by Dan Vining
“You’re gonna freak,” he said enthusiastically, without looking up, loading the syringe.
“No, I’m not,” Ava said, turning away.
As he plunged in the big needle, the EMT said to Ava’s back, “You know where we’re taking her, right? The Garden of Allah. They’ll watch her a few days. It’s for her sake. Some of them have a little trouble believing it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ava said. She made it out the door without looking either one of the coronettes in the eye. Or looking in the mirror in the foyer.
Cold boot.
www
As Ava drove away, the coroner’s helo-hearse lifted off on the roof behind her and slid north, catching an edge of dawn light on its belly. She made it a half block before she encountered Action Man, arriving too late in an electric Jag.
Chapter Eight
Twin chain-link fences ringed the place, twelve feet high. The day was so clear and bright the curled razor-wire atop them looked like jewelry. Cheap jewelry. Lompoc Prison was about sixty miles on up the coast from Santa Barbara, a quarter of the way to San Francisco, off California 1. It was a prison, not a correctional institution, as these facilities had been called in the touchy-feely years when they’d painted the cages calming colors and pretended they were engaged in taming the beasts within. Prison sounded more brutal, and brutality had become useful again. The cons said “Lompoc” was the Chumash word for “screwed,” as in, You’re Lompocked now, friend. Still, it was a medium security lockup, one of the safer, easier places to do time, and must have seemed to some of them kinder than home.
A man walked out the front door, free, or at least not in prison anymore. He was Black, in his forties, wore crisp get-out clothes and too-white sneakers. Under his arm was a package that looked like a present, except the wrapping paper was grocery-sack brown. In his left hand, unwrapped, was a white Bible the size of a cake box. The hem of the new khakis broke over the heels in a way that made him look shorter than he was. He was right at six foot, lean but not muscled up. He hadn’t been the kind of convict who’d bulked up in prison, who lifted weights obsessively or ran wind sprints in that frantic, all-out way that must give pause to the guards. He hadn’t put on weight or lost weight. He’d used up his hours on the yard walking, alone, trying to find peace, staying to himself, internal. Or maybe plotting revenge, all up in himself. His sentence had been like four years of a silent retreat, only here the monks had rifles.
He was Derrick Wallace—“Zap,” some of them called him, or had in his life before.
The sky was blue and blank and wall to wall in a way that would’ve stirred the soul of even the freest man, who’d never been caged, but as Wallace walked across the parking lot he showed no emotion. He didn’t look back, didn’t look up at the sky, didn’t take a deep breath with his arms outstretched. He didn’t smile, didn’t cry. He just walked, with a steady stride that didn’t say anything, even if you knew him. Had he changed? He was clean-shaven, as before. He’d come in without a tattoo on his body, and he was leaving the same way. He had reading glasses now, in the shirt pocket. The most that could be said about any change to his exterior self over those four years plus six days—he had made parole because of overcrowding—was that his cropped hair had gone gray at the temples.
It was a Thursday. The big visitor parking lot was mostly empty, just a few dinky Federals and two or three real cars. A candy-apple red 2020 Cadillac was parked hogging the single patch of shade at the edge of the lot. The Cadillac started up politely and glided toward Wallace. An ugly skin-and-bones gangster, another Black, slouched behind the wheel, tipped to one side that way they do. Wallace kept walking, ignored the sparkly Caddy as it rolled up behind him, tailing him at one mile an hour. He could hear the music from the car. As if he hadn’t gotten enough of that noise inside. At the far edge of the lot another car waited, a ten-year-old silver Lexus sedan with the windows down, a woman behind the wheel staring straight ahead. Wallace kept walking toward it, toward the second car.
But then he stopped. He walked back to the Caddy. The gangster driver braked, smiled. He had a cigarette in his hand out the window.
“Zap,” the man said.
“What were you thinking,” Wallace put his eyes on him and said, “coming up here in this?”
“Nix thought—”
“Nix. You got a ‘ho and a forty in the back for me too?”
The gangster was about to offer a literal answer to the rhetorical question but before he could, Wallace turned his back on him and went on toward the Lexus. The skinny, confused driver watched him go with no idea what to do. He had sense enough not to follow him.
Wallace opened the passenger side door of the Lexus and tossed the paper-wrapped package and the Bible into the backseat. The way he did it made both the package and the holy book seem incidental, like props some stage director had handed him just before he walked out on stage. He sat on the passenger side. He was wound too tight to talk. He tried to slow his breathing. Without looking at the woman behind the wheel, he untied the prison-issue sneakers and tossed them out his window. He pulled off the cheap white socks. A pair of worn, broken-in loafers waited on the floor mat in front of him. He slipped them onto his bare feet.
“Sorry,” he said to the woman behind the wheel and looked at her for the first time.
She was the mother of the dead twin boys. Her name was Jewel.
When he saw her face, he said, “What?”
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Nate woke up that afternoon, 2:30 p.m. With the felt blackout drapes it might as well have been four in the morning. The house was quiet in that way that houses can be for those who live alone long-term, unpeacefully quiet, as if the Cosmos is about to lean close and tell you that thing it keeps meaning to tell you, that thing you’re pretty sure you don’t want to know. He opened his eyes but didn’t lift his head off the pillow. For the thousandth “morning,” he stared up at brown water stain in the corner of the ceiling. It had been there when he’d bought the place, and it hadn’t spread, so he hadn’t done anything about it other than fixate on it every time he woke up. It was like an old friend now. Or nemesis. Some days he thought the shape looked like Florida, all the way down to the dribble of The Keys. Key West. Was there any place that could be farther away from this, from the here and now, LA? As snapshots of Key West express-trained through his head, he realized he hadn’t been out of town in a year. For a second or two he wished he had someone to go somewhere with—go back to The Keys with—someone to tell that story to about the sea turtle trying to make its way up onto the public beach crowded with drunks at 3:00 a.m. to lay her eggs. Someone to share this glass box of a house with, to wake up to, someone to watch cross the room through half-open eyes, someone elsewhere in the house in the morning making predictable, familiar, reassuring noise, brewing something or cleaning up, or even pissing in the bathroom.
But then the idea evaporated, as most ideas do, and Nate got up. He tapped a switch on the floor beside the nightstand and the drapes opened. The wall behind the bed was floor-to-ceiling glass. He walked toward his reflection. High white cottony clouds painted a heaven behind the old rugged cross on the hilltop across Cahuenga Pass. The 101 freeway wasn’t moving, not a bit. At two in the afternoon on a Thursday. He looked south, to the right. A quarter mile this side of the Sunset Boulevard off-ramp, a truck was wheels up and burning atop a couple of Feds, with a pair of Crows circling. He could feel the cops’ boredom from here, could see it in the way they flew. A Fire Department tanker was flying in from the south, redder than red.
Nate turned his back on the catastrophe and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, went into the shower, and came out of the shower in two minutes, two seconds before the miser valve shut it off. He dried his face with a towel, ran a comb through his hair. He went into the kitchen, slid a breakfast tray into the oven and ate a cold hotdog from the fridge while he waited for it. The cof
fee machine sighed a tiny cloud of steam.
The Wallace twins were looking down on him from the screen on the wall in the dining room. Headshots, their yearbook video from middle school. Seven dead in and around the house on South St. Andrews Place and one more at King Memorial, a big enough number to make it into heavy rotation on the local news. The News. That meant something…new now. Newspapers were no more. There was nothing black and white waiting on your doorstep each morning to tell you what was what, what was important in some generalized way. How could they know? You knew what was important, important to you. Now the news was targeted at you, like almost everything else shooting through the air. Your wants, your needs, even the wants and needs you didn’t know you had until they told you. The news feed came to your screens endlessly, if you wanted it that way.
There were ten News Zones. Someone or something somewhere determined what you wanted to hear about and gave it to you, according to your priorities.
The News Zones…
1. Within a mile of where you are
2. Within ten miles of where you are
3. Your city
4. Your county
5. You subregion
6. Your state
7. Your region
8. Your country
9. Your continent
10. The world
Most days, Nate checked the screen when he woke up, and, if his official departmental picture wasn’t on it, he went on about his business.
He tapped the vid-phone on the counter beside the toaster and said a name out loud, and after a second a face appeared on the screen. It was a tough face, an old, Brown, acne-scarred face. They could fix those scars now—the government even paid for it, citizen or not—so the way this one looked said this was the way he wanted to look. It was the face of a Mexican, a certified national, which meant he could have gone back to Mexico with all the others if he wanted. For some reason, for him it made sense to stay in LA, with his face just exactly the way it was.
“Damn, you naked?” Johnny Santo asked.
Nate looked down. “I have on white socks,” he said.
“It’s two thirty, Cole.”
“I work nights. Like you.” He poured the coffee into a clear glass cup. He took a sip, then blew little waves across the surface to cool it. “Where do you get those shirts?” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Where do you get those shirts?”
“Downtown,” Santo said, not sure that Nate was mocking him.
“I’m going to get me one of those,” Nate said. On the front of Santo’s polyester shirt was a rendering of a Mexican man with a mustache in a white shirt and necktie. “Jesus Malverde, right?” Nate said.
“You know it,” Santo said. “The Saint.”
“You think Jesus Malverde watches over cops too, or just narco bandits?”
“Careful, man.”
Nate drank about half the coffee, slowly.
“I guess I know what you want,” Santo said, squirmy. “I don’t know nothing about it.”
“Yeah, but you know what it is.”
“The house in South Central. Last night. Shoot ’em up.”
“I thought that kind of gang shit didn’t happen anymore.”
“Everybody’s talking about it, on the whatchacallit, grapevine,” Santo said and stopped, trying to leave it at that. Wherever he was, he kept looking around, as if someone might hear him.
“I should probably be talking to somebody who knows something,” Nate said, turning his back on Santo, something he’d never do if the two were in the same room. Or in an alleyway.
“Lompoc,” Santo said. “Somebody getting out. Today. It has something to do with that.”
Nate looked him in the cold, pixelated eye. “Who?”
“Somebody getting out.”
“Who?”
“Somebody big.”
“I should pay you by the word. Now we’re up to, what, eight dollars?”
“Zap Wallace.” Another nervous look over his shoulder and the screen went white. No bye, nothing.
And just as the huevos rancheros dinged and slid out of the oven.
“Johnny Santo!” Nate said, just because he liked the sound of it.
Chapter Nine
Eucalyptus trees always made Nate think of scrolls, the way the bark peeled off in curling sheets, like trees made out of parchment. Whenever LA went into a hard drought, like now, the already dry eucalyptuses were the first things to fall apart. But somehow they were still there when it was over. They were tall, taller than any other trees in LA, usually planted in windbreak rows—framing what once had been a farm or a walnut orchard, or hiding a freeway or fencing off Dodger Stadium—and permanently bent by any prevailing winds. They were all over the city. They dug in easily and grew fast. Government landscape regulators hated them because they weren’t indigenous, as if anybody in California had any right to rag about that anymore. Or even notice. Gardeners hated them because they made a hellacious mess. They always looked as if they’d had a fight with something in the night. When it got really dry and the Santa Ana winds came calling, branches broke off, branches as big around as trash barrels, and smashed parked cars. The leaves were pale green, dusty, long, and pointed at both ends like some kind of Aboriginal throwing-knives. And eucalyptus trees had a strong, primitive smell, especially when it was raining. Everybody complained about it. A famous writer said that eucalyptus trees “had that tom-cat smell.” But Nate liked the way they smelled. He didn’t have any idea how to describe it, but he liked it. He suspected the trees would be left long after all the people were gone. They smelled like that.
He wished he’d brought a cigar. It would have given him an excuse for dawdling like this on an iron bench, under the eucalyptus trees, looking across the grass at Building D of the Police Sunset Home. He’d been hanging out—procrastinating—a half hour already. His Crow was parked out on the far end of the nearly empty lot. The “ranch-style” cop retirement home and convalescent hospital were across the street from Blue Field, the cop cemetery. When an LA cop died, they cleared the road out front for a pokey motorcade: a hearse, a dozen vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a V of Crows overhead. And a half mile of “brothers in blue” on foot delivering “one of our own” to “that final shift.” Most of the marching cops would rather think about the cemetery than the rest home so they tended to keep their eyes straight ahead as the procession went by.
A pair of orderlies had walked past Nate’s bench a couple of times and a few others like himself, visiting family members, or delaying it, walking in circles. Or collecting themselves after the visit, before they got behind the wheel. Some of them, the other sons and daughters and wives of cops, brought flowers, as if a beat-up old cop wanted a dying purple hydrangea to stare at. Or sometimes family or friends smuggled in something greasy and beloved out of the past—a Philly cheesesteak, a Tommy burger, or a bucket of tamales—contraband, playing a childish game they hoped said I love you in some way they couldn’t say otherwise. Or was it I’m sorry? Nate was almost always empty-handed.
The wind rattled the leaves over his head. He got up.
The floor nurse lifted her head as Nate came toward her down the hallway. She started to say something, give a report, but apparently the look on his face or the way he walked made her think better of it.
“Hey,” Nate said to her, self-conscious about always being such a sullen crank when he came to call. She smiled, almost certainly used to about everything by now.
Nate assumed his father would be asleep. It was late afternoon and hot. Maybe that was why he’d hung out on the bench under the eucalyptuses, hoping the old man would be asleep. But Bodie Cole was awake. He’d gotten himself out of bed and into a metal chair by the window. He never asked the nurses and orderlies for help. He was sitting there with his back
to the doorway. Nate tried figure the angle of the view out the window, wondering if his father had seen him on the bench, running out the clock.
Nate had the rush of thoughts and feelings he always had at first sight of his father, standing at this spot. Who is that? Did I get the wrong room? That’s my father. How could it be that he’s still alive in 2025? Then the second wave would come right away, kinder, more forgiving. He looks all right. This is hard because I love him so much. This is all a part of living and dying. I’m a good son. And then there was the third thought-wave, as dark as dark gets. I’m never going to end up that way, I swear to God I won’t. It’s why God made guns.
Bodie turned his head, saw Nate. He pushed against the wall with a bare blue foot to move his chair back. His toenails needed cutting. “Hey, Boy Wonder,” he said.
“Hey, Pop.”
Then there was silence. Same as it ever was.
Nate never knew where to sit when he came to visit. There were two of the metal chairs, but he never wanted to even touch them. He wasn’t about to sit on the bed. That would be somebody else’s son. He stayed where he was, standing in the doorway.
“You look like you just woke up,” Bodie said.
“I did.”
“You’re limping. I heard you coming down the hall.”
“I got shot in the leg. How’s Carl doing?” Nate said.
Bodie had a roommate: another retired cop, dead to the world in a cranked-flat bed, needing a shave, half naked in open pajamas, skinny as King Tut. Carl Karlich was in his late nineties, a grizzled Westerner, a for-real lawman who’d come down to Los Angeles and the LAPD from Bass Lake in the High Sierra when he was forty, in 1967. Nate could smell the old timer’s breath and body odor from here. Every part of these visits had become so familiar.
“They’re closing in on him,” Bodie said. “It’s getting funny.” He put on a codger voice, closed his eyes, rocked his head back and forth like a man in the middle of a nightmare, “No, Bart! Oh God, no! They’re there! They came back, the whole gang! Behind the bank! Where’s my shotgun? Gimme my shotgun!”