by Dan Vining
Nate said, “You should have been an actor.”
“Yeah,” Bodie said. “Me and Bruce Willis, it’s like looking in a mirror.”
Bodie Cole wasn’t that old—in his midsixties, still barrel-chested with a full head of hair. When he was sitting up, he combed it every few minutes, quick, strong, almost angry strokes, a signature habit of his. You wouldn’t call it a nervous habit, Bodie wasn’t the nervous type. He wore the same outfit all day and every day, like a uniform: a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt and khaki pants. He had diabetes, which made his legs and feet swell up. (And pancreatic cancer, though none of them knew it yet.) Every few months, a new doctor would rotate in and tell Bodie they should cut off his feet. Bodie always declined. And there was no way that Nate would override his father and sign off on it, though each of the new doctors tried exactly once to get him to do it.
“I saw you out there on the bench,” Bodie said. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming in today.”
Nate didn’t have anything to say to that. He knew better than to lie.
“They’re talking about taking out those eucalyptus,” Bodie said. “They can kiss my ass.”
“You need to piss or anything?” Nate said.
“I’ll let you know,” Bodie said, with a sharpness in his voice that told Nate it was going to be one of the good visits, when his old man was more or less himself.
Carl groaned in his unquiet sleep.
“They issued all of us one of these,” Bodie said, and held up a device the size of a ring box with a push-button on it. “A button. I’m supposed to hit this instead of doing anything myself. They said to think of it as ‘calling for backup.’”
“Did you tell them they could kiss your ass?” Nate said.
“Yes, I did,” Bodie said.
Nate slid some white socks over his father’s ugly feet and took him outside, into the sun. Bodie wouldn’t use the wheelchair they’d issued him. Walking anywhere with his father took ten times as long as it would have in the normal world. It was like learning how to partner-dance when you were a kid, one-two, one-two-three, everything slowed way down and backward. Nate worked hard not to let his impatience show. Bodie winced every third or fourth step, turned his head to do it. So Bodie was doing a little pretending of his own. It was like learning how to die when you were a sick and busted old man.
And then they were back outside under the gum trees. Bodie sat down, hard, on the same bench where Nate had done his procrastinating. “Is it ever going to rain again?” Bodie said.
“It drizzled a little the other night, about six minutes’ worth.”
“That only makes it worse, not even enough to wash things off.”
“Did you hear about this new county plan?” Nate said. “Tanker rain, once a month.”
Bodie adjusted himself on the bench, wincing when he moved. “You know what I hate more than anything?” he said. “Not seeing something coming. I used to make fun of guys who said, I didn’t see it coming. I always hated that. Well, Goddamn it to hell, I didn’t see this coming…”
Nate thought how good a bottle of beer would taste. He didn’t drink anymore.
“You seem a little rattled,” the father said, “like you’re only half here.”
Nate didn’t say anything.
“Sit down,” Bodie said. “I get so tired of everybody looking down at me.”
Nate sat on the bench. He let the wind breathe through the trees a minute. “So I roll in on an aftermath deal,” he began. “Thirteen-year-old kid, probably a gangbanger, shot elsewhere and brought home to lie in state in the front bedroom so his mother and aunts can wail over him. Actually, the mother was quiet, now that I think about it. We’re there, South Central, trying to fill in the blanks, just my gunner and me, and the dead kid’s twin brother makes an appearance. Twin. One kid’s dead in the bed, the same kid is alive, standing right in front of me. Or so I think at first.”
“Goddamn,” Bodie said.
“But I don’t have time to process anything because now a couple of motorcycles with shooters come down the sidewalk and open up, punching holes in the front wall, including with a fifty cal. I hit the deck. My gunner is killed. The twin brother takes one in the shoulder, and three of the wailing women get killed and two spectators out in the front yard.”
“Damn,” Bodie said. “Talk about the Wild West…”
“It gets better. I follow up with the wounded twin at KingMem who comes out of surgery okay, and another shooter comes in the recovery room and kills him while I’m standing there.”
Bodie laughed, more of a grunt. “Whew!”
“Yeah. But, after that, I had a pretty quiet night. I went home, played some music, fired up a Romeo y Julieta.”
“Blacks or Browns? The dead.”
“It’s not that simple anymore, Pop,” Nate said.
Bodie just stared at him.
“Blacks,” Nate said. “The twin boys, the women. The boys’ dad just got out of Lompoc. Coincidence, I guess. The shooters were Browns, at least the two who came to the hospital.”
“Anybody throw signs?”
“It doesn’t work that way anymore,” Nate said.
“It still works that way,” Bodie said. “You just can’t read the signs. Some new alphabet.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” He thought about the Inca coin thrown on the bed. As the blood spread.
“An old gangbanger told me once…” Bodie said, winding up. Nate had heard this one twenty times. Fifty times. A hundred times. He wondered what it meant that nowadays his father didn’t bother to start his stories with the standard apology about probably repeating himself. Did I ever tell you about the time…? Nate could have supplied his father’s next lines but he didn’t.
So Bodie continued, quoting the old gangbanger, “‘We’re all in gangs. You cops are gangs, same as us. You have your colors, we have ours. You have your guns, we have ours. You do your business, we do our business. You have your women who you’re trying to impress, so do we. You live in your neighborhoods, so do we. You have your OGs—you call them by names like Captain and Lieutenant and Chief—and so do we...’” Then, the punch line. “And then the old gangbanger said, ‘You ain’t going nowhere, neither are we.’”
Nate nodded. For some reason it sounded more true today than it had every other time.
www
Night fell. Nate liked to be up in the air when night came on. Something about being above the surface of the earth—even a few hundred yards above it—made him feel more in control. He was thinking about what his father had said about not seeing it coming. That was what Nate thought about nightfall. If he saw it coming—if he could look east and see a thicker dark moving in or look west and see the last hump of red across the water—then maybe, maybe the night had less of a chance of taking him down.
He flew over Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, coming out of Brentwood. He looked over the side. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet, and there was a line out on the sidewalk for a new restaurant everyone was talking about, at least the people who talked about restaurants. Il Cielo e Infinito, the new joint was called. The sad thing was it had replaced a red sauce garlicky checkered-tablecloth joint called Vito’s that was one of Nate’s hangouts, or had been, and his father’s hang out before him. Progress. He banked to port over Pacific Palisades and the Pacific Coast Highway. The lit-up Ferris wheel rotated lazily out on the pier. He looked down at the glass and chrome and white walls of The Shinola, a private club. Something was going on tonight. Quad searchlights swept the sky, the beams cutting through the coastal fog that rolled in this time of night almost every night. A pair of air cabs hovered above The Shinola’s parking lot as a line of cars trying to get in sniffed each other’s butts.
Nate climbed until he was above the marine layer, up into the clear blue-black. “Il Cielo e Infinito” was Italian for “
sky and infinity,” another way of saying, “the sky’s the limit.” Not for him. For him, the sky was just the first ten thousand feet of whatever was above and beyond all this all-too-human shit.
His new gunner was waiting for him, standing on the roof of HQ, his hands behind his back, parade rest, like a dope—the same kid from the end of the night last night.
“Why aren’t you down in the squad room, cleaning your guns or taking another shower or something?” Nate said as the hatches came up and he got out.
“Sorry, sir,” the kid said, snapping to. “I wasn’t sure what you were expecting me to do, sir. I asked the captain and she said—”
“You don’t ever talk to the captain,” Nate said, walking away from the Crow. “You don’t talk to anybody. What I’m expecting you to do is to keep me from getting killed and, if you have any extra time, keep yourself from getting killed.”
“Yes, sir,” the new gunner said, trying to keep up.
“And don’t call me ‘sir,’ call me…don’t call me anything.”
“Right.”
“And don’t say, right,” Nate said. “You don’t have any way to know if I’m right or wrong. How could you? I mean, look at you.”
“No, sir.”
“But I am right, one hundred percent of the time,” Nate said, walking on. The young gunner held his tongue, a fast learner. Nate stopped, turned. The kid almost ran into him. “You know that coach you had, the one who yelled at you and called you names and was always in your face but you knew that it was only because he really cared about you and wanted you to grow up to be—you know—a man someday?” The kid was about to nod yes but caught himself. “Yeah, well, that’s not me,” Nate said. “If you’re really lucky, maybe there’ll be a day like six months from now when I’ll realize, Hey, that kid is still around…and I’ll give you a big smile and ask you what your name is and if you have a girlfriend and who your favorite band is.”
“Understood,” the kid said.
Nate left him on the roof lot nodding and doing a nervous dance as if he had to pee.
It was still in early, so the squad room was nearly empty, empty of higher-ups anyway. Nate picked a path through the desks that kept him from having to talk to any other CROs or gunners, got a cup of coffee, pulled a couple of tabs off of the duty board. He went down a floor and stepped into the door-less glass box that was the home of the Gang Unit. The GU wasn’t much more than a couple of desks and a sagging couch that looked like it had come from somebody’s house. Or from the curb out front. Taped on the glass wall was a poster-size picture of a punk throwing his gang’s sign, one so elaborate it took both hands, an elbow, and a stuck-out tongue.
Three GU cops were lounging, including Whitey, the Black, who’d been on the back patio at the house on South St. Andrew Place.
“Business slow?” Nate said.
None of them liked Nate. The one who disliked him least was Korean, named Il Cho, or Cho Il, Nate could never remember which it was. The other cop was some permutation of Latin American, Juan Carlos. Or Carlos Juan? Maybe they’d like Nate more if he got their names straight. Race mattered in the gang business.
“What’s happening with the Twenties these days?” Nate said.
“The Incas took most of their good stuff,” Il Cho said.
Whitey Barnes didn’t look up from the dub-player in his hands when he said, “Well, now the king is back. Long live the king.”
“Derrick Wallace,” Nate said.
Il Cho unsuccessfully concealed a sideways look at Juan Carlos.
“They say he found Jesus,” Juan Carlos said, also not looking at Nate.
“Yeah, right,” Whitey said, sour, eyes still on his screen. “Jesus must have a short memory.”
Juan Carlos laughed, ugly.
Il Cho said, “You were there at the hospital when the second boy got it, weren’t you, Cole?”
“Yeah, whodunit, Cole?” Whitey said. “We’re hearing conflicting reports. Not that anybody really gives a shit.”
“I didn’t see a thing,” Nate said. “I was flirting with a nurse.”
Whitey looked up from his game, watched Nate leave.
Chapter Ten
There was a busted dinner-hour robbery at a kimchi joint in Koreatown. These days in LA almost every CRO call was a homicide. This was a robbery-homicide. Double homicide. Nate purposefully took the long way there, hoping the coronettes would get impatient and bag the robber and the manager and split. Nate had a short-term goal: to get through the night without seeing another dead body. He landed on the roof of a florist’s shop that used to be a bank, left the new gunner with the Crow, and came down an exterior fire escape to the street.
He was right, no bodies. The restaurant was packed, hungry customers stepping over the puddle of blood, fighting over the tables near the windows. The coroner’s assistants had come and gone. One of them was named Suzanne. She and Nate had some history, recent history. She’d left him a note, written across the bottom of the body-run form. You mad at me? it said. “What, I was supposed to stay over the other night, cuddle? You were dead to the world. I almost put a tag on your toe.” Among cops and coronettes, being dead and being sexually spent were more or less the same mockable thing.
Before Nate could finish the wrap-up in the restaurant, there were gunshots. Outside. Loud, meaty, a big-bore rifle. The diners paused—momentarily—decided it probably wasn’t right out front, whatever it was, and went back to their spicy rolls and dumplings. Then came the sound of a muffled loudspeaker, a voice from the sky, like unintelligible orders from an ordinary, overworked God. A helicopter was somewhere close, a big boy with thudding blades.
When Nate came out of the restaurant, Gunner No-Name had come down from the roof, on full alert, shotgun at the ready. “Bear,” No-Name said.
“So I see,” Nate said, looking up at the big helo hovering one street over, churning up street dust. It was an old Sikorsky, a repurposed Russian warbird, good for heavy lifting. The side door was open. A rifleman sat there with one leg hanging out while another team member rappelled down to the street.
“Where was it?” Nate said.
“In front of the McDonald’s. It came right down the street.”
“They’ll do that,” Nate said. “When I was your age, bears shit in the woods. There was even a saying about it. Let’s go.”
Before the two were a hundred feet along the sidewalk, there came the big bass drum of another gunshot from the next street over, what sounded like a handgun this time, big-bore. Finishing the job.
Then they were airborne again. “You all right back there, No-Name?” Nate said as they flew out of K-Town and leveled off. Of course, the sky was clear, the city lights below just far enough down to be pretty.
“Yes,” the kid said, warily.
“Take the stick a second, will you?”
“Sir? What? I mean…” A Crow wasn’t equipped with dual controls.
“That was a joke,” Nate said. The kid laughed the world’s smallest laugh.
“Nate Cole, code one-eight-seven, two down, MacArthur Park,” Radio Carrie said on the heads-up display, three-dimensional, close enough to kiss.
“I can’t take it anymore, Carrie!” Nate said, like a drama queen, italicized. “I’ve seen too much!”
She smiled. It was a thing of beauty, her smile. Wherever her face came from, it conveyed the improbable idea that there was no place she’d rather be than here, with him, looking into his eyes, crossing Los Angeles, flying backward on a Thursday night.
“Don’t you have a stolen bike in Tarzana for me or something?” Nate said. “Or maybe a baby deer looking for a drink of water, down out of Angeles Forest, roaming Old Pasadena?”
“That would be within the purview of Animal Regulation & Control, Nate Cole,” Carrie said with another smile.
“The thing is we wer
e going to go grab some dinner,” he said, a lie.
“Ten-four. I’ll reassign. Out,” Carrie said and disappeared. Was that a wink?
Nate banked into the kind of diving turn meant to give a new gunner something to talk about back at the squad room and then they were headed south.
www
Time was, every black-and-white cop car in Los Angeles carried the motto: To Protect & To Serve. Now, officially, it was: Always There… But, unofficially, the motto was: Keep The Lid On (Whatever It Takes.) CROs answered calls—went where they were told to go, went where the flare-ups were—but they also flew by their own lights, followed their instincts. All CROs were detectives. At least that was the way it was with the ten-thousand-hour pilots like Nate, who knew LA in a way the office-bound, earthbound cops never would. Nate and No-Name walked up a narrow street. All the signs were in Spanish, the colors brighter, different tunes on the soundtrack. On both sides of the street were clothes shops, restaurants, places that still sold bootleg dubs of movies and music on rolling racks that spilled out of the store. This was way downtown, deep in. It wasn’t Alvaro Street, wasn’t a fake Ensenada. Nobody was waiting for the gringo tourists to arrive in a topless sightseeing bus to experience some local color, traditional delicacies, and lackadaisical margaritas. There wasn’t a sombrero in sight, no strolling mariachis. And nobody was smiling.
“Hey, look, No-Name,” Nate said, walking, “we’re the only Whites.”
No-Name shifted his shotgun strap from one shoulder to the other.
As they passed the next restaurant, Nate pointed with his thumb and said, “Empanadas.”
When they turned right down an alley, the scene changed. It was as if they’d walked into a hip art gallery, fifteen-foot-tall paintings on both sides, both walls, Inca art, gang billboards, the kind painted without fear that anyone was going to come by and make you stop it. Or paint over it. No-Name was wide-eyed. This felt like what it was: a boundary.
