The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  He waited. After ten minutes the door opened again and the three men got back into their car, backed out of the driveway, and drove past him. The coupe followed behind. He ducked all the way down and then leaned back up and watched them through his rearview mirror as they turned left at the next block. He started his car and swung a quick U-turn and followed where they had turned, but the cars were already gone. He turned right, back toward where they had come from, but there was no sign of either car. He felt a mixture of anger and relief.

  “Come on, Plastic Face, what I do?” Lateef Cannon yelled.

  Lateef was Duda Rue’s cousin. Elias was grabbing Lateef’s arm and twisting it behind his back. They were on Fulton Street. It was daytime. Their feet scuffed the ground as they struggled.

  “You lied, and I’m taking you in,” said Elias.

  “Lied on what?”

  “On where your cousin is,” said Elias. He twisted Lateef’s arm farther. Trammell watched with his hands up like he wanted everyone to calm down.

  “You smell like damn liquor, man! You drunk?” said Lateef, over his shoulder.

  Trammell stepped in. “All right, come on,” he said. He grabbed Elias and pulled him back. “Come on—not now,” he said.

  Lateef was twenty-two years old. He wore a black pea coat. He picked his black beanie off the ground and put it back on. He hadn’t seen his cousin in two weeks and even if he had he wouldn’t have told Elias. “Fuck you, Plastic Face! Your face all red,” he said, stepping back and rubbing his arm. “I’m gonna tell my mom what you did, too.”

  “Fuck you,” said Elias.

  “You spilt my Coke,” said Lateef, pointing at his drink on the ground. “I’m gonna make a complaint on your punk ass.”

  “Come on,” said Trammell. He turned Elias and walked him back toward the car.

  “You’re hungover!” yelled Lateef.

  Elias started to go for him again, but Trammell held him back.

  They got back into the car and watched Lateef walk away. Elias, gripping the steering wheel and breathing heavy, stared at a little section of window that was fogging up.

  “Fuck him,” said Trammell.

  After that they rode in silence for an hour until dispatch called a code 33. Someone running away from the cops over near the MLK projects. They drove fast down Webster, fast enough for Elias to forget his problems. Speeding in the car made him feel better. Maybe Elias just needed to chase more people.

  Later they drove around again, looking for Duda Rue. Elias felt the need to talk about the bank growing in him. He knew that talking about it was not the right thing to do, it felt like a compulsion, but he needed to.

  “Let’s go out there and look around,” he said. He clamped his teeth shut and looked out the window.

  “Out where? The bank?” asked Trammell, seemingly able to read Elias’s mind.

  “Not the bank, her house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Rada Harkov,” said Elias. He turned and looked at Trammell. Trammell stayed silent. He was hard to read.

  “She’s the one that did the whole thing,” Elias added. He tried to will his face to relax. He could see Trammell looking right at him. He could feel a pulse in the side of his own forehead.

  “She’s the inside girl, the Russian. I already confirmed it with Peed.”

  “You asked Inspector Peed?” said Trammell. He looked shocked. His face looked transformed. He looked like he had smelled a horrible odor. “The inspector?” he asked again. It didn’t make sense.

  “Sam, relax, Jesus,” said Elias, shaking his head and smiling a wooden smile. “I got it from a reliable source.”

  The light changed. Elias was suddenly sweating. His shoulders were tense and locked. He decided not to tell him about seeing the visitors stop by her house last night. Not to tell him that he had run the license plate of the gray coupe and it had come back as being registered to an eighteen-year-old girl with no criminal record.

  “You doing too much.”

  “It’s not a problem,” said Elias, “I’m just working the gang thing like the sarge said. Jimmy Delarosa told me Peed was ranting and raving about how deep in it this Russian manager lady was.”

  “So what’s that got to do with us?” asked Trammell.

  “Nothing.”

  “So what are you going to do? You going all independent? Man, I’m supposed to be the rookie, not you.”

  “I’m just trying to figure it out—figure who’s who and what’s what, that’s all.”

  They were interrupted again. The radio dispatch asked for a unit to respond to Page and Webster for a 211 and Elias grabbed their radio and said, “Three-adam-boy-seven, we are ten-twenty-five,” and off they went, responding to a fight they had no business responding to. Elias welcomed the break from the questioning.

  They were the third unit to respond. The other cops were talking to a crowd. One black woman wearing hospital scrubs was already cuffed up and sitting on the curb. The crowd was yelling at the cops.

  Elias rolled the car up and asked one of the officers, “You got this?”

  “Yeah, they’re clear.”

  They rolled past the crowd and Elias asked, “Any of you seen Duda Rue?”

  “Fuck you, Plastic Face, you punk-ass cracker motherfucker,” said one woman as she turned and went back to her apartment. The crowd laughed.

  “Who was that?” asked Elias.

  Trammell shook his head. “Nice work, Leo. You’re on a roll today, baby.”

  Elias’s head hurt. He wanted to drink. These people didn’t realize that every time they said fuck you to him he actually felt it. He wanted to keep talking with Trammell, but he also wanted to shut up. He looked at Trammell. Trammell was so young. He didn’t have to worry about anything. The bosses liked him. The bad guys even liked him. Life was easy for Trammell.

  At 7 p.m. they stopped to eat some falafel. Elias said he had to make a call, went back out to the car, opened the trunk, and drank wine from his Gatorade bottle. He drank more than normal. He was feeling vulnerable today. He peeled an orange and pushed half of it into his mouth. The street around him seemed to be filled with twenty-year-olds. A taxi driver drove by and winked at him.

  By the time he got back to the table he had regained his calm. He noted Trammell looking him over suspiciously, but he didn’t care. The Arab guys were laughing quietly at the counter. He felt warmth in his stomach.

  “I’m going to show you something,” said Elias.

  It looked like Trammell didn’t want to be shown anything. He looked uneasy. He looked nervous. He knew Elias had been drinking. Elias’s eyes were red and he had barely touched his food.

  “I’m going to show you how to be a cop,” said Elias.

  “Yippee,” said Trammell.

  In the days that followed, Trammell would look back on that moment in the restaurant and wonder whether any other outcome had been possible. What would have happened if he had said he wasn’t interested? If he had simply said no? The conversations that preceded the incident—conversations that at the time he tried to tune out—played through his mind on a constant loop. He marveled at how many chances he had been given. He would tell himself it had been impossible to know what was going to happen. But then the memory of Elias’s face—desperate like an addict—would pop into Trammell’s mind, and Trammell would feel a blanket of guilt.

  They left the falafel place and got back in the car and headed up Haight Street toward Divisadero. Elias drove to Market Street and headed toward the freeway. He radioed in that they were going to be 10-I for a while.

  Elias felt nervous, but not necessarily in a bad way. He liked mischief.

  “You can be a cop and do what they tell you to do,” said Elias, “or you can be a cop and work for justice.”

  “Preach it, Reverend,” said Trammell, nodding his head.

  They took 101 toward the airport. Trammell asked where they were going and was told it was a surprise. Elias turned the FM radio on
.

  In San Bruno Elias bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. He told Trammell to stop being so serious all the time.

  They parked outside the cemetery in San Bruno and drank the beers. Trammell had never been there. He’d driven by on the way to the jail, but he’d never stopped.

  “Look at all those graves,” said Trammell.

  Elias patronizingly told him they were soldiers. Trammell said it looked like dominoes. He kept shaking his head and looking at it.

  After they drank their beers Elias drove them into the residential part of San Bruno. He parked the car a block north of Rada Harkov’s house, opened the door, and said, “Come on.”

  Trammell got out of the car. Elias set a beer can into a blue recycling bin that was on the sidewalk. He opened the trunk, pulled out two pairs of plastic gloves and a crowbar, and then quietly pushed the trunk closed again.

  “What are we doing?” asked Trammell in a whisper.

  Elias smiled. “You know what we’re doing.”

  It was true, he did know. Elias handed him a pair of the gloves.

  It was dark now. Elias had never seen the house without the lights on. He didn’t really have a plan. He knew he wanted to be inside. He wanted to look around. He had to do something.

  Thirty feet back from the sidewalk was a gated wooden fence that led to the backyard. Elias went to the gate and tried the handle. It didn’t open. He pulled a small pocketknife from his pocket, stuck the blade through the slit in the fence near the handle, and flipped the metal latch. The door popped open, and they walked in.

  Trammell closed the gate quietly behind him. They stared at each other for a moment. Then Elias tiptoed toward the house. The gravel under his feet crunched with each step. He tried the back door. It was locked. He knocked quietly on the glass, and knocked a little louder. Trammell winced. Elias pointed toward his ear, which Trammell took to mean: listen.

  Trammell walked toward the side of the house. He slipped on his pair of gloves. They smelled like condoms. He tried a window near him; it didn’t budge.

  Elias was looking in through the sliding glass door. There was an informal dining room just off the kitchen. Trammell had backed away from the window and was staring at the wooden gate. “Give me that,” said Elias, looking at the crowbar.

  Trammell handed Elias the crowbar and looked at him like he was daring him to do it. Trammell was still only twenty-eight years old and when he was drunk, he acted younger than that. Any caution that he was feeling earlier seemed to have disappeared.

  Elias took the bar and went to the window closest to the wooden gate. He put the sharp end underneath the crack of the window and inched it in. He pulled down on the bar but it slipped out from its hold. He reset the crowbar and used all his weight. The latch popped. He pushed the window open, pulled himself up, and looked in.

  It was a bathroom. Elias dropped back down and motioned with two fingers pointed at his eyes and a nod of the head: watch the gate.

  “We’re just investigating, right?” whispered Trammell.

  Elias nodded, pushed himself up onto the ledge of the window, thrashed his legs around, and pulled himself in with his hands, onto the sink and then the floor.

  He stood up and looked around. There was a tub, some towels, and a mirror. The bathroom was tiled in large, creamy pink squares. He turned on his flashlight, then covered it with his hand. He was so nervous he could barely breathe. He felt exhilarated. The house was silent.

  The hallway was dark and carpeted. He called out, “Hello, anybody home?” There was no answer.

  Elias went back into the bathroom, leaned his head out, and whispered at Trammell, “I’m in.” Trammell waved him off. He knew he was in.

  Elias closed the window and tried to set the splintered latch back as well as he could. He walked to the back kitchen door, unlocked it, and let Trammell in.

  “Go watch the front,” he told Trammell.

  “Did you look for an alarm?”

  “Yeah, no—do it.”

  Trammell stepped through the kitchen. It was lit by a light above the stove. There were magazines and junk mail piled on the kitchen counter. The room smelt vaguely like garbage. Trammell looked around and walked toward the front of the house.

  “Yell if you see anything,” said Elias from the hallway.

  “Stupid,” said Trammell, walking on a light-colored carpet in the front living room. He looked behind himself as he walked to see if he was leaving tracks.

  Elias walked back toward the bathroom. The house felt lived in, but not by a family. There were no toys, no signs of kids. Next to the bathroom was a bedroom. Inside the bedroom was a chest of drawers. He went to it and opened it. It was filled with neatly folded T-shirts and sweaters. He opened the five other drawers and quickly went through them. Where was the cash? There was nothing but women’s clothes.

  The closet was big and full. More women’s clothes. Some boxes of shoes. More shoes. No men’s clothes. She lived alone.

  He looked under the bed and pulled out boxes from the floor. He was sweating. The boxes were filled with personal papers, letters, bills—Rada Harkov indicia.

  He went to the TV stand and opened its drawers. There was nothing but movies, random wires, rubber bands, matches, and batteries.

  He walked out of the bedroom and looked at a framed picture in the hallway: a crowd of adults were seated at a table, smiling up at the camera. Something about the picture—perhaps the waiter in the background wearing a tuxedo—suggested a foreign country.

  “How we doing?” he called out to Trammell. There was no answer. He walked fast to the front living room and found Trammell squatting at the window. “How we doing?”

  “Good, but we gotta get the fuck out of here,” said Trammell, looking over his shoulder.

  “Five minutes,” whispered Elias.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He went back into the hallway and found a door that led to the basement. He closed that door and headed for another room next to the one he had already searched. It was an office.

  He grabbed a lamp and turned it on. He lowered its brightness by putting it under the desk. There was a computer on the desk and to the right of the computer a filing cabinet. He opened a file drawer and looked through it. There were financial papers, but he didn’t have time for them; he wanted cash. He went to the closet and looked in. More clothes, and some white legal boxes. He pulled them down, opened them, and saw only papers inside. He tried to set them back the way he had found them. He was shaking, and a drop of sweat dripped off his head and onto the cardboard of one of the boxes. His nose was running. He breathed deep. “Okay, okay,” he said out loud. He put the lamp back, turned it off, and left the room.

  His flashlight made a drunken sweep of the hallway as he walked to the basement. He’d taken two steps down the stairs when he heard Trammell half whisper and half yell, “Leo!”

  It sounded desperate. Elias turned on the stairs and went back up to the hallway. He tried to breathe. His mouth was as dry as sandpaper. When he reached the living room he saw the headlights of a car turn off. He heard the sound of a car door close.

  Elias would later remember the next few moments so often that they seemed to become something larger than a memory. In the same way that Trammell had pinpointed exact times when he could have changed the outcome of events, Elias, for his own part, would choose this moment as the one.

  “Come on!” Elias had said. Trammell was standing bent over, looking out the window.

  “Come on!” Elias said again. Trammell turned his head and Elias was shocked to see him looking terrified. He looked frozen and pale. A dark figure walked past the front window. This was the moment he could have stepped forward and taken charge. They could have questioned the woman. Instead, as though Trammell’s paralysis was contagious, he stood there, without moving.

  Elias, his ears buzzing, heard the sound of keys jingling and nudging into the lock. He fell back a few steps toward the kitchen. The next thing he saw was T
rammell standing up straight and stepping toward the door. His impression was that Trammell was going to simply open the door for the woman and they were going to have a talk.

  Elias stood in the hallway and time slowed to a crawl. He held his breath. His hands were wet inside the gloves. His mouth was open; his face, set hard, had formed itself into a mask: Plastic Face.

  He heard the door open, the sound of door on carpet. Elias felt the air leave the room. The next second he heard what sounded like a bark and then a muffled yell and two bodies falling hard on the ground. The whole house shook and echoed with the sound of a wooden boom followed immediately by the sound of glass chiming.

  Elias stepped closer: Trammell was wrapped around a big ball of red hair. Their bodies were flailing. “Shut up,” said Trammell, “shut up!” He looked at Elias with his hand over her mouth. “Fucking help me.”

  Elias backed up. Fuck. He could hear Trammell telling the woman to shut up again and again in a weird, high-pitched hissing voice. Elias didn’t understand what was happening. Rada Harkov wasn’t saying anything.

  Elias, not even knowing he was doing it, hit his own head with his fist and moved toward them. He couldn’t pull his gun out; it was stuck in its holster. The noise of breathing was everywhere.

  Trammell struggled with her. Elias wanted to cry. He stepped toward them again. Trammell had somehow taken his own gun out and was shoving it against Harkov’s neck. Legs thrashed. Elias stood above them like a referee. The situation was out of control.

  Trammell was on top of her. She was facedown on the floor. They were three feet from the front door. Elias whipped his head and looked outside and saw a perfectly quiet residential street. He wanted to run.

  “Okay, okay, okay, stop,” said Trammell. Then to Elias, “You wanna fucking question her, question her!”