Dead Dog's Tale

  The sun lorded over 6th Ave like a vengeful despot, wringing every ounce of moisture from the land until the streets themselves seemed ready to split apart, groaning beneath the weight of its oppression. The heat was a tangible force, pressing down on the world, stifling, unrelenting. South Tucson lay in a kind of hushed submission, the silence broken only by the distant wheeze of a struggling air conditioner and the occasional muttered curses of men who had forgotten what it meant to feel cool air on their skin. At two in the afternoon on a Sunday, the streets bore the mark of neglect, filth clinging to the cracked pavement like the remnants of a massacre. Bottles lay shattered, their jagged edges gleaming like the bared teeth of something long dead but still menacing. Needles sprawled in the gutters like the spines of a dead thing's husk, discarded, forgotten, waiting for the next poor bastard to step wrong. The ants were the only creatures that seemed to thrive in this misery,...

I took Razor at his word. I trusted that for him to get justifiable revenge on me, to stab me in the back and add that delicious twist of salt and lime to the wound, he would need to be helpful, for a little while at least. The Tiger Shark began to fill up with the usual riffraff and degenerates, and if I didn't want to run into anyone else with a grudge and a score to settle, I better hit the streets. Outside, Los Angeles roared with a life of its own; the heat wafted off into the open jaws of the darkening sky, turning to grit and grime that breathed on the pavement and the bodies of all who called this concrete jungle home. A cacophony of car horns, distant sirens, and the murmured conversations of the damned droned through the evening, not like the buzz of a beehive but a nest of hornets—one I was hell-bent on kicking. I wandered through alleys and avenues, a voyeur in a world where the line between sanity and madness blurred into insignificance. The alcohol was in full effect,...