The red-faced man in the picture mocked him. Whatever he was laughing at didn’t matter. Ray could hear the coughing howls through the picture. The disdain.
“Now what?” Boom-Boom asked.
He glowered on the bench in the corner. When he had curved the Jeep onto the 101, bypassing the downtown exits, Ray didn’t say a word. The beer barrel sneered the whole two hours through the desolate wasteland of desert sprawl back to Los Angeles, never communicating more than a grunt, occasionally checking his phone for text messages. Glances at the phone constantly cut Ray’s attempts at small talk short, punctuated with a scarred fist slamming into the hard plastic of the dashboard. If it had been a late model car built by another company, Boom-Boom probably would have put his hand through the electronic
