The Monkey's Raincoat

by Robert Crais

  When the Eskimo’s gun moved I went into him, grabbing his gun hand with both of mine and forcing it in toward the elbow and away from his body. The gun kicked free and the Eskimo hit me on top of my right shoulder with an MX missile. My whole side went numb. I stayed inside, wrapping his hips and lifting and driving him away from the gun. His hands came down on my back, he pushed backward, and I let go. He landed on the floor sideways and went over on his hands and knees. I drove straight in with a power kick to the ribs and followed it with two punches, one to the same spot on the ribs, the other behind his left ear. The head punch broke one of my knuckles. Head punches will do that. I hit him a third time, this one beneath the ear where it was softer. The Eskimo grunted and heaved himself up. He didn’t look too much the worse for wear. You couldn’t say that about me.

  Ellen was still in the door. Duran was on his feet now, saying something to her, but I couldn’t hear what. I said, “Only pussies kill seals and polar bears.”

  The Eskimo smiled.

  I threw an ashtray at him. It bounced off his arm.

  He smiled some more.

  I threw a Waterford lamp at him. He batted it aside.

  There are any number of innovative ways to best an opponent. I simply had to think of one.

  The Eskimo came for me. I faked to the outside, planted my left foot, and roundhouse kicked him in the face. His head snapped back and his nose burst into a red mist. He looked down at himself, then charged again. I dropped, spun, and kicked the outside of his knee. His leg buckled and he went down. I went in close, hitting his smashed nose with the heel of my hand and driving in behind it hard with my knees. His head rocked back and his eyes looked funny. I hit him with my left hand and lost a second knuckle. Bruce Lee could fight a thousand guys and not even split a fingernail. Karma. I saw Duran moving toward Ellen, walking across the room, the little sword in front of him.

  “Ellen,” I said.

  The Eskimo came up from underneath, locked his arms around my chest, and squeezed. It felt the way they describe a massive coronary: your lungs stop working, an elephant sits on your chest, and you know with absolute certainty that you are going to die.

  Ellen stepped toward Duran and there was a loud BANG, louder than before because she was in the room now. Duran missed a step, then kept going, holding the sword straight out now and picking up speed.

  I hammered down into the Eskimo’s face, hitting him on the top of the head and in the temples and in the eyes. He squeezed his eyes tight and hugged me closer. I felt something snap in my lower back. Short rib. What the hell, don’t need’m anyhow.

  Ellen’s gun went off again. BANG.

  I wanted to yell for her to get out of here, but knew if I gave up what breath I had I wouldn’t get any more. I stopped punching and tried to dig my thumbs into the Eskimo’s eyes, but he pressed his face into my chest. Everything in my peripheral vision began to grow fuzz. From out of another solar system I heard a gutty choonk-choonk-choonk, choonk-choonk. The HK. Pike. Not lucky for them, finding Pike. Ruin their whole day.

  I reached above my head and brought my elbow down on the crown of the Eskimo’s head. A sharp pain lanced up my arm and another rib went, this one higher in my back.

  Ellen’s gun sounded again BANG. Duran stopped and staggered sideways a step. Then he went on.

  I brought my elbow down again, and this time the Eskimo sobbed. I did it again and his arms loosened. Whenever I hit him, something hot flashed in my elbow, letting me know the bone was broken. That didn’t seem to matter much. Not much mattered at all. Life’s priorities tend to shift when you’re in the process of dying.

  I was seeing mostly gray shadows and squiggly bright things. I heard another BANG. That would be six. Ellen wouldn’t have any more. I hit the Eskimo again, and this time his arms released. I backed away, sucking air, each breath sending razors through my chest. The Eskimo tried to stand, pushing himself up onto one leg, then the other. He looked at me, swayed, and fell. Some tough sonofabitch.

  Domingo Duran was on the floor at Ellen’s feet. She lowered the gun. Then she spit on him. She hadn’t moved, or flinched, or cowered. She hadn’t backed up.

  I walked over to her, but it took a while. Not much was working right. I seemed to go sideways when I wanted to go straight, and I very badly wanted to throw up.

  “Perry,” I said. “Perry.”

  Then there was a lot of noise in the hall, and I dropped down to the rug, trying to find my pistol. I couldn’t and I started to cry. It had to be there somewhere. I had to find it because the game wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over until we had the boy, only the goons were coming and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop them.

  Men with blue rain shells that said FBI or POLICE on the back came in with M-16s. O’Bannon was with them. He saw Ellen Lang, and then he saw me, and he said, “You sonofabitch.”

  I remember smiling. Then I passed out.

  38

  For one of the few times in my life, I thought wouldn’t it be grand if I smoked. I was in the Hollywood Presbyterian Emergency Room watching the nurses, one nurse in particular, and waiting for my elbow cast to dry. They had the cast held away from my body by a little metal and plastic brace. A kid waiting to get his lip stitched asked me how I’d busted it, and I said fighting spies loud enough for my nurse to hear. All I needed now was a London Fog slung casually over my shoulders and a cigarette dangling from my lip, and she’d probably rape me.

  Poitras came though a set of swinging doors, with O’Bannon playing shadow. Poitras was big and blank and carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. They looked like thimbles in his hands. O’Bannon looked like he’d bitten into a Quarter-pounder and found an ear. Everyone in the waiting room stared at Poitras. Even the doctors. What a specimen.

  “My,” I said. “What a delightful surprise.”

  Poitras held out one of the coffees. “Black, right?”

  “Black.”

  The doctor had put three layers of tape around my ribs, splinted my hand, and given me an analgesic, but it still hurt to reach for the coffee. Driving would be an adventure.

  “How’s the kid?” I said.

  They’d found him hidden away in a closet on the first floor. He was still blindfolded and didn’t know what was happening. “Okay,” Lou said. “Cleaned up his hand, gave him some shots. You know. His mom took him down to the cafeteria. He wanted a hamburger.”

  One of Duran’s thugs had put an ice pick through the boy’s hand to make him scream. I didn’t know who. With any luck I’d killed him. “You talk to him yet?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Lou said, “You left a lot of bodies back there, Ace. Sorta like Rambo Goes To Hollywood.”

  I nodded.

  “Between you and Pike and Mrs. Lang, if we include the one in Griffith park, looks to be eleven stiffs.”

  “Me and Pike. Mrs. Lang had nothing to do with it.”

  “Yeah.”

  O’Bannon leaned toward me. His face was very tight and getting tighter. If it got much tighter his brain would probably pop out. He said, “Goddamn you, you ruined four months of undercover work, do you know that? We knew Gambino was setting up a move with Duran. We had his phone bugged, his bed bugged, his goddamned jock strap bugged. We ate, slept, and shit with that sonofabitch.”

  “I can tell,” I said. “Try Lavoris.”

  Poitras said, “They had the house across the street. You had two Feds watch you and Pike hop the fence, wondering what the hell was going on. They like to shit, you and Pike jogging down the road like a couple of National Guardsmen, Pike with that howitzer of his, paint all over his face.” Poitras looked at O’Bannon and made a hard, nasty grin. “Only no one could make a decision until the big boss got there. No one knew jack shit who was doing what since no one had been told anything.” O’Bannon chewed at his lip. Poitras finished, “They thought you guys might be cops, so they just sat on things until Mrs. Lang went in through the front gate. Then they hoofed it across the street.”


  I nodded. Figured it had to be something like that. If Ellen had called the cops, blue suits and prowl cars would’ve come.

  O’Bannon said, “We ran an efficient, tight, secure operation.”

  “Swinging,” I said. The coffee felt gritty in my mouth, like it was mostly sediment. Maybe I should ask the nurse to have a look-see.

  “Goddamnit,” O’Bannon said, “do you know how much this has cost the taxpayers?” Poitras said, “Shit.”

  O’Bannon’s Stanford Law/three-sets-before-breakfast tan was a nice mottled color. He said, “We were finally going to nail Gambino and Duran both. They were making a major cocaine buy together. We had them, and you fucked it up, Cole. You were ordered to stay away from this and you didn’t. Your goddamned license is mine.”

  I stared at him. There was a petulance to his face that one does not often see in law-enforcement personnel. I wanted very much to pat his head, tell him everything would be okay, and send him to his room. Instead, I carefully set the cup down on the seat next to me and stood up. It hurt to stand.

  “Screw you, O’Bannon,” I said. “You were ready to trade the kid for that bust.”

  He stood, breathing very hard, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “We would have moved when the time was right to maximize our results.”

  The nurse behind the station was looking at us. I wondered if she’d ever seen someone split a brand-new cast over a Spec Op before. “Right,” I said.

  Poitras edged between O’Bannon and me, dwarfing us both. “Go back to Special Operations, O’Bannon,” he said. “Tell them the results have been maximized. Tell them that they won’t have to waste any more of the taxpayers’ dollars on Domingo Duran or Rudy Gambino.”

  O’Bannon pointed his finger at me. “Your ass is mine.”

  I said, “Get out of here before I beat you to death.”

  O’Bannon gave Poitras another attempt at a bad look, then walked away. It was sort of a cross between a wince and a squint. I guess it really wilted them in court.

  Poitras said, “The kid doesn’t know about his father. We’re going to let the mother tell him.”

  I was still staring after O’Bannon. Then I looked over at the nurse. She smiled. It was a nice smile.

  “We did a little talking,” Lou said. “Mort and the kid weren’t kidnapped on their way home from school. Mort didn’t even get to pick the kid up. One of Duran’s people snatched him when he was walking out to his father’s car.”

  I stared at him.

  “I talked to Lancaster,” he said. “They didn’t find a .32 in Lang’s Caddie.”

  “No?”

  “So I had the ME run a paraffin. Came back positive.”

  I nodded, thinking about Ellen Lang, thinking about Mort and his .32, thinking about a positive paraffin test.

  Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you knew for certain, you shoulda come to me. O’Bannon or no O’Bannon, downtown or not, I woulda moved on it. It’s my job. I woulda done it.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t like any goddamned cowboys thinking they can go off half-cocked, goddamned Pike running down the street with a goddamned HK-91.”

  I felt very tired, the sort of deep, bled-to-the-bone tired you feel when you’ve tried very hard to keep something dear to you only to lose it. I said, “Are we going to be charged with anything?”

  “Baishe has already been with the D.A. O’Bannon got there first, but Baishe thinks we might be able to square it. I don’t know about Pike. He gets picked up, they say what’s your occupation, he says mercenary, goddamned paint all over his face like he’s still in the jungle. Nobody likes that. Nobody on the department likes Pike anyway.”

  “If the department kept more guys like Pike, they’d have less guys like O’Bannon.”

  Poitras didn’t say anything.

  “If you charge Joe, you charge me.”

  Poitras took a deep breath, sighed. He needed a shave. “I want you to come in. We gotta get a statement.”

  “Can you wait?”

  He stared at me for a while, then nodded. “No later than noon tomorrow.”

  We shook hands. “Tell Baishe thanks,” I said.

  Poitras nodded again.

  I took off the little brace and started for the door. The nurse had left her station with a tall black orderly who looked like Julius Erving. Good looking. Neat moustache. He’d said something funny and she’d laughed. Screw him.

  Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

  I stopped.

  “At least it wasn’t a buy-off. That’s something.”

  “Sure.”

  39

  I found Ellen and Perry Lang sitting alone at a big table in the back of the cafeteria. I went up behind them, put my good hand on Ellen’s shoulder, and said, “Come on. It’s time to go home.”

  She looked back at me silently for a moment, then nodded. She had cleaned the lipstick off, leaving her face pink and fresh from the scrubbing. “I should get the things I left at your house.”

  We picked up Pike’s Cherokee from a cop out front and took the drive west to Fairfax, then north up Laurel and into the hills. It was almost six when we got there. The cloud cover had broken, and the air had a fresh, scrubbed smell. Nice. A red-winged hawk rode the wind pushing up the canyon above my house. I could see his head turn, looking for mice.

  When Ellen got out, Perry got out with her. He had made her sit in the backseat with him, and he wasn’t about to let her get out of reach now.

  The cat was sitting in the middle of the floor, waiting, when we walked in. He hissed when he saw Perry and crept under the couch, ears down. Ever the gracious host.

  While Ellen and Perry were upstairs, I went into the kitchen, drank two glasses of water, then called the hospital and asked after Pike. A woman with a very direct voice told me he was out of surgery now, in serious but stable condition, with a good prognosis. He would be fine. I thanked her and hung up.

  When Ellen and Perry came back, she was carrying the Ralph’s bag I’d brought from her house. She had taken off my sweat shirt and the dirty jeans and replaced them with a pretty pink top and cotton pants. Pike was right. A year from now, she would not remember the smell of gunpowder or ferocious red marks on her face. At the bottom of the stairs, Perry Lang asked her about his father.

  She went white and looked at me, but I did not help her with the decision. She had to do what she thought she could do. After a while, she took Perry into the living room, sat him on the couch, and told him that his father was dead.

  They sat together a very long time. Perry cried, then grew quiet, then cried again until he fell asleep in her lap. At ten minutes before eight, she said, “We can go now,” and stood up with her nine-year-old son cradled in her arms like a baby.

  We put him, groggy and whimpering, into the back of the Cherokee, then took the long drive to Encino. Coming down off the mountain into the valley, the lights were like brilliant crystal jewels in the rain-washed air. Better than that. It was as if the stars had fallen from the sky and lay stewn along the desert.

  “I can do this,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “I can pull us together, and keep us together, and go back to school maybe, and go forward.”

  “Never any doubt.”

  She looked at me. “I won’t back up.”

  I nodded.

  “Not ever,” she said.

  I exited the freeway and rolled down the cool silent Encino streets to Janet Simon’s house. It was brightly lit, inside and out. The older daughter, Cindy, passed by the front window as we pulled into the drive. “Would you like me to be there when you tell them?” I said.

  She sat silently, chewing her lip, staring at the house. “No. If I need help there, let it come from Perry.”

  I nodded. A car passed, washing her with light and revealing something ageless in her face. A sort of maturity and life that hadn’t been there before, and tha
t you never see in most people. The look of someone who has assumed responsibility.

  We got out. I liked it that she didn’t expect me to open the door for her.

  “You didn’t throw away your life with Mort,” I said.

  She stared up at me.

  “Mort wasn’t kidnapped and Mort wasn’t dealing with these people. Duran’s goons took the boy and Mort went after them. That’s where the .32 was. Maybe Mort wasn’t there for you anymore, but he tried to be there for Perry. He died trying to save his boy.”

  Her eyes looked deep in the night. “How do you know?”

  “Poitras ran a paraffin test. The test says Mort fired a gun. He wouldn’t have had to do any shooting unless he was trying to get his son back.”

  She took a very deep breath, let it out, and stared down the street. Then she nodded, raised up on her toes, and kissed me. “Thank you.”

  The front door opened and Janet Simon appeared in the light. We didn’t move toward her and she didn’t move out toward us.

  “There’s more to bring away from this than firing a pistol,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re different now.”

  She looked at Janet Simon. “They’ll have to get used to that, won’t they?”

  I helped her lift Perry out. His face was puffy and pale and he clung to her even in sleep. She said, “Would you like to come in?”

  I shook my head. “Not if you don’t need me. If you need me, I’ll stay. If you don’t, I’ll go sit with Joe.”

  She smiled and told me she’d come see Joe tomorrow, then she kissed my cheek once more and walked up to the house. Janet Simon stepped aside to let them in, then shut the door.

  Perhaps Janet hadn’t seen me.

  I stood there, breathing deep, and looked at Pike’s Jeep. Even in the dark, I could see it was a mess, muddy and streaked and dusty. I found a self-wash on Ventura Boulevard that was still open, and worked there until the Cherokee sparkled. Then I rolled down the windows and drove slowly in the cool fresh air, drove back to the hospital to wait for Joe Pike.