows and cat hair fossilized in the seats. It was a school morning. He woke up with crust in his eyes, Buckwheat hair and the taste of weed and cheap wine in his mouth. He was standing at the curb, brushing his teeth and rinsing his mouth out with a warm Dr Pepper. He was just realizing how stupid that was when Beaumont drove by. Merrill was in the passenger seat. They made eye contact, a moment so humiliating Dodson wanted to shoot him.

  Dodson and Isaiah left the hospital room, Isaiah with that look on his face, the one that said he was pissed off and wasn’t going to let this go. Dodson was angry too, but for some reason, he couldn’t get his mind off Merrill, standing at his father’s bedside holding his hand.

  Dodson had to babysit Micah, so he drove Isaiah home. He stayed distant and tight. Not like him. He was usually talkative to the point where you wanted to put your hand over his mouth. A tension crept into the car, the imminent kind, where something important was going to be said and it was only a question of when. But nothing happened.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Isaiah said as he got out of the car.

  “Yeah, I’ll see you later,” Dodson said.

  Strange, Isaiah thought, that Dodson had come over in the first place. He could have told him about Beaumont over the phone. There was something weighty on his friend’s mind. He’ll talk when he’s ready, Isaiah decided, knowing that was true about himself.

  He ate a bowl of oatmeal standing at the kitchen counter and thought about Grace. Where she was, what she was doing and who she was with. Why hadn’t she called? He imagined a dozen scenarios. She had a deadly disease, she was disfigured, she was homeless, she lost his phone number, address and email all at the same time. Or maybe she had amnesia or had become a heroin addict, joined a cult or was married with a couple of kids. He was driving himself crazy so he went to Ari’s gym to work out.

  Ari taught Krav Maga, a mixed martial art developed by the Israeli military. Isaiah had been attacked and beaten numerous times over his career. Belatedly, he’d realized he should take self-defense more seriously.

  Ari was the same as he’d always been. Built like a concrete pillar, silver hair in a flattop, fists big as sledgehammers.

  “Let’s go, Isaiah,” Ari said. “Show me what you’ve learned.”

  They sparred, Ari saying, “Too slow, Isaiah. Isaiah, keep your balance. You are leaving yourself open, see?” as he slammed him to the mat.

  “Don’t you think you could be a little encouraging?” Isaiah said.

  “Maybe later,” Ari said, pulling him to his feet. He put his hands on Isaiah’s shoulders and looked like a father sending a son off to war. Ari knew what wars were like and for him, they were never over. “Remember, Isaiah,” he said. “Fight to win, and it doesn’t matter how. Don’t stop, don’t give up. Whatever you do, keep fighting.”

  Isaiah was far more skilled than he’d been only a few months ago. He’d been jogging and lifting weights at home, getting his body fat down to nine percent, pro-athlete range. His muscles were cut, steely six-pack, his arms corded with veins. He was pleased when he looked in the mirror but embarrassed too, vanity being new to him. He wished Grace could see him.

  Ari had told Isaiah his kicking was weak and he lacked leg strength. Isaiah worked on it hard, leg squats and kicking the shit out of the heavy bag.

  “Kick through the bag,” Ari said. “Like you’re trying to kill someone on the other side.”

  After his workout, Isaiah went home, showered and changed. He thought about Beaumont. The shooting was obviously gang related, but Isaiah didn’t know any white gangs in the area.

  He made some calls to a few contacts who’d spent time in one prison or another. He found out there’s a skinhead gang in Signal Hill called the Starks—a German word for powerful and strong. In the joint, the Starks hung around with the Aryan Brotherhood and the Nazi Lowriders.

  Isaiah didn’t know anybody from those organizations, but he did have an acquaintance named Kevin Boyd. Kev didn’t belong to any of the gangs. He was more of a closet racist who hated niggers and Jews in the privacy of his own home.

  They’d met about a year ago. Kev was drunk and his car had broken down not far from Beaumont’s. Some local thugs were beating
him for trespassing. Isaiah happened by and told them to stop. It was a sign of respect that they backed off. Kev promptly pronounced Isaiah as one of the “good ones,” right up there with Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter. Presently Kev was serving seven to ten in CCI for armed robbery.

  Getting permission to visit someone in prison was a lengthy process. You had to fill out a Department of Corrections questionnaire, available only if the prisoner sent it to you. There’s also a background check and a bunch of other hoops to climb through. Isaiah called Carter Samuels, a police officer and former client, who got a message to Kev to call Isaiah, which Kev agreed to do for a fifty-dollar contribution to his commissary account.

  “The Starks call themselves white nationalists but it’s bullshit,” Kev said. “They’re not real believers.”

  If you call yourself a white nationalist, Isaiah thought, you are a white nationalist. “Who’s their leader?” he asked.

  “A guy named Sidero Bernal. Weird name for a white guy, huh? He tells everybody it’s Latin but who knows? He’s a vicious little prick. Even the Mexicans and the nig—blacks—leave him alone. He’s done some crazy shit.”

  “Like?”

  “Like he stole some gasoline from the motor pool and set a guy on fire. He made a shiv out of a toothbrush and a shaver blade and cut a guy’s Achilles’ heel. He locked this one poor asshole in a dryer and watched him go around and around until he blacked out. That kind of crazy shit. It’s the joint so nobody saw anything.”

  “Is he in there now?” Isaiah asked.

  “I’m not sure. The Starks have a house they call the Den. It’s in Signal Hill.”

  “Give me the directions,” Isaiah said, and wrote them down. “One last thing. Don’t tell anybody I asked about them.”

  “I won’t,” Kev said.

  “I mean it. I know people in there,” Isaiah said. “You rat me out and you’ll be wearing an apron and calling somebody hubby.”