by Dan Vining
“What’s your dad do, Rockett?”
No response came from the second seat for a couple of seconds, as if Rockett was coming out of sleep mode. Not that he’d been asleep. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know him.”
“What about your mother?”
“Teacher.”
“Do they still have grades, like third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade?”
“Yes, sir. But she teaches college English.” A few more seconds went by before Rockett added, “Restoration Drama.”
“My favorite,” Nate said.
Carrie popped up on the display, all business. A Crime in Progress, Violent call.
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Crows were coming in hot from three directions. The action was out in the yard in front of a single-family house in Mar Vista, a middle-class community between the 405 and the beach towns. Nate had to slalom in, dodging a tree or two and a too-low news rig before he landed on the top deck of a parking structure up the street from the scene.
Nate and Rockett ran down the middle of the street. The house was four houses in from the corner. Across the street was an elementary school. Schools nowadays all looked like prisons to Nate, high-fenced with light stanchions on the corners. An early-in Crow hovered, lighting up the scene: a bloodied man and woman fighting in their front yard, screaming at each other. A real grass front yard. Real grass usually meant a homeowner who still cared about personal property. It wasn’t easy to keep a lawn green with a five-gallon-a-day pipe water ration. The front door to the house stood open. The white downlight from the Crow flashed off the blade in the man’s hand as the man and woman flailed away at each other, pushing and shoving. They were husband and wife—Vietnamese or Cambodian or maybe Thai—screaming at each other in a language nobody on scene understood, the husband with the butcher knife over his head as if ready to strike again, his cut-up wife screaming “No!” at him. They weren’t shutting up, not for a second, not even to take a breath. It looked for all the world as if he meant to kill her and right now.
Nate was still carrying Bodie’s Sig. It felt heavy and…perfect in his hand. There was no other word for it. Rockett kept his weapon holstered for now but he was right beside Nate—a gunner’s job was to protect his CRO, not take out citizens who were only threatening each other. Four other CROs were on scene, taking up positions behind whatever they could get behind, all with their guns drawn and their gunners guard-dogging them.
CROs were yelling, “Drop it! Drop the knife!” Some fool said it in Spanish.
Nate scrambled up for a closer look and dug in beside Baker, the rookie Genesis CRO from back in the ready room who might have been first-on-scene. When Baker saw Nate, he started talking, answering questions before Nate asked them. “She’s cut all to hell,” Baker said. “It started in the house, broke out here. He’s got her blood all over him. We’ve got to take him down, but they’re standing too close together.”
“Go slow,” Nate said. “You never know.”
Baker nodded but had no idea how to slow anything down.
Overhead and across the street, a news bird was dropping in for a better angle, its own spotlight already fired up. The regs said they were supposed to stay a thousand feet above the Crows, but this was too good a show to go by the rules.
Nate looked over his shoulder, saw it coming. “Look out,” he said, cool.
Baker turned just as the news helo clipped a light stanchion in front of the school. There was a metallic scream and the news-bird dropped like a rock and went sideways all in the same moment, nearly taking out the legit Crow lighting the scene. The Crow pulled up and went right fast as the news-copter plowed into the asphalt playground, beating itself apart on the way down. Somehow, there was no fire. And least not yet. They weren’t close enough to see if the pilot/reporter had bought it.
Nate turned back to the business at hand. New cops were running in, higher-ups. “Gunners, if you get a shot, take him down!” a senior CRO called out. “Anybody!”
Rockett looked at Nate. Nate shook his head.
The man with the knife over his head hadn’t even noticed the crash, though something had shut him up. Now she was the only one screaming, saying the same thing over and over. Now the man seemed ready to cry, not that he wasn’t still murderously angry. He spoke in a defeated, fatalistic voice and took a step toward her, the knife still in hand. Every gun on the yard came up. The wife kept saying her line over and over.
The husband was a second away from getting ten bullets in him.
Then came a new voice. “No! It’s her! It’s not him, it’s her!” It was the Asian cop from the squad room, the Keanu Reeves guy. The husband and wife were still shouting at each other. “She’s telling him to kill her. He took the knife away from her. Something happened in the house. He took the knife away from her. She cut herself.”
Then he listened to the woman and said, evenly, “She killed their children.”
The lead CRO stood and took a cautious step toward the husband. The Asian cop was right behind him, shouting something to couple the in Vietnamese. The woman kept crying out angrily but now dropped her knees. The grass around her was already covered with blood. The husband just stared at her and threw the knife off to the side.
Cops ran for the house, including Baker, less of a rookie than before. He’d gone from Genesis to at least Exodus.
“SoCal is coming apart at the seams,” Nate said, as they walked back to the Crow.
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Nate closed out the night circling the TMZ, cruising, lighting it up, looking for any sign of the New Okies. He hadn’t told Rockett where they were headed as they flew away from the craziness in Mar Vista and felt him tense when the downtown towers passed under the belly of the Crow. He had no intention of setting the bird down in the TMZ again, but Rockett didn’t know that.
Nate was stiff and sore from all the hours flying. He still had beach sand in his boots and was sunburned on his face and neck. The sights on Coronado Beach had followed after him all day, like a panhandler with his hand out. The sound of the wind still whistled in his ears. The smell of the bodies was in his nostrils. What he’d seen that morning had The End written all over it, yet still it felt like the beginning of something. To Nate, anyway.
There was nobody to be seen in the TMZ until the ninth or tenth orbit. Whether it was the sweep of the NightSun or the soft whirr of his rotors, they woke. When Nate was starting to think they’d all gone south—all died—they emerged. They looked the same as before, but now there was a hundred or more of them—on the ground between the dilapidated buildings, coming out onto the roofs—all with their heads tilted back, dangerously expectant.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The next day the rest of the story came out. The HÆRVÆRK was pursued down the coast, overtaken and boarded by Mexican authorities a hundred miles offshore of the State of Oaxaca. The ship was well out into international waters, but Mexico had a reputation for hard-ass enforcement when it came to immigration. The captain and crew were completely unaware of the men, women, and children they’d misplaced on their uneventful voyage south. Or so they said. It only took another day for it to come out that the freighter was known for human cargo. Every trip, the ship carried one or two boxcars of living breathing humans in among the containers of scrap metal and shredded plastic and refurbed Priuses. The ship’s modus operandi was to run south to just offshore of Mazatlán below the end of the Baja Peninsula and offload the North Americans into smaller boats for the run to the coast. From Mazatlán, trucks would haul them overnight to the corporate farms in southern Sinaloa. Apparently the smuggle had been going on for six months or more, since the oil boom had turned things upside down and reversed the direction of the illegal border-crossings. Mexico further tightened legal immigration restrictions and erected their own electrified fence—a fence that killed—five miles in from the border with the US, but that onl
y drove up the smugglers’ prices. The labor shortage was a constant. Will met way.
Before it had even passed Ensenada, the HÆRVÆRK had hit heavy seas and at least two of the containers carrying the would-be farmworkers went over the side. The boxcars were sealed shut. They would have floated. There was no way to know when they cracked open; possibly on the rocks of one of the dozens of unnamed islands off the Mexican coastline below Rosarito Beach, some just barely over the border. All told, twenty-eight North Americans had drowned. Thirteen bodies rode a current north to Coronado, six washed up on Mexican beaches, and nine were unaccounted for, their names put forth by relatives left behind. Because the dead were White, the investigation—at least in the US—was manned to the maximum. And expedited. The wrap-up was tidy: the perpetrators on the LA end—the dead on their backs on the docks—were from a Tijuana gang come north to collect the money and load the passengers. The TJ gangsters had been shot and killed in a gunfight aboard an old Chris-Craft yacht trying to escape south from Long Beach. There was no local connection. Or so it was said.
Otherwise, Nate’s gut told him. He had a judge friend who hated cops. All it took was a phone call and a matchbox of the hipper-than-thou drug Tail of the Dragon—which technically was legal but extremely hard to find—and Nate got satellite and drone surveillance of Whitey’s house in Baldwin Park. The judge threw in access to pickup/destination info from Whitey’s favorite air cab company. So, just like that, Nate knew where Whitey was at any given time, probably knew more than Whitey’s wife or girlfriend did.
This morning, Whitey was in church, the same church where Derrick Wallace worshipped his infinitely forgiving (or forgetful) savior. Coincidence? Whitey had brought his wife along. They’d arrived early in an air cab for the eleven o’clock service, the service the devout favored, the one that went three hours with a two-hour sermon. Nate was on a roof down the block with a pair of recorder-binocs. He’d given Rockett the day off on the chance the kid had a spiritual life of his own. Or liked football. Or just needed a day to delete the head-pictures of the dead on the beach down in Coronado.
It was a hot and windless Sunday. Nate had found some shade beside a rooftop water tank but was still sweating. He wondered if church ladies still fanned themselves with cardboard fans with the wooden handles, the kind supplied by the funeral homes for advertising. The first hour of the surveillance of the church had been entertaining: rocking, thumping music escaping out the open windows. Nate could even hear the right-on-the-beat clapping of the congregants. Like they say, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life.
When he was in middle school, Nate’s mother found a bag of pot in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t good weed and there wasn’t much of it, but it got him sentenced to Sunday School for six months. His mother—her name was Cher—supposedly didn’t tell Bodie, so the old man must have wondered what was up with his son and wife’s sudden turn to religion. She picked a Presbyterian church in Encino with a “contemporary worship service.” From the first punitive Sunday on, she let Nate drive there and back, although he’d just turned fifteen and couldn’t even get a learner’s permit yet. He never got the link between the Bible-ing and the mostly lame Christian rock and getting to take the wheel of the family Camaro, but he didn’t question it. One Sunday morning his mother said, “You are probably wondering why I am letting you drive. It’s because I want you to learn to the rules of the road from me and not Bodie.” After six weeks, she told him he didn’t have to go anymore. She was a nurse and had started working Saturday-night-into-Sunday-morning shifts. Though his sentence had been commuted, Nate went to the church on his own for another three months, on his skateboard. He’d even played drums in the “praise band” until his friends found out about it. It was then that he learned that Whites—most White Christians anyway—couldn’t keep time. Whenever the long-haired worship leader shamed the flock into clapping along, half of them would lose the beat immediately. It was embarrassing. Tribally.
The service was ending. The doors of the church opened, letting out—like a held breath—a swell of organ music. Two sharp-dressed deacons emerged, secured the doors, tying them back with red cords. One of them brushed something off the other’s shoulder, which made the second deacon flash a radiant smile before he pushed the first man away, pretending to be angry. The deacons were just teenagers. They made Nate think of the murdered Wallace boys. The pastor in his purple robes—he who’d officiated at the truncated funeral—was next out. He stood there on the top step, tapping his toe, looking like he wanted a cigarette. The music still hadn’t ended; then it did. The first of the brethren emerged. They were a fancied-up crowd—dressed competitively, Nate thought—bright colors, matching shoes, and hats on the women and men. Old School. These days, almost nothing felt more retro than religion.
Whitey and wifey came out, Whitey steering her with a hand on the small of her back. She was a handsome, full-figured woman in her fifties. She wore a pale blue dress with shoes and a lid to match, a hat that looked, from Nate’s vantage point, like an upside-down shoe. But what did he know about fashion? The reverend, Pastor Lamb, tilted toward her and took her hand and pulled her closer with the sort of attention first-time church attendees always got, at least the ones who hadn’t come in off the streets. Then he reached around her to shake Whitey’s hand. Whitey looked like a man who thought he’d just wasted three hours. He all but pushed his wife away from the preacher and down the steps. He walked her across the car-clogged street and pointed her toward the Yellow AirCab idling in the front half of the parking lot with two other air taxis, then he turned to watch the front doors of the church.
Nate had a good view of the whole street. Most of the church-goers were on foot, from the neighborhood, and they began to stroll away, as if it were another century. Some women—and one man—even had parasols. Whitey was hard-scanning the crowd, eyeing everyone who came out. As the deacons were untying the doors to close up, Il Cho emerged into the sunlight, apparently the last one to come out. Cho wore a Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, too. And wingtips. He looked one way and then another until he found Whitey across the street. Cho looked at him and shook his head. No go. Whitey stayed put, waited as Cho crossed the street. The two cops talked on the sidewalk. After a minute of it, Whitey shook his head—frustrated or annoyed or both—and walked away from Cho toward the idling air cab and his wife.
Cho watched and waited until Whitey’s cab lifted off.
A block north of the church, the Gang Unit helicopter hovered fifty feet above the street, whipping up the dust. A sky-ladder hung from the underside of the bird. When Nate approached, Cho was a second away from putting his foot into one of the loops to be hoisted up. It was how they embarked and disembarked when there was no landing spot. Routine but hairy. If you slipped or lost your grip, the loop auto-tightened around your ankle and hauled you up upside down. It worked for dead bears, too.
“So was he there?,” Nate said loudly to Cho to be heard over the helo.
When Cho turned toward Nate, he had a surprised look on his face, a look that could be read a couple of ways. Cho looked up at his pilot, spun his finger in a circle, and the helo lifted and roared away, the carbon-cord ladder retracting.
Cho said, “Until he saw Whitey. Then he disappeared.”
“Derrick Wallace is a smart guy,” Nate said. “Whitey doesn’t think so, but of course Whitey thinks he’s smart. What were you going to do, arrest him for something? Try to drive him in deeper into whatever he’s in?”
Cho hesitated, then said, “Whitey believes Wallace is out of the game, not wanting to get back into any of this, that his wife doesn’t want him to have anything to do with it now. Whitey said he just wanted to make sure.”
“So Whitey thinks a guy going to church means he’s out of the game?”
Cho didn’t say anything.
Nate said, “Did you find out any more about the Tijuana guys dead on the dock in Lon
g Beach?”
“One of them was a woman.”
“Remember the good old days, when smuggling was just drugs and guns? The Yellow Submarine?”
“Why’d they call it that?”
“You don’t like The Beatles? I thought Koreans liked The Beatles.”
“I like new music,” Cho said.
The GU helo came around the corner again, ladder already lowered. It held back a bit, hovering over the next intersection. It was like a big dog with its leash in its mouth, wanting to go for a walk. The pilot was watching the two of them intently. He was Whitey’s guy.
Nate got right in Cho’s face. “Get the hell out of here!” he said.
“What?” Cho said.
Nate wasn’t a half-bad actor. He even managed to draw some blood up into his face and bug out his eyes, get in the moment. Cho was only confused for a second. Then he spit an angry line of his own back at Nate. He tipped his head to one side, cracking his neck, a move he’d seen in more than one Hong Kong action flick. Il Cho was a half-bad actor.
Cho pointed at the pilot and gestured with two fingers and the pilot flew forward to pick him up. Cho and Nate shared a smile that couldn’t be seen from the cheap seats; then Cho hooked the toe of a Florsheim Imperial in the lowest loop on the sky-ladder and rose.
Nate did a one-eighty and strode off, his back projecting mad as hell.
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A big White cop in a CRO suit walking up a sidewalk in Boyle Heights with a bright video screen in hand and no gunner. It was a good way to get killed. It was only nine o’clock, but it was full dark. Most of the streetlights long ago had been shot out and the night’s moon had already risen and didn’t amount to much. Nate was on Whittier Boulevard, way upriver in Inca territory. The gang’s hook-beaked eagle was splashed over everything: the buildings and bus benches and sidewalks, even a school. He was walking four or five blocks east of the house that was Razor’s last known address, the silver-roofed house that he had been circling when the call came in about the havoc across town at La Nacional, the Salvadoran restaurant. He remembered what his CI Miranda had said, that Razor wasn’t Inca, that “maybe once he was even a Twenty or a No Fear” but wasn’t in any gang anymore. Maybe not, but Razor had lived right in the middle of Inca turf. Neutrality didn’t seem very likely, not tonight, not here.