Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set Read online

  I returned to my car and moved it into an empty parking lot, partly-hidden by overgrown scrub brush. I moved the seat back for comfort, locked the doors, and settled in.

  I would be here when he came.

  ###

  It was after eleven when the lowrider car appeared, stopped where its headlights splayed out across the mural, three figures inside pounding armrests to the beat of gangsta rap.

  For some reason, I’d never thought about the flesh El Cazador to match the blood. But if I had ever stopped to picture him, the boy who got out of the car and studied the unfinished tag would have been image come to life.

  Lit by his car’s headlights he was no more than 18, but already tall, over 6 feet, well-built. He wore a sleeveless T revealing muscled, tattooed arms. Handsome, with deep-set eyes and thick, lustrous black hair curling to his neck.

  The tattoos on his arms were miniaturized versions of all of El Cazador’s tags.

  The tattoos, the way he studied the piece with such intensity... it had to be him.

  I unlocked the car door, took the photographic album I’d compiled (the catalogue raisonné), and, holding the rough sketch before me like a truce flag, approached. He had turned at the sound of the car door opening and watched me, expressionless.

  I stopped five feet away. “Is it you?,” I asked, nodding at the mural.

  He glanced at the sketch, then back at me, smiling. “Maybe.”

  Suddenly my heart was pounding, my fingers shaking as I held the album up, flipping through the pages for him to see. “I’ve been documenting your work. I want to write about you, so people can understand what you’re doing....”

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  I looked into his black eyes and answered, “Putting your soul on display.”

  He considered, then said, in that accent peculiar to this part of the Valley, “You wanna write ‘bout me, huh? So you can make a lotta money, right?”

  “Well-sure, I mean we both can. But what I really care about is the work. The art. The citizens’ action groups think you’re nothing but a vandal. They want to whitewash your tags.”

  “Whitewash, huh? I guess that’s somethin’ you’d know all about.” His eyes flicked behind me. “That your car?”

  No, this was wrong. “My car....?”

  “In this neighborhood, somebody could steal it.” He was advancing on me now, grinning. I started backing away.

  Then he called out in Spanish past my shoulder. I jerked around and saw the other two in the car. They were getting out now, moving slow, enjoying this. One walked over and deliberately slouched himself against the driver-side door of my car. The third stopped a few feet from me. They both had bottles of bad malt liquor and moist blunts.

  I faced the original boy, trying to keep my voice even. “You’re not him, are you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he works alone.”

  He pretended to think that over, then laughed. “Guess you’re right, chiquita, ‘cause we always do everything together.”

  The one closest to me, wiry, bad teeth, buzzcut, stepped up to my side. “Bet you never had any real Mexican food, huh, baby?”

  “I’m just looking for El Cazador. If you know him, you can tell him for me-”

  The first one slapped me. Not hard, but enough to leave my face stinging and bring tears to my eyes. “Why the fuck you think El Caz’d wanna talk to you?! He’s not yours, you dumb college bitch. He’s ours. You even know what his name means?”

  Oh Christ. All these weeks and it had never even occurred to me that the name itself meant anything.

  “Goddamn, you ain’t much of a writer, you didn’t even do your homework. El Cazador means ‘the hunter’. That’s us. That’s what we do, like him. We hunt.”

  “Loco lobos,” Bad Teeth giggled.

  “We protect our territory. And you strayed into it, little white rabbit-”

  I made a break for my passenger door.

  I didn’t make it. They got me, bent me back on the hood. Bad Teeth was clawing at my shirt while the others held me down, whooping and taunting in half-Spanish, half-English.

  I can’t say for sure what happened next.

  The gangstas over me were blown apart, like dead leaves in a sudden hurricane. I saw Bad Teeth grappling with someone, then he shouted a hoarse obscenity, a knife blade appeared through his back, and blood splattered my legs and the car. Oh God that thick metal smell...Tattoo had a gun out, the third one had his own knife. Whoever-whatever-had hit them went for the knifeholder first. The hand holding the stiletto was suddenly bent backward, little cracks sounding. The knife fell and its former possessor shrieked. The assailant shoved him away and stared at the boy with skin art and gun. “Go, vato! Now!”

  Tattoo looked around frantically and realized he was alone now; his friends were either dead or fled. His fingers were shaking as the man with his back to me pointed at the tattoos and said softly, “I let you go ‘cause’a the art, man.”

  Tattoo stowed the gun, got in his car, gunned the engine and peeled out.

  I was crouched on the ground, huddled against the protective metal of a fender. Now the aggressor turned and I saw him by the dim light of overhead freeway traffic.

  He was no man. He was young, more so than the others-16 at best. Small, skinny, acne-scarred face, stringy unwashed hair.

  This couldn’t be him.

  The Hunter.

  “El Cazador....”

  The boy with the teeth and the knife in his back moaned and scrabbled at the asphalt. His attacker turned away from me, walked idly over and pulled the knife out of him. Then El Cazador-because this was him-knelt beside the twitching boy, flipped him onto his back-

  —and tore his throat out with his teeth.

  This was not the polite seduction of a thousand midnight movies. The victim pinned beneath El Cazador was flailing wildly in his last seconds of life. He tore at his killer’s hair and clothes, uttered choked babbling cries, bucked his body, tried to dislodge the thing sucking him dry. Blood puddled beneath him and began to run.

  I picked myself up and sidled to the passenger door. I’d forgotten it was locked. The keys were in my pocket. I got them out, wrapping my fist around them to stop the jangling noise. The click of the key in the lock, the creak of the door opening sounded like cannonfire to me, but El Cazador paid no attention, still embroiled in his grotesque feast. I slid in and locked both doors. My fingers were shaking as I got the keys into the ignition. I started the engine-

  —and the driver-side window shattered in.

  He had moved so impossibly fast there was no space to even react. His hand was through the glass, pulling up the lock, opening the door, dragging me out. Then he held me there against the car. His face was smeared with blood and two of his teeth were too long. Light flowed from his eyes.

  I think I was screaming over and over, “Please let me go, please-let me go-”

  He laughed and shook his head. “No way. You’re my dessert.”

  I found a last reserve of determination, then, and answered, “Fine, but before you kill me look at the book on the ground behind you.”

  It was where I had dropped the album. His eyes flicked around, saw the object. Then he threw me to the ground, hard, and turned to grab the album. I lay there, hurting, hoping, while he went through the pages of his book. His expression didn’t change, but he began to turn each page slower, taking longer to study the photos.

  To appraise his work.

  Finally he closed it, dropped it back in the car. “So?”

  “So I want people to know about your tags.”

  “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 sh
irt, 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 fe
lt 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?”