To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  Jackson, hands on his hips, watched the techs gather and mark evidence. Slade was still catching up in his notepad.

  I looked back at our witness and saw his eyes pasted on the body. “We’re just going to need your full name, and we don’t want to find out anything we don’t know when—”

  “You run my fucking name?” He lifted his chin at us, straightened his sleeves.

  Slade said, “We have to do it, sir. It’s how it goes.”

  “Sir is goddamn right. Here I am trying to help your ass.”

  I shrugged. “You’re helping him.” I pointed my thumb over my shoulder. “Me, I could be sitting back at the office, drinking shitty coffee and watching Lakers Showtime highlights on YouTube.”

  “Ooh,” our witness said, “Magic was the shit, huh?”

  “Smooth ass James Worthy,” I said. “High-flying Byron Scott.”

  “Don’t forget Kareem, man. He big and slow, but he smooth as peanut butter.”

  Slade shifted as if bored. “You guys are too old school for me. I’m talking Golden State Warriors with Steph and Klay and—”

  “Get out of here with that Bay Area shit,” homeboy said. “This is So Cal, homie.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Now, from one Lakers fan to another, what happened to our homie who isn’t waking up from his nap?”

  “Shit. They plugged his ass. And his body is all, like, shaking and shit—like he’s being shocked, you know? They plug him so many times. I swear to God, man. It’s like, motherfucker is dead. And I’m hiding right over there.” He pointed at a small home on the street corner. The house was circled by a low wall in the manner of many surrounding homes. “They turn around and they get in the Benz. Fucking, gonzo…” He crossed his arms, stared at us with defiant certainty.

  Slade looked up from his perfect printing. “You get a license plate number?”

  “Hell no. Tell you what I saw though.” He tapped the side of his head. “The back windshield had a name on it, one of those stickers you get made. All white letters and it said, ‘Juarez.’ I know that for damn sure. Clear as day.”

  “You ever seen that ride before? Know the name?” I felt the hot summer air hit the back of my throat. I tried to watch homeboy’s eyes for the clever glint of a lie.

  He said, “Do I know the name? Of course I know the name, motherfucker. That’s some narco shit, homeboy. You should be out here in a Halloween mask, make sure nobody knows you’re murder police. Better believe that shit, too.”

  Slade shook his head, turned and walked back toward Chato’s lifeless body. Behind me, I heard him say, “Fuck this bullshit.”

  “What, man? That dude thinks he’s all fucking fancy, huh?”

  “We don’t get many drug murders in the city,” I said.

  “I don’t know, homie. I see what I see.”

  “You saying the narcos are bringing that murder shit to me?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. You’re the fucking detective. Maybe it’s a family name, something sweet to make abuela proud. There you go—can I be your assistant now?”

  I laughed and took down the guy’s full name.

  When I turned and walked toward Slade and Jackson, homeboy shouted after me: “Eh, fuzz! I did do some time though! Grand theft auto, motherfucker!” The remaining onlookers laughed and pointed at me.

  When I reached Slade and Jackson, I could see they were both irritated. Jackson popped small pink bubbles and Slade kept flipping pages in his notepad.

  I said, “Put that fucking thing away, Slade. Look around and watch all these motherfuckers.” You’d be surprised how many times a homicide cop spotted a killer at a public crime scene. I’d done it three times over the years, all drug killings, but I knew it happened in white upper-crust suburbia too. Don’t let the rich fool you. They’re as violent and perverted as the rest of us—I think they’re worse.

  Jackson said, “This is a cartel hit.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “We were down here last night and it was quiet as a shrine.” Jackson looked surprised. “You two were down here last night? What the fuck for?”

  “A hunch,” Slade said, “about the Jacoby murders.”

  Jackson’s cheeks got red. “So, you two wasted a whole day on that Jacoby thing?”

  “It’s part of the Castaneda murder,” Slade said.

  “The fuck it is. You know what solves homicides?”

  Me and Slade shook our heads, sarcastic.

  “Murder police who work their own fucking cases. That’s what, motherfuckers. Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, we were right on the hunch.” Slade waved his hand at the body like he was revealing the final turn in a complex illusion.

  Jackson blinked. He stared at the body, looked back at the onlookers. “Fuck it,” he said. “Just get me a fucking charge on these murders by Monday. I don’t care if you pay a casting director to get you realistic witnesses.” He paused, added, “And, yes, I’m fucking with you.”

  I said, “About the charge, or the—”

  “The witnesses, asshole. Of all the cops in the city, Frank, you’re the one who needs this most.”

  Jackson stormed to his car—he got the shiny Ford Taurus—and sped off without waving.

  Slade smacked my arm to get my attention. “Frank, look who the fuck it is.”

  Way off down the street, riding a green BMX bike in small circles, was the punk kid from the night before. His head swiveled as he turned circles in the street, his gaze pointed in our direction.

  Slade said, “You want to talk to him, or should I?”

  As I was about to answer, my cell buzzed. I pulled it out and recognized the number—Candida, the former Border Patrol agent. “I got to take this,” I said. “You go smack the kid around and get more information.”

  Slade didn’t laugh, but he did start walking toward the kid. I took a deep breath and answered the call.

  “I don’t know jackshit about those bodies, Detective. Reason I’m calling you—it’s to get my name out of your mouth. I’m trying to be real here.” Candida said this with the false confidence of the powerless. Behind it all, he was scared. He cleared his throat more than necessary, and tried to fill the silence before I responded. “If those bodies got there after I—”

  “I don’t think you killed anybody, Hector. What I do wonder, though, is why you got out of the Border Patrol business. That’s the big thing here for me. I mean, shit, you say—”

  “I took some money from a drug mule.” He said it plain, without regret.

  “You what?”

  He cleared his throat—that was four times in thirty seconds. “I took some money from a drug mule, but it’s not what you think. It didn’t go down like they say, man.”

  “So, tell me, how’d it go down?” I watched the onlookers behind the crime scene tape while Candida talked. All the women crossing themselves reminded me about my prayers. I promised myself I’d say some Hail Marys and Our Fathers before the weekend ended. I treated prayer like I treated dental hygiene—you hate it, but you have to do it.

  “I used to work down near Tecate, across the border,” Candida said. “The thing is, one day, I get put on a checkpoint, just north of the border. Near Jacumba, on the highway.”

  “I know the spot.” Every few hundred miles, the Border Patrol set up checkpoints. I knew it as a way to—in the worst possible sense—stereotype drivers and detain them. Like most efforts at racial profiling and bias, it worked real fucking well. Talk about the American way.

  “But I’m not on the checkpoint, okay? That’s just a way for us to get the real drug runners to try to skirt the checkpoint. Like, they’ll use the highway and get off a few miles before…walk through the desert.”

  “So, you patrol north and south,” I said.

  “Right, but it’s only me that day. My partner got the runs and I’m out there by myself, pissing yellow steam and praying I don’t step on a baby rattlesnake
.”

  “So the fuck what? It’s your job.” Behind a group of old women, I noticed a black cowboy hat appear. The hat maneuvered through the crowd, pressed toward the crime scene tape.

  “So, I’m in this ravine, more like a box canyon, and I’m headed down, trying to get to a spot where I can see better. Next thing I know, I hear voices—Spanish. I try to get my gun out, but then I hear two voices telling me not to move. I wait for a second and three guys carrying big ass marijuana bales come through. They’ve got the fucking things on their backs and the dudes are sweating. I’m talking slave labor here. Next thing I see, I got two assault rifles pointed at me. These two fuckers—scouts, I guess—are standing above me on the canyon walls.”

  The black cowboy hat moved faster through the crowd, got closer. I started watching it for real then. I thought it might be somebody coming to see their fine craftsmanship. “And they said they’d kill you if you didn’t take the money, am I right? That you were on the payroll and—”

  “That’s what fucking happened, man. And I went right to my supervisor, called that shit in and they got there and the shit just went—”

  The black hat was one row behind the yellow crime scene tape. “But you didn’t say a damn thing about the money, did you?”

  “What am I going to say, I took ten grand so I didn’t get my brains blown out? How’s that sound? Think about it, man…The fuck am I supposed to do?”

  “Isn’t that the truth? You took the money because you had to?”

  “They’re not going to buy that shit, man—I know that and so do you.”

  “You should have told them about the money,” I said.

  Candida cleared his throat a final time. “They knew. It was a fucking DEA sting and how the fuck was I supposed to—”

  “Candida,” I said. “Let me call you back.”

  “Don’t you expect me to answer you again, man. Oh, hell no, I’m not—”

  I hung up and watched as the black cowboy hat appeared in the front row. It was a guy dressed like a vaquero, though I doubted he’d broken many wild horses. He wore slick cowboy boots, the requisite ten-gallon hat, tight white Levi’s, and a nice long-sleeved shirt. He had a thick black mustache and it was spread wide into a grin. He lifted a cell to his chest, held it out in front of him—the fucking phone was pointed right at me. I motioned at the nearest street cop, waved like a crazy person, yelled, “Get your ass over here! Look! Grab that fucking cowboy! Get him before—”

  Chapter 19

  Slade said, “He got your fucking picture, didn’t he?”

  I nodded, scanned the scattered onlookers. The vaquero was gone, vanished behind the sea of people. After yelling at him, I rushed through the crowd flanked by two patrolmen, but the old ladies and kids and stern-mouthed men refused to step aside. We got mired in a whirlpool of taunts and bodies, spun around by the neighborhood’s distrust of authority and silver badges. By the time I waded through the crowd, the vaquero in the black cowboy hat was gone. Smirking at Slade, I said, “They want to know who I am, where I live, they can find out.”

  He didn’t seem so sure. “We don’t make our shit public, peddle it to the press.”

  “You’re wrong about that, Skinny.” I glanced at the street corner, where K met Thirtieth—we’d pushed the crime scene back that far to limit the crowd’s view and scattered heckling. I wanted to get another look at the body before we transported it to the coroner’s office, and I didn’t need the entire neighborhood taking in the scene. But there was a news van on the corner by then, and a pudgy guy stomping around with a camera the size of a pickup’s transmission. A male reporter in a flashy suit followed, taking notes as he talked to some of the neighborhood residents. “You know that guy by any chance, the reporter?”

  Slade squinted into the distance. “Don’t think so. Probably a young guy listening to the scanner. Trying to get a breaking story, make himself a face.”

  We both looked back at Chato, sprawled motionless beneath a sheet on the hot pavement. “Let’s take a look at the body again, get back to the station. You get much from the kid on the bike?”

  Slade shook his head, disappointed. “Nope. You started screaming as I was about to walk up on him. That fucking kid can ride a bike, I’ll tell you that. He’s gone until we’re gone. No doubt about that.”

  I shrugged, headed toward Chato, our dead man. I kneeled, Slade across from me, and lifted the sheet.

  His eyes shiny with interest and disgust, Slade said, “More gunshot wounds than I can count.”

  “More than I’ve ever seen.”

  “Hell,” Slade said. “Add up all the ones I have seen—they don’t come close.”

  I covered my mouth to cough, pinched the bridge of my nose before saying, “A job well done is a self-portrait of the person who did it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “These motherfuckers know their business.”

  Slade’s eyes, along with mine, lingered on Chato’s body: The man’s chest was ripped to shreds by bullet holes. His neck, too, seemed almost nonexistent there in the red and black and shredded skin. His torso was a mess of flesh. I imagined shredded turkey piled in a bowl—that’s what Chato’s flesh looked like. They left his face pristine, except for the blood he’d smeared across his own left cheek (covering his inked tears). If mommy wanted, sweet little Chato could have an open casket. I made a mental note: How considerate of his assassins. They must have known the man. And, more important, they respected him.

  Slade spoke after staring for a few minutes: “I been thinking about how fast it ends, the body.”

  “You mean life?” Miranda’s face flashed through my head.

  “Not life,” he said. “I mean, yeah, life. But more so the body, right? Like, the heart just stops. And it’s fast when it happens. It’s…biology, I guess.”

  “Biology?”

  “Like the way cells stop multiplying. That’s at the heart of this.” His eyes scoured the mangled flesh below Chato’s blood-smeared cheek. “It’s just a bunch of cells that stop.”

  “It’s more than biology. Shit, think of God and love and—”

  “Fuck God,” Slade said. “It’s fucking biology, man. Run around talking faith and you’re left with coal. A stocking full of coal.”

  “You saying you don’t like Christmas?”

  Slade said, “I like it fine.”

  “You can thank Jesus then.”

  Slade chuckled. “We all start from one cell. And next thing you know, we’re splitting again and again until…”

  I thought about Kimmie and Norton, saw their tiny baby bodies in their wet diapers. I wanted to smile, but it wouldn’t come—that might’ve been about the body on the ground.

  Slade kept talking. “A million cells, Frank. Ten million. Ten billion. It’s just cells that make us stand up, walk around, take a shit, fuck for too short a time.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I got plenty of time behind all my fucks. Never had a problem there.”

  He ignored me. “Yeah. We’re just fucking…portfolios of cells that keep multiplying, regenerating, until one day it all stops. So goddamn sudden.”

  “Look, Skinny, I don’t mean to interrupt this epiphany, but we need to get back and—”

  Slade said, “It barely matters.”

  “What?”

  “What we’re doing. It’s just chasing after dead cells.”

  “I think you need a drink, Skinny.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Let’s go on over to—”

  “Think about it, Frank. You’re just a bunch of cells walking around, eating fucking burritos. That’s all it comes down to. You and your pile of cells trying to find the next burrito.”

  I wanted to chuckle but couldn’t with the body there beside us. “You should have been a philosopher king, Skinny. You mind keeping all this horseshit to yourself? I got a couple homicide cases to work. Last thing I need is a crazy person whispering in my
ear.”

  Slade nodded again. He sighed and said, “Sure, Frank. I’ll just keep all this to myself. We can’t go around telling people murder doesn’t matter.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “That wouldn’t keep the peace.”

  “No it would not,” I said. “Not at all.”

  Slade shut up after that—I said a prayer.

  Chapter 20

  On the way back to the station, Slade got a call from QB. He picked up the phone, listened while the rookie droned on about following the teenager, Turner. “Just file a report and I’ll take a look,” Slade said. He took a left turn too fast onto Market Street and a young hippie with matted hair and a Van Halen T-shirt had to jog across the street to avoid getting hit. QB must have insisted because Slade didn’t end the call.

  I peeked in the sideview mirror and saw the hippie flip us the bird. I took it as proof that world peace didn’t mean a damn thing to anyone. Besides, war keeps people employed, right? Maybe Slade’s death philosophy wore off on me. Or, I was still tired. I hadn’t thought much about the video Jackson showed me. Riding in the car while Slade avoided potholes and smirked at QB’s report jostled a fear inside me. I was one year away from a decent retirement, if I wanted it, and my indiscretion—let’s call it that, okay?—meant that I put everything at risk. But then again, did I care? Miranda was gone. I never saw or heard from Norton (too important and too damn busy). And Kimmie…Kimmie spent more time being pissed at me than I did loving her.

  My whole world was off balance.

  But I knew that solving these cases, handing something solid to Jackson and the DA, would put me back where I needed to be. Jackson should have suspended me. I knew that. But he didn’t. Because he wanted me to solve murders.

  “Why can’t you just put it in the fucking report,” Slade was saying. He shrugged, avoided another pothole. “We don’t have to meet about this, do we?” Slade glanced at me and moved his lips to one side of his face. “Okay, alright. We’ll meet you at Bobo’s in ten. I’ll see you over there. And you’re buying the drinks, rookie.” Slade slid his cell back into his coat, flipped a quick U-turn at the next light. He accelerated down Market Street.