by Dan Vining
The rookie street cop still crouched against the wall, shaking like a 5.0. Nate put a hand on the scared cop’s head to steady himself and then put a boot on the kid’s right shoulder, used him to step up onto the Dumpster. He was right under the window. He stretched up, trying to see into the kitchen. He came up slowly until the clattering exhaust fan was blowing greasy air right in his face. It smelled like hot oil, tortillas, and pork. And gas.
Nate couldn’t see much through the spinning blades, just two men, Juan Carlos on his ass on the floor, the other guy standing over him with a big knife that caught the light every once in a while. In the moment, neither man was saying anything. Juan Carlos had stopped howling. Nate couldn’t see much. Before he thought about it, he stuck his fingers into the fan, right at the hub, seized the blades, stopped it cold. Juan Carlos’s tormenter shot a look up in the general direction of the high window. It was the kid with the cross on his left cheek. The young gangbanger knew something had changed but he didn’t know what and he didn’t look directly at the stopped fan. If he had, he and Nate would have been eye-to-eye, just like in the recov room at the hospital. He had a twelve-inch kitchen knife in his hand and blood all over his cook’s apron.
Juan Carlos was cut all to hell, little cuts, big cuts. Half of his nose was hanging off. He was plopped down on an overturned white plastic lard tub, his hands behind him, tied or taped, his upper body strapped to one leg of the steel cook table with power cords. There was blood all around on the floor, looking for a drain. Juan Carlos said something or tried to say something but his mouth wasn’t working anymore. The cook with the cross on his cheek put down the knife, saying something to Juan Carlos. It didn’t seem possible that Juan Carlos’s eyes could get any more wide open but they did. This was headed somewhere bad fast. Juan Carlos clinched his eyes shut and dropped his head.
The stalled fan blades kept fighting Nate, cutting into the skin of his fingers and palm. With his other hand he dug into the chest pocket of his flight suit, found a ballpoint pen, and jammed it through the blades. He took his hand away. The blades didn’t move. He leaned in again, looked down into the kitchen. He cocked his head. There was the hissing sound again. And now the kid had a cheap lighter in his hand. He jerked Juan Carlos’s head up and pushed the lighter into his face so he could get a good look at it, but Juan Carlos’s eyes never opened.
The ganger had his thumb on the strike wheel of the lighter.
Nate jumped down off the trash box.
Il Cho and Whitey and two CROs and their gunners were coming his way, up the alleyway. “They said wait,” Cho said. “A Spec-Ev team is two minutes out.” Or maybe it was Whitey who said it: everything was running together. Spec-Ev meant Special Events. Right.
Nate charged headlong toward the service door into the kitchen. It was a steel door but beat up and loose in the frame. The gunners, including No-Name, were all still ten feet back when Nate kicked open the door. It banged against something inside—metal to metal—and came bouncing right back at him. Nate put his arm up just as the door hit him and all in the same moment saw what was behind it. A tall propane tank. Now the hissing was like a whole sack of snakes. In a second that expanded almost into timelessness, the kid with the cross on his cheek turned and looked at Nate there in the doorway. On the boy’s face now was the same flat look the old dog Razor had in the recovery room when he’d killed the second Wallace twin.
The kid sparked the lighter.
In the fraction of time before it blew, Nate hit the deck and dove toward Juan Carlos, knocking him off the bucket, getting him down onto the slick bloody floor. The explosion had no color, was just clear force, clear heat, most of it coming right back out the open doorway, blowing down No-Name and the other gunners and the rookie street cop.
Nate came crawling out of the kitchen, holding Juan Carlos in his arms.
In time, higher-ups arrived in a double-wide helo with twenty antennae on the roof and took charge of the scene. The aftermath. A commander who had some history with Nate stepped up while the EMTs were cleaning him up beside the Dittbenner. The man looked down at Nate for a melodramatic moment before he said, with an edge, “He was already dead before you charged in.”
Nate had gone back to the kitchen, had seen the what the fire did to the kid with the cross on his cheek. He wished he hadn’t.
“Thanks,” Nate said and called the man by his first name.
Meanwhile, Whitey stood across the way, drinking from a bottle of water, talking to Il Cho but looking at Nate with a look on his face that was hard to read.
Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Speaking of aftermath.
Chapter Twelve
A pack of feral dogs trotted down the middle of Mulholland, the leader a Welsh corgi. It was late, after shift. Nate was out walking, away from his place in the hills above Cahuenga Pass, still in his flight suit. He’d unzipped it to the waist, stripped to his white tee, made a knot of the sleeves over his hips. He wore a Dodgers cap. Other than the dogs, there wasn’t much traffic, just the occasional speedhead in an electric Porsche with the top off, silently coming out of nowhere, blowing by—wild to be wreckage forever, as the poet said. The air had a spent feel.
“We tend to get the best results, see the most growth, when you have a face to connect with the voice,” the voice said and waited. As voices go, it was warm and round, a man’s voice. Somebody’s uncle? A wise professor? A big brother? Or was that too obvious?
“Enter,” Nate said to the midnight air.
And with that, what had been just a voice in Nate’s earpiece turned into a disembodied face and torso, a man projected out in front of him at eye level from a lens in the brim of the hat, a man six feet away. Nate kept walking. The projection of the figure retreated apace.
“Hello, Nathaniel,” the man smiled and said. He was middle-aged, graying at the temples with sharp blue eyes, handsome though not in a steal-your-wife, intimidating way. “I’m Jeffrey. Or, Dr. Stone, if you need that,” he said, still smiling that smile.
“Really, a sweater?” Nate said and smiled a different kind of smile.
“I think I’m going to like you,” the other said with miscalibrated enthusiasm.
The walk-and-talk thing was weird. “I’m going to sit down,” Nate said. “This is making my head hurt. It’s disorienting.” Ahead was a wide place in the road, an overlook with a bench and a view of the Valley.
“Disorienting? How so?” the other said.
Nate sat on the bench and said nothing.
The view of the man in the sweater automatically widened and pulled back and now he was sitting too, sitting in the middle of Mulholland in an Eames swivel chair with an ottoman in front of him. And now he had legs. He had his shoes off, was in his stocking feet, the shoes on the pavement beside the chair.
“That’s very interesting,” the man said in response to Nate’s nonanswer. He wrote something in a paper notebook, that way they do, then looked up. The air behind him was thick with looping bats eating bugs, screeching, blacker than the night. Real bats in the here and now.
“Change,” Nate said.
A young Pan-Asian man with rimless glasses now was in the same place in a clear plastic bubble chair, unsmiling, like a villain in one of the Bond movies Bodie Cole had raised Nate on. The bats were still there in the background.
“Change,” Nate said again.
A matronly, big-breasted woman.
A younger woman. Somehow, the program knew Nate’s type. He didn’t drink anymore but when he did—when he stepped into the red dark in one of his favorite dives after a shift on a Wednesday night—this right here was exactly what he would be looking for. And yes, he would end up telling her just about everything about himself.
“Change,” he said again, before she could smile and hook him.
Next up was a man who looked more than a little like Bodie but younger and fit. And on his fee
t. Young Bodie stood there gazing out at the grid of the Valley. He looked back at Nate, about to speak.
“Freud,” Nate said, a joke.
Blink. Sigmund Freud was sitting there in another chair, smoking a pipe, looking impatient, some combination of brilliant and bored.
“Stone, come back,” Nate said.
And Jeffrey was back in his chair, now wearing a sports coat instead of the sweater.
“Did Freud smoke a pipe?” Nate asked.
“Yes,” the other said. “And twenty cigars a day. He died of oral cancer. One of his pipes, a style known as a quarter-bend Canadian billiard, is in the Smithsonian, a gift he made to his longtime secretary.”
Nate said, “How much of this do I have to do?”
“It’s not mandatory,” the good doctor said. “I would hope you don’t think of what we’re doing here that way. We want you to think of it as…calling for backup. But, having said that, nine hours and twenty minutes of talk-time is the average for most officers.”
Empower. Or, rather, Empower™. That was its name, whatever face they put on it, whatever sweater or sports coat or skirt they wrapped it in, whatever pipe or rimless glasses they stuck in or on its face to fool you, to make you open up, relax, confess. Predictably, Empower™ depended upon the subject relinquishing his or her personal power, will, sense of control. It needed to mess with your head, and to do that, it needed you to let your guard down. In San Francisco, the cap was probably a Giants cap.
It wasn’t that Nate had disobeyed an order when he didn’t wait for the knockout team. Something else had rattled the higher-ups, had gotten Empower™ called down on him. It was that there had been more than a hint of…crazy in what he’d done a few hours earlier that night in the alleyway. Charging into that kitchen—a kitchen full of gas and with a dead-ender holding a lighter—looked a little…suicidal. The brass weren’t trying to stop their cops from killing themselves—What are you going to do?—but the LADCCR did have an interest in keeping their down-in-the-dumps CROs from taking out other cops and civilians with them when they went.
“Your father was a cop.”
“Is that a question?”
“No.”
“Yes,” Nate said. “He was a motorcycle cop. Then he started taking the tests, rank-running, and ended up a detective, the first motorcycle cop to ever do that, maybe the only one. I saw him Sunday. At church. He lives out in Sherman Oaks, in the house I grew up in. He remarried after my mother died, coaches a Little League team, still runs five miles a day, is active in Liberal politics.”
“He must be proud of you.”
“I don’t have any idea if he is or not.”
“Is life good, yes or no?”
Of course the virtual doctor was hoping for a quick, revealing answer, but he didn’t get it. Nate got up from the bench, went over to where the Bodie look-alike had been looking out at the greenish grid of lights. A Streamer took off from Hope Airport in Burbank, headed north, rising, and banking. The planes were all but silent with their six props and steam engines. It left six silent white trails over Universal City. It made Nate wish he was up in the air, going anywhere. He’d read something in the liner notes of an LP of old bluesmen. We didn’t know where it was we was goin’, but we knew where we was wasn’t it. When Nate glanced over his shoulder, his interlocutor was on his feet again too, with his shoes on again, the chair and footrest gone. The bats were still there behind him too, looping like crazy thoughts.
Nate turned back around to look out at the lights and didn’t answer the question about whether or not life was good.
“That is very interesting,” the doctor said, after nine seconds of silence.
www
Derrick Wallace stood out on his front porch, trying to find some peace, not having much luck. The house on South St. Andrews Place was on the side of the street that was elevated a bit. From the stoop he could see the towers of downtown and a ghost-image of the mountains behind. Between here and there, helos crisscrossed the city with their blinking running lights. Like sparks above a fire.
It was three in the morning. It was never quiet anymore in LA. Horns honked, outlaw dogs barked, and there were occasional bang sounds that were either car wrecks or gunshots. He cocked his head. Someone somewhere out there was playing an old song called “Sleepwalk,” an instrumental. Or maybe he was dreaming it up. It was already an old song when he’d first heard it. When he was six or seven? Probably on a car radio, cruising around Inglewood with the older boys on a cooled-off Friday night. It was the first song he’d learned the name of, except maybe for “Jesus Loves Me” or “Happy Birthday.” The memory made Wallace feel something, something like a warm hand placed on his chest, but the feeling went away when the song faded out, wherever it was coming from.
Men argued in his living room behind him. He could make out every third or fourth word. It was like nights in prison, meaningless angry bullshit. The cop who had walked in on him at the funeral home was right about one thing: the noise in prison. Always there. Wallace had endured four years and six days of it. Somebody’s favorite song became torture when it was played over and over. The name of a sports team got turned into a taunt, a slur, a curse word, another reason for the men to beat on each other. Always there. Men cried out in their sleep, and other men told them to shut up. Prison was cold surfaces and stale air and aggressive men talking bullshit for hours and hours and hours, repeating the same lines exactly the same way day after day, night after night. There were no editors in prison, nobody cutting out the repetitious parts and certainly not the profanity. No one was cutting for length. That was the point of prison.
He had “accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior” eighteen months into a seven-year sentence and, as a consequence, from that point on found that he didn’t much give a damn about most things on a day-in and day-out basis. Once he had bought into the improbable idea that his numberless wrongdoings were “sins” and that his sins were forgiven—removed from him “as far as the east is from the west,” his hulking, murderous cellmate had said—Wallace didn’t feel the need to expand his faith-walk much past, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He lived by that. Or tried. There was one Bible verse he’d stumbled across that spoke to him, a line from the Book of Job that went, “Man is born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward.” That was where it locked in for him. Faith. Or, to use their word, Redemption. It came to him several months after his initial conversion that Wednesday noon in a circle of metal folding chairs in a corner in the chow hall—tears in his eyes, unexpectedly broken down to some basic version of himself—when he had been asked by some other murderer or thief or baby-raper whether he was ready to throw in with Jesus, and he had nodded yes, staring at the glassy linoleum. They had made him stand up to repeat it. That was a part of the deal. Yes. He knew he wasn’t born all over again but he did think—from that Wednesday on—that somehow he had gotten a pass for all the bad he’d done. Or at least a reset. Since then, he was just living, trying to walk in the light, upright—even if he was, like everybody else, born unto trouble.
The screen door opened, his wife Jewel. “Derrick, you have to come in,” she said. “Or get them all the hell out of here. What are you doing out there?”
So he went inside, following her. Jewel kept going straight on through the living room and went into the kitchen without looking back at him.
There were five of them, led by the one called Nix, a blunt instrument if ever there was one. All of them were Blacks. Three were hip to hip on the overstuffed velvety eighties-style couch, which had belonged to Wallace’s mother. The house that Wallace had grown up in, raised by his mother and grandmother, wasn’t but six or eight blocks south of 5163 South St. Andrews Place. Whites lived in it now. The men on the couch kept crossing and uncrossing their legs, agreeing or disagreeing with the line Nix was pushing but without much conviction, trying to avoid taking a st
and, not wanting to say anything they’d have to follow through on later. The fifth man in the living room was a grossly obese gangster from Long Beach named Madison, the kind of fat person you used to see all the time but didn’t see much anymore. He sat in the lounger that was Wallace’s chair, not that the fat man knew it was Wallace’s. If he had known, he would have moved. If the man named Madison had any real friends in the room, they would have told him.
Nix was on his feet, stomping around, pointing at people, thinking it was leadership. He wore high-waisted rust-colored pants, a cream-colored shirt, and blue shoes. He was the one who’d sent the tricked-out Caddie to pick up Wallace at Lompoc. “You can’t ignore this, Zap,” he said.
“I can ignore anything I want, Nix,” Wallace said evenly.
He gave Nix a look that shut him down, a look that reminded every man in the room of the Zap Wallace they had known before he went to prison. Then he sat down on the bench in front of the upright piano with the pearly inlaid scrolling on the front, sat down with his back to them. The piano had been Wallace’s mother’s too, like the couch. He tapped three times on a white key. He didn’t play piano, but—with all the ways prison can change a man—no one would have been much surprised if he had played “Moonlight Sonata” start to finish.
“I’m just saying we need to move on them or Incas are going to take it all,” Nix said.
One of the men on the couch stuck his neck out. “We got to get back in the game. Get in on this Mexico thing.”
Madison in the reared-back chair said, “Come on, Zap. For real.”
“Don’t call me that,” Wallace said and tapped the same key three more times.
www
Wallace was awake on his back on one of the beds in the boys’ room, on the backside of the house. Jewel came in, wearing a nightgown, a blinking phone in her hand.
“Nix keeps calling, Derrick.”
Wallace just shook his head. Jewel walked out, left him lying there staring at the ceiling.
