Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Gary Phillips

  EDITED BY GARY PHILLIPS

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

  edited by Tim McLoughlin &Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D. C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  IstanbulNoir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las VegasNoir, edited by Jarret Keene &Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  LosAngeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  LosAngeles Noir2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurelien Masson

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Richmond Noir, edited by edited by Andrew Blossom,

  Brian Castleberry &Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaelis

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz Martinez & Sarah Cortez

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & John Byrd

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  11 Foreword by T. Jefferson Parker

  13 Introduction

  PART I: ONLY THE LONELY

  17 SUSAN STRAIGHT Santa Ana Narrows

  Bee Canyon

  40 ROBERT S. LEVINSON San Juan Capistrano

  Down in Capistrano

  58 ROB ROBERGE Tustin

  Diverters

  84 NATHAN WALPOW Seal Beach

  A Good Day's Work

  PART II: EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE

  105 BARBARA DEMARCO-BARRETT Costa Mesa

  Crazy for You

  126 DAN DULING Laguna Beach

  The Toll

  142 MARY CASTILLO Santa Ana

  2:45 Out of Santa Ana

  164 LAWRENCE MADDOX City of Orange

  Old, Cold Hand

  180 DICK LOCHTE Laguna Niguel

  The Movie Game

  PART III: LUSH LIFE

  203 ROBERT WARD Dana Point

  Black Star Canyon

  227 GARY PHILLIPS Los Alamitos

  The Performer

  246 GORDON MCALPINE Anaheim

  The Happiest Place

  266 MARTIN J. SMITH Balboa Island

  Dark Matter

  281 PATRICIA McFALL Garden Grove

  On the Night in Question

  308 About the Contributors

  istory seems slow in the making until we stop for a second and look back on things. Then the past hits the present like a bullet and we all dive for cover.

  I first set foot in Orange County half a century ago. Our new Tustin tract home cost $21,000. The dads wore showingscalp flattops and skinny neckties. The moms sported hardened coifs and dorky glasses. There were orange groves falling fast and Santa Ana winds blowing hard and station wagons called the Country Squire and the Kingswood Estate rolling, kid-filled, down the suburban streets.

  Now look at it. How that Orange County became the one we see today is a tale of migration and war and race and economics and even climate. In ways that are not difficult to see, the changes of Orange County have been the changes of the nation. We are all Orange County and it is us.

  Like a beautiful woman, Orange County is easy to label but hard to understand. Gone are the orange-packing houses and the white Republican demographics and the four halfgallons of bottled milk left cold on your porch early in the morning. Gone is the John Birch Society. Gone too are Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

  But it is often easier to list what is gone than to truly see what is now here. How do we define these 3.1 million souls? Who gets to define them?

  Sometimes it's good to let our artists and writers be our eyes and ears. That's part of their job. Sometimes they really get it right. Sometimes they can see around the corners. You can read Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source. You can watch Orange County, or listen to Richard Stekol or No Doubt.

  And you can read the book you are now holding in your hands.

  Here are fourteen stories about this intriguing and somehow ineffable locale. Orange County through noir eyes? Why not? There's a dark side to most places and certainly the names Ramirez and Kraft and Famalaro haven't slipped your mind. Noir writers are bent toward the darkness, so don't expect the Orange County in these pages to be quite as sunny as it thinks it is.

  But noir writing has its own brand of humor too, and I can foresee a grin or two as you read about a deranged security guard at Disneyland (where else?), or a thirty-something woman who trades in her penniless but hot boy-toy for a paunchy Orange County Republican who can provide her with the good life in east Costa Mesa.

  You'll see some of Orange County's wonderful diversity on display in these tales. You'll see an Orange County that looks very little like it did a few short decades ago. You'll meet insiders and outsiders, power brokers and wannabes, rich and poor, the sacred and the profane.

  They're all out there, whatever there really is. That's up to you to decide.

  Enjoy the black orange.

  BEHIND THE ORANGE CURTAIN

  oincidence that I was born the same year Disneyland opened and Charlie "Bird" Parker died. A lot of things begin and a lot of people die in any given year. But those two events have stayed with me-given the accident of occurring in that particular year-and they provide a hint as to how we arrive at this collection of all-new, tough, unblinking stories in Orange County Noir.

  As everybody probably knows, Disneyland is located in Orange County, the city of Anaheim specifically. When I was a kid growing up in South Central Los Angeles, what I knew of life behind the Orange Curtain-beyond bugging my dad to take me to the theme park-was nil. None of my relatives lived there, nor did my folks have friends in the area. Except for going to Walt's Ad- ventureland or Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, all I knew was that getting to Orange County was too long a trip on the freeway for a nine-year-old anticipatin
g the thrill of riding the Matterhorn roller coaster and realizing the birthright of Southern Californians of driving a car-at least for a few minutes solo on the Autopia.

  Now, I'd heard of the Beach Boys and associated their songs of the endless summer with the surfers I'd seen on TV piloting those majestic waves down in Orange County (even though it turned out those guys grew up in the South Bay area of Los Angeles). By the time I was a teen, I finally understood the chuckles my dad and his friends had over beers when they joked about not letting the sun go down on them in Orange County, "where all them Birchers are." Referring, I'd find out, to the ultraconservative, anti-civil rights John Birch Society.

  Time and the social evolution of the Southland have brought change even to vast Orange County with its forty-some miles of coastline. I was recently told by a resident of Newport Beach, one of the tonier enclaves of the county, that her district, which launched ex-pro quarterback Jack Kemp to office, went for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

  Because and beyond being a GOP stronghold, Orange County brings to mind McMansion housing tracts; massive shopping centers with their own zip codes where Pilates classes are run like boot camp and real-estate values are discussed at your weekly colonic; and ice-cream parlors on Main Street, U.S.A., side by side with pho shops and taquerias. Los Angeles has been and continues to be explored as the place where noir, if it wasn't spawned there, sure as hell flowered. But what about its neighbor to the south? What secrets do Orange County's denizens have to tell ... or hide?

  This volume, like coming in from a sudden storm and then being gripped by a heavy riff from Bird's horn, takes you on a hard-boiled tour behind the Orange Curtain. Among those you'll meet are a reclusive rock star who has lived way too long in his twisted head, a crooked judge who uses the court for illicit means, a cab driver prowling the streets with more than the ticking meter on his mind. In Orange County Noir, cultures clash, housewives want more than the perfect grout cleaner, and nobody is exactly who they seem to be.

  Enjoy.

  Gary Phillips

  Los Angeles, CA

  January 2010

  ee, right now, if the phantom was roaming around like he did back in 1977, haunting the freeway and busting up people's cars, stealing food-damn, he even stabbed a deputy in the neck!-somebody would shoot him. No hesitation. Blow him away. A cop. Hell, a driver. Everybody's got guns in their cars. The freeway's a battlezone. People follow each other off the ramps and pull out automatic weapons. People lean out the window and shoot a nine like Grand Theft Auto. People die every day just for cutting each other off or throwing up a finger.

  I almost shot the phantom thirty years ago, when he came out of that hole. His hair all dusty and his shirt in rags. I had my gun out. I thought I would have to kill him, but I waited to see if he remembered. If he'd look at my face and shout it out, what he'd seen me do. If he said it out loud, my life was over.

  I saw him just before the rock hit my windshield. It was twilight. Strange word. My father always called it ocaso. In school they told us twilight, dusk, evening. Before night.

  That's the only time the phantom ever appeared. A shadow lifted up and twisted for a second, in the center divider of the freeway. I was heading west, toward Santa Ana, and on my left this movement-like when you have a nightmare as a kid and you can't see the guy's face, the guy chasing you.

  He was small. Compact throw. The rock flew into the glass and the windshield exploded like music. A crazy instrument. Most people panicked and that's why they crashed. I felt the splinters on the side of my face and neck like wasps stinging me but I kept driving until I could get out of the fast lane and off to the side.

  The blood dripped into my right eye. Thick. It stung. The salt. I had an extra T-shirt in the backseat and I held it to my temple. I pulled down the visor. One sliver of glass was stuck in my neck like Frankenstein's screw. Not by my jugularhigher up, just under my jaw. I pulled it out and not as much blood came out as from my temple. I held the T-shirt to both for a long time before I headed to the call box.

  It was darker now, red-smog sunset hanging west, where I was headed to work. But even though I was California Highway Patrol, I had to call this in, stay here, just like all the other people he'd thrown rocks at. People driving out of Riverside and the desert, heading to Orange County.

  I'd gone to Riverside to visit my friend Manny, who used to live at Bryant Ranch with me. He and his father gave up picking oranges and went to work in the packing house near Casa Blanca. I'd passed the Prado Dam in Corona, where the big flag they painted for the 1976 bicentennial was getting dusty after a year.

  "Where are you?" the dispatcher said.

  I'd gone about a mile and a half trying to get over, off the freeway. It was a Sunday. He threw rocks at twilight, and usually near Featherly Park.

  I squinted at the hills on the north rim of the Santa Ana Canyon. I knew them better than anyone but him-the phantom. "Bee Canyon," I said.

  "What?" she said. "Bee Canyon?"

  Nobody would know that name. I told her the mile marker. Then I hung up. Bee Canyon was already black in the fading light. Like someone had poured tar down the side of the hills. We'd called in a fire there last year.

  But I'd been up there just before the fire, when I watched what happened to that girl.

  I stood on the side of the freeway, where I'd stood a hundred times before taking reports or writing tickets or hearing about flat tires, and looked back at the center divider. But the headlights went straight into my eyes. Between that blinding and the blood, I couldn't see anything.

  I don't remember why they called it Bee Canyon. All those little canyons along the Santa Ana Canyon, and the Riverside Freeway winding along the edge. At City College, when I was taking general ed before law enforcement, I had a professor who showed its how all the world was just a big irrigation system. The water fell, the water moved, the water shaped the earth. Bryant Ranch took up a lot of the hills and the canyon because it had water. The perfect place for citrus and cattle. I grew up walking all the arroyos and canyons, since I was born on the ranch. After that college class, I realized it was the everyday water that wore down the dirt.

  My dad was born in Red Camp, and my mom in La Jolla Camp. They met at a dance in Sycamore Flats, near Bryant Ranch, and they got married and had me in 1954. All I ever knew growing up was the ranch, the river, the railroad tracks along the foothills, and the canyons.

  People think Southern California is a desert, that it never rains here, cause of that stupid song, but in winter rainfall pours down all those gullies and makes them canyons too. When I was a kid, I wondered how they picked names: Gyp sum Canyon, Coal Canyon, Brush Canyon, Bee Canyon.

  Somebody must have kept bees up there once. Had I seen the white boxes, the ones that always looked like random dumping until you heard the hum swell up like the air was infected all around you?

  Bee Canyon was where he was buried. The guy. I thought of his long brown hair. Gone now. He was a skeleton. The girl woke up and tried to stumble away, and he punched her in the face, and he kept coming toward me. Taunting me. "You a wetback? You just come up outta that river, Frito Bandito? You swum all the way here from Tijuana?"

  The phantom had seen it all. I heard the noise he made. He'd been living in the canyons for a long time by then. He knocked down some loose granite while I was digging. But then I waited for a long time, when I was done, and it seemed like he couldn't help himself. He looked out of his shelter, a wall of creosote and rabbitbrush, and I saw his face.

  He was darker than me. Small. His hair was wavy and black, but covered with dust, and one eucalyptus leaf dangled like a feather near his ear.

  I was off-duty. I knew CHP and Orange County Sheriff's Department and Riverside County had been searching him out for a long time. The freeway phantom. But I couldn't tell anyone I'd seen him, because then they'd see the grave in Bee Canyon.

  "He got you, huh?" the Riverside CHP said. Fredow. They pulled over about te
n minutes after I called. "Goddamn. That's thirty or forty this year. He's gonna kill somebody."

  "That one guy he hit lost his eye," his partner said. Anderson.

  "And you're CHP? That's what the radio said."

  "Yeah," I replied. I pulled the shirt away from my facemy white Hanes looked like one of those tests they make you stare at. The blots. I'd say flowers if they asked what it looked like. Flowers that came out of my skin. My mother's favorite hibiscus, before she died. How did the blood thicken up so fast? "Heading in for night shift."

  "November 6, 1977. Jerry Frias? F-r-i-a-s? How long you been with O.C.?" Anderson asked.

  "Two years."

  "Just past rookie," he said. Then, "You born here?" and I knew what he meant.

  "Right there on Bryant Ranch." I pointed to the hills. Not Mexico.

  "Is that right? I was born in Indianapolis."

  "Wow-the Indy 500." I tried to be polite. I felt the crusting over on my neck.

  "What did he look like? This fucking phantom?" Fredow asked, writing the report.

  "I wouldn't call him that. Makes him sound like a comic book, and this ain't funny," Anderson said. "I call him a goddamn idiot. I don't care if he's a Vietnam vet. I did a tour in Nam and I ain't throwin rocks at people in cars. If he chucks one at me, I'll shoot him."

  Fredow frowned at him. He said to me, "No description?"

  I shrugged. "It's so damn fast," I answered, and it was true. "You're doing sixty and he's just there like a shadow. You know. You turn your head and then you're past him."

  Twilight. The Twilight Zone-me and Manny's favorite show when we were kids. This phantom was like something Rod Serling would talk about-He glides through a river of speeding cars as if not afraid, and in his hands, he holds the possibility of death.

  "You didn't want to pull over on the divider?"

  "Remember what happened in May? The off-duty saw him in the divider and pulled over, chased him around, and then the guy stabbed him in the neck with the homemade knife?"

  "Damn." Anderson looked at the freeway beside its.

  "The deputy he stabbed said he's a short black guy. Named James," I said.