NightSun

by Dan Vining

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  It was a full-on coordinated move on the TMZ; twenty-five helos in formation, a murder of Crows, half of them coming in from the south, the rest in a fan-tail, approaching from the west, north, and east, spread out like fingers. It was the sort of operation that needed a good deal of planning, which meant it was political. Nate was still ten miles out, watching the show on the heads-up display, listening to the noisy cross-talk on the radio. He recognized most of the voices, comrades in arms. No Whitey, no Il Cho, no GU cops, none of the voices he was tired of hearing.

  “Three-six-five,” Nate said to the air in front of him.

  His CRO buddy Tucker appeared. He was airborne, over downtown, behind the controls, moving into position with his gunner behind him. “Yo.Today your day off?”

  “There are no holidays in hell. So what’s in the TMZ? Godzilla?”

  “Okies. We’re doing a ‘humane extraction.’ Round ’em up, head ’em out. I guess there got to be too many of them down in there.”

  “Where are they taking them?”

  “We’re just handling the rounding up part,” Tucker said. “We’re supposed to make a show in the air to center them, then drop and land and come in walkulating. They want to get it all done by dark, before the suppertime news shows.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “You want us to wait for you?” Tucker said.

  “Could you? I love a good show of… concern,” Nate said.

  They didn’t wait for him. It looked like war. Nate made a first pass at mid-altitude and then climbed to a thousand feet and hovered, above it all. Below, the helos tightened up the formation for their friendly assault. Nate opened the hatches so Rockett could see. They watched, waiting for the Okies to come out onto the rooftops or run out of the buildings. It didn’t happen. After a few minutes, a handful of the TMZ’s regular homeless inhabitants emerged between the buildings, looking up. Crows were mostly silent, but not when there were twenty-five of them directly overhead. They started landing, picking roofs on the perimeter of the zone. The long-term squatters disappeared back inside.

  Tucker and the other CROs started coming down fire escapes, moving in on foot.

  “What do you see?” Nate said.

  Tucker clicked on the body cam on his shoulder. He was inside the N Building, where they’d all been that night when things went sideways. “Does that answer your question?” Tucker said.

  Not a soul.

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  Nate went back to looking for the RVs, this time flying south. The empty would-be weed-haulers could’ve slipped into Mexico already if they’d left Palmdale over the weekend as Blind Billy and everyone else had testified. It was a four- or five- hour trip to Mexico. Two middle-of-nowhere roads went south and southeast through the mountains and desert. Even with the tightening of the border after the oil boom, the crossings at Tecate and La Rumorosa remained. They were old-style, low-tech, and undermanned, with local officials more open to bribery than the federales at the big gate at Otay Mesa/Tijuana.

  But something told Nate the RVs were still in LA. He flew over a few big used-car and truck lots east of downtown. Boyle Heights. He flew right over the rooftop where his two Inca pals had tried to teach him how to fly. The memory made his wrist hurt. He went farther south, crossed over two freeways and the dry LA River, and scoped out the massive car graveyards and salvage lots in South Gate, dusty rusted acres of The Way We Were. A battered old Winnebago leaned against another dinosaur RV in the back row of one junkyard, but that was it.

  “We’re still looking for RVs,” he said to Rockett.

  He headed back toward downtown. Storing the coaches out in the open—even for a day or two—would be a mistake Whitey and the Incas wouldn’t make. The rigs were too tall to fit through the entryways for most of the covered parking lots, but Nate circled a couple of those anyway.

  Tucker’s visage popped up on the heads-up display. He looked beat. “The Okies were gone“The Okies were gone, all of them, when we came in on foot,” he said.

  “Gone how?” Nate said.

  “The regulars down in the TMZ said the Okies all went into one building down in there and never came out. Herded by some gangbangers—Latin. It all happened before we came on the scene, early this morning.”

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  It was bumping on sunset when Nate decided to look for RVs another way, on screens. He landed on the roof of the glass block that was the CRO headquarters. He stood there by the Crow a second and looked west. When it got really dry like this, the sky at sundown could look almost like blood. Or that sherbet that was orange and raspberry swirled together. That kind of sky always made him think of The Eagles’ Hotel California album, the picture on the cover, back when records still had covers.

  You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave…

  The song was still stuck in his head as he rode the elevator down, leaving Rockett on the roof supervising the fueling of the bird.

  Nate started with the last forty-eight hours’ worth of high-sat/low-sat surveillance recordings, elapsed-time coverage of Southern California from Ventura south to Mexico, from Palos Verdes Peninsula east to Palm Desert. The big, high clear brown pictures weren’t of much use except to give Nate his bearings and to confirm the drought and near certainty of a dry tomorrow. It wasn’t entirely cloudless. In the Angeles Forest above Azusa, out to the east a few miles, a trio of perfectly round cotton balls had gotten snagged in the derelict broadcast towers on Mount Wilson. The high view had another use for Nate: it gave him, against all odds, a sweet feeling, a feeling of home. Los Angeles was inhospitable in all kinds of ways, but it was his home territory. He clicked down to the closer view and zeroed in on downtown, watched that morning’s commute. The feed was sped up, which meant the cars looked as if they were actually moving, actually commuting. A running analog clock in the corner of the frame ran through two hours while Nate watched. What was funny was how little forward motion there was, even sped up, how dumb and utterly impractical driving a car in LA seemed.

  The video gear had hand-gesture controls. It was like flying with the stick in his hand but without the stick. Nate pointed to the right with his thumb to roll back the time and the footage went in a blur to noon the day before, only stopping when Nate’s thumb came upright again. He lifted his right hand and changed the location with a pushing motion that told the View-Master to speed north. Thus he went from the towers of downtown back to Sun Valley and the mountain pass where the I-5 came south past Vasquez Rocks. It was as good a spot as any to sit and watch and wait. Daylight faded and night came on. The spy system used the best military night-vision cameras. The hills stayed black but the freeway turned orange, bright as day.

  No sign of the RVs. Nate watched all through the night, which meant five minutes.

  Most Angelenos would be surprised to learn of the level of surveillance they now lived under, how close and unblinking the eyes watching them were. Whether they would be angry about it was another question. What did privacy even mean anymore? Tonight Nate had the HQ screen room to himself, but other nights cops would scan LA for scenes to crack jokes about. Nude sunbathers in their fenced backyards. Volleyball girls at Zuma Beach. Falling-down drunks falling down drunk. Unattractive mismatched people getting married at the arboretum. Beautiful guys doing yoga on rooftops in West Hollywood. Dopes stealing cars only to get stuck in traffic a half block away. Hookers hooking. An action movie shooting on a studio backlot, take after take, explosion after explosion. Some Islander taking a leak in his backyard at midnight, drinking a beer with his free hand.

  Nate remembered something. The 24/7 surveillance of Whitey Barnes that his judge friend had secretly court-ordered could still be up and running. He logged in. It was still there, still hot. He was presented with a list of options. Between past and present, he chose past, the last thirty-six hours of drone surveillance. Next he chose a View
, chose to be looking over Whitey’s shoulder anytime he’d been airborne in the last day and a half. And there they were. It took a few minutes of scanning, but there they were. At 3:10 a.m. Sunday morning, Whitey was aloft in the fat and ugly GU helo watching as the RVs came not down the I-5 but instead down the dry concrete wash of the Arroyo Seco, headed toward downtown in a line, lights out, under a sliver of moon. Whitey—and Nate—watched as the convoy passed under the Avenue Twenty-Sixth Bridge, the selfsame arc from which Razor had been thrown, alive or dead.

  Whitey’s helo stayed high but fell in behind the RVs on the dry riverbed, following them another five miles until the line of them drove into the mouth of a thirty-foot-tall culvert.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Nate and Rockett had their lights on as they walked on powdery dirt. Nate had decided not to fly into the culvert, though a part of him was tempted to try. The suicidal part? There was room, just barely. The apex of the curve overhead was twenty-five feet off the deck. The road in front of them wasn’t hard to make out, double-grooves on both sides. It looked like a road—a trail out in the desert—but it wasn’t a road at all, just tracks in silt in the bottom of the big pipe. It had been months since any real rainwater had flowed through this underground section of the Arroyo Seco. Dust hung in the air, as if the convoy of RVs had permanently stirred things up. It had been more than twenty-four hours since they’d come through. The tracks were double-grooved because they were duelies, four tires on the back. To carry the extra weight. The rigs were long gone, but, based on the tracks, nothing had come after them either. Until now.

  “What do you do when you get a song stuck in your head, Rockett?” Nate said, his voice booming in the cave of the culvert.

  Rockett said, “I sing it as loud as I can. It flushes the song out of your head somehow. I used to work at In-N-Out Burger. My manager told me about it. He was studying psychology at Pierce College.”

  Nate took it from the top, at the top of his lungs.

  On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair

  Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air…

  “I sound good,” Nate said. “Natural reverb.”

  Both men wore helmets and body armor. With the lamps on the helmets and the throw-lights on both shoulders, they looked like deep-sea divers, explorers on the bottom of the ocean, which was about the last thing they were. Rockett had a shotgun strapped to his back, for one thing, and nobody knew they were down there for another.

  Nate tapped the side of his helmet. “Is your radio working?”

  “It comes and goes,” Rockett said. “Somebody is trying to get in, sounds like. My GPS is messed up, too. Where does this come out?”

  “Runs about a mile and a half, straight south, comes out again below Olympic. But we don’t know if they’re using this for a road or a storage facility.”

  Nate went back to singing “Hotel California.” Rockett looked back. They were already a quarter of a mile in from the mouth of the culvert—behind them, nothing but black. He felt movement in the air, like a ball whizzing past his head. Bats.

  A hundred yards on, a set of tire tracks went off to the right. Nate stopped singing. The dust had gotten so thick it was hard to see anything more than what was right in front of them or right at their feet. The track was misshapen on the left front, wide. A flat? Nate looked up from the dirt. His headlamp lit it up: a single RV, ten yards ahead, parked against the curved side of the culvert. All the Winnebagos were brown just like the dust and the back window on this one was painted over so as not to reflect light. If Nate hadn’t seen the tracks, they would have trudged on past it.

  Closing in on the disabled RV was like making an old-school traffic stop, something Nate hadn’t done since the Academy. He was all but sure the rig was empty, abandoned, so he was cool. Rockett swung the shotgun off of his back and brought it up to the ready, a crisp, showy motion like a drum major in a high school band with his baton.

  “Don’t get too into this,” Nate said.

  His side-arm still in the holster, Nate went forward. He’d guessed right: a blowout. He came around the rig, tried the main door. It wasn’t locked. Nate opened the door, letting Rockett and the Streetsweeper go in first. Since the other night when he’d been thrown off the roof, Nate had been a little less cocky than normal, especially when there wasn’t much of an audience. The coach was empty, nobody home. Nate stepped in behind Rockett, hit the light switch. An overhead light came on, as did a couple of sconces on either side of the picture window, cheap brass fixtures meant to look like Western lanterns. Nate took off his helmet and went forward. On the floor next to the driver’s captain’s chair there was McDonald’s trash and three crushed red Tecate beer cans. And a stubby joint was in the ashtray. The other captain’s chair up front was bagged in plastic, fresh off the assembly line.

  The RV was as standard as standard gets: main room with kitchen, bedroom across the back. The king-size bed was covered with an ugly comforter with a saguaro cactus design stitched onto it. Off the three-foot-long hallway was the bathroom, a drain in the floor so you could take a shower standing over the plastic toilet-and-sink combo. The whole thing reminded Nate of a prison cell, albeit a really nice beige and brown Southwestern-themed one.

  Looking up, Nate said, “Does it feel a little low in here to you?”

  “I’ve never been in one of these,” Rockett said.

  The ceiling in the hallway was just a foot over their heads. Fiberglass. Nate pushed up on it. No give. There was a light fixture in the middle of things. He used his helmet to punch a hole in the molded plastic over it and ripped it away. A metal drawer pull had been screwed in next to the bulb, an add-on.

  If it weren’t for following hunches, Nate would never go anywhere. “Give that a yank.”

  Rockett grabbed the handle and pulled, and the fixture dropped down, hinged on the backside. They shined their lights up. Crawlspace, another two feet of height over the cabin.

  “Feel around up in there,” Nate said. “I’d do it but I’m scared of spiders.”

  Rockett reached up and patted around until he found something. He pulled down an aluminum ladder on rollers. Nate still had his helmet in his hand. He switched on the headlamp to use it as a flashlight and ascended. Up the ladder, he shined the helmet around, slowly, like a lighthouse. Running the length of the coach was a steel box, light-gauge but steel, not aluminum. Handcrafted. It was like an attic, ten feet wide and thirty feet long and just tall enough for a bale of cannabis.

  Something caught Nate’s eye aft, in the upper corner, like a fuel cap seen from the inside. He came back down the ladder. They stepped down out of the rig and went to the back to the standard-issue ladder. Nate climbed onto the roof, but the top deck had no give. The cargo compartment was steel all around. He pointed the light and found a scoop molded onto the top of the coach at the rear. An air scoop. Another vent was mounted on the front of the coach next to a rack of fog lights. He was walking forward to check it out when the radio speaker in the helmet in his hand cracked and sputtered, a voice coming in midsentence.

  “Say again,” Nate said, putting on the helmet.

  Il Cho. The signal was loud and clear, at least for a second. Maybe it was because Nate was standing atop a steel box. Cho said, “Whitey knows where you are.”

  “Generally or specifically?” Nate said. “What does he know?”

  “Where you left the Crow.” Then the connection broke.

  Nate jumped down off the roof of the RV. Rockett was looking back toward the mouth of the culvert, like he wanted to go there. “Let’s find the rest of them and get the hell out of here,” Nate said, firing up all of his lights and moving back toward the main line of tracks.

  Then it came.

  It didn’t sound like a flood or they would have heard it coming and gotten out of the way. It didn’t sound like anything. Nate and Rockett were anot
her hundred yards deeper into the culvert, still following the tire tracks. The dirt underfoot was dry. And then it wasn’t. Nate looked down. When he lifted his boot, the footprint filled. Mud. Moving mud.

  “Rockett,” Nate said.

  Rockett was out in front but turned as the mud went over his boots, then up to his ankles. It was like pudding, butterscotch, six inches of moving butterscotch pudding. They both knew it wasn’t rain, not real rain. It smelled of reclaimed sewage water, tanker water. The sludge was up their shins now and still rising. Bottles and cans and cardboard boxes floated past, and then a red stop sign, and then a dried-out dead dog. So this was Hell.

  “Get to the side,” Nate yelled, pointing to dry ground still visible along the sides of the culvert. They set out but didn’t get very far very fast. Everything was in slow motion. The flow kept rising. At least the dust was gone.

  The mud was up to their knees when the broken-down RV came at them, straight down the middle of the culvert. It was still driverless but seemed full of murderous intent. They tried to mud-wade out of its path, Nate going one direction and Rockett the other. As if in response, the RV began to rotate. It came right at Rockett, turning lazily, and was sideways when it plowed into him. It knocked him down and almost under. Rockett grabbed onto the side mirror and pulled himself up. All of it took three seconds, about as long as it took Rockett to think about what it would be like to drown in mud. He grabbed the top bar of the mirror and chinned up until he could throw his leg over the lower brace.

  Nate went after him, in slow motion. The motor home was twenty feet past him now. It was like running in a bad dream. He made it to the back deck of the RV, reached up for the ladder, missed, slipped, then caught hold of it on the second try and pulled himself aboard. He hooked his good arm in the ladder, went up a step or two, and leaned out to see where Rockett was. Rockett was struggling, weighed down by his muddy suit. He looked like a three-hundred-pound man. Nate watched as Rockett threw his leg around the front of the coach, across the windshield, holding onto the rack of the fog lights on the roof. Just then, one of the RV’s wheels caught hold of solid ground under the mud and the rig shifted course abruptly, almost throwing Rockett off. Then it shifted again and aimed itself toward the side of the culvert. It crashed against it, crushing Rockett’s right leg, pinning him. Nate climbed onto the roof of the RV and came forward. Free of the mud, he moved like Superman. He came out to the front edge. Rockett looked up at him. He was stuck bad. Nate held onto the light rack and leaned down. Rockett seized Nate’s broken arm just above the cast, more desperate than he wanted to let on.