by Scott Frank
“Messed up how?”
“It wasn’t open all the way.”
“You have a good memory.”
He actually blushed at the compliment. Kelly could not, for the life of her, figure this guy out.
“You remember any of the guns?”
“One was a little machine gun thing I’d seen in movies. The other two were pistols.”
“The one they shot the jogger with, it look old to you?”
“Maybe.” He turned back to the game. “I don’t know much about guns.”
“Can I ask, Roy, what it is you do for a living?”
“I install security systems,” he said. “For a company called Gold Shield.”
She wrote that down and then asked, “Could you give me your Social Security number?”
“What for?”
“Routine,” she said. “Make sure you’re not wanted for anything anywhere.”
She could see he was uneasy about this. She smiled at him. “You’re not, are you?”
“No. It’s just that I don’t have one.”
“Oh?”
“Both my parents died when I was a baby. I sort of bounced around for a while before I was picked up by an older couple. I took their last name.”
“Which was Cooper?”
“Harvey and Rita Cooper.”
“And they don’t have your Social Security information, birth certificate, et cetera?”
“They never asked for one.”
“They still alive?”
“Yes.”
“You have their contact information?”
Roy gave it to her and then added, “They’ll tell you that I’m very hardworking and helpful.”
She considered his profile as he watched the game, his lips moving as he silently mouthed encouragement to the nearly thirty-year-old guy stupidly called “The Kid.”
“Is Roy Cooper your real name?”
“It’s the name they gave me.”
“So they don’t know your real one?”
“If they do, they never told me.”
Kelly nodded and they sat there watching the game for another few minutes. She wondered what the hell was going through Roy Cooper’s mind. He seemed so disconnected from what had happened to him. She didn’t think it was shock. But could he be that simple? Did he just not understand?
“I’m going to make this case,” she finally said. “You know why?”
Roy shook his head. “No, ma’am.”
“For starters those tiny Gs left quite a bit of evidence. Hair, fiber, shell casings. But the real reason I’ll make this case is I’ve got an eyewitness. A guy who tells me he’s hardworking and helpful.”
He smiled, eyes still locked on the damn TV.
“I know you want to help, Roy. I think that’s why you got caught up in this in the first place. Trying to help.”
“I was walking by,” Roy said. “One of them put a gun to my head.” He shrugged. “I didn’t help anybody.”
“But you tried.”
She had been looking at him, the way people do, and made that bad read that always got Albert laughing when he was around to see it: “There’s no reason for you to be afraid,” she was now saying. “Those guys are all going away.”
“That’s a relief.” She was right. They were going away. Because the minute he got out of here, Roy was going to find the one called Science and the one called Truck, get his gun back and then shoot them both with it before they got picked up and told the cops exactly where it came from.
“Let’s get back to the alley. For the moment, they’ve got two guns now, one on you and one on the other guy.”
“Both on me.”
“Both on you?”
He wouldn’t look at her. Kelly wanted to get up and shut off the TV, but she thought that he might stop talking if she did. She decided that this guy was a bug for sure. She just couldn’t figure out what it was, made him so off.
“Why’s that?”
“They weren’t worried about the other guy.”
“But they were worried about you?”
“He was an old man,” was all he said.
She looked at him a moment, then rolled the table with the intelligence cards over to the bed.
“See anybody here you recognize?”
She watched as he took the cards and flipped through them. “Take your time.”
“It’s hard to tell them apart. They’ve all got shaved heads.”
“That’s why they do that.”
He stopped flipping, studied a card a moment, then handed it to her and said, “Him.”
Kelly looked at the card and smiled. “My boy, L.”
“Who?”
Kelly said, “His real name’s Delroy Kinney, but they call him L on account of all the dope he smokes.”
“Why wouldn’t they call him D? For ‘Dope.’ ”
“ ‘L’ is old-school street for marijuana.”
He looked at her.
“Smoke it,” she said, “it takes you to La La Land. And Delroy likes to spend a lot of time there.”
“They like names, too, don’t they?”
“That they do,” she said, “just like baseball players.”
Roy asked, “Who was the old guy?”
“His name was Frank Peres. He was a city councilman.”
That finally got his attention away from the game.
“He was running for mayor. Lived in that neighborhood for quite a while, thirty years or something.”
“Now I know why he was so tough.”
“Tough?”
“The way he talked to them. Telling them to knock it off, even though they took his clothes and hurt him every time he opened his mouth.”
Kelly said, “Did any of them give any indication that they knew who he was?”
“I don’t think so,” Roy said. “They were just there because they were there.”
Kelly’s phone chimed and she reached into her purse and read the text.
From Rudy.
One sentence.
Get out of there.
She said, “Excuse me,” and got up and moved to the window, stood there a moment looking down at the parking lot, tried to process what she was seeing.
A white van with Channel 7 markings was parked at the curb near the Emergency entrance. A guy was on the roof setting up the microwave tower. Another van, this one from Channel 13, pulled in right behind it. Kelly could hear a helicopter, off in the distance somewhere, though not for long.
She heard Roy Cooper clap his hands and turned away and looked up at the television, not really watching as The Kid struck out another batter, then jogged calmly back to the visitors’ dugout. Kelly decided that she’d have to leave through the morgue. It had its own entrance and she’d be able to get to her car without being spotted.
She looked at Roy Cooper, who was now staring up at her, his face a confused mirror of her own.
She smiled and said, “We’ll have to finish this later.”
Roy Cooper said, “Is something wrong?”
But she was already out the door.
Albert had always said that the best way to lie was to tell some of the truth. But that wasn’t the reason Roy knew that this cop wouldn’t be any kind of problem. No, Roy knew that he was safe because she made the same mistake everyone made when they met Roy: she worried about him.
His whole life, most people talked to him like this. They underestimated him. Lowballed him every single time. It was his superpower. So he said nothing, let her go on, knowing that she still didn’t have the faintest clue as to who he was. Who he really was. He could disappear without any problem the minute she walked out of the room.
And he would do just that.
As soon as this nurse left.
A moment after the cop split, a severely bunned Filipino woman with Popeye arms and a dark brown mole the size of a Milk Dud riding shotgun on her chin came into the room and, before Roy knew what was happening, gave him another shot of
Demerol. Her nametag said G RODRIGUEZ, HEAD RN, and Roy thought he could smell peanut butter as she leaned over him, yanked back the sheet, and frowned at his empty bedpan.
“You need to urinate.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to try.”
“I feel like I’m wetting the bed.”
She said, “It goes in the pan.” She rapped a knuckle on the bottom. “See? Right in here.”
She pulled the sheet back up and asked if he needed anything else, but left the room before he could answer.
Roy spent the next hour watching The Kid pitch another shutout in a hazy painkiller stupor. Another couple of games like this one and he would break the record. Roy was beside himself. There he was, doped to the gills and with two gunshot wounds, grinning like an idiot as Joe Mills, aka The Kid, got hoisted onto his teammates’ shoulders. He felt tears welling up as, later, during a locker room interview, The Kid told an equally moved Erin Andrews that he wished his mother was still alive so that she could see him accomplish this great feat.
Lying there in his rheumy daze, Roy thought The Kid looked uncomfortable with all of the attention, his blue eyes never landing anywhere for very long. He wondered how the ballplayer would ultimately cope with such fame. Roy had recently seen him in an ad for Big Brothers of America. He was surrounded by kids and he seemed so earnest and innocent. Roy could see just from looking in the man’s eyes that all of that goodness and incorruptibility would last.
Roy recalled how Joe Mills had begun his career as a superstar, the Royals calling him up from the minors and playing the same day against the Expos. He came into the game in the seventh inning and immediately retired the next three batters. And then he did the same in the eighth and ninth innings, the stadium announcer saying “How ’bout that kid?” over and over.
But two years later he injured his shoulder and struggled for another two years until Kansas City finally traded him to St. Louis. Up there, he was just another journeyman pitcher until a month ago, when he caught fire and pitched a shutout against the Giants, and all at once The Kid was back.
Roy shut off the set and thought about the lady cop. He hoped like hell he told his story the way Harvey had told him to tell it. Roy had an incredible memory. Albert had once said it was near photographic. But this lady, this Kelly Maguire, she kept making him forget. Maybe it was the way she smelled of cigarettes and baby shampoo. Same as his mother. That was it. That’s what threw him off.
A few hours later, Roy was asleep, dreaming that he was watching himself on television. There he was on-screen, standing in the alley, his hands raised. The little gangbanger, the one called Science, had Roy’s gun pointed at the councilman’s cheek. Except that, in the dream, Roy was watching it from a high point of view, looking down on the whole thing.
He saw himself slap the kid.
And then there was a red explosion and the councilman was blown backward against the wall.
There was no sound and the picture was grainy. The Demerol, Roy thought, somehow blurring the dream.
Roy watched himself take a step toward Science, like he was going to grab him, saw the alley bathed in light, and then the one called Truck was shooting at somebody Roy couldn’t see.
Roy watched himself turn, take another step, and fall down beside the dead man on the ground.
And then, bizarrely, the whole scene played over again.
Once more, Roy saw himself standing there with his hands up. Once more he saw himself slap the kid. Once more he saw Science put the gun on the councilman, the man in nothing but a jockstrap. And once more he saw the red explosion as the gun went off.
And then it started again…
Roy realized that he wasn’t dreaming.
He was actually watching himself on television. But how could that be?
Roy remembered the movement in the dark window above the alley.
Someone in the window with a phone.
Someone caught the whole thing.
Roy started to piss. Staring at the television, he could feel the metal bedpan warming between his legs as he filled it with a steady stream that seemed to go on forever.
Roy heard excited voices out in the hallway, turned and looked at the door. He could see shadows shifting in the light that bled underneath.
Then the door burst open and he caught a glimpse of a uniformed cop standing guard just outside before the large head nurse marched in, this time with a grin on her face.
“You’re awake.”
Roy tried to look past her into the hall, but his view was obstructed by the immenseness of her as she leaned over to again check his bedpan.
“Oh, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I knew you could do it.”
She proudly gathered up his piss in her arms, glanced at the television, then looked back down at Roy. “You’re on every channel,” she said, and then bent down, kissed him on the cheek, and whispered, “You’re a very brave man.”
Roy could see several other nurses smiling at him from the corridor.
She said, “Do you need anything?” And then stood there waiting.
“No. Thank you.”
She let her meaty hand rest on Roy’s shoulder, then walked out of the room. Roy saw the cop standing outside the door looking in at him. Another young kid, like the one who had told Roy the night before he was dying. He nodded to Roy, then reached for the handle and pulled the door shut.
On the television Roy now saw a shot of the lady cop as she left the hospital earlier that day, quickly ducking into her car, waving off a reporter. Well—more like shoving him away from her car. The sound was still down, so he couldn’t hear anything. He reached a hand out and felt about the bed for the remote, but couldn’t find it.
Now on the screen there was a mug shot of some black kid Roy didn’t recognize at all from the other night. This was somebody new. Before he could get a better look, the screen changed to snapshots of a Latino woman and her somehow genetically fucked-up daughter at Disneyland.
The picture changed again, this time to show a green house on a street that looked familiar to Roy. But who were these people? Were they there last night? He was confused.
There was a date at the bottom of the screen from several months earlier. A sheet-covered body could be seen just inside the front door.
Who are these people?
The picture then cut to a drainage canal near a power station in North Hollywood. The body of a little girl Roy assumed to be the one at Disneyland was lying at the bottom, the upper half of her body submerged in the water. The lady cop stood among a dozen others, hard to miss the bitter expression on her face.
Then more shots of the lady cop, this time as she stopped to talk to reporters outside a police station. She looked different. Stringy hair and red eyes. Tired, Roy thought.
Roy lifted the blanket and looked alongside his legs for the remote. He couldn’t find it, but was startled to see his left knee wrapped in tape, looking five times its normal size.
When he looked up again, the black kid Roy didn’t know was now standing outside what Roy guessed was his house in a neck brace and flanked by his mother and a white guy in a suit who was making some kind of statement. Along with the brace, the kid had two black eyes and a bandage across his nose. His lips were swollen and Roy could see that he was missing a couple of teeth.
Someone had really worked him over. Though, from the looks of him, Roy thought, he had it coming.
Then, finally, came a shot of the alley from the night before, cops crawling all over it. A body covered with a sheet. Roy couldn’t see himself anywhere in the shot until they once more replayed the video and there he was again with his hands up. Only this time Roy noticed that he was talking to the one called Science, the one with the gun, saying something to him. Science threw something in his face.
Cash. Roy remembered now.
And then the slap.
Roy sat up, felt the remote under the small of his back and reached behind the pillow and grabbed it.
He turned the sound up just as the picture changed to a shot of an attractive brunette in a cream-colored suit standing in front of the hospital…
“…now know his name is Roy Cooper from New York City. Earlier doctors told us that Mr. Cooper suffered two gunshot wounds in the attack, but is expected to recover fully.”
Roy threw his covers off and sat all the way up. His chest felt like there was a knife blade jammed in between his ribs. He swung his legs off the bed, looked up as the reporter was saying, “Earlier I spoke with Alonzo Zarate, the man responsible for the incredible images you just saw, and Mr. Zarate’s lawyer, Milton Shamberg.”
Roy took a breath and stood up on his good leg. His left knee throbbed, felt like it was a bunch of loose pieces held together in a thin bag made out of skin, Roy thinking that it might fall apart at any moment.
He tried to hop to the window, but felt a sharp pull in his forearm where the IV was attached. He pulled the whole thing out of his arm, ignoring the searing pain in his leg and his chest as well as the blood that now leaked from the puncture in his side.
Holding on to the IV stand for support, Roy hopped to the window and looked down at the parking lot. He counted nine news vans and half a dozen squad cars now parked out front. Several helicopters were circling barely a thousand feet up.
“The guy’s a hero.”
Roy turned and looked at the television set and saw the reporter as she spoke to a little guy, looked Mexican, maybe thirty, with black, slicked-back hair and a goatee. He was wearing a white T-shirt and baggy black chinos. Next to him stood a man in a black suit, ten years older, with a round head of curly hair and black-rimmed glasses.
The Mexican was saying, “I hear this music, I come to the window, I see the kids doing drugs. I tell them to turn it down, go somewhere else, they give me this.” The Mexican raised his middle finger for the camera.
“You didn’t call the police?”
“These are brats. I’m not afraid of brats. I agree with what Councilman Peres been saying. They’re all cowards. They call themselves gangbangers, I call them brats. I work for a living, but I see the way people look at me, like all Latinos are in gangs. Like I’m dangerous.”
