A King of Infinite Space

by Tyler Dilts

  TEN

  I once read that when children suffer an emotional trauma, their minds can wipe themselves clean of not only the memories of the event itself, but also of much or all of what happened before. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll close my eyes and try to remember something or other that occurred in my first six years, something I’d seen in an old photo album or on one of the old Super Eight home movies stored in the back of my mother’s closet. There’s only one event I’m ever able to recall.

  It’s a warm late fall day, not long before I’ll begin the first grade. I’m riding my Big Wheel around the driveway, into the empty garage, and out again, circling around my father’s sky blue metallic Plymouth Fury. The sunlight gleams off the fresh wax job as if the entire car were plated in translucent silver. He’s inside the car, crunched down onto the floorboard and working on something under the dash. As I loop around the car’s rear end, plastic wheels rattling across rough asphalt, I turn wide to swerve around my father’s feet, protruding from the passenger door. I don’t know how many laps I did, but it seemed as if I were riding a perpetual motion machine made of red and yellow plastic, as if I’d been going forever and might never stop. But I do stop.

  As I make a tight left turn at the rear of the garage and the Plymouth comes back into view, my father sits up in the driver’s seat. He calls to me.

  “Hey, Danny.” He’s grinning broadly as I ride up and stop the Big Wheel next to the open driver’s door. When I put my feet down and stand up, I can feel the hot asphalt through the thin soles of my Keds.

  “Come here, champ,” he says as he lifts me across his lap and plops me down on the blue vinyl seat next to him. He smells like sweat and Aqua Velva. “Look at this,” he says. There is a new metal-and-plastic box about the size of my Snoopy lunch pail attached to the bottom of the matte-finished-steel dashboard. It has a rectangular opening and half a dozen buttons on its front. “You know what that is?” Dad asks me. I shake my head and look up at him. Drops of perspiration trickle from his crew cut and down the sides of his tanned face. “It’s a tape player,” he says, smiling. “It’s for music. What do you say we give it a try?” He turns and reaches for something on the backseat. He pushes a red plastic cartridge into the slot, and I wait. Nothing happens.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Not a thing,” he says. “You just need to push right there.” He points.

  I reach out and touch the button. “Here?”

  “That’s it. Just push.”

  I do. After a few seconds of fuzzy static, the music begins—Johnny Cash singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” I look up at my father, and he smiles down at me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “It doesn’t get any better than this, Danny boy.” I smile up at him.

  Four days before Christmas that year, my father pulled his LA County Sheriff’s cruiser to a stop outside a small tract home in Carson. He was riding alone that day because his partner had called in sick. He was answering a call about a domestic disturbance, a neighbor complaining about the noise made by an arguing couple next door. He got out of the cruiser, pulled on his hat, and slipped his baton into the O-ring on his belt.

  Yells and shouts were audible from the curb in front of the house. My father crossed the lawn. The neighbor who phoned in the report later said he heard a man inside scream “goddamn bitch” and the sound of breaking glass. My father rapped on the door with his knuckles. No one answered. He pounded harder, with the bottom of his fist, and announced loudly, “Sheriff’s Department, open up!”

  The man who unlocked the door wavered, grasping the frame for balance. “You got no business here,” said the man, slurring the s sounds in his words.

  “We’ve had complaints about the noise,” my father said.

  “This is private.”

  “I need to see your wife, sir.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “It’s none of your fucking business!” He shoved my father back and followed him onto the porch. The drunk lunged and missed, his momentum carrying him onto the lawn. He spun and threw a wild punch. My father ducked it, stepped behind the drunk, and raked his baton down hard across the man’s hamstring, collapsing him into a groaning pile. Pulling the drunk’s right arm behind his back, my father kneeled on the man’s spine and snapped a cuff around his wrist.

  He was pulling the man’s left arm around when the wife stepped onto the porch with a double-barreled twelve-gauge coach gun and pulled both triggers. The blast caught my father just above his left hip and nearly cut him in two. Less than twenty minutes later, he was pronounced dead on arrival at Harbor General Hospital.

  I have copies of all the police reports and witness statements—even a full transcript of the trial that sent the woman to prison for life. The man did twenty on a conspiracy-to--commit charge. Once a year or so, usually around Christmas, I dig the documents out of the closet and read through them again. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to do this. Maybe just to be sure he’s really gone.

  It had been dark for half an hour when we got the go order. Marty, Jen, and I had been in the back of an unmarked Ford Econoline van with another detective who had been assigned to the task force, a woman from Violent Crimes named Hoskins. We were parked a block up the street from the house in which Tropov was known to be residing. He’d been seen returning home around dinnertime and hadn’t left. We were waiting for Ruiz to call and let us know if Kincaid had been able to rush an arrest warrant. Marty’s phone chirped.

  He said “Yeah?” into it and listened. “It’s a go,” he said to us. He clicked the mic on his radio headset. “Dave, you get that?”

  “Yep.” Dave’s voice spilled out of each of our earphones.

  “We’ve got a green light.” Dave was in the alley behind Tropov’s house with another of the task force detectives. “Let us know when everybody’s set, Butler,” Marty said to the narc watching the front of the house. “You with us?”

  “Roger,” we heard in our earpieces. “Ready whenever you are.”

  Marty moved to the front of the van and slipped into the seat behind the steering wheel. He left the headlights off and pulled up to the curb in front of the house next to Tropov’s. As we moved, Hoskins, Jen, and I made a last check of our weapons and tightened the straps on our Kevlar vests. Butler, a lanky black man, met Marty at the driver’s door. Marty turned to Jen and me. “You two go,” he said. “Let me know as soon as you’re in position.”

  Jen and I got out of the van and approached the house. It was a fifty-year-old two-bedroom with peeling off-white paint and wood eaten by termites and dry rot. Yellowing weeds grew in every exposed bit of dirt. There were three doors. Marty’s crew would take the front, Dave’s the back, and Jen and I the side.

  As we made our way along the side of the house, Jen held her Glock .40 in her right hand and a Maglite in her left. I had a pump-action Remington 870 riot gun in the low ready position, butt against my shoulder, muzzle to the ground.

  We took positions on either side of the door. Beyond the frame, Jen crouched under what looked like a kitchen window. “We’re set,” I whispered into the mic attached to my ear.

  “Dave?” Marty asked.

  “Set.”

  “Stand by.” Marty’s voice was calm, but the adrenaline was pumping, and I knew that I wasn’t the only one listening to the sound of my own heartbeat. Jen and I made eye contact, and we each gave a nod. She held my gaze while we waited for Marty’s command. Her hand touched the knob and gave it a gentle twist. She nodded. Unlocked. At least we wouldn’t have to kick it.

  “Ready.” Marty’s voice crackled in our ears.

  In my head I began counting. One one thousand, two one thousand…

  “Go!” Almost simultaneously we heard the crack of the forced front door and the shattering of the rear sliding glass.

  Jen opened the door and braced her gun against the Maglite in her left hand. I switched on the light attached to the magazine tube of the Remington. From the cover of the door frame, we
swept the circles of light across the walls of the kitchen.

  “Clear,” I said.

  “Clear,” she echoed.

  I was facing the only door in the room. “Door on the right.”

  “Covering,” she said.

  I stepped into the kitchen and moved past Jen. She stood, and both of our lights illuminated a faded and stained green door. Circling around an old Formica-topped table, I checked the hinges—the door opened into the kitchen. From the front of the house, I heard the sound of wood splintering, then quiet. I moved toward the door.

  Tropov was smart. As soon as I began to turn the knob, the door burst open and knocked me sideways into the refrigerator. Before Jen could get a clear look, Tropov was across the room, crashing into her, and the two of them tumbled out the exterior door. I scrambled across the kitchen, knocking the table into the stove with my thigh as I passed.

  Through the door I saw them struggling. He was on top of her, pinning her with one hand and raising the other above his head, holding what appeared to be an ice pick. Everything slowed down, and the color seemed to fade from my field of vision, as if someone were turning a knob on an old TV. I felt a burning sensation behind my eyes.

  With Jen beneath him, I didn’t have a clear shot. I charged them, raising the Remington above my head. I cleared ten feet in three steps and rammed the butt into the side of his neck. He screamed—more, it seemed, in rage than pain.

  The blow threw Tropov off balance, and Jen attempted an escape. My second stroke raked upward, and the sharp edge of the butt caught him in the jaw. The force of the blow lifted him enough so that Jen, with a deft twist, could slip out from beneath him. As he stood up, I threw my weight into the next blow and caught him with the stock in the rib cage. His wind burst out of him, and I shoved him hard against the wall of the house. I slammed the shotgun’s stock into his abdomen. Before he could recover, I did it again and then again. From somewhere far away, I thought I heard someone call my name.

  I pointed the muzzle of the Remington at Tropov’s chest and flicked off the safety. As my finger slipped into the trigger guard, I saw the cold emptiness in his eyes and knew, with a certainty I’ve only rarely glimpsed, that I would kill him.

  “Danny!” I felt Jen’s hands on my shoulders, tugging me back. “Danny,” she said, her voice soft in my ears, “I’m okay.”

  I heard Marty’s voice behind me and heard the others coming through the kitchen. Tropov leaned against the wall, barely able to prop himself up. His eyes stayed locked on mine until Dave and two other cops shoved him face-first into the weeds, patted him down, and cuffed his hands behind his back.

  Dave picked up a Phillips-head screwdriver and held it up to the light. “Check it out,” he said. “This look like a deadly weapon to you, Marty?”

  “Yes, it does.” Marty knelt down next to Tropov, took a good look at his face to make sure it matched the black-and-white mug shot we’d all memorized that afternoon, and told him he was under arrest.

  “You okay, partner?” Jen pulled me a few feet away and took the Remington out of my hands. I didn’t want to let go.

  “Yeah.” I looked at her. “You?”

  “Son of a bitch ripped my Windbreaker.”

  “Nice work, kids.” Marty clapped me on the shoulder. “You want to hang out and wait for the Crime Scene Unit or go with us to take him back to the house?”

  I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and clenched them into fists so I wouldn’t have to feel them shaking. From far off in the distance, I heard a lone train whistle crying in the night.

  ELEVEN

  Tropov didn’t make it back to the station, at least not right away. He lost consciousness as Marty and Dave were dragging him to their car, so they took him to Long Beach Memorial instead. That left Jen and me to fill Ruiz in on the arrest. When we finished, I looked down at the paperwork on the table in front of me and pretended to read. But I could feel the lieutenant’s eyes drilling into my forehead.

  “How bad was he hurt?” Ruiz asked.

  I looked up at him and shrugged my shoulders. He turned to Jen and raised his eyebrows.

  “Bad,” she said. When she saw his expression, she added, “Probably nothing permanent.”

  “Probably?” Ruiz said, snorting and shaking his head. He turned to me again. “Well, he’s mobbed up, so at least we don’t have to worry about a lawsuit.”

  “No,” Jen said. “Just about him popping out of an alley somewhere and firing a twenty-two into the back of Danny’s head.” Ruiz parted his lips, but then closed his mouth, clenched his jaw, and left the room without saying anything else.

  A few minutes later, Marty called to let us know they were bringing in Tropov. The docs had wanted to keep him overnight for observation, betting on a concussion, but after they’d stitched his split eyebrow, set his broken nose, and bandaged his cracked ribs, he declined further treatment and insisted on leaving the hospital. If he did have a concussion, I thought, that might work to our advantage.

  Ruiz had gone home for the night, but Jen and I were still busy updating the paperwork.

  “How do you think we should go at him?” I asked her.

  “Marty’ll take the interrogation.”

  “Maybe I should do it. After what went down, he might rattle.”

  She looked at me, and the corners of her mouth curled up. “Danny, get real.”

  “What?”

  “You think just because Ruiz is gone any of us are going to let you get in the box with somebody you just beat the crap out of?”

  “I’m guessing no?”

  “Don’t try to be cute.” She turned her face back down to the report in front of her.

  “Jen?”

  She locked her eyes on mine. “You were going to kill him,” she said. “You had him, and you were still going to do it.”

  “What are—”

  “Don’t.” I tried to defend myself, but she wouldn’t let me. “Just don’t. You might be able to bullshit yourself, but not me.” She flipped her file shut and took it with her as she left the room, stopping briefly at the door to turn and look at me, a weary sadness in her eyes.

  Tropov’s arms hung down at his sides, each hand cuffed separately to a leg of the Korean Conflict–era metal chair in which he sat. His left eye and nose were a swollen and misshapen mass of purple-black flesh. Dried blood caked his nostrils, and his bottom lip jutted to the right. With his black hair and the discolored skin of his face atop his narrow shoulders, he looked like a burnt match.

  “What do you think?” Dave whispered.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Tropov.” Dave lifted his chin toward the two-way mirror.

  “He’s a piece of shit,” I said.

  Dave let out a satisfied grunt.

  “But he’s not our guy.”

  “What?” His eyes widened. He was actually surprised. “I think you’re wrong on this one,” he said quietly, regaining his confidence.

  “I know you feel like you have a big stake in this, tracking down Tropov and all, but you shouldn’t. A rookie uniform could have phoned that MO into ViCAP and done the follow-up. It didn’t take Joe Fucking Friday.”

  Dave blinked twice, turned away from me, and began throwing switches and pushing buttons on the recording equipment.

  Jen stood against the wall of the interview room, arms crossed, staring at Tropov, and Marty sat across the table from him. Dave and I watched from behind the mirror. In addition to the video camera, which was mounted high in the corner of the room and would create the official record of the interrogation, we were also rolling an audiotape and a second video camera. It occurred to me that we were also doing an outstanding job of capturing the damage I’d managed to inflict on our only suspect. Dave tapped the glass lightly to let Marty know we were ready to go.

  “It’s 10:08 p.m. on November sixth. This is Detective Sergeant Marty Locklin of—”

  Tropov let out a phlegmy, liquid chuckle and said, “Pleased to meet
you.” His voice was a low, throaty rumble, and he had a heavy accent. There was something odd about it, though, as if he were intentionally accentuating its foreignness. Marty shot him a look, and Tropov leaned back and tried to look smug, but the bruises got in his way.

  Aware that the tape was rolling, Marty swallowed his irritation and went on with the identification. “Of the Long Beach Police Department Homicide Squad. Also present are Detective Second Grade Jennifer Tanaka and the suspect.” Looking at Tropov, he went on. “State your name and address for the record.”

  “Yevgeny Vasilly Tropov,” he said and then added the address at which we’d busted him.

  “And you confirm that you’ve waived your right to legal counsel?”

  “Yes.”

  Marty asked Tropov half a dozen general questions about his occupation and immigration status before he progressed to anything we actually cared about. “Where were you on the evening of November fourth?” He gave Tropov a moment to answer. “That was last Friday, two nights ago.”

  Tropov managed a swollen, lopsided grin.

  “There it is,” I whispered to Dave.

  “What?”

  “He’s not our guy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, traces of confusion sneaking into his voice. I wasn’t sure if he’d missed Tropov’s grin entirely or only its significance.

  “Watch.” I pointed back through the mirror.

  “Well?” Marty asked.

  “I was in Palm Springs.” Tropov was sitting a bit straighter in his chair, and his eyes sparkled with arrogance.

  “Can anyone else verify that?”

  “Of course. I was at a social function celebrating the wedding anniversary of one of my many business associates. Not only can they verify it, but the staff of Melvyn’s Restaurant will also support this.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yes. And you will see that my Visa card, which has not been reported as stolen or missing by myself, was used there. Also, you may see me making an ATM withdrawal on the video surveillance tape from the Bank of America.” He tossed a broad smile at the camera. I noticed he was missing an incisor.