Southside (9781608090563) Read Free Page A

pompous, Oxford-educated Doot continued, “he would never have been hired here. Glorifying gang members is what he did best. Killers. If there is any betting to do, I’ll wager he was smashed when they finally shot him.”
    Doot’s stinging appraisal of a wounded reporter was further proof to the reporters that he was not human, but rather a heartless cyborg for the paper’s equally heartless editor of California coverage, Harriet Tinder, a hard-working troll with no neck and the personality of dandruff, which she had in vast reserves, like the Kirkurk oil fields. Many people dismissed Doot simply as “Harriet’s bitch.” But, his timing was off today. The staff, which normally put up with his put-downs, was not in the mood this time.
    Carly Engstrom was first to speak. “Ted, the guy just got shot. Can you at least wait till he wakes up to write him up? And I believe the editor of this paper hired Mike, not Greg,” referring to Lyons’s cousin, Greg Mahtesian, also a
Times
reporter.
    Doot stared at Engstrom, but said nothing, silently calculating his revenge for that young hotshot calling him out in front of everyone. He’d just report her slutty little mouth to Harriet Tinder.
    Nona Yates ignored Doot. She’d been sober for twelve years and it was times like this she got nostalgic for her old self: a twenty-eight-year-old Jack Daniel’s-slugging, meth-snorting biker chick with keys to Angel clubhouses in Oakland and Ventura. Now, at forty, she had learned to ignore the ignorance. So she just muttered “mothercunter” and let it alone.
    To the relief of several, Doot waddled away.
    Nona started to walk away. “Betting on Mike. Shame on you.”
    â€œNona,” Goldstein called out, “Greg’s at the hospital. Michael’s going to be okay. No vital organs were hit. He got lucky. We got lucky. In a weird way, this might be a good thing for Mike. He’ll come back stronger than ever and be even more a legend on his streets. In a sick way, I’m almost envious.”
    â€œThat isn’t sick, Morty. That’s just stupid.” Nona shook her head.
    â€œNona,” Goldstein said. “When Mike hears about this, everyone betting on who shot him, us making a pool. Come on. It’ll be newspaper folklore. Lyons is going to love this story.”

CHAPTER 2
    Officers from LAPD’s Central Division had responded to the shooting. Central handled calls for service in the downtown area—north past Chinatown and the Dogtown projects to the warehouses near the Pasadena Freeway; south past the Staples Center, home of the Lakers, Clippers, and Kings to the Santa Monica Freeway; east past skid row and the artist’s lofts to the railroad tracks and the Los Angeles River; and west from the Figueroa Street high-rises to the Harbor Freeway.
    Central Division’s main responsibility was keeping a lid on the bubbling cauldron that was skid row, a twenty-block toilet of humans flushing down the drain, most of them going with the flow, only a handful struggling against the mighty, dirty tide. There was no master plan to clean up the area, just contain it, the way you let roaches roam a corner of an East St. Louis tenement hallway after giving up trying to kill them all. Let the bums run amok east of Spring Street, but keep them away from the Biltmore, the grande dame where old money still threw eighty-thousand-dollar weddings, away from the Water Grill and its sesame-crusted ahi tuna tartare and market price Santa Barbara spot prawns, away from Frank Gehry’s wavy Disney Concert Hall that drew in the Hancock Park crowd.
    But in the last several years, there has been a gradual subduing of the grim and colorful sidewalk culture that defined skid row. Though East Fifth Street and its tentacles still teemed with homeless, most of the cardboard condos were swept away. Long vacant office buildings were turned into lofts occupied by young,