by Dan Vining
“Algún día estas paredes deberan caer...se desmoronarán, y caeran,” Nate said.
“Sir?” No-Name said.
“Someday these walls shall tumble, crumble, and fall…”
“Is that from the Bible?”
“Almost. Los Lobos,” Nate turned and said.
Pink pastries rolled around on a U-shaped assembly line in a baked goods factory. The air was sweet, too sweet, way too sweet. The shift workers wore white—as if it were a medical facility—and hairnets, which made them all look foolish, tamed. They were almost all young girls, Ecuadorian or Peruvian with a few Cubans. And notably, a few White American girls, too. Of course, no Mexicans. Nate had left No-Name behind in the alley. Nate stood just inside the door. The whole scene made him feel too much like a cop.
Nate spotted the woman he’d come to see. As he started toward her, he snatched a pastry off the assembly line. The floor supervisor—a Latin whip-cracker who didn’t look like he’d laughed once since he got the job—hadn’t lifted his eyes from the tablet in his hand but he knew Nate was there, knew who he was and what was probably going to happen next. And how he’d be expected to respond.
“They let you wear those sexy boots?” Nate said to the young woman on the assembly line. Her name was Miranda. She was Venezuelan, had been in LA since she was two. She liked what he’d said about her sexy boots, in spite of her “tough grrrl” stance. Her hands never stopped moving, sliding the pastries into plastic sleeves.
“Did you hear about my thing?” Nate said. “The shooters. At the hospital.”
“I don’t know nothing,” she said.
“It was Incas though, right?”
“That’s what people said.”
“I don’t know, I’m not so sure,” Nate said. “I think somebody maybe wants us to believe it was Incas. What’d you hear, any specifics?”
“Any name I gave you would be wrong.”
Nate liked her. She was smart. He knew her story, or some of it. She had a baby and a husband who had trouble keeping his eyes looking straight ahead. She was carrying a full load at LA City College and paying for it herself. She wanted to be an architect. There was something about that that almost made Nate choke up every time he thought about it. Architect. He wondered if there were any people in her life who thought she was smart. He was fairly certain no one had ever told her.
“That’s OK, I don’t want to get you in any trouble,” he said. He took a bite of the pink pan dolce. “How’s that kid, your cousin?”
“He’s good. We got him in an art magnet.”
“Hey,” Nate said, looking around, pretending he’d just noticed. “White people work here now. What’s up with that?”
“Since all the Mexicans went back,” Miranda said.
“So is that progress? I keep forgetting what they want us to think about each other.”
She smiled a smart smile.
Nate tossed the pink bun in a recycling bin. “You need anything from me?” he said. “Besides diabetes medicine.”
Miranda took a second. Her hands pushed two more pastries into their plastic sleeves. She looked at him. “Somebody said the gunman at the hospital was an old dog named Razor. He’s not Inca. He’s not anything. He used to be a Twenty, long time ago, or maybe a No Fear.”
Nate said, “There were two of them. The old guy was with a young one, a kid with a cross inked on his cheek. That mean anything to you?”
She shook her head but she wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her hands had stopped too. Cops were coming in through the same door Nate had come through, a six-pack of uniformed officers. They called them Streets. Right behind them was Whitey Barnes, the sour GU detective, and, behind him, Il Cho. The third gang cop, Juan Carlos, already had some Salvadoran boy pushed up against a wall, squeezing the kid’s face between his fingers.
“This has nothing to do with me, I swear,” Nate said, before Miranda could even ask.
One worker made a break for it. Two Streets chased him down. When they caught him, they pulled his T-shirt over his head to reveal a back full of Inca art.
Miranda said, “I trust you.” It was something Nate would think about later.
Nate went over and got in Whitey’s face. Whitey always wore white shoes, like a car salesman or a strip-mall lawyer. Nate accidentally stepped on Whitney’s toe.
“Hey!” Whitey said.
“Sorry. What are you guys doing? Tracking me?”
Neither one of them answered the second question. “Just shakin’ the bush,” Whitey said. “Lettin’ ’em know we’re here.”
“I think they know already, Whitey,” Nate said, moving on. “Leave my CI alone.”
“Is she chipped?” Whitey said, a petty challenge that stopped Nate in his tracks. Legal immigrant workers had data chips under the skin on the backs of their hands.
“You guys know it’s going in the other direction now, right?” Nate said.
Cho felt the need to defend his partner Whitey. “Don’t assume, man,” Cho said. Whitey smirked. Nate split.
As he was walking away up the alley with No-Name, Il Cho came out of the factory and caught up to him. “Wait,” he said.
Nate waited.
“Did you get anything from your CI?” Cho said.
Nate told him about the old gangster with a lobster claw—maybe named Razor—and the second gangster, the kid with the cross on his cheek. “You know either one of them?”
Cho shook his head. Nate believed him.
Chapter Eleven
The sign came on. The name of the mortuary—Funderburk & Son—was in blue neon, cursive, what passed for low-key these days. The low brick building was midblock on one of the re-regentrified streets in Compton. It was dinnertime, an hour away from dark, almost quiet. The traffic was light, almost workable. A hulking ganger stood out front, arms folded. He glared at Nate as he approached—a warning shot. “Hey, how’re you doing?” Nate said. He was in his CRO flight suit. He’d left No-Name with the helo across the street on the roof of the Fellowship Hall of the Followers of the Messiah First AME church.
Up front in the viewing room, the reconstructed Wallace twins were on display, side by side, shoulder to shoulder in a single pine coffin. It looked handmade, the coffin. Nate wondered if there was some New Age craftsman in the community who made pine caskets in his garage. If so, God bless him. Nate had a thing about funerals—as in, he had been to exactly one—but he had heard that caskets now were made out of recycled pop bottles and beer cans. On an easel next to the coffin, a heart-shaped screen showed silent footage of the boys when they were little. A banner read: Samuel & Nathan. It was very still in the viewing room, no music, no street noise.
Derrick Wallace was on his knees beside the pine box, his head bowed as low as it would go; he didn’t yet know he wasn’t alone. Nate waited just inside the double doors until Wallace’s prayer was done—or the prayer gave up and lifted his head—before he spoke.
“Being alone must feel strange. The quiet, after all that noise. Prison.”
“Who are you?” Wallace said, getting to his feet.
“How long were you in, five years? Five years of noise.”
“Who are you?”
“I was there. At your house, at the hospital.” Nate’s flight suit said the rest.
“I’d like to ask you to leave.”
Wallace’s polite, measured tone was a surprise. Maybe it was Jesus talking.
“A changed man,” Nate said. “So you found some peace up there. Good for you. Any port in a storm. And it’s always a storm, isn’t it?”
The edge in Nate’s voice didn’t surprise Wallace. He knew cops, had always had cops in his life. He knew how they talked, walked and talked, trying to make you fear them, thinking fear was the same as respect. Over the years, he’d come to respect a cop or two. He’d never feared one. He
suspected the CRO before him now didn’t in any way think that he was a changed man. Both men knew who he had been, knew Derrick “Zap” Wallace had put a good number of boys—other men’s sons—into boxes. Or at least his gang the Twenties did, in wilder times. Two men were standing there, a cop and a criminal, both in deep. However secretly conflicted either man was didn’t much matter. The past doesn’t care what you think about it.
Nate said, “I don’t think the first thing I’d do is pray if they killed my sons.”
“No?” Wallace said. “What would you do?”
Nate stayed put at the back of the room. “I think I’d charge right back into it,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling you, isn’t it? Your people. That it’s time to get back into it, time to kill somebody.”
Wallace wished he hadn’t said anything. He just looked at the other. A flat look he’d learned in Lompoc. It was hard to read anything into his face beyond the long-term generalized anger.
“I had a friend who was a salesman,” Nate said. “High-end diagnostic medical gear. He drove a sweet old Jeep. He worked hard but he needed to get into the woods every weekend just to stay halfway uncrazy. One day he shows up with a new BMW. He said his boss, his friend, made him get it. It wasn’t a joke. I said why and he said, ‘Because he knows I can’t afford it.’”
Wallace took a step toward the side door.
“You don’t have to go, I’m done,” Nate said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I just wanted to tell you about my friend and his BMW. And to say I’m not so sure it was your old enemies who killed your boys.”
He walked back up the aisle and left the man with his sons, alone with the Alone.
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Nate ate a steak at The Original Pantry Cafe, a 24/7 eatery downtown at Ninth and Figueroa in the shadow of the last of the office towers to the south. It was a cash-only place that had been owned by an LA mayor for years, so the crowd had always been políticos and the businessmen and businesswomen who traded with them. And cops. And mid-level drug dealers. Working stiffs. Over the years, it was known especially for steaks and pancakes but, things being the way they were now, you only got a steak if you knew one of the waiters. And you had a hundred bucks. Nate knew Cubby, who had been there forever. And he had a hundred bucks.
Nate sat at the counter, always. When his contraband steak came, it was covered by a thick crusty slice of sourdough almost as big as the plate, Cubby’s idea of a joke. Nate left the bread tent over the steak the whole time he ate it, sneaking under it each time he cut off a chunk, his idea of a joke. With the first bite, Nate had to swear out loud, it was that good. Or maybe because it had been that long since he’d had a steak.
At a table in the back corner, beside a row of tall wooden step-in boxes called “phone booths” in another era, two men in business suits sat across from each other, one of them crying. The crying man kept looking at the man across from him and then he would look away and his tears would catch the light. Nate could see both their faces, the way their table was situated. The man who wasn’t crying did all of the talking. He seemed resolute, very controlled, but after a minute he was the one who reached across the table, pushing aside a plate with a piece of pie on it, and took the crying man’s hand in his. It was ten o’clock at night. Nate tried to figure it out. Had they come here from the office? They dressed alike, standard-issue suits, middle-manager uniforms. Neither man had loosened his tie. Did they work together? How had their day begun? Did the breakup start during the day, over a vid-phone? Were they going back to work after this? Did they have lives apart from each other, lives postponed—or stepped out of—for this, tonight? Was anyone in Los Angeles happy, paired-up and happy? Was happy gone with every other gone thing? Had they passed a law against it? Nate thought about the pretend secretary in the story bar the other night, the longing in the air, the lone woman in the deepest shadows. She was there when he came in, alone with a glass of red wine in front of her, her back straight, as if she thought she might be judged for her posture. He was a cop. It was all about the details. He had scanned the story bar when he came in, noted details and drew conclusions, even if there was no official or even practical reason to do so and all without thinking about it. Details. Her posture, her position in the room. The way she had crossed her legs. The way she didn’t keep time to the music. Red wine, not white. The glass almost full, not empty, not almost empty. The way she had kept her eyes on Jane on the stage, what didn’t exactly seem like lust in her eyes. She hadn’t looked over at them, at Nate and Ava, not once. Who was she? Did she have a place in the world? Wasn’t that always the question: Is there a place for me in the world? Was there any place where she felt at home, at ease, herself? Why was she there?
Why was Nate here? Then it hit him: it was one of Ava’s haunts. She’d talked about the beef shortage. Ava had a hundred dollars too. Ava knew Cubby too. When he’d come in thirty minutes ago he’d been looking for her, he realized now. He wondered what that meant. He decided it didn’t mean anything, or nothing worth thinking about. Whenever he found himself thinking about himself and his motives for more than a minute or two, it made him want a drink. He sawed off another piece of steak.
“Seen Ava Monica lately?” he said the next time Cubby came past.
“Not lately,” Cubby lied.
Nate got up to pay and split. He thought of ordering a ham and cheese to go for No-Name—standing by on a roof two businesses down—but decided the gesture would be too considerate too soon. He left an extra twenty for Cubby, bought a bag of bootleg nicotine mints from a kid standing just inside the door, and went back out into the night.
No-Name was standing next to the Crow, eating his own sandwich. It was wrapped in wax paper, probably homemade, the bread dark and hearty, wholesome-looking. Nate wondered if the kid’s mom had made it, baked the bread. Maybe she was a hippie mom, a back-to-earther, a Five-Ruler. If she was, now her boy was a gunman for the cops. How’d she like them apples? It was something else he didn’t need to think about. No-Name snapped to attention when he saw Nate coming across the roof and started to wad up the grub.
“Finish it,” Nate said.
“No, I’m ready,” No-Name said.
Nate popped the rear deck on the Crow and pretended to care about something under the hood. “Finish it,” he said again. “I’m in no hurry. Tonight we’re just running out the clock, trying to keep it as boring as possible.”
No-Name unwadded the sandwich and ate the rest of it in three bites. The look on his face was dangerously close to happy. Nate Cole had said a dozen words to him. And one of them was “we’re.” It was a start.
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A hissing sound. Nate was thinking it sounded like a snake about to strike, even if he’d never actually heard a snake hiss in real life.
“What is that?” he said.
A spooked young street cop crouching beside him—eyes wide, a gun in his hand—just shook his head, fast. Either he didn’t know what the hissing sound was or he couldn’t talk right now.
They were in an alleyway beside a dirty Salvadoran restaurant, La Nacional.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Nate said.
The kid nodded, fast. He was turning white. And he wasn’t even Caucasian.
“You might want to start breathing again,” Nate said.
The kid nodded.
“It’s all right,” Nate said. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”
The kid nodded some more. “Yes, sir. I know who you are.”
It was headed toward eleven o’clock. When the call had come in, Nate and No-Name had been fifteen air miles away over East LA circling a silver-roofed house where one of Whitey’s informants had said the old dog named Razor lived. This call was a Code 11-99—a cop in deep shit—and Nate had somehow intuited that this particular shit was his deep shit. In the chatter on the radio, he’d recognized Il Cho’s excited voice. Now Nate wa
s down the alley, where it dead-ended, next to a steel door and a Dumpster and a high window, the restaurant’s kitchen. He looked back. Another Crow was landing on a rooftop a half block away. In the middle of the street was the forty-year-old Bell Twin Ranger which had brought in Il Cho and Whitey Barnes. And Juan Carlos.
The GU guys had been first on the scene, “talking” to somebody. Three other Crows were on the ground in the vicinity. All the CRO pilots had the sense to come in quiet, drop right straight down out of the sky on WhisperMode and jog in on foot. Two street cops had been on foot patrol a block over when whatever went down inside the restaurant had gone down and the all-in 11-99 call had come. The streets had cleared out the café’s customers. It was small, only four tables. It was close to closing time, so there had only been three people in the place, an old man and a couple, a Salvadoran girl who looked about thirteen and her grown-up boyfriend, flirting over flan. The people in the neighborhood had known when they heard the big helo to shut the doors and windows and turn off the lights and TV, put the kids in the bathtubs, and lie low. It was quiet. Almost.
The hissing. It was coming from the kitchen. Along with Juan Carlos’s yowling. Or was he calling out to God? It was a pitiful cry for help and not the metaphorical kind. It was hard to take, about as nakedly human as anything ever gets. Nate was right under the window up high on the alley wall, a window with an exhaust fan stuck in it. It was as if the fan were blowing out the sound of Juan Carlos’s torture, amplifying it. Along with whatever the hissing sound was. Water running? Spraying? A broken pipe?
Nate looked back. Where was Il Cho? When Nate had first landed, they’d seen each other, talked for a second. “Juan Carlos went in on his own, through the restaurant to the kitchen, looking for your guy,” Cho had told him. “Whitey and I were sixty seconds behind him. Whitey told JC to wait for the knockout team. He wouldn’t wait. We pulled back.” Then Cho had gone back up to the mouth of the alley. Nate had told No-Name to go with him. The Gang Unit cops rolled without gunners, a macho thing.
