On the Nickel Read Online Free PDF Page A

room doors could be locked. And they all accepted the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s certificates. He tried never to cross swords with the HSA when they wanted or needed a building, but once in a while it happened.
    The door from the elevator opened abruptly and Steve McCall pushed into the garden. The man was the size of a small island off the coast, wearing an Ignore Previous Hat baseball cap pulled down over long gold ringlets that made him look like a chubby General Custer. He was followed discreetly by his partner, the much shorter but more volatile Rice Thibodeaux, his eyes almost always as wild as a small prey-animal startled by a predator.
    Vartabedian wondered, not for the first time, about the fates that had brought the two of them together with him, but whenever he needed a potentially profitable building cleared of its recalcitrant last few tenants, Custer and Psycho were the go-to guys, and he made sure they could not be tracked back to him.
    ‘Hey, Mose!’ McCall called. ‘Why don’t you take over this here place and fix up the shitty garden? And fire that Spic at the desk. I’m tired of watching him roll his eyes at me like I’m nuts to wanna see a Japanese garden.’
    The other one, Rice Thibodeaux, didn’t greet Vartabedian. Instead he brought out a switchblade, for no apparent reason, popped it open startlingly as he walked behind McCall and then stopped beside the hump bridge and cut a three-inch-long swipe straight down his forearm. He waited, letting the blood run down his arm to drip off the webs of his fingers on to the clay path. ‘Say the word,’ Thibodueax announced. ‘Anyone is history.’
    Vartabedian needed to keep his spirits up, and the way to do that right then was not to acknowledge to himself the weirdness of these characters in his employ.
    ‘Be cool, guys. Forget this place. I do not want it. Sit with me on the bench. I have a job. You want to do something about that cut, man.’
    ‘What cut?’ Thibodeaux said.
    Around them downtown went on honking and making the noises of its tires over a loose manhole cover and boiling off the other white noise that permeated the Japanese garden like a fog of unease. The derelict garden had obviously been designed at one time to bring peace, but it was losing the battle – maybe that’s why they’d given up tending it, Vartabedian thought.
    McCall sat down, but Thibodeaux never would. The short man stood in front of them, dripping blood on to the path as if it were of no consequence. ‘Mexicans,’ Thibodeuax said, for no apparent purpose. ‘They either work on their cars or piss against walls.’
    ‘Forget that,’ Vartabedian said. ‘I’ve taken an option on the Fortnum Hotel over on San Julian, by Sixth, but there’s a half-dozen tenants still residing on SRO chits, and I’ve got to get them out in order to rebuild.’
    ‘Do we get to fuck them up?’ Thibodeaux asked quickly.
    ‘Jesus, man, no. It makes things too complicated. Listen to McCall. Just convince them it’s better for all of us if they move out voluntarily. A little tiny threat is OK, but that’s it. I’ll pay them twice the vacate costs, and I’ll even find them other hotels nearby. Good ones, and if I have to, I’ll subsidize the SRO rent that they have to pay in the new place.’
    ‘This is just like the last job at the Globe,’ McCall said. ‘No sweateroo, V. We huff and we puff and we tell them the wolf is at the door. But the wolf is not you; you’re just the wolf’s friend, or maybe not at all.’
    ‘Stephen, I am the friend of the tenants. You’re a genius. No violence, please, gents. I mean that.’ Vartabedian gave them each a wad of twenties – a thousand dollars for what McCall had called their green-’em-up money.
    Vartabedian knew that the building could be cleared out expeditiously with a little discretion – he’d done it a dozen times. The elevators became unusable. The heating system failed. The water became unreliable.