NightSun

by Dan Vining

  “They call it ‘the present’ because it’s a gift…” Ava said.

  “I bet they do the same thing with flowers,” Nate said. “She probably has her own private bomb squad.” Ava was still watching Vivid. Behind her, Nate was taking a second to refresh his memory about Ava’s body while she was looking down at the stage. As if she didn’t notice.

  “But everybody loves her…” Ava said.

  “In my experience, that’s when they try to kill you,” Nate said.

  “I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about obsessive love,” Ava said.

  Nate was eyeballing the group down at the railing in the box. “Who is he? White hair.”

  “David Lynch. And John Tern is a state senator.”

  “His name is Turn?”

  “Tern. With an e. Don’t you ever read a paper?”

  “A paper what?”

  “Lynch all but created Tern. They have mutual interests. Intellectual property, but not too intellectual.”

  “Who’s the blonde who keeps brushing her hair out of her eyes?”

  “You noticed.”

  “She doesn’t look too steady.”

  Cali turned and looked right at them. She was too far away to have heard what they were saying. She’d just heard Nate’s voice. He had the kind of voice that people turned toward, just the timbre of it. In the military world it was called a Command voice. In the cop world it was called a Sit Down & Shut Up voice.

  Cali went back to staring unblinking at the arena floor again. Another tear had followed the first.

  Ava said, “She’s thinking about going over the rail.”

  “So you’re on lifeguard duty,” Nate said.

  “Maybe,” Ava said. “Why are you here?”

  “The usual. Trying to end all the suffering in the world,” Nate said. “Or at least in LA. How about you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ava said after a moment, seriously.

  Nate said, “How come all of these women are wearing the same dress?” Cali and the others were in their matching butterfly dresses, just like up at Xanadu.

  “To please a man,” Ava said. “Or to please themselves by pleasing a man. It’s something we do in our weaker moments.”

  “You make it sound dirty,” Nate said.

  “I guess men do it, too—try to please women,” Ava said, though she didn’t believe it.

  “You got a guy tailing you,” Nate said, trying not to sound superior. “Actually, a guy and another guy working for the first guy. Big guy in a crackerjack brown suit. Blondie’s daddy, unless I miss my guess.”

  “I saw them,” Ava said, though she hadn’t seen them. She knew who the man in the brown suit would be: the big lug with the foot-long gun who’d stood in her path in the parking garage. Nico Passarelli? Don? But she didn’t know he was here. Or that he had an assistant.

  Nate lifted his binoculars. He wasn’t looking at the stage anymore. He’d seen something across the way. Ava tried to see what he was looking at. There was a crowd in the box directly across from them, a multiracial group, unlike Lynch’s gang. Cali left the group at the railing and walked up the aisle on the far side of the skybox, pulling Ava’s attention back where it belonged. Cali was either headed toward the exit or the little lost girl’s room. At least she hadn’t dived over the railing. Ava went after her.

  “Bye,” Nate said, the binocs still to his eyes.

  From this vantage point, Nate could see into the depths of Whitey’s box. Whitey had just said something that got a laugh out of Ignacio “Nacho” Iberriz and his gunsel, who was never far away. Il Cho was standing off to one side, close to the wall. Cho looked like he didn’t belong there, or didn’t know how he was supposed to act among all these criminals. Or maybe Nate was just giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  Someone else had shown up. Derrick Wallace. Along with his wife Jewel, who was wearing the same basic black dress she’d worn to the funeral of her boys. Wallace looked as if he didn’t exactly know what he was doing there either, like Cho. And even here—with love all around—Zap Wallace looked angry, a long way past Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Whitey patted him on the back and handed him a drink.

  Ava never returned, at least for as long as Nate stayed in the skybox.

  www

  Fin. Vivid’s Les Belles du Nuit was over.

  Or rather, the show had moved out of the arena and onto the streets, the twenty thousand fans inside pouring out to merge with the ticketless thousands who had partied outside throughout the concert. The crowd—insiders and outsiders—had arrived singing six hours ago and they were singing still, dancing and jumping up and down. It was almost midnight but not a single belle or beau showed any inclination to leave. Anyway, how would they get to their Feds and trains through this throng?

  Nate had climbed on top of a party bus. The driver was half asleep behind the wheel without one passenger inside. He knew he wasn’t going anywhere soon. The crowd extended north to The Original Pantry, thick as they could be. It was the same view south down Figueroa Street. People were jumping as high as they could jump, trying to touch the letters of an electric sign suspended over the jammed street. Nate had no idea what the sign said or even what language it was. What it should have said was I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction) because they wanted more, all of them. Vivid had come back for four encores and the cheering only got louder with each one until it drowned out the songs. Halfway through the encores, Nate had guessed what was coming next and headed for the exit, ahead of almost everyone.

  The crowd outside would surge in one direction and then surge back. From on high the mass of people would have looked like an organism, a living thing trying to perambulate in the most basic, mindless way. Mindless, but happy. Nate spotted the big man in the brown suit and hat with his boy PI. They’d just come out on the far end of the arena. The young man was pushing fans aside as best he could to clear a path for the big guy, but they weren’t having much luck getting away from the arena. People kept snatching the man’s fedora and putting it on their own heads and then he’d snatch it back. Nate didn’t look for Whitey and Il Cho or Derrick Wallace and the other gang leaders. They’d likely already lifted off of the roof from the city officials’ pad. Vivid and the band and backup singers had probably flown away, too. Nate wondered about Ava. Worried? He hoped she had stuck close with the VIPs.

  Rockett was back atop the lighting truck, a hundred yards across the way. The party people kept threatening to climb up to the top of the truck. Each time they tried, Rockett lowered his shotgun until they backed off, raising their hands in mock surrender and laughing at him. They were like kids playing fort or King of the Mountain, except one of the kids had a shotgun. Rockett didn’t look rattled.

  “Good man,” Nate said to himself. He said into the radio, “Stay where you are. I’ll come your way when I can.” Nate had landed the Crow on the roof of an office building behind The Original Pantry, so Rockett was closer to it than Nate. “Don’t shoot anybody. This’ll break up in a while.”

  But as it turned out, that wasn’t going to happen, because now the rain came. The “rain.” The fat red tanker helos returned, came down Figueroa again—one in front, two behind, as before—loud as hell, louder than before. Their arrival was sudden, more sudden than seemed possible with such big things. Earlier in the evening when they’d passed overhead, it had just been for recon. Now they were getting down to business. The twenty-foot spray-arms were cranked out from the sides of each helicopter and the valves were open as they roared in.

  Rain. The county had been promising/threatening for two months to launch the program: fake rain from tanker-helos filled with water from the desal plants. (Or was it reclaimed sewage water?) The Freshening! it was called, complete with the exclamation mark. The bold/desperate plan was for squadrons of tankers to shower the whole city, neighborhood by neighborhoo
d—one night of rain for each—for forty nights (which meant someone somewhere had an Old Testament sense of humor). The basic idea behind it was to clean the streets and the parked cars and the rooftops, to water the trees and the cemeteries and the lawns that were left, and to buck up the citizenry. No one wanted to see a repeat of the water riots of 2020. So they’d had weeks of debate in City Hall and public information sessions in satellite outreach meetings, a process that was supposed to be ongoing, although tonight apparently someone had decided to just pull the chain and see what happened.

  The helos slowed as they came over, causing the raindrops to fatten. With the down-blow of the rotors, it was like being in a typhoon, a friendly typhoon. Nate thought this whole thing was a joke, but, before he could stop himself, he put his head back with his mouth open, looking like an animal howling at the moon. He missed the rain, more than most people. Rain just felt right, he was thinking. Rain reinforced the idea that the cosmos wanted you to flourish, he thought. Or at least survive. It was hard to believe, but a heavy rain like this used to come over Los Angeles on a regular basis. Even over a desert town like LA, which is what it was. He remembered something his old man said on a camping trip out beyond Twentynine Palms when Nate was twelve or thirteen. Bodie had said, bouncing along on a rutted road in his truck, looking straight ahead, “It never rains harder than it rains in the desert, when it finally gets around to it. Watch the hell out. And don’t pitch your tent in a ditch.”

  Of course, the Vivid crowd loved the homemade rain. When the tanker helos had made their first pass, everyone had thought it was part of the show. Half of them were wearing T-shirts. Now the shirts came off, now they got waved around overhead like flags, as if they were disaster-at-sea survivors on an island waving at a rescue boat, only in this case they didn’t want to be rescued. The three tankers banked slightly. It looked as if they were going to come around for a second slow pass just for the delight of the crowd, something that surely wasn’t part of the night’s official flight plan. Now some of the women started pulling off their shirts, too.

  Below Nate’s island, a woman with a child was panicking. Her daughter was getting swallowed up. The people around the mother were too caught up in the wet wildness to read the alarm on her face. The little girl was wearing a glittery Vivid T-shirt. In the next moment, her feet were knocked out from under her and she went down, disappeared beneath the surface. Even over the cheering and singing of the crowd, Nate heard the girl’s scream and jumped down off the bus. He clicked on his ShockTouch and waded in.

  For the last few years, street cops—and CROs, who occasionally moved (impatiently) on crowded sidewalks—had been equipped with gizmo technology that sent a low-voltage kick to their fingertips. Wires ran down from a unit strapped on the upper arm, connecting to mesh gloves that transmitted the juice. It delivered—with just a touch—a tenth of the jolt of a taser. The cops called it the “Excuse Me.” It didn’t usually rile the person touched but was an effective people-mover nonetheless.

  Twenty feet of fans stood between Nate and the girl and her mother. He parted the Red Sea and then—after he’d de-weaponized his mitts—pulled the girl up to safety. He handed her off to her mother, looked back at the way he’d come in. The crowd had closed behind him. He put the mother and daughter behind him and switched on his gloves again and started back toward the bus.

  He spotted Ava off to his left. She was searching the sea of bobbing heads, looking for someone, probably her own blonde Little Girl Lost from the skybox. Nate got the mother and daughter to the bus and then went back out into the crowd for Ava.

  “Want me to save you?” he said when he reached her. She was soaked. Her hair was a wet mess.

  “I lost the girl,” Ava said.

  “Come on,” Nate said, touching her shoulder.

  She jumped back. He’d forgotten he was hot. “Watch it!” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Boys and their toys,” Ava said.

  “So what do you want to do, Ava?” Nate said.

  Ava took a last scan of the crowd around her. “Get me out of here,” she said.

  This time Nate headed in the direction of the box truck, where Rockett was. Ava fell in behind him. Overhead, the three red helos curved around, apparently for a second drop.

  “Where’d you park?” Nate said over his shoulder.

  Ava’s instincts about chaos were as good as his. “Forget the car. We need to get out of this,” she said. “Now.”

  How quickly everything changed and had gone from joy to riot. Ten feet away from Nate and Ava, four or five people exchanged a look, then started in trying to pull down one of the light stanchions, rocking it back and forth until it snapped off and fell, sparking. It wasn’t prompted by anything, at least nothing that could be seen. Its bulbous head crash-landed on a kid looking the other way and electrocuted him, his body bouncing around on the pavement. It made no sense at all, but the people close enough to see what happened cheered with the ugliest kind of sound. Light stanchions were spaced every fifty feet across the parking lot. Spontaneously, knots of men and women who didn’t know one another started rocking the other light posts back and forth until they snapped off too, sparking and flashing. It was like a light-forest being felled. Then, without warning, everywhere, men and women started beating on each other, pushing and hitting each other, strangers acting as if they weren’t strangers at all, were full of hatred, with bad history. And as if on cue, the second wave of bogus rain fell. The churned-up crowd responded like a beast, one beast shaking its thousand fists at the sky. Blood was flowing by now, too much for the fake rain to wash away.

  Ten Crows arrived, out of nowhere. The scene outside the arena had been monitored from the start and now some human or robotic scanner had determined that it was time to act, or at least to come in closer to investigate. The NightSuns on their underbellies were blazing, ten brilliant orbs, ten unblinking eyes looking down on the crowd, judging them en masse. Nate looked up at the closest Crow. He could see the eyes of the CRO at the stick, nobody he knew. He waved him off and at the same time keyed his mic. “Pull back! Lift!” Three of the Crows obeyed immediately, ascending rapidly and cutting their spotlights. The other CROs had either seen Nate or heard his voice and recognized him. The Crows all lifted.

  Rockett watched as Nate and Ava came toward him through the throng. He jumped off the side of the box truck, landing on his feet on the tarmac with a grunt. It had knocked the wind out of him, but he recovered and crossed to Nate and Ava. Rockett walked point and the three of them made their way through the crush of people, headed south. They stepped over a dead woman, young, blonde, face-down. Ava stopped cold. The dead blonde wore a print dress but it wasn’t Cali. Nate gripped Ava’s hand to get her past the mess.

  Rockett was ten years older.

  www

  It was after one in the morning when Ava made it back down to where she’d parked the Hudson, going the long way, with Nate and his gunner clearing a path on the still-packed side street. The fans had eyed her hopefully, as if she might be someone famous, then went straight to being annoyed that some unfamous someone got a police escort, and an electrified one at that. The riot’s bad vibes diminished the farther they got from the arena. There was at least a little shame on the faces around them, mixed in with a lot of confusion. And blood. Ava waved goodbye to Nate and his too-cute gunner and pulled out of the parking lot.

  The drive across town took too long and somehow not long enough. She had smooth sailing for a short block or two, then Wilshire was bumper-to-bumper, and Beverly Boulevard was worse. Sitting there, stuck, with the big wheel in her hands, she had the idea that maybe she’d be better off walking, not that she acted on it. Going home, going to bed, alone, wasn’t something she thought to do, so she was headed to Westwood to the office. At least there would be a guard at the desk downstairs to say hello to or maybe the accountant across the hall wou
ld be working late. He worked all night some nights, too, apparently also had no one at home who would notice.

  Westwood. Two thirty. The streets dead quiet. A miraculous parking spot waited for her on Gayley, right below her office window. She shut the Hudson down and got out. After the programmed “rain” downtown, everything in Westwood looked so dirty, so parched and dusty. Dry as a bone. She thought of the phrase, standing there beside the car. A city in a drought was like a big boneyard. Maybe the fake rain would be a good thing for the Angelenos—make them think, as they fell asleep hearing it drip off the trees and eaves, that they weren’t going to dry up and blow away after all—and get them to start acting accordingly. Then she remembered that the “rain” had seemed to make tonight’s crowd want to stomp each other to death.

  “Tomorrow,” she said out loud. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

  She was ten feet from the front door to her office building when she heard a squeaking noise. It had rhythm to it: beat, beat, squeak, beat, beat. She looked south toward Wilshire. It was a man on a bicycle, coming this way, still two long blocks away. A big man, too big for the bike, maybe too big for any bike.

  A big man in a fedora. Nico Passarelli!

  Ava grabbed the office door handle. It was locked. She looked in. The guard wasn’t at his post though the screen on his desk was pulsing and she could hear the chatter and soundtrack laughter of an old sitcom. He was in there somewhere. She pounded on the door. The people on TV kept laughing. She dug in her purse for her keys. They weren’t where they were supposed to be.

  He closed in. She kept looking for those keys.

  “Wait,” he said, dismounting awkwardly, almost falling over onto the street. His tone wasn’t threatening. It was meant to not just stop Ava but to put her at ease, something all men learn how to do with women they encounter alone after dark somewhere. Then he said something that further disarmed her: “They say you never forget how to ride a bike but…I don’t know.”