City of the Sun (18 page)

Inside the El Camino the feeling of failure was gone. What replaced it was a bubbling lava river of self-disgust. Rooster was acting like a teenage redneck stick-up man on a losing streak. Now he faced a license check and worse if they put together who he was and that other cops were looking for him. He sat stone still and peeped his side mirror as the officer drew close. The cop stopped a few feet back of him, and he could see that it was a woman. She was pretty. Young. She had sandy blond hair pulled back in a tight pony-tail and not a stitch of makeup. Her coat collar had white fleece lining that rode up around her chin and she looked cute in it. She tapped his window, which he lowered, then craned around for a straight-on look at her.

“License and registration, sir.”

He made her name tag in the glow of the streetlight. Officer Jennings. He felt his stomach quiver. She was a beauty.

“Aw, come on now, that light back there was yellow all the way,” Rooster said. He smiled. The smile came easy, clean and fresh as she was.

“License and registration,” the cop repeated, her voice flat.

Rooster half moaned in frustration but kept it low as he reached for the glove compartment. He handed over his papers. They linked him to a long-gone address with no forwarding information. The car itself was pristine, too, nothing — no weapons or substances — in it that could get him hauled in. His problem, however, was twofold. He had a hell of a lot of old parking tickets he hadn’t paid that had
poof
turned into bench warrants, and if she punched in his name, it might come up that her brother officers were looking.
Can’t let that happen
, he thought, shifting around again, trying for another look. She checked the license against his face, the registration against the car.

“Any chance of a warning on this one, Officer?” Rooster tried.

“You were going pretty good there, you know,” she said back. A little humorless, he thought, but he kind of liked it.

“I guess.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Nothing. Just coming from the gym. I’m all jacked up after my workout, ya know?”

This penetrated her shell. She became present for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. For a moment he could see her racing a mountain bike or running, covered with sweat, like in a sports drink commercial. Then the job came back into her. “But still.”

“I’ll take it slow from here. You can bank on that,” he offered. He tried to put some friendly in his eyes, unsure of how it came across.

She narrowed her eyes and looked at him for a moment. She didn’t say yes or no to the ticket, just stared. He felt unable to stop himself from drifting. It was the sight of her patrolman’s shoes; shiny cap toes that were small, barely sticking out from under her trousers.
This Officer Jennings, this pretty young thing, is the kind of girl I should be with
, he said silently to himself.
Could be, too. Why not? It wasn’t a great way to meet, but there’d been worse
.

He imagined them together, a few months in. Long enough so that they were comfortable, not so long that it had become routine. He pictured her coming home after work. She’d toss her cap at him on the couch and pull out the ponytail doodad that held her hair back. She’d walk up to him and he’d unclip her gun belt, removing it from her slim hips. He’d begin to unbutton her pants, revealing a flat, hard stomach and the top of her fine white cotton underwear. He would’ve just gotten home before her, too. Because unbeknownst to her he’d have followed her on her patrol, making sure nothing bad had befallen her. He’d lay back and scout her patrol area for threats. He’d be her invisible backup. He pictured himself living clean. He’d drop the “Rooster” and go by “Garth.” Garth Mintz and Officer Jennings.
Damn, what was her first name
? It brought him out of his reverie just in time to hear her speak.

“Wait in the car, please, sir. It’ll be just a minute.”

A sense of gloom came down on Rooster like a heavy wave crashing over him. His movements felt thick, distracted, as if he were swimming through gelatin. He swung his car door open and put his feet on the ground. Officer Jennings, on the way back to her car, stopped. He stood and stretched, as if his arms and legs were tight. And they were tight — with disgust, for where he’d ended up and for what he had to do.

“I said, wait in your vehicle, sir.” He heard Officer Jennings’s voice, tight, come back at him.

“Just grabbing a smoke,” he said, bashful, making a show of looking for his cigarettes.

She took a few steps back toward him, reaching for her radio as she came. “I’m gonna ask you to place your hands on the side of the car.” Now her voice was commanding. If she had any fear, she’d put it down and locked it away.

He began to comply, turning toward the El Camino, stretching his hands out toward it. As he turned he saw her key her radio, readying to use it. He took a sip of night air, the gelatin hesitation gone from his limbs, and spun back the way he had turned. He threw a lead right with everything he could put on it that would still allow him to retain good balance on the tail end.

What’s he doing
? Stacy Jennings wondered to herself when Mintz, the traffic stop, climbed out of his car. It was her last clear recollection. The rest she got from the dashboard videotape. Months later, after the surgeries, she’d watched the tape and could hardly comprehend it. She couldn’t believe the way the first punch landed, dead solid, that she didn’t slip it at all. She pretty much walked into it, in fact. She’d been a damn good boxer at the academy, and before, when her father had taught her. She could trade with any of the male recruits, and often got the better of them because of the way she could bob and move in the ring. But that was in the ring, with headgear and mouth guards and gloves and rounds. She could hardly believe the way she went down on the street: like a bag of beans. The first punch broke her jaw. She still couldn’t process the weird distance, the remove she felt as she watched the man kneel on her chest and begin pounding her face. Even though she recognized herself on the tape, acknowledged the face she used to know, the one she’d never have again, it seemed the whole thing was happening to someone else. The back of her head hit the pavement with each blow, blows that messed up her teeth, cut her cheeks, smashed her nose and orbital bone on the left side. Blood, dark and colorless due to the video wash, ran back and soaked her hair, blackening it. She saw the man jump up once she was unconscious, look around, pause oddly over her, then climb into his car and drive away. She lay still for just under a minute, her cap sitting in the lower left edge of the frame. Then her hands began to move, touched her face, then found her radio, and a low gurgling voice called in, “Code one-five-four. Officer down, past intersection of June and Prosser,” before the radio, shiny and slick with blood, fell from her hand.

THERE WERE HOME MOVIES
on videotape, more than ten years old, but Paul found them. It had been years since he’d seen them, months since he’d even considered watching them, but after returning from his night with Behr, he felt he had the strength to look. He sat downstairs in the living room in front of the television and slid a tape into the VCR. He kept the volume low, more for himself than out of concern for Carol. Jamie’s first day home from the hospital, his first bath, his first solid food, oatmeal spread all over his smiling face, an episode of him objecting to being on the changing table. Two minutes of tape, his stupid narration over his own bad camera work. The subject: a tiny faultless being who gurgled and cooed in a language that spoke pure happiness. There were other special moments to come — Jamie crawling and then walking, using finger paints — all too exquisitely painful to watch as they were now, preserved within digital grain and the impossibility of time. Paul rolled forward out of his chair, landing on his knees in the thick carpet. He stabbed at the VCR stop button, causing the image to vanish and the plastic tape to croak out of the machine. He knelt there staring into the blackness of the screen and drew on the dead air for breath.

Carol lay in bed. Through the darkness she heard Paul enter downstairs. She felt the electric hum of the television being turned on, a palpable high-pitched whine. She heard the muted sound of voices, the poor-quality audio, and couldn’t tell what he was watching. Then Jamie’s cry reached her in the night. His cry as a baby, an abject bawl like the rest in the hospital nursery, was distinct and piercing to her then, and was familiar even now. That cry had instantly brought her to a new understanding of love. It made milk weep from her breasts. The response was nature in all its force and glory. That cry no longer caused her to weep. She seemed to have cried her final tear some months back and now there was hardly even feeling, just emptiness. It was then she realized there was something even more horrible than the agony caused by the cry of one’s child — and that was a total lack of sensation at that same cry. She turned on her side and tried for sleep.

Behr arrived home after dropping Paul off and switched on the lights. As he moved about, squaring himself away for the night, he saw the empty spot on the desk where his computer customarily sat. His eyes found the space like a tongue exploring where a tooth had been pulled. He slid into his armchair, flipped open his notebook, and considered what to do next.

He drew a line connecting Jamie’s name to Tad Ford’s. He hung a question mark beneath the line. He drew another line connecting Ford’s name to Rooster’s. He drew still another line that went off toward the edge of the page. He dangled still another question mark from it, one that threatened to fall off into white space. He tapped his pen rhythmically on the spot. This moment came along on most meaningful jobs. The time when the beginning was far behind him, the chance to abandon the matter long gone, and yet there was no end, no resolution in sight. It made Behr feel physically weak in his core. A sense of formless fear filled the room as water would a sinking boat. His familiarity with the moment did little to lessen the feeling. A horrible quiet settled, one that allowed silent questions, about his lost family and what lay at his essence, to echo in his head. This was the moment for courage, Behr knew. More than facing an armed suspect, more than preparing to ram a door and enter a room, back when he’d been a police officer — at least then there was action and adrenaline to cover the fear. This was the moment for which Behr was paid, what little he was paid, to face and endure. The rest was just running down the details.

A sense of clarity returned as Behr managed to control his breathing. Quiet confidence throbbed from a distant, nameless place deep within him. He’d find this son of a bitch Rooster and he would discover his relationship to the rest, and he’d find the next piece of information after that, and so on until Jamie Gabriel’s fate had been laid to rest. Behr would get to the end of it. He knew it once again. It was all he had, but he felt rich for a moment knowing it. Then his telephone rang.

“Yeah?” he said, looking at his watch, noting it was late, too late for a call.

“Hello? Oh, jeez, hi. Is this Frank?” It was a woman. He recognized her voice.

“Who’s this?”

“Sue. Susan Durant.” Silence hung on the line. Behr grabbed her name just as she added, “From the
Star
.“ It was the woman from the circulation department who’d helped him a while back.

“Yeah, sure, how’re you?”

“I’m fine. I’m feeling silly now, though. Thought I was reaching your office. I was just gonna leave a message.”

“I work out of the house. What’s the message?”

“To call me. We were supposed to get together. You think I’m letting you slide on that dinner?” The shyness was gone now, and the snap he’d appreciated the first time he spoke to her was back.

“What’re you doing up?”

“Watching television.”

“What?”

“
ER
reruns. They show ‘em back to back. And nerving up to call you. A few hours slid by. Then it got to be, you know, ridiculous. And just ‘cause it was late, I couldn’t just go to bed without doing it.”

Behr found himself smiling. “Uh-huh.”

“You were gonna call me. You could’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”

“I see that.” There was a moment of quiet on the line as Behr nerved up himself. “So what nights are you free?”

They went ahead and made their plans: Dono-hue’s next week. He could take her somewhere fancier, but it’d be better to see how it went at a regular place.

Before they hung up she asked, “Any luck on that case?”

“Some, Sue,” he found himself answering, “maybe some.”

Rooster sat in a Denny’s on Kentucky eating a Grand Slam that had devolved into him just pounding coffee. He thought the greasy food might calm him, soothe his churning gut, but in the end he couldn’t eat that shit. He put in too much time in the gym to waste it on fried eggs and hash browns. Truth was, his appetite was gone anyway after what he’d done. He wasn’t proud of himself.
No, sir
. He knew he had to dump his car, that he should’ve done it already instead of leaving it in the parking lot like a lighthouse beacon. But he felt a fatigue in his limbs that was outsized to the physical effort he’d just put forth. He considered whether the cop would live and whether he should send her something by way of apology if she did. There’d been a moment there, damned if he could explain it, after he’d beaten her. He should’ve jumped in the car and hauled ass, but he stopped and stood over her instead. It wasn’t with pride, no way. He had the strongest urge to lean down and kiss her, and to wipe the blood from her broken face. Of course he couldn’t. Of course not. He finally
had
jumped in the car and hauled ass. Now he hardly recognized himself. He looked at his arms and counted the scars up and down them, poorly healed cuts from this most recent and other incidents.
Fuck it
, they were the scars of war.

He continued on and drank coffee for what felt like hours, and eventually the glass panels of the windows in front of him lit up in a strobe of red and blue lights. Four patrol cars slid into the parking lot, two circled around back, with lights but no sirens. He sat and finished his coffee. Even as the first two teams of uniforms hit the front door of the restaurant, Rooster just sat, letting the pulsing lights wash over him. It was almost soothing.