by Dan Vining
“Why? He wanted revenge? He wanted to see his mother? He wanted to bury his brother? He was hungry?”
“He thought our involvement was either insufficient or improper.”
“I’m starting to like this kid,” Nate said. “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”
He said bye and she disappeared and he punched the gas. He’d been in this situation more than a few times, when he’d had his hands on Death. Or it’d had its hands on him. He’d long ago given up beating himself up for feeling a little exhilarated.
Nate set down the Crow on the roof of King Memorial Hospital, on a secondary pad apart from the four round landing grids used by the air ambulances. The round landing pads were called the “skillets,” as in, out of the frying pan…
“We had to knock him out,” an ER doctor told Nate in a white hallway on the top floor. “He was not happy to be here.”
“I heard,” Nate said. “You guys still working on him?”
“He’s out of the OR. It was straight through the shoulder, an easy fix.” The doctor dug his finger into the soft flesh in Nate’s shoulder. “Best place to be shot, if you have to be shot, as long as it misses the artery or doesn’t hit a bone and start bouncing around. He’s in recov, bed ninety-nine, down the way, but he won’t come around for another hour at least. One of your guys is sitting out front babysitting him.”
“Thanks,” Nate said and started away.
“You want me to do anything about your calf?” the doctor said.
“No. Thanks.” Nate actually hadn’t thought about it since he’d been shot. It wasn’t the first time he’d been nicked. He had a kit at home to dress it. His mother was a nurse.
“You want some pills?” the doctor said.
“I got all I need.”
No sign of a babysitting cop in the hallway, but in the recovery room a nurse was with Samuel Wallace. Knocked out like this—sleeping on his back, his mouth open—the boy didn’t look thirteen, more like eight.
The nurse tending to him was a guy in his thirties with tattooed arms and thick biceps, which meant there was plenty of skin to write on. He looked like the kind of inner-city deep-shit critical care nurse who liked his job, mostly because it wasn’t spreading hot tar on a roof out in Pacoima all day. With this job you got to work at night and they gave you the best speed in the world, whether you needed it or not. When Nate came through the curtains, the nurse was adjusting one of the monitors, holding the boy’s right hand as he did it, a gesture that, in spite of everything that had happened that night, looked tender to Nate, a little picture of wholly unearned kindness. What was it they said? The test of a man’s character is what he does when he thinks no one is watching. The nurse looked up and tipped up his head to say hello.
“You’re probably going to have to tie him down when he comes around,” Nate said.
“Eh, I’ll talk to him,” the nurse said. “Sometimes they just hate cops.”
“Sometimes?”
“He can probably go home in two to three hours, in the morning anyway. Or go somewhere.”
As it turned out, that wasn’t going to happen because behind them the curtain opened again, and the next act on tonight’s bill appeared: a grizzled-looking gangbanger on the dark side of fifty, a blue do-rag tied around his head and a gun in his hand. A silenced gun. At Do-Rag’s side was another gangbanger, a kid not much older than the boy in the bed. It was either on-the-job training, or the second gangster was there to hand the oldster another gun if the first one jammed. What anybody would remember about the standby kid—besides how young he was—was that he had a cross tattooed on his left cheek, presumably the cheek Christ would want him to offer up after he had been smote on the right.
Nothing was said. The OG looked Nate in the eye. The young gangster looked dangerously skittish, first-timey. Not that he didn’t also look murderous. The nurse was already backing away from the bed and raising his hands, eyes on the floor, almost as if this happened all the time. Protocol. Nate shook his head slowly at how dumb and predictable the whole thing was, but he did what the nurse did, backing off, holding his hands out from his body. Only he didn’t look at the floor. When Nate and the nurse were out of the way, the shooter shot. It was low caliber, probably a .25. Barely a pffft! It didn’t even move the boy’s head much when the round went in, right on the bridge of young Master Wallace’s nose. A second round punched in a little higher. A sigh escaped from the boy’s mouth when the rest of his body got the bad news.
With the hand that wasn’t his gun hand, the old shooter tossed a copper Inca coin onto the bed. The man was missing two fingers on that hand, his index finger and the middle finger, giving him a lobster claw. The younger gangster was already halfway gone through the curtains. The OG walked out, not fast, not slow. No eye contact.
Nate went after them, quicker than was prudent, his gun coming into his hand. He’d already decided to shoot both of them in the back, just because he could. The exit door to the stairwell was five feet away and just now it was closing with a sigh of its own. The gangsters must have propped it open or had a third man waiting—the babysitter cop, in on it?—because Nate hadn’t heard a thing before the two men came in. He almost got off a shot at the top of the young gangster’s head but there was a civilian in the stairwell, a nurse coming up. And then they were gone.
Ninety-six.
www
Nate Cole lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills that was almost all glass, slab to flat roof, curvy, the kind of Moderne house built in the sixties that they used to say “looked like a spaceship” before people actually saw real spaceships. Standing in his living room, looking out, was a lot like being in the cockpit of the Crow, with the traffic of the Cahuenga Pass slinking along below.
Eight hours ago, he’d started his shift flying across LA with Isaako quiet in the back, the sun a smudge of color behind the improbable rain clouds out over the ocean. He’d landed on the roof of a twelve-story Deco apartment building in Pacific Palisades, left Isaako with the rig, took the stairs down, alone, with a bottle in his hand, “Going to see a man about a thing…” A few minutes later, he was back behind the stick, lifting off into the new night, hoping it wouldn’t be too quiet a shift. Now, home, he unwrapped what looked like a piece of bulbous jewelry, about eight inches tall, clear shiny glass with a polished brass base, curly wires inside so delicate it was hard to imagine how it had been made. By hand, certainly, years ago. For some reason, nothing delicate got made anymore. Or so it seemed to Nate. He polished it with the brown tissue paper it came in. He’d had to wait six weeks for it to turn up, putting the word out on the electronic gear underground. It cost $300 and a bottle of 2012 George Dickel Rye.
He pushed the vacuum tube down into the socket in his low-power transmitter, then used a square of soft black cloth to wipe off his single fingerprint. He was in the interior of the house, in the second bedroom, a room he’d converted into a radio room, a studio. He stepped away from the console and closed the heavy drapes. He sat down at the control board again, flipped the main switch, and the transmitter came to life, just like it was supposed to. A pair of cherrywood vintage speakers, Altec Lansings—a name out of the past that meant something to collectors—thumped and then emitted a warm hum that matched the pulsing glow coming from the tubes. He had two turntables and a microphone, a mic that one of his collector pals had sworn on a stack of Rolling Stones had been used to record vocals on The Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds.
Nate broadcast when he felt like it, four or five nights a week, usually those hours between the end of a shift and dawn. He never said his name. “The All-Night Man,” he sometimes called himself, when he was feeling pretentious. He played nothing but vinyl, most of it from the sixties and seventies, mostly his dad’s old records. Nights when the atmospheric conditions were on his side, the range of his little radio station was twenty miles or so, all of it toward the south and west. It w
as completely illegal, unregistered, unapproved, pirate.
Most nights when he fired it up, he talked for two or three minutes to kick things off—just whatever he was thinking—but tonight he didn’t much feel like talking so he looked for a particular record on the rack on the wall, found it, rolled the disk out of the sleeve, blew off the dust, and cued it up.
“I’ve been gone awhile, but I’m back,” he said into the mic. He had a good voice, rich and real. “Here’s some Nick Lowe,” he said.
He had slip-cued the record—the second cut in—and let it go. After a little hiss and pop, the diamond stylus found the vocal, which began a beat before the first spare guitar notes. The voice was clean, naked, the words unrhymed and ragged…
The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bonds,
Restless by day and, by night, rants and rages at the stars.
God help the beast in me.
Nate leaned back in the swivel chair and lit a cigar, one more thing that was illegal now. He couldn’t stop thinking about the faces, the black bandanas, the white shirts—out there on the street in front of the murder house, standing atop their old enemies’ trademark—the eyes looking up at him, full of hate. Defiant, intent. But intent on what? Almost every night when his shift ended there’d be one image that stayed in his head, no matter what he did to chase it out, no matter what tricks he employed to try to replace it with something of his own choosing. Tonight the image in his brainpan was the gathering gang, the Twenties. The younger of their number had their arms folded across their chests, the way boys in men’s bodies will do when they’re scared and don’t want to show it. The older ones had their arms at their sides, like jacked-up fighters between rounds, impatient, twitching, single-minded, and not nearly smart enough.
Chapter Four
It was a little after midnight. The rain hadn’t amounted to much, barely enough to wash the lottery tickets and dusty bear shit out of the gutters; still Westwood looked almost fresh, almost clean, as if LA had been given a makeover, maybe even a do-over.
Take two.
Westwood Village was between the Hills of Beverly and the sprawl of the Veterans Cemetery, that expanse of row after row after row of white headstones, identical except for the names of the fallen and the crosses and Stars of David. And a few crescents. On the top edge of the boneyard were even the graves of a dozen Wiccan vets under headstones with pentangles. Westwood was the first edge of The Westside but a place unto itself, almost as if it had a wall around it. LA had become even more sectionalized over time, more feudal, another change that might be blamed on the traffic. The Village was home to the University of California, Los Angeles, which, in the last twenty-five years, had come to look like a sprawling manufacturing plant for some essential, prosaic product. In the 1930s, Westwood was home to the big movie houses, thousand-seat “palaces” with velvet seats and gilded curlicues going crazy across the absurdly high ceilings. Deep carpet made the vast rooms quieter than churches, at least until the picture started, which is what they called a movie then. The big theaters were still there, kept alive for red carpet premieres.
Ava Monica’s office was in a three-story building on the corner of Gayley Avenue and Weyburn Avenue in a brick building that looked as if it were out of another time the day it was built. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk as she walked away from her car, a land-yacht, a fat, bulbous resto-mod 1956 Hudson Hornet with chamois seats and an electric engine. Black. (Or maybe it was dark green. It was hardly ever out in the full sun.) Ava was just coming back to the office to check her messages. Plus, she wasn’t much good at sleeping. Midnight for her was like the middle of the morning for everybody else.
“There’s a man,” the security guard at the desk inside the front door said. “He looked all right and he was crying, so I let him go on up.”
And there he was, sitting in one of the chairs in the hallway outside her office door.
“Hello,” he said when Ava’s clicking heels got close.
“Handsome” was a poor word for what he was, with all he had going on. Even in the dimness Ava could see the steely blue eyes, the salt-and-pepper hair, the cut of his $10,000 silver-gray suit. Just sitting there in the hallway, he was like an ad for something you’ve wanted your whole life, probably in secret. He smiled and stood. He had stopped crying.
“Hello,” Ava said back to him, trying to keep it from sounding like, Hel-lo…
His name was Beck. “I know it’s late,” he said.
“My watch stopped in nineteen fifty-six,” Ava said.
She let the two of them into her office. As she closed the door, the words on the glass office door—“AVA MONICA” and “INVESTIGATIONS”—crawled up his pant leg. She went straight to her desk. And straight to a bottle in the bottom drawer.
“Forgive me,” she said, “I’ve been out on the frontiers of fashion and my throat is a little dry.”
He sat across from her. She poured two drinks, pushed one across the wooden desk.
“It’s real,” Beck said when he’d had a taste.
“Uh-huh,” Ava said, swiveling absently in her wooden swivel chair.
She really hoped he was sitting there before her because he owned a big box store and the boys down on the loading dock were ripping him off and he needed a month or two or three of professional undercover surveillance. With a lot of “meetings”…“updates.”
“I’m looking for someone, a woman,” Beck began, disappointingly.
“No!” Ava said with mock sympathy.
“I don’t know her full name. I don’t know what she does for a living or where she lives, for that matter. She would never tell me. We always just met at places of her choosing. I don’t know where she’s from. I don’t know how old she is. She’s about your height and build—her breasts are a little fuller…”
Ava took a slug of bourbon.
“She’s blonde, very blonde,” Beck said. He stopped. “I’m sorry, is this how it’s done? I’ve never looked for anyone before.”
I bet, Ava thought. “Go on, you’re doing swell,” she said.
“You have to understand something,” he said. “I’m in business, an importer/exporter. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been places most people only dream of. I’m a man of experience. I’ve been loved, and I have loved in return, but I have never experienced what I experienced with Cali.”
“Cali?” She asked him to spell it. He spelled it.
“I have this,” Beck said. “I don’t know if it will help or not.” From his suit pocket he took an elegant women’s high-heeled shoe. Red. He set it on the desk between them.
Ava looked it and then at Beck. “This ‘Cali’ have any wicked stepsisters?”
Beck didn’t get the reference. “Not that I know of,” he said. “She was so beautiful, so pure, so perfect, so much a part of this place. She’d been so long at the beach she even tasted like the sun. And when she laughed…it was magical. She was the purest, most sympathetic and loving soul I’ve ever encountered.”
“Got it.”
“Sorry, it’s just that—”
“It always is. How long have you known her?”
“A week,” Beck said. “An eternity.”
“It would help if you didn’t say things like that,” Ava said.
“Sorry.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“We were on the beach at Malibu three nights ago.”
Ava put her finger to her chin and conjectured, “You had a bottle of wine, a blanket? You watched the moon rise while the warm breezes lifted her hair? Maybe you recited a little verse?”
“Everything but the poetry,” Beck said, hopelessly serious. “That was implicit in the moment.”
“What did I just say?”
“Sorry.”
“So where’d you meet her?”
“On the stree
t. Downtown. Hill and Third. At one eleven on a Wednesday afternoon. The wind blew her hat off. I caught it.”
Ava felt something turn over in her chest, a sweet hurt, a longing, the kind that hooch can’t heal, despite all the advertising. “So what happened?” she said. “How in the world could something so perfect go wrong?”
Again, Beck missed her tone. “We argued,” he said. “I was supposed to leave this morning for Alabama on the Trans-Electro. Montgomery. I wanted her to come with me. I believed we would be together forever. I believe we will be together forever. Present tense. She was sad about something—before we argued, I mean. Maybe I pressed too hard, spoke too honestly, said too much, asked for too much from her. She always seemed…unsettled, restless. We argued and she pulled away from me and—”
Ava was still holding the fancy red shoe. “She wore these to the beach?”
“We had been out to dinner. At The Rings of Saturn. It was her favorite place.”
“What’d you have? I’ve never been there but I’ve heard good things.”
“The mock starfish,” Beck said.
“Mmmm, mock,” Ava said. “Go on. Rings of Saturn. Starfish. Malibu. Sad. Unsettled. Alabama. You argued. She pulled away.”
“She swam into the ocean, crying,” Beck said. “She just kept going.”
Ava set the shoe on her desk, now that she saw where this was headed. Lust only distracts a girl up to a point.
“She just disappeared,” Beck said, looking at his hands. “I swam after her but she was too fast. I waited and searched the shoreline but…”
“Did you go to the cops?”
“I don’t deal with the world that way,” he looked up and said.
“So, if she’s shark bait…pardon me, but what’s the point?” Ava said, “I mean, what do you want me to find out?”
“She’s not dead!” he said and slapped the desk-top. “She’s not dead. I would know. You don’t understand. Between us there was a kind of communication that would preclude any possibility of—”