NightSun

by Dan Vining

  Nate had made a couple of passes at a thousand feet, then set the Crow down on a patch of plastic grass in a park, a piece of turf that had been a soccer field for the locals until the Controllers realized they had lost control. The local futbolers—Browns mostly—weren’t signing up on the official schedule, much less filling out the liability release forms. They were just playing, whenever the hell they wanted. With their own ball. Unsupervised. So the city had yanked out the lights by their roots, packed up the goals, and—just to be safe—dropped three or four boulders in the middle of the field, making it unusable for anything except picnics. And rapes.

  Whittier Boulevard had traffic, slow but moving. Every head in every Fed pivoted toward Nate. Occasionally a sho-nuff low-rider would creep past, stuck in traffic like everyone else but not minding it as much as the others. A reminder of better days, all dressed up with everywhere to go. Nate kept walking, reading his screen. All he had for now were dots on a map, one red dot that was supposed to be Whitey and five or six other yellow dots around him, unknowns. They were on an open lot on a corner, only the lot wasn’t exactly open. When he’d flown over, he had seen that it was covered by a tin roof, blocking his view.

  Nate had “dotted” Whitey, sending a command drone to individually target and move with him. The command drone then coordinated secondary drones and worked up map-views and sat-views: The Whitey Barnes Show. The system was all computerized, which meant it didn’t involve a human being once a nameless unionized clerk somewhere checked the electronic “paperwork” and touched the GO button. When Nate woke up that morning and checked his screen, the surveillance system had asked him, as the sole data reader, if he wanted the subject dotted. Nate had said, Why, yes, thank you, I believe I do. The program should have asked for Nate’s authorization for full track-and-trace surveillance, but it didn’t. So the dotting wasn’t exactly legal. It was what they called illegal. Nate felt a little… illiberal about it. At least for a couple minutes, while he was brushing his teeth.

  Nate closed the screen. He knew where he was going. Ahead.

  He went two more blocks. He was feeling too many eyes on him so he ducked down an alleyway, stepped over a couple of cardboard condos, went up an old iron fire-escape ladder on the first building he came to, and climbed over the low wall onto yet one more flat roof. He’d lived half his life on flat roofs. He trotted across the gritted tar paper, parallel to the street, and went up and over the parapets until he got to the corner. He dropped into a crouch and crept up to the front wall, staying low, though it was his experience that people almost never looked up at the tops of the walls around them, not even criminals—especially criminals.

  He straightened up, came up like a periscope. He had a clear view of the open lot cater-corner across the broad intersection. The tin roof made the scene look almost cozy, like a patio, a hangout. No grass, but there were two picnic tables and some white plastic Walmart chairs. During the day, old men probably played chess there. Whitey Barnes stood next to one table, drinking a bottle of Mexican beer, six men standing around him in postures that said respect. Or at least fear. Whitey’s posture said everything was cooool.

  Nate dropped back down. He leaned his shoulder against the front wall, dug out his screen, snapped it open, set it to night-read red. The map was gone, replaced by a live feed in thin color, a view from on high that angled in under the tin roof. He looked up at the gray night sky overhead, trying to spot the drone. Nowadays the little bastards had chameleon skin, fitted with a camera that read whatever was above and painted everything down-facing to match. One of them could be ten feet overhead with you feeling the breeze from the rotors on your upturned face and you couldn’t see it. Nate touched the zoom control and went in for a closer view. Four of the men stood with their backs to the street, facing Whitey. A fifth person was in shadow in a chair, but not one of the white plastic chairs. Nate could see the face of the sixth man but he didn’t know him. He could tell he wasn’t anybody important.

  One of the standing men wore a black cowboy hat. And was tall.

  Then the food truck came. With a building roar that meant big engines and twin-rotors, a freight-hauler came down the boulevard at two hundred feet, lights blazing, a roach coach clamped to its belly. It was good that Nate was more or less the color of shadows around him because the big rig flew right over his roof, slowing, turning. Nate peeked over the wall for a look. The huge rig orbited the intersection three times, waiting for the traffic to clear, then set down. People had heard the racket and were already coming out of the bars and cars up and down the street. The helo uncoupled from its cargo—gave everyone another moment to admire its brute self—then revved up and rose, leaving the food truck right in the middle of the X. Before the street-dust settled, a young man in a white apron jumped out of the back as “La Cucaracha” played on the truck’s horn. A side awning came up. Greasy smoke was already rising out of a blowhole on top, another form of advertising.

  It was a repurposed RV, a Winnebago. It looked new.

  Whitey and the men strolled out from under the tin roof. Apparently what Nate was seeing was a meeting of the Inca board of directors. The six came out, led by Ignacio “Nacho” Iberriz in the upright MotoWalker. Iberriz wore his cheap reflector sunglasses at night, too. The other men, including Whitey, moved aside and led him ambulate forward onto the street, then closed in behind him. Iberriz turned to the underling Inca and tipped his head toward the food wagon and then toward Whitey. Whitey put up a palm to say, No gracias, but the runner was already running off to score some chow for him. The Incas were showing off for Whitey.

  Nate didn’t get to watch any more of it because there was a sound behind him. Footsteps but…softened somehow. He turned, quickly, but not in time to do much about what came next. Two men were coming at him across the roof, almost at a run, one with a gun in his hand. They never took their eyes off him as they stepped over a couple of junk pipes. They were barefoot. Incas. In the space between one quickening heartbeat and the next, Nate pictured them running through a jungle. Nate was already trying to get to his feet and at the same time going for the Sig Sauer in the holster strapped to his leg, but they were moving too fast. Not much more than a second had gone by and it was already clear that this wasn’t going to play out in any way that was in Nate’s favor.

  O O D A… The OODA Loop. It sounded like the latest dance craze but it was a mindset training mnemonic for soldiers and cops. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Nate blew right through O and O and D and was trying for A—going for the Sig—when the men reached him. One gangster stepped on Nate’s gun hand and the other man punched him in the face three times. At least they weren’t going to shoot him.

  Then they shot him.

  Or the one Inca did. No warning, no sense to it. It didn’t seem like part of the plan. Sometimes a man will use a gun just because it’s already in his hand. The shot was so close and so loud and came so immediately—like a door slamming—that it made Nate think maybe he was already dead, that he had been blown away into Whatever Comes Next. But then the onrush of pain in his face told him otherwise. Do the dead feel pain? Another second passed. His face and whole head hurt so much he couldn’t feel anything else. He couldn’t begin to pinpoint where he’d been shot. Maybe he wasn’t shot. Maybe the shooter somehow had missed him, but how could that be? From three feet away? Nate realized his eyes were shut. When he opened them again, there was the smoking gape of the pistol. It’s a shitty little thirty-two cal, he thought, hopefully.

  O O D A. He exhaled roughly, let his head flop to one side, played dead. It was the only thing that came to him to do. He waited for the kill shot. Instead, they picked him up, each man grabbing a handful of flight-suit shoulder and a pant cuff. Nate figured they were going to throw him off the front of the roof and that would be the end of it, but they didn’t; instead, headed with him toward the back edge of the roof and the fire escape. They were taking him somewhere. To show
him off or to kill him in front of the boss? Or in front of Whitey?

  He was still playing dead. The Incas had their hands full carrying him and they’d forgotten about the gun still in his holster. Or maybe they had bought his act. OODA. Nate came back to life and went for his Sig again. The man on the right side was young and had a young man’s reflexes. He reacted fast, letting go of Nate, dropping him. The other Inca grunted and was about to bitch at his coworker for dropping the cop when he saw what was happening. The first man was already taking care of it, stomping on Nate’s right wrist, breaking it with a crack that could have been heard down on the street. The first man snatched the Sig out of Nate’s crippled hand, looked at the piece admiringly for a half second and tucked it into his waistband.

  Where were they taking him? They threw him off the back of the roof, like a sack of potatoes. Uno…dos…tres… Throw. It was only twenty feet to the street. Newton would know how many seconds, from release to landing. One? The same for a feather as for a stone… Actually, time didn’t matter because somehow, just his luck, they’d tossed Nate right into a wormhole—a portal between realities—and he had all the time in the world to fall. Anybody who flew anything had this selfsame recurring dream: somehow the hatch comes open and you’re falling, falling, falling, looking up at the aircraft getting smaller, smaller, smaller, going on without you, the wind whistling past you or you whistling past the wind, in the company of birds, clouds seen from the inside, eyes wide open, your legs and arms flailing as if you were a swimmer backstroking it, in the most horrible kind of danger but never hitting ground.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Nate landed on his back on a cardboard box, a box with an unfortunate man sleeping in it, maybe a man having a dream of another man falling out of the sky onto him.

  Chapter Thirty

  The doors were golden and twenty feet high, the kind of doors a poor person might expect to see upon arrival in heaven. But this was Beverly Hills. At three in the morning. Nate knocked again. With his left hand. He had already rung the bell but there was enough party noise coming out from inside to make him think he should probably just go on in.

  Then the door opened, letting out an explosion of laughter.

  It was a naked woman with a Ping-Pong paddle in her hand.

  “Love-Thirty,” Nate said.

  “That’s tennis,” the naked woman said. “This is table tennis. It’s scored differently. You think I’m thirty?”

  “I’m a friend of Bruce’s,” Nate said. He could see past her into the living room, which was grand and glassy and cold as ice, marble-floored and filled with white couches and chairs and titanium coffee tables and people who looked like models in an ad for some overpriced thing guaranteed to make you happy. A video-fire roared in the fireplace. Nate could see all the way through the house to the lit backyard where the Ping-Pong table was. And the pool. And the tennis court. And another pool. More happy rich people were out back, eight or ten of them. She wasn’t the only nude woman. Nate’s air taxi lifted off from the motor court behind him. He couldn’t fly the Crow in his condition.

  “Wait here,” the girl said. “I’ll inform Dr. Lark he has a gentleman caller.” She turned around and walked in. She had a remarkable backside, Nate thought, even in his banged-up broken gunshot state. He did as he’d been told, stayed put. The Ping-Pong girl stopped and turned back toward him. “I was kidding, you idiot,” she said.

  Nate apologized for being an idiot. She waited until he walked past her and slapped him on the ass with the Ping-Pong paddle. He winced. He hurt all over. He thought about shooting her, then remembered his holster was empty. He was still in his flight suit.

  “You’re a mess,” she said. “Are you a cop? Is that blood?”

  “Fake,” Nate said. “I’m an actor.”

  “No, you’re not,” the girl said, authoritatively.

  Bruce Lark was a friendly-looking gray-haired man in his forties, dressed all in loose white and barefoot. Nate found him out by the pool, sitting by himself on the end of a chaise lounge, drinking some kind of green drink you couldn’t see through. Dogs were everywhere, running in and out of the house, little puff-ball Beverly Hills dogs, illegal dogs. A white cockatiel flew across the yard from one perch to another, for dramatic effect. Nate stood there a second, kicked away a Pomeranian that looked like it was thinking about some ankle-nipping. When the dog yelped, Dr. Lark came back from wherever his thoughts had drifted to and saw Nate.

  “I got shot,” Nate said.

  “That’s never good,” Lark said.

  Then they were in the examining room, out in the guest house. Lark came in and flipped on the lights. The swinging door whooshed closed behind Nate. It looked like any other doctor’s office. Lark went straight to a sink, rolling up his sleeves, scrubbing in. A standard stainless-steel table was center stage in the middle of the room with the standard lights over it and the standard wheelie tray beside it. The steel table didn’t look too inviting, so Nate stood just inside the door until Lark looked at him. Nate stepped over to at least stand next to the table. Lark activated some kind of sterilization tank and went into a cabinet for a package of wrapped surgical tools. He opened two of the packages and threw the metal gear into the sterilizer. On the walls were bone charts and nervous system schematics. For dogs and cats.

  “My wrist is broken, too,” Nate said.

  “You start skateboarding again?”

  “I never quit.”

  “Strip. Where’s your gun?”

  Nate just shook his head, didn’t want to talk about it. He unzipped his flight suit and let it drop. He’d bled more than a little. The bullet-wound was in his left shoulder, just above his “bulletproof” vest.

  “That, too,” Lark said, meaning the vest.

  Nate cringed as he unfastened the blood-soaked body armor and pulled it off. It was stuck to him. Lark patted the steel table as if it were a bed and Nate sat upon it.

  Lark was gently examining Nate’s right arm—a nasty-looking compound fracture that wasn’t going to fix itself—when the Ping-Pong player stuck her head in.

  “You need me?” she asked. She was still naked, only now she wore a nurse’s cap, apparently not a joke. Now Nate was naked, too. Or almost. Just his boxers. She covered her eyes, pretending to blush.

  “No, I got it,” Lark said to the nurse. “But put some clothes on. Buddy is fully erect out there.”

  She winked at Nate and left.

  “Buddy’s a dog,” Lark said. “The Yorkie. Lie back.” The table was full-length. And cold. Lark started poking at the bullet wound in the soft part of Nate’s left shoulder. The wound was only an inch or two above the heart, though neither man was going to talk about that.

  “Are all these dogs yours?” Nate said, to have something to say instead of howling. Lark had moved his gloved fingers to the pain trigger.

  “People bring them back for dinner parties. I hate dogs,” Lark said. “Well, I don’t hate ’em. I hate these shitty little ass-kissers. I got a cat around here somewhere.”

  Lark unwrapped a syringe and took a vial of something blue out of a med-cabinet. He drew out a dose and poked the spike into the meat right next to the gunshot wound. He went back to the tool tray for a refill and then numbed up the wrist, too.

  Nate tried to think of something offhanded to say, a crack, but he wasn’t really feeling it. “You been all right?” he said, after a second. It was something the sober said to each other. Nate and the doctor had met in a West Side twelve-step meeting, court-mandated for Lark.

  “I’m so happy I can’t stop crying,” Lark said. He’d started to clean both of the wounds, painting them up with orange disinfectant. Nate just stared at his friend’s hands, the way they moved, the deliberateness of them, the control, the efficiency, the gentleness which—Nate was thinking—seemed feminine in the best kind of way, though of course he’d never say that
aloud. “Straight through,” Dr. Lark said of the gunshot.

  “That’s always good,” Nate said.

  Bruce Lark had been a doctor to rich people for ten years when he became addicted to morphine and a mix of the most perfect prescription drugs known to those in the know. Things went surprisingly well for him for three or four years. He was working long hours, booked solid, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, lots of energy. Then the curtain started to close and the house lights came up. Well before anyone suspected anything, Lark had thrown in with some celebrity patients on a $10 million Mexican brown heroin deal. It blew up, and in the end he lost a lot more than did his famous partners. The celebrities went into rehab, talked about it on every TV show there was, and saw their careers expand, while Lark lost his license to practice medicine. For all time. On people. Actually, he wasn’t licensed to be a vet either, but that was how he lived and kept the homestead: the outlaw vet for outlaw pets.

  “Where were you when you got shot?”

  “On a roof, Boyle Heights.”

  “Heroin is dirt cheap all of a sudden, starting about two weeks ago.” To Lark it wasn’t a non sequitur. “The market’s flooded, coming in from Mexico, some new way I guess. It’s crazy strong, too, laced with Fentanyl. I know of three people who died. Since Tuesday.”

  Lark let the syringe take another long pull on the bottle and then again stuck the needle into Nate’s wrist. Nate watched Lark’s face as he thumbed in the dope, wondering what wellspring of faith or fear or discipline kept him out of the medicine cabinet. It was ten feet away, day and night, right across the room, right here at home.