by Dan Vining
“You’ll remember this next part for the rest of your life,” Lark said, taking hold of Nate’s arm with both hands to set the bone.
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Nate found himself on the chaise next to the pool. Apparently the others had either gone home or gone quiet. The night was crystal clear, stars and everything. Even a shooting star. Two! Or maybe it was the drugs. Nate never took anything anymore, not even an aspirin. He was afraid to. Like most men, he was the leading authority on his own weaknesses.
“You want some sushi?” Dr. Lark said, materializing, standing over him.
“No.” Nate’s forehead itched. He reached up to scratch it, clunked himself with his brand-new cast. It was dyed black.
“Don’t go anywhere for a hour,” Lark said. “Just sit there. You want a smoothie?”
Nate shook his head. He was watching a beautiful cougar walk across the lawn like it owned the place. Dr. Lark stepped toward the big kitty with his hand held out, which slightly increased the possibility that it was real.
Chapter Thirty-One
A steady stream of people moved past the front window of The Original Pantry though the sun wasn’t down yet and the show at The ObamArena didn’t start until ten. The concertgoers were mostly kids—and wannabe kids. They were singing the hits as they flowed past on the sidewalk and in the street. They would finish one song and someone would choose the next and then they’d all be singing that one too, as happy as could be, that kind of happy that has anticipation right at its core, like children on their way to Disneyland. They were packed so tightly they kept tripping over each other, their laughing apologies added to the lyrics they sang.
Nate surprised himself: he knew a couple of the songs, not that he was going to sing along. He was sitting at the counter using a steak knife to scratch the itch down inside his black cast. He wasn’t eating a hundred-dollar steak, though he probably should have been; could have used some red meat to help replenish the blood he’d lost. Cubby looked over at him with the standard waiter question on his face. Nate gave him the That’s right, I am still not drinking look. In the old days, Nate drank enough red wine at The Original Pantry to supply a wedding in an Italian village. Good times. And then they weren’t. But getting shot and beat up and thrown off a roof was a real test of his will. Or his ability to surrender to the one kind of painkiller the doc had used to numb him to set his arm and yet not the other, the kind that came in a bottle.
Cubby came over with a fresh cup of coffee as hot as a volcano. The Original Pantry’s cups were the same squat heavy cups they’d had for a hundred years. After a nuke attack, all that would be left of downtown LA would be cockroaches and Pantry china. And maybe Cubby.
Il Cho came in off the sidewalk, harried. “Did you know it was going to be like this down here?” he said. He took the stool next to Nate.
“This is where I need to be, man,” Nate said, like a beatnik on Dragnet, his favorite show when he was four.
“Why did you want to meet down here?” Cho said.
“I was going to be here anyway. I thought it would be convenient for you. Did you drive? Where’d you have to park?”
“I took the Red Line. You OK?” He was looking at the cast and the bruises on Nate’s face, pretending not to.
“A lightning bolt couldn’t stop me,” Nate said.
“Everybody was talking about it. You know how it is: if the cop doesn’t die, it’s like a joke.”
“It’s good to know I’m in their thoughts and prayers.”
“Can you fly like that?” Cho said, pointing at Nate’s cast. The cuff of the flight suit wouldn’t snap over it.
“I’m letting my gunner take the stick.” Rockett was sitting near the door, alone, his Streetsweeper on the white paper tablecloth. Nate said, “He’s got the worst table manners, but he’s only eleven.”
“They said you wouldn’t let them take you to the hospital.”
“It wasn’t me who called the EMTs.” Nate was well past wanting to talk about what had happened to him in Boyle Heights. He pivoted on the stool to face Cho. “Did Whitey say anything about it? About me?”
“No. And I was with him all morning.”
Nate still didn’t know if he could trust Il Cho. He couldn’t read him, or couldn’t read him all the way through to The End. Cho had come to Nate with his suspicions about Whitey, shared in the craziness on the rooftop in the TMZ, told him about Johnny Santo’s double-cross. So there was that. All in all, Cho had talked a good game, but Nate still didn’t know exactly where he stood. After all, he was a Gang Unit cop. With Whitey. He wasn’t a CRO.
“So you’re the one who wanted to meet,” Nate said. “What?”
“I went up to Palmdale,” Cho said.
“You found the place.”
“I counted twenty RVs in the lot. You said there were ten or twelve.”
“They’re making food trucks out of them.”
“All of them?” Cho said.
“Maybe they’re going to export them,” Nate said. “To someplace where gas is cheap.”
“Incas are doing this?
“It’s all very confusing.” Nate’s coffee had cooled off enough to drink it, after he’d put an ice cube in it. He took a sip.
Cho said, “What were you doing on a roof in Boyle Heights?”
“Getting more confused by the hour. Until they tried to kill me.”
The crowd outside seemed to surge and suddenly the door flew open and there before them was a teenage girl, as if coughed up by the beast out front. She had pink hair and carefully smeared makeup that was part of her look. Behind her, the chorus on the sidewalk kept moving. The Original Pantry patrons stared at the girl as if she were famous or an alien. Or a famous alien.
“Sorry, guys,” the girl said and turned and went out the door.
“You’d better go,” Cho said to Nate.
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Les Belles du Nuit.
There was Vivid, a hundred feet high, in costume and full makeup and black, chopped-off, serrated hair, a Parisian waif with pleading eyes. It was a huge moving image billboard on the front wall of the arena, a “live” loop of the waif’s face. Every once in a while, she’d blink, in case anyone thought it was a still. Beauties of the Night was Vivid’s new road show. It wasn’t nearly enough anymore for the biggest of the stars to simply come onstage with a band and sing and dance, perform the hits, maybe change costume once or twice, touch hands along the front of the stage and then come out for a Who, me? encore or two. These days, fans could sit home with their twenty-speaker sound systems and realer-than-real holographic projections and have the basic concert experience for free, alone or with friends and with their drugs and alcohol closer at hand and not overpriced. As with drugs, what once had been enough wasn’t enough now, not for the shows with thousand-dollar cheap seats.
Judging by the image on the billboard, Vivid had immersed herself in the role, let go of a good deal of her vividness. Vividity? The mop of pink or silver hair was gone. The trademark smeared lipstick was gone, the sunken black eyes, even the dot over her lip. She looked sad, and getting sadder, as if the weight of the world was on her now. Or at least the weight of Paris. For tonight, anyway.
Without warning, three enormous helicopters—one in front, two behind side by side—flew down Figueroa, coming in from the north at five hundred feet. They were the new-model firefighter birds with doal rotors and 1,100-horsepower unmuffled engines—converted Navy bomber helos. They looked like red silos coming down the canyon between buildings. As one, the crowd pressing on toward the concert arena looked up and cheered. Maybe most of them were already high and anything big and loud and unexpected made them happy, even repurposed warships.
Nate watched the big helos thunder over. He was standing atop a box truck on the edge of the arena’s jammed front parking lot. Rockett was up there with him. The truck bore
the logo of a theatrical lightning company, part of Vivid’s crew. As the fire wagons continued on south, Il Cho jumped up onto the truck’s front bumper. Apparently he’d been down on the pavement in the crush of citizens. Nate waved him on up. Cho stepped onto the hood and then onto the roof of the cab. He climbed as if he were afraid of denting personal property, a concern that hadn’t occurred to Nate, who saw almost everything in life as an emergency situation.
“They picked the wrong night for that,” Cho said, meaning the fire wagon flyover.
“The fans think it’s part of the show,” Nate said.
Now that the big ’copters were gone, the crowd was singing again. It was almost touching in the human unanimity it showed. Or terrifying.
Nate thought it odd that Cho was still there, hanging around. Nate and Rockett had left him inside The Original Pantry. He’d said he was going to eat and then go back to work, clock in for a shift. Now here he was. If Nate let his paranoia hold sway, he’d wonder if Cho was somehow doing Whitey’s bidding, keeping an eye on Nate, trying to find out what he knew and what he didn’t. But that would be paranoid. Paranoia was one of the things that had taken the fun out of smoking weed and drinking for Nate.
“Is there any way we can get inside?” Cho said, looking out to the crowd.
Nate smiled. “Are you a Vivid now, Cho?”
“A what?”
“Maybe you’re just a belle of the night,” Nate said. “Come on.” He jumped straight down to the hood of the truck, denting it good with his Doc Martens completely on purpose.
Rockett followed, denting it worse, having learned from the master.
Cho came down Cho-style: carefully, respectfully.
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Ava Monica wasn’t paranoid enough, Nate thought. An odd duck was tailing her and she hadn’t noticed him. She was down on the main floor, sipping a Coke, munching on a tub of popcorn, her eyes on the skyboxes on the left side. The man tailing her, watching her, looked country, from down south, maybe—a big man in an out-of-fashion three-piece suit. Brown? The colored lights and the dimness of the arena made the suit look gray or even red. He wore a fedora.
“Nice hat,” Nate said. He tended never to say things ironically.
Nate was at the railing in the loge, one level up from the floor. It was half past ten and the crowd around him was happily impatient, already standing on their seats, clapping. At least they weren’t singing anymore. Ava hadn’t seen Nate. He was behind her and above her and she was looking in the other direction. The hat man who was still watching her hadn’t moved a muscle. He was down on the first floor with her, but he was almost all the way across the arena and under the overhang of the loge. He looked like someone who was used to waiting and watching. Maybe he was a PI. Or a deer hunter.
Then another man—a younger man wearing a Vivid T-shirt as a “disguise”—came up to the man in the suit. He said something in big man’s ear—three or four sentences—and pointed up at the skyboxes. He seemed like a Junior G-Man, an intern PI, a mook. Everybody has to start somewhere. The big man nodded and dismissed the younger man, and then his eyes went back to Ava. A booming announcement told people to take their seats. People obeyed. The crowded aisles and jammed stairs didn’t make it any easier for the younger snoop closing in on Ava. The place was so packed and she was so preoccupied with the skyboxes that she never spotted the second man. Or the big man. Or Nate. Unless she was doing a great job of pretending. She definitely wasn’t paranoid enough.
Ava put her drink cup and popcorn tub in a trash receptacle like a good person and started walking through the crush of fans, not looking back. A tunnel between the stands was marked Exit. She took it, going upstream against the fans rushing in. The youngish man tailing her went after her, but the crowd did its part and pushed him back.
Nate thought about going after Ava, but then remembered why he was here. He looked around for Il Cho, but he wasn’t back yet. Cho had said he was going to get a beer but that was half an hour ago. Cho wasn’t a very good liar. Nate had left Rockett out on the street. The kid didn’t seem disappointed at missing a Vivid show, especially one with a French name. Plus, they wouldn’t have let him in with the shotgun and Rockett had gotten attached to it. It was his favorite fashion accessory. It went with everything.
Nate looked up at the skyboxes Ava had been eyeing. What was she doing here? Clearly, she was working. Twelve glassed-in boxes all the way up on the west side of the arena. There were twelve more across the arena from the first, but she wasn’t looking in that direction. He couldn’t tell which of the twelve skyboxes had Ava’s attention. The one dead-center was full of people, beautiful people. Nate took out his binoculars and scanned the partiers. They were dressed as if it were New Year’s Eve. Some were in the three rows of seats with a steep rake, while others up in the front rows danced around each other, cocktails in hand, touching each other, complimenting each other. The floor-to-ceiling glass across the front had been moved aside, the better for the perfect people to take in everything without having to rub shoulders with The Imperfect down there below the clouds.
Nate panned across their faces. They had to be somebodies. He could only see three men, including a tall drink of water with white hair wearing a black suit. Nate thought he should know who the man was—an actor?—but he couldn’t come up with a name to match the face. And the shock of white hair. The man next to him looked familiar, too. The mayor? A politician? Either that or a used-car salesman on late night TV. A door opened at the back of the skybox and Ava entered. The box was crowded enough that no one paid her any mind. Nate may have been the only one who noted her arrival. He watched as she walked down some steps in a way that made her look like she belonged there. She was wearing her tarnished silver catsuit. In this context, it seemed chic—not that Nate had a clue about such things.
Every light in the arena went out. Even the exit signs, undoubtedly a code violation. Pitch black. The crowd gasped as one. Angelenos were accustomed to sudden disasters—earthquakes and explosions and mudslides (back when it still rained)—but they were still human beings. Instinct made them duck and cover before they realized that this particular sudden thing was part of the show, and they recovered and applauded the darkness. Some dolt whistled and whooped with that kind of piercing concert whistle-and-whoop nobody likes.
Then, it began: a single, pure, phosphorous-white spotlight found a wingless angel in a wisp of a dress hovering high above the crowd. Vivid! Or so it would seem for the next few seconds. The crowd cheered as one, a unified sound that seemed like a release, a sound like the sight of a flock of birds set free at a wedding or an antiwar march. Every eye was on her. She moved her arms slowly, gracefully, treading air, and the strains of a theme began, a sweet, thin, faltering melody. Or notes on their way to becoming a melody.
Nate was thinking that it’d been years since he’d been to a big concert. The audience around him was mostly young but they weren’t all young. He wondered if he’d ever had that look on his face at a show with some band or some singer, the look that was on their faces: satisfied already by the first notes of the first song, one song and one image. One Vivid. But not for long, because now the hovering Vivid was joined by another a hundred yards across the arena. And then there was another, this third Vivid swooping down almost low enough for the main floor crowd to touch. They tried, reaching for her, screaming. Before long, there were a half-dozen Vivids, spread out, swooping and soaring. You couldn’t see the wires. Nate was thinking there must have been some real advances in theatrical trickery since he’d stopped going to concerts. They really looked as if they were flying, a flock of Vivids.
Which was the real Vivid? The last to appear. Almost imperceptibly, the black void at one end of the arena began to turn blue and very slowly the stage was revealed. A set, a scene, a lamppost, a street. In Paris? Paris in unhappier times? As the blue intensified, the lamppost somehow increased in size until it wa
s as tall as a tree—like an effect in a trippy cartoon—and Vivid herself walked forward from the deeper darkness at the back of the stage, singing the first words…
There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye but very wise was he…
Nate raised his binoculars again and looked up at the middle skybox on the left, turning on the night vision. The tall white-haired man whose name he couldn’t remember and the others were all up front at the rail, fully caught up in the spectacle—or pretending to be. Ava was watching the stage, too, but off to one side from Whitehead and the others and with a look on her face that was hard to read. She seemed lost or…sad of eye? Maybe that was it, though Nate would be the first to admit that he could almost never tell what a woman was thinking. And whenever he was certain, he was almost always 180 degrees wrong.
He panned across to the next skybox, the next-door neighbors to Ava and her beautiful people. More beautiful people. The next one? More beautiful people. He went from skybox to skybox, all the way around the arena.
And there they were. Directly across from the beautiful people’s perch was a skybox on the east side with a different sort of Vivid fans. Il Cho was up front with his back to the railing with a beer in his hand, not a beautiful somebody at all. Behind him were Whitey and Ignacio “Nacho” Iberriz, the crippled El Jefe of the Incas, cranked upright in his MotoWalker. And there was the South American cowboy businessman, all of them just hanging out like the best of friends, only the women paying any attention to the show on stage.
By then, Vivid had gotten to the punch line…
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return…