A Better Goodbye Read online

  Suki’s breath caught in her chest. The cops must have busted Contessa and Brooke. Alarms were going off in her head as she wondered if there had been anything with her name on it lying around. And were the cops waiting for her to come back? This was all new to her. The only other time she’d thought she was going to get busted, she was working in a musician’s guesthouse on Beverly Glen and another masseuse got all cocaine paranoid and started playing head games. Suki had forgotten her purse in her rush to get out of there, and when she went back to get it she was so scared she almost wet herself. That wouldn’t happen now.

  Purse in hand, she was starting to leave when she heard something besides the fridge and the hum of traffic out on Sepulveda. Crying, maybe. Or a moan. Wait, there it was again, coming from behind the master bedroom’s closed door: “Motherfuckers.” Definitely Contessa. But she didn’t sound nasty, the way she usually did. There were tears in her voice. And pain.

  Suki reached for the doorknob as if it were a coiled snake. When she finally made herself turn it, she opened the door an inch at a time. Six inches in, she was greeted by a scream and Brooke shouting, “No, go away! Leave us alone!”

  “What are you talking about?” Suki said.

  Then she stepped inside and saw for herself.

  Brooke and Contessa were on the futon, both in their robes, sheer little things that were their greatest concession to modesty. Contessa was lying on her side, looking back over her shoulder at Suki, a pillow pulled tight against her chest, the towel beneath her stained with something dark. Brooke was kneeling beside her protectively, eyes wild and desperate. Her hair was a tangled mess, and there was a mark on the left side of her face and what looked like dried blood under her nose.

  “They raped us,” Brooke said.

  “Who?” Suki asked, barely able to get her voice above a whisper.

  “That new client. I buzz him up and he’s all well dressed and everything, and before I close the door behind him, his friend comes charging in.”

  “Niggers,” Contessa said.

  Brooke sank back on the futon and started to cry. “They said they’d kill us. Oh, Suki, they had guns.”

  “We’ve got to call the police,” Suki said. She was fishing around in her purse for her cell phone when Contessa stopped her with a derisive snort.

  “And tell ’em what, a couple ho’s got raped? Yeah, those cops’d love that. We can tell ’em the motherfuckers stole all our money, too. And you know what they gonna do, little girl? They gonna laugh and say it’s the price we pay for peddlin’ our pussies.”

  “At least call Derek.”

  “Bitch, all that motherfucker want us to do is clean up our mess and disappear.”

  Suki tried to think of what to say next. Contessa beat her to it.

  “Just get the fuck outta here, all right?”

  Suki looked at Brooke, hoping to find an ally but knowing that now more than ever Brooke wouldn’t stand up to Contessa. She wouldn’t even raise her head.

  “Goddammit, go,” Contessa said.

  Suki hurried from the apartment without so much as a goodbye, shedding her name like a second skin. By the time the elevator stopped in the underground parking garage, she was back to being Jenny Yee and nobody else. She doubted the process would be that easy for Contessa and Brooke, cursed now with their terrible secret. And she wondered, as never before, what their names really were.

  2

  The Mexicans woke Nick Pafko at six straight up, the way they always did, their radio blaring music that was heavy on happy accordions and ai-yi-yi-yi’s. They were gardeners who lived in the termite palace next door, anywhere from four to six in a one-bedroom. Nick had watched them come and go, probably back and forth across the border with as many Yankee dollars as they could squirrel away while tending the lawns of anybody with enough money to afford them. The only ones who never left were the guys who drove the two trucks, both of them in their fifties and easy to imagine respectfully taking off their ball caps when the lady of the house came out to say bugs were eating her roses. Once they figured out Nick didn’t work for La Migra, they stopped watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They’d smile or nod, sometimes offer him a beer, as though they understood he wasn’t any better off than they were. Good guys, but they couldn’t keep it down in the morning.

  Nick rolled out of bed and into the chilly March dawn. The rising sibilance on the 405 let him know that last night’s rush hour was already turning into morning drive time without a break. The trick with the traffic was to pretend it was the ocean, waves washing up on a concrete shore. He didn’t hear many people spoiling the illusion by honking, the way they did back home in Chicago. With nothing between him and the freeway except the two apartments up front, a street the city never fixed, and a half-assed wire fence, Nick took his blessings where he found them.

  Sleep had come hard last night, refusing to budge until exhaustion got the best of the voices in his head. The voices had shouted loudest when the rest of him was ready to shut down, and now, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, he could see the weariness in his eyes. There were still women who liked his looks—they liked his smile too, though a smile was a sometimes thing for him. It was as if his mind was always focused on what he saw now, scars above and below each eye and a broken nose that had never been set properly. At least those wounds had healed. It was the deeper ones he feared never would, the ones he was forever struggling to keep at bay.

  As he walked out of the bathroom, he shook his head disapprovingly at how he’d slept in his sweatshirt and jeans. That wasn’t his style. His apartment proved it, everything squared away, no matter how big a mess his head might be. The place wasn’t much, but it was all he needed. That and the money to keep him in it for another month. He was trying to think of a way to come up with it when the phone rang. It was Coyle, sounding like a call so early made him some kind of a comedian.

  “Yeah, I’m awake,” Nick said. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s time I did you a favor,” Coyle said.

  “Why do I think there’s something in it for you?”

  Coyle had never been a fanatic about his marriage, and this time he wanted Nick to drive his beer truck for a couple of hours while he boned a liquor store clerk he’d met on his route. For his part Nick would make two hundred bucks in cash, more money than he’d seen in a day since he’d maxed out his unemployment.

  “Big spender,” Nick said.

  “It’s what I pay when I’m paying for it,” Coyle said, with the confidence of a man who had a job he wasn’t going to lose.

  “Yeah? Well, I’ll try not to think about what that makes me. Looks like you got a deal.”

  “Man, I’m gonna fuck her so good I’ll wish I was her.”

  Coyle had used the same line when they were throwing bags for Delta at LAX, but Nick let it slide. It was easier just to picture Coyle’s leering face and oddly canted posture. He always looked like he was going to fall in your lap, but somehow the ladies didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he just concentrated on those with low standards.

  It wasn’t like he’d had a lot of time to explain his philosophy of chasing tail to Nick. On a big day before the 9/11 horror show, they would be part of a three-man crew that turned seven or eight planes—bring ’em in, unload ’em, load ’em, and push ’em, one after the other. The repetition drove Coyle nuts, but Nick welcomed the numbing predictability, letting it swallow him whole for twenty-two dollars an hour.

  The only time he came all the way out of his trance was to save Coyle’s ass. First, Coyle pissed off one of the two-to-eleven shift’s king-sized Tongans, then he got holier-than-thou with a do-ragged, corn-rowed gang kid who was stealing bags. The gangster backed down because his spine was made of what Nick suspected it was—chickenshit. But the Tongan was one of those guys who thought brawling was fun, until Nick froze him with a shot to the liver and then walked away rather than throw any more punches.

  He offered no explanation, and h
e didn’t want Coyle’s thanks. Coyle, being Coyle, however, couldn’t shut the fuck up. The guy stayed grateful even when the terrorist-freaked airline industry went into the toilet and Delta laid them both off. Sometimes Nick thought Coyle was embarrassed that his brother-in-law had gotten him on at Budweiser, except embarrassment wasn’t his style. It was more like he felt bad for Nick, which made Nick the one who was embarrassed. It was hard enough on his pride to find out that nobody was hiring, grab day work where he could, and count on $666 from the state every other week to keep him in a studio apartment with peeling paint and cancerous-looking carpet. Unemployment was only supposed to last six months, but he got a three-month extension, and then another. After that, the law ordered him off the public tit.

  So here he was, driving toward a score that would help him make his rent—$825 for another month in a dump that was all wrong for the Westside, where everybody was supposed to be a movie star and every car was supposed to be a Mercedes. His pickup was a fourteen-year-old Chevy S-10 with a transmission that slipped and an odometer that had gone around the clock. It said 17,000 miles, but 217,000 would have been closer to the truth. The only thing on the truck he didn’t worry about was the burned-out catalytic converter that used to light up the CHECK ENGINE sign. He had pounded the dash until the light bulb broke.

  There were lots of trucks like Nick’s in Highland Park, a neighborhood of people who knew from necessity how to make do. The fact that they all seemed to be Hispanic barely registered on his consciousness when he got off the Pasadena Freeway at Avenue 43 and rolled north on Figueroa. The city didn’t belong to the gringos anymore, and the proof could be found in one sign after another, from Lazaro Bateria de Serviço to Clínica Médica y Dentista to El Pescador, where he’d had seafood tacos the last time he’d traveled this far east. Up ahead he could see the marquee for the Highland Theatre. Across the street, there was an old-time bowling alley. Coyle had said he’d be waiting in the parking lot behind it.

  Nick turned left onto Avenue 56 and started looking for the entrance to the lot. What he saw first was a guy crouched beside a beat-to-shit Pontiac, using a sander to finish a Mexican patch. The guy had probably told the owner he could fix a dent, then plugged it with Bondo without bothering to pull the dent or grind down the metal. First time the owner hit a bump, the Bondo would fall out. It happened all the time. But people kept getting Mexican patches.

  The parking lot’s entrance wasn’t quite halfway down the block. As Nick hung a right into it, a hooded figure in black caught his eye and he instinctively slowed down. It was a gangbanger who wanted to make sure everybody knew it. He was going up the steps of an old Victorian with a ragged front lawn and drooping window shutters. Even if he’d been in his underwear, his walk would have told the world he was trouble, shoulders hunched, legs wide, stride filled with slow-motion menace. Take that hooded sweatshirt off him and you’d undoubtedly find a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, back, and chest. He probably had them on his legs, too. Nick was getting the picture in his mind when the banger caught him staring. No big whirling gotcha or anything like that, just a subtle turn of the head, the banger peering around the corner of his hood and meeting Nick’s stare with one of his own, his eyes like black ice.

  The challenge was unspoken: What you lookin’ at, motherfucker? Once it had been a staple of Nick’s existence, whether he was asking or answering; now he could barely summon the enthusiasm to do either. It was only habit that made him return the banger’s stare for a beat longer. Then he looked back into the lot and saw Coyle standing beside his beer truck, radiating impatience. Time to move on, but Nick could feel the banger watching him all the way into the parking space next to Coyle’s. When he climbed out of his pickup, he looked back toward the Victorian. The banger was nowhere to be seen.

  “Something the matter?” Coyle said.

  “Nah, just some guy.”

  “Somebody you know?”

  “Forget it.” Nick nodded at Coyle’s truck. “This what I’m driving?”

  “Yeah, if my afternoon punch shows up.”

  “A smooth operator like you, how could she resist?”

  “Hey, fuck you,” Coyle said.

  Nick liked yanking the man’s chain. Some days it was good for the only smile he got.

  “You’re on time, one-thirty, she should be too,” Coyle said. “She’s the one that wanted it like this, but I’m the guy putting out the money to make it happen. You, a motel room—”

  “You could call her, you know.”

  “And act like she’s got me on a leash? Fuck that.”

  “Maybe we better talk about what you want me to do. Get your mind off your problems.”

  “You brought your trucker’s license, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Nick was damned if he would show it unless Coyle asked.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d have one. You must get out of that shitty apartment more than I think.”

  “Coyle, the truck . . . ”

  “You sure you’ve driven one of these?” Coyle slapped the side of his Mack. It had a five-speed Maxidyne, three hundred and twenty-five horses, and handled like a car as long as you were careful backing up and taking corners. “They can roll on you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Nick said. “As long as you loaded it right.”

  This time they both smiled. Then Coyle pulled a key from his pocket, slid it into the lock on a bay door, and rolled the door up like a Venetian blind. Inside, cases of cans and bottles—half Bud, half Bud Light—were stacked and waiting to be unloaded. “Good enough for you?” Coyle said.

  “Tell me my first stop and I’ll get rolling.”

  “Right there.”

  Coyle pointed at a building with BOWLING painted on it in large, faded blue letters. Beneath it was more: “Air Conditioning—Open Bowling 3 Games—8AM to 5PM.” There was a door with an orange vinyl sofa and a dilapidated easy chair beside it. Over the door was an arrow aimed at the door with the words “Mr. T’s Bowling” on it.

  “They like to bowl around here, huh?” Nick said.

  “Fuck, no,” Coyle said. “Lanes haven’t been used for years. It’s a bar and coffee shop now. Nights they have music.”

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “That punk shit.” Coyle thrust the key at Nick. “Don’t lose this. Door’ll lock by itself when you pull it back down.” He took a sheet of paper folded in quarters from his hip pocket. “Here’s the other addresses you’re going to, size of the delivery, all that good shit.”

  Nick studied the note while Coyle rattled on like he was certain his replacement couldn’t read. “Only four stops besides this one, no big-assed unloads and everything’s in Highland Park. You oughta be back here by three forty-five, four at the latest. Any problems—you got a cell phone, right?”

  “There a reason why I should?” Nick asked.

  “It’s the fucking twenty-first century.”

  “Maybe I want to see how the century works out before I get carried away.”

  “Jesus Christ on a crutch.”

  “Relax, Coyle. It’s right here.”

  Nick gave Coyle a glimpse of his cell phone, then stuffed it back in his Levi’s. He loved messing with Coyle. Push the right button and you could spin his head around. Just as Nick was about to do it again, he spotted a dirty red Jeep Cherokee pulling into the lot. “This your ride?” he asked.

  “She’s my ride all right,” Coyle said, leaning on “ride” just hard enough to make it sound dirty. As he walked toward the Cherokee, he looked back at Nick and said, “I’ll give you a call so you can listen to her scream when she comes.”

  “What if she yawns instead?”

  Coyle gave Nick the finger and kept walking. The woman picking him up flashed a big smile that made her prettier than she had first seemed behind her sunglasses. “Hi, Ray,” she said, just loud enough for Nick to hear.

  Nick hadn’t heard many people call Coyle by his first name. He wondered if Coyle’s wife did. He was stil
l thinking it over when he began taking cases of beer from the truck and stacking them on a dolly. He’d start with six, three on the bottom, three on top. It might take longer that way, but he didn’t want to lose any beer if he could help it. He didn’t need Coyle bitching at him. He just needed two hundred bucks.

  By the time Nick found his last stop, he was running late and praying to God he was done with pissed-off store managers and postage-stamp-sized parking lots. Paisano Groceries sat next to a locksmith that told the world where it was with a large yellow sign shaped like a key. The store’s windows were papered with hand-drawn signs for brands of soda that supermarket chains couldn’t be troubled to carry—Big Red, Nehi Peach, Root 66 Root Beer. There was a beat-up Chrysler Fifth Avenue, its color a cross between dirt and Bondo, parked across the two handicapped spaces in front of the store’s double doors. Nick nosed in beside it, and by the time he had walked to the front of the truck, a small round man wearing a grocer’s apron was coming out to greet him.

  “Only ten cases of regular today,” the round man said. “Nights are too cold for my beer drinkers, I guess.”

  “Ten,” Nick said. “You got it.”

  “But still five Light.”

  “Right.” When Nick saw the round man looking at him, puzzled, he said, “Coyle’s taking some personal time.”

  “Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure what to think. You’re not wearing a Budweiser shirt. I’m Eddie.”

  “Nick.”

  After they shook hands, Eddie told Nick the girl at the register would have cash waiting for him and went back inside. As Nick wheeled in his first dolly load, he heard Eddie talking soda pop with a customer. Something from North Carolina called Cheerwine. “I don’t know what it is about the South—they like high carbonation. Sometimes the bottles just explode. I come in some mornings and there’s glass on the floor and soda all over the place.” Eddie shook his head. “The carbonation.”