SUICIDE HILL

583

“No. They’ll hurt me.”

“They won’t hurt you, but I will.”

“No.”

“Don’t say no to me, say yes to me, or I’ll hurt your family.”

“Yes. Yes. Duane Rice. Bobby Garcia. Joe Garcia.”

Them.

Lloyd closed his eyes and flashbacked: The “Duane/Rhonda” message on Calderon’s bootleg message list; Christine Confrey’s puzzled reaction to the mug shots of Duane Richard Rice, allegedly serving a year in county jail for G.T.A. He pressed himself into the bars, the better to see and listen. Collins was squatting beside Calderon, unlocking the handcuffs that bound him to the chair. “There’s a lot of Bobby and Joe Garcias,” he said.

“Be more specific about them.”

Likable Louie fumbled himself away from the chair, slowly stretching his arms and kneading his gouged wrists. “Bobby ‘Boogaloo’ Garcia, the exboxer. His brother Joe.” His voice was filled with the self-disgust of the freshly turned snitch. Lloyd held his eyes shut to give the man back some of his dignity. He kept them shut until he felt a tap on his shoulder. Collins was standing directly in front of the cell. Lloyd saw that his eyes were brown, not gray like his own, but that they were still somehow identical. “I’ll have the desk officer let you out in a little while,” he said. “But stay out of this, it’s ours.”

Lloyd couldn’t think of anything to say. He stared at Collins as he walked back to the storage room and helped Calderon over to the holding cell next to his. Still too numb to talk, he heard the door being unlocked and locked again, followed by footsteps moving away from the blood-spattered corridor. Then, from beyond the periphery of his vision, Louie Calderon said, “Don’t let them kill the kid. Bobby and Duane are hope-to-die trash, but the kid was just too weak to say no. Don’t let them kill him.”

22

Midway down Vermont to Los Feliz, Joe Garcia realized he didn’t know how to steal a car. He’d heard nine million raps on hot-wiring and drilling steering columns, and that was it. Anne Vanderlinden walked beside him, talking gibberish about karma and the ritzy houses they were passing. Her voice was getting more and more feverish, and when streetlamp light caught her eyes, they glowed wide and loony. Then Joe caught a blast of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band and weaving headlights. He grabbed Anne just as a yellow Corvette cut a sharp left turn and screeched to a stop in the driveway next to them. A young man got out of the car and stumbled across the lawn and through the front door of a large Tudor house. Joe left Anne on the sidewalk and checked out the ’Vette. The keys were in the ignition. He looked at the house and saw window lights going on, then off. Now or never.

He walked back to Anne and shoved her toward the car. She got in the passenger side and started burrowing in the glove compartment. Joe slipped behind the wheel, trembling when he saw the shifter on the floor and realized that he didn’t know how to drive a stick. Muttering “Fuck it,” he remembered the way Bobby used to drive his old VW and watched Anne open up a prescription bottle and start shoving pills in her mouth. He found neutral; he depressed the clutch; he hit the ignition. Bob Seger boogied. Joe slammed the shifter into reverse and inched out of the driveway. Anne giggled, “Drive to the Strip and we’ll call my friends!” and Joe ground his way through the gears, stalling the car twice, but finally working clutch and gearshift to the point where he could keep them going. The moment on the hillside came back, ten times as strong, and they fishtailed toward Hollywood. 23

Two-way radio crackle in the distance; helicopter searchlights swooping the motel at irregular intervals. Duane and Joe gone over twenty-four hours, probably dead. Twice the radio had screeched, “ ’81 Chevrolet Caprice.”

Bobby “Boogaloo” Garcia knew they were coming for him. His hours of Bible reading and prayers had reaped nada. He was going to die alone, excommunicated, away from God and his brother, two .45 automatics and 16

grand in cash his only companions.

No one to mourn him;

No one to talk to on the night he finally figured it all out; No chance to pay back his victims and slide into heaven on last-minute good deeds and acts of contrition;

No one to grant absolution for his sins.

At first, when he got it all down in his head, it made him feel peaceful. Then the choppers kept buzzing and flashing their lights, pissing off the old juiceheads boozing in the parking lot, who started jabbering and throwing their empty T-bird bottles at the wall. That made him mad, made him feel like going out defiant, even when he knew that defiance was his most heavy-duty sin. That was the funniest part of it. Half of him wanted to admit it and go out clean; the other half wanted to go out righteously defiant, because that’s what he was for thirty-four years, and if he reversed his act now, it meant that he never existed at all.

Bullhorns barking from up the block; copter lights flooding the sky every five minutes; the winos wailing like nigger banshees. Finally Bobby decided to cover his bets. He pulled up his chair to directly in front of the door and placed the Bible on the right armrest, then loaded both .45s and unscrewed the silencers for better range. Sliding shells into both chambers, he sat 586

L.A. NOIR

down with the guns in his lap. When they kicked in the door, he’d know how to play it.

24

Three minutes after his cell door was opened by a station trustee, Lloyd was in a phone booth on Rampart and Temple, turning out his pockets for change.

His first call was to the Central Jail Records night line, where an information clerk told him that Duane Richard Rice, white male, D.O.B. 8/16/56, 6'0'', 170, light brown hair, blue eyes, had been released on a sentence modification on November 30, after serving six months of a one-year sentence for grand theft auto. He had one previous conviction, for vehicular manslaughter, and had put in three years of a five-year sentence at the California Youth Authority Facility at Soledad. He was now on both state parole and county probation, and his last known address was 1164 South Barrington, West Los Angeles. Pressing, Lloyd asked the clerk what module Rice was housed in at the Main County Jail. After a moment spent checking other records, she came back on the line and said, “Twenty-seven hundred.”

The Ding Tank—Gordon Meyers connection.

But why?

Lloyd called the Los Angeles County Probation Department and got an operator who put him through to a series of clerks, who finally put him through to the county’s chief probation officer at home. The chief made a series of calls herself and buzzed Lloyd back at his pay phone with the word: Duane Richard Rice had not reported to his P.O. after his release from jail and had vacated his condo on South Barrington. He was now technically a parole and probation absconder, and a bench warrant for his arrest had been issued. Hanging up, Lloyd tried to recall the phone numbers from Louie Calderon’s message book. After a minute, they came to him: Rhonda, 6548996; Silver Foxes, 658-4371. He dialed Rhonda’s number and got the beginning of a recorded message, then hung up and called Bell Telephone and made his demands. A super-