Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  I didn’t feel like arguing. “How did I get here?”

  Her smile got bigger. “Some kids brought you in. They looked like gangbangers.” She looked at me curiously for a moment; I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “Except for the girl, of course. She was amazingly beautiful.”

  For a moment I tried to feel even worse, but there wasn’t room in my head for more than I had going, so I just looked at her.

  “Why’d they bring me here?” My voice sounded weak and incredibly irritating to my ears, but I was stuck with it.

  “Good question,” she said. She held up a crumpled three-by-five-inch card. “My name and the address of the clinic were on this. It was in your pocket.” And she put one hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow at me, like a first-grade teacher who caught the class clown with a handful of spitwads.

  I tried to organize my answer. I was making some progress with my head, but it still took me a moment to put together a thought with as many parts to it as this one had. There were several different things to say, and I knew they had to go in the right order. So I let my head roll forward and I just breathed for a moment before I answered.

  “Oh. It—I wrote it down. The—address. I was going to be down here…on business…I wanted to stop by. Maybe—have lunch.” It was tough, but so am I; I made it through the whole sentence without fainting.

  I looked up at Nancy. She looked very serious.

  “You could have just called,” she said. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.” She watched my face as I figured out she was kidding. Then she gave me a little of her warm, low chuckle and I closed my eyes. I opened them up again after a moment and she was still looking at me.

  “Would you like to have lunch now?” she asked.

  I gulped some air and closed my eyes. “Not if it involves eating,” I said. “Or even looking at food.”

  “Hm,” she said. “Well, that’s the way I usually do it, so I guess lunch is out.”

  Nancy leaned forward and put a thumb on my eyelid. She peeled it back and looked inside, then whipped a small penlight up and into my face. She looked a moment longer, switched eyes, then nodded, putting the light into a pocket of her uniform.

  “I think you’ll live,” she said. I closed my eyes again, remembering the last time I’d heard that. “Do you remember what happened?”

  I shook my head. It was a bad idea.

  “Well, somebody apparently gave you a pretty good knock on the skull.”

  “Yeah. That seems about right.” I started to remember the outline of what happened. The details were still too much work.

  I raised a hand to feel my forehead. The hand was trembling. The forehead was throbbing. There was a brand-new place on my head that stuck out about four feet further than it ever had before. I felt like a very sick unicorn.

  What they never tell you in the movies is that getting whacked on the head can ruin your whole day. It’s like the cinematic tough guys who say, “It’s just a flesh wound,” and yank a hanky on tight with their teeth and then jump on their horses, draw their sabres, and fire two shotguns with their lips.

  Sorry: I’ve had flesh wounds. They hurt. They make you want to gnash your teeth and howl, and when the pain settles in to a constant throbbing you just want to sit quietly by yourself and whimper.

  A good head-whacking is about the same. When you come to, you’re not sure where you are, or even who you are sometimes. You want to crawl into a dark, well-ventilated corner, preferably with some kind of drain in it, and stay there until you can stand to take aspirin without gagging. It can take a day or two for things to settle down and lose their bright yellow edge.

  Nancy put a cool, dry hand on my forehead. It felt very good. “You had me worried,” she said.

  That was the best news I’d had for a while. “Really?” I asked her, managing to get one eye opened and pointed pretty much in her direction. I thought maybe opening one eye would only hurt half as much, but it didn’t work out that way.

  She smiled. She didn’t take her hand away. It felt good. “You did not look good when those kids brought you in. You still don’t.”

  “Thank you,” I said, leaning my head gratefully onto her hand.

  “But the doctor had a look at you. He said whoever hit you got you in a good place, hit mostly bone.” She chuckled again but had the good taste not to make any of the obvious jokes about bone and my head. “Anyway, he doesn’t think you’ll have a concussion or any other serious problems. Just a headache.”

  “It’s a serious headache,” I told her weakly.

  “Maybe. But it could have been a lot worse. Two inches lower and it would have been the bridge of your nose. Off to either side and it could have been your temple.” She touched each place as she named it. “They’re not as hard as your forehead.”

  I was starting to feel a little better. And as her hand moved over my head, I was starting to feel other things, too. Her hand had an almost electric feeling to it as it passed across my face. It made my skin feel like a Santa Ana wind was blowing over me and charging all my pores with static electricity.

  I stood up. For a minute I forgot all about Nancy. Then light and sound came back and I was still standing.

  “Thanks,” I said. I managed to make the room hold still long enough to look her in the eye. “I appreciate the TLC. Sorry about lunch.”

  “That’s okay.” She smiled a little. “You can spend a little extra on dinner.”

  I had actually turned away before I registered what she said and it took me a couple of seconds to turn back and wait for the sloshing in my head to slow down.

  “Di-dinner?”

  She raised a perfect eyebrow at me and waggled it once. “You don’t want to take me to dinner? I’ll take my Band-aid back—”

  I managed to stammer out that I’d love to take her to dinner. We settled on Friday night and a few moments later I was out on the sidewalk with my head spinning in two directions at once. I must have looked kind of scary with the big knot pounding on my forehead and the big grin on my face, because two young black women made a wide arc around me as they passed me and went into the clinic.

  It was just five blocks to the mini-mall where I had left my car, so I managed it in only about an hour. I had to stop a lot and wait for my head to catch up with me, but by the time I got there I was feeling better—better enough to drive, anyway.

  As I pulled out into traffic I thought I saw something move in the window of Park Honest Good Food Grocery, but with all the junk hanging and the glare off the glass, I couldn’t be sure.

  By the time I got back to the hotel the throbbing had faded to the background. As long as I didn’t make any sudden movement or try to sing “You Light Up My Life” it wasn’t bad. Anyway, it was no worse than brain surgery without anesthetic.

  In my room I pulled off my shoes and stretched out on the sagging bed, just breathing deeply for a while. I remembered hearing that it’s bad to fall asleep if you might have a concussion because you can slip into a coma and not wake up, so I fought against sleep, just lying with my eyes closed, just breathing. I would just relax for fifteen minutes, soothe myself a little, try to get the pain to ease off, not fall asleep, definitely not…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sun was down when I woke up. I guess I don’t have a concussion, I thought. Either that or I’m dead and this is heaven. I sat up carefully and glanced out the window. It was dark. A row of lights gleamed dully through a thick blanket of smog.

  Not heaven—not even close: Los Angeles.

  I put a finger on my forehead. The swelling was down a little but it still felt like I was wearing a rhinoceros costume. The pain was a lot less, and I was hungry as hell.

  As I swung my feet onto the floor, the telephone rang.

  “Well, Billy,” Ed Beasley’s voice purred at me, “I’m surprised you’re not out sampling our night life. Too much excitement for you after sleepy Key West?”

  “What time is it?” I ask
ed him. He chuckled.

  “Still right on top of things, huh? Well, truth is, it’s dinnertime. And I got something for you.”

  It took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant—the case files. Like I said, a whack on the head slows you down for a few days.

  “Oh. Well, how about Mama Siam?” It was a Thai place near the Greyhound station, and Ed loved Thai food—the hotter the better. I’d seen him eat things a circus fire-eater wouldn’t touch and grin while the sweat rolled off him in buckets.

  But he hesitated just a moment, so I prodded him a little. “Hey. I know you’re saving up for those lieutenant’s uniforms, Ed, but it’s on me.”

  He chuckled again, a little strained this time, and said, “Okay, Billy. Mama Siam’s, twenty minutes.” He hung up.

  It took me a while to get myself together, but I was surprised at how much better I felt. Now the problem was not so much the pain as it was that the circuits weren’t quite connecting properly. I would look for my shoe, see it, and have to hesitate just a moment and think, yes, shoe, before I could reach for it.

  This had happened to me once before, back when I was in the Rangers. I had mouthed off to a drill instructor before breakfast and woke up after lunch. For the next day or so reality had been a slightly grainy movie running on a projector with bad sprockets. But at least I had learned how much punishment my head could take. I had also learned not to talk back to people with black belts in more than one discipline.

  I figured out my shoes. It wasn’t so hard if I just took my time.

  Exactly twenty-six minutes later I walked in the door of Mama Siam’s. Ed Beasley was in a booth, already working on a pair of egg rolls accompanied by a few dozen slices of Thai pepper.

  Most Thai places have small pots of them on the table, thin slices of green pepper about as big around as a pencil. Each piece is about the size of a thumbtack’s head and if you eat a whole slice you will pass out from the pain.

  Ed was shoveling in five or six slices with each bite of eggroll. Sweat was pouring off him, and he was smiling like a kid with an all-day sucker.

  “Billy,” he said as I slid into the booth across from him. His grin was so big I could almost count his teeth. But I’d have needed a team of MIT researchers and a Cray computer to count the drops of sweat. “You walk into a door?”

  “Some kids beat me up,” I told him. He nodded like he was expecting something like that.

  “Right,” he said. “They do that here.” I guess he thought I was being funny, so he didn’t smile.

  “Well,” he said, after looking at me for a minute. “You really been working on that tan, huh?” He took a big bite with a half-dozen of those terrifying peppers clinging to it, and shook his head slightly as he swallowed. “Damn, that’s good.”

  Ed took a big swig of water and then smiled, just a little. It made me think of how he had always been known for that big Cheshire cat smile and how I hadn’t seen much of it this trip.

  “You don’t look so hot, Ed,” I said. “How’s business?

  He just looked at me. There might have been some good humor left in him somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. “This keep up, I be on the boat next to yours, Billy. They got Thai food in Key West?”

  “I thought you were almost a lieutenant. What’s the problem?”

  “Shit floats, man. The closer I get to the top, the more of it sticks to me.” He pointed a large finger at me, thumb cocked. “You got out just in time, boy. Things going straight to hell since the riots. Awful lot of guys thinking about early retirement all of a sudden.” Ed pushed another hunk of eggroll into his mouth, followed by a forkful of peppers. “Oo-ee,” he said softly, happily, as he chomped down on the peppers.

  “Come on, Ed. It couldn’t be that bad.”

  He gave his head a half-shake. “The fuck it can’t. We still not back on our feet from the riots. Not just what happened, but how it happened. Like somebody tried to fuck us up on purpose.”

  He ate a couple of peppers all by themselves. “Fact is, Billy, morale is so bad, I’m just not having any fun lately. Everybody running around trying to catch everybody else doing something or other, and staying out of it their ownselves at the same time. My ass is out the window if they find out I’m letting you see the files.”

  “Is that them?” I asked him, nodding at the seat beside him. There was a brown paper grocery bag, wrinkled and folded over, sitting beside him. It said RALPH’S on the side. It was nearly full.

  “That’s it.” He popped in the last bite of eggroll, finishing the pot of peppers with it.

  I stood again and leaned across the booth, snagging the brown bag and sitting down with it on my lap. I wanted to tear it open and start reading; that surprised me. I had not expected to be so eager.

  I put a hand on the top of the bag, then rolled the paper over tighter and placed it beside me. “What can you tell me about Hector?”

  Ed swallowed, took a sip of water, and leaned back from his empty plate. “Roscoe was very damn proud of that boy.” He wiped his forehead with a napkin. The napkin came away soaked. “Hector didn’t have to hang out in that kind of ’hood, you understand. He made that choice for himself.”

  “Why?”

  Ed saw the waitress across the room and raised a finger to her. “He was his daddy’s boy, Billy.”

  The waitress arrived. I thought about what Ed had said while he ordered dinner. Then I ordered, too—a Thai beer and a special hot-and-sour soup Mama Siam makes that is the best I’ve ever had. When you’re sick, whatever you’ve got, it cures you. The waitress, a middle-aged Thai woman, looked at the lump on my head and nodded approval. She made a few of the mysterious, elegant marks that are Thai writing and vanished into the kitchen.

  Maybe my head was still working at half-speed, but I couldn’t quite figure out what Ed was hinting at. Roscoe had been making decent enough money—and his wife was an attorney. They could live where they wanted, and Hector could have gone to private schools, or Beverly Hills High, or whatever he felt like. So why would he choose the inner city?

  “His daddy’s boy—” Did Ed mean that Hector was a political animal? Then why—

  “Are you saying Hector hung out in the inner city just to get a political background? So someday he’d be, what, authentic?”

  Ed looked very serious. “Yes, Billy. That is what I am saying.” He said it in a kind of low, Presbyterian voice with no accent and no inflection. Then he laughed, the first real laugh I’d heard from him since I’d been back. It was a deep, raucous yell of joy. A few of the other customers looked up at us, then looked away. “Shee-it, Billy. You been away too long.” Still laughing, he shook his head some more. “I thought eating a lot of fish supposed to make you smart—man, that bump on the head must of got you all stupid.”

  “I guess so. What about Hector?”

  He pointed a long finger at me. I could see where the nail was chewed all the way down to the quick. “You know what Roscoe was like—coldest black man I ever met. Never did a thing unless it was for a reason he’d thought out years ago. Boy started out the same way.”

  “But he changed?”

  He gave me all those teeth again. “Good for you, Billy boy. Good for you.”

  “What changed him?”

  The waitress set two beers on the table and poured half of each one into the two glasses, pushing one to me and one to Ed.

  Ed took a big sip, then poured the rest of the beer into the glass. “The ghet-to changed Hector, Billy. It marked him like it marks everybody. It made him care.” He took a big swallow of beer. “Worst mistake he could’ve made.”

  I didn’t say anything. If Ed wanted to be cynical and mysterious, I’d let him. If he wanted to dance naked with a rose in his teeth I guess I’d let him, too. He had been my partner for two and a half years and in some ways he still was.

  He finished his beer and waved for another one.

  “Then there was this girl, too.”

  “You mean Lin Park.”


  He raised one boomerang-shaped eyebrow at me. “Yeah-huh. That’s right.” Then his gaze moved up to the knot on my forehead and he nodded again. “Well, well…”

  “Yeah,” I told him, seeing he had put it together. “Maybe you should eat more fish, Ed.”

  He showed me the teeth. “Don’t need to be smart, man, I’m almost a lieutenant. I just need to cover my ass.” He pointed his head at the Ralph’s bag. “Don’t you leave my ass hanging out, honky.”

  “Sure. So Lin changed Hector?”

  “Not the way she changed you, Billy.” He snorted. “The way she changed him hurt a lot more. Lasted longer. Made him start thinking about being black, and that’s no way to get a career to happen.”

  “What career?”

  He gave me his devilish smile and leaned back. “You got to understand how important it is for a black politician to be able to say he’s from the ’hood, he grew up in the ghet-to so he understands what it’s like to be really black.

  “Roscoe knew that, and he got Hector to understand it. They were all set for that boy to be the first black president, Billy, and they were serious about it. You want to be major league, you got to start young these days. Ain’t nobody walks in off the street and throws a perfect knuckleball.

  “Then he meets this Korean girl and the whole beautiful plan is in the shithouse. ’Cause her daddy’d rather see his girl dead than doing the horizontal boogie with a black boy. So now Hector’s gotta think about Black Identity, Black Pride and Black Culture, Racial Context, the Politics of Assimilation, and the Meaning of Color.” He rattled it off like it was a list of classes he had taken at L.A. City College, and maybe it was. But he meant it, too.

  I shook my head. “Kid’s what—sixteen? And he’s thinking like that?”

  Ed started to look serious. “He’d already been thinking that way, Billy, that’s the point. But now he wasn’t thinking about it tactically—he was thinking what it meant. Why it meant that, what he could do about changing it.”

  He looked down at the table, almost like he was embarrassed. “Boy started out Jesse Jackson. All of a sudden he’s turning into Martin Luther King.” He shrugged. “And all he ever wanted was a background.”