by Lewis Perdue
"But, Doctor, dealing with these sorts of situations is not your expertise. The Good Lord didn't bless me with the immensity of your intellectual gifts, but he did give me an operational sense of how to handle things such as this, and I think you should let me worry about that. It's worked well so far—this division of labor—for damned close to forty years, hasn't it?"
Braxton paused. "Think about it: How many from your original program are left?"
"Only Talmadge and you," Harper said without hesitation. "We have a few more recent head-wound veterans using the medications, but those are administered indirectly"
"And who knows the whole story from beginning to end?"
"Just you and I."
"There," Braxton said. "See? I've done all right with that part of things, have I not?"
Harper offered an uneasy smile. "I only wish I had been as successful with the others." He nodded toward the screen.
Braxton was disappointed at Harper's swift concession. Not long ago, Harper had been a formidable intellectual opponent. They had enjoyed sparring and Braxton didn't always win. But, the General knew, it was time for being graceful.
"Frank, I admit we failed by not taking Talmadge out before he fell into the hands of people we don't yet control. But by the time we found out, he was spilling the beans to the shrinks in Jackson. You know as well as I do, we can't do anything while he's in custody. That would only invite more questions. Things will change after my election, but until then we need to work with what we have.
"But you have to admit his mental condition and the nature of his crime pretty much destroyed his credibility. Nobody wants to believe a man like that."
Harper shrugged and made his way to the window "Except for Jay Shanker and the nosy bitches at the legal foundation." He looked over at Braxton. "And of course we still have the daughter to contend with and she's as bad as her mother. And there's Stone."
"I disagree. She's not half the lawyer her mother was. And we're well on the way to taking care of Stone."
"Oh, yes, your crack teams have taken very good care of him so far"
"Stone's a capable man," Braxton said evenly enough to keep the brief flare of anger from showing on his face. "He's a natural two-percenter—and not one of ours. We have ways to handle him."
"How— "
Braxton shook his head. "You don't want to know." He nodded. And the gas chamber will take care of Talmadge. Either that or the cancer. That's my bet." Braxton faced his old comrade. "Frank, things will be fine so long as your records don't emerge from the grave you were supposed to put them in."
CHAPTER 23
Jasmine's head rested on my right shoulder. We leaned against each other in adjoining plastic chairs in an unoccupied office at the LAPD's Pacific Division Headquarters. She slept lightly, wrapped in a borrowed blanket.
The open door gave on to a fluorescent-lit deskscape of paper, phones, and tired people winding down their watch. At the far corner, two uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective escorted a handcuffed man tagged with prison tattoos out of an interview room, the same one I had occupied for almost two hours. Events before then had been predictable: first there was one black-and-white, then a Smokey-and-the-bandits parade populated by backup uniforms, plainclothes detectives, scene supervisors, crime scene van, forensic techs, then finally the coroner and a meat wagon.
Jasmine and I had made things as easy for them as possible. We bagged my gun and our assailant's in separate Ziplocs, labeled them properly, and set them on the kitchen counter before going outside to wait.
Then they brought us here to the architecturally undistinguished building on Culver Boulevard just off Centinela in a nondescript neighborhood filled with two- and three-story stucco apartment buildings, strip malls, gas stations, and dueling gang graffiti.
Across the big squad room, Darius Jones, the detective sergeant who had driven us here, emerged from the watch commander's office shaking his head. I heard nothing, but someone in the office must have spoken because the detective stopped in the doorframe and turned around. He stood a couple of inches taller than me, nearly as broad in the shoulders, a lot sloppier at the waist, and nearly filled up the doorframe. He'd played defensive tackle for USC until he'd blown out his right knee at the end of his senior year.
Darius Jones shrugged and continued to shake his head as he headed toward the main reception area. My stomach growled; I rubbed at the stubble on my jaw with my free hand and checked my watch. Again.
Hours had dragged by after detectives had interviewed Jasmine and me and then quickly agreed it was self-defense. But because there had been a homicide, Jones needed his supervisor's okay to let us go. Approval took a lot longer than expected thanks to a platoon of Oakwood boys who showed up in rival gang turf a couple of blocks away with Molotov cocktails and large-caliber weapons.
I tried now to enjoy the feeling of Jasmine's head against my shoulder, but the intractable fatigue and adrenaline hangover of the past twelve hours had left me drained, distracted, and dwelling on death. In a previous life, I had seen a lot more than the average person and had frequently been on the dealing end of it in service to my government.
During that time I had casually ridden a ballistic path of workaday death and risk that I accepted as an inevitable part of my personal trajectory. My acceptance didn't change until the day I realized death wasn't only for the other guy. My finger grew more reluctant on the trigger then I started to wonder where people went when they turned into one more seeping sack of organic soup waiting for the cell walls to burst and feed the waiting bacteria. I struggled with the durability of consciousness and realized it was the only thing that mattered. If you're unaware of being alive, then dying's not all that different. Did death represent the irrevocable loss of that individual or could a disembodied mind prevail? If it prevailed, was it our soul? Questions led to more questions. Was consciousness our soul peeking dimly through the meat-ware of the human body? Did bad people have good souls sabotaged by bad meatware?
No memorable epiphany stands out; no discrete single event redirected me from killing to healing. The process ran more like dust accreting on one side of a balance scale until one day it tipped, propelling me out of one life into another. Medical school turned me into a better than competent but less than brilliant neurosurgeon. Nevertheless, I reveled when I opened a cranium and moved my fingers and instruments among the living stuff that made someone who he was. Making him well felt even better, especially when I had cut away a tumor or relieved a pressure and had returned a profane, vile patient back to the congenial, likable person he had once been.
The most poignant cases came from the families of patients accused of the most hideous crimes, criminals whose malevolent creativity produced horror that seemed to verify the existence of evil.
"Please tell us it's a brain tumor," the families would plead. "Or an artery blockage or same sort of lightning storm in the brain cells." Something, anything that could be seen, touched, treated, removed, that would confirm that this loved person was not evil, only suffering from a merely physical lesion, which would absolve them of crime and guilt.
On occasion, surgery located such a physical epicenter, but even more often, I suspected a physical cause I could not prove. Locating a physical cause often allowed the sort of treatment that frequently led to normal lives. The lack of an identifiable, biological lesion was a shortcut to jail terms or execution. This bothered me because in many of the successful cases I located physical causes that would have gone undetected fifty years ago. Will people we jail and execute today be saved fifty years from now by more advanced diagnostic technology that will find the physical evidence?
Of course, taken to its logical absurdity, this led to the speculation that no one was ever guilty of anything since every act had a purely biological origin that precluded free will. Despite the lack of answers, the questions fed my notion of good souls trapped in bad meatware.
As I built an astoundingly lucrative surge
ry practice alongside my teaching and research at UCLA, I began to consider the tissue beneath my hands as a philosophical duality—spirit and flesh—which threw me into conflict with the scientific mainstream, which believed—with faith as absolute as that of the most ardent Bible-thumping Baptist—that consciousness came solely from the brain's electrical activity, all matter, nothing transcendent, which they couldn't prove any better than the average Baptist could prove the virgin birth.
What did it mean? Even more significantly, did it mean anything at all? I had worried this issue around and around for years, confusing myself half the time and often coming back to things I had written about it and realizing I did not quite understand my own words.
Instead, I tried to make sense of the attacks on my boat and at my house and finally fell asleep concluding that it all pointed straight back to Mississippi, to Vanessa and Darryl Talmadge. A convicted white racist murderer sentenced to die in the gas chamber. I certainly hoped Jasmine knew why in hell her mother would want to save a man like that.
CHAPTER 24
I awoke to Vince Sloane's worst scowl.
"Up! C'mon, wake up!"
Sloane shook my shoulder.
I struggled to remain in a significant dream, desperate for its fleeting epiphany
where answers outnumbered questions.
"Shit." I opened my eyes.
"Glad to see you too," Sloane said.
Jasmine stirred.
Looming over us, Sloane offered two large Styrofoam cups glaring with the
orange-and-black logo of a small convenience store a block away we called the "Shop and Rob" because of the way crooks frequently used it as their personal ATM. "Time to go home," Sloane said as he shoved a cup at me. "Wherever the hell that is for you these days."
I took the cup and caught his disapproval. Vince was a solid, trustworthy man with a time-honored and still-admirable set of ethics and personal principles that he always hoped others would live up to, while recognizing most would not. He reminded me of that Marine division motto: "Your best friend, your worst enemy."
Beyond Sloane, Detective Darius Jones obscured the doorway like a walking roadblock. His deep black skin trended toward blue; sweat beads glistened on his forehead and a murderous stare distorted his face. He avoided my eyes, looking first at Jasmine, then back toward me. Back and forth, pendulum regular. When I finally caught his gaze, Jones glanced away and made a perfect poker face.
What the hell was that all about? I looked over at Jasmine, who sat up straight in her chair, leaving a warm spot on my shoulder. She had obviously read a message on the big detective's face. I thought better of asking her about it, for now.
I pried the plastic top off the coffee and took a gulp. A palsied shudder ran down my spine and cinched my scrotum tight like a drum. The coffee was everything I expected, I took another gulp, then stood up and stretched.
"You and I need to have a little chat." Vince looked toward the door, then back at me. "Alone. I'll drive you home."
"But—" I looked over at Jasmine, who struggled to throw off the fatigue and jet lag. She shivered for a moment, then tugged the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Vince caught her eye, waved the coffee about, then set it down next to her.
"No buts." Vince gave me his authoritative sergeant's tone and I almost returned a "Yes sir," but knew no matter how I said it, he'd hear sarcasm. I nodded.
"Good." He nodded toward Jones, who stepped forward and addressed Jasmine.
"I'll give you a ride to your hotel, Ms. Thompson," the big detective said, his voice deep, formal, and professional. His assassinating stare had vanished, which made me wonder if I had imagined things in waking up.
Jasmine stood, let the blanket slip into the plastic chair, then combed her fingers through her tight curls.
"Thank you for the coffee," she told Vince. And thank you," she said to Jones. Then, to me: "Call me after you get some sleep." My gaze held her face, but my peripheral vision caught anger flashing across the big detective's face again, quick and bright like fractured shards of sun glinting off polished chrome.
"Count on it," I told her, and felt all sorts of regret when she picked up her purse and left the room with Jones.
Vince made his way over to me, picked up the blanket from the chair and folded it. I took that moment to drink as deeply as I dared of the Shop and Rob coffee.
"You know I don't mess in people's business," he spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him.
"Sorry?"
He cocked his head to the now empty doorway and continued to fold the blanket. He always took care of equipment. Put things where they belong and you'll know where to go in an emergency.
"Your friend." He finished the blanket. "Look, you've known me long enough to know I don't care what color a person is or any of that."
This bewildered me.
"It makes no difference to me, but it makes a lot of difference to some other people, a big, big difference."
A queasy recognition blossomed in my gut.
"And it's not just your Aryan Nation bozos and Klanners who think birds of a feather should stick with their own kind."
"That's just freaking wonderful," I mumbled. Darius Jones's visual daggers added up.
"Ducky." He bent and placed the folded blanket with its perfectly aligned corners and perfect right angles on the chair. "Now, if you don't mind..." He motioned toward the door with his head. "The LAPD gives me the creeps; I'm running a severe sleep deficit, and quite frankly I am truly weary of following the trail of bodies you've left behind you."
Without waiting, Vince left the room. I spilled hot coffee down the front of my pants following behind. We exited into a bright new day and crossed the parking lot, lined with trees and populated by a variety of temporary buildings. We zigged through a jam of cruisers, RVs, personal vehicles, and brown temporary buildings until we came to a battered Dodge pickup parked under a spreading eucalyptus tree. Vince used the truck for his house-painting business, one of those side ventures cops need either for financial reasons or for the psychological satisfaction coming from a job not connected with drug dealers, casual killers, gangbangers, rich celebrity drunk drivers, hormone-crazed teenagers, and an aggressively disappreciative public who rarely had anything good to say about their public safety officers. I experienced enough of that on my reserve duty to realize why some cops retreated into their "cops versus civilians" world.
We walked silently and got in. Vince started the truck's engine and backed out of the space.
"Remember what I said back there. Jones is a terrific detective, closes a lot of his cases without all the BS you get from others." Vince headed for the exit. "He's a lot smarter than he is big, but he's got this thing about his black women and white guys."
My fingers tingled with anger and caffeine.
He paused at the Culver Boulevard exit. "Where to? Where the hell you gonna sleep now that your boat's sunk and your house is trashed?"
I shrugged. "My lab's pretty much it." I looked at my watch. "Besides, it's time for work."
Vince smiled, then pulled carefully into traffic.
"I thought Jones's kind of thinking was for Archie Bunker," I said.
"Bigots come in all colors." Vince turned north on Centinela. "Watch yourself."
I opened my mouth to reply, but he cut me off.
"Look, Doc, we could talk forever about why its not right. But we can't change it and we don't have all day because I need to tell you a few things which are a lot more important."
"Ooh-kay," I said slowly.
"Chris Nellis—you remember him, the reserve guy who dives?"
"Uh-huh, he's got an ad agency or something. I've trained with him."
"We had Chris in the water right after we pulled you off the rocks, down to check to make sure there wasn't anybody still alive. He retrieves some debris and a few pieces of a guy left after the explosion. Then out beyond the breakwater, one of the Harbor Patrol guys finds an inflatable idling a
round in a circle, and nearby a floater with a very broken neck.
"So, while the suits at Internal Affairs are working you over, they haul all this stuff to the dock, and they're not there half an hour when this Army chopper lands on the jetty and farts out some pretty pushy guys in fatigues flashing heavy-duty military ID and firepower."
Vince stopped at the light by the east end of the Santa Monica airport where Centinela turns into Bundy Drive. A small single-engine plane on final approach coasted across the road above the stoplight.
"To make things short, these military guys check out. Then they take everything. Raft, body, body parts, debris." The light turned green, and a nanosecond later a horn sounded behind us. I turned around and spotted a blond in a black BMW, one of those California clichés that plays on the worst of both worlds. Vince looked in the rearview mirror as she honked again. He pressed on the accelerator more slowly than usual.
"She's very important, I guess." He smiled. She wore a snarl on her face as she weaved the Beemer back and forth in the lane. She had nice, shiny nails on the hand used for her Anglo-Saxon salute.
"Anyway, these Army jerks are gone almost as fast as they arrive, only they leave behind a tight-assed, full-bird colonel, who tells us there's not going to be a report on this incident because it involves national security and it's a training exercise that got out of hand with some new men who were way too gung ho."
"Whoa! No report? What about my boat?"
"He said the check would be in the mail."
My jaw dropped.
"No, really." Vince gave me a smile. "That's what he said. Checks would go out to everybody today. He made a point of saying that you would be a lot better off without insurance, not filing a claim."
"It doesn't add up. My attackers told me exactly what they came for and that they came looking for me to give it to them."