by Dan Vining
“Leave me alone, scram, I have a gun,” Ava said, and widened her stance, the way men do when they are standing their ground.
He leaned the bike against a parking meter post and straightened up and pushed his hat down. “No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t like guns. That was one of the reasons I wanted to use you.”
Ava found her keys, aimed one toward the lock in her office door.
“Wait!” he said. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Ava got the door unlocked. The guard was just coming back to his desk with a cup of coffee. He saw Ava outside, saw the look on her face, put the coffee down, and came on toward her.
“I’m her husband,” the big guy said.
The line did what it was meant to do: it stopped Ava from going in. He was close enough now to put out his hand. “Tom Hadley,” he said. “Belleville, Illinois. Some call me Happy.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sunday morning coming down. The doctor caught Nate in the hallway when he was about ten feet away from Bodie’s room. She touched him on the back to make him turn. Doctors don’t usually touch people—at least not in the way regular people touch each other—so it spooked Nate, but when he turned, she didn’t have a particularly worried look on her face. He’d learned how to read the faces of doctors in places like the Police Sunset Home. Or he thought he had. The doctors had a whole different manner when he was on the job and the dead and dying were someone else’s old man. Or son. Cops and doctors on the job talked to one another as if they were letting the other man in on the joke. Here it was different, what might be called normal.
She backed into an unoccupied room. He followed her. The door stayed open. She didn’t turn on the light. “Old Carl died,” she said.
She was in her fifties, had the kind of good looks that lasted, Nate was thinking, even at a time like this.
“I hate to hear that,” Nate said. “He was a for-real gunslinger.”
“He died in his sleep,” the doctor said. “Though with Carl that didn’t mean he died peacefully.”
Nate smiled. “The bastards behind the bank finally got him.”
She smiled back. She didn’t seemed rushed, the way doctors always seem rushed. She noticed the cast on his arm. He had his sleeves rolled down. She knocked on it, like knocking on a door. Nate was thinking maybe she was flirting with him, though she wasn’t smiling anymore. Then he realized she just needed to put a pause in the scene. That was when she said, “There’s something going on with your father. We have to run some tests.” So much for being able to read doctors.
Nate came back out of the world of his own vanity and self-absorption. “What is it now?” he said. “What’s wrong with him? Do I want to know?”
“We’re running some tests. Blood work today and a CAT scan Monday.” She ran her hand across her stomach and abdomen. Nate tried not to think about what exactly hid in the dark in that section of the human body.
He cursed. One word. She had heard the word before.
“He doesn’t know,” she said. “There aren’t any new symptoms.”
Nate nodded. Maybe she knew what he meant by it, the nod, because he didn’t know what he meant.
Bodie was in bed, but he’d propped himself up with an extra pillow behind his head. He had his comb in his right hand, down beside his hip. He’d been combing his hair. If he was sicker than he’d been the last time Nate had come, he didn’t look it. Nate stayed in the doorway for a second.
“You’ve got more hair than I do,” Nate said, instead of hello. “Mine is starting to thin out.”
“You’ve got your grandfather’s hair. He was bald by fifty. Maybe it skips a generation.”
“That would suck,” Nate said.
“Carl’s gone,” Bodie said. Both mens’ eyes went to the empty bed. Nate nodded. Bodie said, “I thought maybe you’d think they were just giving him a bath or something.”
“When?”
“What difference does it make?” Bodie said.
“Good point.”
“Last night,” Bodie said. “He went all quiet, right after he got real loud.” They both looked away from the empty bed. “When I got put here, he was still pretty much in the here and now,” Bodie said. “Goddamn, he was tough. He had seen some things, done some things too, probably. Tough.”
Nate took his father outside. Today, Bodie let him push the wheelchair. Neither man commented on it. They went out under the eucalyptuses. Nate thought of the trees as belonging to the two of them, their eucalyptuses. Since it was a Sunday, there were a lot of visitors, on the benches, under the trees. Did they think the trees were theirs? A windstorm had come through two nights ago and no one had come in to clean up yet; there was shredded bark everywhere. No birds were in the branches, as if they’d been scared off, as if they’d all flown off to wherever birds go when waiting for bad weather to pass. The question was why hadn’t they come back?
A volunteer rolled a cart by, ice cream bars, free. Neither man wanted one.
“Are you going to tell me how you broke your arm?” Bodie said.
Nate thought of a joke answer but, instead, said, “I think I’m onto a dirty cop, a senior guy in the Gang U. Something involving smuggling, maybe smuggling people. Two different gangs, maybe working together. I got thrown off a roof in Boyle Heights.”
“We used to kill crooked cops,” Bodie said, just like that. “It wasn’t about Internal Affairs. Hell, most of us didn’t care much one way or another with most IA cases. It would have to be a bad case that we’d find out about or personally witness. Not just a guy who got in money trouble. And not a first offense. It would have to be habitual or particularly egregious. In our faces. We’d kill ’em. It happened twice in my years on the force. And one other time, the guy killed himself, with some of us standing right there.”
Nate was used to Bodie charging off down some road in his head. It seemed that the sicker he got—the closer to an end that only he could see, perhaps—the more Bodie had to say, the faster he talked, as if he was needing to get things on the record. Nate would say something that triggered a memory and away Bodie would go, usually starting with a line that was designed to grab Nate’s attention, hook him, draw him close. No doubt the gerontologists had a name for the phenomenon, a designation meant to tame it, make it seem less crazy, less…end stage. As before, Nate just listened, let him go.
“A robbery detective had a thing at Santa Anita,” Bodie said, in the next breath. “When they still let horses race and let people put money on them, right out in the open. Imagine that. It wasn’t that he had some kind of skim going on, the usual thing. This guy was working with somebody inside, doping horses and probably jockeys, too. A couple of them died. Horses, not jockeys. We thought he’d let it go then, but he started right back up and when he did, he laid off the previous deal on another cop, a rookie who didn’t have a clue and ended up in prison over it.”
“So what happened?” Nate said. Bodie had stopped cold.
“Somebody—not me—shot him in the head, out under an old oil well in Alhambra, end of his shift. Cops can’t let things like that go on. Not when it’s in your face, not when innocent cops are taking the fall or worse. You have to do what you have to do.”
You. Nate wondered if his old man meant him specifically. He was still watching the high branches of the stinky, papery trees. It was such a dry, dead day that nothing was moving, not the smallest branch, not one leaf. It was as if the world were holding its breath, this little corner of the world anyway.
“The other day I was remembering when we got our pool,” Nate said.
“Nineteen ninety-six,” Bodie said. “It cost eight thousand dollars.”
“I was seven or eight. You were sitting there with a bottle of beer in an aluminum folding chair. I had these goggles I got for my birthday. You took the bottle cap and threw it out in the mi
ddle of the pool. You said you’d give me a dollar if I dove down and got that bottle cap.”
“I don’t remember any of this,” Bodie said.
“I dove down,” Nate said. “It was deep. On the second or third try, I got it. I climbed back out, handed it to you. You dug in the pocket of your shorts—you weren’t wearing a shirt, just shorts—and you came out with four quarters.”
Bodie started to nod.
“You threw them in the pool, the deep end,” Nate said.
“There’s your dollar!” his father said, laughing. Nate laughed, too.
A motorcycle came past, and not one of the new electrics. This one had that throaty my-wife-doesn’t-approve sound. Nate looked over as it turned into the facility. It was fire-engine red, a thirty-year-old Harley Roadster. It made a loop around the lot, then stopped next to Nate’s Crow at the far end of the lot. The rider got off, dropped the stand, and pulled off his red helmet. It was Il Cho. He looked across at Nate, stayed right where he was.
“I gotta go,” Nate said.
“Leave me out here. Sun feels good. I can get myself back in.”
Nate bent over the wheelchair and kissed Bodie on the forehead, something he’d never done before, not once. He could tell his dad appreciated it, even if he didn’t see it coming or understand why it had come today.
“Thanks for dropping by.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” Nate said, starting across toward the parking lot and Il Cho.
“Sorry about the hair,” Bodie said, instead of goodbye.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The CI switchboard was on fire, every snitch in Snitchville calling in. Nate had even gotten a message from Johnny Santo sitting in County, waiting to be transferred up to Soledad. They were like third-graders squirming in their seats, waving their hands, hoping to be called on, get that gold star. And they were all saying the same thing: something about RVs, a line of them supposedly aimed toward LA from some place in the high desert, purportedly headed on to Mexico, apparently to pick up weed. A new big-scale smuggle. Incas.
The first informant of the day was Blind Billy, a legally blind (former) barber in Compton. “I’m not looking to get anything out of this, not a thing,” he had said right off that morning there on the screen on the counter in Nate’s kitchen, before Nate’s KitchenMaid had even made coffee. “You turned my life around. I’m forever in your debt.” Blind Billy said the same lines—run together like that—every time he talked to Nate. Six years ago Nate had put together the trafficking case that sent the blind man to prison along with three of his men. Improbably, right there in the courtroom, Billy had thanked Nate for arresting him and—in prison and once he was out again—had continued to thank him with the occasional tip.
But this time something was off. There was subtext in the blind man’s video tip. So Nate flew down to Compton to look him in the eyes, such as they were. Billy wasn’t at his usual spot on the sidewalk in the green lawn chair out in front of the shop he still owned. The barbers inside said they didn’t have the slightest idea where he could possibly be, but then Billy stepped out from the back room. Maybe Billy smelled the turkey. Nate had brought him a smoked whole turkey.
They went into the office to talk. From the start—when he pointed toward the red plastic couch and closed the door behind them—Billy was uneasy, hesitant, acting like a man who had something to say but wasn’t sure he was going to say it, who wasn’t sure what trouble it would bring down on him if he did say it. Blind Billy was a White man in his sixties. His hair once had been sandy blond, but now what was left of it was dyed red-out-of-a-bottle. “Legally blind” in Billy’s case meant that he could make out shapes and shades of light. He had lived his whole life in the Black community. Nate didn’t know his personal story, had never thought to ask. There were a lot of Blind Billys in Nate’s life, men and women who weren’t what they looked like from across the street, men and women with backstories that went a way toward explaining—but not all the way—how they got to be the way they were. Billy wore sunglasses day and night, apparently because he thought they made him look more Black and made people think he couldn’t see a thing, which was useful. People spoke to him as if he were fully blind and senseless in all the other ways. They’d say, “There’s a coffee there in front of you on the table, Billy.” Behind his back, the same wise-asses might say, “Has anyone ever told him he’s not a Negro?” though everyone knew he’d lost his sight in high school.
He settled behind his desk and said, “What brings you down here, sir? Did I say something in my message that gave you pause?”
“Everybody’s calling me about the RV thing, using the same words,” Nate said.
“Like the man says, they’re just words unless they’re true,” Blind Billy said. He looked up at the ceiling, squinting, as if attempting to read something there. Maybe he was trying to remember the words he’d used when he’d called Nate that morning.
“Who did you hear it from? If you don’t mind telling me.”
Billy shifted in his chair, made it squeak. He hesitated, then said a name. Then he said another name. “It could have been either one of them,” he said. “I honestly don’t remember. People come to me with all manner of things. Trying to get a free fade, I guess. Shave and a haircut, six bits. Like you said, everybody’s talking about this.”
“When?”
“It’s happening now, probably already happened. They on the road, brother.”
“I meant when did you hear?”
“I imagine I heard about it sometime Sunday. I guess it’s an entertaining idea, captures people’s attention, RVs.”
“And everybody likes more Mexican weed,” Nate said.
“Indeed,” Blind Billy said. “And there’s a drought.”
“What about heroin?” Nate asked.
“A ton of it all at once,” Billy said, turning toward Nate again. “First there wasn’t none, now there’s a ton. One if by land, two if by sea.”
“Any thoughts about who’s behind the RVs?”
“Incas. And a Gang Unit cop is in on it. What I hear.”
“A fleet of RV haulers. That would be a whole lot of pot.”
“Indeed. But people want a lot of it. They use it as an escape goat.”
Nate smiled, stood. He had the turkey in a paper sack. He set it on the desk.
Billy got up to see him out. “It probably was Little Devin who told me, now that I think about it. That’d make sense,” he said. It was one of the names he had offered up a minute ago, the second of the two names he’d said. “He’s dead,” he said. “Found this morning.”
“Hope you like the turkey,” Nate said. “A guy in South Pasadena smokes ’em. Real wood, real smoke, real meat.”
“Real illegal,” Blind Billy said, and licked his lips.
Nate had left the Crow a block away atop the building across from the funeral home where he’d walked in on Derrick Wallace. Rockett had given up standing at parade rest beside the bird but he was still alert, head on a swivel. He had his side-arm in hand. Nate wondered if he’d holstered it since the other night’s riot. He also wondered if the kid was keeping his own body count. A hundred people had been stomped dead in front of the arena. It was Monday. At least the kid had gotten Sunday off.
Yesterday morning in the cop home parking lot when Il Cho had ridden up on his motorcycle, he hadn’t said anything about the RVs in the High Desert but he had told Nate about the goings-on in Whitey’s skybox at the Vivid show. Nacho Ibierrez and Derrick Wallace. According to Cho, the get-together had been about making peace between the Incas and the Twenties, clearing the way to do some business together. Or at least not trip over each other. It had stayed tense between the leaders of the two gangs, Cho said. And Cho said Whitey had said, when it was over, that he’d brought together Derrick Wallace and Nacho Ibierrez to play the two gangs against each other. “To neutr
alize them,” Cho said Whitey had said. “To keep the whole thing from happening.” Maybe. Or maybe Cho was feeding Nate a line Whitey wanted Nate to hear, to throw him off.
Nate and Rockett flew north.
And there they weren’t. The RVs. The fenced lot behind the factory in Palmdale was empty. It had held twenty or more new coaches but no more. Gone. The plant looked dead, abandoned. Nate hovered for a few seconds and then circled for another angle, another view. He knew Rockett in the seat behind him was looking down on the utterly empty scene, too. Maybe he was getting used to this. He’d been Nate’s gunner long enough now to figure out that the job was a lot of watching and waiting in places where nothing seemed to be happening. Down below, a literal tumbleweed rolled across the lot.
“You like Westerns, Rockett?”
“Not really. My mom made me watch Unforgiven once. It’s her favorite movie.”
“That makes sense. Your dad splitting and all.”
“I guess. I never thought of it that way.”
“They’re morality plays, Westerns,” Nate said. “The best ones are black and white.”
“Actually, I think she was the one who split,” Rockett said.
“Oh,” Nate said. Of course.
He pivoted, pointed them south, dropped the hammer. When accelerating, haulin’ ass, Crows tilted down radically. At speed, Rockett had the same view as Nate. They were above the 5 freeway, five hundred feet off the deck. It wasn’t but a minute before they were over the weird slanted red slabs of Vasquez Rocks. Nothing looked more Western than Vasquez Rocks. Or was it Martian?
“We’re looking for RVs,” Nate called back to Rockett. “A bunch of them. Rollin’.”
As they flew over Mission Hills into the San Fernando Valley, Nate reached under the dash and revived the radio. Carrie appeared instantly. “Where have you been?” she said, almost like a wife. “We have a Yellow Code call.”