by Don Winslow
Chris says, “Something beautiful might happen here.”
“What’s that?” Carolyn asks.
Chris says, “Stammen is going to throw the batter a sinker, try to get him to hit a ground ball. If he does, you’re going to see something beautiful.”
Sure enough, second pitch, Stammen throws the sinker and Descalso hits a sharp bouncer to the shortstop, Fernando Tatís Jr., who runs, scoops up the ball and makes the throw to first for the out.
“He’s the most beautiful ballplayer I’ve ever seen,” Chris says.
Chris was right, she thinks.
It was graceful, maybe even elegant.
Certainly beautiful.
Carolyn hears herself say, “Something else beautiful might be about to happen.”
She leans over and kisses him.
So life is good for Chris Shea.
He goes into his last week in Central on a high. Lieutenant Brown is off his ass, the monkey razzing is starting to fade, and he comes off shift to a beautiful girlfriend.
Even the Padres put together a little winning streak.
He’s half an hour before end of his last shift—that close—when another radio call comes in.
A 10-35.
Dangerous, armed person alert.
In this case a man with a knife on Cabrillo Bridge, which connects the halves of Balboa Park over Route 163.
Chris gets there first this time to see a man slashing at the air with not a knife but a machete. He radios a 10-97—arrived at scene—and gets out of the car. No one else is on the bridge. If there had been anyone there this time of the night, Machete Man must have chased them away.
The guy looks to be in his forties—his hair is shaggy, his shirt wrinkled, and he wears baggy khaki trousers held up by a piece of rope in place of a belt. He swings the blade in a wide figure-eight pattern as he yells at an invisible (at least to Chris) adversary.
It’s obvious to Chris that the man sees his enemy very clearly.
Chris sends an 11-99—officer needs help—on his radio, then pulls his gun but holds it low at his hip. Right hand on the pistol, left held out palm forward, he walks slowly toward Machete Man. “Put down the blade!”
The man turns his head and looks wild-eyed at him. Chris has seen eyes like that a hundred times. A lot of the people he has encounters with are psychotic, and they have a certain look in their eyes when they’ve gone off the meds.
And now, Chris thinks, his enemy is me.
Machete Man walks slowly toward him, swinging the blade, yelling, “I know you, devil!”
Chris raises his gun and aims at center mass.
Three years on the job, this is the first time he’s pointed his gun at anyone. He hates the feeling, the awful, very real possibility that he might actually have to pull the trigger to protect himself.
Civilians are always asking about these situations, why the cop doesn’t shoot the guy in the hand or in the leg. But the public doesn’t know anything about situations like this, the nauseating rush of adrenaline coming up, your heart racing. They don’t understand how hard it is for even highly trained police to hit someone in the hand, or even in the leg, in a combat situation. You aim for center mass—for the chest—because if you miss, you might be dead.
Chris stops, but Machete Man keeps advancing.
“Don’t!” Chris yells. “No! Stop right there!”
His finger tightens on the trigger.
Machete Man stops.
Thank God, Chris thinks, but he keeps the Glock trained on the man’s chest. “Drop the machete!”
But Machete Man doesn’t. Instead he yells, “Leave me alone!” turns away from Chris and runs to the north railing of the bridge, starts swinging the blade again, yelling at the devil.
I’d love to leave you alone, Chris thinks, but that’s not the job. He walks steadily but slowly toward the man, who turns to see him again and then backs to the bridge’s railing and swings one leg over. “I told you to leave me alone!”
“I know what you told me, but I can’t do that,” Chris says. “Let me get you some help.”
The man looks at him sadly. “It’s too late.”
“No, it’s never too late,” Chris says. “Come on, let me help you.”
Machete Man swings the other leg over, and now he’s precariously perched to jump.
Or fall, Chris thinks.
Either way he’s going to plunge a hundred feet down onto a freeway with traffic coming both ways.
Chris is maybe ten feet from him now, close enough to make a lunge if he has to. But he’ll need both hands, so he holsters his gun. The man can’t swing the machete from that position anyway.
He looks at Chris again and holds his hand out, as in don’t come any closer, and then he says, “The devil’s inside me. I have to kill him.”
“No,” Chris says, edging forward. “I know a priest . . . uhh . . . exorcist. We’ll go see him. He’ll help you.”
Machete Man thinks about it. He looks down at the highway beneath him and then back at Chris. “Are you telling the truth?”
“The truth,” Chris says.
Machete Man nods.
Then the lights hit as Grosskopf’s squad car speeds in from the opposite direction in response to Chris’s radio call. The flashers cover Machete Man in a red demonic glow.
He turns back to Chris with a look of betrayal.
Then pushes off from the railing.
Chris lunges.
His right hand manages to grab the rope belt and hang on, but Machete
Man is already in midair, and his weight and momentum pull Chris over the top of the railing.
Chris reaches back and grabs the railing with his left hand.
Holds on, as it were, for dear life.
Because this time he won’t fall fifteen feet into a net but a hundred feet down onto a concrete highway and oncoming traffic.
What he should do is let go of Machete Man, but he doesn’t do what he should do and feels his grip on the railing start to slide off, his arms burning, his fingers going numb, and he knows he’s going to fall, him and Machete Man, and then—
A hand grabs his left wrist.
Chris looks up and sees—
Batman.
He’s five-three and skinny, but definitely Batman. Then Robin, all six-five of him and muscled, takes firm hold of Chris’s forearm, and the Dynamic Duo pull him and Machete Man up and over the railing back onto the bridge.
“Holy cocksucker, Batman!” Robin says.
“We should have them over for dinner,” Carolyn says.
“At the least,” Chris says.
He’s strolling through the zoo on a Saturday afternoon after his first week in Robbery with his beautiful, smart, warm and charming girlfriend instead of being a stain on the 163, so yeah, they should have the two guys who saved his life over for at least a major taco night.
“I’ll make beef stroganoff,” she says.
“Better than what I was thinking.”
They stop by the primate environment.
Champ looks out at them, recognizes Carolyn and lets out a scream of greeting. He doesn’t seem to recognize Chris.
Oh, well, Chris thinks, it’s a thankless job.
Nobody ever finds out how the chimp got the revolver.
For Mr. Raymond Chandler
Sunset
Chewing on an unlit cigar, Duke Kasmajian sits on his deck and looks out at the beach where he never goes.
“Too much sand,” he answers when asked why not.
Sand is hard to walk on, especially if your five-ten frame has to carry 287, your knees are shot, your new heart valve has no warranty, and sixty-five is getting smaller in your rearview mirror. Add all that to the fact that Duke likes expensive shoes and doesn’t like them full of sand, and you got the reason he looks at the ocean mostly from the deck of his home in Bird Rock.
Even though his cardiologist tells him to walk.
Duke has a treadmill and a stair-stepper and d
oesn’t use either of them. They’re the world’s most expensive clothes hangers.
He has stopped smoking.
Also doctor’s orders.
Hence the unlit cigar.
A squat glass of scotch sits on a stool by his left hand. Duke’s not giving that up for anything—not for the doctor, not for his kids, all adults now, not even for the dozen employees he has in the largest bail-bonds outfit in San Diego, if not all of California.
The Duke is a San Diego legend.
His face is on highway billboards and local TV and radio ads.
“Need to juke? Call the Duke.”
He sponsors Little League teams (“Caught stealing? Call the Duke”), OTL tournaments for the wheelchaired (“Over the line? Call the Duke”), and a safe house for battered women that his tougher bounty hunters guard on his dime (no advertising on this; its existence and location are on a strict need-to-know basis).
Duke also doesn’t advertise the college tuitions he’s laid out for, the twenties he drops at kids’ lemonade stands, the Christmas boxes to the families of slain cops and firefighters, or the employees’ medical bills he’s hijacked at the hospital billing desk.
Nobody knows about those.
Nobody needs to.
All anyone needs to know is that if you have to make bail, phone Duke Kasmajian’s office and he’ll get you out. The Duke is an equal-opportunity bondsman who doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, relative degrees of guilt or innocence or criminal history. Duke, in fact, prefers recidivists, because they’re a steady income base, and he even offers discounts to “frequent fliers.”
“But don’t fly on the Duke,” he warns.
Don’t be fooled by the round, friendly face, or the soft, curly salt-and-pepper hair, or the curmudgeon’s smile twisted around the cigar. You run on Duke Kasmajian, he’ll hunt you down. Because you’re running with his money in your pocket. You take off on one of Duke’s bonds, he’ll track you until he finds you or one of you dies.
He’ll never give up.
Just like he’s not giving up his beloved scotch.
Or his vinyl.
Which, the younger people tell him, is coming back again.
Bullshit, Duke thinks as he listens to the Jack Montrose Sextet play “That Old Feeling” (Pacific Jazz Records, 1955)—vinyl records never went anywhere. Duke’s collection of the genre generally known as “West Coast jazz” takes up most of the second floor of his house, and his nephew-in-law—his sister’s daughter’s well-meaning but idiotic husband—is afraid that the weight of all those albums is going to collapse the floor.
Also bullshit, Duke thinks.
His house was built in 1926, when they built things to last.
When most guys his age look out at the ocean, the soundtrack in their minds is the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Dick Dale or maybe the Eagles.
Not Duke.
He hears Cool School.
Pacific Jazz Records.
Art Pepper, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Hampton Hawes, Shelly Manne, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars, Lennie Niehaus, Lee Konitz, Bud Shank, Clifford Brown, Cal Tjader, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Harold Land, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jimmy Giuffre, Red Mitchell, Stan Kenton, Benny Carter . . .
Charlie Parker blew here.
They all did.
Bird played the old San Diego Boxing Arena back in 1953, too long ago for even Duke to have been there, but it means something to him. Just like it means something to him that Harold Land was from San Diego.
This album?
Jack Montrose on tenor sax, Conte Candoli on trumpet, Bob Gordon on bari, Paul Moer on piano, Ralph Pena on bass, Shelly Manne, of course, on drums. Duke knows this without looking at the album cover, he knows most of these details by memory because it’s important, goddamn it, to know the sidemen on recordings. Just like in his work, details are important, details are everything, you don’t get the so-called small things right, you’ll screw up the big things. So Duke remembers who plays on almost every album, but if he doesn’t, he can look at the goddamn liner notes, which you can’t do on the iPad or mePod or shitPot or whatever they call the thing that his nephew-in-law is always trying to sell him on.
“But, Duke,” the kid says, “you can take all your music everywhere.”
But I don’t want to take my music everywhere, Duke thinks now. I want to listen to it in my home, sipping my scotch, on vinyl the way it was meant to be heard.
I’m old-school that way.
A dinosaur.
In more ways than that, he thinks as he chews the cigar and looks out at the Pacific, because the state of California has just passed a law banning cash bails, which is going to put Duke out of business and all his employees out of their jobs.
Duke’s not worried about himself—he knows his money is going to last longer than that heart valve.
But the business he built, the life he built, is about to be gone.
And gone is gone—you can’t track it down.
Life isn’t vinyl.
It doesn’t spin round and round until it comes back again.
Duke knows this all too well.
How many times did he and Marie sit on this deck and watch the sun set? It was a near-nightly ritual. She would come out with his scotch and her glass of red wine, he’d put on some jazz, and they’d stand and watch the blazing reds and oranges, bask in the sheer peacefulness of the oceanic dusk.
It seemed as if the world stopped for those ten or fifteen minutes of awe.
Other couples would come outside, stand silently, and watch. Even the surfers would stop trying to catch waves, turn their boards toward the setting sun, and sit in quiet admiration, maybe even worship.
Later, when Marie was so sick and they both knew that their sunsets together were numbered, he would bundle her up in a coat and a blanket, a knit cap for her bare head, make her a cup of hot tea because she was always cold, and they would sit and watch the sunset, knowing it was their own as well.
Now he sits and watches alone, although he still pours a glass of red wine for her, which he tosses over the deck into the bushes when he’s ready to go inside.
It’s always beautiful and sad, the sun going down.
Duke goes inside and, reluctantly, picks up the Maddux file.
Terry Maddux is a dirtbag.
Short in stature, baby-faced, killer handsome, with shaggy blond hair, startling blue eyes and a grin that could charm a rock, Terry is also, Duke thinks, looking at his file, a junkie skell. A thief, an addict and therefore a liar, and Duke loves him.
Everyone does.
So much that Boone Daniels, one of Duke’s bounty hunters, pinned the name ELT on him, as in “Everyone Loves Terry.” Because Terry is charismatic, funny, incredibly kind when he’s not jonesing, and he used to be the best surfer that anyone had ever seen.
A legend.
Duke has never been on a surfboard in his life, but he knows beauty when he sees (or hears) it, and watching Terry on a wave was pure beauty. He had a grace about him, a style. He rode a wave like a great trumpet player doing an extended solo, riffing, taking an old tune and making it new, making it his, creating art.
Breaking barriers.
According to Boone—a surfer himself and an ardent surf historian—every big wave on the West Coast had Terry’s footprints, as it were, on it. Terry was just a kid, literally a kid, when he paddled out at Trestles. Not much older when he was the first to ride the big wave at Todos Santos. One of the early guys at Mavericks.
He was older when the boys took a boat sixty miles out to the mystical break at Cortez Reef, and it was Terry Maddux who was the first to jump into that sixty-footer, in cold, sharky water, and ride it.
All with that grin on his grill.
“Joyful” was how Boone put it.
“He was joyful on a wave.”
And off it.
Terry never met a party he didn’t like.
&nbs
p; Whether it was beers on the beach or shots in a bar, Terry was in it—laughing, joking, slinging back booze and chatting up girls, many of whom went home with him, home being a van he lived out of, taking it up and down the 101, riding waves, causing parties to break out, never causing them to break up.
Terry was on a high—the whole world loved him. The surf mags, the photogs, the clothing companies, they all loved Terry. He was on magazine covers, in surf videos, he had sponsorships and endorsements. When he needed cash to finance his surf jones, all he had to do was put on a wet suit with a logo, a hat, a pair of shoes, and they gave him money for it.
Money to surf.
Money to party.
And that was the problem.
Terry loved to party too much.
It was like he was looking for a bigger and bigger wave. Booze wasn’t a big enough high, and then weed wasn’t. And then coke didn’t give him the rush it used to, and then speed failed to get him high.
Heroin did.
Heroin is the big wave of the drug world.
The undefeated macker.
You don’t ride that big wave, it rides you.
Rode Terry Maddux down, blew him off his board and held him under, tumbling him around until it spit him out on the beach.
Washed up.
He’d get high and blow off tournaments, personal appearances, photo shoots. At first the surfing world would make excuses for him—“That’s just Terry being Terry”—so as long as he could ride and look good, it was cool.
But then he couldn’t.
The thing about surfing—it was Boone who explained this to Duke—is that you have to be in shape to do it well. And to ride big waves, you have to be in fantastic shape—you have to be able to paddle, to swim, to hold your breath for as long as three minutes if one of those giants keeps you under.
You have to be strong, and heroin makes you weak.
Makes you skinny.
You need total, insane focus to ride those waves, and heroin makes you unfocused and insane.
Plus, it makes you look like shit.
Not like a cover boy.
Or a vid-clip hero.
Behavior that made Terry cool when he could surf well made him uncool when he surfed badly. His charm became manipulation, his stories bullshit, his jokes pandering, his pickup attempts creepy, his explanations excuses.