His window zipped up and I walked around the car. He pushed the door open and took a black suit coat from the pa.s.senger seat so I could sit. I climbed in, glancing at the rear of the cruiser where the back seats had been removed to make room for a gurney. And stashed just behind the front seats, a tightly packed bedroll and three milk crates filled with various pieces of camp gear tucked neatly on the floorboards. Coleman stove and lantern, hand generator emergency band radio, tent bag, ground tarp, a coffee can of rattling iron stakes, four small red fuel bottles, shrink-wrapped bundle of flares, boxes of waterproof matches, a hatchet with a well-worn leather handle, binoculars, a large plastic canteen, an Army surplus mess kit in a nylon pouch, a black cast-iron skillet with a heat-warped bottom. And more.
I pulled the door closed.
-Going on a trip this weekend?
He dug a finger behind one lens of his gla.s.ses and rubbed an eye.
-Do me a favor and buckle up, OK?
I pulled the seatbelt over my shoulder and lap and clipped the silver tongue into the buckle.
He stuck out his hand.
-Gabe.
I took his hand, calluses on his palm scratching my skin.
-Web.
He loosened his black tie and undid the top b.u.t.ton of his white short sleeve shirt.
-Some coffee there if you want it.
I took the large white cardboard cup from the holder clipped to the dash.
-Thanks.
He put the car in drive and pulled from the curb.
-No problem. Didn"t know how you liked it. Some creamers in the glove box.
I opened the glove box and found a couple creamers bouncing around on top of registration papers weighted down by a huge ring of at least a hundred keys, and a thick flipper of leather with a little plastic handle jutting from it. I closed the box and peeled back the top of my creamer and poured it in my cup.
Gabe pointed at the paper bag in the middle of the front seat.
-Garbage in there.
I dropped the empty creamer in the bag.
He drove us a couple blocks up Mansfield, past several two-story apartment buildings stacked like stucco cakeboxes in pink, aqua, terracotta, yellow and mint. Across Fountain the street gentrified slightly into a sprinkle of trendified craftsmans and renovated 1930s Spanish revival apartment blocks that were going to be squeezing out the drifters at the BHS Hollywood Recovery Center in due course. He stopped at the corner next to the Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse, and I watched some skater kids across the street working the steps of the Liberal & Household Arts Building at Hollywood High. He found a hole in the commute traffic and turned right, the Hollywood Hills rising just north of us, early summer smog settled on their tops. We started and stopped our way down past a few motels and strip clubs and stopped for the light at Highland.
A school bus crossed the intersection.
I closed my eyes for a moment, when I opened them it was gone. I looked down the street, knowing it must have just turned the corner, but unable to keep myself from thinking other thoughts. Thinking about the Flying Dutchman. Ghost ships. Haunted freighters, lost souls that manifest and dissolve, unbidden. Just the usual.
The light changed and I sipped my coffee.
-So where we headed?
Gabe glanced at his right blind spot and changed lanes.
-Koreatown. Code enforcement. Second day. Guy had stuff piled floor to ceiling. No egress. Blocked himself out of his own bathroom. Been filling gallon milk jugs with p.i.s.s. s.h.i.tting in little individual ziplock bags.
-Ah, man, Po Sin said it wasn"t a real s.h.i.t job!
He looked at me, my face reflected in the mirrored lenses below the deep, horizontally scored forehead and cropped graying hair.
He looked back at Sunset.
-He lied.
Po Sin was waiting when we got there, studying several large red splotches of paint on the back and sides of his Clean Team van.
He watched us get out of Gabe"s wheels and pointed at the van.
-Motherf.u.c.ker.
Gabe walked over, pulling the tie from his neck and folding it into a neat roll that he tucked in his pocket. He touched the paint with the tip of his finger, leaving a slight imprint.
-Couple hours after midnight. Maybe three or four AM. AM.
Po Sin kicked one of the van"s tires.
-Motherf.u.c.ker.
I took a look. The paint covered the name of the company on both sides of the van and dripped down over the phone number and web address.
-That sucks.
Po Sin turned his face to the sky.
-Motherf.u.c.ker!
Gabe picked a sc.r.a.p of yellow rubber that was stuck in the paint.
-Water balloon.
-Motherf.u.c.king water balloon!
-Where was it parked?
Po Sin pointed north.
-At the shop. Around back. They didn"t just drive by and heave one out the window, they parked, got out, walked around, and pelted it. Only reason they didn"t get the windshield was because I had it nosed in against the fence back there.
-No one at the shop?
Po Sin walked to the back of the van, taking a set of keys from his pocket.
-Someone was supposed to be at the shop. Someone was sure as h.e.l.l supposed to be at the motherf.u.c.king shop!
He pointed a finger at the sky.
-They"re asking for it. There is no denying they are asking for it! And they are going to f.u.c.king get it!
Gabe hooked a thumb in a belt loop of his black slacks.
-How you want to go about it?
Po Sin looked down from the sky.
-Eye for an eye.
Gabe took the sungla.s.ses from his face. Crease-cornered eyes, the faded black outline of a tear tattooed beneath the left. He nodded.
-OK, I"ll make some calls.
Po Sin looked again at the van.
-Motherf.u.c.ker.
He unlocked the van and opened the rear doors.
-Let"s get to work.
He pulled out three white packets and handed one to me and one to Gabe. I watched them shake theirs out until they unfolded into paper jumpsuits. Po Sin"s the size of a mainsail, Gabe"s meant for a normal human. I did the same and stepped into mine and watched how they tied the flaps on theirs. I was tying mine closed when I heard a long loud rip and watched Po Sin pull a huge roll of duct tape around and around his ankle, sealing the leg of the Tyvek suit to the top of the plastic shoe cover he"d slipped over his boot. He did the same with his other ankle. And then both wrists. And then the neck. He pa.s.sed the tape to Gabe who did likewise.
Gabe offered me the tape.
-Do it yourself, or need a hand?
I got taped up and hooded and Gabe showed me how to fit the goggled filter mask over my mouth and nose and I followed him into the hotel, Po Sin trailing behind us, glancing back at his vandalized van.
-Motherf.u.c.ker.
The roaches swarmed me. The first bag I shifted disturbed their routine and they swarmed me, simultaneously revealing what my feet had been crunching on when I walked into the dark apartment, and what the constant background rustling sound was caused by.
So I freaked a little.
A couple hundred c.o.c.kroaches come spilling out of the s.h.i.t-encrusted nooks and crannies of a dead shut-in"s festering den and start racing each other up your legs to see which can be the first to crawl in your facial orifices and see if you don"t freak.
Po Sin watched the freaking. Stood there with his arms folded, framed by towers of piled trash and bundled newspapers and plastic gallon milk jugs filled with urine, and watched all the c.o.c.kroaches in creation crawling on me trying to find holes they could climb into.
-Can"t handle this, you can"t handle the job.
He stood in front of me, his torso being populated by swarms of roaches combining into continents, pieces breaking off and drifting and forming with other ma.s.ses. The geophysical history of the earth enacted by roaches on a globe of a man.
He extended an arm and elegantly brushed a few from the sleeve of his Tyvek.
-Worse things to be covered in, man. Let me tell you.
Gabe walked past me, edging down the open corridor between the piles of refuse, making for the dim light at the back of the place where they"d excavated a couple windows the day before.
-Lots worse things.
He disappeared, lost in bugs and towering waste.
Po Sin watched me.
And, not wanting to at all, I thought about worse things.
Po Sin crunched over.
-OK?
The legs of one of the roaches tickled the exposed rim of skin running between my filter mask and the edge of the Tyvek hood. I flicked it to the floor and stomped on it. And, incidentally, about a dozen more.
-Yeah, I"m fine. You"re a d.i.c.k, but I"m fine.
He nodded and pointed toward the back of the apartment.
-Then head back there. Gabe is bagging the s.h.i.t. Start hauling it down to the service elevator.
I started down the hall, the smell of rancid c.r.a.p already seeping through the mask.
-You suck, Po Sin!
Appearing in front of me, Gabe shook his head.
-Here"s the thing. You don"t want to yell like that. It will break the seal of your mask around your chin and jaw. They"ll get in. You take off the mask to get them off and they"ll be all over your face. Be in your nostrils.
Roaches in your nostrils. Pretty bad. But still, like I say there are worse things.
So I got to work.
I hauled s.h.i.tbags. A lot of them. The shut-in who lived in the place, he must have s.h.i.t like a dozen times a day. He must have eaten nothing but beans and broccoli and topped it off with Mueslix.
Hauling the big black garbage bags filled with little bags filled with s.h.i.t between the teetering ma.s.ses of putrefying garbage, the smell of fermenting waste in my nose hairs, I tried to do some math. I tried to figure out how many years the guy must have been s.h.i.tting in bags to create this kind of poundage.
I took another load of the bags down in the service elevator and out the back to the bin Po Sin had rented for the job and had parked in the alley. My face itched under the mask and I wanted to take it off, but I knew the reek coming off the bags would kill me without some kind of protection. I started taking bags from the dolly I had piled them on and began flinging them over the side of the bin.
I tried to remember how much Chev said a new cellphone was gonna cost. Almost two hundred. At least twenty hours of s.h.i.t-flinging to pay that off.
c.r.a.p.
One of the bags snagged a f.l.a.n.g.e of steel at the top of the bin and tore open and little ziplocks of s.h.i.t spilled down onto the asphalt.
-c.r.a.p!