by Dan Vining
Chapter Twenty-One
It was three in the morning in the Fashion District, or what had been the Fashion District. Nate had landed as close as he could without getting himself and No-Name killed and the Crow stripped for parts. Now the two were wading into the deep dark of a “neighborhood” they called the TMZ (for a reason lost along the way), a half block of hollowed-out buildings east and south of Center City, down where LA’s rag trade had been. It was a nasty zone. Down here, cops and even firefighters went in, didn’t come out. Nate’s pulse was racing: three in the morning on a weekday, everything creepy quiet. A perfectly good night to die. No-Name was walking point, clear-focused all around, and had the shotgun off his shoulder, close at hand.
“I don’t think we’ll get shot,” Nate said to his gunner’s back. “I doubt there are many guns down here.”
“I’d guess spears and clubs,” No-Name said.
Nate was about that close to asking the kid what his name was. They were three blocks in and still hadn’t seen a soul, which was not as comforting a thing as it might seem. Then, ten feet ahead, what looked like a pile of trash moved. Two human beings, sleeping or… something. No-Name drew down on them. They jumped up and scurried into a bombed-out building through a doorway with no door. A beat-up sign said:
American Apparel
Squatters’ rights had made the West. It had made California, sure enough made LA. The history of the West was the history of generations of good people who just wanted to live in peace…on somebody else’s land. In this case, the squatters had taken over the bombed-out shell of the Fashion District, dug in, created the TMZ. But those verbs were too strong, wrong. What they’d done was more passive-aggressive than any commonly recognized form of taking over or digging in or creating. The squatters knew squat about intentionality. It had long since been beaten out of them by circumstances. Or drained out of them by their own weaknesses. At first—during some particularly rough patch in the local economy—it had just been a few transients creeping south from Skid Row to the TMZ, looking for empty and stopping when they found it. This was five or six years ago, around 2020. Then a few more came. A month later there were too many to count, not that anybody had any inclination to count them. Toward what end? Up on Skid Row the people living on the street had their do-gooders ministering to them, but down here there weren’t any do-gooders, official or unofficial.
The whole place stayed dark inside and out, somehow even at noon on the brightest, hottest summer day. At night, there might be cook-fires, but of course there were no streetlights. If there had been streetlights, the squatters would have smashed them out. They wanted it dark. Everything was dirty, everyone was dirty. It was hard to tell the women from the men. There were no children. How could there be? Even feral dogs trotted three blocks south to avoid going through the TMZ, picking up the pace and looking back over their haunches until they were past it. The cops took their cue from the dogs.
A rock or chunk of concrete came at them out of the night, just missing Nate’s head. No-Name brought up his shotgun again but maintained his trigger discipline.
“We could come back tomorrow,” Nate said.
But they didn’t turn back. CROs wore helmets with brilliant lights mounted fore-and-aft, mini-NightSuns to be used as needed. Nate tapped the switch on the side of his helmet for the forward-looking spot. At the flare of light, No-Name jumped. It was like tossing a phosphorus grenade out in front of them.
“Sorry,” Nate said.
No-Name lit up his high beams too. His lights were on his shoulders, perched like ravens.
They went another block, then stopped to figure out where they were. A black bear loped across twenty feet in front them. In the moment, it didn’t get much of a response from either man. It was just a moving shadow with red eyes.
Ahead was a six-story building with a big N painted on the side, up high, high enough to have been some kind of advertising from the fashionable past.
“There,” Nate said.
An hour ago, after the funeral, they’d been sent out on a run to Chinatown: a family of eight arguing in a one-room apartment. Even with the CodeBox translator clipped onto the strap over Nate’s shoulder, twenty minutes on site didn’t get him any closer to figuring out what was what, who was who. Much less who was right, if that even mattered. When they’d gotten back to the Crow, there was a message waiting, floating in the air in the cockpit.
It was Johnny Santo, the CI.
“Hola!” Nate had said, though it was a recorded message.
“I got something for you,” Santo had said. He kept looking over his shoulder, as before on the screen in Nate’s kitchen, as if he were about to be busted for talking to a cop. “Down in the TMZ, top of the building with the N on it. Tell me when you think you can be there and I’ll be there. The N Building, the roof, N like nada. Don’t fly in. Tonight. Tell me if you can’t make it. It’s important.”
Nate called Santo back. No answer. He left him a message and said he was on the way.
When they were at the base of the N building, at the foot of the stairs, No-Name said, “You want me to go up with you?”
“Well, yeah,” Nate said.
A dirty child, three or four, wearing just a pair of shorts but no shoes, stepped into the doorway in front of them. So maybe there were kids in the TMZ. A hand jerked the boy (or girl) back into the shadows. The kid had sad, tired, dirty blue-gray eyes Nate would remember later.
“Turn off the spots,” Nate said.
They went dark, waited a second for their eyes to adjust, then started up the stair-steps, feeling their way with their hands on the wall, No-Name in front. The shell of the building was brick but the stairs were iron, mounted onto the wall and fairly solid. The staircase had likely been the fire escape in the old days. The elevators would have been in the middle of the building, taking fashion designers and models and executives up and down—never moving fast enough for them—as they prattled on about things that must have seemed very important in the moment.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” Nate said to No-Name.
No-Name let Nate go ahead of him. The gunner looked back down the dark steps behind them, thinking he’d heard something. He had.
Nate had Bodie’s Sig in hand. “Just so you know,” he said, “for future use, this is the kind of place where a snitch wants to meet when he’s going kill you.”
“Yes, sir,” No-Name said.
They came out onto the roof but found it only marginally lighter. As far as they could tell, Johnny Santo wasn’t there. There was sound, a footfall on gravel. No-Name’s jitter-meter was redlining.
“It’s all right, be cool,” Nate said, clicking on a pencil-size red-lens flashlight.
He found them: a family—a mother and a father, two little kids—huddled next to a cardboard tent across the roof, trying to decide whether to run or when. The mother had her hand across the girl’s mouth to keep her from coughing and giving them away.
“It’s OK,” Nate said to them. “We’re the police.”
The mother took away her hand and the little girl coughed violently, from deep in the chest, sounding like a sick old man who’d smoked Lucky Strikes his whole life.
“Go on, go. You don’t want to be here right now.” Nate used the sweep of his flashlight to show them the way to go. The family gathered up what few things they had and abandoned their pitiful home. They only went a few feet before they stepped up onto the parapet of the roof. For a second, Nate had the horrible thought that they were all going to jump off, but then he saw that there was a wooden plank bridge over to the next building. The family scurried over, even the boy, four or five, whose father waited for him to cross before bringing up the rear. They were Whites, more pairs of blue eyes shining out of dirty faces. The boy looked back across the black chasm between the buildings, right at Nate, as if he wanted him to acknowledge something tha
t way kids do.
Was it the towhead who’d hugged his leg up from the Goodwill Store?
The world lit up. NightSun, the light from on high, the light of Authority. God when God has gone home, punched out. A Crow was landing. Nate wasn’t used to this point of view, being on the ground with a lit-up bird coming down on top of him, and he couldn’t help but have the standard reaction: shock and then anger. Something about a Crow made you want to shoot at it. But then the light bouncing up off the roof illuminated the face of the cop/pilot—a CRO named Tucker—a friend, a veteran with twenty years in the air. He wiggled his fingers in greeting, turned off the fireball, and descended blind the last ten feet.
As the helo settled, the hatches came up and it was Il Cho who got out of the gunner’s perch. Tucker, who apparently already knew more than he wanted to know about whatever this was, stayed in the bird.
“Hey,” Nate said as Cho walked toward him, as the rotors slowed and the wind subsided. He had already holstered Bodie’s pistol. “What are you doing here?”
“What’s your gunner’s name?” Cho said, before anything else.
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “Why?”
“Could he go sit in the bird with Tucker?”
Nate looked at No-Name and pointed with his thumb at the Crow.
www
The short version from Il Cho was: Whitey was up to no good.
“So what else is new?” Nate said.
“He’s working something with this Twenties/Incas thing. I don’t know what it is but he’s right in the middle of it, cheering it on.”
Nate said, “I just figured he was breaking windows.”
“What do you mean?” Cho said. He wasn’t much on metaphors.
“A guy owns a plate glass business. Business is off, so he sends his son out at midnight with a pellet gun.”
“It’s more than that,” Cho said. “Something big, real money.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something about Mexico.”
Tucker had cut all the Crow’s lights except a blue-tone overhead in the cockpit. Cho kept looking around. He couldn’t see much of anything. What light there was ended before the edge, the parapet.
Cho was all kinds of anxious. “I won’t go to Internal Affairs,” was the next thing he said.
“Did they make you do that Empower™ thing?” Nate asked.
“This is serious,” Cho said, looking Nate in the eye. “It got Juan Carlos killed, almost got you killed. I had to tell somebody.”
“Who sent you to the Salvadoran restaurant?”
“Nobody.”
“I thought you said you got a ten-twenty on the Inca kid with the cross on his cheek from one of your CIs.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe it was Whitey who said it.”
“I came into work and Whitey was already suited up and getting Juan Carlos all jacked about it,” Cho said. “Then we were in the air. Whitey and JC went into the restaurant to check it out. JC apparently right away saw the Inca kid in the kitchen, through the little window, just went for it. I wasn’t there. Whitey said he told Juan Carlos to wait for backup.”
“You understand that Whitey knows everything you’re thinking, right? He’s been at this a long time. I guarantee he’s ten steps ahead of you.”
“I don’t think so,” Cho said.
“Watch your ass is all I’m saying.”
Nate looked over at the Crow. Tucker was reading a paperback in the blue light. “Why’d you want to meet down here, in the kill zone? We could have met out at the beach or something, had a fish taco.”
“Johnny Santo said you picked the place.”
“What?”
“When I met up with him to pay him off for the bridge tip, I told him I wanted to see you about something, private, away from everybody, and would he set it up. Whitey was ten feet away. Johnny called back a half hour later, said you said meet here.”
“You think Johnny didn’t turn right around and call Whitey?”
Cho got a look his face. He hadn’t been at this all that long.
“Forget it,” Nate said. “I’m like you, so trusting of people.”
“Shit, look out,” Cho said, and jumped back a step and went for his gun.
Nate spun, the Sig leaping into his hand. In the same moment, the hatch came up on the Crow and No-Name jumped down, landing with his feet apart, the stubby shotgun already in hand.
Squatters. Ten or twelve of them, ragged and dirty, coming across the roof, coming up from below. Tucker reacted, flipped on the Crow’s side-floods, lit up the rooftop, over-lit the scene, as if the rooftop were a stage in a no-budget little theater somewhere, a shabby local production of Les Miserables. The raggedy squatters were slow-moving. They were bunched up, all looked alike. Some of them had clubs, two-by-fours, or baseball bats. And they weren’t all men. They were all White, except for one young Black and what looked to be his son. Another half dozen of them followed the first wave, spilling up out of the staircase.
“Is it now?” they started saying, first one of the ones in front, then the others. “Is it now?” They were like the creepy chorus in the same bad play.
Now more of them were coming from the other side of the roof, crawling on all fours over the plank bridge from the adjacent building, including the blue-eyed family that had fled just minutes ago.
“Check your six!” Nate yelled.
No-Name turned and saw the second flank.
Nate raised the Sig over his head. “Get back!” he said.
“Tell us. Is it now?” They kept coming on both flanks. No-Name fired a shotgun round into the air. They kept coming forward.
Tucker cranked up the Crow, started the blades turning, panic preflight.
“Come on, get in!” No-Name ordered Nate and Cho.
The cops dashed to the two-man helo, intending to make a four-man helo. Il Cho, who wasn’t a small man, climbed up into the raised gunner’s seat while Nate jumped in beside Tucker up front, practically sat in his lap. The Crow was already rising.
No-Name jumped onto the skid. The starboard-side back hatch was still up.
“Get in,” Nate said.
No-Name shook his head, disobeyed the order, stayed on the skid as the squatters swarmed forward. The Crow was six feet off the deck when one squatter jumped and seized hold of the skid under No-Name’s feet. No-Name kicked the man away with a boot to the face. The man fell away but another squatter jumped and grabbed hold of the skid where the other man had been.
“Let go!” No-Name hollered at the hitcher.
Another man jumped and wrapped his arms around the first squatter’s waist, piggybacking. The engines strained. The helo wasn’t rising any higher. The Crow wasn’t made for this—three men in the cockpit and a gunner on the skid—and it certainly wasn’t made to lift two hangers-on. The bird drooped to one side, seconds away from crashing. No-Name tilted down and shoved the shotgun against the shoulder of the closest man and fired. The squatter fell away, his face frozen into a nightmare look, leaving his hand and arm behind. It took a second for the squatter’s fingers to let go of the skid. With the weight off, the Crow rose, fast. The piggybacking second squatter landed hard on his back on the roof, his arms still around the waist of the now one-armed man.
Tucker clicked on his NightSun. The other squatters threw up their hands to shield their eyes and fell back, and the helo rose, up and out of there.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Less Les Mis, more Grapes of Wrath.
The day was done, gone, down to ash. Nate was laid out in a chair in his living room, a bottle of water in his hand, staring at the wall, a projected image there. It was a black-and-white still, floor to ceiling and as wide as the room. It captured a moment in time, out of the far past, an unstriped two-lane highway, a barbe
d-wire fence alongside it, a black car cresting a low hill. A 1934 Dodge Deluxe Sedan, if Nate had it right. Time was, Nate knew the shapes and names of cars, the way some other kid knew his dinosaurs or his ballplayers and stats. New cars, old cars, bold cars of the future flying off the pages of Popular Mechanics. This was when he was eleven or twelve, dreaming of the day he could get behind the wheel and break free. The Dodge looked to be running wide open—blurry—as if just barely escaping the inescapable thing behind it, a roiling black wave, blacker than either the car or the road, a dust storm a thousand feet high.
The picture had a name: Doomsday, Texas Panhandle, 1936.
Suitable hard-times music—gut-bucket blues and Depression-era jazz and folk tunes—played in the background, from the other room, tonight transmitted out onto the airwaves without comment from The All-Night Man. If he had any listeners, they’d be wondering what had gotten into him.
“Go,” Nate said.
A second and third and fourth picture came up, shots of brown powdery dirt piled against fences, drifts as high as the top row of barbed wire. The stills gave way to newsreel footage accompanied by the sound of ninety-year-old wind.
“Go,” Nate said.
The fifth picture: a late-twenties Hudson Super-Six sedan loaded to just shy of cracking an axle, strapped on top with a mattress and iron headboard and a pair of straight-back wooden chairs and along the sides with a white suitcase and a washtub and a sack of flour—all they had, whoever they were and wherever they’d come from. The Hudson was somewhere out in the desert, crawling past a highway sign, a black badge: Route 66. A canvas water bag hung off the stanchion for the missing mirror on the driver’s side. A stunned boy and girl—there was no clearer way to describe them—looked out the back window. California Or Bust had been painted down the side by one of the adults.
“Go,” Nate said. When nothing happened, he said it again, impatient in that way only a modern man can be.
And there she was. There they were. It was as famous as any American photograph, a tired-eyed migrant mother sitting on a box in a lean-to tent with her two girls clinging to her, the girls’ faces turned away. It was taken at an ag camp off US 101 in the Central Valley at Nipomo, 165 miles north of LA, March, 1936. Migrant Mother. Eyes trying to see tomorrow. That the woman and probably her daughters were long since dead didn’t make it any less sad and unsettling to look on.