Jet Sweep

by David Chill

  “It was a civil suit, and it was dismissed,” I said. “There were no criminal charges filed. The judge ordered both sides to find an agreement. I agreed to pay for most of the other man’s dental work.”

  “And the decision to seek treatment for anger management?” she asked.

  “That too. But I only agreed to this because it was at my wife’s insistence. She’s concerned.”

  “Are you concerned? That you lost control?”

  “A little. It’s just a part of who I am.”

  “Oh, really? Why do you say that?” she asked, eyebrows arched.

  “I used to play football. And coach football. It’s a violent sport.”

  She looked at me for a long moment and said nothing. I said nothing in return. I looked up at one of the sunset photos. I decided that one was a sunset because it was setting over a pier that reminded me of the one in Venice Beach. But it could have been a pier in Florida, or to be honest, anywhere. But it also struck me as being the hazy colors you see at the end of a day, not at the beginning. The horizon was gold and pink, framed by a dark blue sky above and a patch of dark blue water below. After a too-long pause, Dr. Rosenbloom spoke again, and I turned away from the photo.

  “When did you start playing football? How old were you?”

  I shrugged. “When I was about nine, my mother enrolled me in Pop Warner. There was a local cop who had taken an interest in me and recommended it. Kind of a Big Brother program, although he may not have been the best role model. My own father died before I was born. Car accident. My mother thought I needed some male guidance.”

  She looked at me with some sympathy in her eyes. “That must have been difficult. To grow up without one of your parents,” she said.

  I shrugged again. “I didn’t think about it much. Growing up, it bothered me once in a while, usually when I saw a friend having fun with his dad. I knew I was missing out on something. But I’d also see someone’s dad discipline them. I saw one kid get slapped in the face in front of a bunch of us for misbehaving on the playground. I don’t know what my father was like, so I guess I don’t know what I missed. My mother didn’t like to talk about him much. She said the whole situation made her very sad.”

  “I see,” she remarked. “Let me ask you about how comfortable you were in expressing your feelings when you were a child. Were you able to confide in your mother? Could you talk to her?”

  “Not necessarily. Like I said, she was struggling with the situation, being a single mom, trying to keep everything together. Earn a living, run a household, put food on the table, take care of me. My mother was a nurse, she had a demanding job at a hospital. She didn’t have a lot left after that. I don’t blame her. She did what she could.”

  “Was there anyone else you could confide in?”

  I thought about that, and there really wasn’t. “Teachers and coaches and that cop from the Big Brother program gave me direction and taught me how to function. My friends and I would just talk about things like sports and cars. But sharing feelings? No, that wasn’t what we did. I would guess you perceive that as a problem.”

  “Yes. I do. And I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself here when I say this. But when a child can’t express themselves in a safe way, they lose some of their innocence, and they lose it quickly. Their feelings can get repressed. Let me ask you this. Is there someone in your life now with whom you can share your emotions?”

  I nodded, albeit warily. “My wife. I know I can say anything to her, although I don’t always do that. In my line of work, there’s sometimes physical danger. I literally experienced that last night, trying to prevent a shooting before it happened.”

  “Oh, my,” she exclaimed, her mouth wide open. “Is this something you can talk about now?”

  I shrugged. “Long story short, I saw what was about to be a drive-by shooting. After being a cop for thirteen years, I get a sixth sense about things, when something bad is about to go down. I tried to get the victims out of harm’s way.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Fortunately, no, and we’re still trying to unravel what happened. You know, I can always discuss the details with my wife, but, well, I’m a little reluctant. She worries about me, and probably with good reason. When you get down to it, some of my job involves being a professional thug. Not a criminal per se, and I know that may be difficult for others to process. But my role is often to try and protect people who need protecting. That puts me in a position where I have to deal with some very bad guys, and deal with them harshly.”

  She paused for a moment. “You mentioned earlier that you were once with the LAPD. What happened that caused you to leave?”

  “Long story. I had been a model cop for thirteen years. Then I arrested a teenage runaway for prostitution. The more I learned of her story, the horrible life she was living, much of it not her fault, the more I wanted to help her. I took her in, but … as it ended up, I couldn’t help her. And she dragged me down into the morass she was in.”

  “What happened?”

  I licked my lips. “She got arrested again and turned on me. I was put in jail, thrown into a cell with the same criminals I used to bust. I was now one of them. I was accused of all sorts of things, ranging from pimping to being a pedophile, and none of it was true. In the end, the girl skipped town, disappeared into the wind, and the charges were dismissed. But I was changed forever. I couldn’t go back to being a regular cop. Everything I believed in had been altered. The experience affected me badly. I had to leave the job. I couldn’t return to who I was. That person no longer existed.”

  Dr. Rosenbloom stared at me, and I began to wonder how thrilled she now was at her shiny new patient. “All right. I’d like to get back to how you deal with these, well, let’s call them events that happen to you. Is there perhaps a colleague in your line of work who you can open up to? Someone who’s lived through similar things?”

  I shook my head no. “There are plenty of cops and ex-cops I know. We can talk about situations and how to handle them. But we don’t talk about our feelings. It’s a macho culture. It’s rarely done. The way we deal with trauma is to focus on something else. Lift weights, go for a run, have a few drinks.”

  “Let me ask you this, then. Even if there aren’t many people with whom you can talk about these traumatic events, do you ever think about your feelings? Or do you just try and put them out of your mind? And do you have control over them?”

  That question stopped me cold. I was very good at compartmentalizing. Practically deciding when to feel things and when not to feel them. I took some small measure of pride in choosing when to express emotion, but more as a tool to get others to talk, be it by threatening them or feigning concern. I knew this display was fake. But as I thought back to the fight outside of Chuck E. Cheese, I honestly wasn’t so sure that I had much control over my emotions.

  The next half-hour was spent talking about my childhood, my mother, and her passing away right before I started college at USC. I can’t say as it felt cleansing or cathartic, but Dr. Rosenbloom said this was a process and could take a while. I wasn’t so sure it would help, but I wasn’t convinced otherwise, either.

  We made plans to have another session early next week. I had a little time before heading down to WAVE, and taking a walk in Beverly Hills seemed like a good therapy session in and of itself. I also felt the3 need to think about our session. I strolled past an art gallery, a shop that sold Greek frozen yogurt, and a Vietnamese restaurant with a secret kitchen that served plates of garlic noodles for twenty-one dollars a pop. I had heard the noodles were worth it. But it was only eleven in the morning, and a cup of coffee seemed like a better idea. I checked my phone, and there was a Starbucks on Beverly Drive near Little Santa Monica. I walked the four blocks and ordered a grande dark roast. I sipped it and placed a call to Bernadette Green, who was clearly expecting to hear from me. She said I could come by and meet with her in an hour.

  I thought about my session with Dr. Rosen
bloom, thought about elements of my childhood, and felt bittersweet about my past. I didn’t have a lot of regrets but I began to wonder what my life might have been like if I had my father when I was growing up. At that moment, a young couple entered the Starbucks with a little boy, about three years old. They were speaking a language I did not recognize. The child was wearing a harness around his torso, with a leash attached to it. I stared at them, but they were oblivious to me. The mother held the leash and directed the boy toward a table in the back. I no longer felt so bittersweet about my childhood. It could have been worse.

  Chapter 4

  WAVE felt especially still as I walked through the parking lot and toward the front entrance. Last night’s crime scene had evolved into today’s calm, peaceful, sunny workday. The bullet holes in the stucco exterior had been patched, and the fresh coat of paint was drying. After checking in with the receptionist, a security guard escorted me inside the office. We walked past the break room and through a huge open space. The ceiling was a good fifty feet high, with a few small skylights scattered here and there, but most of the light came from soft LED fixtures. A honeycomb of interwoven steel rods completed a look that struck me as industrial-chic, more reminiscent of a manufacturing plant and could likely be transformed into a factory producing pretty much anything, and done so in a matter of days.

  A few dozen people were at their workstations, and a number of them had Uplift desks, allowing for adjustable height, with some of the desktops being a good four feet off the ground. These people apparently preferred standing to sitting as they worked. One woman had positioned herself on an exercise platform, walking as she had an animated conversation on her phone. Some of them were wearing t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. Most stared into their laptop screens, and a lot were wearing some form of earbuds. One young woman sped past us on a scooter, headed to the far end of the office, where she deposited a folder on someone’s desk, and rode back toward us again. No one, besides me, gave her a second glance.

  A series of offices lined the perimeter, with windows that offered a view to the outside world, even though that view held little more than a parking lot. A security guard who had not been there last night led me into one of these offices. It was a smallish office, with a small window, but a window nevertheless. Seated at her desk was a tall, light-skinned black woman who looked to be about thirty-five, which may have made her the oldest employee in the building. She wore a blue blazer over a white blouse, and she had a weary expression on her face, as if she were dealing with a form of battle fatigue. She rose as I walked in and shook my hand.

  “Mr. Burnside, I’m Bernadette Green. Thank you for coming in. I apologize. This is a tough day.”

  I sat down on a small chair and looked at her. “I can imagine.”

  “Cody talked to me last night. We had a company-wide meeting this morning. This is not a big company, and we’re tightly knit. This affects all of us.”

  “I gather you’re the HR person.”

  “I’m director of human capital,” she corrected me, taking a breath quickly and trying to regain her composure. “I gather you spoke with Cody last night about working with us here.”

  I looked at her. “What did Cody tell you he wants me to do?”

  “He didn’t tell me much. Just that you’d be coming in as a consultant to help out with our operations team. Said it was urgent, and to make it happen right away.”

  “Yeah,” I said, deciding it would be better to ask questions than answer them right now. “Can you help me understand a few things?”

  “Of course. What would you like to know?”

  “Maybe give me the nickel tour. Who’s in charge of what. Are all of the founders involved here day-to-day? The board of directors, Cody’s relationships with people. Everything. We’re trying to figure out why someone would want to fire shots at him and Kristy last night.”

  “All right,” she said. “I believe you knew Cody from USC?”

  “I did. I was one of his coaches there.”

  “Then you know something about him. His background.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “He had been growing up in Laguna. Then the private plane his mother and father had been on went down. Cody went off to live with his grandparents in Irvine when he was fourteen.”

  “Right before high school,” she said. “Terribly tragic.”

  “I know. They enrolled him at Mater Dei, I saw him play a few times there. I don’t know much about Kristy. Last night was the first time I had met her.”

  “Kristy was a few years older,” she said, a faraway look in her eye. “She was almost done with college when that accident happened. Awful thing to have to go through, to lose parents suddenly. I know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “My father passed away a few years ago, he was killed in a shooting, liquor store robbery. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So … shocking. He was only fifty-three. I know what it’s like. The heartbreak. So sudden. I was very upset, and it lasted for a long time. I never got to say goodbye. You move on with your life, but you don’t get over it. Oh, I’m sorry, this whole episode last night brings back some bad memories. I don’t mean to burden you with this.”

  She choked back a tear, and I gave her a moment before responding. In my thirteen years with the LAPD, I had witnessed numerous instances of people losing loved ones in an instant, sometimes through accidents, sometimes through violence. It was never easy to process, and never easy to accept. Death is certainly a part of life, but it is so jolting when it comes out of the blue. And it struck me that the hardest goodbyes were the ones left unsaid. Bernadette seemed to be reliving that right now. I decided to change the subject.

  “It’s okay,” I said, with a wave of the hand. “But again, maybe you can tell me a little about the company. How is it organized, who’s in charge of what, things like that.”

  “Of course,” she said, taking a breath and trying to compose herself. “It’s a flat structure. Cody is the CEO, he has a small team of senior executives below him, and a lot of junior staff under them. Ryan Concannon is our CFO, he’s in charge of Finance, Sean Danelo is our CMO, he leads Marketing. We have an open position now for Head of Operations. And Kristy is our CTO, she runs tech. They form the leadership team.”

  “Right. So tell me a little about the culture here. I’ve done undercover work at some companies, but this seems … different.”

  “It’s a typical startup. It’s not my first, I’m from San Francisco. Look. I try to teach these kids about how the real world works. Kristy does, too, she’s closer to my age than most of our employees.”

  “How’s that working out?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes learning by doing is the best way to go. Telling them what to do doesn’t always work because there’s so much skepticism about authority. And this generation is sensitive, believe me, I know. You almost have to let people make their mistakes, point them out gently, and hope they learn from them. I tell our executives that their staff is not necessarily their friends. And if you treat them like friends, they’ll take advantage. It’s human nature.”

  “This is my first foray into the world of tech startups,” I admitted. “I used to be with the LAPD and spent a couple of years working plainclothes. I’ve also done undercover assignments for private clients in my business. So I’ve had a glimpse of how business operates. But to be honest, I’ve never seen a business stock their kitchen area with alcohol.”

  She shrugged. “This is the new world order. A few years ago I worked for a beer distributor. They always kept six-packs in the office, and employees could take what they want. Most people might have one at the end of the afternoon, but you could always tell a new employee though. They’d end up woozy on their first day. But they learned. Experience is a great teacher.”

  “It is. Let me ask you something else. I heard you replaced Zander Foley recently.”

  She gave me an odd look. “Why, yes. How did you know?”

&n
bsp; “Cody and Kristy mentioned it. And they thought Zander may have had some help. That maybe some of his cronies who were helping him steal scooters were still here. Said there had been some grumbling in the ranks about Zander getting fired.”

  Bernadette Green shrugged. “As I said, people here tend to be friends with their supervisors. So if someone gets fired, the subordinates aren’t just losing a boss, but someone they were personally close to. A few of them didn’t believe Zander was involved and didn’t believe he was starting his own scooter company.”

  “Do you think Zander had anything to do with what happened here last night?” I asked, gesturing toward the outside.

  “Hmmm,” she replied, rolling this around longer than I would have liked. “I don’t think so. Zander was plenty mad when we let him go, but he didn’t strike me as that sort of person. You never really know, I guess. But it struck me that he was madder about not getting his stock options. Said we hadn’t heard the end of this, but I took that to mean he was going to sue.”

  “Be pretty pointless to file a legal claim if he was ripping off the company, wouldn’t it?” I asked, eyeballing her closely.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said. “This is the startup world. There aren’t a lot of rules. But Kristy said she had proof. And it’s funny that he hasn’t been formally charged yet. We heard they were still putting together the evidence. But it’s been taking a while.”

  “All right. What about Kristy,” I said. “What’s her role here?”

  “As I said, she runs tech. She helped develop the actual prototype for the scooters. So we could allow riders to unlock the scooters after they registered their credit card with us. The tracking devices told us where every scooter was at any given time. Whoever took them was tinkering with the tracking mechanism, and turning them off after they stole them.”

  “Then the people who did this had to be pretty sophisticated. Doesn’t sound like some kids off the street.”

  “Not at all. Whoever did this had to have known what they were doing.”