Chapter 6
The bar was dark and cool and smelled of old beer and cigarette smoke. As the sprinkling of patrons slowly drank away the early afternoon the jukebox thumped out endless country songs.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me the new guy was working last night?” Eduardo Morales demanded.
The other man in the booth took a sip of his beer and shrugged. “Happened at the last minute.”
Morales’ beer was losing its foam but he hadn’t touched it yet. “You nearly fucked everything, you know that? I think he saw me.”
“What were you doing?”
“Dumping some shit. Man, three minutes earlier and he would have seen me putting the stuff in the trunk.”
“Did he see what you dumped?”
“Naw, the angle was all wrong. But man, you nearly bitched up everything.”
“I told you to lay off. We don’t need trouble now.”
“Hey, I got commitments, you know? And the stuff was just sitting on the loading dock.”
The other dropped it as hopeless. Once a thief. . . “So, all he actually saw was you throwing some stuff away? That’s nothing.”
“No, but it could have been, man!” He paused. “Did he report it?”
J.D. Dunlap, head of security at Black Oak Mall, shook his head. “Not a thing. Either he didn’t see anything or he decided to keep his mouth shut.”
Morales snorted and took a pull on his beer. “Maybe he’s brighter than we thought, huh?”
“I hope not,” Dunlap said. “It will work better if he’s dumb.”
###
Surfer stood by the bus stop across from the mall, watched the traffic go by and fidgeted under the smog-bright California sun. He looked like someone who was in a hurry and waiting for a bus. But the Surfer had parked his expensive Camaro less than a block away. The bus stop bench advertised a funeral home. That didn’t help Surfer’s mood.
Finally, a blue van pulled up, the side door slid open and without a word, Surfer got in.
The van’s blue-on-blue airbrushed paint was custom but not unusual for Southern California. The vertical windows in the back were smoked plastic and the wheels were gold plated. Fancy and expensive, but not something that would stick in your mind if you spent much time on LA streets.
Nothing unusual—unless you knew the plastic in those windows was bullet-proof Lexan, the floor was reinforced with sheet steel and the tires had special run-flat inserts. But then if you knew that much, you probably knew a good deal more about the van and its occupants.
“So good of you to join us,” Toby said as Surfer settled into the backward-facing purple velour bench seat in the front of the van’s passenger compartment.
Toby was a compact, strongly built young man in his early twenties. His gray sharkskin suit was def without being outrageous, and his gold jewelry was expensive without being flashy. Like the Surfer, he wore wraparound shades. He looked like a concert promoter or a record executive—a mean one.
Toby’s diction was a tribute to the quality of American television announcing, his rhetoric to American gangster movies and his erudition to the quality of American prison libraries. He owed his success to his native drive and intelligence and his profession to the opportunities available to a poor black kid who grows up in the wrong neighborhood.
In short, Toby was a medium-big drug dealer with very big dreams.
He was sitting in a single large captain’s chair at the back of the van. His companion, hulking in another captain’s chair facing the side door, was equally well-dressed. Lurch was tall enough to play forward for the Lakers, bulky enough to play linebacker for the Raiders, and crazy-mean enough for damn near anything.
Pedro, the driver, was a lot shorter and fatter than Lurch, but nearly as strong. He was deaf, which meant that Toby didn’t have to worry about what he overheard. It also kept the cops from hassling them too much in a traffic stop.
“Would you care for some refreshment?” Toby gestured to the built-in bar with the mirrored countertop to Lurch’s left. Surfer shook his head. Then Toby leaned forward and got down to it.
“Now word up, my man. We got us a business opportunity to discuss.”
Surfer threw a nervous look at Lurch. When Toby started talking about “business opportunities” or any of that other educated shit, it usually meant someone was in trouble.
“I am about to cut you in on the ground floor of a really prime proposition.”
Surfer licked his lips nervously.
“My man, you are about to become a test market for a totally new product.”
Lurch reached into a drawer in the bar beside him and pulled out a vial. Wordlessly, he passed it over to his boss.
Toby held the vial up between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you know what this is?”
The stuff in the vial was a coarse grayish powder, about the color of cigarette ash and a little finer than sugar.
“Crappy coke?” Surfer ventured.
Toby chuckled. “Thinking small, my man. That’s no way to get ahead in this organization.” He held the vial to the light and smiled. “This here is something completely new. What you might call a ‘designer drug,’ you dig? A synthetic cooked up by my very own research department. Imagine if you will a combination of coke and speed. The rush, the energy, the staying power. The best of both worlds.”
Toby tossed the bottle back to Lurch, and it disappeared instantly into the drawer.
“And best of all, it don’t show up on no drug tests. None of the standard field reagents the cops use can pick it up.” He leaned back and spread his arms expansively. “Research, my man. Research is the key to success in the modern business environment. You gotta keep coming up with new products to stay ahead of the competition, you dig?”
Like most people in his line of work, Surfer thought the key to success was staying one step ahead of the law and burning the competition before they could burn you. But he nodded.
“Now, this here is a unique product, and we’re gonna start by pricing it low to gain market share on entry. That means nickel bags, you dig? You get it cheap and you sell it cheap and we make it up later when the market is established.” He slid his sunglasses down his nose and looked over them at Surfer. “There be any questions?”
“How much?”
“To you, hundred an ounce.”
“How much in a nickel?”
“Quarter-gram and don’t you be shorting none.”
Surfer did a quick mental calculation. That kind of profit wasn’t at all bad at his level. Not that he had any real choice.
“When?”
“My people be in touch. Just be cool and have the money.”
The van dropped Surfer at a bus stop about a mile from the mall.
As the van pulled away, Toby leaned back on the cushions and smiled. The other key to successful product introductions was test marketing. For that, you wanted someplace relatively isolated with minimal competition. And in this business, you also wanted someplace it wouldn’t hurt to lose if things weren’t successful. The speed-freak chemist who’d turned out the stuff to Toby’s specification wasn’t too stable, and Toby wanted to make sure it worked as advertised before he peddled it to his better customers.
###
The rock music blended with the din of the video games and the noise enveloped The Pit like a shield. Heather Framel took another moody drag on her cigarette. Dani’s mom had told her not to come back. None of her friends had shown up and she needed to find a place to crash at least for tonight. Idly, she ran her hand through her bleached blonde hair on the side where it was chopped off short. She’d gotten Terry to drive her by her mom’s place, but his truck was out front. She couldn’t go home.
There were a couple of places around the mall where she could sleep outdoors, hidden in the bushes, but she hated doing that. You wake up all grungy with twigs and shit in your hair.
Someone came into The Pit, and Heather looked up expectantly. But it wasn’t anyone she knew, only the new rent-a-pig.
Well fuck it. She’d get by. She always did.
###
After a week on the job, Andy Westlin had decided checking The Pit was the worst part of the job. The noise, the lighting and the hostility to authority tended to give him a headache. But it had to be checked frequently, so he put on his best street-cop stare and worked his way through the tables.
It was almost four p.m. but the place was nearly empty. Not even the air guitarists had shown up yet. There was a skinny blonde girl with hair hacked off short and a black vinyl jacket covered with chrome studs sitting and smoking at one of the first tables; a couple of skateboarders wandering around; and at a table near the back, three or four punk rockers in leather jackets, chains and wraparound sunglasses. The punkers and the girl ignored him ostentatiously, and the skaters just weren’t paying attention.
Two of the punkers wore spiked mohawks dyed in bands of violent color and the third’s head was shaved. As Andy got close enough to hear their voices over the infernal racket of The Pit, he realized the bald one was a woman.
When he got even closer, he saw they weren’t very young either. As nearly as he could tell all of them were in their thirties. Caught in a time warp and preserved in the never-never land of the mall. It made him a little sad.
He stopped outside The Pit and blinked a couple of times as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“It gets to you, doesn’t it?” said an old woman sitting on a bench in front of him.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” Andy was polite but cautious. Part of his job was being pleasant, but some of these old ones were so lonely they’d talk to you for an hour about their grandchildren.
“The noise and the lights in there,” the old woman said. “It’s supposed to bother you, you know.”
Andy looked more closely. The woman on the bench was small, almost frail, tanned brown and leathery with silver hair cut short and straight. He vaguely remembered seeing her around.
“It’s a filter,” she went on. “It weeds out people over twenty-five.” She dropped her voice and nodded toward the table of punks in the back. “Mostly anyway.”
Andy grinned. “Yes, ma’am, I guess you’re right. It’d sure weed me out if I didn’t have to go in there. But how did you know?”
“Oh, I’m doing fieldwork. I’m an anthropologist. My name is Pauline Patterson.”
“How do you do, ma’am.” He started to extend his hand and then he noticed the walker sitting next to the bench.
She followed his glance. “Emeritus now, of course. But I’m doing a study of the cultural anthropology of the modern American shopping mall.”
“I thought anthropologists studied primitive cultures.”
Pauline Patterson nodded at the punks and smiled with the half of her mouth that worked. “What do you call that?
“Seriously, anthropologists study all kinds of cultures. There’s a branch called urban anthropology that deals with subcultures in industrial societies.” Then she sobered. “Besides, I think it will be a while before I get back to the New Guinea highlands or the Cameroon.”
“You were in those places?”
“I walked for nearly three weeks into the Owen Stanley Range to do my first fieldwork.”
Andy, for whom the word “culture” meant either symphonies and art museums or yogurt, shook his head. “I’d think after places like that the culture you find here would be pretty dull.”
“Cultures,” Pauline Patterson corrected, “and it isn’t dull at all. What you find in the mall is many different cultures, or subcultures if you prefer. The groups are quite distinct, and some of them are mutually hostile. In general, there is very little mixing in the mall except among some of the affines.” She caught Andy’s puzzled look. “The groups with similar values, lifestyles and symbol systems.”
The skateboarders came out of The Pit and sauntered off down the mall, chattering.
Andy’s eyes flicked to them and then he turned his full attention to Dr. Patterson. “How do you tell these groups apart? They all look like kids to me, except some are better dressed than others.”
“That’s easy. You pay attention. For example, did you notice those young men’s haircuts?”
“Short on the sides and long on the back?”
“Shaved on the temples. The area not covered by a skating helmet. If you ask them they might tell you that’s to cut wind resistance while keeping the hair under the helmet for extra padding. Now look at their shoes.”
Andy’s eyes followed her pointing finger. “They look like running shoes.”
“They are similar, but the design is quite distinctive. The waffle soles give a good grip on the board and the tops are higher than most running shoes to give good ankle support, but lower than high-tops for easy movement. Skater’s shoes. They are skaters.”
“So it’s all for efficiency.”
“No, it’s for identification. They are proclaiming to all the world, or to all the world which is important to them, that they are skaters. The point of the dress and haircut is almost never just efficiency.”
Andy looked down at his blue-on-blue uniform with yellow piping. “I see what you mean.”
“Of course, identifying the groups is the easy part of the work. It is more difficult to track behavior and social interactions. Then there are the really difficult matters like worldviews.”
“How do you find all that out?”
“I listen and I take notes.” She held up a miniature tape recorder with a thong looped around her wrist. “My daughter gave me this. A lot better than taking notes by hand, I can tell you.” She looked down ruefully at her right hand lying in her lap. “Especially now.”
There was a brief, awkward silence.
“Don’t think it isn’t interesting work,” Dr. Patterson went on briskly. “The social groupings at this mall are the most complex I have ever observed. There are so many different groups, and they have the resources to express their differences in so many ways.”
Andy looked around at the people flowing by. “I never noticed.”
“Most people don’t,” Pauline Patterson told him. “They just go blindly along, ignoring all the rich and complex social ecology that flows around them.” She smiled. “I’ve been lecturing, haven’t I? I’m sorry. A bad habit left over from my time in the classroom.”
“No, it’s very interesting,” Andy said quickly. “I never paid attention to things like that.” He paused. “Except maybe when I was sorting out the good guys from the bad guys and trying to figure out who was likely to go squirrely on me on a routine stop.”
“So you were a police officer, then. I thought I recognized the signs.”
Andy grinned. “I guess it’s kind of obvious. But I never would have pegged you as an anthropologist.”
Pauline Patterson smiled. “Oh, we have our identifying symbols and mannerisms, I can assure you. It is obvious at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.” Her face fell. “Not that I have been in four or five years. I had a stroke, you see. Only they don’t call it a stroke any more. Now it’s a CVA.” She made a face. “As if changing the name made them any prettier.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Andy said with more emotion than he intended.
Dr. Patterson looked at him sharply. “You know about them?”
“My mother had one when I was in junior high. I pretty much took care of her until another one killed her six years later.” He stopped. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
Dr. Patterson waved that away with a flip of her good hand. “You’re not saying anything I don’t think about constantly.”
There was another awkward pause. Then Dr. Patterson looked down at the watch on her left wrist. “Well, I have to go. My daughter is meeting me out front.”
She reached out with her left hand and pulled the walker over in front of her.
Andy didn’t try to help her.
She shifted her grip and tried to pull herself erect. She got a few inches off the bench and sat back. She shifted her grip again and forced her body forward as she pulled with her left arm. This time she forced herself up.
She smiled at him. “Thank you, young man. I hope we meet again.”
“I hope so too, ma’am,” Andy said, and meant it.