Police and Thieves: A Novel (16 page)

Eichmann got defensive, and he lashed back, “We saw each other in the drugstore and had a conversation, okay? I didn’t ask him to come up and start talking to me! He did it on his own, got it? He’s got plans for us! You want to know what they are or not?”

“What’s he want?”

“What do you think he wants? The only damn thing we have. I’m going to sell him some dope.”

Eichmann was modeling a horseshoelike scab on his cheek. His eyes were vacant as he absentmindedly picked his nose, sermonizing,
“Hey, if he wants our weed, that’s what we’re here for. And I’ve got a surprise for him, the biggest one of his measly life, that’s for damn sure. Selling him dope? That’s the least of it. When we’re done with his ass, there won’t be enough of him to have a proper burial, the punk.”

Dee Dee told Eichmann to meet him on the Nineteenth Street footbridge in Dolores Park. Homeboys hung out there day and night; the dope traffic was so heavy, you couldn’t get across the bridge. The citizens who lived on nearby Church Street had organized themselves into an antidrug vigilante brigade—juvenile dealers were always getting arrested in the park and sent to jail.

Eichmann’s counterplot? I was the bait that would set the trap. I’d give the weed to the junkie while Eichmann and Bobo took him for his money. We were well versed in this type of activity; there didn’t seem to be any mechanical flaws in our tactical planning. Bobo would cross the bridge from Church Street, taking Dee Dee from the rear while I guarded the staircase to the landing. Bobo said it was a worthless strategy. “I’m telling you, we can’t do this with Dee Dee. You’re asking for pain getting anywhere near him. It’s going to backfire on us.”

Bobo couldn’t see it, but Eichmann was losing his marbles. The issues he was going through with Loretta were reducing his hardness, the lucidity he needed to keep his head above water. Eichmann said diplomatically, “We’ll be out in the open. He won’t pull any tricks on us. What’s he going to do? Nothing.”

“What bullshit,” Bobo said. He picked up the burrito with his fingers, tearing off a strip of tortilla with his teeth, letting it whip against his chin before he sucked it into his mouth.

Eichmann replied loftily, “Shut up. I don’t appreciate being undermined on the eve of a crucial event.”

There was an hour to go before I had to undertake my mission, so I laid down on my sleeping bag to rest. I fell asleep and dreamed I saw my father in the Twenty-fourth Street BART station selling potato latkes and flowers to the commuters at rush hour. The flowers were an assortment of wilted carnations and cost a dollar a bunch. The latkes were homemade and stuffed with onions and spices, served with applesauce, costing fifty cents each. “Latkes!” he sang. “Get your fresh latkes here!”

When I woke up, it was near twilight and Eichmann was rudely shaking my shoulder, and complaining, “Get going, damn it. You’re late. Why can’t you ever do anything on time.” He threw my shoes on the sleeping bag and walked away, carping, “Everybody’s so disorganized around here.”

Latkes? I was losing my mind having dreams like that. I didn’t even know my father. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, put on my shoes, and tied my laces in double knots. Bobo opened the garage door; the springs hadn’t been oiled in years, and the noise they made was psychotic, earsplitting. Then it hit me: Eichmann hadn’t made any provisions in his plan for the police. This was unlike him, and it fed into my notion that he was getting ill in the brain. I said to him, “What about the cops?”

He folded his arms over his chest and scoffed at me with a mean little smile on his veal-colored lips. “You’re back on that crusade? Why can’t you do what you’re told and leave the rest to me. I’ll take care of it.”

“Yeah? How? You didn’t say anything about what to do when the cops show up. Dee Dee isn’t going to come alone.”

“No, he won’t. But he doesn’t trust them any more than he trusts us. He won’t do anything that’s a risk. He ain’t that audacious. We’ve got a chance to clean him out for good.”

“How can you be so naive?”

“Naive?” Eichmann’s oversized ears twitched. “What’s that? Are you capping on me?”

The clod didn’t know what the word meant, and he was leading us into a massacre. Furthermore, the irony of my destination was not lost on me. Dolores Park used to be a Jewish cemetery before the turn of the century. When the neighborhood changed hands, going Irish, the bodies were disinterred and laid elsewhere. Now it was my turn to get buried there. “Dee Dee is going to fuck us and leave us for the cops.”

“No, he ain’t, Doojie.”

“Oh, the swami predicts? Don’t fool yourself.”

“You know what? You’re getting chicken on me.”

“Yeah, so what if I am? What if I can’t take your shit anymore, then what?”

“Don’t give me that jive-ass shit! You’ve got to pull your weight on this job!”

“What for?”

“You’re asking me what for? I can’t believe you’re that dumb. I’ll tell you what for!”

“Sell him an eighth and steal his money, is that what this is about?”

“You’re getting out of line!”

“Why is this so important?”

Eichmann was ecstatic with rage; the red-bite scar on the side of his nose flared up like a bougainvillea in bloom. “Because selling weed is what we do … and we ain’t stopping for Dee Dee or Flaherty or anybody else!”

I was bowled over by his logic. Eichmann arched his eyebrows, smirking at me. I took the eighth from his outstretched hand, then I stepped through the garage’s door into the parking lot. Except for a couple of kids playing stickball on the pavement, the street was deserted. I took a breath to clear my head. A seashell-pink-and-robin’s-egg-blue
sunset was settling over Mission’s brown sagging ghetto skyline, cooling off the neighborhood. Eichmann said, “Go up to the park and check it out, okay? That’s no biggie, is it? If everything’s proper, we take Dee Dee. If it ain’t, we don’t.”

“You all right, Doojie?” Bobo asked.

Eichmann’s dislike for me was scribbled all over his ruddy, scarred face. We looked at each other without the slightest hint of warmth. He was saying, “You ain’t going to let me down, are you?”

“Have I ever done that? What are you getting at?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. If I say I don’t, I don’t.”

“I think you want to bail out on me.”

“This isn’t about you. It’s Dee Dee I’m worried about and the cops. Why can’t you understand that?”

“He ain’t shit. Now, are you going to do this or what?”

I gave up and let it go. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

“We’ll watch your back.”

“Swear?”

“I swear it. We’ll be close by.”

Since I had nothing further to say to Eichmann, I put the eighth in a Marlboro hard-pack, turned around, and walked off toward Eighteenth Street, dragging my feet. Dolores Park was four blocks away, but the way I was feeling, it would take me ten years to get there. Eichmann yelled at me when I got to the sidewalk, “Hey, don’t fuck up, all right?”

All my life I’d been counted on to fail, to come up short. If there was a mistake, if there was a crime, you could pin it on Doojie. If you needed a scapegoat, some patsy who’d take the heat, you could always find me on San Carlos Street. Not this time. I periscoped my head into my jacket collar and said under my breath,
repeating it like a mantra, “This is the last deal I do.”

If the passengers on the Church Street cable car felt like peering out the window, and if they saw anything in the dark of Dolores Park, they might have noticed the halo of corruption around Dee Dee’s head. The snitch was on top of the landing near the Nineteenth Street footbridge waiting for me. I doubted the cops were paying him to set us up. The narcs wouldn’t give him anything in return, no rewards. At best, Dee Dee would be promised limited immunity, like a warranty on a cheap car.

Dee Dee was so much like Eichmann: They both wanted revenge. Dee Dee wanted it on us; Eichmann wanted it on the world. Revenge was all the dope fiends on Mission Street ever talked about, the glory of getting even, as if it was their sacred duty.

Behind Dee Dee, on the other side of the bridge and down the stone steps toward the Muni stop at Eighteenth Street, I heard the faint crackle of a police radio riding the breeze. The cops were in the soccer field, hiding under the wall that sheltered the playing grass.

I wanted to make Dee Dee wait. Doojie Sr. used to say patience was a hunter’s greatest virtue. He proved this the time he took my mother and me duck hunting at the Crystal Springs Reservoir down the peninsula near San Mateo. We packed a picnic and took a route through the mountains at La Honda. When we arrived at the reservoir, the mosquitoes were thick in the air, and it was twilight. Doojie Sr. got his shotgun from the trunk and said to my mother, “You wait here and don’t make a sound. I’ll be right
back.”

He shut the door and disappeared into the bush. My mother turned to me and smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. Then she lit a cigarette. A few minutes later, a single shot trumpeted in the pitch-black distance. I fell asleep in the baby seat, and my mother gave herself a pedicure by the glow of a flashlight.

Hours later, she jumped at the sound of some movement in the underbrush. She rolled down the window and called out, “Who’s there?”

Doojie Sr. reeled over to the Hillman, bleeding from his scalp. He opened the driver’s door and my mother wailed, “Oh, God! Where have you been?”

My stepfather’s head was slick with blood, as if he had dipped his skull into a gallon can of paint. He gasped, “I’ve been unconscious. I slipped on a branch and knocked myself out on a rock. That’s when the gun went off. I’m lucky I didn’t shoot myself in the foot.”

Dolores Park was vacant except for a solitary man walking his dog on the Twentieth Street path. Much as I hated to admit it, the night was gorgeous. A crescent moon was rising over a wedge of fog, throwing spears of light against the houses, the palm trees, and all the streets in the Mission. I couldn’t see the cops, but I was close to the footbridge, and I had a head start on them if things turned sour.

It was time to proceed to the next stage of Eichmann’s plan and make contact with Dee Dee. My heart was pounding against my rib cage like a prisoner trying to break out of a jail cell.

I twisted my ankle in a snarl of rosebush bramble, then jumped over the cable-car tracks and climbed up the grassy embankment to the bridge. By the time I got to the walk path, I was sweating buckets.

Dee Dee saw me and waved his arm, yipping, “Doojie, Doojie, how ya doing? Where’s everybody else?”

“I’m by myself. What did you expect, a marching band? I got an eighth for you. Show me your money, Dee Dee.”

“How come you came alone? I was hoping Bobo would be here. Eichmann too.”

“They’re busy. What difference does it make? Do you want the weed or not? I ain’t got all night.”

“They’re too busy for me? Even for me?”

“Yeah, it’s amazing, ain’t it? You being the most important person in San Francisco and everything.”

“Too bad. God, wouldn’t it have been cool to have all of us together again? I wanted to see them.”

“I’m sure you did. How come?”

“I ain’t got a reason. Just trying to be sociable, you know, friendly. Is that okay?”

“I don’t have no feelings about it one way or another. Let’s just make the deal.”

“Ah, Doojie …”

“Yeah?”

“You and me go back a ways, don’t we?”

“Sure do. Longer than I care to remember.”

Dee Dee pulled out a roll of cash from his pocket, luring me in closer to him. He’d been on a methedrine binge; I could smell him from three feet away. He gave me a queer grin, then wind-milled his right arm. That was the signal. I looked over my shoulder—Flaherty was scrambling up the stairs, causing a ruckus. His presence was so sudden, it didn’t scare me.

I plucked the money out of Dee Dee’s hand and took off, shooting between the narc and him, running across the grass to the tennis courts. In two blinks of an eye, I was on the sidewalk at Dolores Street. Flaherty was raging, “Get him! Get him!”

The man with the best arrest record in the police department had made a mistake. Using Dee Dee as his foil was a bad idea. Untested, the junkie folded under fire. I was joined at the phone booth on Eighteenth Street by Eichmann, and we went over to Guerrero, scooting past the bakery at the corner.

Flaherty was behind us, but we were pulling away from him; sprinting was no fun for a man of his girth. If speed had to decide the race, I was going to beat Flaherty hands down. But in the end endurance would decide the contest, determine who would run the longest without having a nervous breakdown.

When we were midway down Dearborn, Flaherty appeared at the end of the street. There was no getting away from the dybbuk. At Duggan’s Funeral Home on Seventeenth Street, a service was letting out. The front steps to the chapel were packed with mourners. The parking lot to the side of the mortuary was a crush of black hearses. Irish families lived in the Sunset District now that they had more money, but they still came home to the Mission when they died. I ran to the intersection of Sixteenth Street, losing myself among the junk dealers and prostitutes milling by Dalva and the Roxie Cinema, but that didn’t stop Flaherty. He was right behind me.

Doojie Sr. said I always had a knack for finding trouble. Once he got it in his head to take me to a kid’s birthday party. We climbed into the Hillman and drove out of town, turning off the freeway and climbing a road to an exclusive suburban enclave in the Los Altos Hills. The backseat of the Hillman had its usual cache of weapons: two Browning Defender shotguns and a Chinese SKS assault rifle wrapped in an oilcloth. Doojie Sr. was feeling magnanimous toward me because he’d just come back from Florida after a successful three-month gig poaching alligators in the
Everglades.

There were thirty kids at the party along with their parents. I was five years old, and I didn’t have good manners. Doojie Sr. went straight to the punch bowl, got himself a cup of grog, and started flirting with our host’s wife, a woman in green capris with a matching cashmere sweater.