“Sup?” the Mongol said.
“Sup?” nodded Junior.
“Sup?” said Chango.
“Hangin’,” said the Mongol.
There was a time when Junior would have written a poem about this interaction and turned it in for an easy A in his writing workshop. Oh, Junior, you’re so street, as it were.
The van was sweet, he had to admit. It was painted white. It had a passable American eagle on each side, clutching a sheaf of arrows and a bundle of dollars in its claws. Above it: BOWDEN FEDERAL and some meaningless numbers in smaller script. Below it: Reclamation and Reparation/Morgage Default Division.
“You misspelled mortgage,” Junior said.
They gawked.
“So what?” Chango said. “Cops can’t spell.”
“The plates are from Detroit,” the Mongol pointed out. “An associate UPS’d ’em to me yesterday.” He turned to Chango. “Your sedan is out back.”
Chango bumped fists with him.
“Remember, I want a fifty-inch flat screen.”
“Gotcha.”
“And any fancy jewelry and coats for my old lady.”
“Gotcha, gotcha.”
“And any stash you find.”
“You get the chiba, I got it. But I’m drinkin’ all the tequila I find.”
Chango, in his element.
Junior had to admit, it was so stupid it was brilliant. It was just like acting. He had learned this in his drama workshop. You sold it by having complete belief. You inhabited the role and the viewers were destined to believe it, because who would be crazy enough to make up such elaborate lies?
He followed the truck up I-15. It was a sweet Buick with stolen Orange County plates. Black, of course. He wore a Sears suit and a striped tie. His name tag read: Mr. Petrucci.
“Here’s the play. We move shit—we’re beaners,” Chango explained. “Ain’t nobody gonna even look at us. You’re the boss. You’re Italian. As long as you got a suit and talk white, ain’t nobody lookin’ at you, neither.”
To compound the play—to sell the illusion, his college self whispered—he had a clipboard with bogus paperwork, state tax forms they had picked up at the post office.
Three guys in white jumpsuits bobbed along in the cab of the truck—Chango, a homeboy named Hugo, and the driver—Juan Llaves. Hugo was a furniture deliveryman, so he knew how to get heavy things into a truck. They banged north, dropping out of San Diego’s brown cloud of exhaust and into some nasty desert burnscape. They took an exit more or less at random and pulled down several mid-Tuesday-morning suburban streets—all sparsely planted with a palm here, and oleander there. Plastic jungle gyms in yellow yards, hysterical dogs appalled by the truck, abandoned bikes beside flat cement front porches. Juan Llaves pulled into the driveway of a fat faux-Georgian, half obscured by weeds and dry grass and looking as dead as a buffalo skull.
Junior took his clipboard in hand and joined Chango on the lawn.
“This is it, Mr. Petrucci!” Chango emoted. Junior checked his papers and nodded wisely. Nobody even looked out of the neighboring houses. It was silent. “I can’t believe we’re doing this shit,” Chango muttered with a vast porcelain grin.
They tried the front door. Locked. Chango strolled around back. Some clanging and banging, and in a minute the front door clicked and swung open.
“Electric’s off. Hot as hell in here. Fridge stinks.”
The associates went inside.
The bank notices were there on the kitchen table. Somebody had abandoned a pile of DVDs on the carpet. “Oh yeah!” Chango hooted. “The Godfather!”
Llaves and Hugo hauled the table and chairs out to the truck. Plasma TV in the living room; flat screen in the bedroom. Black panties on the floor looking overwhelmingly sad to Junior. Chango put them in his pocket. “Chango’s in love,” he told Junior.
In the closet, most of the clothes were gone, but a single marine uniform hung at the back. They took the TVs, a rent-toown stereo system with about fifty-seven CDs, mostly funk and hip hop. Chango found a box of Hustlers and a Glock .40 that had fallen behind the box. For the hell of it, they took the dresser and the bunk beds from the kids’ room.
In the garage, there was a Toro lawn mower and, oddly, a snowblower. They took it all. As they were leaving, Chango trotted back into the house and came out with a blender under his arm.
In and out in less than three hours. They were home for a late supper. The stuff went into the garage.
Wednesday: three TVs, a tall iPod dock, a long couch painting, a washer and dryer, a new king-size bed still in plastic wrappers, whiskey and rum, a minibike, and a set of skis.
Thursday: a Navy peacoat, a mink stole (fake), six rings, another TV, another bed, a recliner chair and matching couch in white leather, a shotgun and an ammo loading dock, a video porn collection, a framed swirl of blue tropical butterflies, golf clubs, a happening set of red cowboy boots.
Friday: aside from the usual swag—how sick were they of TV sets by now—they found an abandoned Mustang GT in the garage. Covered in dust, but sleek black. Chango wiped that baby down and Llaves hotwired it for him and he drove back to San Diego in style.
It was a massive crime wave, and the only witnesses so far had been two kids and an ice-cream man, and the ice-cream man had called, “Times are tough!” and Chango, into some Robin Hood hallucination, took him a thirty-two-inch flat screen and traded it for Sidewalk Sundaes for his gang.
After a month of this, after dealing the goods out to fences and setting up a tent at the flea market, Chango and Junior were rolling in it. They paid their associates a fair salary, but their folding money was in fat rolls held together by rubber bands. Chango had the old repair bay in his house converted to a gym. Nordic Trak, an elliptical, a Total Gym As Seen on TV, three sets of weights, and a shake-weight that nobody wanted to touch because it looked like they were wanking when they were ripping their biceps.
“You don’t make this kind of money selling dope to college girls,” Chango said.
“No,” Junior confessed. “Not lately.”
He hadn’t planned on selling pot to anyone. He had hoped to teach a good Acting 101 class. Maybe write a script or some poems. And there was a gal … well, enough of that happy horseshit. He wasn’t going there. Then he chided himself for thinking a cliché like “going there.” No wonder he drank—it was the only way to shut his brain down. Fortunately, Chango had collected seven kinds of rum. Junior doctored his Coke Zero and lounged.
He had a cot in the corner of Chango’s gas station. It was a little too close to Chango for comfort, and he had to put in his iPod buds to cancel out the old crow’s snoring. But it was free, and the snacks and booze were good.
The Mustang sat out on the street. Junior kept telling Chango it would get him busted, that it was too visible. But Chango was invincible. Chango told him: “Live, peewee. Ya gotta live!” There was a tin shower rigged up in the restrooms. Junior’s stolen iPod port was blasting “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”
“Stones suck,” said Chango, swallowing tequila. “Except for Keith. Keith’s ba-a-ad.”
Junior was thinking about the old times, how when they’d gather at the bowling alley to play pinball, Chango would smoke those pestilential Dominos and force Junior to lose by putting the burning cherry on his knuckle every time he had to hit the bumpers.
“Fucker,” he said.
“You got that right, homes.”
“So, Chango—what’s next?”
“We, um, steal a lot more shit.”
“Shouldn’t we cool it for a while? Let the heat die down?”
“Heat!” Chango shrieked. “Did you actually say ‘heat’? Haw! ‘Heat,’ he says. GodDAMN.” And then: “What heat?” He laughed out loud. “You seen one cop? We is invisible, homie. We just the trashman.”