The Speed Chronicles (11 page)

After about an hour I located the keys—I'd hidden them from myself during the bad run the week prior—and we were doing fifty on Franklin, feverish for the turnoff up into La-La Land.

“There it is!” Grace screamed over the wail of Neil Young's “Cortez the Killer” spun up to earsplitting decibels.

“I know.”

“Man, fuck Cortez!” Grace howled, slapping his knees.

“Look,” I said, pointing out the windows at thick chaparral climbing up the rise, houses disappearing into the shadows of oak and rocky crags. “Old Mexico.”

“Fuck Spain! Fuck the United States! Goddamn goldbrickers! This is Mexico! Glorious Mexico!” Grace cried, now a hardwired demon full of fast rage.

“You're not Mexican,” I said. I leaned into the left turn going at least 45 mph. After a good fifteen-minute bounce up the mountain we reached the gate and were buzzed in.

“Better leave the tent in the car,” I said.

“Right,” Jim Grace agreed.

“Gents,” Harv greeted us as we walked up the three-hundred-yard stretch from parking to the house. There were about ten cars in the lot, meaning the place was going to be a scene.

“Harv,
que pasa
,” Grace said, extending his hand. I simply nodded, keeping my clenched fists in my pockets.

“Come on in.
Mi casa su casa
and all that.”

We went into the den—the business room—and as we passed the kitchen I caught a glimpse of Nettles slunk against the stove smoking nothing but two inches of ash from a beaten cigarette. She had a lake of purple around her right eye. I reached up and patted my own bruised orbital plate. When we passed the sliding glass that opened into the courtyard we saw a half-naked blond girl prancing around the pool in a fried haze. She looked no older than sixteen.

“That's Tabby,” Harv said. “Her and Nettles are getting … acclimated.”

In the den Harv measured up two very generous sixties, even though I was just along for the ride; not buying, necessarily, but knowing that Grace would part me off a kind freebie.

“Don't worry about it for now,” Harv said. “Two for one today, and you'll make it up to me later.”

A loaded deal to be sure. Regardless, Grace and I quickly pocketed our bounties when we heard a gang of intriguing cheers and whistles explode from the clubhouse out beyond the pool. Harv eyed us cautiously, then fixed a stern, secure gaze on us that warned:
You shall not fuck with me
.

“You boys want to come out back and 'tend the ceremony? It's totally cracked.”

My throat clenched
no
, but the ill-fated notion sank back down to my gut unspoken. I had a bad feeling. I'd only been up to Harv's Hills house a handful of times, and the place didn't sit right. It always felt appropriate to leave. I'd never seen anything too strange going on outside of meth heaven and hell and their according crimes in general, mostly just a bunch of paroxysmal, self-entitled eccentric turds jettisoning their brains toward sweet oblivion; rather, it was an aura of badness, and all I wanted to do now was go home and read a thick nineteenth-century Russian novel front to back, or masturbate for four or five hours, maybe.

“Ceremony?” Grace asked.

“Yeah. The New Church of Zoom,” Harv shrugged. “It's not my thing—pretty fucked-up, really—but they pay me too much to refuse.”

We leaned into Harv's taster plate and each took a hefty snort. Somewhere deep down inside not wanting anything more to do with any of this, I still couldn't refuse.

“Well, okay,” Grace said.

Never coming here again
, I swore,
this is the end
, when Harv slid the clubhouse door aside.

“This is Jesus. He died for our—your—sins.”

In the middle of the clubhouse stood a meticulously constructed seven-foot crucifix with a beautiful, sleek, powerfully built, but atrociously dead brown-and-white pit bull terrier nailed to it, flies swarming around the bloody spikes driven through its spread front paws and its bundled hind quarters. A male, his eyes expired shuddered in incomprehension. A dozen people were cajoling in a circle, swathed in sweat, caught in the frenzied, possessed grip of fanatical religious conviction. I recognized one of them as an acclaimed actor who'd been in the papers on drug charges, pornography scandal, and spousal abuse. To the right of the sacrificed dog was a much smaller cross with a fanged marmot crudely driven into it, caught sneering in its death. To the left, an empty cross the same size. On a table next to it sat a tray of pulverized methamphetamine, a giant syringe, the necessary means to fire, and a Bible. There were tufts of hair stuck to the bloody rig.

“You're just in time. I guess Judas is next,” Harv said, and nodded toward a cage where a handsome white domestic short-hair cat lay apprehensively licking its paw. The dancing freaks of the New Church of Zoom paid us no attention at all.

“Judas wasn't crucified,” Jim Grace said. “He killed himself.”

My heart sputtered and my gut folded. I have never been one to stomach the slaughter of innocents. I gave Grace a piercing leer, a silent command that it was time to go. He looked pallid, confused, knocked silly from the scene. Before either of us could fully comprehend the massive severity of it: “Now isn't this a surprise,” someone cooed from behind, just outside the clubhouse door. I recognized the voice but I couldn't place it. Grace and I turned around and found a thick, sculpted bulldog of a man walking firmly toward us.

“Shit,” Grace mumbled.

“What?” I whispered.

“Nothing,” Grace said. “Nothing.”

The zealots continued, praising the Lord and singing “Blessed All Ye Faithful.”

“What the fuck is going on?” I gasped.

The man offered his hand. “Roy Mendoza. Dozer.”

It immediately struck me that Detective Dozer was doing absolutely nothing to curb the sacrifice—felony animal cruelty to the highest degree—nor making any attempt to bust Harv or anybody else on enormous drug offenses.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I said. I turned to go.

“Give me a minute, Will, please,” Grace said.

“Ah, William O'Sullivan,” Dozer said.

“You here on a call for domestic aggravated assault?” I asked Dozer, regarding Nettles. Harv hissed a clicked tongue at me and spat on the ground.

“Let's have a seat,” Dozer said.

Jim Grace, Dozer, and I sat at a picnic table in the area between the clubhouse and the pool. Dozer faced the New Church of Zoom, and Grace and I faced the house, yet I couldn't help turning my head back to look. The congregation clamored further with song. The detective remained unfazed, and Harv retreated into the angry womb of his manor.

“I haven't heard from you.”

“Look, Roy, it's done, man. You can't keep living in the past, right? You've got to move on. I can't do anything more for you. I've gotten on with my life,” Jim Grace said.

“Yeah, getting along well, aren't you,” Dozer mocked. They talked as old friends gone sour long ago, presently uncertain of what it all amounted to.

“She's gone, man. Gone for good. How many years has it been? Five? Seven? You've got to give up the ghost,” Jim Grace said.

“What the hell is going on?” I burst in.

Jim turned, his face wrung with guilt and sympathy, not for Dozer, but for me. “Shit, Will, I'm sorry. I didn't know he was going to be here.”

“Just damn good timing,” Dozer chimed.

“Roy—Detective Dozer—was on my case, hard, years ago, when I was a driver. Until he discovered his wife was a lesbian. He found her in bed with Cammy. Strange turn of events.”

Cammy—Camille—was Jim Grace's ex-wife. He'd talked to me about her from time to time, how he had not known much true happiness since, and about getting into using afterward, but never exactly why she left. At the time he was a high-paid wheeler for the entertainment industry, escorting celebrities to the most exclusive dealers in town, when heroin was making its comeback in the '90s and speed was mostly for maintenance, and Grace himself had not yet partaken in either.

“They're still together. They divorced us both,” Dozer said, his face old and worthless. “Back when I was full of piss and fire,” he waved his hand, “and actually cared about all of this. A real star trooper.”

I rubbed my temples and dreamed of simpler times, times that I had mistaken for complex, before my own downfall into this exciting, mesmerizing, and delicious and nefarious, dire, and abusive world. I'd been living disenchanted beyond my means for too long, so I thought, just wanting certain kicks—some sort of adjuvant freedom from the pain of life, I guess. But the fee, it seemed, had suddenly grown too large. You cannot blame it on the drug, only the people.

“Speaking of piss,” I said, bewildered, disgusted, “excuse me.”

I got up from the picnic table, glanced once more at the horrendous scene in the clubhouse, and stormed into the mansion. I went into the bathroom, pulled myself out, but nothing came. I zipped up, flushed the unsoiled toilet, and scrambled through the medicine cabinet for some downers. There were none. I shut the cabinet and looked in the mirror. Alien, a phantom, as if I could no longer place who I was. I produced the sack, crushed the biggest dose I'd ever considered, withdrew a single from my wallet, rolled it tight, and sucked the line dry. I didn't know what else to do. Moreover, at this point I was full of distortion, blasting like a roaring, gnashing, hot-blooded ice comet through outer space. My throbbing, beaten eye could have easily popped with stroke against the mirror. A. Am. Amp.

I walked out of the bathroom and passed Nettles. I paused, turned, and headed into the kitchen.

“What do you make of this shit?” I asked, chewing on my lips, my brain swelling to the palpable limit within the gripping palm of my skull.

“Mind your own business.”

“Jesus, Net, you should cook yourself up a sandwich or something. You look like hell. Get strong, don't let the bastard hit you no more.”

“I'm getting the fuck out of here,” she said quietly. “And I'm taking it all with me.”

“Me too. But first I'm going to cook you something to eat.”

I feigned rifling through the cupboards for food, secretly contemplating the options of my exit, until I found a large cast-iron skillet that must've weighed ten pounds.

“If I don't ever see you again, for chrissakes, Net, stick up for yourself. You don't need to deal with all this just to get some good crank.”

“Why you ain't got no woman, Will?”

“Hell if I know,” I said. I walked past her and out toward the pool, the skillet firm in my hand.

Dozer went out like a lit match under tap water. I stood over him panting, having clocked him from behind with all of my might. I dropped the frying pan and scrambled through his clothes until I found what I was looking for. Jim Grace eyeballed the piece.

“What are you doing?”

“Did you give him my phone number?”

“No way. He's a cop, man, it takes him two minutes to figure that stuff out.”

“What kind of deal do you have with him, you a selective narc or something?”

“Hell no,” Jim Grace shot back, offended by the question. “Can't you tell he doesn't give a shit about the law anymore? He didn't even know we were coming. He was up here doing his own kind of business with Harv.”

I almost pointed the thing at him, my best friend. Catching myself, I lowered it. I reached in my pocket for the car keys.

“Go start the car, Jim.”

“Dozer just wants the panties.”

“Go start the car.”

He refused to take the keys. “Be calm, be calm.”

“They're killing fucking animals in there!”

“It's none of our business,” he said. “I don't agree with it. It's wrong. It's terrible, but …”

Jim Grace was holding out because this was sanctuary: a place to connect—any bad, otherwise intolerable sin washed away in the name of screwing-it-on, in the name of assured supply, in the name of, well, addiction, I suppose, or at least undeniable enchantment. The same things that had made me tolerate it all up until now as well. The dose I jammed in the toilet shifted into twentieth gear. The blood in my veins was going for the record, racing like a rocket car across a desert salt flat, reckless and proud, screaming for something official. I turned my back on Jim Grace and stomped toward the clubhouse.

I raised the gun and shot three times into the ceiling. Everyone quivered, turned, stood vacillating before me while drywall and stucco from the bullet holes blanketed the room in softly falling snow. I said nothing, but went over to the cage, opened it, and grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck and held it close to my chest. Back to the door, I turned and piloted the barrel in a straight line across every one of them. They all stared at me blankly in disbelief—the same look Grace and I had on our own faces when we stumbled upon their terrible ritual—as if I were the one in the wrong. The semifamous, Academy Award–nominated actor moved to speak, but thought better of it. I held fast, my finger microscopically humping the trigger, but I did not bring fire on them. Instead, I honed in on the crucified dog and let a single shot go into its chest, rotated slightly, and too symbolically gave the marmot an honorable death. Then I walked out.

When I returned to the picnic table Grace was shaking. The gun had given him a fever. In the distance, next to the pool, Nettles had Tabby by the hair in one fist, and was burying the young girl's face with the other.

“You coming, Jim?”

“I'm Mexican. By marriage. My uncle. I have a right to care, you know.” Grace nodded his head about, regarding the landscape. He had slipped into asylum, unable to deal with the matter at hand.

“Sure,” I said. “Old Mexico.”

Dozer came to, groaning, the big man curling into a bamboozled little ball.