by Dan Vining
He turned to look at her.
“I was executed. They buried my body. A few days later, I was walking the streets again.”
She could walk out the door, but she didn’t. She met him where he was, continued in the scene as if he’d just said he’d been sick, been treated, rose up off his sickbed, healed. In that way she surprised herself more than he’d surprised her. She felt very strong. So this was the kind of knowledge that made you stronger.
“Is that what’s been left unfinished,” Jean asked, “this business about Mother?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We never know what it is.”
He blew out smoke. “It’s not like we hear voices from the clouds, telling us what to do. There are rules. We just don’t know what they are.”
He smiled. But then it was gone. He walked back to his chair and picked up the glass and drank the water, all of it. He looked at the big clock again, seemed as if he had things to do, places to go. He put down the glass and stepped closer and stood over her again, casting a shadow over her, as he meant.
“You’ve inadvertently threatened some powerful people,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”
“They were responsible for Mother’s murder.”
“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it?”
“It was a long time ago, Jeanie.”
“They killed a woman who was living in the house,” Jean said. “Bill Danko’s daughter. They’re killing people now.”
Kantke lifted a hand to stop her.
“There are killings every day, every week, every year for a thousand years in all directions. You have to stop this, sweetheart.”
He looked at the clock again. “You should go. Go back to the house at Point Dume. You’ll be safe there. They won’t follow you out of the city. This all will be over soon.”
Jean stood, but not to leave.
“Why? What do you mean? What happens now?”
He held out his hand to her, pulled her close to him. With his touch, the reality of it hit her, unreal as it was. She felt as if someone had pulled the plug on her power source. She was in free fall. Maybe now the floor beneath her would open up and she’d fall through to some other unthinkable other world. Long seconds passed to the ticking of the ship’s clock.
“I remember your aftershave,” she said in his arms.
“Aqua Velva,” he said. “Your mother always hated it.”
Kantke held her tightly, as if he would never see her again, breathing in her scent, his eyes on the round moon out the window, which looked like the head of a hammer.
Now she had a secret.
TWENTY-FIVE
The shadows where the man in the peacoat and watch cap had been led to a canyon between buildings, a grid of alleyways, unpeopled. Jimmy and Angel walked straight ahead, not following the man, who was out of sight, but just going the only way there was to go. As they stepped past one intersecting alley suddenly there was light from above, like a spotlight, the full moon in a wedge of sky.
Ahead was an abandoned building, an old factory from the looks of it with a loading dock ramp and painted-out windows. A sliding iron door stood open.
“I guess all this is part of the plan,” Jimmy said. “Somebody’s plan.”
Inside the shell of the factory, five Sailors stood in a rhombus of moonlight cast onto the floor from a skylight, all of them pulsing blue, more strongly than before.
They parted.
There was Drew in his blue snowboarder’s cap, sitting on the floor. The Sailors seemed to enjoy the drama of the reveal. Others of them appeared behind Jimmy and Angel to block their exit.
It wasn’t necessary, Jimmy and Angel were already resigned to what would come next. The Sailors surrounded them and Drew, took them by the upper arms and they set out.
They went down ten steps into an underground passageway, a corridor lined on three sides with asbestos-covered pipes. As they walked—it could have been a half mile—the passageway shuddered sometimes, probably trucks passing overhead. You would have expected to see rats but there weren’t any. They would have been welcome.
“I gotta say, man,” Drew said to Jimmy as they were hustled along, “I thought you and your people were messed up, but these people are really messed up.”
One of the Sailors shoved him forward.
Drew yanked his arm away. “Back off! We’re going!”
He looked at Jimmy. “Where are we going?”
Jimmy knew but there was no reason to tell him.
They came to an elevator. Old, brass. They rode up, eight of them crammed into the space.
Drew said, “Everybody’s getting real jumpy. Something’s about to happen, right?”
Jimmy just watched the numbers.
“Yes, but not here,” he said. “This is something else.”
The elevator doors opened onto a landing. They were pushed through a pair of heavy doors.
It was a courtroom.
Jimmy and Angel had never been here but they knew about it. They were on the top flo or of the old Hall of Justice, a Gothic granite block on Spring Street across West First from the modern Criminal Justice Building that replaced it. Everywhere across L.A. Sailors were in control of abandoned places, of spaces like this, for whatever purposes. A part of the night was theirs and there were enough of them to assure its continuance.
The courtroom echoed with the sound of a dog barking incessantly, sharp, regular. Clocks covered the tall paneled walls, clocks of all sizes and shapes, named clocks from banks and long-closed businesses: square, round, octagonal, all running at different speeds, some backwards, some very slow, like clocks in hell, and some too fast to watch, hands spinning like knives.
Drew was scared, or just creeped out.
“Anybody know what time it is?”
Jimmy seized him by the front of his shirt. “They can’t do anything to us,” he said. “Nothing that really matters. Remember that.”
He let the kid go.
“Whoa,” Drew said.
The barking continued, unbroken, like a metronome. Drew narrowed his eyes to look into the shadows. The hanging lights high above them were dim, half of the bulbs burned out. Shutters covered the tall windows on the west wall, keeping the light in. The wooden seats had been ripped out, stacked in the back, but the high bench remained at the front of the courtroom.
A collection of Sailors, twenty or thirty of them, milled about the room or leaned against the walls. Here there were some women, too, though they wore the same clothes as the men and most of their sex had been taken from them, or let go. Their eyes bore the same open yet dead look as the men, a look that might come to the rest of us from staring at great distances for long hours.
They all pulsed blue, as blue as blue could be.
“Somebody oughta do something about that dog,” Drew said.
“It ain’t a dog,” Angel told him.
Jimmy’s eyes were on something else, someone. A woman, the only woman in the room in a dress, though it was a shabby one with faded roses.
Rosemary Danko. Alive.
She stood before the high bench, looking up at it.
Jimmy started off across the room toward her.
“Who is she?” Drew said.
Angel said, “I think somebody from one of Jimmy’s cases. But she was supposed to be dead, killed a few days ago.”
“She’s one of us?”
“No. Look at her.” She wasn’t wrapped in the blue.
Rosemary was still staring at the judge’s bench, a smile on her face, when Jimmy touched her on the shoulder.
She turned to look at him. “I knew you’d be in on this, sooner or later,” she said. She turned her attention back to the bench and the big clock behind it, the only one in the room that showed the real time.
It was a quarter to midnight.
“Tell me what happened,” Jimmy said.
“I looked up and they were there,
just like you,” she said, “a short one and a tall one. They had a lot of questions, just like you, and then they took me out of there. The tall one with red hair started that fire on our way out. We rode in a car over to Garden Grove. It was dark, after the news.”
She was still looking at the high bench. It was the old style of courtroom, the kind that still ends up in movies, though the justice system has moved on to blond Formica and low tables and “theater seating.”
There was a wooden chair beside the bench. Maybe there’d be a last-minute witness in the case, a quick wrap-up, surprising, yet the only thing that could have happened.
“What did they do to you?” Jimmy said.
“They could have killed me quick but they just kept asking questions.”
The big hand on the big clock jumped, a minute.
“I guess now is when they’re going to kill me,” Rosemary said.
“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Jimmy said. But he wasn’t so sure.
She stepped up and sat in the witness chair. She leaned over to look at her feet on the footrest, ran her hands over the dark worn wood of the arms.
She raised her right hand.
The barking stopped.
Rosemary laughed, thinking she’d caused it.
There was silence in the room now, only the whirring of the clocks. The peacoats as one had turned toward her but it was not because of her.
A door had opened behind her, the door beneath the biggest clock, the only one that told the right time.
Angel and Drew came up to stand behind Jimmy.
Los Angeles still existed, the regular world, wrapped in its regularity and regulations, laws and principalities. It was just outside, down at street level. A cab on Alameda, street people in doorways, Salvadorans a block over getting off a Greyhound, Japanese tourists lifting food to their mouths in the glass restaurant atop the Otani five blocks away, laughter in The Jonathan Club, Dodger Stadium a half mile away.
The regular world was still out there, alive.
But this, starting now, starting here, was something else.
The first through the door was Boney M, tall, red hair.
Next was a very short man built like a boxer, a prison boxer, a man in his fifties, gang-tattooed, Mexican.
Angel looked at Jimmy.
“You know him?” Jimmy said.
“Perversito,” was the answer. Little Evil.
There was a moment when the doorway was empty and then Red Steadman stepped in. He wore a brown suit, white shirt, tie, very chairman of the board. He was a huge man, six-five, barrel-chested and heavy in that way men used to be.
Here was the familiar big man in the back of the Lincoln at the end of the chase in Griffith Park.
He stepped to the front so they could all see him.
He filled his bull chest with air. His blue aura was faded, old, but intense in its own way.
He seemed, in this moment, their king.
Rosemary Danko, still in the witness chair, the only wholly live person in the room, trembled pitifully at the sight of Red Steadman and the others. She knew who they were. Here were her airplane people, in the flesh. Or some version of it.
She stepped down off the stand.
She got as far away from them as she could in the room.
Steadman fixed his eyes on Jimmy. Jimmy remembered old man Kirk’s line about his former boss: He’d definitely tear you a new one if you looked at him wrong. What unfinished business had cast him here? He was such a ruler it was hard to imagine him in a personal way, to picture his family, a naked moment, a love in his life beyond the things he built.
He stared at Jimmy. It was hard not to shake.
“There’s a price for defiance,” Steadman said.
There was an ugly sound from the Sailors.
“Tie their legs,” Steadman ordered.
The closest peacoats seized Jimmy and Angel and Drew.
“Not him,” Steadman said. He meant Drew.
“He’s with us,” Jimmy said. The men were already wrapping duct tape around his ankles, around Angel’s ankles.
“We’ll see,” Steadman said.
It was called Clocking. Ropes came out from somewhere and the peacoats threw them over the light fixtures and knotted them and took the ends and threaded them through Jimmy’s and Angel’s ankles.
“Tight, so they won’t get loose,” Steadman said. “Let them spend the night here.” It sounded like the worst kind of threat.
They strung them up upside down.
The ghouls now started shoving Jimmy and Angel, hanging that way, until they were swinging from one end of the courtroom to the other, in separate arcs, hung from separate light fixtures.
Drew watched.
Rosemary cowered in the farthest corner.
Jimmy and Angel bent at the waist to keep their heads from dragging on the floor. The peacoats would shove hard each time a man came by until Jimmy and Angel were crashing into the walls.
Jimmy slammed into the big clock over the bench. It fell, shattered, but the scattered pieces kept spinning.
Then the clocks stopped.
All of them.
As Jimmy and Angel still swung back and forth, the peacoats all turned to watch the dozens of clock faces on the walls as now, slowly, they synchronized, zeroing, going to midnight.
Out the open window, the moon had just turned full, a specific moment none of us could see or sense, but they could.
The room began to empty.
“Take the boy,” Steadman shouted.
Sailors surrounded Drew and dragged him away toward the elevator.
Steadman exited through the door behind the bench with his men and then they were alone in the hollow room, Jimmy and Angel, the pendulums centering.
No one had touched Rosemary. They were going to let her live. When she realized that, she made her own way toward an exit.
As Jimmy and Angel pulled themselves up, grasping at their ropes . . .
Tick.
The clocks as one recorded a minute lost, a minute after midnight, the beginning of what was called The Day.
The last day for some of them.
TWENTY-SIX
A crab, just a pair of ragged claws, scuttled across the surface of the moon reflected in an oily pool.
Rats scurried over broken glass. The air stank.
You came in this way: There was a pipe, on its side, an immense section of pipe tall enough to walk through standing up—and three peacoats now walked through it—a gateway through the sawgrass that rimmed the last remaining acres of wetlands of Long Beach.
It was after one.
“I hate these last hours,” Jimmy said.
Angel, in spite of himself, felt his own spirit dropping. It was all converging, and it was all about death. He spoke a prayer in his head, the words echoing there as if he’d said them aloud: Lord, just let me see Your face. He wanted to be strong. Clear. Sure. The one the others depended upon. They all hated this time, when it came round again, the blue moon, for all the pressure, the insecurity it brought, the questions it threw at them. They even hated it for what was at its core, the promise or the threat of resolution.
The tide was coming in. Before them was a wasteland of flotsam and jetsam, of abandoned boats, of bleached logs, of weather-battered and sea-battered squares of plywood, of hundreds of big and little chunks of Styrofoam reflecting white in the light of all that moon, looking like bones strewn across a cemetery after a flood.
“There’s a fire up there,” Angel said.
They were closing in on the hull of a rusted tuna boat, big as a gas station, at a wrong angle, listing in a sea of mud and grass. Fire flickered in the broken-out windows.
They were looking for Drew.
“I don’t get this,” Angel said. “Why’d they do this?”
“They just want to mess with us.”
As they slogged forward, they came upon a body floating face down, a peacoat, arms outstretched, the dead man float. Ang
el lifted him by the collar. He was alive. Angel yanked him out of the muck, holding him by the collar like something foul.
The man coughed his thanks.
“I know you, Brother,” he said, like a punch line.
Angel deposited him in a derelict turquoise speedboat. The man sputtered and then grasped the wheel, as if heading out for a day on the lake.
“Get me out of here,” Jimmy said.
A few faces appeared. Fifty or more of them lived down here, who feared the downtown, not Walkers, but who didn’t have it together enough to be of use to the powerful Sailors. Or maybe they were just waiting like everybody else and liked the water, even this brackish swamp. They lived in houses made of boat wreckage, cabins from cruisers stripped of their hulls or shacks of plywood built in where the grass was tallest, to hide them. Some had put a few boats seaworthy enough to cruise out to fish in the dark. Some of them now stood in front of their shacks, watching without much feeling as Jimmy and Angel passed.
They reached the stern of the tuna boat where the fire burned. There were crude steps made out of oil drums stuck into the mud. Jimmy and Angel stepped up them, though the bow of the boat was almost afloat with the rising tide, shifting, moving underfoot.
They crossed the canted deck and went down into the hold. Below, the fire burned in another oil drum, black smoke rising through a rusted out gap in the overhead. The space was empty but there were rough sounds, men’s voices, from the next chamber.
The boat shifted. The oil drum fire slid sideways. Angel danced out of its way.
In that next chamber they found three men beating a kid. Jimmy saw a flash of blue, Drew’s snowboarder’s cap. He pulled away one of the men as Angel slammed another against the bulkhead. The third man struck the kid two more times and then stood up.
The kid said, “OK. All right.”
It was some other kid.
Jimmy yanked him to his feet.
“Where did you get the cap? Where is he?”
“I don’t know, man,” the kid said. “What difference does it make? He was here. Now he’s gone. Who are you?”
