Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  Miguel had been Zack’s previous partner until he’d gotten busted, seven years ago, for borrowing an air compressor from an evidence room. He’d since done penance and re-made detective in Western. Every now and then, schedules would overlap and he’d meet up with them at Uganda. There’d been a time when she’d acknowledged a twinge of jealousy whenever the two men got together, as if Zack were making time with an ex. Then she realized Miguel could be a better conversationalist.

  Terri and Zack each took an edge of seat at the end of the two booths, facing each other. His shades chirped and he rose, saying, “Auuuhhhggggg. Round three. Excuse me, gang.”

  A fight with Janice had slowly come to consume the afternoon and evening. She had a hard time picturing what the Zendejases would fight about. Janice was neat, clean, and kept her cards close to the vest. If she had ever felt her own twinges of jealousy over how much time Terri spent with her husband, she’d never shown it. The two cops continued scrolling through the air in front of them. Miguel said, “We were just discussing your boy, Dorothy.”

  “Owen Dorothy? I’m not on his mailing list.” Three weeks earlier, Detective Dorothy had sent out Christmas cards featuring three prostitutes found in the refrigeration locker of a shuttered convenience store, each shot once, in the head, their threadbare saris soaked with blood. The card’s caption had read, HO HO HO.

  “Hey, I get it, Terri. I’m on your side. Totally out of line, he completely deserved suspension. We’re all just hoping this doesn’t close the Godzilla pipeline.”

  She growled. For years, cops had traded altered Godzilla movies, redoing the beast’s battles as absurd pornos: Godzilla Does Rodan, Godzilla Pounds King Kong, Godzilla Bangs Mechagodzilla. These remixes were less appealing to her than fantasy sports championships. It made sense that Owen Dorothy was the mastermind, although lots of other cops had a hand in the redo world, constantly mining lower and lower into the depths of carnal subgenres for new shocks.

  “C’mon. The work that man does? Pure art. Isn’t that right, Jack?”

  One of the overweight cops grunted.

  “You can’t deny the artistry, Terri.”

  “I’ve never seen any of his handiwork, so I wouldn’t know.”

  This got the table’s attention.

  “Are you kidding me?” one of the heavy strangers said. “It’s some of the most sublime artistry done by the human hand!”

  She was about to ask, “Do I know you?”, when Zack swung by the booth and deposited two sandwiches as he walked, still engrossed in his argument. As he stalked off, she heard him say, “Uh-huh. Meaning what, exactly? That I don’t?”

  Uganda offered a fridge of sandwiches and other last-resort bar food. As she looked down at her paper-and-twine-wrapped bundle, she faced the sudden and absolute knowledge that she didn’t deserve such a bounty when so many had died. It was a fleeting experience, universal for every other adult her age, although she’d never once discussed it with anyone.

  Miguel was talking about his own redo, some project he’d labored on for weeks. She snapped out of her trance.

  “This is this thing you were telling me about last time? With, uh, Mary Pickford and Robert Redford?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As cops, right?”

  “Cops in the future, yeah.”

  “What happened with that Dragnet redo you were working on?”

  “It’s sort of a crowded field with that one. So I back-burnered it for a little while.”

  Cops’ obsession with Dragnet had never abated in all the years she’d lived here. It was an odd twist of local history that the cops had become custodians of the city’s filmic past. Everyone she knew pored over these old movies and programs, dispatches from a time when law enforcement had infinitely fewer tools but infinitely more respect. Other American police forces had undergone similar declines of prestige. But only Los Angeles had once owned a police force so memorialized throughout more than a century of cinema. All those LAPD archetypes—besieged, brutal, corrupt, heroic—lived on in the endless, eternal mash-ups of police culture. One more private world among many.

  The two overweight Gang and Narcotics guys said, “Oh shit” at the exact same moment, huffing up out of their seats and rushing out the front door.

  “Someone’s in trouble,” she said.

  “That? They’ve been waiting on that Shep guy. He’s supposed to help them crawl out of The Loop.”

  “Shep Lyra? That idiot freelancer?”

  “I don’t think he’s so freelance anymore. I think he graduated from a Times stringer to a salaried reporter.”

  “And he’s the guy who’s going to get them out of The Loop?” She snorted. “Good luck.”

  The Loop was an echo chamber, a hermetically-sealed alternate reality of false reportage that attempted to swallow all cops. Some police lost their careers in The Loop, others just had their blood pressure raised by it. Reporters who fed The Loop referenced other sources from inside The Loop, supplying the largest media market of all; people who needed to have their opinions validated.

  Officers on the Wall went after false footage with all the resources the department could bring to bear. But there were a million needles in a vastly larger haystack, all that citizen footage and raw data requiring sifting and analysis, everyone watching every move of every cop, or so it felt, some footage apparently generated just for the fun of it; SWAT standoffs, businessmen freakouts, skyscraper suicides, sometimes slipping from witness footage into pure action movie, sometimes satirical.

  “Man. He looks bad. Is this a new thing?” Miguel motioned toward Zack. She wolfed down half her sandwich, then rose and approached the table where Zack sat seething, Miguel cautiously in tow.

  “Wanna take your mind off whatever? And compare notes?”

  “Whatta you think,” Zack said.

  “There’s still some halfway potential foot and car witnesses you tagged.”

  “It’s a bunch of crap. You know it, and I know it.”

  “There’s the Mercedes. That one’s driver-owned and probably has decent side macros,” she said with a light lilt, realizing how dumb it sounded now that she was saying it.

  “What’s the point of doing any of the southbounds if there was another however many lanes of traffic between them and the lot?”

  She contemplated pulling at the thread—what’s the point of being a detective if you lose interest four days in?—then thought better of it, she really being in no position to cast stones, after all the various go-nowhere cases she’d let dissolve after a week or so of waning enthusiasm.

  “Where’s the guy live?” Miguel said.

  “The dead guy? He lives in a trash bag at the landfill,” Zack said with a growing testiness.

  “Okay, calm down,” Miguel said, smiling at Terri, raising his eyebrows and then bumping his chin up. “Where’s the Mercedes guy live?”

  She drew up the list in her margins. “Stone Oak.”

  He whistled. “Mulholland.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Nice. If you’re doing any tonight, pick that one.”

  “You been up there?”

  “No, but my nephew did some contracting up there and he let me look over the footage one day, when I was sick with the flu and had nothing better to do. Only time in my life I’ve ever been jealous of a roofer.”

  “Who? Stu?” Zack asked.

  “Yeah,” Miguel said with a half chuckle.

  Zack chuckled at some old in-joke, so Terri did too, happy to see him momentarily escape from his funk. One of the tables near the front door burst into a mass volley of applause and laughter.

  “On that note,” she said, “I gotta take a whiz.”

  “Gotta do a two,” Miguel said from behind, following her down the long hallways leading to the restrooms. For a moment, she thought he wanted to speak with her in private about Zack’s morale problem, but then she heard the men’s room door slam. Miguel had never been her partner.

  Returnin
g from the ladies’ room, she saw that the far two tables had abruptly cleared out, leaving the space with a slightly mournful, closing time vibe. Uganda was spooky that way, even on Fridays. In a half hour, it could be standing room only. She put on her shades, reading that it was only a little after nine. Zack sat at their table clutching a beer with both hands, staring down into the settling bubbles with an expression close to total blankness, his head hung low enough to give him a stubbly double chin. She thought of her father, seated at the kitchen table of her childhood, lost in the invisible vice grips of debt and bills.

  “’Sup, killer.”

  He sounded a weary grunt.

  “Going home?”

  He sighed, took a long, thoughtful sip, and then said, “No, gonna wait it out a few hours.”

  Terri considered asking him if he wanted to talk about it, then realized she wasn’t currently interested enough to act as a responsible therapeutic ear.

  She looked around the somber room one more time, then said, “Hey, if you want a diversion, it’s just ten minutes away.”

  “What’s ten minutes?”

  “The Mercedes place. Get some fresh air, see how the other half lives?”

  “Jesus, you’re a pip, Terri. Why don’t you ever give up?”

  “How about I just check and see if the Mercedes is even there?”

  He took another slow slurp, wiped some froth off his chin, and glanced at her sideways. “Yeah, great, do it. You’re going to anyway.”

  She brought up a surveillance box over his head, punching in a drone order as Miguel emerged from the men’s room and said, “The fuck? The Rapture happen?”

  She shifted focus, looking through the semi-translucence of the hovering Surveillance Box to the wall next to him, where a faded poster for some beer she’d never heard of featured two muscle-bound idiots in lederhosen hoisting their steins to the Heavens. She must’ve seen this poster a thousand times and never actually looked at it. Miguel made a bored sucking sound and finally said, “Hey, I forgot. Guess what I ran into? Zack?”

  Zack groaned.

  “Guess what I ran into? Over at the Haseley?”

  “I have no idea who you ran into.”

  “The lonely boner.”

  Zack suppressed a small smile. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah. For like thirty seconds. I was out in the parking lot, Kip was still inside, I felt this, like, sixth sense, and I looked over,”—he did this now, his face crumpling in glee as he stared over to the space where her surveillance box hovered, seen only by her—“and it just sort of … floated …”

  Both men burst into laughter.

  “Is this one of those guys-only things?” she asked.

  “Naw, it just …” Miguel was laughing too hard to speak.

  “It just floats around,” Zack offered, trying to keep a straight face. “And you never know where it’s gonna strike …”

  “It’s like a …” Miguel was doubling over with laughter, his voice a squeak. “It’s like this …”

  She walked past several empty tables to the bar, shaking her head, catching and then losing the eye of the unsmiling bartender who, wearing shades, stared straight through her, off into the visualizations and problems of his own life.

  She said, “Just water,” as a chime sounded and a text box in her upper-left-hand field of vision signified that the drone had spotted the car at the residence. Year after year, the response time got a little quicker. She kept the drone in a holding pattern in case the Mercedes took off again, then dinged a request box for a ride of her own. A pictographic car materialized over the bartender’s shoulder, a red neon cartoon indicating that her ride was eight blocks away and closing, as if it had been racing toward her all this time.

  Another volley of laughter came across the oddly desolate barroom. She turned and saw it was Zack and Miguel, still chortling over their private joke. In her apps sidebar, she called up and clicked Hospice Style, so that the two men appeared to grow old and feeble, their backs bent, gray hair and beards descending to the floor, until they finally collapsed in on each other in a death hug, dying in each other’s arms, melting into dust, which an imaginary gust picked up and scattered into nothingness. A car honked outside.

  “Yo!” She raised her hand and snapped her fingers. “Zendejas! Vamos a rollo!”

  Out on the sidewalk, the air had cooled considerably, the sky lit by a fullish moon to an eerie, portentous gray, a strong gusty breeze shaking the palms that lined the block. Far overhead, a fleet of mammoth, silvery cumulus rolled in from the coast like battleships. She stepped to the curb and leaned against the car’s side, waiting for Zack with folded arms. All cops took full advantage of this prerogative of the force—keeping an automobile waiting for as long as they wanted—and she wondered now how many minutes and hours of her life she’d wasted standing in this exact same position. Surely more than her partner.

  As she watched, a sunburned drunk in a sleeveless T-shirt shuffled down the pavement with a cheap BMX, trying simultaneously to balance the bicycle against his arm and himself against the bike. He crossed between the car and building in quiet concentration, and she thought, Mulholland: How could this all take place in the same city?

  The two finally emerged, Miguel saying, “Hey, Terr, you left your drink.”

  “I’m good.”

  Zack looked up and said, to the night sky, “You coming with, Migs?”

  “Nah, I got a traffic meeting at eight. Early night.”

  The three waved goodbye and as she and Zack climbed into the warm vehicle, she had to consciously will herself down from sparking an argument over his shitty attitude—as if his ex-partner could just snap back into position whenever Zack felt like it—instead saying, “What the fuck is a ‘traffic meeting’?”

  “Beats me.”

  The car slid into motion. Uganda had been named after a group in-joke, Culver City being a punchline of alleged remoteness, a place no one actually went except to go to sleep. Cops might make a bit of noise on the sidewalk outside, but a strict local ordinance kept vehicles under sixty miles per hour within city limits. As they moved toward the freeway in silence, the car passed under a lone, long-decommissioned traffic light, bobbling on its metal pole like an animal perched in the dark. It reminded her of the blackouts, the bad days. She probably wasn’t the only one who made this association, the memory surely jarring every cop who had passed under its arch over the years, a specter of bad tidings that would register with even the wooziest of booze brains.

  The car jumped onto the freeway and accelerated, a particle in an artery. They passed huge mounds covered by worn black plastic tarps, stalled construction machinery, dark stacks of massive concrete tubes reduced to smears by the speed.

  “You’re not sucking me into your thing,” he said, looking out the window with one foot propped up on the jump seat, staring out at the blurred center divider.

  “Which thing?”

  “The thing where you spend your weekend nights hunting down crumbs,” he said.

  She pursed her lips, knowing she should feel insulted but somehow secretly pleased. Long ago, she’d realized that her reputation for being thorough, for putting in time far above and beyond what was called for, did not necessarily work in her favor. Some cops probably viewed her as a pain in the ass. But it was nice receiving any sort of acknowledgment toward how much labor she actually put in.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he continued. “I’m gonna blast that bigwig.”

  “Mr. Overholser,” she said, hoping this wasn’t about the son.

  “Putting the car in his son’s name. I’ll put a boot up his ass.”

  “Yeah … maybe don’t do that.”

  “I am doing that.”

  “Sure. But maybe don’t.”

  “Too late.”

  “Right. Only don’t.”

  The car continued to pick up speed, shooting through a narrow channel between a formation of tractor-trailers, five wide and a
t least ten deep, slightly terrifying in their immutability, the moonlight between each one strobing off the windshield.

  “You don’t think it’s disgusting?” he said.

  “That he gave his son a car? Maybe it was a Christmas present. Maybe it was a reward for not pooping on the floor, I don’t know. People have all kinds of crazy motives. What I’m saying is, if this guy’s car is the issue, let’s keep our eyes on the car. No reason to go all the way up there and not get the recording.”

  She recalled the conversation with Chandrika Chavan, and thought that it also would be nice to skip any more bad public relations this week. No matter how creepy or demented someone’s living arrangements may be, there was probably no scenario where it would look good for a cop to chew out the parent of a grown developmentally disabled child. And who knew who recorded what.

  “First of all, he didn’t give his son anything. It’s still his car. He just put it in his mongoloid’s name. The issue is that he’s evading taxes or title fees or some other kind of fee,” Zack said. “He’s obviously evading something. He’s found one more loophole that he can juice us all through, and he thought no one would ever notice.”

  “So?”

  “So, I pay my taxes. And this joker probably pays nothing and rides around town like he’s the Monopoly Man? It pisses me off. So yeah, he can fuck off into the furnaces of hell. But I won’t tell him off until we have our useless recording. That’ll appease you?”

  “Sure,” she said as the car slowed for the exit and banked left, up into the hills that marked the borderline between the overlit world of everyone and the secluded world of true financial power.