Read Online Police and Thieves: A Novel by Peter Plate - Free Book Online

Los Angeles television drug overlord. I was a San Franciscan nickel-bag dealer, and most of the other sunbathers atOcean Beach resembled me. No one was tanned or buffed. I didn’t see any weight lifters or beach bunnies. The men were hunchbacked and pale from their day jobs. The women were blanched and wrinkled, and their children were anemic, weedy creatures that puttered around the shoreline, tossing seaweed at each other.
    As a rule, I stayed away from the water. The one time I went swimming, the tide took me out farther than I wanted to go. I was underwater, sinking. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see anything. Air bubbles trailed from my mouth, disappearing over my head. The currents under the surface alternated between tepid and cool; the warm water made me drowsy, but the cold water frightened me, amplifying the ringing in my ears. Clouds of air bubbles swirled around my face; my lungs were torqued to bursting. I asked myself, If I drowned, who would care?
    Bobo stumbled over the sand to us and threw himself on Eichmann, baying happily. Loretta sat up, adjusting her sunglasses. She rose to her feet, brushing sand away from her swimsuit. She looked at Bobo, Eichmann, and me, then sashayed over to the waterline. Eichmann didn’t want her straying off too far; he was about to yell at her when Bobo cautioned him.
    “Let her be. Can’t you see she’s having a hard time?”
    The Mexican’s off-key suggestion stung Eichmann. He was so used to everyone giving in to him, letting him say whatever he wanted to, he couldn’t believe Bobo’s impertinence. It was one thing if Eichmann brought up Loretta in conversation, but it wasn’t anybody else’s place to do that. And I never did. Loretta was off-limits to me. I just thought about her, that’s all. Eichmann’s retort to Bobo was succinct and charged with animosity.
    “Stay out of my business.”
    “Aw, c’mon, I’m your friend.”
    “Oh, yeah? Wonderful … and how long has that been going on?”
    “Slow down. What’s with you?”
    “What’s with me? Everything you say stinks, you know? Have I ever told you that? And you want to tell me how to talk to my girlfriend?”
    “Don’t get ugly with me.”
    “Don’t get ugly? I don’t need nothing when it comes to me and her, you hear?”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Being nice to her.”
    Eichmann looked at Bobo, throwing spearheads of scorn at him. “Yeah? Tell me what to do, bright eyes.”
    “You’ve got to be more tender with her, you hear?”
    Normally, Eichmann would have laughed at Bobo, knowing he was talking through his hat. But this time, he responded to the Mexican in a low, homicidal undertone, hissing, “Shut up.” Eichmann wanted to acknowledge the accuracy of what Bobo was saying, but something in him refused to let it happen, and for good reason: He’d been constructing walls around himself ever since I met him. He couldn’t get through to Bobo, Loretta, or me. His whole body shook with agitation as he mumbled, “Don’t tell me nothing. I know more about women than you ever will.”

11
    After our expropriation of Roy’s sinsemilla, we didn’t waste time maximizing our retail operations. The day after our visit to Ocean Beach, the dope was broken down into eighths—one hundred and twenty-eight of them—at the house of a girl we knew who lived behind the Valencia Street funeral homes. Her name was Randi, and she was maybe five inches taller than me; a baby lesbian who wore low-slung Ben Davis jeans and smoked cigarettes like a man. I had a crush on her that was going nowhere fast.
    Bobo and I trimmed the buds with a pair of nail clippers. The task required dexterity and patience, the same traits you needed when you were an inmate doing art therapy in a mental institution. I wasn’t so great at it. I butchered the buds, making them cosmetically undesirable. Eichmann felt he had the right to scold me about my lack of productivity. “Hurry up, will you? We ain’t