Orange County Noir

by Gary Phillips

  My mother called me chavalito. When I came in at night smelling of the river.

  I shot him in the chest like he was the silhouette at the range. But he didn't move sideways. He fell straight back.

  No sound from above. The girl pushed up again, on all fours, like a dog. She crouched and swayed and stared at my face, squinting, the blood crusting like dried ketchup under her nose and mouth. Like a movie. I went over to the guy and stared at the hole in his chest. The blood running down his ribs. Different blood.

  I looked up to say, "Miss, I'm gonna call-" She ran sideways past me, bumping past the rock.

  Then the car started up at the bottom of the canyon and the tires popped over the gravel like firecrackers and I jumped.

  I must have stood there for a while, because five flies landed on his chest, green as fake emeralds moving slowly over his blood. I would lose my job over this asshole. I would go to prison.

  His shoulder was sweaty and hot. I grasped it to see if the bullet had gone through. It was gone. Went into the soft sand that smelled of animal waste and creosote roots. I'd never find it.

  I put the shoulder back down. I didn't look at the open mouth. I didn't have time to go back to the ranch for a shovel. I found a stick and started trying to dig in the damp sand where the water had pooled long ago. Deep enough to keep him from coyotes, was all I thought.

  A scraping above me, and granite pebbles falling.

  A pick slid down the steep hillside and landed a few feet away. Homemade. Metal wired to a piece of crudely sanded wood. Like someone had thrown an anchor overboard.

  Once it was all the way night, I thought that if he came my way, down this trail that led to the east, to the golf course, I would grab him, take the knife, cuff him, and keep my face down. It was dark. He wouldn't see me.

  But he never came. He knew exactly where we were and what we were doing.

  I'd slept, off and on, hearing small rustlings of rabbits and birds in the darkness. Twice I heard metal scrape against rock. One of the other men.

  The phantom hadn't gone toward the river, or the freeway, or the golf course. He was probably watching its, even now at daybreak, when the sun rose over the Chino Hills and the brush glittered with dew like glass shards.

  Kearney and George and the others came down the trail and I fell in. We drank some water and ate some stuff they'd packed, and then we fanned out to look for fresh signs. Footprints in the moisture, broken stems, all the things Kearney had used for years to track Mexicans on the border. Mexicans trying to swim up the rivers and walk over the desert. Beaners. Wetbacks.

  I was out of breath. Hungry. Bending down so far my back hurt, remembering the short-handled hoe my father keptthe one he'd brought from Red Camp and propped in the corner of the porch so he wouldn't forget it. He was awake, a few miles away, brewing his coffee in the dented aluminum pot, making sure the veladora was lit, looking out the window at the pomegranate tree. He didn't know I was here-so close to him.

  "Hey!" one of the deputies called softly.

  Fresh tracks.

  We followed for two miles, but we ended up at the mouth of Brush Canyon. Kearney said he knew it all along. He and two guys started up from the bottom, and George circled up and worked his way down. I was behind him, and then one guy hollered out, "There he is!"

  We looked down the steep canyon slope. A head popped out of a heap of brush. Black curly hair covered with dust. He was moving.

  Everybody drew their guns. I had mine aimed at his back. His shirt was so tattered and patched it was like a weird quilt. He had a knife. He had the pick. I'd left it there when I was done. I'd wiped off my prints with my flannel shirt. His shirt was even worse in front when he turned to see the rest of its.

  Don't look at me, I was thinking. Don't do it. Don't look in my eyes and then start yelling about what happened.

  He was hunched over. I saw his face. He wasn't some little mocoso. He was a grown man. But the sound he'd made, up in Bee Canyon, when he heard the punch. The bones breaking. He'd been beaten. I'm not through with you. That sound.

  But he had a knife. I couldn't move toward him, but if he saw me and shouted, "No! I didn't kill him! He did it!" I'd have to shoot him. Justifiable.

  My gun was pointed at his face.

  "I quit! I quit!" he screamed, his eyes on the ground. He wouldn't look up.

  Kearney holstered his gun. "Come on out, James. We aren't gonna hurt you."

  The phantom. He was about five-seven, slight, but it was his face. A little kid. He bowed his head. "I quit," he said.

  I holstered my gun and turned around. It felt like someone sitting on my chest, hammering at the bone running down the middle of me. Like I always felt when I'd done something wrong. I looked out over the canyon. Down there were bones, and skeletons, everywhere under the dirt. The babies. The guy. My mother's bones, in the churchyard. The Indians who lived here first. The cows and coyotes and rabbits. The skulls rolling down the arroyos if it ever rained for forty days and forty nights.

  They questioned him for a long time.

  He was James Horton Jr. He'd been born in Keithville, Louisiana. He was forty-two. He'd been riding the rails since he was twelve.

  I pictured the arm throwing the rock at my Nova.

  "When I was little, I never had no time to play. I never had a chance to get into mischief, like Dennis the Menace. That's what I was doin with the rocks."

  But why throw them at cars?

  "The cars were going so fast. They made me mad, because they were going so fast."

  Why did he live in the canyons?

  He didn't want to be around people.

  He ate black walnuts in fall, lemons and oranges, the goat he found dead, and food from the trash.

  "You coulda killed someone," one of the deputies said, and I felt the hammering again, lighter, but still there.

  "I quit, I quit," he said again softly.

  They tested him for insanity, and he pleaded, and I never heard anything about him again.

  My father had a heart attack in 1979, and we buried him next to my mother. Our house was empty for a year and then it burned down. They said transients were living there, but Bryant Ranch was already sold by the grandson of the woman who'd built the place and planted all the pomegranate trees.

  Last week I saw an ad in the newspaper. Executives Prefer Bryant Ranch, it said, with pictures of huge houses. Close to Brush Canyon Park, Box Canyon Park, and Golf.

  I left my apartment in Santa Ana and drove up there in my old Nova. I'm in the Old Farts Car Club and we restore classics.

  I drove along La Palma. The river was much calmer now because of flood control. I used to imagine the phantom in some locked room in a mental ward. No river in his sight. Back then, I kept thinking Louisiana-he must have grown up beside the Mississippi. Huck Finn and shit like thatDennis the Menace. But I looked up Keithville, and it was near the Red River.

  He must have spent years looking out a window somewhere, waiting until he wasn't insane. No rocks. No water. No hiding except under a bed, when people came and scared you and said, "I'm not done with you yet."

  I drove up to Bee Canyon, but it was just a scar in the hills. There were bones in every canyon of the world.

  The big gray and beige and rust stuccoed houses, the roads and sidewalks and the same plants over and over. Purple agapanthus, society garlic that stunk up the median, and fountain grass, which my father always thought was a weed. The only people walking were two women in workout clothes with iPods.

  It was late morning, and I still worked the evening shift, so I drove as close as I could to the Santa Ana River, off and on the freeways. The water was wild and free in the canyon, and then corralled with cement banks, tamed by the time it got to Newport and emptied into the ocean.

  I drove around Fashion Island, and the South Coast Plaza. No island. No coast. Just rooms. Big rooms. Asphalt like black carpet around them.

  On the way back, I drove up into Santiago Canyon, Mod
jeska Canyon, and I ended up in Santa Ana. The canyon turned into flatlands covered with rooms. My three rooms. The same number my father had.

  I didn't want people around me either.

  I liked working at night.

  I partnered with Carl McGaugh for the last three years. He was only twenty-five. Didn't say much. His dad was Irish.

  I drove. Driving the freeways was like swimming in the river, the currents and the way you had to move. But the freeways were choked with traffic all the time now. The phantom wouldn't have any trouble getting onto the median. He could walk through the stopped cars easy. But if he stood up with a rock, somebody would shoot him. In a heartbeat. Because what people cared most about was their vehicles. Their Beemers and Hummers and Acuras. Their property. No room for mischief when someone would pull out a semiautomatic weapon from the passenger seat for any reason at all.

  ndel Cream, the chief deputy working the overnight shift at the Orange County Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana, owed Judge Oliver Wendell Knott a favor, which is why the judge was able to slip in after hours without a security search or a need to sign the visitor's log, a phony Vandyke beard and wraparound sunglasses sheltering his identity from the security cameras.

  "Least I can ever do for you, Your Honor," Ondel said for the third or fourth time while guiding the judge to one of the second-floor Module-R conference rooms reserved for pretrial maximum-security inmates and sexual predators, where he'd stashed Quentin Lomax twelve minutes earlier, wrists cuffed to the anchored cast-iron table, ankles secured to the castiron chair.

  Ondel said, "What you went and done for my baby brother Marcus, a righteous act not another judge woulda done," his hoarse baritone echoing in concert with the squeak of his rubber-soled combat boots along a dimly lit corridor that reeked of a disinfectant not strong enough to entirely eliminate the layers of prisoner sweat insulting the judge's nose.

  Judge Knott smiled benignly, wished the deputy would shut up, but he knew better than to destroy the mood or otherwise disrupt the bond that grew between them after he'd sized up the deputy as somebody he could manipulate to his advantage and dismissed the drunk driving charge hanging over Ondel Cream's brother.

  He said, not for the first time, "Marcus struck me as a young man who deserved a second chance more than a third strike," and, adding a fresh bit of friendship massage, "especially given an upstanding, God-fearing sibling like you to keep him grounded on the road to good citizenship."

  "Amen, Judge, sir, amen to that, and you seeing it for the truth. Marcus, he ain't had nothing hard to drink ever since, but only once where I needed to slap him around some to keep a shot-a the hard stuff from cursing his lips."

  They reached the conference room.

  Before turning the key in the lock, Ondel assured him, "You'll be safe as my own son in there, Judge, what with Lomax secured tighter than a virgin's precious jewel. It's a precaution worth taking, since no telling what all could happen if that murdering cuss was crazy enough and free enough to go for your jugular."

  "Lomax hasn't been tried and convicted yet in my courtroom, Ondel, so fairness dictates we withhold judgment until all the evidence is in and a jury renders its verdict."

  "What you say, Judge, but you might sing a different song if you saw him up close here, days in and out, and listened to his mouthings. Ain't for no reason at all he's kept in solitary, in the block reserved for the worst of the worst. And even the worst of the worst, they scared of Lomax just being so close to themselves. Mark my words, no jury is ever not gonna escape seeing that ... Fifteen minutes, you said you need?"

  "Maybe twenty, but certainly no longer."

  The deputy raised his wristwatch to his eyes and squinted after the time. "Need to get Lomax back where he belongs before the next bed check, so that works out fine. I'll be outside keeping guard, so knock if you finish up your business early or need me any reason at all, Your Honor. A shout and I'll come running."

  Quentin Lomax eased back as far as the security restraints allowed and studied the judge through deep-rooted black eyes fired by a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They seemed a mismatch with the oversized features of his pockmarked face and a wrestler's body stretching the limits of his orange jumpsuit.

  "I don't know you from spit or why you're here all dressed up like it's Halloween, thinking the beard's fooling anybody," he said. "Trick or treat or whatever in hell's going on, you're getting not a word from me without my lawyer, so who in hell are you anyway?"

  The judge stroked his fingers over the Vandyke to strengthen the spirit gum holding it in place, removed the sunglasses and parked them inside the breast pocket of his jacket.

  He flicked a smile and said, "If you're a praying man, I'd be inclined to say I'm the answer to your prayers, Mr. Lomax."

  "And if I ain't?"

  "I'd say the same thing."

  "That sort of gag goes with the whiskers . . . or you on something, mister? I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Of course you do, Mr. Lomax. We both know the murder you're about to stand trial for was not your first murder, only your sloppiest. A particularly bloody crime you won't slip out from under, the way you have more than a few times in the past."

  "Hurry this up, will ya? I gotta piss real bad."

  "Your lawyer, Mr. Amos Alonzo Waldorf, will be up to his usual courtroom stall tactics, but in the end they'll all be struck down, one after the next, and, it follows, justice will prevail. You'll be judged guilty and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Appeals will keep you alive for some years. They'll be struck down one after the next, and in time your mother will cry over your grave, but-"

  "Leave my mother out of this!"

  Lomax's face turned a fiery red. He pushed up from the chair and, shouting curses, aimed a headbutt at the judge, falling short by two or three feet because of the cuffs and leg irons. He dropped back into the chair, struggling for breath, his eyes promising some future menace.

  Knott, who'd stayed still as a statue through the attack, answered him with a smile. "May I continue?"

  "Screw you. I want my lawyer."

  "As I was about to say, it doesn't have to be like that, Mr. Lomax. You take my offer seriously, you'll be a free man before you know it, out from under the shadow of prosecution. Back to making regular visits to your mother at the Sunny Acres nursing home. All your other habits, good and bad."

  "Who are you to talk? My judge?"

  "Yes. Your jury and executioner as well, if it comes to that. Are you ready to listen?"

  "What the hell. Spill it."

  When the judge was finished, Lomax said, "That's all of it? I send him sailing over the edge, this Arthur Six guy, and-"

  "Exactly, Mr. Lomax. Arthur Six dies, you will go free," Judge Knott said, making it sound like an elementary exercise in justice. "The Arthur Six jury made a mockery of my courtroom when it bought into the so-called Unwritten Law invoked by his crafty lawyers, who cloaked Six in sympathy, laid the blame on the victims, and convinced enough of the jurors to cause a hung jury."

  "My legal beagle's no amateur, so maybe I take my chances with a jury. They vote my way-what then? It becomes my turn. You set me up for a whack, send me sailing over the edge?"

  "You keep your end of the bargain, Mr. Lomax, I'll keep mine."

  "How much time I got before you need my answer?"

  "Until I reach the door and call for the guard," the judge said, rising.

  At Central Justice Center in Santa Ana later that week, the judge flipped through some legal paperwork before he spit a little cough into his fist and announced, "Allowing that the defendant has never been tried, much less convicted, of the multitudinous crimes the district attorney maintains were of his doing, the court denies the prosecution's motion to remand the defendant to custody. Bail is set at ..."

  Lomax missed how much he'd have to fork over for his freedom, too busy bear hugging his attorney, like it was Amos Alzono Waldorf who'd pulled it off, at the same time thinking how
Judge Knott had delivered on his part of their deal, how now it was Quentin Lomax's turn.

  He already knew where to find Arthur Six.

  The judge had seen to that.

  Six was down south in San Juan Capistrano, at the mission, working as a gardener and handyman in exchange for room and board in the friars' quarters; hiding his history as an accused murderer under an assumed name, John Brown; Lomax chuckled every time he thought about it on the train ride down, trying to figure how much imagination it took to come up with an alias like John Brown, as in not very much imagination at all.

  Stepping off the Amtrak at the station, he considered what name he might pick for himself, it ever came to that, not all that convinced he'd want to give up Quentin Lomax, mainly because that would also mean giving up the rep he'd worked damn hard to achieve over all these years with clients who paid top dollar to get the kind of contract service that would never track back to them.

  Even that last friggin contract.

  A fluke he got caught, but no way he'd let it go to touch tag with the people who'd put their confidence in him, paid him the cash money.

  One of the reasons he gave in to Judge Knott, to prevent something being said in open court that would implicate them.

  Sail Arthur Six, a.k.a. John Brown, over the edge?

  A cheap price to pay for the privilege.

  Lomax fell in with the tourists window-shopping the antique stores and souvenir shops along the main drag leading to Mission San Juan Capistrano. He bought himself through the gate for seven bucks and split from the pack to go looking for Six, confident someone who couldn't do better than John Brown for an alias was no master of disguise.

  He found Six after fifteen minutes of wandering around what the tour brochure said was ten acres of gardens. Six was on his knees, pulling weeds and puttering around inside a vegetable garden. Except for the Charlie Chaplin-Hitler kind of mustache sitting slightly crooked under his eagle beak of a nose and dirt smears on his forehead and cheeks where he had been swiping off sweat with his muddy gloves, he looked exactly like his mug shot.