L. A. Burning Read online

  L. A. Burning

  A Novel

  D. C. TAYLOR

  For Priscilla, Susannah, Jennifer, Jacob, and Felix, with love. And in memory of my friend Carlos Davis.

  Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  Chapter One

  No one oversleeps the day they come to release you from prison.

  I was awake at four thirty.

  Five years in cement teaches you how to wait. Time in prison is a routine of gray monotony sometimes made bright by anger, violence, or fear. I watched the light change in the cell as the sun rose and tried to keep my mind blank. Don’t think of what might go wrong, what order might be changed, what new charges they might decide to bring.

  At seven the corrections officer we called Pinky opened my cell door.

  “What the hell, Bonner? You ain’t even packed. Can’t stand to leave us, huh?”

  “I’m packed.” I stood up. Nothing in the cell was coming with me. I was done with it. This part of my life was over. All I was taking with me was what I had learned.

  Pinky was a tall man with a soft body, thinning pale hair, and red-rimmed eyes. “Let’s go, then.” As usual, he stood in the doorway so I would have to squeeze by him, and as I did, he pushed his groin against me and ran his hand over my ass. “Going to miss that.”

  I said nothing.

  “Hands back.”

  I put my hands behind me, and he put the cuffs on. He took a moment to grope my breast while he grinned at me with yellow teeth. I stood like stone and told myself it was the last time, the last time, the last time.

  “Let’s go. Let’s go.” Our footsteps echoed on the concrete floor as we walked the cellblock tier. Some of the other women came to their cell doors as we passed. Some called my name and said good-bye. Some called me a lucky bitch. Some just watched me go, headed out to the world they couldn’t have.

  Pinky took the cuffs off in Receiving & Release and nodded toward a cardboard box on a metal table against a dull-green wall. It had my name on it, Cody Bonner, along with DRESS OUT CLOTHING in big black letters in handwriting I didn’t recognize, not my mother’s anyway, an assistant’s, someone at the studio. Someone had slit the tape on the box to search the contents. “Get to it,” Pinky said.

  A woman CO was supposed be on duty for dress-out and release, but she wasn’t there. Prison worked on the barter system both for inmates and for guards. Whoever was supposed to be here wanted something Pinky could give, and Pinky was willing to trade it for her not showing up.

  I could feel his eyes as I carried the box to the dressing cubicle and pulled the curtain shut. The box held a pair of blue jeans, a plain white shirt, a belt, a pair of socks, a pair of running shoes, a fleece jacket, just what I had asked my mother to send. And black lacy underwear. That wasn’t on the list, but my mother believed sexy underwear was a basic foundation for any woman’s day.

  I laid the clothes on a wooden bench and stripped off the blue polyester prison shirt and pants, the cotton underwear and socks. I reached for the new clothes. The curtain rattled back as Pinky pushed it aside with his baton. I didn’t look at him as I stepped into the panties and picked up the bra and put it on.

  “A waste of time,” he said. “You’re just going to have to take it off again.”

  I said nothing and reached for the blue jeans, but he pinned them to the bench with the tip of his baton. “Uh-uh.”

  I waited.

  “We’ve been a long time coming to this,” he said.

  “You’ve been a long time, not me, not any of us.”

  “Well, we’re here now.”

  “How do you think this is going to work, Pinky?”

  “Don’t you be calling me that. I could violate you back up to that cell. You ain’t out of here yet, you stuck-up bitch.”

  “What would you tell them? That I was trying to escape the day they were letting me go?”

  He stepped toward me and poked me in the stomach with the baton. When I didn’t step back, he poked me again. I slapped the baton aside and went by him before he could react. I heard his startled, “Hey,” as I went out the door from R & R. I was already halfway to where I wanted to go when I heard him come into the corridor behind me. “You hold up there, Bonner, goddamn it. Hold up.”

  I banged through the door of the corrections officers’ break room. There were four COs drinking morning coffee, three men and Sara Brodsky, not a bad hack but a low-grade grafter, twenty dollars for a pack of cigarettes or tampons, that kind of thing. They all looked up, startled. The men fixed on my underwear. Brodsky watched my face. “There’s supposed to be a woman CO on R & R,” I said. “All I’ve got is Sergeant Loomis, and he wants to help me get dressed.”

  “Paula Sanchez has the duty today,” Brodsky said. “I guess she called in sick.”

  “I see your name on the roster over there.” Everyone looked at the erase board on the wall near the coffeemaker like they’d never noticed it before.

  Pinky came in behind me.

  “No one told me there was a release today,” Brodsky said.

  “I see my name. It says release at eight o’clock.”

  A hack we called Gomer said, “Hell, Brodsky, you don’t want to do it, I’ll take the duty.”

  She glanced at him for a moment and then looked past me to where Pinky was standing near the door. She shrugged and stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “I got it, Brodsky,” Pinky said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and pushed me toward the door.

  Pinky poked me in the side when I went by him. “You’ll be back.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Yeah, you will. Stupid bitches like you always come back. And I’ll be here.” He hit me hard on the shoulder once to regain some sense of dominance. Nobody said anything. As I went out the door, one of the assholes wolf whistled.

  * * *

  They check you at two posts before they let you out the gate to make sure you’re the one who’s supposed to be going. Name: Cody Bonner. Age: twenty-six. Check the file photo against the person. Length of sentence: five years. Time served: five years, two days, eighteen hours. Do it all again at the next post. “Okay, you can go. Have a nice day.”

  * * *

  When the prison van drove out through the gate and the walls were behind me, I began to breathe. An hour’s drive to the city across a brown late-winter landscape. The driver checked me out in the mirror a few times, but he said nothing. He wore earbuds and bopped in his seat to the beat of whatever was feeding his head. The van dropped me at the Greyhound bus terminal in a downtown neighborhood of brick tenements, boarded-up storefronts, and uncollected trash. I had a state-issued ID, $200 in gate money, $85 in earnings from my work in the prison library, and a ticket to the county where I’d been arrested. I wasn’t going back there. I was going home.

  The next bus for LA left in an hour and a half and arrived the next morning, nineteen hours riding the dog. I turned in my local ticket, which brought the bankroll up to $320. I asked the woman at the ticket window where I could find a pay phone. She gave me a puzzled look and asked, “Don’t you have a cell phone?”

  “No.”

  “There used to be one downstairs near the ladies’.” She pointed across the waiting room to stairs under a restrooms sign. “I think it’s still there. Don’t know if it works.”

  “Thanks. Can I buy some change?” I pushed three dollars across to her, took the change she gave me, and turned away from the window.

  Someone was watching me. In prison you learn to feel when eyes are on you. You learn to be aware of who’s in a room when you enter it, who’s behind you, who might be dangerous.
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  There, the janitor over near the newsstand. He stopped sweeping to watch me cross. Okay. So what? You’re out. You’re free. No one knows you. No one holds a grudge for words passed in the yard. No one here wants anything from you. No one owes you, and you owe no one. A man checks out a young woman walking across a room. Normal. Get used to it.

  I found an old-fashioned phone booth downstairs near the doors to the restrooms. The phone book had been ripped from its chain, and the bottom of the door glass had been kicked out by someone listening to someone tell him something he didn’t want to hear, but the receiver hummed with a dial tone, and 411 gave me the numbers of three airlines. Flights to LA left almost every hour on the hour, and the cheapest one cost $365, $45 more than I had. I guessed I’d be taking the bus after all. Hey, it could be worse. I could be waiting to go to the mess hall to eat macaroni and cheese.

  As I pushed open the door of the booth, the janitor came down the stairs and opened a metal door with a key chained to his belt. The room he opened held mops and buckets and other cleaning gear. There was an iron cot covered by a sleeping bag against the back wall. The janitor leaned his broom in with the others and came out. He left the door open. “How’re you doing?”

  “Fine.” I started toward the stairs.

  He was in his midthirties. He had a pointed, bony face just the wrong side of looking like a rat’s. His hair was dirty blond, but his beard came in darker. His sleeves were rolled high to expose his tattoos and his weight lifter’s biceps. His teeth were very white when he grinned. “Just out?” he asked.

  Fuck. What was this about?

  “I can tell. A lot of you come through here. This is where they drop you if you don’t have someone picking you up. Wearing them—what do they call them?—dress-out clothes. The shoes are the thing. The shoes are new. No dirt on the soles yet or anything.”

  “Is that right?”

  “So, you want to get high? A little celebration for getting out?”

  “No thanks.”

  Another man came down the stairs and stopped near the janitor. They knew each other. The second man was older, bigger. His thinning black hair was gelled to his scalp. His jeans rode low enough for his belly to hang over his belt. He wore a faded Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt and cowboy boots and had the lumpy broken-nosed face of a man who’d been hit more than a few times.

  “I’ve got weed. I’ve got blow. You name it.” The janitor waved a hand at the room with the cot. “I know you’ve got that gate money.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Looks like she doesn’t want to party, Frank,” the second man said.

  “Sure she does, Willie. She’s just playing hard to get.”

  “Christ, look at her. No wonder Pinky’s got a bone for her.”

  “Shut up, Willie.”

  So it wasn’t just about the money. My heart surged. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “Do what? What are we going to do?” Frank grinned. “We’re just going to have some fun, the three of us. Everybody likes a little fun, don’t they, Willie?”

  “Shit yeah. Everybody likes a little fun.”

  There was nowhere to run. They were between the stairs and me. A look passed between them, and Frank, the janitor, nodded. He was the leader, but Willie worried me more. He outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and if he got his hands on me, his bulk would be too much to handle. They moved, and I took a step back. They were herding me toward the open door to the room with the cot. In the room they could crowd me back, trap me, and once they had me on the ground, I was done. I couldn’t let them get me in the room.

  I slid a couple of steps to the side. The men mirrored the move. The big one, Willie, made sure I had no angle to the stairs. Willie’s smile had nothing to do with humor. “Jesus, I like it when they fight. Honey, I’ve got a bone for you you’ll never forget.”

  “You want to go to prison for rape?”

  “No one’s going nowhere for nothing, honey, except you’re going in that room for a good time.”

  The problem with stupid people is they have no thought for what their actions might bring down on them. The mantra Live for the moment can get you in a world of trouble. I was an expert on that.

  “Let’s do it,” Frank said, “Before some asshole comes down to the can.”

  Now I would find out how much I had learned. Ginger had always warned me that practice, half-speed strikes, sparring, even the gladiator fights in the yard were one thing, but you never knew what you had until someone went after you for real.

  They came at me, grinning, two big men on one woman. Nothing to worry about there. Willie in first to grab me and hold me. I made a move toward the stairs, and Willie took the feint. I came back the other way, and while he was wrong-footed, I hit him with a jab that broke his mouth. His hands went up to the pain. I stabbed a straight kick to his belly, and when he bent over, I kept turning and drove my elbow into the side of his jaw with all my weight behind it. He went down hard. Frank hesitated. I hit him with a kick to the chest. It drove him into the wall near the open door, and when he bounced off, I smashed his mouth with my elbow. The blow banged him back against the wall again. I stepped forward and kicked him in the balls, and he slid to the floor with a moan.

  The whole thing had taken seconds. Willie was still down and not moving. I went through his pockets and found $140 in tens and twenties. I pulled Frank away from the wall and searched him. He had a plastic baggie of white powder in a buttoned breast pocket and $340 in his jeans back pocket. I took the money, left the dope on his chest, and went upstairs.

  No one paid attention to me as I crossed through the crowded waiting room. My left hand was bleeding from Willie’s teeth, and my elbow hurt. My heart still zoomed with the adrenaline rush. As I went out into the cold morning, I couldn’t stop smiling. I found a cab at the curb and took it to the airport.

  I fell asleep on the plane and woke when it dropped down over the San Gabriel Mountains toward the Los Angeles basin. I could see the small blue rectangles of swimming pools in the backyards in Anaheim and Lakewood as we swung out over the coast. A Santa Ana wind off the desert was blowing the air clear, and a brownish bank of smog lay a few miles offshore, waiting for the wind to change and blow it back. It was the wrong time of year for the Santa Ana. They usually blew in the fall, but things were changing, and maybe the Santa Ana had decided to be part of that.

  The glass towers of downtown rose in the distance. New ones had sprouted in the years I’d been gone. The sprawl of the rest of the city spread from Pasadena to the sea, home to thirteen million people, dream chasers, working stiffs, lovers, haters, madmen, strivers, bums, poets, artists, saints, and monsters, every weird, wonderful, and awful animal in the human zoo. Los Angeles. I never could figure out whether I loved it or hated it.

  Somewhere down there was my sister’s murderer. Who was he? Where was he? Could I find him? What if I did? What would I do then?

  Chapter Two

  The taxi from the airport took me north on the 405 Freeway to the 10 and then out through the McClure Tunnel to the Pacific Coast Highway. I opened the window to catch the salt smell of the sea. There were few people on the wide beach. Waves ran up onto the sand and retreated with a hiss. Looking over my shoulder through the back window, I could see the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier turning lazily against the blue sky.

  This was a route from the map of my childhood and my life until I got busted. I’d been sure that prison had changed me profoundly, that it had scrubbed out the molecules of my past self, but the stir of memories mocked that certainty. I closed my eyes, but the past can’t be shut out that easily.

  There was a red light at Entrada. A young woman came out from the curb to panhandle the northbound lanes. She carried a sign, red marker letters printed on box cardboard: HOMELESS—NEED MONEY FOR FOOD AND SHELTER. She had made an effort to draw the letters evenly, but she had run out of space and the last ones dribbled away. I recognized myself in her tired shuffle along
the line of cars. I understood the hopeful hesitation when she held up the sign to the driver, the disappointment, and then the shuffle to the next car. Jesus, that’s close to the bone. Maybe I’m not ready for this.

  It was hard to tell how old she was, late teens or early twenties. Life on the street ages you fast. She wore battered running shoes, jeans ripped at the knee and cut off raggedly above the shoes, a Modelo beer T-shirt, and a jeans jacket a couple of sizes too big. Her hair had been chopped short and dyed green in streaks. Most drivers looked straight ahead and refused to see her. A woman in a Mercedes cracked her window enough to slip a bill through the gap and then closed it quickly to avoid the contagion of poverty and bad luck. The young woman took the money, thanked the closed window, and moved on. I rolled down my window and waved her over. “How are you doing?” I held out four twenties from my dwindled stash.

  Her eyes widened at the amount. “I’m okay.” But clearly she wasn’t. She was pale and underweight. Her hair under the bright dye was lifeless. Her eyes were dull.

  “Get something to eat,” I said.

  “Sure.” When she reached for the money, her sleeve pulled up enough to show track marks on her forearm.

  The light changed. The young woman went back to the sidewalk. The traffic moved on. My cab turned right and climbed Chautauqua toward the top of the bluff.

  “You should not give them money,” the cab driver said. He had an accent I couldn’t identify. He looked at me in the rearview mirror to emphasize his point.

  “Why not?”

  “They must work. This is not work to stand and ask for money. When I came to this country, I did not ask for money. I found a job. They must get a job.”

  Get a job. How many times had I been told that while I was standing on a street corner holding a cardboard sign?

  Half a mile later the cab turned left and started out toward the edge of the palisade. “You can drop me here,” I said.