Page 61

CHAPTER 61

IT WAS A HELLISH night on Waterway Street. Baby had never read Dante’s Inferno, but she saw scenes out her window overlooking the front of the house that she presumed belonged in its pages.

Three houses down, one of the vacant dwellings seemed to have become a makeshift brothel, cars arriving every twenty minutes or so. Baby watched as men held up their phone screens to a guard at the door, were let in, then came out anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half later. While the system seemed orderly, it was a rowdy bunch. Girls fighting. Johns arguing over payments and girls. She saw one man get thrown clean over the dying hedge at the front of the house and another get punched in the stomach and stuffed in the trunk of his own car.

The sex work seemed to be relegated to one end of the street; the other end was where the drugs and partying were going on. One party had begun in a pretty two-story brick place, then spilled across the street to the opposite property. A guy passed out in the gutter, and a group of men came over, surrounded him, took whatever was in his pockets, then filmed themselves urinating on his sleeping form.

As the night went on, the dealers, the pimps, and their drunken and drugged clientele grew louder, more violent. The same cops who’d done a drive-by in response to Baby’s call came by again, but they didn’t exit their vehicle. They stopped to talk to a couple of men. They pointed half-heartedly at the passed-out guy in the gutter.

Baby assumed Su Lim Marshall had somehow arranged for the street to be available for whatever goings-on the bad men of Culver City and the surrounding area wished to conduct. Apparently, the only rule was that no one was allowed to die. A death would raise questions, bring unwanted attention. So, ten minutes after the second drive-by, an ambulance arrived to carry the unconscious guy off. The bewilderment on the faces of the paramedics at the happenings around them was obvious to Baby even from a distance.

With months of stress already weighing down his bones, Arthur put wax earplugs in his ears and went to bed around eleven o’clock. Baby stayed awake to fend off anyone who approached. Arthur’s house, the only one on the street without booming music or steady traffic in and out, became a curiosity for the street’s visitors, so soon some of them knocked at the front door to see what was up. Mouse’s wild performance behind the door discouraged them. But before long Baby was following the aggravated dog out back, where a shadowy figure had decided to investigate the porch. Once he’d been chased away, a group of drunk girls from the house on the left decided it would be fun to see if they could sprint across Arthur’s yard without the dog catching them and mauling them to death. Baby locked Mouse inside again, aware that the game could have fatal consequences.

When the visits stopped, around two a.m., she lay on the couch and stared at the purple and red lights from the street party dancing on the ornate ceiling moldings. She wondered if Arthur’s life had been better before she entered it. One way or the other, it was only a matter of time before Su Lim Marshall’s minions set up some catastrophe leading to Arthur’s violent but apparently accidental demise, and at least before she’d shown up, he’d been able to get some sleep at night.

Maybe Mouse was better off without her too. In other circumstances, Rhonda would never have let Baby get a dog. She would have said Baby was too young for the responsibility. And Baby hadn’t exactly provided a safe and stable home for the abused animal — she’d drafted him as a soldier in a war he couldn’t possibly comprehend. Was she any better than the pet thieves who’d used him to guard their animal-trafficking den?

At three a.m. someone hurled a brick through one of the front windows, and Mouse went charging around looking for the perpetrator, growling and snapping his jaws. Baby settled him, then started sweeping up the glass. As she knelt on the carpet and worked, tears sprang to her eyes. She swiped at them angrily. Baby had told Rhonda she could handle this situation, and damned if she would let Marshall turning Arthur’s street into a Pop-Up Gangland break her.

Baby cleaned up the mess and dragged a bookcase over to block the broken window, which exhausted her but also gave her a sense that she wasn’t completely failing. She fell into a half-sleep on the couch at four a.m.

The screaming woke her at 6:17.