The Dead Janitors Club by Jeff Klima Page B

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        Leslie drove a little hatchback. Though she was officially a police officer, she wore civilian clothes and did office work, like Dirk. While I was en route to Dirk's office, he had briefed her on the address and location. She knew the area well. I tagged along behind her, having to race to make lights that she blazed through on yellow.
        I hoped she wasn't attempting to set me up for a traffic ticket as part of some scummy police sting. The sheriff's coroner for Orange County had just been charged with money laundering and bribery offenses, so it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. As she raced along, her car blended in with the weathered vehicles of Santa Ana—plain, simple cars that didn't have a lot of cash invested in them for extras like rust proofing.
        Her car guided me down streets that got smaller and smaller, past houses that were situated closer and closer together, and finally she turned onto an impossibly narrow street where her tiny car sailed along. In the truck I had to creep slowly, cautious to not slam my side-view mirrors into the beat-down cars polluting both sides of the pockmarked asphalt strip.
        Even I, an ignorant, small-town white kid, knew where I was. It was a place you didn't really believe existed when you grew up in a pleasant suburb, a place that for many in this country's urban areas was just another fact of life. I was in the hallowed stomping grounds of rap culture. I was in "the ghetto."
        Obviously I was, and largely still am, an ignorant, sheltered individual from a place where people leave their doors unlocked at night and don't worry too much about their kids running around late at night. For those of you like me, "the ghetto" is that part of any given city where the poorest of the city's inhabitants congregate and call it home.
        In Eureka our idea of a ghetto was the trailer park. We knew the idea of a ghetto, and that was what we could perceptibly link it to. But we were wrong, because a ghetto is something so much more than a hamlet of poor folk. "The ghetto" has shifted to being something more sinister, a place built largely on fear and mistrust. For many in this day and age, being from the ghetto is a thing of dangerous pride.
        Ghetto culture has its own way of communicating, from the graffiti tags that look like scribbles to most of us, to the clothes, to the tattoos. There are signs all around, and if you don't decipher them correctly, you could find yourself in real trouble, innocent visitor or not.
        Leslie parked her car in the driveway of a one-story, tan-colored house with a three-foot-high rock wall built around the property. On top of the rock wall, linked metal spikes jutted skyward, flecked with white paint to form a gate. Rust revealed itself through wherever the paint had chipped off.
        I had no other place to park, and not knowing the appropriate rules of conduct for where I was, I was forced to stop the big truck in the middle of the street. I was frustrated that Dirk had once again sent me out alone to do the work that would net me a third of a half, whether he helped me or not. But he was a sheriff, and there wasn't a whole lot I could say to that. Foolishly, I hoped that someone would take offense to the truck being stopped there and firebomb it…while I was outside of it, anyway.
        Making sure to lock the truck, I pushed the clicker on the key ring multiple times so that the alarm-activated beep would sound out as a warning to the ne'er-do-wells that my truck was definitely locked and off-limits.
        I walked up the short driveway, noting a manually operated gate with equally sharp fixtures on it that could be rolled across the driveway and padlocked. The front windows of the house had bars on them, and if the family had anything of value, it was not in plain sight.
        I passed the car on my way to meeting Leslie at the front door. The back window was gone,