City of the Sun

by David Levien

  One downside of the program: He had so much damn energy, near aggression, that he was practically bugging. Have faith, baby, he told himself, a change is gonna come.

  Then the phone rang like sweet relief.

  “Hello?”

  “Oscar.”

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Anything,” Rooster said, meaning it, because anything would get him out of his apartment.

  “Tad.”

  “You want me to do that?” Rooster was not hesitant, only surprised. Tad, the pussy, had quit, because he didn’t have a taste for the work anymore and because he was so whipped sick in love with his dancer whore. Not to mention the crank. He’d screwed up the operation and had now made him and Riggi vulnerable.

  There was a quiet static on the line and no reply to his question.

  “You know where he lives these days?”

  “Yeah,” Rooster said, picturing the cheap-ass apartment building just beyond Broad Ripple. Unlike his own dump, which at least didn’t pretend to be anything else, Tad’s place was supposed to be for the upwardly mobile professional type.

  “Only some fucked-up yuppies would live in a place like this,” he’d told Tad on the grand tour. Weak-sister Tad had looked like he was ready to cry at that one.

  “What’s your time frame?” Rooster asked.

  “Yesterday,” Riggi answered. “Yesterday would’ve been ideal, in fact. Before some guy’d come around asking him questions.” Riggi’s words brought a cold stab of fear racing through Rooster’s chest that was quickly chased by a hot bolt of anger. Oh, he’d take good motherfucking care of Tad.

  “What kind of questions? What kind of guy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. We’ll talk later, in person … if you can do this.”

  “Do this, man?” Rooster said, a luxurious feeling of loose power rolling down through his limbs like syrup. “It’s already done.”

  Rooster was half embarrassed at the glow he knew was on his cheeks at Riggi’s asking him to do this important thing. It thrilled him deeply, that he couldn’t deny. It was a thing you couldn’t ask just anybody to do, nor could just anybody do it. All the same, thrill or no thrill, it surely needed to be done because the idea of going back to jail for a long stretch was unacceptable. Rooster didn’t mind his little apartment all of a sudden, compared with the alternative. He climbed up into a small crawl space at the top of his closet. The apartment wasn’t so much a cage now as it was a secret headquarters, a base of operations. As bad as the waiting had become, things could be a hell of a lot worse. But he wasn’t about to let that happen. Rooster found the hidden plastic box by feel and brought it down. Inside the box, wrapped in an old rag-wool sock, was a stainless Taurus .38. He filled it with soft points, set himself up with two speed loaders, did seventy push-ups, fifty squats, took a piss, and looked at himself in the mirror for a long, centering moment. Then he put on a windbreaker that wasn’t heavy enough for the weather but had good pockets, shut the lights, and stepped out.

  Tad pressed a bag of frozen Tater Tots to his throbbing shin and tried to control his breathing. He meant to let it out in a calming, hissing growl the way he’d learned in the lone Pilates class he’d taken three months back. He’d gone to the studio after hearing it was where Michelle trained. She wasn’t there that day, and by the end of his session Tad was wringing wet with sweat and felt clumsy and stupid. The breath came out a warbling whine. He was scared. He looked around his place and considered running. He had seven hundred in the bank, but he could only pull three hundred from the ATM at one time. The dipshit Indian branch manager had convinced him on this limit when he opened the account.

  “This way, if you lose the card, someone can only take three hundred before the card is canceled,” he’d said, the push-start, cow-loving bastard. Tad was sorry he even had the bank account and didn’t have the cash on hand. He’d needed to open it, though, when he went on the payroll at the Lady. He had a check coming to him in two days, five hundred fifty after withholding. The timing was a bitch. He’d be able to make it a lot farther and for longer if he had that money. He got up and paced the room in a limping gait, wishing he hadn’t finished the last of his stash when he smoked up before work. He grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey from the kitchen cabinet and took a pull that made him shiver. He limped over and sat down on the couch and looked at the phone, thinking of calling Michelle. Things had been going well with her, small steps, a little conversation here, a look there, and he hated to rush it, but maybe he should call her and ask her to go with him. He felt in his pocket for the hand-carved and-painted wooden key chain from Ciudad del Sol, La Frontera. He’d given her a matching one. She didn’t know it, but he felt the closeness in their both having the same one. He picked up the phone and dialed her. Rudy from the club, in a rare moment of generosity, had slid her home number Tad’s way several weeks back.

  Tad tried to control his breathing again. Failed. He wondered what he would say should Michelle answer. “Hey, ‘Chelle, it’s Tad. … I know we’ve only been friends around work, but you wanna road trip with me?” It sounded fucking lame even to him. After four rings, her machine picked up. Her voice, low and sexy, asking for a message while Ryan Adams played in the background. Tad was almost relieved that she didn’t answer. He hung up and cradled the Wild Turkey and wondered what to do next.

  Sitting surveillance was a mental exercise in calm focus and patience, and knocking a guy around was no way to set up for it. Behr sat still behind the wheel staring up at the lit window that was Ford’s apartment, coming down from the electric high the bracing had put him on. It was impossible, he had found, for him to experience physical violence without the adrenaline jag by-product he called the “come-down.” To combat it he reached across the front seat and took a Red Bull from the little Igloo that was always stocked with them. It was warm and syrupy, but he downed it and set his mind to the task: watching.

  Behr switched on the police scanner he kept in his car. It brought back the old days as it fought off boredom. He looked up at the window while he listened to calls.

  No matter how much, Behr talked to himself, which was another thing he did to focus himself and pass the time on stakeout, you never get used to it. It was the same with death, he thought, but didn’t say it aloud. No matter how much exposure to it, for however long, he never became immune to the hollowness in the pit of his stomach brought on by a dead body. He thought back to his first week on the force, when he was just a kid. He worked Meridian Park then, a nice, quiet section that wasn’t known for its action. But he’d encountered two dead bodies within that first week on the job. On his second night there was a motorcycle versus an eighteen-wheeler motor-vehicle casualty. Behr and his training officer, Gene Sasso, a portly vet nearing his pension, were first on the scene. The biker was dead when they got there. His head and legs were twisted at impossible angles, and he was barefoot, his boots blown off and strewn around the blacktop. The truck driver sat on the side of the road, his head in his hands, sobbing.

  “Check him for ID,” Sasso commanded.

  Behr swallowed and reached into the rider’s back pocket. He had the momentary sensation that the biker would animate and grab his hand to stop the invasion. But the biker was through moving. The man was dead weight that barely rippled when Behr pulled the wallet free. Meat was the word that crossed his young mind. As well as the disquieting sensation that everyone, even he, was headed for that state eventually.

  On his fifth day, a call came in from a distraught woman. Her boyfriend had been unreachable for three days. Behr and Sasso were sent to force entry into his third-floor apartment and found the guy, a twenty-six-year-old white male, draped over the arm of his couch. He had overdosed, a strange occurrence in a nice neighborhood where hard drugs weren’t supposed to be. Young Officer Behr learned that day that all the fluids drain out of the body in death, creating a vile pooling. The body was rigor mo
rtised in its awkward position, and they couldn’t figure out how he would be carried down the narrow staircase.

  “Break him,” said the seventy-year-old coroner when he arrived on the scene. “Straighten him out.”

  “Sir?” Behr asked.

  “Step on the joints, they’ll give.”

  Behr rolled the corpse to the floor and did as he was told, as only the young are able. It was like crushing corrugated cardboard refrigerator boxes underfoot. Sasso hadn’t even helped. It was a question of seniority, youth being served. The older you got, the closer you came to death, the more you wanted to avoid it, Behr figured.

  Eight months later Behr was transferred to Haughville, where death was a much more frequent occurrence. He never did get too comfortable with it though. He just learned to put the thought of it away as the body bags were zipped shut.

  Rooster arrived on Tad’s street and drove it once at speed. The maroon El Camino wouldn’t attract any attention in this part of town. Still, after checking the building, Rooster planned on parking a few blocks away and hoofing it over in the shadows so that no one would notice his plates. He wasn’t sure how he’d actually do the thing. Maybe he’d push his way through the lobby door, then knock at Tad’s apartment. Tad wouldn’t be expecting him and in his surprise, since Rooster wasn’t a stranger, would probably open the door. Or Rooster could buzz from the lobby and call Tad down for some spurious reason. He could even call him with the cloned cell phone he’d picked up a week earlier. First he wanted to get the lay of the land, though, and even as he passed Tad’s building at twenty-five, thirty miles an hour, something felt wrong to him. He didn’t know exactly what he felt. Maybe he was just jumpy. He made three consecutive rights and wound up at the head of the block once again. He killed the lights coming around the last corner and rolled alongside the curb, shutting the engine. From his position Rooster could just make out Tad’s building a few hundred yards away. There were a dozen dormant cars dotting the street between him and it. None of them were patrol cars or seemed to be unmarked police vehicles. There were no people out at all. An instinct kept Rooster in his car, though, slouched low in the driver’s seat, his fingers drumming lightly on the wheel. He waited. Fifteen minutes. Forty-five. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but he didn’t want to hurry, either. It would be an act of extreme ego to walk straight into that building carrying a gun, and ego, Rooster knew, was dangerous. Better to be smart, he thought.

  It had been five and a half hours and Behr looked ahead to his next move. No one was coming to meet with Ford. It seemed unlikely that Ford was on his way out to meet anyone, either. Behr’s pressure tactic was a bust. It had been a slow night for the Indy P.D. as well. A few DUI arrests earlier; an alarm response at a Hooters, but no one apprehended at the scene; a speeder resisting; domestics; the usual drunk and disorderlies outside the bars on Lafayette. Then the low static of the scanner was punctured by a call.

  Units respond. Eagle Creek Park. It was a recreational area ten miles northwest of the city with golf courses, boating, archery ranges, and crosscountry jogging trails.

  Human remains discovered by a dog walker. Advanced decomposition. Appears to be Caucasian youth. M.E. in route. …

  Icy pinpricks ran up Behr’s arms. He turned over the car motor and jerked it into gear.

  Son of a bitch. Rooster jolted aware at the sound of the engine. He might’ve been in a heavy-lidded state of rest and missed it, but he was almost sure that no one had just gotten into a car. He hadn’t heard a door slam. No, the driver starting the Olds down the street near Tad’s building had been in it. For a long time. It didn’t seem like a coincidence. The son of a bitch was staking out Tad. Rooster had the idea to drive down the street quick, box the guy in, and do him. But he resisted. Then the car lurched away from the curb and once again the street fell silent. After several hours of stiffening waiting, Rooster felt a charged looseness instantly return to his limbs. His breath came in knifing jabs and he worked to slow it down. He touched the gun handle in his right jacket pocket and felt the outline of the speed loaders in his left. He considered moving his car off the block and walking back to Tad’s place.

  Fuck it, he decided. He’d already been sitting there long enough to have been ID’d by anybody looking. He reached behind his seat for a faded ball cap and pulled it down low to his eyes. He exhaled hard and stepped out into the cool morning air. His feet hardly made a sound as he walked down the sidewalk. He looked around as he neared the building. Not a soul was in sight. He approached the lobby door and tried it. It opened right up with a slight rattle. The latch bolt had rusted to the faceplate in the unlocked position. Good luck for Rooster, bad luck for Tad.

  Rooster went up the stairs toward Tad’s apartment door. He’d only been there once, but the building layout, everything, seemed familiar to him, like he’d lived there his whole life. He thought about whoever had been around to the Lady questioning Tad, wondered if it was the same guy who was outside. Probably was, he figured. Even dumb-ass Tad would be on his guard after being talked to, Rooster realized, and decided he’d better go into the apartment unannounced. He walked quietly down the hall and reached Tad’s door. It was cheap hollow-core, painted builder’s white, with six fake inlaid panels. It had a brass knob lock with no extra dead bolt. That’s just penny wise, Tad, Rooster thought, as he held his breath and listened at the door. He heard some muffled sounds, a rustling from inside. He focused on a spot a few inches to the right of the knob. He flexed his knees and felt his thighs, thick with new muscle.

  Tad had reached the dregs of the Wild Turkey and at some point below the label had taken to crying. It was a quiet weeping that had no real direction. The air in the apartment had grown stagnant and close, and not sure what to wear and what to pack, he had taken off his T-shirt and jeans and was down to his skivvies and socks. He touched his stomach, lapping over his underwear band, and felt wretched and cried some more. He was spun out. All his decisions during the past year or so had led him here. Maybe his poor judgment went back even further than that. He had done bad things for money, and he hadn’t quit soon enough. Selling the bikes had been plain stupid, and not even that profitable. The smoking didn’t improve matters, and he hadn’t tried to quit that soon enough, either. Now that he had to leave, he could admit to himself that things at the club — with Michelle — weren’t going to work out any better than the rest of it.

  “I need help,” Tad said aloud, his voice sounding weird and pathetic to his ears. He wasn’t religious. He didn’t go to church like Mr. Riggi, and he didn’t know how to pray. But something about speaking aloud felt right. It wasn’t talking to himself. He just felt someone, Jesus, was listening. He put down the bottle and moved out of the chair onto his knees. He moaned as his tender shin met the floor and took his weight.

  “I need help,” he said again. “Please. I want to change my life. I know I can be good.” He thought for a moment, unsure of how to continue, of what words to say. He wasn’t exactly waiting for a sign, just a thread to follow. Then there was a loud bang and the front door jumped. A current of fear shot through Tad’s chest. There was another bang. A bright piece of brass, part of the lock, broke free and flew through the air. The door swung open, moving through its arc in slow motion, and revealed a stocky man in a cap and a windbreaker.

  Rooster, Tad realized after a second, all muscled up. He saw himself there in his underwear and with a tear-stained face. Embarrassment flooded over his skin like hot water.

  “Rooster,” he said aloud, seeing his old partner’s lip curl up in a smirk. Then Rooster’s hand went into his pocket and came out holding a pair of scissors. He pointed them at Tad. It’s not scissors. Tad’s mind struggled to catch up. Gun. He saw fire.

  EIGHTEEN

  BEHR ROLLED PAST the entry booth, still unmanned due to the early hour, and drove into Eagle Creek Park. He followed the road around the lake until he saw a string of official vehicles, cruisers, unmarked cars, ambulances, and the M.E.�
�s meat wagon. A young uniform waved Behr to a stop. He put down his window.

  “Officer.”

  “How ya doin’?” the kid asked. They’d never met, but he read Behr as on the job or retired.

  “Frank Behr,” he said, sticking his hand out the window and shaking with the officer. “Who’s controlling the scene?”

  “Detective Petrie for now.”

  “Don’t know him. Is Cale here?” Cale was a lieutenant, a veteran Behr went way back with.

  “Vacation, I think.”

  “Who’s down from the coroner’s?”

  “Gannon.”

  Behr smiled. “Good. She’ll vouch for me.”

  The kid shrugged, showing fatigue, and pointed. “Pull your vehicle onto the shoulder.” Behr did it and got out.

  “Have someone radio back that you’re cleared or I’ll have to come find you.”

  Behr nodded, then tried to make his last question sound breezy. “Captain Pomeroy’s on his way, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Behr made his way to the scene at a more than casual pace.