In the ladies’ room Yolanda raises her shirt and untapes the note from her abdomen. Stiffly, she lowers herself to her knees to peer under the sink and, feeling satisfied that conditions are OK under there (on the basis of criteria she invents on the spot), she tapes the message to the underside of the basin. She rises and dusts off her knees and then leaves the room. She places a quarter next to the steaming cup of coffee and is about to walk out, but then she stops, fixing the coffee with sugar and plenty of milk to cool it. She drinks it down quickly, feeling upon her the eyes of the counter woman and her single customer. She tells herself that she feels closer to these people every day. She is trying hard to love them.
Meanwhile …
It is 8:55 and a police sergeant lifts a bullhorn to his lips.
“To those inside the house at Eight thirty-three West Eighty-fourth Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. We want you to come out of the front door with your hands up. We want you to come out immediately. You will not be harmed.” He lowers the bullhorn and looks at the device while he awaits a response, as if he expected to see smoke curling from it. One hundred twenty-five cops and federal agents are here, ready for a siege, ready to see blood rain from the poor shack they surround and fix their attention on, 125 law officers wearing jumpsuits and flak jackets, laid across rooftops with powerful scoped rifles trained on Prophet Jones’s hovel, concealed in the shrubbery with M-16s and tear gas canisters, crouched behind unmarked cars, all squired by dozens of members of the press, who stand back across the street with notepads and doughnuts and cardboard cups of tepid coffee. Their attention is beginning to wander. The LAPD commander on the scene notes this and imposes himself on the FBI supervisor, calling for immediate action. The agent agrees.
There is a ritual uneventfulness to what follows, the way that brutal and violent games intersperse bursts of outraged fury with prolonged and decorous procedural maneuvers. Four FBI men break from cover to dash toward the house, two covering with M-16s as the others fire Flite-Rite rockets bearing CS tear gas through the front windows of the building. Then all four men disappear again, to rejoin the waiting.
Five minutes later another team of four agents storms the house, breaking down the door and rushing in with rifles. The remaining lawmen and the press wait.
Then one of the agents emerges from the house, his gun put up, and removes his gas mask. He is supposed to be indignant — he says, “Shit!”—but he’s actually relieved to live another day.
Dead Drop 3
CRENSHAW ACRES SHOPPING CENTRE, INGLEWOOD
So I’m out here with my staple gun and my flyers, going around and hoping for the best. They do run away sometimes and you just have to face that and I said to Ralph last night just before bed when I’d gone outside and called for her for a little while with no luck that you just have to face it. Cats aren’t the most domesticated of creatures, you know? It is the essence of their appeal if you ask me. They were in the wilds aeons after dogs had already made themselves right at home among man, because I suppose dogs had more of a function in a hunter-gathery kind of culture like they liked back then. Then of course people started growing things and storing grain and before you know it you have mice and rats getting into the grain and that’s just not good at all for the good people of the Fertile Crescent or wherever it was and so cats sort of insinuated themselves and the people looked the other way and then the next thing you know they’re carving these big statues of them and praying to them! And from there you get the common house cat that we all know. But common as they are, you become oh so attached to them. The last one I had, it was all over at seven, kidney problems, that’s how the males go. I’ll never have another male again; it breaks your heart. But we moved recently, not too very far from where we were, I suppose she may have gotten confused. Somebody over there is probably feeding her, and I’ll be heading over there with my flyers and my staple gun, and then I’ll be off to the Humane Society to check the binders and see if anyone’s reported finding her. There’s always a little hope.
Young man, do you need to get in here? I don’t mean to be blocking your path but as I’m telling this young lady here I want to cover this bulletin board nicely because — oh, excuse me!
Some people just aren’t very nice these days. Well, I don’t let it bother me, though I do hope that it’s a nice sort of person who spots her. I’ve heard terrible stories about vivisectionists, do you know, who slice open living animals for science — science they call it! — they roam around looking for lost pets to take to USC for secret experiments. It’s too horrible to even think about! So I won’t.
Yes, young man, I can, and I would. I’m just not so spry as a strong young fellow like you … oh, you look perfectly healthy to me, young man, your knee may have been injured once upon a time but I’m sure it’s healed completely, the young are lucky that way, but please do not push past me, I told you that I will move out of your way just as I did before, you have only to ask.
It gets worse and worse. It really does.
This is General Teko’s most daring move yet. The drop is on the community bulletin board of the Crenshaw Acres Shopping Centre-directly across from Mel’s Sporting Goods! It was while scouting out this drop, during their first day in L.A., that Teko had spotted Mel’s and made a mental note to return for supplies. There is some bright yellow police tape demarcating the crime scene in front of the store and plywood covering the plate glass panes that Tania’s bullets shattered. Otherwise things look pretty peaceful. The old biddy is staring daggers at him but looks away when he meets her eyes. He wonders whether she noted the relative incongruity of the LETTER TO THE PEOPLE amid the ads for dance lessons and used cars or if his photograph has been broadcast locally. The radio has already aired news reports that the police have surrounded a “bungalow in the ghetto area of Compton.” And here he is back at the scene of the skirmish. He looks at his watch. About five to nine.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
Some girls came to see Crystal. They wanted to know if she wanted her hair cornrowed. She was wearing it in a sort of sloppy natural and she and her two friends went in the bathroom and studied their hair in the mirror. One thing they knew was that it was one hot-ass day. They wanted their hair out of the way if this was how summer was going to be. Casually, one of the girls asked Crystal who were all the white people in the house.
“They the SLA,” said Crystal authoritatively. She poked out her lips and opened her eyes big. It was her mirror face.
“The who?” said one friend.
Cinque stopped in the hall and poked his head in the bathroom door.
“How you sisters doing?”
One girl, Cathy, rolled her eyes. The other, Rondella, asked him: “Who’s the SLA?”
They were going to start a revolution and get the police. Not necessarily in that order. They were recruiting too. Interested? The girls shook their heads.
Crystal decided not to get cornrows because Rondella, who was good at it, wanted three dollars. She walked out with the two girls when they left the house. While they stood on the shaded porch, two of the white girls came out. One carried a rifle, and the other had her pistol out and was cleaning it. Cathy and Rondella were bugging out. They went off to tell people what they’d seen at Sheila Mears’s house.