“No you’re not,” I said. “You’re taking me home.”
I put the Magnum to my head, so the cops could see it, and A.C. again used his cell phone to call the cops. “Back the fuck off,” he said. “Can’t you see the man’s gonna kill himself?”
The whole thing took less than an hour. By then we were driving past the Wilshire off-ramp, and A.C. took the Sunset exit. If the cops had any doubts about where we were going, they knew now: O.J. Simpson was heading home.
For a moment, cruising those familiar streets, I suddenly felt crushingly depressed again. A man spends his whole life trying to figure out what it all means, trying to make some sense of this business of living, and in the end he doesn’t understand shit.
I missed Nicole. I was worried about the kids.
There was a goddamn battalion waiting for us at Rockingham, and before A.C. had even killed the engine the cops had pretty much surrounded us.
I was pissed off again. What the fuck did they think I was going to do? Shoot it out?
I dialed 911. “You tell those motherfuckers to back off!” I said.
The operator patched me through to someone at the scene, and I hollered at him for a while, but I couldn’t see who I was talking to, and I’m not sure what I was trying to say.
Then I saw a sniper on the roof of a neighbor’s house, and I swear to God – I almost lost it. The sons of bitches. What were they planning on doing? Taking me out when I stepped out of the Bronco?
I showed them the Magnum again, and I could see the cops tensing up, backing off.
“Put that fucking gun down,” A.C. said. “You want to die?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
And I didn’t know, to be honest. I was depressed. Then I was angry. Then I was a depressed again. The shrink had told me that the pills were going to keep me from hitting bottom, but this felt awful close to bottom. And if bottom was worse than this, I didn’t want to know about it.
A moment later, I felt the tears coming.
“We should have tried harder,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Nicole and me,” I said. “I should have tried harder. Even when I thought I didn’t love her, I loved her. It’s just there were times I forgot.”
A.C. didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t even looking at him. I was thinking about all those years with Nicole, most of them so good I wasn’t sure I deserved them, and I was thinking about the way we’d gone and fucked everything up.
Like I said earlier, this is a love story, and like a lot of love stories it doesn’t have a happy ending.
I got out of the Bronco and the cops moved in. They gave me a few minutes in the house, a chance to freshen up, then took me downtown, to Parker Center. They booked me and took my prints and had me pose for a mug-shot. The flash blinded me, and I closed my eyes for a few seconds.
Nicole had written:
I want to be with you! I want to love you and cherish you, and make you smile. I want to wake up with you in the mornings and hold you at night. I want to hug and kiss you everyday. I want us to be the way we used to be. There was no couple like us.
And I’m thinking:
You were sure right about that, Nic. There was no couple like us.
EOF
If I Did It Page 19
