Land of Shadows

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  “But what if something happens?” I asked, tugging my ear harder. “And Mom doesn’t want you going into another store without her after you … you know.” I swallowed, then added, “The earrings and that bracelet.”

  Tori sucked her teeth. “This is different. I boost shit in Crase’s store all the time. He’s too busy watching girls’ asses to pay attention to what I do.”

  “But—”

  “If you’re scared,” Tori mocked, “just say so. You scared, Lulu?”

  Two minutes later I was following my sister down Hillcrest Avenue. The sun was hot and high, and the sky was the color of dirty oyster shells. Tori had tarted up with every Bonne Bell and Wet N Wild cosmetic she owned—strawberry-scented lip gloss, salmon-colored blush, blue eyeliner, violet eye shadow, and a fake mole. She had given me a fake mole, too, and had rolled sticky gloss across my lips. Tori’s friends Golden and Kesha, just as painted as my sister, were seated on the stoop of Golden’s apartment building. They saw Tori and me walking and decided to join us.

  Once we reached Santa Rosalia Drive, Tori dug into her purse and pulled out a crumpled pack of Kools. Kesha and Golden both took cigarettes. Then Tori, eyes narrowed, offered me one, the words “You’re just a stupid little baby” ready to trip from her pointy pink tongue if I refused.

  I plucked the cigarette from the pack. “Got a light?”

  The girls gave each other surprised looks as I waited with the cigarette between my fingers, as I prayed for forgiveness and that He would keep me from vomiting in front of these three bitches because that would be it for me, I would never be cool again.

  Tori produced a mint green Bic she had boosted from Woolworth and held out fire for us to take.

  Smoke filled my chest and I found it difficult to breathe—but I didn’t throw up. I wheezed out a compliment to Golden on her pink L.A. Gear high-tops and listened as she bragged about the twenty-year-old gangbanger who had bought them for her. “All I had to do was suck his dick,” she said nonchalantly.

  I blushed—I knew what a “dick” was but didn’t know anything about sucking one. That day, though, I learned that you sucked them to get shoes, purses, Quarter Pounders, and anything else you wanted. “Just don’t bite,” Golden told me. “Cuz then he’ll hit you.”

  And then the trio laughed.

  18

  Pepe found me in the parking garage, sitting on the hood of my Crown Vic of the Day. He said nothing as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and sat beside me. He lit up and smoke mixed with the scent of hot grease from the taco stand across the street. “So,” he said, then blew smoke into the air. “How are things?”

  I raised an eyebrow and laughed.

  He joined me. After a few more drags, he said, “Saw the roses.”

  “Fancy, huh?”

  “Gorgeous.” He paused, then said, “Can I be honest?”

  “Aren’t you always?” He had never liked Greg and had always told me so.

  “What he’s doing,” Pepe said. “It’s bullshit.”

  I picked at the cuticle on my thumb. “Yeah?”

  “So now, you’re gonna throw yourself into the Darson case—”

  “Because I’m a good cop.”

  “Sure. And because you don’t wanna deal with the asshole at home.”

  The nerve over my left eye ticked. “Such language, Peter.”

  He slipped off the hood and faced me. “I know what it is to lie to myself, Lou. To pretend to be with someone because I don’t wanna deal with the truth. Many times, many, many times, I wish I had it easy and could just say, ‘Fuck this, this is what I want,’ but I can’t. You can, though. You’re straight and you’re married. You can be honest.”

  “You can be honest, too.”

  He tossed the cigarette on the ground. “Oh, yeah. I’m gonna tell my buddies in there that I’m queer. And I’m thinking afterwards, we’ll go hunting and shit and they’ll be cool sharing the showers with me. Yeah. That’s easy. And so is climbing Everest without oxygen.”

  “It’s been done: coming out and climbing Everest without oxygen.”

  “Yeah. And people have died doing both, too.”

  My eyes swept over Pepe, at the bead of sweat trickling along the scar on his left cheek. A scar he never talked about.

  He gave me a slow smile. “Let’s make a deal: you reckon with the asshole and I’ll call what’s-his-face.”

  I gasped and leaned closer to him. “The guy over at JPL? Rocket Man?”

  Colin banged into the garage and yelled, “Lou! Where you at?”

  Pepe winked at me. “An-nyeong, my sista.”

  I held up the Black Power fist. “An-nyeong, my brotha.”

  As Pepe headed toward the exit, Colin made a face. “What the hell is ‘an’ … ‘an’ … whatever the hell you were saying?”

  “It’s ‘good-bye’ in Korean,” I said, standing now.

  “You and Pepe got somethin’ goin’ on?” Colin asked with a sly grin.

  “Can’t men and women be friends?”

  Colin smirked. “Not if she’s hot. And I must admit: you’re kinda hot.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You talk to Zucca?”

  “He’ll keep us posted.” Colin’s cell phone chirped as he climbed into the passenger seat. He hummed as his thumbs tapped at the keyboard.

  “Lemme guess,” I said. “A girl?”

  “Yep. Met her at Whole Foods on Sunday. Hope you’re not the jealous type.” He turned the phone to show me her picture.

  I squinted and said, “What’s his name?”

  Colin said, “Ha-ha,” but studied the picture again with a teaspoon of suspicion.

  “Seriously,” I said, suppressing a grin, “she has a five o’clock shadow.”

  Colin peered closer at the picture. “No. No, she’s just … the light’s weird.” Then he shoved the phone into his jacket pocket.

  I pulled onto King Boulevard and shifted in my seat—the Kevlar vest pinched at the roll of skin caught between my pants’ waistband and the vest’s bottom. It also pressed against my boobs in a way that only a masochist would enjoy.

  Since Colin was still sulking about possibly picking up RuPaul in the gluten-free aisle, I said, “But he’s very pretty. And after some electrolysis … You have good taste in … whatever he or she may be.”

  He laughed, then brought out that damned container of Tic Tacs.

  Baldwin Village was the government name for my old neighborhood. But regular people knew it as the Jungle, a used-to-be-nice-place-to-live back in the Sixties, a neighborhood boasting twisty streets lined with banana palms, roomy apartments, and swimming pools. But the Seventies came, bringing with it the Black P Stones and PCP, and now the twisty, sometimes dead-end streets weren’t so charming. Shootings in the alleys (so many alleys in the Jungle) behind those roomy apartments caused white folks to flee and middle-class blacks to move to Inglewood. The neighborhood was bad when I was a kid, but in a candy-is-bad-for-you kind of way. Now, though, it was bad for you like swallowing Drano followed by a rat poison chaser.

  The police department and the city council had worked together to develop safe city initiatives, to file injunctions, to form task forces and arrest hoodlums for trespassing. They also revoked family members’ Section 8 if they harbored gangbangers. Eventually, the rate of serious crime dropped. Unfortunately, it didn’t drop for the most serious of serious crimes—homicides shot up 33 percent.

  There were rumors that the Jungle would be torn down once the Santa Barbara Plaza was rebuilt. This meant that the twenty-seven thousand residents that resided in two square miles of mostly Section 8 apartments, including four hundred gang members, would have to find another place to live.

  One part of me thought that displacing these people was a cruel and unreasonable act. It wasn’t cheap to live in Los Angeles—where would they go? Sure, the neighborhood had its share of thugs and crack dealers, molesters and rapists, but there were also day-care workers and janitors living in th
ose apartments, third-graders and toddlers, deaconesses and nurses. And girls in green-and-white cheer uniforms, skirts barely covering their asses, crushed packs of cigarettes in their Swap-macci handbags. Where would people like my family, poor but hardworking and decent folks, live?

  But the other part of me was now navigating an unmarked police car up Coliseum Street, passing bangers in long white T-shirts and red denim shorts; passing a chickenhead in run-over flip-flops, her saggy breasts peeking beneath a cut-off tank top; and watching babies run in and out of apartment gates without adult supervision. As I witnessed all of this, I wanted to shout, “Burn it down!”

  As a cop, it was my job to yank out the 1 percent who screwed it up for everybody else. But that was hard to do when the deaconess was hiding her Black P Stones grandson in her bedroom closet. Hard to do when the crack dealer was also the nurse’s baby daddy. The bad grew with the good just like weeds in wheat.

  Despite the circumstances, my heart warmed as I made a right onto Hillcrest Avenue—on that corner over there, Tori and I had found a twenty-dollar bill and had bought bags of potato chips, Snickers bars, cans of soda, and Jolly Ranchers. My friend Kimya (a.k.a. That Little Whore) had lived in those apartments over there. And my father taught Tori and me how to play tennis in that park right there.

  I slowed as I reached the green apartment building where I had lived for fifteen years: a few boarded windows, weeds where grass once grew, thugs hanging out in the entryway. “Home sweet home,” I said, awed that I had made it out.

  Colin’s eyes bugged and his knee bounced—this was his first trip to Baldwin Village. “You grew up here?”

  “Yep.” I accelerated and made a right at the next corner, drove for a bit, then turned right onto Coco Avenue. “Welcome to the Jungle. Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times.”

  “This place is fuckin’ gnar,” he whispered, shaking his head.

  I glanced over to my partner. “If that means ‘rough,’ then yes, it’s fuckin’ gnar.”

  Colin swallowed hard and his left hand fluttered to his underarm—making sure that his Sig Sauer hadn’t been jacked by the air.

  I slapped his bouncing knee. “C’mon. Colorado has poor areas. I saw it on an episode of Cops. I’m guessing that’s where you saw it, too, since you worked the west side.”

  He didn’t throw the ball back—his Adam’s apple kept bobbing and his eyes kept gaping at the ghetto canvas on the other side of the car’s windshield.

  I laughed, told him that he’d be fine, then grabbed my radio to call Sergeant Gino Walston, one of the gang officers assigned solely to the Jungle. “Hey, Gino-Boy, we’re almost there.”

  The radio crackled and blipped, then Gino responded: “I got another black-and-white roaming the block. Just in case Derek needs to blow off a little steam.”

  I parked in front of a dingy yellow apartment complex named Sea Side Village, then said to Colin, “Assume that he’s packing. Watch his hands. Keep your mouth shut. And if you do say something, be careful—we don’t want him to lawyer up.”

  Gino and his partner, Samoan Ro, drove past in a black-and-white patrol car, its trunk filled with nine-millimeter submachine guns and shotguns. Both wore their everyday paramilitary gear.

  Colin checked the magazine of his Sig, then pushed the air from his lungs.

  After Gino and Ro parked near a fire hydrant, I plucked the sticky note with Derek’s address and apartment number from the dashboard and whispered, “Lord, be with me.”

  With cops on the block, the street had cleared. Crack smokers slunk further into dark carports. Middle-school drug runners hustled past wrought-iron gates to not do homework. Homies lounging on the hoods of El Caminos and Regals watched us with wary expressions, hoping that they weren’t on Gino’s and Ro’s dance card today.

  “Hell-o-uise.” Gino, tall and dark and ex-Marine-big, winked at me. “The party can start now that you’re here.”

  I winked back at him. “The roof is on fire, my friend.” I had never dated cops and had no plan to in the future. But if Gino and I were to ever score hall passes from our respective spouses, we would destroy each other, then combust into flame, leaving behind a pile of ash and Glock.

  “You got my back?” I asked him now.

  “Your back, your front, every little finger and toe,” he affirmed.

  Every step I took, glass crunched beneath my shoe soles. Broken forty-ounce bottles, broken vials, broken crack pipes. The security gate that protected Sea Side Village was wide open. So much for safety. The swimming pool in the middle of the courtyard was filled with liquid the color of the Incredible Hulk. On top of that “water” was a thin film of lord-knows-what rippling with the draft. Flies skimmed across that layer and their buzzing was almost louder than the stereo blasting Lil Wayne.

  The music was coming from Derek’s place, Lucky Unit Number 7.

  I kept one hand on the butt of my gun and used the other to knock on the door.

  The stereo cut off, and now the courtyard was left with the buzzing of those flies.

  A dog started to bark from inside the apartment.

  “A Rott,” I predicted.

  Colin took a deep breath, then muttered, “Shit.”

  From behind the door, a man yelled, “What?”

  I badged the peephole and said, “We’re here to talk with Derek Hester.”

  A pause, then, “For what?”

  “We gon’ have a problem, Derek?” I asked. “Open up, please.”

  The dog stopped barking.

  Click. Click. Click.

  How many deadbolts could one door have?

  Click.

  Four.

  The door opened and the stink of weed and dog washed over me. The theme music from I Love Lucy had replaced Lil Wayne.

  Derek was big—six-foot-five, and damn, he could fill a doorframe. One side of his scalp remained cornrowed but the other boasted a big, wavy Afro. A Rottweiler on a red leather leash heeled at his side. Derek made eye contact with Gino and Ro before settling his gaze on me. Poor Colin, the white boy from Colorado, didn’t even merit a glance.

  I smiled. “Hi, Derek. I’m Detective Lou Norton from Homicide. This is my partner, Detective Taggert. I believe you already know Sergeants Walston and Matua.” I placed my hands on my hips, making sure he saw my gun.

  Derek didn’t respond. His jean shorts hung low on his hips, showing tan boxers. He wore a gray wife-beater and his biceps, bulked up from his fellowship at State, were as big as my head. Stretch marks rippled up to his shoulders and tattoos—BPS, pyramids and stars, Sleepy D—covered his caramel-colored arms.

  “We need to talk to you for a moment,” I said.

  “I’m off the paper,” he spat.

  “This ain’t about probation or anything you’ve done. I hope.”

  “What about then?”

  “Monique Darson,” I said.

  He squinted at me, making his sleepy eyes almost close. “Monie?”

  “May we come in, please? Unless you wanna do this at the station.”

  He gave me the up-and-down and asked Gino, “She Five-O for real?”

  “Naw,” Gino said. “She a sandwich artist over at Subway.”

  Derek sneered. “Sergeant Walston got jokes.” Then, he stared at me. “Ain’t nothin’ scare you, huh?”

  “Bees,” I said, faking a shiver.

  He smirked. “You need to be up in a classroom, teachin’ niggas algegras and shit ’stead of bustin’ fools’ nuts.”

  “You sound like my mother,” I kidded. “Did she call you? Did she tell you to say that?”

  He laughed. “You got jokes, too.”

  “Wednesdays and Thursdays only,” I said, doing anything to make him—and his Rottweiler—relax.

  Derek tugged the dog’s leash. “C’mon, King.”

  Colin and I entered the apartment while Gino and Ro stood at the open door.

  The apartment was clean, too clean. There was no furniture in the living r
oom, just a patio chair placed in front of a forty-inch television now playing the “Lucy Stomps Grapes in Italy” episode. Empty Olde English bottles lined the baseboards around the room. In one of two dog dishes, there was a bone the size of a T. rex’s leg. About ten yellow boxes of sandwich bags sat on the kitchen counter.

  “You part of the summer lunch program?” Colin asked.

  Derek frowned. “What? Sir?” He glanced at the boxes, and then at Gino, now stepping into the living room and standing near the television. “They was on sale at Target, sir.”

  The bedroom closet probably hid guns, Baggies of weed, some raw, and some white. But I couldn’t wander around without probable cause, and the hospitality shown to us by Mr. Hester thus far didn’t warrant probable cause.

  “Do you have your dog under control, Derek?” I asked, hand back on my Glock. “Cuz I’d hate to shoot him. I’m an animal lover.”

  Derek, eyes on Colin, drawled, “King cool.”

  “Monique Darson,” I said, “how do you know her?”

  “We friends,” he said, focusing on the television set.

  “Romantic?”

  Gino hit the TV’s power button, forcing Derek to focus on me instead.

  “Were you in a relationship?” I asked again.

  “Somethin’ like that,” he said in a flat voice. “Not that she wanted everybody to know. Except when she came ’round here. Anywhere else, though? My name was ‘Whodat?’”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  Colin was rubbing something on the filthy shag carpet with the toe of his shoe.

  King growled, and perfect drops of spit fell from the dog’s gleaming white teeth.

  I gave Colin a quick headshake. What the fuck, dude? Stop that.

  “I ain’t seen Monie since the night she graduated,” Derek said. “Pissed me off. She ain’t want me at the ceremony, but I was supposed to buy her a gift? Fuck that. I ain’t talked to her after then. Wait—no. I talked to her on Tuesday, like in the afternoon. She wanted to meet me somewhere, but I wasn’t down wit’ that.”

  “Mind if I look at your arms?” I asked.