by Dan Vining
Nate floated up a foot or two and looked up the length of the convoy, all the way to the front. There was a line of phosphorescent targeting dots. He wished he could fire a rocket, or two, or three—until he remembered the cargo. Anyway, Crows weren’t fitted with rockets. Yet. He jumped the Crow out to the left side for a different view. Coming up was an open section, not another mesa but at least a short break in the trees.
For a second, he went eye to eye with the driver of the last rig in his left side mirror. He was just a kid, scared, in over his head.
Nate dropped back, waited until it broke clear above—black, starry sky—then jumped up and over the last rig in the line. He skidded across the roof, cutting it closer than he meant. There was no more than a quarter mile of open air. He sped ahead, trying to get to the front of the convoy so he could look the black-hat cowboy in the eye. Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten RVs… The trees on the other side of the gap were coming up fast. Nate had a chance to pull up and go over the trees but he didn’t take it, flew right back into the tunnel with the rigs. There was but ten feet of open space between the tops of the rigs and the overarching oak branches. Nate flew over four more rigs. Nine, eight, seven, six… His NightSun was still fired up, as was his forward-looking light. The drivers had to be seeing him coming in their mirrors, but maybe they couldn’t believe that a Crow was in there with them. When Nate came over the fourth wagon from the front, the driver freaked and backed off the gas and the rig behind plowed into him, knocking the RV in front forward again and half out of control.
“We’re going to get these people killed,” Nate said, to no one. Ahead was a hundred-foot gap between two huge trees. Nate took the exit, turning the bird onto its side to thread the needle. He made it out, shot high.
“Holy shit,” Tucker said when Nate popped out right in front of him.
The sky was crowded over the convoy, everybody still moving with it, all with their lights on. A hundred yards ahead, Carlisle was just above the trees, forward of the lead truck, flying backward again. “The road’s straightening out,” she came on to say.
“Five miles to the border,” the Aussie CRO said.
“I can’t see you, Timbo,” Nate said.
“I’m ahead of Carlisle a klick,”
Nate climbed for a long-range view, oriented himself and pinpointed all the players on the game board, though this was less like chess than a rodeo. Ahead, the terrain was the same—trees after trees after trees, not another open area—no way to get in front of the convoy again.
“Mexico knows you’re coming,” Whitey said over the radio, just when Nate had forgotten about him. The GU and ICE helicopters were still standing off. “I predict they’re going to close the gate in that big new fence of theirs. I almost feel sorry for these guys.”
The border was a mile away. Nate couldn’t see it. At least, not until a second later the Mexicans fired up the high-wattage tungsten floodlights atop the twenty-foot-tall steel fence that stretched off west and east. So Tecate wasn’t the dinky, friendly crossing that Nate remembered as a seventeen-year-old kid with his friends, headed down to surf and drink and buy firecrackers. He should have known. He should have seen it coming. More Mexican lights came on. There was the checkpoint building itself. The gate was closing, all right…but not before a six-pack of armored troop carriers rolled out. Nothing like a country with a lot of oil.
“Now what?” Carlisle said. “I hate to say it but—“
“Pull up,” Nate said. “The Mexicans are going to stop them. On our side of the border. They’re rolling out APCs. We’ll wait a few minutes and go in on foot… Or not.”
His voice betrayed him. He’d already figured it out: the rigs were empty. He spun the Crow to see the panorama. The ICE helos were there, waiting, standing off a hundred yards, but the Gang Unit bird with Whitey in it was already gone.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The .38 round that Nate turned end over end when he had the jimmies got a little more worn down as he flew flat-out toward Long Beach on autopilot. It was coming up on five o’clock. Dawn was already brewing behind him out over the Salton Sea. As fast as the Crow would go, it wasn’t nearly fast enough. What he really needed was a time machine. He’d been wrong. He’d been tricked, played. He’d been Whitey’d.
A song was looping in his head, a Velvet Underground ditty about “the big decisions that cause endless revisions in my mind.” The question in Nate’s mind, causing endless revisions, was what had happened to the people down in the TMZ because of his decision to head toward Tecate. He’d let Whitey play him. Magicians called it misdirection. Pay no attention to the box with the woman in it waiting to be sawed in half. Look over there. Keep your eyes on these thirteen shiny Winnebagos speeding toward Mexico.
So where were they? Where were the people in the magician’s box? Where had the New Okies gone this evening, where had they gone? Where was the kid who’d lost the dinosaur in the tunnel under LA? Where had they gone? Home? Home didn’t exist anymore for them. Where, then? It was clear they weren’t downtown, at least nowhere in plain sight. Who knew where they were? Cho had been on the ground at the border when Nate and the others—including the ICE agents—checked the hollow motor homes while the Inca drivers stood there smirking. (The black-hat cowboy businessman was in the gatehouse smoking a cigarette, making the Mexican agents laugh.) From the way he’d acted, Cho had been tricked, too. Of course in the case of Cho’s misdirection, Nate had unknowingly been one of Whitey’s shapely assistants helping pull off the trick. Keep your eyes on the thirteen shiny Winnebagos, Cho, it’s all about the Incas and RVs.
But what about Derrick Wallace?
Nate had heard a voice in his head when he’d been lifting off from Tecate, that of Blind Billy—the barber in Compton—talking about all the heroin coming into LA now. One if by land, two if by sea… Billy had thrown in the line when he was talking about how there had been a shortage of heroin but now there wasn’t. Zap Wallace used to run heroin out of Long Beach. He went to Lompoc for it. Derrick Wallace. His Bible was probably still in the backseat of the car, where he’d thrown it when he walked out of Lompoc.
Nate was still a hundred miles out from the LBC, twenty minutes. Rockett was asleep behind him, snoring like a kid in his car seat, one more thing tonight that made Nate feel old. He ran his finger down a directory on the heads-up display. The helo’s brainbox sent out the call. Nate still hadn’t reconnected to home base and Carrie. He knew she’d ask how things went down south. Or maybe she was in on the trickery, too. It had been one of those nights.
“You there, Baker?” Nate keyed the mic and said.
Baker was the rookie who had been the first CRO on the ground at the front-lawn domestic drama in Mar Vista the other night.
“Yessir,” Baker said, quick, at the same time his young face came up on Nate’s heads-up. He was at the stick of his Crow.
“You’re working,” Nate said.
“I’ve been on the dogwatch all month.”
“So lunch is breakfast,” Nate said. Rockett stirred behind him—probably at the mention of food—but then went back to snoring.
“My wife’s having a baby. I’m taking every shift I can get.”
“You know who Derrick Wallace is?”
“Just from TV. His boys’ funeral, the shoot-riot.”
“He lives in South Central, little house, five-one-six-three South St. Andrews Place,” Nate said. “I need you to go by there. You don’t have to land, just see what you can see.”
“You got it,” Baker said. “I heard about the drive-by, then the other son killed at the hospital. You lost your gunner, right?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“It was last week,” Baker said.
“Call me. Don’t talk it up to anybody. Thanks. I’ll buy you a crib or something.”
“They cost like a grand.”
“Then I’ll buy you a steak at The Pantry.” Nate rang off before the young cop could tell him he was a vegan.
The sky had gone almost yellow while they’d been talking. Nate could see all the way to the coast—a good twenty miles—or at least all the way to where the coastal fog sat, a big white feather bed. Some other day, he might have enjoyed the view, say if he had just gotten up and had his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, sitting on a roof. Or if he’d been up all night, maybe with somebody instead of being alone and full of regret. But wasn’t that what the wee little hours of the night were for? As he sped over Orange County with nothing to do but beat up on himself, he leafed back through the calendar in his head. Baker had been wrong about it being a week, but it was only nine days ago when he and Isaako hit the deck in the front room of Derrick Wallace’s house while the machine guns rattled and roared, drilling holes in the wall.
Nate switched off the autopilot. “Wake up, Rockett,” he said.
“I’m not asleep, sir,” Rockett said, too fast.
“Wake up anyway. Talk to me. So I don’t crash.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you care where we’re going?”
“No, sir.”
“Good man. We’re going to Long Beach.”
“Good, sir.”
“You ever heard of The Velvet Underground?”
“No, sir. It sounds like a strip club.”
“It’s a band. Check ’em out. It’ll warp your mind, in a good way.”
Nate had sent Carlisle home to San Diego, then flown off, leaving Tucker and Cho on the ground to close the show at Tecate. Now Tucker came on the radio, out of nowhere. “You’re flying like my grandmother,” he said.
Tucker was back on his wing, ten feet aft. Cho in the second seat raised his hand in greeting. Both men looked whipped, especially Cho, who had a look on his face that said he was wondering what he was going to do for a living now.
“What’s in Long Beach?” Tucker said. “I’m about to run out of gas.”
“Plan B,” Nate said. “One if by land, two if by sea.”
“You think they’re just going to put ’em on a boat, sail ’em out of there?”
“I guess we’ll see,” Nate said.
Long Beach. In full, clean new light, dozens of gulls and the occasional bully pelican screeched and reeled and fought over fish scraps above the marina. Not much else stirred. Across Shoreline Drive were the office towers and the terminus of the cross-city Metro line that had never opened. Downtown was barely alive. On the waterfront were the usual seafood restaurants and a marina. Up and down the bight were hundreds of sailboats, their masts uniformly still and straight. The day’s wind hadn’t yet come. On the far side of the marina were the sportfishing boats. Beyond that, two wide channels over, it was all business, commercial vessels, Terminal Island, cargo ships, and cruise-line docks: the Port of Long Beach.
Nate looked over at Cho behind Tucker. “You come up with anything from the sat-scans? What about my covered berths?”
Cho answered, “Three big enough and out of the way enough. One is just over from downtown, the end of your tunnel. Remember, we never could find it.”
Tucker said, “I don’t get it.”
“What about traffic overnight?” Nate said to Cho.
“Since the cargo container thing, there have been drones up, wall-to-wall,” Cho said. “They’re checking every cargo container ten ways from Sunday. Anyway, nothing big going out all night—four or five fishing boats in the last hours, open decks, lit up. Maybe they could be down in the hold, but they all went straight out, then north,” Cho said. Images came onto Nate’s second screen, sped-up/slowed-down coverage of the commercial boats heading to work, nets out, floodlights hung from their masts. “The last red-and-white Catalina ferry came in at midnight, been at the dock all night.”
Then they were above a nondescript tin building on the end of a dock, a covered berth. “It’s big enough,” Nate said. “And a straight sail-in.”
“The other two possibles are on Terminal Island,” Cho said.
“Terminal Island is too out in the open and too far from downtown.”
“I am seriously running out of gas,” Tucker said.
Nate dropped down over the tin building. There was a line of open berths next to it. Nate circled, Tucker hovered. At the opposite far end of the dock, a deckhand looked up as he washed off a small gray sea urchin diver’s boat in an uncovered slip. Something about the man said, I am not a deckhand. He was a Black but a lot of Blacks worked on the water. Maybe it was the velveteen jumpsuit.
“Capture,” Nate said to his target & track gear. The deckhand looked right at the camera, like a fifty-dollars-a-day extra. “Close in on the face. ID.” The lens came in tighter.
“Shayne ‘Cinder’ Block,” a radio voice said. “DOB: Eight–fourteen–ninety-nine. Compton, Los Angeles. Gang Affiliation: Twenties. Incarcerated: Two thousand sixteen to two thousand eighteen—Men’s Correctional—Yucca Valley…”
Nate cut him off before he had to listen to the rest of the rap sheet. He lifted, shifted to port a hundred feet until he was over a tree-covered parking lot. There was a candy apple red 2020 Cadillac, in case anybody needed something else by way of ID.
Young CRO Baker came on the radio. “You there, Cole?”
“What have you got?” Nate said.
“He’s walking. Alone,” Baker said. “I was over his house when he came out. He’s been walking since before the sun came up, going nowhere as far as I can tell.”
“I know the feeling,” Nate said.
Tucker said over the radio, “If I don’t get some fuel I’m going to drop right into the sea.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Wallace never went to bed Saturday night, instead staying up in the red velvet chair in his living room, staring at a cloth satchel on the coffee table. It was like a purse. Men carried them now—some men—carried their computers and their mobile phones in them, slung over their shoulders. Wallace had spent the hours of the night staring at it, never touching it, never opening it. The phone had rung a half-dozen times, but he’d ignored it. He drank a beer.
The same group of men as before, minus Nix, had come back to the living room that afternoon, a meeting that lasted into the early evening, until Wallace told them to leave. Wallace didn’t sit in front of the piano for this one. He didn’t sit anywhere, just stood there until the last man, Madison, was out the door.
By about four-thirty or five o’clock, he’d taken a shower, staying under the downpour for twenty minutes, leaning forward with his hands on the wall, the pose of a man about to be arrested. In prison the showers were short, on a timer, the water rationed, and you only got a shower every other day. Two minutes, five gallons. The prisoners had figured out a routine that got the washing done, but it grated on them, day after day after day. They knew it wasn’t about the water shortage. The drought hadn’t really kicked in until 2016, and the shower-rationing had begun years before. There was plenty of water, snowmelt from the Sierras. What it was was another way for the Controllers—the men with the keys—to control them. It gave the convicts one more reason to hate them, as if they needed one. And if a man stopped taking showers in protest, they put him in Segregation.
Jewel was awake in the bed behind him as he dressed, standing in front of the chest of drawers and the mirror, though she was pretending to be sound asleep. He knew she was awake and was glad she was pretending otherwise. If she was awake, what would he say to her? Were they going to sit at the table in the kitchen at 3:00 a.m. with a cup of coffee and talk about it? Talk about the distance between them now? Men in prison became well-acquainted with solitude. Every silence was an awkward silence. Were Wallace and his wife going to talk about that? Were they going to talk about the fact that, tonight, anyway, he felt utterly alone? She’d made him go out and buy some new suits.
Standing in a men’s shop, he’d realized that she too wanted him to go back into it: the criminal life, his old life. She wanted Zap back. He’d even seen her huddled with Nix once, talking close and very seriously. He lifted a suit off the rod in the closet. It was black, like his old suits. He took things out of the drawers, dressed, put on a white shirt and tied a tie, put on the suit coat. He looked at himself in the mirror. Together. His exterior was at odds with what was going on inside him.
He kissed Jewel in her “sleep,” a kiss that held as much anger as love but was sincere. She didn’t stir. He looked back at her from the doorway, wondering if he’d ever see her again. It was just like the old days, though today he didn’t have the weight of a gun under his armpit or snugged in his belt. That man would have been Zap.
It was still full-on dark when he came out of the house on South St. Andrews Place. He didn’t pause on the stoop. He started up the sidewalk, the satchel gripped in one hand. The neighborhood wasn’t quiet: more than a few parties were still going. He’d pass by a house or apartment with a crowd spilling out and music going and come face-to-face with a pack of partiers, leaving—but not going home to bed or to breakfast—heading off to look for another bash with a little life left in it. Some of them recognized him. A cop helicopter was overhead, nothing new about that.
He walked past the church twice before the doors were open. The earliest service was at eight. It was still dark. He kept going and walked over to Leimert Park. In a few hours, it’d be full up with kids and families, picnics. The day broke. The short, sleek helicopter came by again. “You think I can’t see you?” Wallace said, to the sky. He set out walking again. When he made the third pass by the church, the service was in full swing, mid-sermon. He went in. It was crowded inside. He slipped into the last pew next to a fresh-faced couple with three dressed-up kids who smiled that everyone-is-welcome-here church smile. When the sermon was over, there was another song for what they called “the invitation” or “the call,” and Wallace slipped out, leaving the satchel on the pew with a hymnal to cover it.
