Tropical Depression Read online

  Inside the low coral rock wall around the lot there were enormously tall patches of weeds sharing space with the blotches of hardscrabble dirt where nothing could ever grow. A huge key lime tree leaned over the back door and dropped fruit on the cat who lived in the crawl space under the house.

  The house had once been painted Florida pink, a strange bastard color halfway between tan and the hot blush of a Puerto Rican whore’s toreador stretch pants. The paint was fading now. Chunks of it had flaked off to show a pastel green undercoat. I dropped my bike on the poured-cement front step and kicked the front door open.

  The house had two small bedrooms, a living-dining room, a bathroom about the size of a coat closet, and the kitchen. At the moment the house was dim, and hot enough to melt plastic. I switched on the big Friedrich window unit and a throaty roar of arctic air pushed me towards the kitchen.

  The kitchen had a pass-through about five feet wide with one louvred shutter on the left side. The other shutter, for the right side, had been gone when I moved in. I stood in the kitchen doorway, with the pass-through on my left, and looked at the refrigerator. It was older than me and streaked with rust.

  I thought about Roscoe and what he had said. I thought about getting out one of the bottles of St. Pauli Girl beer. Then I thought maybe I should take a shower first. I couldn’t decide and felt my shoulder muscles getting tighter as I just stood there, unable to make a simple decision.

  What I should do, I knew, was just grab a beer. It was right there, ten feet away. Just step over, open the door, grab a beer. But then—I couldn’t really take a beer into the shower. Maybe I should take a shower first. Get clean, sit down, then have the beer. Except then the beer wouldn’t taste as good. So have the beer first. Except—

  It was too much. Both decisions suddenly seemed to have enormous consequences. I just had to choose, one way or the other, and I couldn’t. I could feel the tension in my shoulders spreading, the muscles starting to knot, and before I knew it I was shaking from the strain. It was all coming back to me. Roscoe’s visit had brought it all back.

  Chapter Three

  March 18. It was not a date I was likely to forget. The day had started badly. The freeways were full of mean drunks and Type A personalities with too much engine in their car and not enough sense of their own mortality.

  The air that day was a solid yellow-brown, a poisonous, barely breathable ooze unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Sure, other cities have pollution. New York has a dark brown cloud cover that can rip out your throat when the wind is right; Mexico City has a vicious fog so thick you can feel the weight of it and watch it peel the paint off your car. But L.A. has something special. It clings to your clothes, drifts gently into your pores in that dry desert air, and gives you blinding pains in your throat and head that make you want to drive up onto the Santa Monica Freeway and look for somebody to run off the road. The pollution in L.A. is special. After you’ve lived there awhile you realize that the gauzy, yellow-brown air really stands for the whole city in a unique way. Like everything else about L.A., the smog is often pretty to look at, completely intangible, and ultimately poisonous. But hey—it sure makes for great sunsets, huh?

  Great sunsets and lousy mornings. On my way in to roll call that yellow morning it was already over ninety and the smog was pounding its way in and making my temples throb. My eyes were stinging, there was a sharp rasp in my chest, and jolts of pain shot around my skull if I tried to use my head for anything except pointing my eyes.

  I had plenty to think about and it all hurt. Jennifer and I had just finished another of our early-morning screaming matches. She had this nutty idea that just because she married me she ought to see me every now and then. She said I had this two-year-old daughter who thought the mailman was her daddy.

  A cliché like Cops and Divorce can be a tremendous pain in the ass when you’re living through it. You can’t find much comfort in the fact that you’re falling in with the statistical norm. I was fighting it with both hands, but we were edging closer and closer to divorce. It seemed like every morning when I left for work and every night when I came home there was another yelling session. Each time we shouted we said things we shouldn’t. Each awful thing we said was a little worse than the one before, a little harder to gloss over, apologize for, rationalize. I felt like we were both passengers on some kind of wild amusement-park ride. The guy running it was drunk, the ride was spinning out of control, and nobody could do any more than ride it out and hope we all landed okay.

  Except lately it was looking like we weren’t going to land at all.

  We’d said some truly hurtful things this morning. Most of them centered on my shortcomings as a father and a human being. It was getting tougher to explain myself—even to me. I loved my wife and my daughter, loved them so much it hurt sometimes. But I worked long hours. I had to. I was a cop. I had been a cop for a long time before I got married, and I expected to be a cop for a long time to come. It was the only way I had been able to work things out for myself, to balance what I believed with who I was and how I lived. It worked for me.

  And on the darker side, I loved the faintly queasy thrill of it, of never knowing when a bullet or a knife might be aimed at my back. I loved waiting for danger, meeting it, beating it. I loved the high-stakes crap game of putting my life on the line, gambling it to keep the rest of the world safe.

  It was not just the thrill of danger, but danger that meant something. Resisting it mattered, helped in a small way to make things better—or at least kept things from getting much worse more quickly. I guess that’s what Roscoe meant when he said I was still a rookie in my heart. Most cops lose their idealism pretty quickly; I never did. I liked doing something that was both important and dangerous. I never felt so alive as when I was answering a call that might mean my death. That’s why I resisted promotion, fought to stay on the street. I loved seeing results, and I loved the danger.

  I could see where that might not make sense to someone like Jennifer. She was a resolutely Good Person. She was tough, strong, but she hadn’t seen what I had and so she still believed in the basic goodness of human beings.

  I never tried to disillusion her. That sweet inner core of hers was my anchor to the fake Real World that most people live in. I came home from work in my world and gladly stepped into the loving order of hers. I could leave it all at work: the whores ripped up by their pimp’s knives because they blew their money on crack, the shit-bums who drowned because they were so wracked by wine and TB they couldn’t even roll up onto the sidewalk when it rained, the day-old babies fished out of dumpsters in several pieces—all the grisly, nightmare pieces of reality that swept me along every time I went on duty. I could walk away from it and into sanity in a way that most cops can’t, and it was only because of Jennifer. She kept that bright, wonderful, silly version of How Things Are alive and well, and I let her, grateful that it could include me, somebody who knew better.

  I could see now that was a mistake.

  I lived in both worlds, understood both sides. She never did, never could understand what it meant to be a cop. She thought of it as a career, the kind of thing you could change if it wasn’t working out. Everything I tried to tell her about how it really was just made her all the more convinced that it wasn’t working out, that the sooner she got me out of it and into something sane, like selling real estate, the better for all of us.

  And so now Jennifer’s Real World was getting ugly, too, and I had no place to hide from it except in my work, and of course that just made it all worse on both ends, until the whirlpool got so overpowering I didn’t know where I was anymore.

  Days like this one weren’t helping much. After two and a half hours of paperwork I had a court appearance. In court I learned that I was just this side of Adolf Hitler and only twelve years of demented Republican power-brokering and the consequent dismantling of the Bill of Rights kept me from a long-overdue prison sentence for my crimes. That took me through to lunch time.


  I started back to the station thinking I’d had a rough morning. I wasn’t even halfway to my car before it got a lot worse.

  I had just turned the corner on the top floor of the parking garage when my beeper started yipping at me. It was a long way down to the telephones, and almost as long to the far end of the garage where my car was parked. I sprinted for my car.

  My head was pounding from the smog by the time I got the door opened. I slid onto the front seat, snatched up the radio, and called in.

  Maybe you’ve never heard police radio traffic. There’s a very rigid structure to it. There’s an order, a rhythm, and a way things are done.

  Let’s put it this way: If there had been a nuclear attack on Universal Studios I would expect Central to tell me in a calm, unemotional voice using the correct call codes. If Long Beach Harbor were under attack by Japanese war planes, Central would tell me where to go and what to do in a flat tone, with clear dispatch numbers.

  So when the dispatcher stuttered at me and couldn’t seem to think of the right thing to say, that set off all the little alarms. I got a Code Three 10–19, which didn’t make too much sense: Emergency, return to station. When I asked for a repeat, I got a 10–23, stand by, and a hiss of dead air.

  A long moment later my radio crackled again and gave me a 911–B for a 10–35, followed by an address on Boyd Street: Contact the officer there for a confidential message.

  I didn’t get it at all. “Central, is this Code Three?” I asked.

  Nothing. Then, “Lincoln Tango Two-oh, Ten–Twenty-three,” again.

  More nothing. I was already rolling. Boyd Street was five minutes away. As I turned onto Los Angeles Street I tried again. “Central—”

  I was cut off by the dispatcher. “Lincoln Tango Two-oh, that is a Code Three. We have a Two-oh-seven in progress.”

  I hit the siren and stepped on the gas. Two-oh-seven is kidnapping, and like all cops, I hated it like poison. I didn’t know why they wanted me for it, but they’d have a reason.

  And they did. They did have a reason. Oh boy, did they have a reason. One of the all-time great reasons.

  Boyd Street is in a depressed downtown area. It’s full of flophouses, sweatshops, and Korean toy warehouses. The address I had took me to a flop near Sixth Street, only a few blocks from the Greyhound station on Fifth Street, known as the Nickel, the center of downtown L.A.’s Skid Row. It’s the kind of area that’s so scummy you want to burn your shoes after you step on the sidewalk.

  There was quite a party going by the time I got there. There were two paramedic trucks standing by, six patrol cars, another four unmarkeds, a fire truck, and the big truck I knew belonged to the bomb squad. It was all I could do to find a parking place. I finally pulled onto the sidewalk two doors down, in front of a rolling steel door. As I got out, a Korean man stuck his head out the door I was blocking, looked at me, and spat carefully about four and a half inches from the toe of my left shoe.

  On the rooftops all around, through a poisonous yellow L.A. haze, I could see that the SWAT team was already deployed. They lay or kneeled motionless in their positions, already sited in and hoping for a quick shot.

  The SWAT guys always want to shoot fast. Not because they think they’re so good, although most of them do. Not because they want any glory or excitement or because they are ravening beasts consumed by bloodlust. They want to shoot to get the job done and go home. They want to sit in their easy chairs with a can of beer and watch game shows. The dullest, most unimaginative guys in the world are the hired killers. Maybe they have to be.

  Below the SWAT team on the sidewalk, on both sides of the street, a line of blue uniforms straggled across the street in an arc in front of the place, behind their cars or whatever other impromptu cover they could find. They all had weapons out, too, but very few of them were as nerveless about it as the SWAT team. So far I didn’t see any press.

  The place everybody was paying attention to was one of the old flops that are all around the area. For twenty bucks you got a week in a room with no door and a mattress so flimsy you could feel the fleas moving inside it. You generally find a family of eight or ten in each room, working in the sweatshops and saving up for a green card. This place was called the Rossmore, according to the faded spidery red letters above the door.

  My precinct commanding officer was already striding toward me. His name was Captain Spaulding, and nobody kidded him about it. He had a flat nose and a big mustache. He was a hard guy, even for a downtown cop. About fifty years old, he’d run the PAL boxing program for fifteen years and would still go three rounds with anybody stupid enough to offer. In his younger days some wise guys had coshed him and thrown him in the trunk of a Cadillac. Captain Spaulding punched his way out of the trunk, bending the sheet metal into a piece of abstract art, and killed two of the wise guys with blows from his bare hands. The other one ran for his life.

  “Billy,” he said, and that was a bad sign. Like a high-school football coach, Captain Spaulding never used first names. I could see beads of sweat rolling into his thick black mustache. The day was hot and smelled like hell was leaking up through the pavement.

  “Captain?” I was starting to feel a cold trickle of sweat myself. Since this morning, when I got the working-over in court, reality had been about fifteen degrees off. Now, seeing the captain’s face, it turned a little further, and even though I had no idea what he was about to tell me, I knew now it wouldn’t be on my wish list for Christmas.

  “Billy,” he repeated, and put a hand on my shoulder. I could feel his stone-hard fingers through my jacket. He jerked his head at the Rossmore. “Your wife and kid are in there.”

  Just like that. That was the captain’s style.

  I blinked. I didn’t know if I was going to throw up or laugh. What he had said was so wildly improbable I couldn’t take it at face value. There had to be something else, some strange metaphor he was trying to make.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  He nodded and looked even grimmer, never breaking eye contact with me. “They came down to the station to see you. You were in court and they left.” He ground his teeth. “We’re not real sure of what happened. We think the perps were hanging around outside the station. Maybe they figured they’d grab a cop. Maybe figured your wife and kid would work better.”

  I found myself shaking my head, as if I could keep it from being true. “What do they want?”

  “They want a trade. Your wife and daughter for a buddy of theirs.”

  I heard myself breathing. I was panting, on the verge of fainting from hyperventilation. Everything was flip-flopping between horrible slow motion and fast-forward. I felt like Wile E. Coyote. I opened my mouth; Captain Spaulding was already shaking his head.

  “We can’t do it, Billy. The guy they want is gone. We had to let him go about two hours ago. Two feds showed up with extradition papers and we had to ship him back east on a homicide charge.”

  The last sentence dropped several octaves down as things slowed down again. I’d heard people describe the LSD experience, and that’s what this felt like. Spaulding’s words were terrible slow globs and his face looked like a Cubist painting. I couldn’t remember how to breathe.

  Captain Spaulding slapped my face. It hurt a lot. Normal time returned.

  “You okay, Billy?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’m not okay at all.” I concentrated on getting some air in and felt it steady me. I turned to look at the flop. “I’m going in there.”

  His fingers gripped me tight enough to break the skin. “No you’re not, son. Listen to me. Lesley Bishop is already on the line with these guys. She says she’s getting somewhere and I’m going to let her run with it for now. Lieutenant Mendez has his SWAT guys all lined up and you know they’re good. We can do this, Billy, you know that. We can take care of this with our own people and do it right. We take care of our own.”

  It was true. Lesley Bishop was our negotiator and she really believed she could sell sh
it to a dog. The SWAT guys were top-notch too—the whole crisis team was. Most often the precinct cops are better at these situations than the feds or anybody else that might get thrown in.

  There are two simple reasons for that. First, the precinct knows its own turf. Second, its people get more practice. There are more snatches, stand-offs, blow-ups and fuck-ups every day in every precinct in L.A. than the FBI’s local office handles in a year.

  That also explained why there was nobody from the press here yet. If the TV cameras showed up, so would the FBI; and about two dozen more county, state, and federal agencies. Captain Spaulding was keeping it quiet. He’d even made sure the call I got wouldn’t tip anybody monitoring that something newsworthy was going down. By keeping the press away he kept control. It was my wife and my daughter, and I was one of Spaulding’s men. Every guy on the watch would drop whatever he had going and come help if it was necessary. Like the captain said, we take care of our own.

  One side of me could appreciate that. The other side wanted to grab a twelve-gauge and kick down the door.

  Of course, Spaulding knew that. That’s why he was meeting me personally, clamping his steel-spring hand on my elbow, leading me back to his improvised command center, and sitting me down in the front seat of his car. “This is going to work out fine, Billy,” he said. “It’s going very well.”

  “Very well,” agreed Lesley Bishop. She had a cellular phone beside her and one of those electronic travel alarms. She used the phone to talk to the perps and the clock to time herself, so when she said she’d call back in five minutes, she’d watch the clock, wait carefully for ten minutes to pass, and call back. It was her favorite negotiating technique.

  “Where are we, Lesley?” Captain Spaulding asked her, clearly for my benefit.