THE STORE4CHEAP LOCKERS were just off the highway, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and a gate that locked by code. We pulled up, and Chris punched in a few different number sequences. None of them worked. He cussed after each try. I could feel the frustration fuming off him. To remember things bit by bit had to be maddening.
Eventually, he gave up and went inside, flashed his badge, and the attendant let us in. If only the attendant had known what we were hoping was inside that locker.
A ton of drugs meant to be peddled by children and instead confiscated by a cop on a secret mission.
I was pretty sure we would all be in deep shit if anyone had figured this out.
Chris unlocked the door and rolled it open. Inside were two giant moving boxes. We stepped inside, turned on a battery-operated lantern, and shut the door behind us. The air felt close and stale and smelled dirty and somehow a little oily, like exhaust. I wanted out. Everything looked gunmetal gray, and I knew that meant it wouldn’t be long before that gray bubbled up into black bumps and panic would set in and I would have some sort of embarrassing meltdown. I tried to concentrate on the smell of Chris to keep me grounded. But I could feel the slate nerves crackling off him like static. His yellow was intense in here. Almost too intense.
He stood over one box, hands on hips.
“Well?” I asked. “You going to open it?”
“I know what’s inside,” he said. “I remember. I know what’s inside both of them.”
Still, he didn’t move, and if something didn’t happen soon, I was going to go crazy and start clawing at the door, so I bent and opened the flaps of a moving box. Inside, bags upon bags filled with powder and crystals and pills. Heriberto and his boys could have given the Hollises a run for their money when it came to pushing.
I reached in and scooped up a handful of bags, then let them drop.
“Holy crap,” I breathed. “You’ve been at this for a while.”
He nodded. “Sam.”
“Huh?”
He scratched the back of his neck, and then one eyebrow, wincing at the memory. “Ever since I realized it was Sam. It was one thing for Heriberto to be dealing. That goes with the territory. Using someone like Sam to do his dirty work, though . . .” He shook his head. “These aren’t just any kids, Nikki. These are kids who will eventually end up in the gang. If they’re not already. These kids have no future. And I couldn’t let that happen with Sam. Not after everything Rebecca did to get me out.”
I picked up and dropped another handful of bags. I couldn’t even imagine how much money was in that box.
“How did you afford all this?” I asked.
He pointed to the other box. Slowly, curiously, I walked over and opened its flaps. And was nearly blown away by the greens and reds and yellows of twenties and fifties and hundreds. Stacks and stacks of them. I gasped.
“Are you kidding me?” I dropped to my knees next to the box. I glanced at him, but he was looking down at his feet, his face set in grim concentration. “What did you do, rob a bank?”
“Close,” he said. “I robbed Heriberto.”
I sank back so I was resting on my heels, the hard concrete floor digging into my knees. “You’re kidding, right? You? I don’t believe it.”
When he leveled his eyes at me, they were so angry they were nearly black. Slowly, he shook his head.
“How?”
“I found out where they were keeping it. My brother Javi knew. I visited him up at State and he told me where to look. I watched and I waited and the first chance I got, I robbed the bastard. And I bought his drugs with his own money. And stashed them here. It was like he didn’t even exist.”
It was a brilliant plan, really. The gang probably thought it was another gang who’d stolen from them—not a cop. The kids kept selling, so they didn’t get busted up by Heriberto and friends. Heriberto thought he was making money, but he wasn’t. And the drugs went nowhere.
“So what went wrong?” I asked, standing up and brushing off my hands. Suddenly they felt filthy. Probably simply because I knew what the money had been used for. I knew where it had been.
“Rebecca,” he said. “It wasn’t enough anymore. I was starting to see a change in Sam. He was getting tougher or . . . or something. More like cold. So I went to her. I told her I was going to get her out just like she did for me. I had the money and I was going to somehow get it to her and help her leave L.A.”
“And someone saw you there.”
He nodded. “I was an old rival in their neighborhood. And a cop on top of it. Of course someone noticed me. Heriberto put out a hit. That’s all there was to it. I was so close to getting her out. So close to . . .” He trailed off, lost in thought.
“Chris?” He didn’t answer. I bent low and waved in his face. “What? So close to what?”
He didn’t answer, but quickly closed the flaps on the boxes and in just another motion, whipped up the garage door.
“Close to what?” I asked again, following him out, so confused I only barely registered how cool and fresh the air felt against my skin after being inside the locker. He slammed the door shut behind us and locked the padlock. “Hello, close to what?” I repeated.
He raced around to the driver’s side of his car and pushed a button to pop the trunk. He practically launched himself inside, brushing aside jumper cables and other pieces of equipment, and lifted up the carpet. Beneath, inside the well where the spare tire sat, was an envelope. He pulled it out, closed the trunk, and upturned the envelope so the items inside fell out. Photos.
“Close to busting them,” he said.
I riffled through the stack. Surveillance photos. Photos of Heriberto handing drugs off to kids. Photos through a window of Heriberto sitting at a kitchen table, counting money, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Photos of Heriberto cleaning a gun. Close-ups, albeit grainy, of the gun in his hands.
“That gun will match the bullets taken from a couple guys who were killed outside a convenience store last year,” he said. He slid the pictures around until he found one of Heriberto sitting on a porch rail. “Those shoes,” he said, “will match shoe prints taken at the scene. And we have an empty cigarette wrapper from the scene too. Same cigarettes.” He moved his finger to a close-up of Heriberto’s hand holding the cigarette. “The shoe prints and cigarette wrapper were okay evidence, but we needed more. I got more. I got a picture of him holding the gun. And I got Rebecca. She was going to testify.”
“No wonder they wanted you dead,” I whispered. The thought flashed through my mind that it could have been so much worse, what happened to him. Heriberto could have succeeded in killing him—getting rid of the cop who could take them down. I also became convinced of something else. Chris was right. There was no way they were going to leave him alone now. He had no choice; he had to finish what he’d started.
We heard the rattle of the gate opening. Nighttime had fallen on us while we were inside the locker, so technically Store4Cheap was closed. We both froze, then locked eyes, then worked together to stuff the photos back into their envelope.
“We should go,” Chris said.
I took the envelope and we hurried into his car, rolling out of the aisle just as the car that had come in started down our aisle at the other end. All I could see in the side mirror were headlights. But they were headlights that weren’t slowing.
Chris noticed it too and began driving faster, going over the speed bumps so hard I came up out of my seat. The headlights continued behind us, slow but picking up speed.
“Come on,” I whispered, as the gate, which had just closed, trundled open at a maddeningly slow pace. I glanced in the mirror again. The headlights were still coming. “Come on,” I repeated.
Finally, the gate was open enough for us to get out. We cut off a minivan in our haste. It swerved and honked, but Chris ignored them. I turned in my seat. The car behind us had gotten through the gate just in time. It nearly sideswiped the minivan, which honked again and slowed to a stop on the shoulder.
“Hold on,” Chris said. Calm. Rational. Deadly.
I wrapped my hand around the door handle and tensed my legs for leverage. Chris punched it and we took off like lightning.
The car behind us sped up too, but it wasn’t as fast as Chris’s car. Plus, Chris was a better driver. He darted in and out and around cars by what seemed like feel alone. There were honks and shouts and cars plunking off onto the shoulders, but Chris never stopped. Never touched another car with his. Just kept his eyes on the road, his foot planted all the way to the floor and his mouth pressed into a scowl.
I looked. The car was still there. It was back a little bit more now, but it was still there.
“Keep going,” I said, even though I knew it was useless for me to even speak. He would have kept going whether I had been in the car or not.
We hit a stretch of open boulevard and Chris zoomed ahead, the speed starting to make me feel woozy.
“He’s still there,” I reported.
“Hold on,” he said for a second time, as matter-of-factly as if he were telling me to hold his drink while he went to the bathroom.
I squeezed the handhold tighter, and he took a corner so fast we fishtailed. But he hardly slowed down as he took another corner and then a third. There was a bowling alley straight ahead and we bounced over the curb into its parking lot, my teeth clacking together from the jarring bump. I bit my tongue; I tasted blood. Chris immediately turned off his headlights and whipped the car into a parking space, blending us in with the other fifty cars that were in the lot.
“Duck,” he said. I didn’t move at first, so he put his hand on my head and pushed until I moved down in my seat. He moved down in his, too. It was only then, in the sudden silence, that I noticed he was breathing heavily. “Stay down.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I sat up just an inch or two so I could see through the back window. There were headlights coming down the street we’d just come from. I held my breath, ready to tell Chris to gun it again.
But instead of turning into the lot as we had, the car turned the other way and drove slowly away from us.
I watched as it passed under a streetlamp.
It was black, with the words Monte Carlo coming out at me in silver.