"Will do."
I turned to Darlene. "You really think it would get you in trouble if you moonlighted as an advisor on a legitimate documentary?"
Darlene eyed me. "How legitimate are we talking?"
"Darlene," Donato protested. "Come on!"
I smiled. "I'm not bullshitting you. My sponsor Hal is a pretty wealthy man. He has made millions with a media company, and still advises its board. That's who is putting up the money for us to do this. Everything will be on the books, just like I said. You'll be covered in the contracts and with the IRS."
"I'm with you now," Darlene replied. "And if anything were to happen to go wrong with a legitimate news project . . ."
"We would certainly have the right to defend ourselves," I said, finishing her thought.
"And that weird kid?"
"Jerry? He's an electronic genius and a world-class computer hack. I know how his mind works. He'll be Stanley Kubrick with that camera in less than an hour."
Donato stood up. "Darlene, you can't be serious. You could lose your badge for getting involved in something like this."
She batted her eyelashes. "Why Larry, a girl has a right to moonlight a little after hours and on vacation, doesn't she?"
Donato shook his head. "Don't do this."
Darlene chuckled, sighed, and shook her head. "He's right, Mick. Actually, I can't. No hard feelings?"
"No hard feelings." I took her hand and squeezed. "I had to ask, though. You can understand that, can't you?"
"I wish I could help out," she said. "But like I said, Larry is right. This is my career we're talking about. My pension."
"Say no more. I get it."
We heard sounds coming from the other room: Raucous cheering and then the loud blaring of rock music. Jerry had finished tinkering with his computer and started playing back the streamed video of the Burning Man Festival.
"Jerry, you want to turn that down some?"
The music got louder. I laughed. "Let's go out on the lawn, it's probably cooler anyway."
I got up, opened the front door and stood to one side so that Darlene and Donato could leave first. Night had fallen, but the porch lamp was off. I flipped the switch and the front yard turned into an odd blend of light and shadow.
Donato stepped out onto the porch and stretched his tall frame. Suddenly he stiffened and twitched. A millisecond later a POP came from somewhere far away. I felt my stomach flip over. Donato grunted, as though he'd heard something funny, fell against the porch post and then rolled out onto the cool evening grass. Dark blood flowed out from the side of his head and ran down onto my L.A. Rams sweatshirt.
I grabbed at the back of Darlene's blouse, but she was already moving, flinging her open purse away, going down the lawn with a 9mm in her hand, screaming at the top of her lungs.
"You motherfucker!"
Another shot blew a bathroom window out and showered us with fragments of broken glass. Tires squealed. Darlene quickly assessed the situation and saw that she could not safely discharge her weapon. She swore under her breath and lowered the gun. She turned and ran back.
I was already crouched down beside Larry Donato. Darlene knelt on the opposite side and chanted under her breath: "Face is red, raise the head; face is pale, raise the tail." She checked Larry's color in the dim light. He was flushed. We propped his head up slightly to keep him from choking on his own blood.
"Easy, Larry," Darlene whispered. "Hang on."
Jerry appeared in the doorway, eyes wide with fear. I yelled at him. "Move! Call an ambulance!"
FOURTEEN
"Can I get some more coffee?"
"In a minute," the detective said. He was a balding, bony man wearing a cheap brown suit that shined at the elbows. His fingers were yellow from tobacco use, and his hands trembled with fatigue, or maybe a jones for booze. He finished writing and closed his spiral notebook. "Now, when I go outside again and talk to your friend, he's going to tell me the same story you just did, right?"
"He's going to tell you he was inside my house. He came out when he heard the shot and found the three us down on the lawn. That's all he knows."
"What the hell happened to his face?"
"Tough childhood."
"Okay, you have my card?" The detective seemed bored, yet tense. I decided he was probably desperate for a smoke.
I nodded and tapped my shirt pocket. I had already forgotten his name. "I've got it right here, and if I think of anything else, I'll call you."
"Right." He got to his feet, hands searching his pockets for a mangled pack of cigarettes. He called to his partner: "Jack, you about done down there?"
The one called Jack looked Hispanic. He was solid, intense, and had a neatly trimmed moustache flecked with gray. He was still at the end of the long white hall, seated backwards in a metal folding chair, listening intently to Darlene's version of events. Darlene had stopped crying and seemed furious again.
"Jack?"
Jack waved a hand as if annoyed. "Yeah, Gardner."
"I'll be right outside," Gardner said. That was his name, Dave Gardner. He stuck out his hand and I shook it. "Take it easy, Mr. Callahan. Sorry about your friend."
"Thanks."
"He's a cop, right? You know what that means?"
"It means you're going to move heaven and earth to figure out who capped him."
"You got that right," Gardner said. "And we'll make the bastard pay for what he did before we bring him in, too."
"Good."
Gardner glanced at Darlene. "She holding up okay? Sure is a beautiful girl, especially for being on the job."
"Gardner, do me a favor. Tell Jerry to just hang around here when you're done talking to him, okay?"
"Sure thing," Gardner said. He walked away to smoke.
Valley Presbyterian was the closest top-notch hospital with a decent trauma center. The paramedics had arrived within minutes, and with the neighbors watching they gently patched Larry Donato, slipped an IV in, shifted him onto a gurney and rolled away, siren screaming.
The police had placed yellow tape up and down my yard and taken over the premises. We watched numbly as they searched the street for any spent shell casings. They found nothing. One of the neighbors vaguely remembered seeing some kind of a large van or small motor home, painted a dark color, but that was about it.
We spent the evening in the hospital, grabbing catnaps and answering the same questions over and over again. I'd worried about getting every little detail right, until I remembered that the cops always expect small discrepancies. I said nothing of his conversation about finding Mary or confronting Fancy, only that I'd been discussing hiring both Donato and Darlene to work on documentaries. I relied on a quick exchange of words that had taken place before the paramedics arrived, and believed that Darlene would take the approach we'd agreed upon, but not knowing for certain made me anxious.
I rubbed my tired eyes and broke a five at the coin dispenser, went to the automated coffee machine and made two more cups of espresso with sugar. I kept one eye on Darlene as she dully answered the other cop's lengthy questions.
I sipped one of the watery coffees and waited. A handsome young doctor with wavy brown hair walked briskly through the swinging doors. He stopped to strip off a pale green gown splattered with droplets of blood. He knelt by Darlene and spoke to her softly, patted her arm and strode away.
Finally the cop called Jack got to his feet, handed Darlene Hernandez his card, and left the building to look for his partner. Darlene leaned forward on the plastic chair, let her arms and head fall forward into a slow stretch. I walked over and sat down.
"Any news?"
She looked up. Her eyes were puffy. "He's still in a coma, nothing has changed."
"I'm so sorry." My voice broke. "He was wearing my shirt, and I can't help thinking . . ."
"Don't say it. Let's just not say it, okay?"
I looked at her and then looked away; offered the second espresso and she gulped it down gratefully. "I can go and see him if I
want. They moved him to ICU on the third floor."
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"Yes," she said. "Please."
We walked silently to the elevator. As the doors closed, the Muzak began to play an insipid version of an old Beatles classic. I felt for her hand and squeezed it. After a long moment, Darlene squeezed back. The elevator stopped on the second floor. The doors slid open and an old woman got on, closely followed by two adults who looked stricken. Suddenly, all three began to weep, inconsolably. They meant to descend to the ground floor to go home and had gotten on the wrong car. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and the elevator felt claustrophobically small.
At the third floor we had to squeeze by the grieving family. I pulled Darlene by the hand and led her into Intensive Care. The scrubbed floor tiles and bare walls were all shockingly white, and most of the beds were discreetly screened off by curtains. Some of the exposed patients were shriveled and so stuck full of needles it was difficult to look at them.
A tall African-American woman in white stood behind the counter. She had narrowed eyes and held her clipboard like a weapon.
"Larry Donato?"
"You on the list?" The nurse eyed us like a customs agent looking for dope.
Before I could say anything confrontational, Darlene showed her badge. "He's my cousin."
The woman nodded. "Fifth bed down on the right, honey."
Darlene marched on ahead, heels clicking on the tiles, but when she arrived at his bedside and heard a machine wheezing in spurts, she hesitated. She looked back at me with an expression at childlike, sorrowful. I stepped in closer, took a breath, and gently moved the curtain out of the way.
Larry Donato had a tracheotomy tube sticking out of his neck, and the area around the incision had turned a reddish shade of brown. He wore an oxygen mask. A plastic mouthpiece had been jammed between his teeth, perhaps to assist in the event of a seizure, and his lips were pulled back in what appeared to be a permanent grimace of pain. The bullet hole had been bandaged. His handsome features were badly distorted by the damage caused on impact. The machine was helping him breathe.
Darlene whimpered and bit her hand. I held her upright. She reached out and touched one exposed arm; ran her fingers lightly over the IV needle and the surgical tape holding it in place. One tear fell on the metal gate that surrounded the bed. She needed time, so I waited. Darlene breathed deeply, stepped back and regained her composure.
"Let's walk," she said.
The nurse barely glanced up as we went by, except to say: "Go get some sleep, honey. Someone will call you when there's news."
The elevator opened. Peanut stepped out. She was wearing red sweats and tennis shoes with no socks. She was red-eyed and trembling. When she saw us she sobbed and hugged me.
"God, Mick, what happened? Who would want to shoot poor Larry? Was he on duty?"
"No," Darlene answered. "We were just leaving Mick's when it happened. I'm Darlene, we spoke on the phone."
"Hi Darlene," Suzanne Walton said. "Thank you for thinking to call me."
Darlene's eyes filled. "He's crazy about you."
The women held hands. Peanut cleared her throat. "Can I see him?"
"He's down the row," I said, softly. "I'll come with you."
"Mick, I want you to come outside with me." Darlene hugged Peanut. "Take some time alone with him, honey. We'll be back in a few minutes."
We rode down to the lobby level in a different kind of silence. Darlene looked around, saw a security guard and snapped: "Wait here."
My body felt stiff, so I ran in place for a moment and did some pushups on the pale blue wallpaper. Darlene returned with three cigarettes and a book of paper matches. She walked past me without saying anything, through the large glass doors and out into the nearly empty parking lot. She fired up a smoke and paced, her arms tightly crossed over her chest.
"I didn't know you smoked."
"I quit. Did you know that I never intended to be a cop?"
"No."
The patio area had been decorated in a vaguely Oriental fashion. I found a concrete bench near a planter and sat down. Bugs were dancing under a nearby faux lantern, and we watched them for a moment. I knew she was not finished. Darlene took another long pull on the cigarette.
"My father was a cop," she said. "So was his brother. Larry's father met Larry's mom when she was on the job in Chicago. It's a real family tradition for some reason. Cool, huh?"
I saw no need to answer.
"It changed my dad, almost destroyed him, but I was certain nothing like that would happen to me. I just figured this would be a way to make some decent money while I decided what I really wanted to do. And I was naive enough that it sounded like fun."
"Chasing the bad guys?"
She grimaced. "Exactly, but the first day on the firing range, when I was holding that big piece of impersonal metal in my hand and trying to blow a hole in a target shaped like a human being, it started to sink in. Do you know weapons?"
I shrugged. "I have a .357 I keep around."
"You ever take it out?"
I dodged the question. "Naturally, I grew up around a lot of guns in Nevada, and some of our neighbors were bow hunters."
"And in the service?"
"They damn near make you worship weapons in the Seals, so I have a healthy respect for what they can do, but the truth is I am pretty ambivalent about guns. They take away a lot of options in a fight."
She wrinkled her brow, finished the first smoke and lit the second off the orange butt. "I do not understand that concept."
"I had a stepfather who used to beat the hell out of me and made me fight other kids for money."
"You told me all that the night I busted you."
"Oh. Anyway, I learned an awful lot about fighting and how to drop into a neutral state of mind when using force. I learned how to be impersonal about it during matches, and to think clearly. Danny also taught me that most of the time the idea was to stop the fight by winning, not to kill, but that guns push it over the line. When a gun gets pulled, somebody usually dies."
"He was right," she said.
I caught something in her tone. "Go on. Tell me what you were about to tell me before I interrupted you."
"I was maybe nine or ten weeks out of the Academy," Darlene said. She sat down next to me on the bench. She stared straight ahead, out into the darkness. "I had a partner, a lazy old fart named Jenkins. We were getting some coffee at a little stand kind of like the one you and I ate at last week, but this one is way down in the 'hood. Radio goes '227, 227, 411' and the address. It's a home invasion thing. It's like two minutes away.
"Jenkins was a bad cop, the kind that will sit on his butt and let someone else get there first. Me, I was new and thought I had something to prove. So when he didn't move fast enough, I slapped the coffee out his hand. That pissed him off. We got in the car. I drove, and left rubber for half a city block trying to ride to the fucking rescue."
Darlene paused. She smoked in silence for a moment. "I don't talk about this all that much," she said cautiously. I waited, allowing the tension to build, eyes locked on hers.
"Jenkins took his fucking sweet time getting out of the car. I guess I should have expected that. Big bag of shit comes stomping out onto the porch, carrying a pillowcase full of stuff. People inside the house start screaming how he took everything they own and we have to do something and we have to stop him.
"The guy takes off like a track star, bag swinging at his side. Got his knees pumping halfway to his chest and I take out after him, screaming he should stop because I'm the police.
"I'm strong, but I'm not fast. He's going down the back yards and the alleys, and he's got things he has to jump over, see, trash containers and old bicycles and tires and shit. I can bob and weave through them a little easier. Somewhere along the way, the porch lights start going on and the whole damned neighborhood starts getting into this.
"He's hauling it over fences, dragging that sack behin
d him, and I'm huffing and puffing but staying pretty close behind. Naturally I turn a corner and look over my shoulder for my back-up, and there's nobody in blue watching my sorry ass. No sign of Jenkins."
Darlene paused. She eyed the third cigarette, thought the better of it and tossed it away un-smoked. "We're kind of going around in circles, actually, although I didn't know that at the time. The local news was on it live. Fuck, it felt like the whole damned town was watching. A helicopter pops up overhead, shining that spotlight down and it's just like the movies. Except I have a stitch in my side that's white-hot and I'm ready to puke and scared half out of my mind."
"I don't blame you," I said, quietly. "What were you carrying back then?"
"I didn't like the 9mm at the time, so I had a Smith & Wesson Model 66, .357 Magnum, brushed stainless finish with night sights and Pachmeyer combat grips."
"Serious weaponry."
"Anyway, I wind down and I'm about ready to give it up. I say fuck it and turn back towards the squad car. I'm moving down the sidewalk, and I'm starting to let up, you know?
"And there he was, like magic. He just appeared, all of a sudden. I saw his gun. I don't know how it happened exactly, but I pulled my 66. I had it up, hit my stance, and fired two rounds into his chest before I had even made the decision. He fell back a step, kind of leaned against a fence, and looked down at the mess that had been his chest like he was amazed. And then he dropped like a bag of sand."
I reached out, touched her hand with the tips of my fingers. She started to cry, but was determined to finish. "Up close, I could see he was maybe seventeen years old. Oh, he had a gun. He was going to kill me. It was a righteous shoot. But just like that I had ended a life."
"It feels unresolved," I said. It wasn't a question, just a fact.
"Sure. But not because of what I felt, because of what I didn't feel. I kept waiting for a wave of guilt, or shame, or rage or something like that to come over me. I just sat there and looked at the body.
"The spotlight found us, and so did the neighbors, and then eventually my so-called partner. I just waited, shaking from adrenaline but not even crying, just trying to sense something that wasn't even there. And do you know what I was really feeling, looking down at that poor kid?"
Eye of the Burning Man: A Mick Callahan Novel (The Mick Callahan Series) Page 15