Eduardo Martinez sat behind a dark cherry wood desk. The room, like a priest hole in reverse. Easy way in, hard way out. A computised report was on the desk. Hand written. Martinez studied it, subvocalising in silence. Thirty feet in front of him, a reinforced lift door. To its right, a control panel was flushed into the wall. No buttons. Just a smooth silver pad with a green light above it.
From Martinez’s desk, to his left, a bar and three barstools. Penchek poured himself a drink. Clear white liquid. Vodka. His silk shirt pulled tight across his waistline. Black cropped hair fading into a bulge of fat folding backwards over his collar. Thick set, he wore a Rolex Daytona that caught the light and cast it across the room. A widescreen TV was bolted to the wall beside the bar. A soccer game was playing, the sports bright LCD panel polluting the dark light. The volume off, Penchek watched in silence.
A muted vibration broke Martinez’s concentration, but he kept reading. After a minute or so, it stopped. He flicked through pages of the report, closed his eyes and made a mental note.
The vibrating began again. A metal spike on the front edge of his desk skewered notes like layers of meat. On top, a dull tarnished gold ring set with a dark red stone. Martinez stared at it. Number 88, engraved around the outside. He opened the left drawer of his desk. Inside, a burner skittered left and right. He picked it up and held it in his hand, the buzzing dulled inside his grip. Martinez opened the phone pulled it apart with two hands and held it an inch from his right ear.
On the black walls, light from maroon wall lights, like so many candles absorbing sin, Our Lady of Guadalupe, emerging from the holy veil, looked down on him from above.
‘Speak,’ he said. Martinez listened for a few seconds. ‘And he’s one of ours?’
‘He is,’ the manager said.
The office down in Venice Beach had minimum security. The manager, a 6’6”, wide shouldered, Black guy.
Martinez could hear the money counters whirring in the background. ‘Is the vault locked?’ he said. He knew better than to lie to him. The vault was always open, but it shouldn't be. That’s how he thinks. Believes it's his size as most big men do. Always an optimist.
Once, the manager had it all. A tight end for the 49ers, a fourth string up and comer who made it big after an impossible touchdown. Then came the Superbowl. The win. And the money. Then women. The injury. The painkillers and the drugs. He thought he was smart. Smart enough, anyway. He’d lost it all in less than a year.
Three years ago, he gave Martinez the ring. Made easier with Penchek pressing a 9mm into his temple.
‘No,’ the manager said.
Martinez stayed silent. He’d been there a year ago, persona non grata, when a phone call would not do. The Velvet Kush was off the main boardwalk tucked into a side street, between a burrito joint and a yoga studio. T-shirts hung on wooden awnings on the other side of the street, Gorilla Glue #4 impregnating their fibres. The Kush had a glass front painted yellow and green in two horizontal stripes. Inside, the walls were royal purple, sea snails squeezed for bile, crushed and left to rot in the sun for the adornment of kings. The symbolism lost on almost everyone.
A glass topped counter across the width of the shop separated the public space from a door that led to the back office. The room looked like an old Spanish jail, split in two by iron bars salvaged from before the Treaty of Córdoba.
Since El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula became Ciudad de Los Ángeles became The City of Los Angeles. Before the oil. Before Los Angeles became LA. He wanted it back. The old ways. A simpler time. Before the corruption of the American Dream.
‘Danny Blake,’ the manager said, ‘he’s on the arm.’
Martinez didn’t answer.
He knew the advantages of saying less than necessary. It unnerves the weak, like a screwdriver to the eye.
‘Mr. Martinez. It’s a hundred large give or take. Plus juice.’
On Martinez’s right, a lithograph hung on the wall. A union of greasy ink on stone, colonial violence, and war. A woman on her back, top ripped open, breasts exposed, strangled by her own pearl necklace, men fighting around her, women looking on, clapping.
Men like Pencheck could never understand. Turned on by violence, trapped in ignorance. Blind to the true meaning of the art around him. Power dehumanising form, complicity through silence.
And Martinez didn’t trust silence.
‘Cut him off,’ Martinez said, ‘I will deal with it.’ He could hear the manager trying to figure things out, could hear his mind double checking his reply. Making sure of the syntax.
‘Mr. Martinez. I’ll need settlement tonight. I’ve got a pickup.’
Martinez didn't reply. He folded the phone carefully using both hands and placed it back in the drawer.
Pencheck was sitting on a barstool watching the game.
‘Go get him,’ Matinez said.
He was on a call when the green light above the panel turned red. He looked at the upper right monitor. Danny Blake entered the elevator and hesitated. Penchek pushed him forward and stepped behind Danny. From the camera in the lift door, Penchek’s eyes looked black. Dead. Lifeless. Like a doll’s with the irises pulled out. Martinez went over to the viewing window behind him and stared out into the club below.
The upper floor was nearing capacity. Celebrities invited to the corporate launch drawing in the crowds. The walls inside the club turned black. An attack of snares, then silence. Ten seconds later. Bass. Its beat like an anvil, reconfigured the senses as the concrete walls turned into a virtual mesh of silver edged black squares.
The lift doors opened. Danny entered the room. Penchek right behind him.
Martinez kept his back to them.
‘Danny. Come in,’ he said.
Danny Blake looked like an overweight Don Johnson from the 1980s, minus the espadrilles. No one knew how old he was. Despite his fat face, loud shirts, fake watches, and dyed dark brown hair that fooled no one, Danny was well liked by the ladies. But he wasn’t a lucky man.
Penchek walked Danny into the middle of the room and went over to the bar and sat down, the game still playing in silence on the wall.
Martinez stayed silent.
Squares merged, forming large blocks. In others, letters of the alphabet scrolled from A to Z, rendered to look like a departure lounge from an Audrey Hepburn movie, and some fractured their platonic constraints and morphed into filaments in a kaleidoscopic entanglement. Inside this fractured reality, a rocket ready at T -30, the countdown beamed into squares on all sides. Interviews with Bloomberg journalists, chat show hosts laughing and smiling. Sycophantic. As if prostrate before a new god.
‘How's things? Danny?’
‘Good, Mr. Martinez. Good.’
‘And how's that young wife of yours?’
‘She's okay, Mr. Martinez. She's good. Yes, thank you. She's good.’
‘How long have you worked here, Danny? A year, maybe?’
‘That sounds about right, Mr. Martinez.’
‘Long enough to know what we do here. Right, Danny?’
Martinez turned to face him and went back to his desk and sat down. Danny hesitated, checking himself. Martinez was thin, around 6’ tall, in his late 40s, a native Angelino. The silvering around his temples gave him a kind face. He had a calm demeanor. Disarming. Charming, almost. He had the look of an accountant that fooled many. But then again, many have been charmed into an early grave.
‘Yes, Mr. Martinez.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘So, Danny, what is it that we do here?’ On Martinez’s left, the video monitors on the desk surveilled the club, a distorted projection like an anamorphic memento mori.
‘Danny, I just got off a call with one of our partners. It seems that you're on the arm for an off-the-books loan.’
Danny looked around at Pencheck, who was sitting at the bar, his fingers caressing his vodka, watching the football.
Distracted, the images on one of the desk monitors captured Martinez’s attention.
The label above that monitor said VIP Lounge.
Martinez reached for the controller and pressed down the trackball to pause the video feed. A brunette in a blue dress lay in front of the booth, contorted in positional mutilation. She looked like a doll punished by a child. Her legs splayed at an angle bent by the physics of rage as if mocking human form.
With three fingers, he slowly pulled the trackball toward himself and pressed it down again.
Frame by frame as the woman’s body lifted, her head, a dead weight bent ninety degrees was forced around the hard edge of a glass table with a Procrustean logic. Shards of broken glass had ripped her to pieces.
Martinez kept on moving backwards. Frame by Frame.
A silver tray leapt up from the floor twisting into a spiral, colliding with bottles and glasses. In the booth behind the brunette, champagne frozen in time and space hung in the air, glasses and bottles imploding inwards. A man poised, half sitting, half standing, reached out, arms extended to catch the wrath of god. A blonde sitting serenely with a projectile of liquid an inch from her temple. She had not moved, as if the signal hadn’t reached her brain. A redhead on the other side recoiled forwards, her low cut top forced back up, covering her naked right breast. The spattered blood on her face returning to its source.
Martinez pressed the trackpad again and stared at the monitor. A digital fresco of perverse violence.
He continued on, frame by frame.
A silver tray pulled psychokinetically into Rey’s outstretched hand and rewound, it moved counterclockwise, weightless, drawn backwards into the woman’s face half turning her body, the violence not yet registering.
Martinez paused, capturing the brunette just before impact.
On the monitor. Rey. The tray in her hand, inches from the brunette’s face.
‘Now, Danny, where were we?’
Martinez had this way about him. Not charisma, though he had that in spades. The more unpredictable it became the greater the contrast. People sensed it, as if everything was in slow motion around him.
Pencheck got off the barstool and stood up. He straightened, pushing his hips back and rolled his shoulders. He put his arms down by his sides, waiting.
Danny looked over his shoulder. ‘Mr. Martinez. Mr. Martinez.’
‘Now is the time to be honest, Danny. Would you like a drink? You look a little pale. What you say next is very important.’
Danny avoided eye contact and stared at the floor about three feet in front of him.
‘It's a gambling debt, Mr. Martinez. But, I've got it under control.’
‘Does your cute wife know?’
‘Yes, she knows.’
Martinez stayed silent.
He looked over at the monitors, over at Rey.
‘Don't worry about the debt, Danny. We look after our own.’ Martinez studied the violence. ‘Go take the night off. Relax. Go downstairs and have a drink. On me.’
‘Get down there and get her up here,’ he said.
Penchek walked over to the lift door. Danny glanced over his shoulder.
‘You can go now,’ Martinez said.
‘Thank you, Mr. Martinez. Thank you.’
Martinez said nothing. He got up and went over to the bar. He opened the freezer, took out a bottle of Beluga Gold Line and set it on the brushed steel bar. He reached up to his side for a crystal glass and placed it beside the vodka.
When Rey entered the room, Penchek was right behind her.
Martinez pulled the cork stopper out of the vodka and poured it slowly into the glass. He put the cork back in the bottle and returned it to the freezer.
Rey stood in the middle of the room. She adjusted the space between her and Penchek, keeping him in her line of sight. She looked confident. Calculating, even. Martinez could sense her unease.
He said nothing and walked slowly and deliberately back over to the viewing window and looked out into the nightclub below. He took a sip of his vodka. ‘She works for one of our partners,’ he said.
On the desk, in the bottom left monitor, a black SUV pulled into the side alley outside the Triple V. Nobody got out of the vehicle. Martinez still had his back to Rey.
‘Are you lonely?’ he said.
‘That girl you assaulted.’
Martinez took another drink.
Rey stayed silent.
‘Fractured cheek, lacerated to the bone, broken nose, she’s lost several teeth.’
Martinez turned. ‘What is it you make here, Rey?’
He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Never mind, I'm tired of you. Thirty grand, that's the going rate to fix your handiwork.’
‘Off the books?’ Rey said.
‘You think she's on Medicaid? And I'm keeping what you're owed. Thirty thousand plus interest. Sound about right?’
Rey shook her head but stayed quiet.
‘Seven percent juice, weekly.’
She didn’t look at him. Her eyes fixed on the bottom left monitor. The side doors of the Triple V opened. Marcus walked out, the brunette in the blue dress in his arms, held out in front of him. The driver got out of the back of the SUV and opened the rear back door. Marcus put the girl in the back seat and the SUV drove away.
Martinez sat on the edge of his desk.
He looked at Rey and said, ‘Now get the fuck out.’
To be continued…
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Loving the pace and intrigue of this.