Ortiz kept listening. Elias told him that they walked Emily up Sixth Street. They approached the van. The guy jumped out, and they engaged him. Ortiz nodded his head while he listened. We engaged him.
“The man shot Sam, and I shot him.”
They took Elias to the Hall of Justice. He rode in the front seat, a sergeant from Southern Station drove; the sergeant didn’t talk, he just kept shaking his head and wincing. Elias consciously willed himself to appear more sad. He was feeling a lot of things, but not sadness. He closed his eyes. Trammell had been shot in the cheek, below the eye, as though he had turned his head away from the gun. There was a black hole stamped in his cheek. Rada Harkov, Sam Trammell.
When they arrived at the Hall of Justice the sergeant pulled the car into the sally port. Lieutenant Fleming was waiting by the door with three other officers, and the group converged on the car as it stopped. The lieutenant, a man Elias had never spoken two words with, opened the car door, pulled Elias out by the arm, wrapped him in a bear hug, and squeezed him for a few seconds. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and then he let go. Elias stepped back and they regarded each other. The lieutenant’s eyes were filled with tears.
The group moved toward the building. “This is what’s going to happen,” said the lieutenant. “I already talked to Ortiz; he filled me in on everything. Delgado is waiting upstairs. He needs to talk to you before Ann gets here.” Delgado was the police union rep, and Ann was the defense attorney hired by the union to represent any officer who found himself in a potentially criminal situation.
All six of the men crammed into the elevator. Elias’s hand went to the outside of his pockets. He could feel the bulge of the stack of money he had taken from the girl.
Lieutenant Fleming leaned his head toward Elias and said, “Ortiz told me that you and Sam walked with the female to the alley and the suspect fired on you.”
“That’s right,” said Elias.
The lieutenant leaned in even closer and half whispered, “Look, you’ve been through the wringer, and you’re going to come out in one piece—don’t worry about anything—but just to set me straight, tell me why you were even on Sixth Street?”
“We were 10-7I at the Henry Hotel.”
“That’s what Ortiz said. And the girl?”
The elevator doors opened and they walked toward the homicide department.
“We saw her running. Trammell went after her—I don’t even know why—on a hunch, I guess. She told him a man had tried to grab her in the alley, and we walked her back over there in an attempt to locate the suspect.” Elias felt a wave of fear. Was this story crazy?
“The woman was in distress?” said the lieutenant.
“That’s right.”
“I just wanted to hear it in your own words.”
“Distress,” said Elias.
The lieutenant clapped him on the back and handed him off to John Delgado, who was waiting at the door of the homicide unit.
Delgado was wearing jeans and a sweater. He looked like an unemployed father. He was rumpled and in need of a haircut. He walked Elias away from the other officers and down the hall. “Jesus,” he said. “Un-fucking-believable. I’m sorry. Don’t worry, we’re just waiting on Ann Richter to get here. You’re going to have to sit down with some inspectors from Homicide and tell the story one more time. That’s it. We’ll run through it together with Ann, make sure everything’s good, but from what I’ve heard you’re fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about. Shit, you should get a promotion.”
“It’s Sam who should get the promotion.”
“Commendation.”
“He saved me.”
“Worst day of your fucking life.”
Delgado leaned toward Elias and whispered, “There were a couple cameras in the alley, but none of them caught the incident. Which is to say, your memory of what happened is the correct version. Also, just so you know, there were a couple cameras on Sixth Street that got you walking the girl toward the alley. But that’s it.”
Elias nodded.
Ann Richter came. She talked with Elias and Delgado in the hallway. She was reassuringly unfriendly. She hadn’t changed out of her work clothes, and she looked tired. Elias smelled wine, garlic, and seafood on her breath. She didn’t seem concerned about him.
When they were ready, they walked back down the hallway and into the homicide unit. Elias had only been here a few times. They walked past a row of interview rooms. He saw Emily Rosario waiting in one of them. She had her head down on the table in front of her and didn’t appear to notice him.
The interview was conducted in the lieutenant’s office. The lieutenant waited outside the room with Delgado. Ann Richter sat behind Elias. A female inspector named Cooley and her partner, Lake, had him tell the story one more time. Ann Richter didn’t speak except to identify herself for the tape.
He told the story the same way he had told it to everybody else. The words came out easily. He wasn’t challenged on any points. Everything was pro forma. Emily Rosario had given him his lines, and now he used them.
As he talked, all of the wildness that he had been feeling over the last week, over the last few months, all of the instability vanished; for the first time in ages, he felt calm. Even the gun and the money didn’t bother him.
The interview ended. Elias, stepping out of the lieutenant’s office, felt a wave of importance. He felt at the center of things. He shook hands with Ann Richter. Her hand lingered in his for a moment.
Delgado and the lieutenant walked him down the hallway, toward the elevator. They were joined by a young, uniformed female officer.
“Carbonza’s going to drive you home,” said the lieutenant, nodding at the female. “I want you to call this number tomorrow.” He handed Elias a Post-it note with a number handwritten on it. “Set up a time to talk with him. He’s a good guy. You’re going to need to talk about this stuff. That’s an order.” The lieutenant reached out and shook Elias’s hand one final time.
“Yes, sir,” said Elias. He stared at the Post-it.
The female officer drove, and Elias rode up front. They rode in silence until he asked her how she liked being on the force. She was so young. Elias felt like this drive could be one of those moments she remembered forever. She told him it was great.
“Busy,” she added. “It gets hectic—like today, they got your thing, they got a shooting in Double Rock, and they got that dead lady in McLaren Park.”
They had found Rada Harkov’s body and in that moment, with the freeway coming at him, he was sure they would find him, too.
11
Emily rode the elevator down to the ground floor of the Hall of Justice. The female inspector had shaken her awake in the interview room and told her she could leave. When Emily asked if it was all right to go home, the inspector, her face showing a mix of cynicism and confusion, had said, “Why wouldn’t it be?”
The sheriff’s deputies at the front entrance of the building stared dumbly at Emily as she left. She walked down the front stairs to the sidewalk on Bryant Street. There was nobody around; the street was deserted and the temperature had dropped. Emily finally understood once and for all that it was time to leave San Francisco. Fuck Pierre, fuck everyone, it was time to go.
She cut through the McDonald’s parking lot. It was empty but for two dark cars occupied by men who chewed and stared and didn’t look away. The wind pushed trash over the ground. A car alarm sounded in the distance. She passed a homeless man who was staring in the direction from which she had come; his face—with his lips pursed round, the inside of his eyebrows tucked in, and his head tilted to the side—all suggested he was seeing something behind her. She turned and looked: there was nothing.
She crossed Sixth Street, picked up her pace, and headed under the freeway overpass. The noise of the cars driving above sounded like landing airplanes. It was dark down there; the columns, painted mint green and stained dirty, were large enough to hide a gang of men. The sidewalks were bordered by fen
ces topped with barbed wire, and the sidewalks themselves were stained brown. Emily didn’t know what time it was, but traffic on Sixth Street was light. She pulled her jacket in to try to warm up.
Emily’s thoughts bounced from Pierre, to her room, to her neighbor Isaac, to another neighbor named Doris, who had told her a story about a time when she had been staying at the homeless shelter at Fifth and Bryant and two of the night workers had grabbed her and tried to pull her into a utility closet. Doris, illustrating the story with full reenactments in the hallway outside Emily’s room, had told Emily that she managed to fight them off by using her thumbnails as knives and aiming at their eyes. Emily pictured Doris laughing: her bottom front teeth were missing; she had wrinkle lines around her mouth; she held her thumbs out like hooks and danced around like a boxer. Doris later got arrested for selling pills and had to move to a halfway house in Manteca. She had called Emily from jail and told her to hold all her stuff for her. Emily went to her room to get her things but found that someone else had already been there and taken all the good stuff.
Emily rubbed her own thumbnails and was sad to feel them bitten down to nubs.
A man on a bicycle rode past and called out, “I got pills.”
Much later, Emily tried to reconstruct in her head the scene that followed so that she could somehow understand where the different players had come from. She was still under the freeway. She remembered a black Monte Carlo driving past on the opposite side of the street (headed away from downtown), the sound of heavy bass droning from the trunk. The Monte Carlo was up on twenty-twos and if Emily turned and watched it as it went, it wasn’t based on caution, but more because she wanted that specific car for herself. In her memory that was the only car that had passed.
After following the car with her eyes she looked over her shoulder and noticed a man walking behind her. He was thirty feet away when she first saw him. Later, she tried to remember if she had seen him cross to her side of the street, or if he had been waiting on Bryant. Had the homeless man she walked past been staring at this guy? Who had the man on the bike been offering pills to? And if Emily had stopped the man on the bike, what would have happened?
It seemed to have become even darker where she was. The man on the bike had turned onto Harrison and was gone. The Monte Carlo was gone. Emily’s instinct to run set in. The thought I will quit drugs played through her mind. I will leave the city. Even under these circumstances Emily recognized that her desire to quit drugs always seemed to kick in when she found herself in some kind of dire situation. She thought of her friend Jules Gunn and pictured them together somewhere warm.
The man behind her was silhouetted by lights, so Emily couldn’t see his face, but the way he was moving, the determination of his walk, made the hollowed-out feeling of fear in her gut grow in mass. She thought of buses, first wishing there was one on Sixth Street, and then thinking about Greyhounds and wishing she was on one. She tried to speed up, but she felt like she was in a dream, like her feet would not move as fast as she needed them to. She looked around for help but there was nobody. The nearest open business, lit up like a kind of sanctuary, was the gas station at the corner of Sixth and Harrison. Nobody was outside pumping gas. It was only about six hundred feet away but it felt like miles.
The man was getting closer. Cars passed indifferently and for a moment Emily pictured exactly what she looked like to the passing drivers: poor and loud. Only men were out, only lurking men were out at this time; it felt to Emily like she was the last woman on earth. Fear tangled her limbs. The smell of urine was everywhere. Flies swarmed around a spot on the sidewalk and up at her face; the ground beneath her shook from the cars driving on the freeway overhead. Images of the cop getting shot, his head snapping back, the Russian getting shot, all looped through her mind.
Emily stepped toward the street, ready to run into the middle of traffic if she needed to. The man was closer now. Emily turned and watched as he came. She squared up to him, not wanting to turn her back. He was fifteen feet from her. Her hand instinctively went to where the gun had been, but she remembered the cops had taken it. She raised her fists up to her stomach and turned and stepped off the curb to let the man pass, but instead he came right at her.
Confusion set in. Pierre? Pierre. Pierre. Pierre. It wasn’t happiness that she felt upon seeing him, with his low hairline and bugged eyes, his skinny arms out all arrogant; instead she felt an immediate surge of anger. She could tell he was mad. She could tell he thought that he was saving her. He closed in on her.
“What the fuck you do?” he yelled. His face looked angry and ugly. Spit came out of his mouth.
Her anger instantly matched his. “That’s how you’re gonna do this?” she yelled back.
“What the fuck you do?” he yelled again, emphasizing the words you and do, as though that would somehow make the question more clear. He moved closer, like he was going to tackle her. “You know what you did!”
She stepped back, but he grabbed on to both her arms and crushed down on them. She didn’t understand what was happening. She tried to pull away, but she couldn’t. His hands were locked down on hers. She could feel his nails digging into the skin of her wrists. Cars drove past in both directions, but nobody stopped.
“What the fuck you get me in?” he yelled. He seemed high and drunk.
“Let me go,” was all she could answer.
A car slowed down and stopped near the curb. Emily leaned toward it and again tried to squirm out of Pierre’s grip. He swung her toward the car. The driver’s door opened and a man stepped out.
“Help me,” said Emily.
The man walked around the front of the car. Emily recognized him: it was the man from the alley. The private investigator, Nichols.
“Help me!” Emily said to him. Her arms were held down. She couldn’t wave for help. “No, no, no,” said Emily. She was terrified. Pierre was pulling her toward the car. The man, Nichols, walked right at them.
“Get in the car,” said Nichols.
Pierre opened the back door and began to push Emily in. She fought against him, but he was too strong. He forced her head into the car and then Emily saw Sophia, sitting in the back, her face looking so scared that Emily thought maybe she had been kidnapped, too. There was a gun in Sophia’s hand, though, and Emily knew it was bad. The gun shook in the woman’s hand. Emily was forced all the way in. The door shoved shut behind her.
Pierre grabbed at the front passenger door, trying to open it, but it was locked. The whole car shook. Pierre started banging at Emily’s window, leaving little smears on the glass. Nothing made sense. Emily watched as the bald man, Nichols, stepped behind Pierre and held something to his neck; Pierre’s body jolted up straight and then slumped down to the ground. The man stepped over Pierre, picked up his legs, and moved him out of the road. He then went back up to Pierre’s head and held the Taser to his neck. Pierre’s body twitched and shook. The man then walked to the driver’s side and jumped into the car.
“Fuck you,” said Emily. “Damn, y’all, fuck!”
Sophia held the gun at her. Emily looked at Sophia. Her bangs were straight, she was wearing the same wine-colored lipstick as before, she had her glasses on, but underneath it all Emily sensed panic.
“Calm down,” said Nichols. He breathed heavily and leaned over in his seat toward the passenger window to try to look at Pierre. He turned and looked at Sophia and Emily, fastened his seat belt, and wheeled the car back into traffic.
“I didn’t ask for this,” said Emily. She looked out the back window at Pierre lying on the sidewalk as they drove away. “I don’t even want your stupid fucking money.”
“Of course you don’t,” said Sophia. “It’s not yours. How could you want what’s not yours?”
“I don’t even need my little percentile.”
“You don’t get a percent!” said Sophia. “You understand? You stupid fucking American junky.” The car bumped as they went. Sophia reached out and grabbed Emily’s chin, a
nd held it gently. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry to yell,” she said. She breathed deeply like she was composing herself and said, “We need the money. No more games.”
“It’s in my room,” said Emily. She was done with Pierre. She was done with San Francisco.
Nichols looked at her in the rearview mirror as he drove. “Don’t worry about Pierre. I just shocked him.”
Fuck him, thought Emily.
“It’s not his fault,” said Nichols. “We made him do it. He didn’t have a choice.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” said Emily.
They stopped at a red light. “Let me tell you something,” said Sophia. “When I was a young girl in my country, I got caught stealing packages of cigarettes from one of our bosses. He was a very mean man, big and ugly, but he worked with my father. When he caught me he told me, ‘Stealing is an art, but there are certain things you never steal, and certain people you never steal from’—he didn’t hurt me but he said—‘don’t steal what you can’t sell, and don’t steal from anyone who would enjoy cutting your hand off.’ He was a stupid man, and I continued to steal from him, but I think his lesson may be an appropriate one for you to consider.” The light turned green.
They drove down Sixth Street past Minna alley. There were still police officers and yellow tape everywhere; it was madness to come back here. Nichols drove around the block and made a right onto Mission Street. A man was praying like a Muslim on the sidewalk. They continued to Fifth Street, made a right, and parked the car.
“We can’t go in there now,” said Emily.
Sophia pushed the gun into Emily’s side. “At some point,” Sophia said, “you are going to come to realize that you are not telling us what to do.” She stopped talking and looked around like she was checking for witnesses.
The phrase I’m the boss popped into Emily’s mind. It wasn’t that she was feeling it, invoking it, or anything—it just came. It was followed by: I tell bitches what to do.
“The cops are everywhere,” said Emily. She was conscious that they were going to make her go, but she wanted to create the illusion that they were in control.
The White Van Page 18
