Red Light

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "What does Brighton think? Of you following him?"

  Glandis smiled and shrugged. "You know Chuck. He likes to talk about retirement but he hates the idea of doing it. He's been on the verge of retirement for half a decade. I don't blame him. You want to hang on, do what you can do. But you know, there comes a time for fresh ideas, younger blood. That's just the way it works. We're all like boxers, we all want to fight one more time. That's when we get hurt. He's seventy-two years old. I'm fifty-eight. I think I can contribute. Anyway, thanks for being honest with me."

  Fourteen years ago, as a first-year deputy working the jail, Merci had picked fifty-eight as the age she wanted to become sheriff. She considered it a lucky number for no reason. She didn't know if Glandis was usurping her good luck, or perhaps, in some way she was yet to understand, adding to it.

  She disliked her superstitions but could never get rid of them.

  "I don't lie very well." Just ask Mrs. Heath, she thought.

  "Me neither. But I take care of the people who take care of me. Remember that. I will, when it comes time to pick a sharp detective run homicide."

  "That's good to know."

  Glandis sighed. "So, what was Mike doing at the hooker's house that night?"

  "Having dinner."

  He slowly shook his head. "This can only end bad or worse. I'll help you on it if I can."

  "How?"

  "I have absolutely no idea."

  "I don't, either. Maybe you could keep it to yourself, for a start."

  "I will. I promise. Half the department knows anyway. By tomorrow, the other half. It gets out, Mike's dead. We'll all suffer if it does

  Merci felt her pulse speed up, the quick heat in her neck and ears. "It's like a bunch of little old biddies around here. It's all yap, yap, yap.”

  "It's the nature of the organizational beast."

  "Chickenshit's what I call it."

  "You've got a way with the language, Sergeant."

  • • •

  Back at her desk Merci tried to concentrate on the CSI reports on Aubrey Whittaker scene. She was hoping something would pop, something would stand up and call attention to itself, something would take her mind off what she'd found at Mike's place.

  But she couldn't take her mind off it, the way she couldn't let creeps get away with things. It just wasn't in her nature.

  So she asked herself the same questions over and over, and came with the same answers. What possible motive could Mike have for keeping around silencer and bloody boots he'd used in a murder? None whatsoever.

  Was it just a device he'd made, or perhaps purchased, never used on Aubrey Whittaker at all? Was that quail or deer blood on the chukkas? An injured bloodhound? Possibly.

  What if someone had planted it all there as part of a frame? Who? And how did they get their hands on my damned underpants?

  It occurred to her again to simply confront him. Let him explain. That's what adults did, right? But if he had killed, he would destroy evidence. Maybe worse.

  If he had not, his firearm would vindicate him, thanks to the precious brass from 23 Wave Street. She'd never have to reveal herself as the distrustful, prying, bitter bitch that she was. Reveal how furious she was at him.

  The key was Mike's Colt. For him and for her.

  One of the cadets brought around the afternoon mail. Merci got her monthly copy of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, a pitch from a credit-card company, and a white envelope with her name written in a very simple, childlike hand. No return address, and the postmark was Santa Ana. The stamp pictured a top hat in stars and stripes. There was something hard inside, on the bottom, something that had creased the paper around it.

  She opened it carefully, using her pocketknife. The one sheet of white paper read:

  For P. B.— 23974 Tyler #355 Riverside, CA 92503

  There was a key taped to the bottom of the sheet.

  The writing was the same as on the envelope. It looked like a righty had done it left-handed, or the reverse.

  For P. B.

  Merci rolled back in her chair, spun around and looked around the detective's pen as if she'd get an explanation if she scowled hard enough. Dickinson was at his desk, lost in paper. Arbaugh had his feet up while he talked on the phone. Two uniforms sat with Metz, drinking coffee.

  For Patti Bailey? What in the hell is going on?

  • • •

  Zamorra walked in at quarter to three. His face was pale and whiskers were dark but, as always, his black suit and white shirt looked crisp. No lipstick on the collar this time, she noted.

  He nodded at her, sat. "I just dusted the hell out of Aubrey Whitaker's kitchen. Down low, where all the action was."

  He swiveled his chair and held up the fingerprint cards.

  "Coiner or O'Brien can—"

  "No. I'll run them myself."

  "Why?"

  "I don't trust them. I don't trust anybody. Not lab techs, not brain surgeons, not God almighty on His tin throne in heaven. I'll have to trust me."

  And I thought I got pissed off, thought Merci. "Fine. Run them yourself."

  He looked away. "Sorry I'm so damned gone all the time. How do you like having an invisible partner?"

  "I understand."

  "The flowers were nice. She always liked, uh, whatever they were.”

  She felt shallow and inconsiderate. She felt worse than that for Paul, but what was it—sympathy, sorrow, fury?

  "Mums," she said. "Take a walk with me, will you?"

  They headed out of the Sheriff's Building on the south side, past Forensic Sciences Building and the jail. The day was bright, soaked and scrubbed by the storm, with a chill in the air and a cap of snow out Saddleback peak.

  They got coffee from a vendor. Merci scorched her lips. She watched Paul drink his without even a wince. Merci was a fast walker but Zamorra kept getting up ahead.

  "Look, partner," he said, turning. "I'm just so damned sorry I haven't been here. It's my job, it's the second most important thing my life, but I can't be here."

  "Paul, I understand."

  "Yeah, well I don't."

  They walked past a row of big magnolias with leaves green and waxy in the breeze. Zamorra crumpled his cup and dropped it in a trash bin. Merci still hadn't taken a full sip.

  "What happened to her, Paul?"

  "They put in the radiation and chemo seeds. Supposed to kill the tumor, spare the good brain cells. But the tumor is near the motor center—the part of your brain that tells you how to move your body. Well, she walked into the hospital at seven in the morning for the procedure. By seven that night she was in her room, losing . . . losing . . . herself. First her toes went, then her feet and ankles. Then her calves and knees. Then her thighs and her hips."

  Zamorra stopped and looked back. When she caught up to him she saw the tears welling in his eyes, and the tremendous distance he seemed to be looking through.

  "The movement just went away, one inch at a time. All she could do is watch and try to move and scream. Scream like nothing I've ever heard. And those fucking doctors, they came by to tell us, yeah, the pellets are turning you into a paraplegic, too late to do anything now, guess we missed the spot or maybe used too big a charge. Sorry, honey, but you'll never walk again. The thing that really rattles them is, was the radiation too strong, or the chemical too strong? That's what they're really worried about. I almost actually killed one of them, but I didn't want Janine to see it. Had his temple all lined up. Didn't want to lose my job. It wouldn't have mattered. Nothing fucking matters now, nothing you fucking do."

  Merci said nothing.

  "And you know what, Merci? I want to be here. I love this job. It matters. The last place in the world I want to be is in some hospital room watching my wife get paralyzed one inch at a time. I sat there watching her go and I just wanted to fly away, man, grow wings and just jump off the fifth floor neuro ward and never come back. She sees that in my face and it breaks her heart. It breaks her heart to be doing that
to me."

  They walked in silence. Merci's duty boots were quiet on the sidewalk, Zamorra's hard-soled brogues clicked with a martial sharpness.

  "It breaks her heart to lose herself. She's got a bunch of wigs—all different styles and colors. She's got a new wardrobe. She's always her face made up and her lipstick on and perfume dabbed on her wrist. She's fighting every step of the way. She's saying, 'you can kill my body but you can't kill me.' It's so graceful. So absolutely, beautifully hopelessly graceful."

  Merci was unexpectedly relieved to know that the lipstick Zamorra's shirt collar had been Janine's. The lipstick had become important to her, for reasons she had not allowed herself to think about.

  "She knows you love her, Paul. That's what she's got to hang to now."

  "Fly away, fly away," he muttered. "That's what I'm good for. When this is over, I'll do it."

  It seemed to her a witless invasion to ask, What will you do? They headed up Civic Center Drive, then down Flower. The sun was already lowering and Merci felt the night's cold creeping across the city. A string of Christmas lights went on around one of the bail bonds offices. Merci wondering what the point of such a cheery veneer was. Did it you more business?

  She came close to telling Paul what she'd found at Mike's, but didn't. What she'd done wasn't just illegal, what she found wasn't just inadmissible. It was a betrayal of trust, pure and simple, and she'd did it willingly and she'd do it again. That didn't mean Paul had to know. She believed in the right to keep and bear secrets.

  She'd already decided what to do about it. She had the gun from range. All she had to do now was call Mike and make the arrangement. This time tomorrow she would know for sure if Mike's .45 had done what she thought it did. She'd never wanted so badly to be proven a fool, but she could hardly talk herself into believing there was even chance of that.

  So why burden Zamorra with it?

  "Do you remember the Jesse Acuna beating?" she asked.

  "People from the barrio remember it. I was ten. Why?"

  "Patti Bailey told her sister she knew who did it."

  "Customer?"

  "That's the assumption."

  "Acuna said it was cops."

  "That's right, and Bailey lived in a room at the old De Anza—popular with law enforcement and certain ladies of the night."

  Zamorra looked at her, a frown on his face. Somehow, it was a lighter expression than she'd seen on him in the last half hour. Something to think about except his wife, she thought, a distraction.

  "When I was a kid, everybody assumed the cops did it. The barrio was smaller back then. When a Mexican got beat up we figured it was because he was a Mexican. The cops were either indifferent or they hated us. Take your pick. We weren't supposed to be doing anything but picking fruit or washing dishes."

  "What was your take on it?"

  "I thought Jesse Acuna was probably right. It wasn't until I started studying for the Sheriff Academy exam that I realized the obvious."

  "Which was?"

  He shrugged and looked at her again. Some wicked amusement showed through his pain. "The issue was his land, right?"

  "A hundred acres between two big parcels."

  "Well, who ended up with it, Merci?"

  "Orange Coast Capital. For 4.2 mil."

  "What did they do with it?"

  "Turned it into housing tracts."

  "Not all of it. They donated thirteen acres to the county, and the county turned it into a new facility."

  "What kind?"

  "It's ours. You're walking on Acuna's old orange farm every time you step inside the South County Sheriff Substation."

  Merci felt the cool surprise of truth inside her. Acuna to Orange Coast Capital to Meeks to Owen, she thought: thirteen of the choicest acres in the county. 1969. And a dead hooker near the corner of My ford and Fourth who said she knew the truth.

  • • •

  She said good-bye to her partner on the building steps, then walked around the block again. The day was fading with a whimper, night closing strong, and she wished that God was prouder of the light He had created. Was it only there to separate the darkness? She tried to look on herself like God would, from way up there, trying to view herself as of many human beings faced with tough questions and no good answers.

  Looking down on herself she saw a woman looking for the truth. She knew the value of truth because she'd been taught to believe in it. It had occurred to her more than once that the truth was often dismal sad. Look at Janine Zamorra. But at least the truth came with an end: like a case that was finally solved. While lies seemed to go on forever, unsolved and fertile, breeding more and more lies to choke the world.

  • • •

  She went to the Vice Detail and found Mike at his desk, on the phone. His eyes lit up when he saw her, his face colored. Within a minute he hung up and waved her over. He held out the extra chair for her like maitre d', but Merci didn't sit.

  It was hard to get the words out, but she managed.

  "How about dinner at your place tonight?" she asked. "We can talk."

  "You got it. I'll get steaks for us, kid stuff for Tim, Jr."

  "No Tim, Jr. Just us."

  Mike smiled. They agreed on seven.

  He walked her out of the pen. In a quiet place along the hallway he asked her if she'd been thinking about what they talked about last night. She said she had, but nothing more. He smiled and took her hands, squeezing gently. "Bring your overnight things if you'd like. We can build a fire and keep the cold away. I'm so sorry for everything. I've missed you so damn much."

  "I'll be going home. But that doesn't mean we can't have a fire."

  He nodded and smiled again. It reminded her of Tim, Jr.'s, smile---it was all in the moment, irrespective of history or consequence.

  "That's okay, too. See you then."

  • •

  She left headquarters just before five, drove to the Newport Beach office of Dr. Joan Cash. Cash was a psychiatrist and a friend, in that order. They'd roomed together in college, Cash having seen Merci's "room-mate wanted" posting on a Cal State Fullerton bulletin board.

  Years later Merci had helped get Cash onto the county's subcontractor's list because Cash could hypnotize subjects so adroitly. Merci thought of it as a gift. She had actually let Cash experiment on her—just once—back in their undergraduate days, using all her might to keep from being put under. She'd chewed the inside of her cheek while Joan asked her to picture a lake in the mountains; she'd bitten the end of her tongue when Joan asked her to imagine clouds. One second she was tasting blood and the next she was talking in a dreamy but lucid hypnotic state, fully aware of herself but astonishingly relaxed and disinterested in saying anything but the truth. The things that came to her mind!

  The friendship had grown distant over the years, as all of Merci's friendships had.

  Once inside the consultation room, they hugged rather formally, smiled at each other, then hugged again harder.

  "Thanks, on the short notice," said Merci.

  "Just doing the billing. How are you?"

  "I'm fine. This is about my partner."

  Dr. Cash looked at her askance. Merci knew that Cash was displeased with her as a patient. For one thing, Merci's reluctant participation in her own Critical Incident Stress Management program made things difficult. Dr. Cash had told her as much. Cash—and a few fellow deputies with the boldness to say so—thought that Merci must be carrying an unbearable psychological load, given her use of deadly force, the death of her partner, the death of her mother and the birth of her son, all within a few short months.

  But Merci believed that suffering and aloneness were part of the law enforcer's life. She believed there was more to life than lifting the scab. She believed they could take their defusings and debriefings and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and stick them where the sun don't shine.

  The nightmares would end; the stains in her soul would fade. If she had to awaken a hundred more times deep
in the black morning with her legs beginning to cramp from chasing Colesceau through dream bamboo, then that was what she would do.

  "Sit. Tell me about him."

  Merci explained the basics of Paul Zamorra's hopeless predicament. Cash, as a physician acquainted with the glioblastoma, concurred that the situation was indeed hopeless, in the medical sense. She'd heard the radiation/chemical implants, said she'd heard of bad complication.

  "You think he might kill himself?" Cash asked her.

  Merci nodded.

  "Most suicides will communicate their intentions—verbally or none verbally. Has he done that?"

  "Yes. Said he wants to just fly away when all this is over. 'This being Janine's life."

  Merci looked at the doctor, well aware that the suicide rate among cops is roughly three times the national average, that more cops lose their lives to suicide than to homicide.

  Merci continued, "He didn't say a word about his wife to me, until few days ago. Now, he's brought her up three different times. I think he wants to talk."

  "Then he's ripe for a QPR intervention, and he wants you to do it.

  Cash had presented a Sheriff Department lecture on suicide and QPR—Questioning, Persuading, Referring—just six months earlier, which Merci and forty-eight other deputies had attended. Merci had told herself she had no specific reason for being there other than to bolster her friend's attendance numbers. The upshot of the QPR intervention was you listened, then talked the potential suicide into getting professional help, fast. Cash had cited new studies showing that the hot phase of a suicide crisis was relatively short—three weeks.

  "I'm afraid that if I suggest a shrink, he might take his toys and play somewhere else."

  "I'm the somewhere else."

  Merci considered.

  "He thought this experimental treatment was going to save Janine. He told me that. It reminded me of your lecture—the part about prediction

  "Well, yes. Male suicides tend to make dire predictions. You know, something like 'the sun won't rise tomorrow' or 'they'll find me in some field someday.' But this hope about the new treatment ... I can where you're going with that."