Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (20 page)

“People
do
know.”

“But only the ones around here.”

He frowned for a moment, then walked away from me to where Bad Teeth lay dead on the cracked sidewalk. He leaned down, drove his hand into the dead man’s midsection, pulled it out wet and sticky. Then he went to the wall and fingerpainted, finishing his signature. Wiping his hand clean on his shirt, he told me, “Blood’s no good after they’re dead, so I use it for the tag.”

Was he offering himself to me? I took the chance. “Let me write about you. For the newspaper. I can sell them an article, a big article. You tell me what to say, that’s all I’ll put in. It’ll be just about you, why you do it, what you’re saying-”

“So all the Beverly Hills assholes can go, like, ‘Oh, now I see,’ that it?”

“Yes,” I answered, “and maybe then they won’t be so anxious to paint over your stuff.”

“Who’s painting over me?,” he demanded.

“Not other taggers. People who think it’s graffiti, vandalism.”

“And you think you can stop that?”

“You can’t by yourself, Cazador,” I told him. “Sure, you can take out a couple of stoned gangbangers, maybe some unarmed stupid little girl, but you can’t stand up to the rest of the world alone.”

After a long pause he toed the corpse of Bad Teeth. “What about him? You saw what I did.”

Was there a hint of self-disgust there? I started to pull myself up. “Yes, I did.”

“And?”

“Too much bad crack, Caz.”

He smiled and I saw with relief that those long teeth didn’t look so long any more. “Hey, you’re pretty brave, y’know? Dumber’n shit, but brave. Maybe I talk to you.”

“Yes, talk to me. But you’ve got to guarantee my safety when we’re done.”

He spread his hands in mock resignation. “Now, how can anyone do that in this neighborhood, huh?” Then, bending close to me, he said, “You’re in my world, so you’re gonna take what I give, okay?”

He strode off a few feet and reached for a backpack he must have brought with him, opened it and pulled out paint cans, several of which he jammed into his cavernous baggy pants pockets. Then he went to his mural and called back to me, “I show you how I paint, but you can’t write it, okay?”

I muttered agreement and asked if I could turn on my car headlights. He said no, I’d have to use my night vision. He floated up twenty feet and began to paint.

I should have been terrified, or incredulous. I should have scrambled for safety, screamed for help, gotten in my car and squealed out of there. Instead I felt only...rightness. It all fit together now and, watching, I believed it was his fervor that lifted him. In the dark I could see his arms move, first contained and precise, next in grand sweeping arcs, and colors appeared. He layered them, the colors, he had special nozzles he switched between cans, he knew his materials with the intimacy required of any great artist. Sometimes he masked areas with his hand, carelessly letting the blue or red or black whoosh out across his brown skin.

And all the time he talked. He told me about how he’d been just another Mexican gangbanger, ditching school and chasing girls, until at 13 he’d discovered he could paint. At 15 the police had caught him and he’d done six months in a juvie honor camp. While there he’d heard rumors about “some crazyass motherfucker in Echo Park” who sucked blood like Dracula and he wanted that so he could paint forever. Upon release from the honor camp, he’d gone searching and on a dark, cloudy Saturday night had found what he’d been searching for-or, rather, it had found him. He’d managed to bite his assailant before he was drained and so he had turned. Now he disguised his feedings as gang acts, letting the press draw the conclusions for him. His family watched over him in the day, protecting their treasure, their Cazador.

“Do they know what you are?,” I asked.

“I dunno. I think they gotta, but... don’ ask, don’ tell, kinda the way it is in my house,
comprendé
?”

The sky was purpling by the time he came back down to earth. Even in that shallow light I could see the finished work was magnificent. If I didn’t remember everything he’d told me, the new tag was a living document, it would endure.

I squinted at the violet sky, and shivered in the morning chill. “It’s almost dawn. Would you get hurt if....”

“You ever forget you left shit on the barbecue?,” he asked.

I laughed, despite my cold and my hurts and the dead boy 20 feet away. “Will you make it?”

“No problem. I don’t live far, an’ you wouldn’ believe how fuckin’ fast I can run now.”

A car drove by a block away. Early workers, beginning to file back to the few buildings still functioning in this urban hell. “How can I reach you again?”

“You can’t,” he answered.

“But I—”

He interrupted, “My deal, remember? You jus’ go home, write the story, get it in the paper. Not like I need the money, after all.”

I nodded-

-then jumped at the sound of a voice behind me. “Freeze!”

I whirled to see a man 50 feet away, holding a gun out. Where....? Then I realized-he’d been in that car that had driven past.

He walked closer. “I’m making a citizen’s arrest.”

As he neared, revealed in the dim light, I recognized him. It took me a minute to make the connection, then it burst out of me: “Henry. Henry Colson. I saw you on the news.”

Henry smiled, but didn’t waver his grip on the pistol he held steady. “That’s right, you’re face to face now with a local hero.”

“Right. Now put the gun away, Henry, that’s-”

“Shut up! He’s the one I want.” He waved the gun at El Cazador. “I heard it on my police scanner. When they took his friend to the hospital to fix his broken arm. Lucky me, I beat the cops. Guess they got other shitheads to worry about, so I’m holding you until they get here.”

I glanced at El Cazador, knowing what he must be thinking: Henry would get more than a citizen’s arrest in about twenty minutes, when the sun edged up past the horizon.

The Hunter wasn’t going to wait.

He launched himself at Henry. He was little more than a streak, a crazy panel out of a comic book. Henry panicked and popped off a shot before Caz plowed into him.

The shot hit me.

The impact threw me down, then the shock hit. It was in my left shoulder. There was blood everywhere-and o god it was my blood my blood this time spilling out-

I heard Henry scream as something ripped. Then El Cazador was over me, his face smeared with Henry’s blood, his eyes actually concerned. “Son-of-a-bitch, man, he got you-”

I think I told him to go.

He never saw. Never saw Henry, not dead yet, his chest laid open, his mouth an “o” of astonishment and agony, the gun still in his fingers, bringing it up, firing, once, twice...

El Cazador toppled. Two holes in his chest.

I got to my knees. I looked at Henry first, to see if he would fire again. He was on his back, eyes open, staring at the cobalt blue sky. I thought he was dead.

Cazador was coughing, trying to lift his head to look at the wounds. “Shit,” he muttered.

My hands fluttered above him helplessly. “I thought bullets couldn’t kill you.”

“They can’t, but the blood’s leakin’ out, makin’ me...making me weak. If I don’t get blood...I won’t make it home before...before....”

“What about Henry?”

El Cazador’s nose wrinkled. “I can smell him from here-he’s dead, the motherfucker. Can’t have dead blood.”

“Then take me.”

He blinked at me in surprise. “You been shot, already lost blood. I could kill you....”

“El Cazador will die otherwise.”

I put my wrist to his mouth. I was shaking, from cold, from shock, from weakness, from terror. He pushed the wrist away and I thought he was refusing me. Then he gently pushed me down and rolled towards me. There was nothing beautiful about his scarred face as it bent over me, I could smell the blood and paint on him, I could feel his weight...but when his teeth slid into my neck, what I saw was beautiful, glorious, transcendent. I saw his art, all his tags, the way he saw them. I saw the colors, the layers of shimmering shades, the figures so vivid they seemed to move if you turned your gaze to the side. I felt the rage and the pride and the desperation. It was all there before me, a magnificent panorama of vision.

A vision worth dying for.

###

But I didn’t die.

When I came to, I was in the back of an ambulance, on the way to County.

It turned out the police had come about the time the sun had risen. They’d found Henry Colson and the boy with bad teeth. At first they’d believed me to be a third corpse, but the paramedics found a weak pulse and started transfusions immediately.

Of course they asked me what had happened. I told them I’d been following Henry Colson for a story and he’d been attacked when he’d foolishly tried to step into a gang rumble. They didn’t believe me, but it made as much sense as anything else.

I got out 10 days later and wrote the first story. Of course, it didn’t say El Cazador could float or drank blood or would live forever as a 16-year-old kid. What it did say was good enough that the paper did publish it. They even put it in the Sunday magazine; you probably read it, then forgot it as your weekend wore on. The check helped defray part of my hospital costs. One production company called, but nothing much ever came of it. Meanwhile, a major studio has gone into production on THE HENRY COLSON STORY.

I’m still waitressing these days. I haven’t thought much about writing again. Sometimes I do, then I see the scars, the ones in my shoulder and throat.

El Cazador disappeared, no new tags. For a while I thought he hadn’t made it, that my blood had not been enough, that he’d been snuffed out by the sun’s blistering whiteness, vaporized into nothingness.

Then one day I was on my shift when four Mexican kids came into the restaurant. They sat, giggling and joking among themselves. I went to pour coffee-and nearly dropped the pot.

One of them was wearing an expensive jacket with an airbrushed painting on the back, showing a brown fist hovering in the air over the Los Angeles skyline.

It was unmistakably his work.

I asked the kid where he’d gotten the jacket. Something in my face or voice must have told him I was serious, because he stopped kidding around, looked at me and said only, “What diff’rence does it make?”

I nodded and knew he was right.

THE END

Learn more about the author at
www.lisamorton.com

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###

THE MAN IN BLACK

By Nate Kenyon

“I want to know more about this obsession,” Dr. Devey said. “Tell me about the man in black.”