The Famous and the Dead ch-6

by T. Jefferson Parker

  10

  Late the next morning Bradley stood before Mrs. Perez’s sixth-grade class at Lincoln Elementary School up in the Antelope Valley, north of L.A. This was high desert, where a constant wind whistled through the housing tracts and blew flotillas of plastic bags against the windward walls and fences. Antelope Valley was serviced by LASD’s Lancaster Station, and was considered a Siberian assignment by most deputies. Bradley looked out a window at the flat brown grass of the playground as he tried to answer the question.

  “Well, I’ve never shot anyone on duty because I’ve never had to,” he lied. “The goal of any good deputy is to do his or her job without resorting to force.”

  “What if someone pulls a gun on you?”

  “You waste ’em!” offered a skinny boy.

  “No, you try to talk to them,” said Bradley. He wanted very much to agree with the student. You can’t talk to a surprised kidnapper with a gun in his hand. “Circumstances change quickly and you have to keep up. Things get complicated fast. It’s like a game. Like. . I don’t know. I’m not being clear here. Sergeant Padilla, maybe you can weigh in on that one.”

  Bad verb choice, he thought. Padilla easily tipped the scales at two hundred. She glanced at him. His headache was back. The room on this cool morning was heated to what felt like ninety degrees. The children were alert and attentive and annoying. Padilla droned on about appropriate use of force and limits of restraint and last option and the like. Bradley watched a dirt devil unravel across a field. He imagined Erin in a Max Azria dress years ago when they’d ditched a party down in Baja and taken a midnight stroll on a beach and made love standing up in a sand dune.

  “What if they pull a knife on you?”

  “Don’t mess with no blade,” said the skinny boy again. “That’s what my daddy says.”

  “He’s a wise man,” said Bradley.

  “Not wise enough to stay outta prison!”

  Bradley thought of Erin now, her middle distended, just days away from making him the proudest father on earth. How could he have fallen so far, from a world in which Erin loved him even in the sand dunes of Baja, to one where she was scarcely able to look at him without pity or anger or amazement at his self-absorption and greed? He felt cursed and singled out for tragedy. And worse yet, unlucky.

  “I’m sure he’ll be out of the can soon,” he said, then looked at Sergeant Padilla. “Sergeant, I’m going to take a quick break. Just get a sip of water outside.”

  “You stay right here, Deputy Jones. We are just about done.”

  Padilla spoke in the cheerfully condescending tones of some elementary school teachers. She covered the three signs of drug and alcohol abuse, pedestrian safety on the wide new boulevards of the Antelope Valley, and dealing with suspicious adults. Near the end of the period she told the students about Maslow’s pyramid of self-actualization, where once your basic needs are met you can then be free to strive for excellence. And a career in the LASD, she pointed out, was a wonderful base on which to build your life.

  Outside in the soon-so-be-busy hallway Padilla stood before Bradley and launched a finger into his chest. “I don’t care what kind of a celebrity you think you are. I’m a superior, and when I say jump, you ask how high. Got it?”

  “Ma’am yes ma’am.”

  “And quit staring out the windows. You’re worse than the children.”

  • • •

  After shift he waited in a bar off Highway 395 in Adelanto. It was the nicest place in town, though still a hellhole, he thought. From the booth he could see the old motel still boarded up, its sign lying in the rubble of broken asphalt and bottle glass that was once a parking lot. The wind had blown the tumbleweeds up against the security fence and they looked like they were trying to get inside. He looked up at the sign by the highway: WELCOME TO ADELANTO, CITY OF UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES. He caught his reflection in a window and noted that his hapkido-toned shoulders and arms were flattered by the uniform shirt, but his eyes looked heavy and dead. The STAR Unit, he thought. Maslow’s pyramid. What happened to my life?

  Mike Finnegan came in a few minutes later, dressed for golf in a lemon yellow shirt, green pants, saddle shoes, and a red newsboy cap with PGA stitched in gold. He had a white sweater tied around his neck against the high desert chill. He came to the booth with a smile on his face and the sound of his cleats clicking on the floor.

  “This is the first time you’ve actually invited me anywhere since your wedding,” he said as he climbed into the booth. Mike was a short, stout man. He took off his hat and Bradley saw that Mike had again changed his hair from its usual red to black. “After all these years! It makes me very happy.”

  “I’m not happy. I’m at the end of my tether. All tethers.”

  “Talk to me.”

  They ordered drinks from a wispy blonde with tired eyes and no smile. She was chewing something as she took their orders and still chewing it when she brought the drinks back and set them out. Two men came in and looked at everything in the room except Bradley. The Blands, he thought. CIB’s trusted watchdogs. He waved at them and they looked briefly his way.

  “Friends?” asked Mike.

  “Department watchers. Criminal Investigation Bureau.”

  “No wonder you’re not happy.”

  “They’re just a small part of my trouble. Although when I caught them loitering near my home I felt like shotgunning them both.” He said this loudly so they could hear. They ignored him and took a table on the far other side of the room. Bradley marched over and slid a fiver into the jukebox and chose the six loudest, fastest songs he could find.

  Back at the table he sat and looked into Finnegan’s optimistic blue eyes.

  “I am here to listen and help,” Mike said.

  Bradley gave a heated description of CIB’s treatment of him-the endless interviews and accusations, the watchers near his home in Valley Center, the watchers shadowing him while he was on patrol, the CIB prying into his banking, tax, and phone records, the threat of a polygraph, his new assignment to the STAR Unit.

  “STAR Unit?”

  “Success Through Awareness and Resistance. It’s for students. It’s actually a good program,” he said without conviction. “Keeps the kids from being taken advantage of.”

  “That’s important.”

  Bradley sipped his beer and looked out the dusty window at the traffic moaning up and down 395. And of course his thoughts turned to Erin again: He remembered time they’d driven up that highway to Bishop, where Erin and the Inmates played the Millpond Music Festival. They’d taken a few days to go camping high up in the Sierras north of there. He pictured Erin with her little ultralight spinning rod and reel, catching trout in a lake, the way the high-altitude light turned her hair to radiant copper. Now a boxy-looking vehicle buzzed up 395 trying to outrun a big rig, and it was the same color as Erin’s hair had been in that brief but eternal moment. He’d taken her picture. What a face. What a smile.

  Then he began talking about her. His voice softened and he looked down at the tabletop as much as he looked at Mike. His heart felt so full yet so constricted. It felt good to let some things out. He had no one in life to speak to, really, except his wife. His brothers were scattered; his father missing-in-action, as he always had been; his mother a ghost. Erin was his best friend, now alternatingly tolerant and furious at him. He told himself it was her hormones but knew it was more than that. When he thought of his soon-to-be-born son, Bradley felt the tears well up in his eyes. He felt locked out of fatherhood, robbed of his natural right to protect and nurture, extorted out of something that should already be his.

  When Bradley was finished, he looked up into Mike’s hopeful face.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want my wife to love me. And if I can get those assholes over there off my case, I can operate again. And if I can, I can provide everything Erin needs. Both things are connected. I want it to be like it used to be.”

  Finnegan studied him frankly.
His small, freckled hands were folded over each other on the tabletop. “These are not small things. You are twenty-two years old. You have a powerful bureaucracy on your trail-men who know how to inflict harm. And you have lost the love of your wife. I can’t make Erin love you.”

  “I know that.”

  “But I can help get you the possibility of escape from your predicament at work. And perhaps through that freedom, you could woo her back.”

  “That’s what I want. I can work with possible.”

  “Bradley, do you truly believe that I can help liberate you from your tormentors at work?”

  Bradley thought, What I truly believe is I’ll try anything to get what I want. “Mike, without you I wouldn’t have gotten Erin back from Armenta. I never thought I’d see her again. I’ve come to realize what you did for us. You and Owens both. So I genuinely thank you. I believe that you can help me again. I’m here to ask for your help.”

  Finnegan was standing and had already dropped a ten on the table. “Let’s take a short drive, Bradley. Enough of these big-eared Blands.”

  “Blands? How do you know that word? I never called them the Blands in front of you.”

  “Bradley, your thoughts are as loud as those trucks out there, especially when they’re about Erin, or your career. I can explain later. But now, vamos!”

  • • •

  Mike drove a nicely restored 1953 Chevy pickup, fire engine red, aftermarket pipes. They rumbled several miles up Highway 395, then out a dirt road that led past a Vietnamese Buddhist meditation center and wound back into the hills. Mike sat up ramrod straight on a pillow and Bradley could see that the toes of his saddle cleats were all that touched the brake, gas, and clutch. With his small hands at ten and two, Mike warbled on about the corruption that shut down the city of Adelanto a few years ago, how the cops were taking money and freebies to turn their backs on prostitution and gambling going on at the now-boarded-up motel, and how some of the city councilmen were taking bribes for business favors, and there were backroom real estate deals involving usurious mortgages and people of color.

  “I was five years old then,” Bradley said idly. He wondered what Erin was doing right now, what were her exact posture and movements and thoughts.

  “It was an easy project, considering the handsome, long-term returns,” said Mike. “There were gambling losses, loan sharking, foreclosures, ruined marriages, blackmail, drug addiction, violence petty and not, untold heartache. A murder or two. Even venereal disease has its own wonderful little half-life. Too bad it all couldn’t last. You saw the old bordello. Technically a motel. Now nothing but dust. But those were three bountiful, beautiful years. All it took was a few ambitious citizens, a stuffed ballot box to put them into power, and wham! Bradley, remember this: If you can secure one politician and one member of the law enforcement profession, you can go bonkers in a small town. One thing leads to another to another. Everyone comes to see how easy it is to get what they want. It’s social fission. Things explode. Look at Bell, Maywood, Vernon! It’s my happy little circle of corruption.”

  “What did you do back there in Adelanto, Mike? Personally. I mean, exactly what did you do?”

  “Me? Oh, mostly just brainstorming. The city manager was one of mine. Just pure good fortune that I ran across her years prior. She came up in the net, as I like to call it, long after I’d partnered with her father. Who, by the time his daughter was running Adelanto, was locked up in Corcoran for a very squalid domestic murder. I didn’t see it coming. One of the dark spots on my curriculum vitae. But then, I gained her in the deal, didn’t I? She was a blessing I didn’t see coming, either.”

  Bradley checked the side mirror but through the swirling dust he saw that the road behind them was empty. He remembered now that Mike, for as long as he had known him, had often seemed to find humor, and sometimes even joy, in human travail. “What value is it to you, Mike? Crime and suffering?”

  “Executive summary? There were two brothers who lived hidden in a forest near a village. One was the King and the other was the Prince. In the beginning they disagreed about control of the people in the village. The King wanted to give them laws and demand their worship. The Prince wanted to let them create their own laws and worship whatever they wished to worship. You see, they both loved human beings. They saw human beings as the future of not only the village but the whole earth. So the King banished the Prince from the forest to the desert. The King remained hidden in the forest and sent his representatives into the village, disguised as people. The Prince from the desert did likewise. Then the village became a state and then a country, then the world. This story is oversimplified. But it is a convenient and truthful way to understand the world around you.”

  “But I asked about the crime and suffering you seem to enjoy.”

  “When faith in the King is undermined, people are freed from his control. People can then choose. We who work for the Prince know that our best tool is chaos, but our goal for you is not chaos at all, but choice. Choice. Freedom. Liberty. Man came into the world free and the King bullied you and stole that freedom away. We work in opposition to his slavery. We hold humankind in the highest esteem. We love and respect you. You are our image and ideal. In a very real sense, we worship you. So we work tirelessly to help you get your freedom back.”

  And you’re crazy as a shithouse rat, thought Bradley. He nearly laughed but managed to get out his next words convincingly, with feeling. “You. . you’re the devil?”

  “We rarely use that word, but yes. I’m one of many. And there are angels, too, and they have us outnumbered roughly ten to one. We are all representatives. Agents, if you prefer. Worldwide. We’re comparable to two multinational conglomerates. Though we wouldn’t be among the largest in terms of employees.”

  Bradley looked at Mike and tried to apply the word devil to a small man dressed ridiculously and thought, Why not? A devil dressed for golf? What better disguise? Mike always looked ridiculous. Maybe that was how he managed to get around so easily. But try as he might Bradley could not swallow the idea. Still, he thought. Tell him anything he wants to hear. Let him believe that I believe. “What do you mean, partner? You’ve used that word around me before.”

  “Partnership is the deepest personal and professional bond we can offer you. To become a partner requires three things of you and one of me. The first of your requirements is belief.”

  “Belief in what?”

  “In yourself and in me. Second, there’s a simple vow. Much like the pledge of allegiance that students used to say at Friday morning assemblies. But it has to be spoken with the aforementioned belief or it means nothing.”

  “Lay it on me, the vow.”

  “We call it the Declaration of Parity. It goes like this: As the equal of God, I renounce Him. I am the judge of right and wrong and of beauty. I am the author of law. I am man. I am free.”

  “That’s all a person has to say?”

  “No. Truly believing, and then having declared your parity, you must ask me to be your partner. If I accept, then we are partners. I can’t do the asking. That’s a law of nature, of course, which neither man, devils, angels, nor God can delete or modify in any way.”

  “Can I change my mind later and un-partner?”

  “Of course. We’re not gangsters! Making up your own mind is what we’re trying to promote. That’s our number one goal, simply stated. So you can change your mind about anything. Though honestly, it’s never happened.”

  “Not once?”

  “Never to me. My partners have all been very, very successful. I try my best to get to them by age eleven, and I have rigorous standards. The single best prognosticator for success as a partnered human being is ambition. This is where everything begins. Second greatest? Appetites-indulged appetites. Third? Perfectionism. I look for monstrous, gigantic egos linked closely to a sense of entitlement and possessing a simple can-do attitude. I never partner with the mad, I simply won’t. They sadden me. I use them occasionally,
but never long-term. I do have associates who haven’t been so fortunate with partners, but we all have different standards. It’s all about judgment and luck. Enough of that, though. We’ll have plenty of time for shoptalk, Bradley, if we decide to do this thing.”

  “Who is stronger, the King or the Prince?”

  Finnegan looked over at Bradley with a frankly optimistic expression. Then he turned his attention back to the road, which had gone bad by now. He downshifted with a growl from the pipes and guided the truck through the ruts and around the rocks. “The King is stronger and has more angels, but they are not strong enough to defeat us. Think of the contest as elemental: fire and water, or wind and rock. They influence each other endlessly but there is no end to either, no finality.”

  “Are angels and devils evenly matched?”

  “Very closely matched, pound for pound. We identify one another largely by smell. Very doggy. Close proximity weakens both parties. But as I said, they outnumber us considerably. They’re much better organized. Look at the thousands upon thousands of churches and synagogues and mosques. They provide endless options for contact with men. Endless opportunities for observation and of course persuasion. We’ve got nothing of the sort.”

  “Why not set up some Satanic churches?”

  “They go nowhere. Because we have no goodies or punishments, no carrots or sticks. We have nothing to offer but freedom. True freedom terrifies most of mankind. They would much rather have specific limits. God commissioned the concepts of heaven and hell through his poets, just for such people. These concepts give you easy-to-understand, obtainable goals. He still commissions them. Propaganda constantly needs to be updated. But there really is no heaven or hell. Thus, we offer no ten commandments except as each man decides them. What we want, finally, is for you not to need us. The final freedom, if you will.”

  Bradley studied the foothills around them, dotted by mines and collapsed frames that looked like piles of splinters and great rusted iron contraptions slouching here in the pitiless sun for over a century. Of course he didn’t believe anything Finnegan was saying, but just hearing such blasphemy made the adrenaline flow. He’d never heard a more invigorating symphony of bullshit since some Scientology dweebs cornered him one night in a club where Erin was performing. So now his ears were ringing and his heart beating fast. Tell him what he needs to hear. “What about that night in Baja with the knife? When you cut my palm and yours, and we traded blood?”