by Dan Vining
She felt a little lost, Ava. Not geographically. Being lost geographically was almost impossible now. If you were lost lost these days you could call up a live satellite shot and there you were, Charlie. All you had to do was zoom out until you saw something you recognized and off you went. (It cost the lost person a hundred bucks, to keep people from doing it for kicks or mooning the sat-cam.) Ava wasn’t lost lost. She knew exactly where she was on a map. Not to put too fine a point on it, but she was lost in her own narrative, in the road trip of her life. Something about the case—something about Beck and Cali—had bumped her gyro. She’d gotten lonelier day by day since the night she’d walked down the hallway in her office and seen Beck sitting there in the half dark.
She thought of the last time she’d been here—Cambria—the last time she’d stayed at the Little Sur Inn. It was on the fifth anniversary of the week her brother died. She’d come up alone. The two of them were six years apart. He was the baby. Jacob. Jacob Weiss. He used the family’s real name. He and Ava fought a lot, but mostly as a way to bond against the tyranny of their parents, though they didn’t know it then. (They also didn’t know their parents weren’t all that tyrannical, compared to what was out there in the world.) Jacob wasn’t like anyone else in the family. When there’s a boy and a girl, a son and a daughter, it’s common to say one takes after the father and the other takes after the mother, but Jacob had always seemed as if he’d come from some whole other family, Ava thought. Or was it that that he was just himself, a mystery that might someday be solved? It turned out not to be so.
She looked across the street at the inn, thought about checking in. The No Vacancy sign wasn’t hanging off the hooks anymore. She could spend the night, eat a lobster, drink a bottle of wine all by herself, get up in the morning, and maybe make another stab at getting Cali out of Little Xanadu. About now she was wishing she’d stepped over to the circle of girls and taken Cali by the arm and led her away. But she hadn’t done that. She’d bailed. She’d seen enough. Cali wasn’t her problem. Beck was.
And, besides, everyone kept saying Vivid was getting ready to sing. There wasn’t any reason to think that would cheer her up.
Ava didn’t check into The Little Sur Inn, didn’t eat a lobster all by herself in the restaurant or drink a bottle of wine staring into a video fireplace in the Mopey Single Lady Suite. She didn’t make a plan to go liberate Cali in the morning. She just climbed off the hood and got behind the wheel of the Hudson, backed out of there, crossed over the main highway again, and drove into Cambria—not intending to stop—hoping she could get south to San Luis Obispo before dark. That was the target she was aiming for: to get to SLO at sundown and home before midnight. Nonstop. That was the plan. It was always good to have a plan.
But then, surprising herself, Ava pulled into a charger station in the middle of Cambria to top off. She could have paid outside, but she went in. Truth be told, she stopped at the station because was hoping for some last bit of human contact before she headed back to LA, even if it was just the Cambria High School sophomore running the register. She bought a bottle of water and a premade sandwich. Egg salad. The kid said she’d made a good choice. No one had said anything even remotely like that to her lately.
Actually, she wasn’t hungry. She threw the sandwich onto the seat as she got in, cracked the seal on the water, and took a slug.
“Ready?” the car said.
“Ask me something easy,” she said. She tapped the shifter to put it in Go.
“Excuse me,” a voice said. A man’s voice. A gentle voice, already apologetic.
And there was the face to match. A man with a sunburned face looked in the passenger-side window, careful not to lean in too far, not wanting to seem aggressive or dangerous. He was wearing a sun-bleached denim shirt, bleached almost white.
He extended his hand to shake. The apologetic tone continued as he said his name. “Gene Lindgren.”
“I can’t help you,” Ava said, by rote. “I don’t have any change. I’m sorry.”
He withdrew his hand. “I wasn’t asking for change. Well, not that kind.” He came within fifty miles or so of a grin. “Over there, that’s my family, my wife and daughter, Betts and Bridget,” he said, pointing toward the outside of the station’s restroom where a woman kneeled, cleaning a little girl’s face with a wet paper towel. The wife didn’t look up.
They were Whites. In the moment, that seemed to matter. Ava opened the glove compartment for her purse.
The man held up his hand to stop her. “I told you. We’re not asking for money,” he said. “We were just hoping for a ride. Out of here. Anywhere south, as far as you are going. I hate to ask but we’re stuck here.”
The daughter rode up front, the husband and wife in the back. The Hudson was a two-door; Ava had to get out and let them in because of the jammed passenger-side door. The wife told Ava their names again and said they were from Missouri.
“Originally,” the little girl added. She wasn’t more than eight or nine and wore a cotton dress that looked like her grandmother could have made it.
“Bridget is a pretty name,” Ava said.
“Thank you,” the little girl said, straightening her dress.
“She’s named after my best friend in college,” the mother, Betts, said.
Gene Lindgren turned to look out the back window, as if he was glad to be seeing Cambria shrinking away behind him. He turned forward again. “My great-grandfather had a Hudson,” he said. “Hornet.”
Ava steered onto Highway One south. The road was empty. The hills were treeless through this section, covered in just dry grass. There wasn’t any wind. A barbed-wire fence ran alongside them. The sun was dropping. The light was the color bad painters can never get right. The Hudson found its groove and Ava took her hands off the wheel.
The little girl had her hands folded in her lap. “How old are you, Sweetie?” Ava asked.
“Eight,” the girl said. “I’ll be in third grade, when I can go back to school.”
“We came out to work in the vineyards,” the man said from the backseat. “Or tried. They’re all dried up. Someone lied to us, took most of our money.”
“So what are you going to do in LA?” Ava said. “Do you have family there?”
“We hope to get to Mexico,” the man said. “Work.”
“My grandma died,” the daughter said, as if it was just another fact to report. The little girl couldn’t take her eyes off Ava. “You’re so beautiful,” she said. “Like a movie star.”
Ava reached over and tucked the girl’s blonde hair behind her ear. “You’re adorable!” she said. “I think you should come live with me in Hollywood. We’ll be best friends.”
“All right,” the girl said, seriously. “I’d like that.”
Ava wasn’t used to talking to kids. Actually, she wasn’t used to thinking before she spoke, wasn’t used to being anything other than a smart-ass. She wasn’t used to poor desperate people, only rich ones. She looked up at the mirror, caught the mother’s eye. “I’m so sorry,” Ava said.
“It’s all right,” the woman said. “This hasn’t gone the way we meant.”
The man looked out the window, tired inside and out. But at least they were moving again.
Another half mile of road passed underneath. “I have a sandwich,” Ava said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
She was just a little girl, seven or eight, White. Nate didn’t know much about children, how to tell how old they were. How could he? She was lying on her back in the sand with nothing around her, stripped naked except for a turquoise tee with a sparkly Princess Pam design across it. She was sunburned, as red as if she’d been cooked in a pot. She was more or less whole. None of the real predators of the deep had bit her, but she’d been chewed on by smaller fish or crabs or birds. The wounds opened up the skin to show the seawater-bleached meat underneath. Her brown h
air was in ropes, sandy, like any other girl-child on the beach. Fortunately for all of the cops, her eyes were long since closed.
“You have kids?” Nate said to Il Cho.
“No,” Cho said. “I just bought a house I can’t afford. Maybe next year. I have a niece, my brother’s daughter.”
“What grade do you think she’d be in?” Nate said, still looking down.
“I don’t know. Third or fourth?”
“Do they even still have grades in school anymore?”
“I guess,” Cho said.
Nate turned away. He needed something else to look at. Up the way was the Hotel Del Coronado, wooden, white-painted, red-roofed, with bay windows and spires with old-timey lightning rods. It had been built a million years ago yet somehow was still here and still in business, the pride of Coronado. Coronado Island technically wasn’t an island—a narrow strand went all the way down to Imperial Beach and Chula Vista—but everyone treated it like an island, the tourists anyway, a place to get away from it all. Ferry boats and water taxis and twenty-passenger helos came across the bay from San Diego. For those who wanted a bridge, down south there was a high span that curved over from the mainland, a suicide bridge second only to the Golden Gate when it came to vertical traffic. Speaking of getting away from it all.
“That place is bizarre,” Nate said, eyes on the old hotel. “Did you ever stay there?”
“It’s supposed to be haunted,” Cho said, turning away from the dead girl, too.
“What isn’t?” Nate said.
Hotel guests—including whole families—stood a hundred yards away watching the commotion on the beach, all the helicopters in the air and on the ground. It had all begun at daybreak when the first runner came down the sand and found the scene and the call went in. The San Diego Police had immediately brought in the LA Gang Unit and LA’s famous coroner to assist and advise. Nate had a friend who was a San Diego CRO, a woman. In SD, things were ever so slightly more civilized, and so there were several female CROs. LA had one. Nate’s CRO friend had called him and two minutes later he was lifting off the roof of his house.
“You have to see this,” she’d said.
TV news helos hovered a thousand feet above the traffic from the working cops. Whitey was down the way, talking to a woman reporter who would occasionally look up at the sky, at the camera.
“This is going to be a big story,” Cho said. “Whites.” He didn’t say it with any rancor.
“I guess,” Nate said.
He looked back down at the little girl. Her face was puffy from the hours in the water. He wondered if her kin would even recognize her when they were brought in for ID, if any of them were still alive.
One hundred.
Here it was, the hundredth body Nate had stood over. Not that his coworkers were going to stop everything and have some kind of ceremony, give him a commemorative coin like they do in AA. Today there wasn’t even going to be a pause in Nate’s personal body count. He looked down the beach. Another twelve bodies had washed up overnight. Twelve. And the girl made thirteen. All White. Screeching terns circled in full riot mode, anticipating the feed. He decided he was done with the counting thing.
“Is it now?” Cho said, mostly to himself.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Nate said.
They were seeing the faces of the Okies on the roof in the TMZ from the other night. They started walking down the beach toward the beached bodies. Cho pointed ahead. “Mexico. What is it, ten miles? Somebody said the current flows north, they probably went into the water in Mexico if they ended up here. At least they made it back home.”
“I guess,” Nate said.
He’d set down the Crow on the hotel parking lot. No-Name Rockett stood by it, hands behind his back. Nate waved him over. This was a teachable moment, if Nate could only figure out what the lesson was.
www
They already had some answers so they called a press conference. The live news coverage started with a panning shot of six dead men and one dead woman dressed like a man. All Latin. Browns. Wherever they had been shot and killed, the six had been dragged onto a dock in Long Beach. The image was meant to convey that the story had started here—Long Beach, the LA harbor—and that it was ending here, too. Or the authorities wanted it to. The close-up of the dead gave way to stock footage of a rusty freighter stacked with containers, most of them with Chinese writing on the side. HÆRVÆRK was written across the ship’s stern. The camera held on the word a long moment, as if with time it would start to mean something.
Then came a wide shot of cop brass, a White cop standing at a microphone with a grove of multiracial cop-trees behind him.
“Why aren’t you up there, Whitey?” Nate said.
Twenty CROs and the gang cops and a couple of higher-ups sat on desks and stood around in the squad room downtown, watching the show. The CROs had allowed their gunners in. They were at the back of the room, Rockett among them. It was a day to remember.
“I’m like Batman,” Whitey said. “Nobody knows who I am.”
That got a laugh. Nate didn’t join in.
“How come they never had a Black Batman?” some wag said. “They had everything else.”
Il Cho was trying to watch the press conference. He had a sad, unsettled look on his face.
“They never had a Chinese Batman,” another Asian cop said.
“Keanu Reeves,” a CRO named Baker said. He was a Genesis CRO, on the job/in the air less than a year.
“He was Hawaiian,” the Asian cop said. “Half.”
“And he never played Batman,” Nate said.
The joke had played itself out so there was a silence. Then a sergeant said, “Can’t we all just get along?” The man wasn’t known as a comedian, so most of the men and women weren’t sure if they were meant to laugh. So they didn’t.
“Touché,” Whitey said.
The Thirteen Dead on Coronado! press conference got boring fast, nobody asking or answering the real questions. The TV director, wherever he was, sensed his audience’s boredom and cut away from the cops to the feed from a drone gliding over the still-uncovered bodies, like any other bird of prey. For narration there was only the sound of the wind. The director would probably win an Emmy.
The cops in the squad room had already begun to wander off.
Whitey was alone in the Gang Unit office when Nate came in.
“What are you hearing?” Nate asked, just for fun.
“Nothing,” Whitey said. “They’d been loaded into a container somewhere and the container was on deck on the cargo ship and it got loose and went over.”
“So when did it crack open?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Who worked this end? Who loaded them in Long Beach?”
“I guess those dead gangsters on the dock. I wasn’t there. They could have loaded them anywhere, then trucked them in. I wasn’t wherever that was either.”
One the dead gang members on the dock wore a white guayabera shirt and black pointy-toed boots, like the tall cowboy businessman Nate had seen with Whitey at the RV factory in the High Desert, only this one had three or four bullet holes in him around his heart so the shirt wasn’t so white anymore. And he wasn’t tall.
“Who was the cowboy?” Nate said, his vagueness fully intentional.
“You were watching the TV, Cole. They IDed him. Something Something Juan Something. I never heard of the man. May he rest in peace. I’m sure his mama’s upset.”
“He wasn’t in your gang book?”
Whitey tapped his forehead. “This is my book. You trying to get jumped into the unit with us, now that JC is gone?” Whitey said. “We’d love to have you. You could do all the flying. I know Il Cho thinks the world of you.”
“Were they Inca?” Nate said. “The people on the dock.”
“The Incas
don’t smuggle people. And they aren’t in TJ. I think you’re going to find out these gangsters were from Tijuana.”
“Where were they headed?”
“Who?”
“The people in the cargo container.”
“China?”
“That’s a long trip.”
“There was Chinese writing all over everything. Supposedly there are jobs waiting there, in China, if you can get there and get in. I sure wouldn’t want to do it. Does all this have something to do with you, Cole?”
“I don’t see how it could,” Nate said, on his way out.
www
Nate had been half afraid Rockett would turn chatty now that Nate had learned his name, but the kid had been real quiet all shift, since the morning in San Diego. Maybe he had a sister the age of the girl on the beach.
It was ten o’clock, moonless, dark. Or at least as dark as the West Side ever got. Money meant light. (And more water.) Nate looked over the side. They were low-flying over the flatlands of Beverly Hills, businesses and halfway-normal houses and apartment buildings on tree-lined streets with sidewalks and bright streetlights: 90210. It looked peaceful, which meant all the crime was indoors. Or riding around in Bentleys. He flew over Beverly Hills High. Century City was ahead, the Westside business towers, most of them still lit up, all forty floors. The protocol for routine patrol-flying in a ’scraper zone was to elevate and go over the top of the buildings, but Nate stayed at the same altitude, flying between the towers at five hundred feet, spooking the white-shirt guys and gals still at their desks at ten o’clock. Served them right.