Hollywood Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

born and raised in the former East Germany and believed that
     Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, and those from other former Soviet-bloc countries were more reliable than Americans.
     He said, however, that he never hired Russians or Armenians, who were too ambitious and dangerous, too given to extortion
     and violence.
    But the only thing Polish about Jerzy Szarpowicz was his name, thanks to a Polish great-grandfather who’d immigrated to America
     from just outside of Radom, Poland. On one of his meetings with Tristan, Jakob Kessler admitted that he was sorry to learn
     that he hadn’t hired a real Pole, but he’d decided to give Jerzy a chance anyway.
    Until the older Jerzy, whose surname was Krakowski, failed to show up on a scheduled job and was not seen again, having two
     Jerzys in the group confused some of the other runners. So Krakowski was called Old Jerzy, and Szarpowicz New Jerzy. When
     Tristan inquired after the fate of Old Jerzy, Jakob Kessler simply said that his employment had been terminated.
    New Jerzy seldom spoke to Tristan, communicating with grunts and mumbles in response to the running commentary from the loquacious
     driver of the battered sixteen-year-old Chevy Caprice. Jerzy knew his partner only as Creole. When the car slowed and stopped
     at the next street mailbox with the flag up, Jerzy opened the box and scooped all of the outgoing mail through the open car
     window into his own lap.
    Tristan said, “Man, I knew a crew of tweakers that used to steal the blue mailboxes right off the street corners. Took some
     tools, a pickup truck, and lots of sweat, but they’d do it. Or they’d break into a mail truck and steal keys and mail. I knew
     one street whore that was blowin’ a mail carrier, and she made her own key from his and sold that to the tweakers.”
    “So what happened to the tweakers?” Jerzy muttered.
    “What always happens to tweakers? Their teeth fall out and they end up in the joint. They’re doin’ federal time. How about
     you? Smokin’ much crystal these days?”
    The fucking nerve of this dude, interrogating him, Jerzy thought, but he said, “I do pot and booze. And maybe I do a little
     crack or crystal once in a while.”
    “Mr. Kessler will let you go if he thinks you’re a tweaker,” Tristan said. “He don’t like tweakers.”
    Jerzy gave a noncommittal grunt while eyeing the multimillion-dollar homes on both sides as the car snaked its way along the
     residential streets overlooking Hollywood. As he saw it, the problem with stealing mail was that down in the flats, there
     weren’t street mailboxes. Most down there were attached to the walls of homes or businesses, and mail thieves would have to
     get out of the car and run to the box, taking a chance of being gang-tackled by some fucking neighborhood heroes or of giving
     some nosy neighbor enough time to take down their license number. That’s why they were cruising these fancy streets in the
     Hollywood Hills, but it was risky because the only people who drove crap cars like this one were Mexican gardeners or housekeepers.
     And since neither of them was a greaser, Jerzy didn’t like it a bit. Any cop who took a close look would jack them up for
     sure.
    Jerzy Szarpowicz had been in Los Angeles for twenty years, having drifted in at the age of nineteen after receiving a bad-conduct
     discharge from the US Navy for grand theft. He’d thought about returning home to Arkansas but decided that with his dicey
     discharge and the several runins he’d had with LAPD narcs that got him three trips to L.A. County Jail for selling meth and
     crack, he wouldn’t even be able to get a shitty construction job like his father and both his brothers. Besides, he liked
     the climate in L.A.
    What he didn’t like were all the goddamn nonwhite foreigners who lived in the city, and what he especially didn’t like was
     this dude next to him, who said Creole was his “nom de guerre” instead of just his