Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

this for us. You laughed when you saw her picture on my phone. Was she one of your dancers at some point?”

There was silence, then a small, sinister laugh, and I heard Ada sigh as if she was giving in.

“I was sitting on Ventura trying to get to a meeting with an associate of mine,” she said. “This was maybe six months ago. Traffic was backed up. I mean, it was at a standstill. I’m sitting in the back of my Lincoln—I got Fred driving—and I’m looking out. We’re stuck under this freeway overpass and there are these pigeon nests all clustered up under the concrete ledge. Dozens of them. Shit dripping everywhere. Feathers. Really nasty, nasty business.”

“Okay,” I said.

“While I’m sitting there, a girl gets out of a cab in front of us,” Ada said. “Pops the back door and walks over to where the wall is all filthy with pigeon crap. She takes her hoodie off—her own damn hoodie, that she’s wearing—and she starts chasing around this goddamn pigeon that’s minding its own business there on the ground. I mean, holy shit. I’d never seen anything like it. She’s trying to catch this disgusting little bird and it’s squeaking and flapping. Nobody else could believe it, either. We were sort of a captive audience, I guess you’d say—all the other people in the cars. Dudes start honking their horns, yelling, hollering.”

“Did she get the bird?” I smiled, seeing where this was going.

“Yeah,” Ada laughed. “She got it all right. Snatched it up like, uh, like a crocodile you see on the nature channel grabbing a bird off the side of a lake. She’d done it before, you could tell. I was so curious I rolled down my window. I said, ‘Hey bitch! What the fuck you think you’re doing? You going to eat that thing?’ I mean, I couldn’t understand it—woman has got enough money for a cab but she’s taking a skyrat home for dinner. So she comes over to the window of my car to show me the damned bird all wrapped up in her hoodie like a newborn baby.”

I laughed.

“She says it’s a juvenile,” Ada said. “Baby pigeon fallen from the nest. It’s been blown around by cars going by. It’s bleeding, hungry, dehydrated. She shows me how you can tell it’s a baby from the feathers and the beak and all that. This bitch is giving me a nature-channel lecture right there on the side of the road. She says if she leaves the bird there it’ll starve to death or get hit by a car, or a hawk will come down from where they sit up on the light poles along the freeway and eat it. Turns out pigeons are terrible parents. They won’t go down and help it.”

I listened, watching the night.

“I tried to tell this girl,” Ada said. “‘Honey, that’s what happens in life. Birds fall from nests and get eaten alive or run over or whatever the fuck. They suffer and they starve. That’s life.’ And you know what she says? She says, ‘Not this one. Not on my watch.’”

I heard two clunking sounds, imagined Ada putting her boots up on the desk in her office.

She continued. “So, anyway, she turns away and tries to get back in the cab she came out of. Well, the cab driver is having none of it. He’s yelling about lice and disease and infection. So I called the girl and I told her to get in my car, and me and Fred gave her a ride to Sunset.”

“That’s hilarious,” I said. “You had that bird in your car?”

“Oh, I had the car taken away and crushed right after,” Ada said. “Shame. I liked that car. But I ain’t riding around in something that’s had some sick fucking vermin bird in it. I had Mike burn all the clothes I was wearing at the time, and Fred’s too.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I got body lice in juvie once. Fat girl like Sneak brought it in. Everybody got it. It was hell.”

“No, I mean why did you give Dayly a ride?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffed. “Crazy ho amused me, I guess.”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you recognized the fact that if someone had said ‘Not on my watch’ about you when you were a baby bird, then maybe your life would have been different,” I said.

There was silence.

“Are you kidding me?” Ada said eventually.

“What? You think I’m wrong?”

“I know you’re wrong,” she said. “I’m not some scabby fucking highway pigeon who needs rescuing. I’m one of the hawks. I’m a bird of prey, bitch.”

I felt the smile drift from my face.

“You tell anyone that story or your bullshit backyard psychoanalysis of it and I’ll cut you,” she said.

“I won’t,” I answered, but she had already hung up on me.

Dear Dayly,

You’re right, I do get a lot of letters from crackpots and weirdos, but “Are you my daddy?” is a subject that had not, until your letter, appeared among their writings. Regardless of the answer, your letter was a breath of fresh air in what is for the most part a monotonous stream of public grumblings and pleadings. Most people write to tell me how awful my crimes were, particularly the Inglewood massacre, in case the idea hadn’t occurred to me. Rarely if ever are these letters from actual victims of the crime; mostly grief tourists wanting to vent their supposed pain. Much of what I’ve received lately has been people writing to see if the $3 million you mentioned was mine, or if indeed there are other caches of my stolen money buried across the state. The find has tripled my mail intake.

It’s true, your mother Emily Lawlor and I had a brief thing around 2000. She was a bit of a young punk. Smart-ass, but sweet about it. People called her “Sneak” back then because she was real light-fingered, but she mainly stole to support what