Lola on Fire Read online

  A glance in the rearview showed not one car in pursuit, but two.

  There are more of us on the way, Leo spoke up in his mind. Another carload. Bad hombres.

  “Shit,” Brody said.

  They’d catch up to him on Main—four lanes of straight blacktop. They’d shoot out his tires or go one in front, one behind, and force him to a halt.

  “Shit, shit.”

  The light at the next intersection was red. Brody slowed but didn’t stop. He steered between traffic—horns everywhere—and hit the gas on the other side. “Got to get off this road,” he said, then made a sliding right onto a side street lined with parked cars. He traded paint with a few of them, then found his lane and floored it.

  The mobsters weren’t far behind. They appeared in the rearview and gained fast. Molly looked over her shoulder.

  “Oh shit, Brody.”

  “Yeah.” He gripped the wheel. “I know.”

  “If we get out of this, I’m going to kill you myself.”

  Brody made another sharp turn, then another. Both cars followed, smoke pouring from their tires. The rush of air past Brody’s window, the engine clatter, the overworked grumble of the exhaust, were nothing compared to his sister, who looked over her shoulder again and screamed through the rags of her hair.

  “Faster, Brody. Go . . . go!”

  Chapter Eight

  Blair’s phone rattled against her right hip. She plucked it from her pocket, glancing at the screen as she slipped from the room to answer.

  “Where is he?”

  “Tear-assing out of Bayonet,” Leo replied. Blair heard his car’s engine roaring in the background. “Keeping to the backstreets. A better chance of losing us that way.”

  “Is he scared?”

  “Kid’s got some fucking balls.”

  “Is he scared, Leo? Tell me you put the fear of Christ into him.”

  “Are you kidding me?” A horn blared. Tires shrieked. “I took a shot at his front tire. Missed on purpose. But yeah, he’s pissing in his pants right now.”

  “Okay.” Blair closed her eyes and smiled. This whole thing was playing out exactly as she’d planned. “Back off. Let him lose you at a red or something. We’ll see where he goes, what he does next.”

  Leo started to say something, but she ended the call and stepped back into Jimmy’s office.

  “What’s going on?” Jimmy called out.

  The massage table was erected in the center of the room and Jimmy lay facedown on it, his hairy ass covered by a white towel. Puccini floated from the Echo on his desk. The air smelled of jojoba and sandalwood.

  “He’s on the move again,” Blair said.

  “On the move,” Jimmy muttered. “Jesus, Blair, you better pray you don’t lose him.”

  “We’ve been glued to this kid’s ass for five months,” Blair said. “Monitoring his cell phone, his email. We’ve got a tag on his car and Eddie the Smoke has been tailing him since he left Rebel Point. We won’t lose him.”

  Today’s masseuse was Celeste. Long eyelashes. Strong wrists. Oiled to the elbows.

  “But you keep rolling the dice. You keep taking chances.” Jimmy grunted as Celeste pressed knuckles into his sacrum. “I mean, why . . . ungh . . . why ambush the motel room?”

  “To terrify the little fucker.” A proverb occurred to Blair—the one about old dogs and new tricks. She couldn’t help but smile. “We can’t afford to let Brody relax. We’re herding him, Jimmy. Not following him.”

  “Herding. Right . . .”

  The Puccini encouraged a thoughtful, relaxing vibe, but the atmosphere in Jimmy’s office was anything but. Physically, he was prone, glistening with essential oils. Energetically, he was like a shark in a tank, circling for the scent of blood.

  “You need to be cool, Jimmy.” Another proverb surfaced in Blair’s mind, one she felt impelled to share: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

  “Not in my goddamn world,” Jimmy snapped. “In my world, if you want something done, you’ve got to . . . ungh . . . grab it by the balls.”

  “But this isn’t your world. It’s mine.” The smile left Blair’s eyes, yet her lips crept higher, showing teeth. “This is my show, remember? I told you that I’d deliver Lola Bear, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  * * *

  Jimmy had trusted her with this, but it wasn’t his style to play the long game. Direct force had always been his modus operandi. Blair was not opposed to violence—she’d employed it herself on many occasions—but was it effective when it came to procuring information? Jimmy certainly believed so, but the numbers suggested otherwise. In the twenty-plus years that he’d been searching for Lola Bear, his methods had netted only one crucial lead. A two-bit gun dealer out of Memphis had attempted to sell information—“Fifty Gs and I’ll tell you what I know”—but had shown an eagerness to negotiate after Jimmy had taken a chainsaw to his left foot: “Little Rock, Arkansas. Calls herself Jennifer—ARRGH CHRIST JESUS FUCK SHIT—Jennifer Ames.” Jimmy’s top guy, Bruno Rossi, had gone to Little Rock and tracked “Jennifer Ames” down—sent Jimmy a photo of her buying groceries at a Harps Food Store. The next photo Jimmy received was of Bruno slumped in the corner of some brick room, a small, ragged bullet hole over his left eyebrow. It was accompanied by the message: Back off Jimmy! But Jimmy hadn’t backed off. He sent more men to Little Rock, but Lola had blown town by the time they got there.

  Other leads had gone nowhere, and then, nine months ago, one of Jimmy’s lawyers, Aldo Perera, had tracked Lola’s family to South Carolina. “By going back and cross-referencing old files, and with some black-hat-level hacking and old-fashioned cunning, I was able to link Vincent Petrescu’s last will and testament to a general practice lawyer in Minnesota. Turns out Vince’s sister, through her company, wired three payments of ten thousand dollars each to the Juniper Law Firm in Minneapolis—no doubt money that Vince had indirectly willed to Lola. From there, I joined the dots to a divorce lawyer in South Carolina. The details will numb the shit out of you, but the upshot—the divorcé: Ethan Ellis, a foreman at Blackridge Auto. Two kids. Brody and Molly. You’ll find them in Rebel Point, a little shitburgh in the upstate region.” So Jimmy had sent a team to Rebel Point and they watched the family for six weeks—too fucking long, by Jimmy’s reckoning. There was no contact with Lola. Not even an email. Boiling with impatience, Jimmy had sojourned to Rebel Point with his direct-force strategy. A fruitless excursion, as it turned out; Ethan Ellis had no idea where Lola was, and in Jimmy’s experience, people tend to speak truthfully when being dangled from the rooftop of a fourteen-story building.

  Dropping the divorcé from the rooftop of a fourteen-story building hadn’t worked, either. Jimmy had thought it would draw Lola—a vengeful cunt if ever there was one—out of hiding. But no beans.

  “So we grab one of the kids.” Jimmy’s eyes had been wild and black in the scarred rag of his face. “Shit, both of them. Make the little fuckers talk.”

  At which point Blair had intervened.

  “You think that’ll work, Jimmy?”

  “Sure. If they know something—”

  “But they don’t. You know they don’t. Torturing them gets you nothing but a mess to clean up.” Blair knew how to handle Jimmy—an intuitive understanding of his ugly, yet delicate, clockwork, and what it took to make him tick. “Maybe it’s time for something other than brute force.”

  Jimmy’s eyebrows had been burnt off in 1993 and the muscles across his brow were partially paralyzed. He conveyed many expressions, including doubt and consternation, by tilting his head and pressing his tongue to the inside of his cheek.

  Blair said, “We need to use our brains, Jimmy.”

  His tongue had remained lodged in place for a full twenty seconds, then he retracted it and exhaled through his nose. “Brains, huh?” He struck a light to a cigar, reclined, and propped his expensive Italian shoes on his desk. “So tell me, Blair . . . you got any ideas?”

  * * *


  To begin with, she wasn’t Jimmy’s daughter.

  The Strawberry Avenue Massacre, in which thirty-three rival gang members killed one another in a storm of semiautomatic gunfire, had been entirely Blair’s doing. Unlike Jimmy, she saw value in the long game.

  “You singlehandedly eliminated Swan Grove’s gang problem,” Jimmy had said to her. This had been several years later, after he’d taken Blair under his wing and spent tens of thousands of dollars training her to be a fighter as well as a thinker. “You did what the Feds couldn’t. How?”

  “Time and patience,” Blair had replied.

  She’d been born on a bed of damp cardboard, gasoline stench in the air, a bleak December wind howling through the broken windows of her momma’s trailer. Momma was a tweaker and penniless. Daddy was gone, taken by a gator while harvesting hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Wasino Bayou. Daddy was a small man—not an inch over five-three—and the rumor went that the gator had swallowed him whole. He’d left Momma only a sack of burdens.

  The trailer was run-down and let in the rain but had no lien against it. The same couldn’t be said for Blair’s momma, who owed more than she’d ever have. She chipped away at her debts, usually with her body, but it was all too little. By the age of eleven, Blair was earning, too. Typical of Blair, she used her wile, not her body. She rode the bus to New Orleans and petitioned tourists on Bourbon Street: My granddaddy died and I’d so dearly like a rose for his grave. A yellow rose. Uncle Bloom’s on Toulouse sell ’em for a dollar apiece. She graduated from grade-six mooching to picking pockets, then to ferrying Class A narcotics for the Black Lizard Boys.

  Swan Grove had none of NOLA’s allure and all of its dirt. Located in the mire southeast of the city, it was sometimes referred to as the Big Easy’s dim-witted stepchild. It had three sleazy blues bars, a strip joint, a riverboat burlesque. It also had two gangs: the Cajun Warlords and the Black Lizard Boys.

  Dakota Mayo—Blair’s momma—was in deep with the Lizards. She owed mainly for her meth addiction but had borrowed five thousand dollars over the years and, for all her whoring, had repaid only a touch of it. The Lizards’ veterano was a hotheaded Mexican called Lupe “El Martillo” Paez. Lupe was unblessed in the smarts department, but commanded deference by way of his fists. Dakota was his plaything. His perra. “For as long as you owe me,” he told her, “I keep the leash tight.”

  Employing Blair was part of the arrangement, but for how long would she remain a mule?

  “How old are you, chiquita?”

  “Twelve.”

  Blair was stringing washing in what passed for their yard. Lupe watched her from the hood of his Caddy, his legs spread, the tips of his Old Gringo boots flashing in the Louisiana sunlight. He rubbed his chin and nodded.

  “Sí . . . te veo pronto.”

  Blair was not yet a teenager but intelligent enough to know a couple of things: that the only way to slip El Martillo’s leash was to cut off the hand holding it—an act that required considerable force. Also, the Lizards were not a one-man operation; Lupe had an army around him, and lieutenants who were more than ready to step into his Old Gringos.

  Blair needed an army, too.

  The Cajun Warlords ran the west side of the Grove. A rabble of rednecks, they’d had it all until the Lizards slithered in, and there was no love lost between the two gangs. There’d been bloodshed, and then compromise: the Lizards controlled hard drugs, firearms, and prostitution, and the Warlords controlled everything else. This included marijuana, moonshine, and gambling—primarily by way of underground fighting. Something else Blair knew, because she’d heard one of those clever women on The View—maybe it was Whoopi—say it once: A compromise is an agreement whereby both parties are equally dissatisfied.

  Big Trapper Neal was boss of the Warlords. A former Creole State boxing champion, he conducted most of his business at his gym on Strawberry Avenue. The basement was one of several venues used for his lucrative Fight Nights. Upstairs, his spacious office (a rebel flag in one corner, a photo of Trapper meeting Sylvester Stallone on the wall) doubled as the Warlords’ boardroom. This was where Blair first met Trapper. She just dropped by one day.

  “Well, shit, girlie. Lookit you.”

  “I want to box,” Blair said.

  “I respect that, but I don’t train girls.”

  “That’s some bullshit, mister. Girls can box, too. You ever hear of Laila Ali?”

  “I sure have. Heard of her daddy, too. But that don’t change shit. You could tie the leather on, but the fact remains that I don’t train girls. That means you ain’t got no one to spar with.”

  “So?”

  “No winner was ever made from just punching a bag.”

  “Do I look like I just want to punch a bag? Shit, mister, put me in with the boys.”

  Trapper was as wide as a truck’s grille and when he laughed the floorboards trembled just a bit. He wiped eyes made bleary by years of taking leather, and even more years of guzzling his own hooch. “I tell you what.” He slapped a hand on the table. A breeze from somewhere made the rebel flag shiver. “I could use some help around the place. Someone to drag a mop across the floors, to clean out the spit buckets. You do that, and maybe I’ll show you a thing or two.”

  Going in, Blair had hoped things would move swiftly, but it soon became apparent this wouldn’t be the case. She was still twelve when she first picked up a mop at Trapper’s gym, and thirteen when she felt ready to plant the first seed. She’d been sparring with a knucklehead named Lorne Franco, four years older but built like a length of rope. She’d let Lorne knock her around, and between rounds the trainer, Ducky Rose, asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” Blair had responded. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re getting schooled in there.” Ducky was high up the Warlords’ chain of command and Blair knew it. “Flash some goddamn leather. I got better things to do than watch this beanpole make a monkey out of you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But she took a knee twice in the next round and the second time Ducky stopped it. “Left your pluck at the trailer park, kid,” he said, snipping the tape off her fists. “That’s not like you. Want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Drop the tough-girl act.” Ducky stopped snipping and held her reddened hands firmly. “I’m talking to you as a friend now, not as a trainer.”

  At which point Blair dropped the tough-girl act and turned on the waterworks. It was easy to fake-cry with the sweat on her face and her eyes still puffy from Lorne’s gloves.

  “Come on, kid.” Ducky handed her the same towel he’d tossed into the ring not five minutes before. “Don’t let the boss see you crying. He’ll get you back to dragging that mop around.”

  “Yeah. I know. Sorry.” Blair ran the towel across her face. “It’s just . . .” And she told Ducky the story she’d devised—how the Mexicans were tightening their stranglehold on Momma. “I guess she owes them big.” And how, last night, eight of them had come over, stinking of tequila, and made her pay her dues. “I got the heck out of there. I couldn’t—”

  “Dirty goddamn spic assholes.”

  “Momma was still tweaking this morning. It’s how she deals, you know?”

  Ducky nodded.

  “Bitch threw a glass at me. Just missed.”

  “Christ.”

  “And things’ll only get worse.” Blair wiped her eyes again and said, very clearly, so there was no way Ducky would misunderstand, “I overheard a couple of those beaners saying how more of them were coming to the Grove.”

  “More?”

  “Lupe’s cousins, I think. Primos. That’s the Spanish word for cousins, right?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “Some from New Mexico. Some from Veracruz.”

  “That so?” Ducky cleared his throat.

  “Yeah. Something about Lupe wanting to expand his territory.”

  Seed planted. Blair stopped fake-crying and started counting.
One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. She got only to forty-five-Mississippi before Ducky tromped his way upstairs to Trapper’s office.

  Blair let the seed gestate. She went about her business—just another luckless kid from Swan Grove—and on a warm September night, five weeks after her heart-to-heart with Ducky, she spray-painted wetback mo-fucks eat shit!!! on the sidewalk outside the Lizards’ clubhouse, and she was careful to leave the fat ass-end of a joint packed with Purple Widow—one of the Warlords’ famed strains—in the gutter nearby.

  Tensions between the gangs escalated. There was much crowing and flexing of muscle. Nothing more than that, but Blair knew it was just a matter of time. She watched and waited, occasionally fanning the flames. A whisper here. A comment there.

  “Those damn Lizards really are cold-blooded,” she said to Otto Dickinson during one of their morning training sessions. Otto wasn’t as many rungs up the Warlords’ ladder as Ducky, but he had a big mouth and he liked to run it. “Bunch of them at Shooter’s last night saying how they’ll soon be using rednecks for gator bait.”

  And to Héctor, her momma’s meth dealer, she said, “Nope. No sparring today. Gym was closed.” Héctor was a former student of the sweet science, before his life hit the shitter, and he regularly asked Blair how her training was coming along. “Trapper was at the range. Word is, some damn fool redneck shot his left foot clean off while trying out one of the Warlords’ new guns.”

  Héctor and Lupe were very close. Héctor was a good earner. “Guns?” He pronounced it gonz. “What kinda gonz?”

  “All kinds.” Blair shrugged. “Whole crate of them came in last week.”

  Blair was careful how and when she leaked these deceptions. She understood that they needed to work their way beneath the skin. She also had to ensure nothing came back on her. Even the “innocent” observations of a teenage girl would arouse suspicion if divulged too frequently. What Blair never expected was for both gangs to own these fabrications with an odd kind of pride. Neither side denied anything, as if to do so would show weakness.