Without saying a word, I rose from behind shelter and walked to the gate of the chain-link fence and entered the yard.
“Lyons!” yelled Hart.
“Fuckin’ Lyons, you’re gonna get her killed,” screamed Kuwahara.
I spoke loudly, as the irate LAPD command, foremost among them Kuwahara, now looked on and fumed in stunned silence.
“Mr. Sims,” I said, “Payton would not want you to do this. You must know this. This lady is a good woman. Please, Eddie Sims, let her go.”
Silence from inside.
“Look, you tried for me first, you can have a second chance right now. I’m the one that made Big Evil famous. I’ll swap places. Let her go.”
I was three feet inside the gate, right there on the front yard where Big Evil and Terminal were raised, and I didn’t fear a thing. I thought what a wonderful life I have lived. Full of wonder and tears, full of love and imagination. And I felt strong then. Proud, too. And, I guess I was a little sad, too. I had a lot of thoughts going on. Still, I continued my fervent plea. “You know, Edward Sims, Walter Payton was a great running back, a great man. He’s up in heaven hoping and praying you’ll let that woman go. So is your son, Payton. So is Gale Sayers.”
CHAPTER 33
Hart looked over to LaBarbera who was still behind the neighboring UPS truck. “Lyons is an imbecile.”
Commander Kuwahara scatted over to the Buick. “If that woman dies, Lyons is going down for accessory to murder. I am dead serious. Get him out or I’ll have the SWAT unit shoot him.”
“You’re kidding, right, Lester?”
“Unfortunately, but not about the accessory part.”
In the house, Sims was about to end this drama. “Say a prayer, Mrs. Desmond.” She lowered her head, softly weeping. “Say a prayer for Payton.”
Betty Desmond who had been shaking, suddenly calmed. She bowed her head and said, “Bobby, I’m coming to be with you. Payton Sims, I’m coming to meet you. Sweetness, you too.”
Eddie Sims looked at her, raised his pistol, then opened the front door and fired.
CHAPTER 34
Nanoseconds after former Marine Corps sniper and current SWAT sniper commander Juan Jose Gallardo, Jr., son of a Vietnam War Marine Corps sniper, saw the door move, he fired, too. His projectile from the .50-caliber Barrett M82A1 tore through Sims’s brain. Fortunately, Mrs. Desmond was five foot three and the lead whizzed above her, though she was showered with brains, bone fragments, and blood. She collapsed.
Sniper Gallardo yelled, “He’s dead. All clear.”
Laying twisted near the gate, his face and the right side of his head covered in blood, was the body of Michael Lyons. The cops rushed to the house, most of them going on into the house from front and back. LaBarbera, Hart, and a paramedic ran to the fallen, motionless reporter.
“Is he dead?” Hart asked the paramedic who was quickly at Lyons’s side.
“He’s got a pulse,” the paramedic announced. His gloved hands, already streaked scarlet, were gentle on Lyons’s face and head. “It might be a, no, it looks like a side head wound. Could even be a graze.”
“Lyons. Lyons!” Sal bellowed.
“Wake your ass up, you motherfuckin’ imbecile,” hollered Hart.
I stirred a bit and then groggily opened my eyes and stared up at everyone for five dazed seconds until I could talk. “What, what happened? She okay? What happened? Somebody call me an imbecile?”
“I did,” Hart said. “Gale Sayers isn’t dead, you fool.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. What happened?”
“Sims is dead. She’s not.”
I closed my eyes, and I guess I went to sleep right there on the lavish 89th Street sidewalk.
I spent just one night at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. Hart told me he’d thought I was dead with all the blood and being knocked out, but the paramedic had been correct. It was a graze. Francesca was getting ready to wheel me out of the hospital when Hart and LaBarbera arrived.
“Will you two please tell him not to play cops and robbers anymore,” Francesca said. “He’s just not good at it.”
Hart laughed. “I would if I thought it would do any good, but, on the positive side at least he’s getting better at it. First time, he got shot two times, this time he only got grazed.”
“Whaddya mean ‘grazed’? Man, I got shot in the head. I’m counting that as getting shot.”
Francesca tenderly rubbed her hand over the bandage on the side of my head where I had chalked up another thirty-two stitches. “Sometimes, darling, I think you like getting shot.”
Back at Francesca’s home, I stayed in lockdown mode all weekend and wrote. No e-mail, no cell, no landline, no Internet, unless I needed to Google something for the six thousand-word cover story for the Weekly. The Weekly’s covers were never written this quickly, but this was a huge story, and I promised I would have it to them on Tuesday morning.
Francesca came home with a wild mushroom pizza on Saturday and lasagna on Sunday. She also brought a six-pack of the pizzeria’s new house root beer, Capt’n Eli, my drink of choice when I wasn’t drinking.
While I was taking a break and eating, I resisted the urge to check my e-mails, for fear I would be drawn into that quagmire. But, on late Sunday afternoon, while heating up the lasagna in the oven, I did finally check my phone messages. I had twenty. Most of them were from friends, six from media outlets wanting interviews. One was from Betty Desmond.
“Hello, this is Mrs. Desmond. Betty Desmond. Cleamon and Bobby’s mother. That’s Big Evil and Terminal to you,” she said with the slightest of chuckle. “Sal gave me your phone number. I hope you don’t mind. Well, I know we don’t get along like best of friends, but I did want to call and thank you from the top to the bottom of my heart for what you did out there on my front yard. I know you know I was quite upset with that story you did on my son, Mr. Lyons. I remember talking on the phone to Cleamon about it. He told me ‘Ma, don’t worry about it. That reporter’s crazy.’” She chuckled again, this time not so faint. “I guess he was right, thank God. They tell me you are already out of the hospital. That’s good. Thank you and God bless you.”
She didn’t leave a number, but it showed up on my phone. I didn’t call her back right then, but I would, both for the story and for what we had been through together. I’d finish the saga of Eddie Sims first, then call her Monday for some quotes. By then, I laughed, she’d probably be back to being pissed at me.
I was asleep by the time Francesca got home sometime after midnight. She was asleep, on her side, when I awoke at seven a.m. Monday and began kissing her neck.
Afterward, we showered and dressed and walked seven blocks to G&B Coffee on Larchmont. A double cap with whole milk for her, for me a large black coffee. From there, she went on her morning walk, but she had changed her course. The week before, a sixteen-year-old boy riding his bike at Clinton Street and Norton Avenue, part of her regular walk route, had been shot to death with the sun shining bright. It wasn’t just the Southside. Even three blocks from Francesca’s two-million-dollar home, kids were killing kids.
I went home and wrote all day. It was, along with getting a good interview, my favorite part of journalism. I had all the ingredients assembled, now I needed to put them in the right order, make it flow. Then I went over and over the story, cutting here, adding there, taking out a sentence, a word, an “and,” a “the.” Then, if it worked, if it was true, in went some poetry. Not too much. Sometimes I had a tendency to over season a story, but I had learned, from an unlikely source—Francesca—that it is usually best to let a great story alone, let it write itself, just get out of its way. She told me when she had the best ingredients—a tomato from a Fresno backyard, a prawn from old Dublin Bay—she didn’t need any brilliant yellow saffron, just some good salt.
By ten, I was done for the night, satisfied and drained. I showered, changed my head bandage, then drove over to Zola where I had a glass of Barolo with Francesca and some staff.
>
Monday, I called Betty Desmond. It was a cordial conversation, her thanking me again. I asked her a few questions. How had she felt when she first saw Sims at her porch? Did she think she was going to die? Did she try to get through to sad, twisted Eddie Sims? She said she was terrified at first, but then, when she realized what was going to happen, she grew calm, was at peace. She didn’t think she was going to die, she knew it.
She said Detectives LaBarbera and Hart had shown her where Edward Sims lived, just the other side of Central, about eight, nine houses down.
“When Sal and Johnny took me over there, I remembered that house, because it had these beautiful rosebushes. It was sad, though, because one of them was crushed, lying on its side like it was dead. Sad. I remembered that house from years ago. Way back when, before all this Bloods and Crips garbage got so terrible, Cleveland and I used to take walks and there was this man at that house. Used to be out there almost every evening, watering his yard, working on a car, throwing a football with this young boy I guess was his son. Very nice man. Used to always say, ‘Good evening.’ That’s all he ever said, ‘Good evening.’ I bet that was Eddie and Payton. I know it was.”
• • •
I turned the story in Tuesday and the editors at the Weekly loved it. They had some very minor edits and a few questions, but that was nothing, especially for a story that long. I felt grand.
That night, Francesca and I went to dinner at Jar on Beverly Boulevard. Usually when we go out, some foodie would recognize Francesca and say hello and tell her some dull story, all the while ignoring me. I was used to it. That night at Jar, a tipsy, face-lifted, bejeweled seventy-something woman approached the table. “Here comes one of your fans,” I told Francesca. Instead, she directed her gaze at me.
“Aren’t you the young man who got shot on television the other day?” she said with a slur.
“No, I didn’t get shot. Just grazed.”
When the story came out in the Weekly, it received lavish praise and attention. The only other time I’d received anywhere near as much notice for an article was years ago for a story about a gang leader known as Big Evil. The Weekly was so lauded, that they offered me a full-time staff gig. Much to Francesca’s chagrin, I passed, saying I needed to think some things over.
“Like what?” Francesca asked.
“Just some things.”
“Like what things?”
“I don’t know yet, but there must be some things that need to be thought over.”
“Just get a job.”
Later, I got lousy news from my cousin Greg. He and Carly Engstrom and thirty others had been let go, given their walking papers by the Times. The Times was downsizing big time. Cutting staff. It was hard times for newspapers. I called Laurie Escobar at home and told her I would take the job offered. She was glad to hear that, and so was Francesca.
A week later, Francesca and I were heading up the highway. She had surprised me by taking off five days and reserving a room for three nights at the Post Ranch Inn on the mesmerizing Big Sur coast.
We left Los Angeles shortly before ten, timing it so we could be in Santa Barbara as the doors opened at La Super Rica, said to have been Julia Child’s favorite Mexican restaurant. We were there in seventy minutes and had a feast for twelve dollars.
That first night we stayed 160 miles farther up the coast in Cambria near the Hearst Castle. Stayed at the Castle Inn on Moonstone Beach Drive. Made out across the street on the rocky beach, made love on the silken bed.
The next morning we set out on the magnificent odyssey up Highway 1 to Big Sur. I was going to relish the windy drive in the Porsche Turbo S. I wished I could crank it up and emulate my favorite race car drivers—Fangio, Moss, Clark, Stewart, Senna, Schumacher—but I knew it would scare Francesca, and a one-sided fight would ensue. So I planned to drive merely rapidly with just an occasional blazing burst.
The day Highway 1 beckoned was a glorious one. Cobalt sky, crashing waves. I thought of the other line I knew from the Iliad. As when along the thundering beach the surf of the sea strikes beat upon beat as the west wind drives it onward.
I said it aloud. She shook her head. “We have a long drive. Go easy on the saffron.”
The road work on that part of Highway 1 had been constructed by inmates from San Quentin starting in 1919. Those killers, those early day Big Evils, built Highway 1. It was, in all the world, my favorite road. I stomped on it. The twin turbos whooshed and the famous chef and the crime reporter were gone.
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