CHAPTER 3--RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
June 1997
| W |
e booked out of there, fast as we fuckin' could fly, Queen. Hit the road in the ol' Dodge and headed north on U.S. 95 straight for Vegas. Just when I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, Louie noticed.
"We gotta turn back."
"Why? Wait. Don't tell me."
The back of the Dodge was empty. No shrill voice yelling at us, "Where the fuck are we going now?"
The sister. Must have gotten out while we were in the casino to go to the head, because she sure as hell wasn’t in the back of the Dodge.
"Well, isn't that too bad?"
Louie was all over my ass in no time.
"Louie, you don't understand man, I can't go back there. Everybody's going to be looking for me, even if it's just to question me. They know what I look like. And I can't fucking afford to play hero. I've told you that."
"Look I didn't tell you to shoot that guy. Besides, you don't understand, man, I fucking love her. I fucking love her, and if we don't go back I'll fucking kill myself."
"Louie, chill, this is just too fucking..."
The little twerp opened the door to the car and started climbing out.
"What the fuck are you doing? Get back in the car!"
"Turn it around," he screamed.
"Turn the car around. And I'll go find her. You just wait in the car. Park far away. I'm begging you. She's only 17. We can't just leave her there."
"She's a resourceful kid, Louie."
"Jack! Jack of HEARTS!"
Goddamn fucking kids these days.
Really, I guess I would have turned back eventually. It's just that a horrible scenario kept playing through my mind. Getting dragged into custody. A hearing.
A court martial. Media attention.
Having to relive that nightmare of thirty-years passed.
Ah, what are the chances?
Hung a U-turn.
"Why do you love her so much?" I asked. “She's such a bitch to you. Treats you like shit."
"I don't know. I can't explain it. No one has ever made me feel the way she does," he said without hesitation.
Well, this little girl sometimes was more trouble than she was worth, I swear, but Louie really dug her, even though she would have nothing to do with him romantically, that is. But if it weren't for Louie I was inclined to leave her sorry ass behind in Laughlin. I mean, Queen, she was only 17. Very unpredictable. A moving target. This wasn't the first time shit like this happened. And yet there we were, hurtling back to the scene of the crime to find our sugar-spun sister.
Of course, the media was out in full force. Like L.A. had its Camp O.J. outside the Downtown Criminal Courts building, here was Camp Psycho Boy. And the police were everywhere. I wasn't taking any chances. Got my Raider's Cap on. Got my sunglasses on. Hair pulled up inside in the pony tail inside the hat. Still, I wasn't leaving the fucking car. Louie had to do all the leg work. We tried to get back to where we had parked before, but it was all blocked off. Ended up we parked in between another van and a Nissan Pathfinder two casinos down, and I felt fairly safe waiting there. "OK, go find her and get her and let's get the fuck out of here," I ordered the one-armed bandit. "Pronto! Rapido!"
Louie vanished. Sitting there waiting, I decide to puff a Camel. Cracked the window down just a bit so I could blow the smoke out. Liked my tobacco, but when Louie was in the car he could be one fucking pain in the ass. The guy hated cigarettes. He'd smoke reefer now and then, but not cigarettes. Mostly because shortly after his little sister died, so did his father, from a massive heart attack. He had been a two-pack-a-day smoker.
And his mother couldn't handle losing the two of them so close together, and thus being stuck with an unpredictable juvenile one-armed-bandit son, she slipped away one night in the garage of their soon-to-be-foreclosed upon home, by shutting all the doors and starting up the Chevy. And so that's how Luis Carlos Mejia AKA Louie, the one-armed small-change bandit, at 13, became an orphan.
He went to live with his uncle in a mobile home in
Where in the hell was the kid?
