by Dan Vining
Now there were three would-be Cali-snatchers. When the skinny gunsel saw the big man’s shooter, he dug into his shoulder holster for his piece, going full gangster, shrugging his shoulders as he drew down on him. Then it was Action Man’s turn. He pulled his piece too, but not so smoothly. He was wide-eyed and seemed to realize that the shiny outsized automatic in his hand looked like just another silly accessory to his ridiculous purple outfit.
“This isn’t even loaded!” Action Man said, trying stupidly to make it a threat.
“You’re an idiot!” Ava said behind the wheel. “Why are you even here?”
Action Man said weakly, “Give her up, Ava! This has gone beyond you!”
“He’s here to kill her,” the skinny gunsel said, meaning the big man in the hat. “Let us take her.”
The big man’s shoulders sagged, as if his feelings had been hurt by what the gunsel had said. He just shook his head and lowered his gun.
“Go!” Ava said to the car again.
“Obstruct—”
“Fine!” Ava grabbed the stick herself and shoved it up and mashed the gas. The Hudson lurched backward, ramming into a concrete support.
“Obstruction!” the Hudson said, too late.
“Oh, right…” Ava said, woozy. She’d hit her head on the car door post.
Cali was on the floor on the passenger side, hunkered down.
The big man holstered his gun and took a step forward, peeking over the dash. “Come on, now,” he said to Cali with unlikely tenderness.
Action Man started down into the garage toward the Hudson, acting fearless when he was anything but. “You, get back!” he said to the big man. He mistakenly thought he wasn’t a threat anymore because he’d holstered his gun.
Cali tried to open her door to make a run for it, but the wreck had jammed it. She rolled down the window to climb out.
Action Man didn’t get far. The big man turned away from Cali and the car, rushed him, grabbed a handful of purple, and threw him against the wall. The Bentley driver, who’d decided it was time to wrap this up, came down the ramp and stuck his gun in the big man’s face until he backed up a step.
Action Man got his wind back, found his own gun, and waved it at the big man. “That’s right, back off! It’s loaded! Regardless of what I said before, it is loaded!”
“Point it at him,” the gunsel said to Action Man. “Look unpredictable.”
Action Man tried. The gunsel went to Cali’s side of the Hudson. Cali cowered, scooted across the seat toward Ava.
“T-Bone, no, just leave me alone!” Cali said.
Ava stirred, half out of it. “T-Bone?” she said.
All she saw was a blur, the silk of the butterfly dress being yanked out the passenger-side window.
The gunsel carried Cali toward the Bentley.
“Please, T-Bone, I can’t anymore,” she said.
“Quiet,” the gunsel said. “You’ll be safe at the castle.” He put her in the backseat of the Bentley and got behind the wheel again.
Action Man waved his gun around a bit more and then jumped into the Bentley.
The big man had dropped to one knee, bent over, as if he’d been hit although no one had fired a shot. The gunsel backed up the driveway fast through a fresh cloud of smoke. The big man drew himself up to his full height and stepped up the drive.
He had a real name: Tom Hadley. He watched the Bentley speed away. He turned to look back down into the garage. Ava was climbing out her window. Hadley looked her in the eye. He seemed as if he were about to say something—or, worse, do something—but he didn’t. He turned his back on Ava and walked toward the street.
Ava got out of the Hudson—still wobbly—and went after him.
Hadley was already gone, out of sight or blended into the coursing crowds on the sidewalk. A half block up, the old-fashioned Bentley was attempting an old-fashioned getaway, honking and nudging cars, changing lanes, headed west at ten miles an hour. It would have been cinematically fitting if Cali had been looking out the back window imploringly, but she wasn’t.
She was on the floor in the back seat, her back against the door, still not herself—in more ways than one—thinking about the concept of the lesser of two evils.
Or was it three?
Chapter Twenty
It was Bodie’s gun, a Sig-Sauer P226 9mm. Nate turned it over in his hand. And in his mind. The Sig had been a standard-issue cop gun back in the day. It weighed two and a half pounds loaded. It was no-shine black, black as soot, nothing gun-blue about it. He kicked out a bullet, a jacketed hollow-point. Bodie had hand-loaded his rounds, a cop’s idea of a craft project. Nate fingered it, felt the care with which it had been made, made by his father’s hand in a whole other time when things mattered that didn’t seem to matter anymore. Or maybe it was just a bullet. Maybe Bodie hadn’t really given two shits when he’d “crafted” it, had just cranked out a couple dozen of them in the garage in Sherman Oaks some Saturday when the Dodgers on the TV went five runs down in the second inning and he gave up on them.
Nate was sitting on the edge of the roof of his house, legs hanging over the side, facing Cahuenga Pass, the traffic below, the hills on the other side. The sun was almost down, making the vista in front of him all postcardy, a lovely lie.
“He had a rough night,” the voice on the phone had said. It was eleven in the morning when the call had come and Nate was dead to the world.
“What does that even mean?” he had said.
The woman on the phone could have come right back at him with attitude of her own—smart-ass, hard, biting, or institutionally cold—but what she’d said was, “He was hurting and scared. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat his dinner. He was yelling at Carl. He ate some of his breakfast and he’s asleep now.” She wasn’t giving him the real details and he knew it. The mercy of God must be near, he thought, a line from an old Dylan song. He couldn’t remember which one, a song Bodie liked.
As soon as he’d heard the nurse’s voice, he pictured her, though he couldn’t remember her name. She was the one with the two little boys who played soccer and a husband who might have been their coach. She kept pictures at her station. She was pretty, had brown hair—the kind of woman it was easy to imagine as a girl back in her high school days. But she didn’t look like that now. Now she had kids and a husband and probably a banged-up father of her own (or a father-in-law) that she or somebody like her was watching over through long, bad nights.
Nate dropped the magazine out of the gun, pressed the extra round into place, and loaded it again with his palm. He racked the slide and armed it, then set the gun down beside him on the white gravel of the flat roof.
“Can you see me?” he asked the air.
“I try to picture you and respond accordingly,” the Empower™ therapist said. “Your words paint pictures.” This time the fake doctor was standing—wearing a cream-colored suit and pale blue shirt open at the neck—floating out in front of Nate, suspended over the pass with the red taillights and white headlights of the traffic three hundred feet below him.
“You should be barefoot,” Nate said.
“Why’s that?” Dr. Stone said, tilting his head.
“The taillights under your feet look like coals, embers.”
“Where are we?”
“I’m on the roof of my house. You’re over the one-oh-one freeway, midair. You look like you’re standing on burning coals. Remember that thing where ‘confidence coaches’—or whatever the hell they were called—had people walk across burning coals to learn how to… self-empower?”
The virtual shrink wasn’t programmed for wordplay so he missed the pun, the sarcasm. “Wait a minute…” he said, thinking. He blinked twice. “Yes, fire-walking! In the low two thousands. What do you think made your mind click on that, Nathaniel?”
Nate ignored the question.
/> “Are you back on active duty?” the therapist said after five seconds.
“Never left.”
“I thought, following an on-duty fatality you took some time away to reflect and heal.”
“You need an update, Doc. That whole suspended-with-pay thing went out ten years ago. Now we just put on a clean shirt, pull up our socks, reload, and salute. Actually, we reload first.”
“I see,” Jeffrey Stone said.
“But not literally,” Nate said. He picked up the Sig again. “You can’t literally see me.”
“No. Unfortunately. They’re working on it.”
Nate lifted the pistol, pointed it casually at the sky, straight up. “Picture this. I have a gun in my hand. I’m sitting out here on my roof with a gun in my hand, bare feet over the side, like I was on a dock in Key West. What do you think about that?”
“Why do you have a gun in your hand?”
“To a cop, a gun’s like a socket wrench.”
“But you mentioned it.”
“I woke up early this morning. I was standing at the sink in my bathroom, looking at my handsome self in the mirror, and the thought came to me: Tonight you’re going to want to take a backup gun. Just like that. So I got it out of my underwear drawer, cleaned it, loaded it, now here it is in my hand, ready for whatever the night brings. What do call that, a premonition? Or Generalized Anxiety Disorder?”
“Do you find yourself going up onto your roof to sit alone often?”
“You mean more often than before I almost got myself blown up in a Salvadoran restaurant kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“No, I’ve always been a moody bastard. You can ask my ex-wife.”
“You said in our third session that you’d never been married.”
“Pamela Anderson,” Nate said. “It didn’t last all that long. Sweet girl. Shy.”
Dr. Stone went to the cloud again. After a moment, he smiled.
Nate hated that smile, in all of its permutations. “Why do you exist?” he said, to bring the robo-shrink back to earth.
“I’m sorry?”
“Why am I not sitting in an office with a human being in front of me?”
The program hesitated, almost as if it had feelings and they were hurt.
“Forget it,” Nate said. He didn’t like hurting anything’s feelings. He and Bodie had had an old classic Chevy truck they were restoring and hot-rodding before Bodie got sick. He’d thrown a tool at the engine and called it a piece of shit! and felt bad for a week.
“No, I was formatting…formulating an answer.”
Nate waited. Some of the pinkish/yellowish light went out of the sky, turning to night. The traffic below went to full stall.
“The counselors were getting burned out,” Dr. Stone said, “exposed as they were to so much very specific human pain. As the city became more dangerous—more deadly—the caseload increased exponentially, overwhelming the office and the men and women who worked there.”
“The shrinks started offing themselves.”
“Yes, some of them. But that’s always been true. It’s a high-stress occupation. So much human pain.”
“Jeffrey, you’ll tell me if you’re feeling a little blue, won’t you?” Nate said.
The therapist smiled that smile again and ran a hand through his hair, that way models do in commercials when they want to appear complimented. Or hide their unshakeable self-confidence.
Nate took off the Dodger cap with the projector in the brim and sent it spinning over the Cahuenga Pass, like a Frisbee.
www
Gunmen on both sides, Incas and Twenties—all told, close to fifty of them—were shooting up the funeral, standing right out in the middle of the street, most of them with a gun in each hand just as they’d seen in the movies they’d grown up on.
“That’s for Samuel,” one Twenty said, standing over an Inca, shooting him in the face.
“And this is for Nathan,” another Twenty said, firing two shots at the wide eyes of another Inca who’d slipped in the blood and fallen.
It was a night service though the whole street scene was lit like noon, lit like an arena. The funeral had only just started. The gangbangers weren’t waiting for the solemnities inside to end and paid no mind to the swarming Crows overhead or the CROs and gang cops on their loudspeakers telling them to break it up. The curtain had gone up when the double-wide pine box came out of the back of the black MBZ hearse—on an air-gurney that made it look like it was floating—and sailed all by its lonesome up the steps into the old brick church. The pallbearers—bearing nothing, standing in two lines, heads bowed—flinched with each shot. The screenplay had been written, at least the first act, and they were all caught up in the enveloping action: just pulling trigger, ducking and diving, shuckin’ and jivin’, happy to be bit players, extras, stuntmen. The shooters on both sides seemed surprised when their mags went empty and they had to jam in another. (Only the good guys run out of bullets in the movies and they were all bad guys.) Those who caught a round looked as if they knew it wasn’t real, just a scene. Even the dead.
The Gang Unit cops watched the clash from their oversized helo, above it all. Whitey looked down out the open hatch, smiling dumbly, as if he were watching one of his games on his dub player. Il Cho was newer to all this and was anxious, gripping a handhold over his head, his heart racing.
“It’s hard to tell ’em apart from up here,” Whitey shouted over the sound of the whipped wind. “I wish they’d go back to colored bandanas or something. Hoodies. Remember when they all wore hoodies?”
“Take us up higher,” Il Cho yelled to the pilot, gesturing with a thumb. A gunship was coming in, crossing underneath, shooting out cans of dispersal gas, what the cops called Vitamin D.
“Shit,” Whitey said, “it was just getting good.”
Down below, an Inca snatched up one of the canisters spewing out the yellow gas and held it up to his nose and breathed it in, grinning up at the sky like crazy. Whitey dug it.
Nate was inside the church in a black suit and tie, sitting at the outside end of the third row, not hiding but also trying not to shove anything in their faces. There were not a lot of Caucasians there. In fact, not a lot of anybodies. Most of the pews were empty, friends and even family scared off, sending their condolences electronically or with plastic flowers. Nix and Madison were in a row near the back. Standing against the side wall was one of the twitchy men who’d been on the velvet couch at Wallace’s house.
Derrick and Jewel Wallace were in the front pew to the right of the aisle, staring straight ahead. So far the purple-robed preacher hadn’t said a word. Pastor Lamb had just stood there up front through ten minutes of recorded music, street music, apparently the boys’ favorite tunes: brash, assaultive, joyless unlove songs that—at least for Nate—went at least a little way toward explaining how this could have happened. Nate didn’t exactly know why he was there. Or why he’d made No-Name stay on the roof two whole blocks over where he’d parked the Crow. If there was ever an occasion a CRO needed a gunner at his side, this was it. The walls and doors couldn’t keep out the gunfire and the shouts and cries from the street.
And then the pastor spoke. He began the service with a question.
What is Man that You are mindful of him
And the Son of Man that you carest for him?
The text was from the Bible somewhere, but the Black minister looked up at the ceiling and spoke the question as if it were his question, as if it had kept him up last night. He said it again, the whole thing, “What is Man…?” He spoke the words with a weariness that didn’t seem theatrical. Then he lowered his gaze and looked at the assembled, went from face to face. He picked out a young man—a stranger he’d never seen in his church—and spoke directly to him, as if it were just the two of them. It was a common preacher’s trick. “Some people believe
Man is little more than an animal,” he said to the young man. “And there are those others who would lift Man almost to the position of a god. What is Man? What is Man?”
The singled-out, apparently unchurched young fellow shifted in his seat, wondering if he was supposed to offer an answer. Mercifully, the pastor looked up from him and spoke again to everyone assembled. “On a good day, family, I see both points of view,” he said, “see that there are depths in Man that go down to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, as the Holy Writ says. But that is on a good day. A good day. On a day like today, I don’t know. Can we all admit that, today, we don’t know?” A few amens.
There was a crack! Nate flinched, then turned. A shot from the street had punched a hole in the stained glass window up over the empty choir loft in the back of the sanctuary. No one seemed surprised, and only a few others turned to look. In a movie—or a child’s poem—the slug would have drilled a fresh hole in one of Jesus’s outstretched hands or bagged the dove over his head with the olive branch in its beak. But here it was just a random shot and a random hole, a black dot, night sky where blue glass sky had been.
Wallace turned to look up at the stained glass window, then looked forward again. Pastor Lamb spoke a next line.
“Stop,” Wallace said.
The reverend looked at him, nodding for a good ten seconds. He then stepped down to Jewel and Derrick Wallace and put a hand on each of their shoulders and said something between their two faces. Only Jewel cried. Wallace just nodded, almost impatiently, and then led his wife toward a side door with an arm around her waist.
Everyone stood. No one seemed surprised by the way it had ended.
Nate left by the same side door Wallace had used, not that he was going after him.
He took the back way down the alleys over to where he’d parked the bird and managed to see not one body. No-Name seemed surprised to see him walking up, coming out of all that chaos on the street, alive and all, unshot.