by B. J. Graf
Cacophony sounded the second I crossed the threshold back onto the street. The news was on the megathons racing up the sides of buildings on the boulevard.
“Six hundred fifty thousand more Americans underwent nano-cosmetic surgery this year, marking a sharp increase in profits from Magic Makeovers,” trumpeted the blonde spokesmodel on the Fox WSJ Market channel.
NBC’s Tomorrow Today Show interrupted with a promo for their special report on Alzheimer’s X. “Early onset-dementia has claimed record numbers of victims under thirty this quarter,” said a different blond commentator, a Latina. Images of blank-eyed teens, warehoused in special wards which had sprung up since the plague hit, flashed by on the screens.
“We should check for that Monday.” Shin pointed at the newsfeed. “If a doctor told me I had early-onset dementia. I’d think about putting a spike in my vein.”
“If you had it,” I said, “it wouldn’t be early onset.”
“You hear that whoosing sound behind you, eight-pack?” Shin leaned in so close I could feel his hot beer-breath on my skin. “That’s the sound of middle-age coming for you.”
Shin reached out and grabbed a handful of air, stumbling a little. I grabbed his elbow and righted his stance.
“Breaking news today on a stunning reversal,” said the Latina on CNN’s Crimecast. “Convicted murderer Alfonso Nieto’s sentence has been overturned due to irregularities in his trial.”
I froze.
“Irregularities in his trial.” Shin said. A Japanese native, he tripped a little over the r’s when he drank. “They make it sound like a laxative ad.”
I just shook my head. “The tiger,” I said, flipping my wrist.
“Rolled over.” Shin nodded. Years ago, he’d told me the ancient Japanese used to think the earth rested on the skin of a tiger. Whenever there was an earthquake or an event that rattled their world, they’d said the tiger rolled over.
“Two and a half years ago Alfonso Nieto,” continued the Crimecast anchor, “a high-ranking enforcer in the AzteKa cartel, was convicted of the murder of Manuel Ortega, a rival in the Zetas. A minor dispute escalated into tragedy that left more than two families devastated and Alfonso Nieto in prison for life.”
“Minor dispute,” Shin scoffed.
“He disputed Nieto’s right to blow his brains out,” I said.
A photo appeared as the newscaster blathered on. With his affable smile and salt and pepper hair, Alfonso Nieto looked more like everybody’s favorite brother than a stone-cold murderer.
“Nieto appealed the verdict when a supplemental police report from the first officer on the scene, Miguel F. Obrador, came to light after the verdict had been given.” The newscast blathered on. Apparently, that supplemental report gave Nieto the hammer he needed to win on appeal.
“And they let him off.” Staring at that smug face blown up to a hundred times its actual size, an angry red tide washed through me. It wasn’t my case, but like every cop, I knew the basic facts. I wasn’t all broken up about the death of another Zeta. But Nieto had set off a bomb that had taken out a detective and and more than a few innocent civilians. That was why every cop cheered when he was sent down for Ortega’s murder. I remember that celebration well. That was the year I joined Robbery-Homicide.
As I stood gawking on the sidewalk, my hand curled into a tight fist. The urge to hurl something through Nieto’s pixilated visage was strong.
Shin put his hand on my pitching arm. “Don’t lose sleep over it, Eddie. Today’s suspect, tomorrow’s victim.” Shin intoned the departmental mantra. “Karma gets them in the end.”
I swallowed, trying to get rid of the sudden bitter taste in my mouth. “Problem is karma’s a slow draw.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was magic hour. The setting sun stained the sky burnt orange as we headed back to our car.
Burning sage and that skunk stink of cheap marijuana wafting out onto the street redirected my attention to a life-size hologram of franchised psychic Cassandra as we passed one of her storefronts on Cahuenga. The parapsychological parasite promised ritual armor to ward off Alzheimer’s X. Cassandra had hair the color of new tarmac framing glittering obsidian eyes. Her hologram shimmered like a heat mirage.
“Hello, Edward Piedmont,” Cassandra said. The ad’s ‘smart’ sensor, embedded on the storefront behind her, read the barcodes of passersby and adapted the sales pitch to each. “Come inside. I’ll tell you your future.”
I know the future, Mama Cass. My thoughts flitted back to the reversal of Nieto’s verdict. It’s the past that keeps changing.
Shin and I walked on. The car’s sensor clicked open with a chirp as we approached.
Shin ambled towards the driver’s side, swaying a little.
“You only want to drive when you’re toasted,” I said, blocking the door.
“I’m not drunk,” he protested.
“Exhale.” I held out my glove-phone and clicked on the breathalyzer app.
Shin’s breath would have caught fire if I’d held a lighter, not a phone.
“The Japanese have many virtues,” I said, “but holding your liquor isn’t one of them.”
“That is a lacist srur, Eddie,” Shin said, grinning and wagging his forefinger at me.
“Mock all you want,” I said. “You’re still not driving.”
“You drive then, hakujin.” Shin inclined his head in a fake bow. We got in and the car switched over our phones. The Nokia glove phones, called Handys, were courtesy of yet another corporate sponsor in search of a marketing bump. In five more years my guess is all city employees will be wearing suits plastered thick with corporate logos like NASCAR drivers.
I was behind the wheel as we drove south towards Nokia P.D., police headquarters, on our way to turn in the sedan. Though our shift was officially over, the car called in our position automatically.
Shin flipped on the radio and tuned into the last country music station in L.A.. Some rhinestone cowboy began to wail.
“Tell me,” I said. “Why is a guy from Osaka so hot for soap operas sung with a twang?”
“You just don’t know what’s good,” Shin replied, crooning along in his off-key baritone. “She done left me on the bullet train, a bullet through my heart.”
We took the 101 Freeway south, colors blurring as I hit the gas till we exited at Temple.
A few blocks down I stopped for the yellow light. Scanning the intersection as we waited for the green, I spotted two pairs of shoes dangling over the phone lines opposite, one a pair of black high tops with a white Z sewn on the dark fabric, the other a white tennis shoe with the letter A inlaid on the rubber sole. The Zetas and AzteKas marking turf. Sneakers were an improvement. Last month they’d strung up headless corpses on the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.
“Look at that,” Shin pointed to a rundown branding-tattoo-piercing parlor with a sign outside hawking its wares. Pete’s Piercing–With or Without Pain.
“Wonder which costs more,” I mused.
Then, the day and my life switched gears.
It started with a small violation. A black Excalibur SUV with illegally tinted windows ran a red through the intersection. Veering wildly all over the street, the SUV rocketed by. The radio dispatcher was already calling out…503–stolen vehicle…505–reckless driving.
A black and white pulled out from a side street, attempting to cut the Excalibur off and force a stop. The bar of colored lights on top of the police vehicle flashed like a Christmas tree. The Excalibur didn’t even brake. It rammed the black and white, hurling the squad car into a cell phone tower. The black SUV careened past us.
Shin glanced at me. “We’re off duty, Eddie.” Shin was a stickler for protocol.
That’s when we heard shots from the vehicle. I hit the siren and slapped the portable strobe on the dash. The light pulsed arterial red.
Shin sighed, but he activated the Traffic Light Expediter.
With the TLE changing the timing of traffic lights,
how long they hold and how fast they turn, we sailed through green lights.
Shin answered the dispatcher’s call. “Detectives Piedmont and Miyaguchi in pursuit. We have a visual……shots fired.”
We took a corner fast. “You got strips up yet?”
“Affirmative,” the dispatcher replied. “Spikes down two blocks away on Grand and First.”
The sirens’ wail got louder. The Excalibur accelerated to eighty, fishtailing around the corner. Staying well back, I cut through an alley. Now flanking his left, we herded him towards those steel spikes.
He slowed for a second then pounded the gas again. I blocked his left. But two black and whites appeared up ahead - cutting off his escape. So he made a sharp right on First and raced for Grand. Brakes squealed as he turned the corner. Too late. Two more black and whites stood waiting in ambush just past the Music Center. Then the SUV’s tires blew. We’d corralled the Excalibur over those waiting spikes. The black behemoth on wheels lurched. It bumped and rattled and crawled to a stop. Excalibur’s only escape now was backwards the way it had come. Slipping our Glock dual action semi-automatics out of holsters, Shin and I exited the vehicle. The red light on the laser option turned green. We kept our car between us and the SUV – blocking its escape.
“Police,” I yelled to the occupants of the Excalibur. “Come out of the vehicle with your hands in the air.”
That’s when the first civilian left her little roach coach perched on the sidewalk outside the Music Center and ran out into the middle of the street, glove phone camera at the ready. She wore a tee shirt with the words Kill the Masters printed on the front. Her camera flashed and the Excalibur punched the gas hard in reverse.
Shin leapt from the cover of our vehicle. “Get Down!” he yelled. Shin shoved the girl, sending her flying wide-eyed to the sidewalk, out of the path of the Excalibur. But that put Shin directly in the line of the speeding behemoth on wheels.
“Stop!” I yelled. The driver didn’t. He turned and raised an arm. I saw the faint outline of the suspect’s head through the rear window. And a gun. No passengers or civilians in the line of fire. The suspect had already fired shots. So I did what I had to. I emptied the clip-fifteen shots in the time it takes to exhale.
My shots punched holes in the car’s metal skin and took out its rear window. Glass shattered and fell in a glittering mist. The Excalibur lurched, then meandered right into a yield sign and stopped. The horn suddenly blared. The uniforms covered me as I made my way to the driver’s side. I opened the door, gun at the ready. The driver, slumped onto the wheel, spilled out of the car onto the pavement. Crudely done gang tats covered the back of his neck. He didn’t move again. His .9 millimeter lay on the passenger seat, an extra clip beside it. There was no other occupant in the vehicle. Just the strains of a new cover of an old narco-trafficker ballad, “Silver or Lead,” bleeding into the air.
Two uniforms moved in now, guns on the suspect as I checked his vitals. Two fatal shots had severed his spinal cord and punched a quarter-sized hole in the back of his head. I turned him over and saw the exit wound through what had been his left eye. Peach fuzz framed his pudgy baby chin. Shit. He was just a kid – some baby-banger.
The woman started to scream. She ran back into the middle of the street. Kneeling, she picked up a smashed telephoto lens attachment for her glove phone, cradled now in her outstretched palm. A hoard of camera-toting civilians were already taping. When Shin had knocked the first civilian to safety, the Excalibur had run over her phone-cam. Maybe the shooter had seen her as the diversion he needed, or maybe it had been pure coincidence. We’ll never know. Now this kid was morgue meat.
One of the officers on the scene scanned the dead kid’s prints into his Nokia and sent the dark swirls to the crimecom lab. They’d correlate his past and see if he had a record. Others put up the tarps to screen the victim from the cameras of more lookiloos. Another bluesuiter picked up the shell casings from my Glock and those from the kid’s weapon too. By law all registered guns imprinted the owner’s identification on the bullets when fired. It was for the record. This time we already knew who fired the fatal shot. I forced deep breaths into my solar plexus.
My heart still pounded in my ears. Gradually, the pounding quieted, other sounds starting to register, as time sped back up to normal. That’s when my hands began to shake. Adrenaline shakes are part of the job. You never really get used to standing there shivering like a wet dog in the wind, as the hormone works its way out of your system. But that’s the inglorious reality of all gunfights.
By the time the shakes stopped, a new moon hung in the black sky. Lab techs had already taken blood samples and officers had statements from the witnesses. Paramedics were zipping up the body bag and lifting it onto the stretcher for that long ride to the morgue. Another paramedic swabbed liquid bandage on my hand. I hadn’t realized I’d scraped the shit out of it dropping into position.
Shin came over. “Insta-tox confirmed he was higher than Jupiter,” Shin said. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Did they run his barcode through the scanner?”
“Prints too,” Shin said, nodding. “Paco Ramirez, age fourteen.”
I winced. He obviously wouldn’t have a license to drive, let alone a permit to carry. But Jesus, he was just a kid.
Shin looked at his notes. “They’re correlating his past now but judging by his tats I’m figuring he was a baby banger for the AzteKa 17.” It was a local street gang tied into the AzteKa organization and the Juarez Cartel down south.
“And I thought today was a good day.”
“It’s a pretty good day for me,” Shin said. “Thanks to you, Eddie. I owe you.” He handed me an Altoids breath mint.
“Don’t thank me yet.” I popped the Altoids into my mouth. The strong peppermint flavor burned my tongue. Until this moment, adrenaline had driven from memory the drinks we’d had at the Code Seven. The mint could mask any hint of alcohol on my breath, but both of us knew it wouldn’t hide the booze in my blood.
“Right,” Shin replied. “As my grandmother always says “deru kuga wa utareru.”
“The nail that sticks up gets hammered. I know. Looks like I won’t be popping the question to Jo tonight after all.”
Before I could say another word a swarm of cops, including both the brass and internal affairs, surrounded and separated Shin and me.
All officer involved shootings require an investigation by the team of the same name. A detective from a special section of Robbery-Homicide already strode across the tarmac to tape my statement and relieve me of my body cam and gun so that it could be checked by ballistics. He took my departmental glove phone too. Reflexively, I looked up at the ever-recording surveillance cameras on overhead billboards and traffic lights. It was starting to rain. Clouds of steam rose from the hot pavement. I just hoped the cameras caught the whole story, not merely the bloody end. I braced for the storm.
BOOK TWO
The day I was born I made my first mistake, and by that path
have I sought wisdom every since.
The Mahabharata
CHAPTER FIVE
The storm hit the next day. Captain Tatum wanted to see me right away.
The story as spun, White cop shoots fourteen-year-old Latino honor student, had made the late-night news and gone viral on the web in a heartbeat. Paco’s smiling middle school photo with his big Bambi eyes played non-stop on the news cycle. Pictures of him shooting the .9 mm at that black and white, and us, didn’t.
I hadn’t slept a wink. Now as I wended my way towards Nokia P.D., an angry throng of people crowded the steps of the new police headquarters, calling for blood, my blood.
Nokia P.D. is a ten-story edifice of steel, metal glass and stone planted on the 2nd St. site of the former police headquarters, which in turn had replaced the crumbling Parker Center in 2010.
After the work of a suicide bomber had turned the new headquarters into a coffin for a hundred cops in 2029, the wireless company steppe
d in with the cash. The re-christend building looked like the architectural love child of the Getty Museum and a high-security fort.
“Once again police brutality is out of control in LA!” shouted a lean middle-aged man on the steps. He had razor cut hair and eyes that leaked bitterness into the waiting camera of reporters from Crimecast and the news blogs covering the story.
It was Ira Natterman spouting his usual diatribe. Natterman was a civil rights attorney whose entire career centered on suing the police for alleged violations. The joke among cops was that the most dangerous beat in L.A. was between Natterman and a microphone. And here he was, moist red lips hovering over the mike, a ravenous junk yard dog about to grab that bone.
Community policing, body-cams, huge increases in diversity hires, sensitivity training, none of it ever changed Natterman’s spiel. Whatever else ailed society: fatherlessness, mental health issues, drug addiction, poverty – to Natterman police were always the problem. Well, we were his meal ticket after all.
“We demand justice for this child’s death, and his mother’s pain.” Natterman pointed to the red-eyed woman at his side.
Keeping my eyes on the ground, I moved ahead. That was low, using the mother’s grief like that. Still, Natterman’s spiel was old news to me. But halfway up the steps the lawyer's next line made me pause.
“We demand jail time for the reckless cop who put an end to the life of this fourteen-year-old honor student,” he continued, grabbing the mike of the Crimecast reporter for emphasis. “Past reforms have not worked. Let’s make an example and end racist police brutality this time!”
The crowd behind the reporters roared approval. Would these people screaming for my blood even have registered a complaint if events had gone the other way, and Shin or I were the ones lying in that steel drawer of the morgue today? I didn’t feel very confident about the answer.