by John Shannon
She passed the big new cement hill they’d built for their single lame brown bear, and she knew exactly where she was. Around the path to the left now, she thought.
How was she going to forgive herself for the adulterous episode? She’d never before had trouble forgiving herself – she was so intense and self-focused that she’d always been the center of her own universe, the one who mattered. But this was a new kind of trouble, with poor Jack right there, so aware of her infidelity, and Sonny so demanding and needy – and so loving himself. Men were no easy task, for sure. She wanted to keep her spirits up for the liberation of the bald eagle, but she couldn’t get any distance on her own crisis. She had to find something to make it all bearable in the end.
She flicked the flashlight and there it was, the wire atrium, maybe twice the size of the creature’s full wingspan. A big dark shadow stirred atop the dead tree in the middle.
‘Toha tsopege ggwe’na’a, my apologies for taking so long. I’m here now. May your spirit please bless this action.’
She tapped the flashlight button again, and the bird stirred in the flash of light, but did not visibly come awake, its glorious white head lolling forward to rest on the middle of its chest. There was a kind of airlock double-door portico made of chainlink at the back of the cage to let a keeper enter. She debated attacking these doors, but wondered if the great bird would be willing to waddle out the low doorways. This was not going to be as simple as she’d thought.
Her bolt cutter could shear the chainlink easily so she decided to open a big inviting window up high right in front. She reached up and began snipping. The only sounds she heard were the downhill winds from the mountains to the east rushing over the trees in the zoo, a faint chittering that might have been a restless squirrel, and the nasty snip of her bolt cutters as she worked hard at the wire. Her palms began to smart with the pressure of the cuts, and reaching upward with the heavy tool made her arms ache.
Then she heard a metallic clang somewhere not so nearby and halted for a moment. Sounds could often be deceptive. Maybe a bulky animal shouldering into its cage wire, an antelope or the bear. She told herself not to be so anxious just because she was jeopardizing her whole career to free a bird. She knew there was no love lost between the Bakersfield cops and LAPD, and particularly her. They would cut her no slack at all up here – since she’d solved one of their own cases, quickly and easily, making them look inept.6
She went back to work, panting a little with the effort and promising herself to return to her daily exercises, at least one round of the machines in the exercise room at the station and a good mile jog after work. She was always after Jack to do something similar.
There was enough starlight now that her eyes had adjusted, and her grappling with the cage had awakened the creature inside so she saw the hooked beak and the fierce appearance of the bird’s white head, turned profile so its big eye could watch her. My heavens, Toha tsopege ggwe’na’a, aren’t you something! Sacred to my people, but no more sacred really than all life – even a cane rat caught along the banks of the Owens River is sacred. Her aunt would always apologize at length before cooking and eating any wild animal.
Eagle, I apologize for my species. You shouldn’t be held in a crappy little toaster-oven like this, even if your wing is lame. It’s dead wrong.
She had about two-thirds of a big flap cut free from the wire and wondered how she could induce the bird to grasp its freedom. Maybe it would be afraid of the open air after so long? But she hadn’t been afraid to exercise her freedom from Jack, had she? Enough, woman.
With her palms on fire from the rubber handles of the bolt cutters, she sliced the last few links of the cage fencing, then she used the bolt cutter to grasp the big overhead flap that she’d made and yank it wide open. It was certainly big enough to release her bird. She shone her flashlight on the opening, then on the eagle, on the opening again, and made chirping and tsking sounds of encouragement. ‘Mr Toha tsopege ggwe’na’a, come on out now!’ she urged. ‘Bald Eagle, dammit, fly!’
She wished she had some meat or live bait as an inducement, but she hadn’t thought she’d need an inducement. She wondered if she was such a great cop after all if she hadn’t thought this rescue through.
There was another clang in the distance, and the shriek of a bird circling overhead. She hoped it was another eagle, offering companionship. Please! Go out for a little sex, big boy. Or big girl. She realized she had no idea. She heard the air-rush of big wings overhead and tried to catch whatever it was with a flash of her light but couldn’t. The light was like a beacon up into mist, a bit creepy.
The eagle stirred, and she showed her flashlight on the opening again, the bird doing a little side-to-side dance on the dead limb.
‘Oh, come on, do it now. Fly! It’s your fucking nature! This is your chance. Things that you leave undone are the ones you regret.’ Was she sure of that?
The huge bird ripped open its wingspan, as if posing for a postage stamp, spreading the black wings an unimaginable width, but still it hesitated. Then it launched itself in a leap to the edge of the window she had cut open and perched there unsteadily on the wobbly edge of the wire, glaring out.
‘Yes. GO!’
At that instant, all the overhead lights in the zoo came on, and she knew immediately that she was totally screwed. She took the clip-on holster off the back of her skirt and laid the .40-caliber Glock gently on the path behind her. She set the bolt cutter beside it, then the Pelican light. She wanted to live. Tetchy cops vs people holding firearms rarely worked out well. All the complications rose like angry ghosts before her – the reaction of her own captain to this depradation in a faraway city, Jack’s reaction, of course, but most of all, memories of the last time she’d been up here and badly insulted a couple of the dimmer Bako cops. Let’s just hope those dipshits weren’t shifted to nightside, she thought.
‘Go, eagle!’ She shook the wire cage below it, and the shudder only startled the bird, and made it hop back inside on to its perch, her heart dropping inside her.
‘No, No! Out! ¡Pendejo! Don’t forsake me!’
The eagle screeched once at her in complaint – of what? – and then a squad of cops came around the corner of the bear house with guns drawn.
What did they expect? An international animal thief?
‘Freeze!’ somebody shouted.
‘I’m frozen, gentlemen. I’m an L.A. cop, out of my jurisdiction, and my pistol is on the ground there behind me. My badge is in the dark blue Toyota. I’m sure you saw it outside.’
‘Ruca, are we being invaded by the tactically and morally superior forces of the famous Los Angeles Police Department?’ It was that very voice, she thought with a terrible chill. What was the name?
‘Please don’t get your back up, man. I’m the one who’s in the wrong here. You’ve got me.’ What were the odds, for God’s sake? She was sure it was the Basque one, the mean-spirited racist sheepfucker. She couldn’t come up with his name.
‘On the ground, bitch! Down now! Hands spread.’
‘You don’t have to do this, sir. My pistol is on the path behind me. I don’t carry a throwdown piece.’
‘GET DOWN NOW!’
She sighed and lowered herself full length onto the gritty walkway with her arms spread out inoffensively. For the first time, she felt the faint chill on the air, a breeze wicking under her skirt. She wished she’d worn trousers, but this was meant to be an official trip to a semi-formal lecture. What impressed her was the absoluteness of her predicament and, of course, her own stupidity to bring it about. Once the LAPD fired her, what job could she take? Security guard at a bank? Even Jack Liffey might have trouble understanding what this was all about. She had a bit of trouble herself. She wanted to look up and curse the bird, but didn’t.
‘I’ll frisk her! Look for other burglars.’
‘We should wait for Carol, Tom.’
‘Bullshit. Not with officer lives in danger.’
Tom
, oh yes. Tom Etcheverry, she remembered. The barrel-chested asshole who’d always stood with his hands on his hips, leering at her. And she knew he had every reason to hate her guts. She’d probably cost him a promotion and some salary by showing him up and solving the crime he was making a real mess of investigating, tromping all over the evidence.
A heavy man knelt beside her and ran his hand slowly up the inside of her thigh, forcing up her skirt, bunching it higher and higher until he pressed two fingers hard against her pussy, then worked them under her panties and began rubbing. Unfortunately she was still a bit wet from Sonny.
‘That a weapon you got there, ruca?’
She knew better than to sass him, but there were others around. ‘Gentlemen, this officer is feeling me up. He’s about to penetrate me with his fingers. That’s a felony in this state. Is there anybody in charge here?’
Nobody said a thing, but when she turned her head back to the cage, she saw the big bird dance on the tree and one of the other cops using her bolt cutter to push the window of fencing closed. All for nothing.
The cop worked his two fat fingers into her wet vagina and his thumb pressed hard on her rectum.
‘I can lift you like a bowling ball,’ he joked.
‘You try and you’re a walking dead man.’
‘Anybody hear that? She just threatened me.’
Who knows what else they could take away from her that night, she thought. And the great bird was still a prisoner.
6 See The Devils of Bakersfield.
TWELVE
Our Rise-Up-Angry
I park the Porsche Targa as quietly as I can several doors up the road from the pool house that I’ve already seen. A hint of moon has just appeared and it’s throwing its usual licentious silvery light. I see no stalking guards with big automatic weapons, or even snoozy men on chairs with bulges under their coats. Now an owl hoots or a coyote bays. It’s so far I can’t tell which. This isn’t like an action movie at all. Just a pool house in a suburb. No second unit director to tell me what to do.
Tyrone Bird here – I take my heart in my hand and walk alongside a row of redwood roundels set into the grass, quiet as I can. Only one Skinny tiptoes along with me, emoting caution like a mime on speed. Something is keeping me from looking straight at what I’m doing, and I know how long I’ve been waiting for this. All my life, really. If I make no noise at all, I can turn around and flee at any moment and deny to some big ear in the sky that I was ever here.
There’s a low wall I go over cautiously and a bell-push beside the door, and I pause and argue with myself over ringing or knocking. The decision is made, finally, to make noise and disturb the universe. But is ringing too assertive for this time of night? Knocking softly is what fools do, the weak. What’s my motivation? Calm down, kid. You’re overthinking it.
In the end I push the button, hearing a single bleep-bloop in the house. I wait, as the distant owl/coyote announces itself once more, and then I push the button again boldly. There’s one of those fish-eyes in the middle of the door and I see it darken almost imperceptibly. I display empty hands. Oh, man, am I so very innocent.
Finally a number of chains and bolts are withdrawn noisily, like a New York door.
The door draws open a few inches, and a handsome older black man stands there in a bathrobe, an astonishingly large auto pistol in his hand, pointed vaguely in my direction. I offer both empty palms again as I study his face intensely. Could it be?
‘Sir, I’m no threat to you. None at all.’
‘You’re the sucker in that Porsche. If you have plans to go home alive, you better explain yourself.’
‘I believe there’s a large chance that I’m your son, Mr Stone.’
‘Bullshit.’ I can see he wasn’t told back in the day. Moms and her pride.
‘The Sandstone Retreat, sir. She used a lot of names: Donna Wisecki; Donna Freedom. Later she dropped Donna, too. Melanie Bird was the Moms I knew. I bet she never told you she was pregnant.’
The man’s eyes look me over in a new way, head-to-toe. ‘I heard this fairy tale from my own man. It was the hip days. Everybody was fucking everybody, fool.’
And you never used a condom. She was always careful. Except with you. ‘She said you were a philosopher, a college teacher, her liberator from white skin privilege.’
With a sneer, I think he recognizes something he may have told a lot of white girls. ‘Cool out, nigger. Take this thing real slow. Why do I feel I’ve seen you? I felt it this morning when I saw you drive past in that two-year-old Targa. My man says you’re a big movie star. Is that right?’
He sees cars better than genes, I think. I name several of my bigger movies. ‘I’m not here to extort money from you, sir. I probably have more in my 401K than this whole neighborhood. I just want to meet my pops – if he wants to meet me.’
‘Shit, fool, I said slow down.’ Marcus Stone rubs his forehead hard with the side of the huge pistol. ‘Come in out of the dark. Very slow.’
‘If you want a DNA test, it’s done,’ I offer.
As I enter, I can see one of the Skinnies already inside, beside a tiny fridge, making a big-mouth O at me. I look at the man, and a bit of ancient resentment stirs. Moms fucked you like pure madness, discarded her protection, and you didn’t really think about her at all, did you? I bet she loved you.
But one could forgive almost anything of a father. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? How would I know?
They erected a couple of xenon crime scene lights and a lot of POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS yellow tape, but the area had been pretty badly despoiled by the first two beat cops to arrive. What they hadn’t stomped all over, they’d vomited on several times. The first detective to arrive thought he was tough enough for anything but did more of the same with a fresh spaghetti dinner.
In fact, not one of the cops at the church knew what the word ‘flay’ meant. The captain of detectives, arriving about five a.m., sorted that out for them and sent everyone outside the tape until the SID forensics truck could get there. The only remaining question for most of them was whether the poor guy who’d been crucified to the clapboard siding of the church on Central Avenue had been dead before someone had made a clumsy effort to skin him, and every one of them hoped fervently that he had been very dead first.
A note fixed to the wall with the same nail gun used on the victim was addressed to ‘Rocky,’ and suggested Rocky learn his lesson muy rápido. The name ‘Rocky’ was not of much use to anyone, since even L.A’s City Attorney was nicknamed Rocky, and there were far too many others. They’d also nailed a driver’s license to the wall, but it was two-thirds covered by the note and no one was touching it yet.
Gloria sat as confidently as she could in the interrogation room – she wasn’t even sure whether it was the Kern County sheriff’s headquarters or the Bakersfield city P.D. She wondered if this bilious yellow-green room was where they’d held Maeve and a lot of other kids and terrified them to death about being devil worshippers.7
There was a single rap on the door, and the fat fuckhead – Etcheverry – strode in to screech his aluminum chair out from the table and sit hard opposite her.
‘Fraudulent destruction of property, four-fifty-eight, B-and-E, four-fifty-nine, resisting arrest, one-forty-eight, assault on an officer of the law, two-twenty-one. You want to deal with all that shit?’
‘Sodomy with penetration, two-twenty-zero, assault under color of authority, one-forty-nine. I know the California Penal Code, pendejo. Yours are worse.’
‘Just erase all that, ruca. Nobody in this town is going to believe you for a minute. No judge, no jury. And I can drag in your new boyfriend in Oildale for conspiracy to enough crimes to get him twenty years, even if you get off.’
She let out a slow breath. That did scare her. How did they know about Sonny? ‘You sound like you want to give me options. I haven’t even had my phone call yet. Where’s your partner, Lieutenant Efren Saldivar? He always had sense.’
&nb
sp; The abrupt grin was frightening. ‘You remember Effie? He’s out on disability, ruca, playing poker with all the other tired cops. Must be nice – except for the screams of all that wife-beating. I like Effie, I still do, but he has a tendency to wait around for his bosses to tell him how terrific he is. Not me. I want what I can get now.’
‘How about my phone call?’
‘You get to listen to me first. I’m doing you a favor. I don’t want you to lose all your L.A. luck, sergeant. If you call a lawyer right now, everything is etched in stone, you know that. You’re booked, printed and slammed. I file my report and that’s the end of you. You lose your big L.A. job, for sure. You probably go to the can for a while, too. That was one stupid stunt at the zoo; what got into you? As I say, I can even take that little Cajun prick down on something.’
She noted a tiny indicator light up in the corner of the room and it wasn’t on. Oh, God. Her heart sank. This was the wages of her sin, she thought. ‘You’re not running tape on the interview.’
‘Oh, my. How negligent of me.’
‘What is it makes this all go away?’
‘Real simple, ruca. You’re no virgin rose. You come to a nice comfortable motel with me and have a few beers and do what I ask for twenty-four hours. Willingly and with enthusiasm.’ She wondered if she could do this and then kill him later – or even during. It sounded like a plan.
‘And I’ll take a few nasty photos and mail them off to a pal just in case you want to get back at me later.’
‘You sure know about power, don’t you?’ She figured it would flatter him, and it did. He grinned and leaned back in the chair. She thought she could probably launch herself across the table and kill him right now with a single knuckle to his larynx, the way she’d been shown – entirely in theory – by one of the ex-SEALs teaching at the Academy. But nothing would go away if she did that. How could she have been so damn stupid? For a bird! She could barely stand to look at this oily fuckhead. ‘The guy in control of the game calls the shots, doesn’t he?’ she said.