Hoodtown Read online

  “Oh X. Oh honey, I’m so glad you’re here!” She stepped back, unsteady. “It’s number twelve. I just can’t...”

  “Don’t sweat it, Minnie,” I told her. “I’ll handle this.”

  “Bless you, muñeca.” She made little ineffectual flapping gestures near her breasts. “I’m gonna go have a little cocktail and lie down for a while.”

  The fruity-thick rum perfume that lingered around her told me she’d already had a not-so-little cocktail. Or seven. I probably could have used one myself.

  Instead, I walked down the covered breezeway to unit twelve, as ready for it as I was ever gonna be. The door was slightly open. I could smell blood. I took in a shallow breath and pushed the door the rest of the way open.

  Now I’ve been through my share of ugly. I was the steady hand all the undercard kids came to for quick stitches when they gigged too deep. I’ve dealt with suicides and accidents and broken bones. Never mind that shit with Blue Velvet. When everyone else was flipping out, I took care of business. Cool as ice.

  Inside, a dead girl sprawled on the bed just like Minnie said. She was naked, a mess of brutal stab wounds across her pale torso. The tips of her fingers were gone, leaving behind swollen stumps. Awful, but nothing I couldn’t handle.

  I was trying to discern the pattern on her red and white hood to see if I might recognize her when it hit me that she wasn’t wearing a hood at all. I knew that, remembered Minnie saying the girl had been unmasked, but the reality of it didn’t sink in until just then and I turned away, wracked with sudden nauseous chills. Every detail of her bare face burned itself into my memory. Slack mouth, wormwhite cheeks splattered with gelatinous blood and a pointed chin that was cleft in the center. Dead eyes slitted red and silver. Dark stubble on the exposed curve of her obscenely vulnerable head. Every inch of her intimate facial geography displayed for anyone to see and she was helpless to cover it. That’s when it registered that I was not alone in the room.

  A pair of Skin detectives stood nearby, regarding me with expressionless eyes. The closer of the two was black, younger and slight of build with his hat cocked back on his head. His white partner was older and harder, mean red face and yellow hair that would be all gray in another year or so. The kind of guy who has seen it all and wears his hat low over his eyes. I bit into the flesh of my cheek as he casually lit a cigarette behind his cupped hand.

  “Cover her face.” I meant it to sound strong, but my voice was barely more than a spitting hiss.

  “Huh?” the kid said. Then; “Oh... uh, well...”

  The older cop shook his head, sucking air between his teeth.

  “Fuckin’ Hoods,” he said under his breath.

  There’s only one prison in Angel City. Juvie may be segregated but the big kids get to mingle. You hear horror stories all the time about Hoods getting harassed, getting peeled by Skin inmates while the Skin guards just laugh and pick their teeth. They’re trying to pass legislation to protect against that kind of thing, but rights for criminals is always a hard sell. Anyway, I figured until they work all that out, I’d try to restrain myself from beating up Skin cops, no matter how badly they deserve it.

  Instead I walked over to the bed and pulled a corner of the blood-soaked sheet over the victim’s head, trying not to look at her poor battered face and failing again of course. The bit of sheet turned out not to be quite big enough to cover her whole head. One blood-crusted ear remained exposed, as intimate and raw as a spread pussy.

  “That’s tampering with evidence y’know,” the older cop told me around his cigarette. His tone and the sarcastic twist of his stubbled lips told me he didn’t give a damn about the evidence in this case.

  I shuffled past all the things I wanted to say and instead told them who I was and asked what had happened, surface cool but burning on the inside. I figured I wouldn’t get a drop from the hardcase, but the younger one seemed softer, sorry about his partner and full of malleable Skin guilt. Plus I caught him looking at my ass.

  “Your aunt said this unit was empty, unrented for several days,” he told me. “Lock was busted. No one saw this girl or anyone else coming or going. All we do know is that whoever did this took their sweet time. A real sick bastard.”

  “She’s a working girl, we know that much.” This from the son of a bitch, who spoke with low, blatant contempt in his voice. “Nice girls don’t carry mouthwash in their purse.”

  He toed a spilled purse on the blood stained carpet. Champion brand rubbers, bubblegum, pack of cigarettes, lighter, and that damning bottle of mouthwash.

  “Any ID?” I asked, disturbed by the sad clutter of a girl’s life reduced to evidence.

  “Nothing.” The kid shook his head. “No wallet, no gimmick registration card, no family photos, no address book. Even the tips of her fingers have been cut off. She could be anybody.”

  “So where’s her máscara?” I tried not to look back at her naked ear, but my eyes kept returning to those small bloody curves.

  “Her mascara?” He pronounced it like that black stuff you put on your eyelashes. Ma-Scare-a.

  “She means her mask,” the hardcase said, cynical lips barely moving as he spoke.

  “Oh, right,” the kid said. “Well, we don’t exactly know. Killer must’ve taken it with him, like a souvenir. They do shit like that sometimes.”

  The hardcase snorted and crushed his cigarette into a cheap tin ashtray, eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat and I still couldn’t quite get over the desire to wipe that smirk off his naked face with my fist.

  “What makes you so sure she had a mask in the first place?” he asked.

  “You’re the dick.” I shrugged, my eyes flicking back to the dead girl. “You figure it out.”

  To anyone that knew to look, the dead girl’s neck showed a clear line of demarcation between the tan chest and the white face. Her exposed ear was flattened, cartilage crushed down from a lifetime of tight-fitting hoods. Maybe the killer could have shaved her head, but he couldn’t have created those spots of calloused skin I’d seen around her eyes, nose and mouth where the edges of her faceplate would have pressed in year after year. Never mind the charm hung on green thread between her breasts. It was shaped like a little playing card, the sacred silver mask of El Santo surrounded by a frame of sequins. No Skin girl would ever wear one of those. Neither of the dicks seemed to notice when I palmed it.

  Outside, away from the heavy blood stink and the naked accusation of that exposed ear, I found myself standing with the young black cop, watching the uniforms elbowing each other and chatting up the hooded hookers. Two doors down, the son of a bitch was questioning the neighbors, a pair of Skin junkies, scrawny and barely aware of where they were at that moment, let alone the night before. The younger cop obviously wanted to say something, but instead he scuffed at the ground with one foot, uncomfortable.

  “So what’s your name, dick?” I asked him, just to give him something to say.

  “Cray. Joseph Cray.” He tilted his chin toward his partner. “My partner’s Mick Sullivan.”

  “Kinda young for a detective, aren’t you?”

  “I’m 32,” he said, a little defensive.

  “You must be pretty smart.”

  “I guess.” He scuffed the dirt some more. “I just wish they’d give me a shot at some real cases instead of sticking me down here in Hoodtown.”

  I suppose I could have jumped all over him, but he knew he’d fucked up as soon as it left his mouth and immediately started backpedaling.

  “Not that this case isn’t real, I just meant...”

  “Save it, willya.”

  There was a long silence between us. When he finally spoke, he did it with his eyes down, face turned away. “Guess that’s a pretty bad thing to do to a Hood, stealing their mask like that.”

  “Worse than bad.” I wanted to make this Skin boy understand how wrong it was, but the churning heat of emotion and outrage inside me couldn’t seem to find its way up into my voice, which came out j
ust as cool and steady as ever. “Like stealing your heart and your balls, your history and identity and everything you are and then leaving you in the gutter like a scrap of bad meat. Picture your wife raped and lynched on your front lawn with a sign around her broken neck that says “The only good nigger is a dead nigger.” Worse than that. Worse than death. It’s an intimate fucking violation is what it is.”

  He was nodding, fooling unconsciously with the gold wedding band on his skinny finger, but I could see I wasn’t really getting through. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes and so I reached out and gripped a fistful of his pale yellow shirt, pulling him close, his naked face inches from my hooded one. His eyes went huge.

  “You catch him, you hear me?” I spoke softly, voice still cool and steady. “You catch him and you make sure that he resists arrest. I want this bastard to pay for what he’s done.”

  Of course the son of a bitch showed up then, all bluster and hey-hey-hey and I let the kid go, anger pulsing like a bad tooth inside me.

  “It’s OK, Mick.” Cray said, straightening his collar. Then to me; “Don’t worry, Miss X,” trying to all sound steady and official. “We’re gonna do everything we can to solve this case.”

  “You do that,” I told him, turning to leave. I didn’t have to look back over my shoulder to know he was watching my ass as I walked away.

  3

  The Chrysanthemum Arms was on Kendo, just off Lutteroth Boulevard, down in the fabric district. Yet another generic hotel in a long string of seedy residential joints I could never quite bring myself to call home. Downscale, but not enough to make you cross the street as you passed. Big Japanese characters crawling up the side of the building, advertising caffeinated chewing gum in lurid, up-all-nite colors. That neon throb filled my tiny room, painting me and the walls and the cheap furniture migraine crimson and deep, saturated purple until I could see those colors with my eyes closed.

  It wasn’t much, just a room like a hundred others. Peeling wallpaper with some faded design that looked like rows of little grayish-pink brains but was probably meant to be roses. Anonymous, unremarkable furniture and a bathroom down the hall, but it did have a nice little gas fireplace. Didn’t work worth a damn but looked kinda pretty. Some books too, leftover from the Japanese machi no chica that lived here before me. Pulp mostly and books about how to tell which birds are which even though in Hoodtown there’s pretty much nothing but pigeons. Anyway I’ve had worse places.

  Sure I’ve had better too, classy places on the good end of the border, in the barrio de las estrellas. Y’know, crime bosses and promoters and bigtime wrestlers, Hoodtown high rollers all clustered up as close to Downtown as Skin zoning would allow. Close enough to be hypnotized by the flames, but not close enough to get warm. Not like I was complaining at the time. Of course, I was younger then and more impressed by sparkle.

  Funny how back when I had the dinero to score a swank address, I almost never saw it. Those days I was living out of a suitcase, working Japan and Mexico or traveling with A.C.L.L. from one shitty hotel to another, even sleeping on the floor of the venue when whatever cracker town we were in turned out to have no hotels that allowed Hoods. Back when I would do six shows a week 50 weeks out of the year, drifting in and out of consciousness in the back of some borrowed van, squeezed in between giggling undercard girls, no idea where we were or where we were going. Greasy road food served by slitty eyed Skin waitresses who would ask each other how we could possibly eat with those things on our heads, not even bothering to whisper or wait till we were gone. Or sometimes, if we were lucky there would be a little Hoodtown where we would be taken in to people’s homes, fed carnitas and yakitori and treated like royalty. There would be guitars and laughter and shy sons with that hungry look in their big brown eyes. The joy of being an exalted stranger, a Box y lucha pinup come to life, a star. Of course, that was before the thing with Blue Velvet. Anyway, I’m better off here, in the heart of Hoodtown, where I belong.

  Home, laying on the sagging couch, naked except, of course, for my thin silk underhood. Red and purple across my closed eyelids and I couldn’t stop thinking about that dead girl. I knew the Skin cops didn’t give a damn about the case. Sure, the black kid would try his best, but nothing would come of it and the case would sink into the swamp of unsolved Hoodtown murders, the bottomless pit of dead whores and junkies and smalltime criminals. That’s just the way of this bad old world. Passing a hand over my eyes, I decided to go out and get to work forgetting.

  I hunted up a decent, silver-trimmed dresshood, pairing it with a black dress beaded around the low cut neckline with tiny silver cylinders in a pattern like Japanese waves. A sleek little silver-veiled hat and touch of lipstick and I felt ready to deal with that bad old world.

  And where else to go but The Cobra Room. Typical Blue Street bar, all lowbrow flash and neon. A place for the pimps to hold court, play cards and count money.

  Out front I ran into a Spaniard named Chepa and two of his chicas. The girls looked like they just stepped off a trashy pulp cover, one in a tacky red sequined hood and red, feather-trimmed cocktail dress and the other in a tiger striped mask with matching trim on her black satin jacket. Chepa himself was a Skin, dressed in a cream-colored suit specially tailored to accommodate his extra limbs. He had a small, twisted arm sprouting from the left side of his chest and three legs, the middle one shorter than the other two and sporting a bulky, built-up shoe. He held a long cigarette holder in the three-fingered hand of his extra arm. His hair was slicked smooth to his skull and his teeth had been filed to points. I nodded as I passed.

  “Que tal, Chepa? Ladies?”

  “La Ice Queen wants to play con Chepa?” The pimp grinned and grabbed his two crotches with his two normal hands while taking a drag from his cigarette with the third. His lisping Castilian voice was all honey and ground glass. “Un poquito de double trouble?”

  “I got plenty of trouble already.”

  Chepa nodded sagely, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  “I heard all about that shit up at Minnie’s.” He spat. “It don’t get no lower than that.”

  Bad news is a virus.

  “She wasn’t one of yours, was she?”

  “Hell no!” He made a soft, dismissive sound. “Chepa’s chicas are safe as babies because he watches over them. Chepa’s chicas love him because he protects them. Treats them right.”

  He caressed the tiger girl’s masked cheek. She looked away. There were fading yellow bruises on her neck. I found myself wondering if that dead girl might not have been better off that way.

  Inside, The Cobra Room was just what you might imagine. Whores checking in between tricks, bolstering themselves with tequila and shared candy tins full of chemical heaven. A smoking hot all-girl band in the corner, cranking out manic Hoodtown Salsabilly while pairs of tipsy women danced together to the hooting encouragement of pimps and their underlings. A bar covered in varnished pin ups and behind it, the bartender, bulky and grim, moving like a masked shadow between the gleaming bottles. Lounging down at the far end of the bar, bathed in the dull flicker of a Chupacabra Malt Liquor sign, was the one person I actually wanted to see.

  Gitcho was full Japanese, a hulking butch dressed to kill in a 500 dollar maroon and silver máscara with a matching pinstriped double breasted suit and maroon and gray two-toned shoes. Her physique and body language were utterly masculine. If you didn’t know her like I did, you’d never know the bulge in her trousers was removable. We had known each other since forever, whiling away our misspent youth stealing radios and dirty postcards, anything we could find to bribe the backdoor guard at the Telco arena into letting us in to see Lady Scorpion fight La Tigressa Blanca. Even then, Gitcho wanted nothing more in life than to be a bad-ass pimp with a stable of hot girls.

  On that night, in The Cobra Room, she was living her dream, flanked by her two top honeys. Kitsune was a textbook specimen of the quintessential Hoodtown genetic mélange, Meztiza and Japanese with just a dash of
gringa that gave her taller bones and a greenish-gold tinge to her brown eyes. Sporting Dragon Lady nails and sling-back platform heels, Kitsune was built like me twenty years ago, a thick, curvy body that she had squeezed into a skintight black satin china-doll dress. Her mask was horned and complex, open at the top to allow her long hair to hang free. Rubia Peligrosa was pure Mexican and top heavy, nearly falling out of a tight little wraparound dress that left nothing to the imagination. She had a cluster of velvet flowers pinned to the curly, bleach-blonde ponytail that protruded from the top of her purple hood and a tattoo of an Aztec goddess on her left breast. Gitcho thumped me on the back and motioned for Rubia to give me her seat. The blonde slid off the stool with a sly smile and made a smoldering burlesque act out of sashaying over to share a seat with Kitsune.

  “I am so sorry to hear about the terrible event at your aunt’s motel.” Gitcho’s voice was deep and soft, her Japanese marred by the unique Hoodtown accent we all share.

  I nodded and gave her the short hand version, leaving out the ear and the way it made me feel. My Japanese has never been great, so as the story unfolded, it devolved into the corrupt gumbo of Hoodtown Spanglanese — totally incomprehensible to anyone south of Fire Avenue.

  “Unmasked?” Gitcho frowned, motioning for the shadow to pour me a shot. “¡Hijo de la chingada!”

  I nodded, knocked back the drink and let the shadow set me up again.

  Kitsune licked her plump lower lip and whispered in Gitcho’s ear. Gitcho’s eyes narrowed.

  “Kitsune says that Diamond has two girls missing. He thinks they ran away together but considering today’s events...” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

  I was about to lift the second shot to my lips when a spontaneous explosion of fists and flashing nails erupted behind us as a knot of screaming machi no chicas fell into some sort of furious, alleycat tussle. A stray elbow slammed into the back of Kitsune’s head and she turned and dove into the fray like an angry mink. Her panties and stocking-tops flashed beneath her rucked-up skirt as she took down a pudgy morena in a fuchsia hood and high-slit satin gown. The second the bigger girl regained her feet she had Kitsune by the horns, pounding her head into the bar so Rubia jumped in after her, grabbing a full beer bottle off the bar and letting the morena have it. Before I knew what was happening the pimps were getting involved and Gitcho grinned at me, slipping off her jacket and rolling up her sleeves. My fists were itching too so I laid my hat on the bar and let the brawl’s undertow suck me in.