On The Grind

Chapter 6

Mita never smiled, never changed her expression as she asked questions about my background and typed the answers on a tattered, throwback IBM Selectric. She filled out the top of the first form, then rolled the paper down and typed some more information on the bottom of the sheet. She never turned on the computer that sat on her desk; never typed in the secret password for POLITE; never read about my career-ending felony case-tampering charge.

"Fill the rest of that out and sign it," was all she said and scowled at me as if I were week-old bird plop cooking on the hood of her car. I went to the table across the room to do the work, but as I looked back, I caught her sneaking a peek at my ass. Gotcha, Mita.

After filling out the report and smiling at Mita s Aztec stone-face, I left.

Next, I drove around Haven Park looking for a suitable place to stay. I still needed employment before I could look for an apartment or motel room to lease in the area. Unfortunately, the hotels that I passed looked pretty Third World. I picked one called the Haven Park Inn, which was a cut above the rest. If things worked out down here, I'd give it a try.

I continued to drive around the one-square-mile city. It was blocks and blocks of the same thing. Very little money had been wasted on landscaping. The business streets like Lincoln and Pacific were wall-to-wall one-story markets, stores or auto body shops, all pretty low-end. The residential neighborhoods were mostly bungalow-type houses with Spanish arches and barred windows, painted in traditional Mexican hues, bright, but also strangely depressing.

I passed Club A Fuego. It was only eleven o'clock in the morning and there were very few cars in the parking lot. The nightclub was located on Willow Street and as Alonzo had told me, it was huge, a gymnasium-sized red barn. In Spanish a fuego means "on fire," but it can also mean "cool."

The parking lot could easily hold two hundred cars. There was a porte cochere that shaded the entry. I saw a Haven Park police car parked under the overhang in the shade. A uniformed police officer was leaning against the front fender of his unit smoking a big black cigar. He didn't even look at me as I sharked through the parking lot and out the side entrance.

I think in all the years I've been a cop I've never before seen an American police officer in uniform leaning against the fender of his patrol car smoking a big cigar. It was like a bad Mexican movie down here.

I left A Fuego in my rearview mirror and headed through Vista. I passed the ritzy Bicycle Club Casino that sat on the lip of the freeway. A very impressive structure with a neon sign that advertised POKER amp; PAI GOW. Then I drove around Fleetwood.

After about two hours, I had a pretty good idea of the layout of both towns. There was very little to distinguish them from one another. The Los Angeles River ran through the east end of Fleetwood and then through Haven Park. The river was a sludge-filled mess that afforded little esthetic relief from the relentless feel of poverty.

Once, as I was passing back into Haven Park, I thought I caught sight of a tan Chevy four-door sedan tailing me. It looked like some kind of cop plain-wrap with blackwalls. I slowed clown, trying to see inside, but it immediately turned off.

One other thing caught my eye as I cruised. The Hispanic gang that was operating clown here was a branch of the large and powerful 18th Street gang. The clique in Haven Park called itself the 18th Street Locos. They had spray-painted almost every available wall or overpass with 18-L. Agent Love had said that the 18th Street gang were the new gun and drug players in L. A., moving their product into our city from criminal warehouse towns they'd constructed south of the border. The flow of new Russian machine guns had been so relentless it had finally captured the interest of Homeland Security.

The Locos were a powerful inner-city gang, so I wasn't surprised to see their graffiti. But there was some other tag art that did surprise me. Intermixed with all the I8-L'S were several freshly painted sscc graffiti tags. I knew that stood for the South Side Compton Crips. Compton was a few miles south. It struck me as strange and faintly ominous that black gangsters from Compton had started tagging walls in a predominantly Hispanic territory like Haven Park.

What's going on with that? I wondered.