Earth Angels (17 page)

On his way to the gang unit office at Hollenbeck Station he was stopped several times by other officers and congratulated on the shooting. He made his way down the stairs. There was no one else in the gang unit squad room.

The phone rang. It was his mother. In the background squeaked a metal conveyer belt.

"I saw the television," she said.

"I'm OK, Mom. There's nothing to worry about."

"I could tell something was bothering you. You've been acting like you did when you came home from Vietnam."

"Television always blows things up."

"You're in some kind of trouble, aren't you? I can tell by the tone of your voice."

"They had an shooting investigation, but that's normal."

"It's not normal to shoot people. I want you to get out of that gang unit. You can be a teacher at the police academy and get paid the same money. Let them find someone else to do that gang crap. You've been there long enough."

"I'll come over when I get a chance and we can talk. "

"Don't treat me like one of your girlfriends. I'm your mother and I know what's good for my son."

"I know you're frightened because of what you saw on TV, but everything is OK, Mom. There is nothing to worry about," he said, staring at the desk.

There was the sound of a horn in the background. "I have to get back on the line," she said. "I'm going to go to church tonight and pray for you. Please be careful, son, I love you."

The phone clicked. Slowly Stepanovich set the receiver back on the cradle.

Harger stepped out of his office and motioned Stepanovich inside. As Harger closed the door behind them, Stepanovich saw on it a framed photo of Harger dressed in police SWAT team gear holding an M-16 rifle at port arms.

"How are you feeling?" Harger asked, moving to the hot plate in the corner of the room. He picked up a glass coffee pot, filled a styrofoam cup, and handed it to Stepanovich.

"Still a little hungover."

Harger filled another cup. "I just spoke with the Chief. He wanted me to extend unofficial congratulations to you and the others. He insisted I write all of you up for medals of valor. I've never seen him so positive and upbeat."

"And the shooting investigation is OK?"

"The Chief made sure you and the others came out clean in the final report," Harger said with a wry grin. "He's the angel watching over the gang unit." Without warning, Harger's expression suddenly turned hard. "Gimme one sentence on the effect of the shooting, Joe. Just between you and me. What does it mean on the street?"

"Both Eighteenth and White Fence lost face," Stepanovich said.

Harger sipped his coffee. "What's next? Give me the street gang big picture."

"Because of the shooting, they'll probably lay low for a while."

"Then what?"

"It's hard to say."

"I want you to look into that crystal ball for me. You know how these gang assholes think. What's their order of battle?"

Stepanovich sipped the bitter coffee as he reflected. "With Greenie's wife in the hospital, Eighteenth Street will be after blood. When the time is right, they'll come into White Fence's turf for a payback."

"How? What will they do ... and where?"

"Their shooters will cruise Hazard Park. The first White Fence member they see gets blown up. If no gang members are around, they'll shoot whoever is there. "

"Why Hazard Park?"

"White Fence turf is small and mostly residential - lots of cul-de-sacs. It's an easy place to get trapped after they shoot someone. On the other hand, Hazard Park is at the edge of their territory. They can open fire and speed onto the freeway. That's where they'll hit. "

"A drive by shooting," Harger mused on the way to his desk. With a furrowed brow he pulled his chair back and sat down. He made eye contact with Stepanovich. "I want you to be at Hazard Park waiting for them. "

"The park'll be hard to cover. "

Harger used an index finger to wipe a design in the moisture coating his coffee cup. "You'll manage," he said smugly.

"If we keep this up, eventually the gangs will figure out what we're up to."

"Then we'll change tacks, but until that time we're going to set up one trap after another. We're going to keep the heavy heat on 'em until every time they cruise for blood, they'll be worrying as much about us as the gang they are going to hit. I want to give them nightmares, then make the nightmares come true."

Back in the squad room, the others members had arrived and Stepanovich related what Harger had told him. As he spoke he noticed how pale and hungover everyone looked. Having completed the briefing, he stepped to the wall map of East Los Angeles posted above the copying machine. He pointed to a small green square on the left side of the chart representing Hazard Park. "If it's gonna be a drive by shooting, they have to drive down Breed Street," he said, running his index finger along a black line on the north side of the park. "They'll either come off the freeway and make a left turn, or approach from Fickett."

Arredondo pointed at the map. "There's a wall right here."

"Right. If they're going to open fire they'll have to be at this end of the street. If so, afterward there's only one logical way to escape."

"You're right," Black said, studying the map.

"We'll never be able to mount surveillance on Hazard Park," Arredondo said. "The homeboys know that any stranger in the neighborhood has to be a cop. "

"We could stake out near the freeway," Fordyce suggested.

Concentrating on the problem, Stepanovich leaned against the copying machine. Perhaps because of his hangover, the colors on the map a thick red line for the freeway, the blue rectangle designating a housing project near the park seemed harsh. He closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the park where he'd played as a child. He opened his eyes. "The freeway is too far away. If a shooting goes down we need to be close enough to respond. Otherwise, there's no point being there in the first place."

"We can use my motor home," Fordyce said.

"I'm afraid you're right. It's the only way we can watch the park without the gangbangers knowing what we're up to," Stepanovich said.

Stepanovich and the others spent the rest of the day cleaning weapons, checking out equipment, and completing overdue reports. Though they hardly talked, Stepanovich felt a sense of anticipation among them, a sense of oneness he'd experienced only with his platoon in Vietnam. Because of the shoot out and the wild night afterward, they shared a bond that no one on the outside would ever understand.

Around six they loaded the equipment into the motor home. Stepanovich informed the others to meet him in the station parking lot the next morning at five, and everyone headed for home. Concerned that Gloria hadn't returned his call, he picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answered on the sixth ring.

"Did you get my message?"

"No, I, uh, just got home."

"How would you like to go to dinner with a nice policeman?"

"I'm busy tonight," she said in a tone that told him there was something wrong.

"I thought this was your night off."

"Yes, but, I, uh, have a lot to do."

"Is everything OK?"

There was a long moment of silence. "We'll talk sometime."

"We're starting a surveillance tomorrow. I may not be able to call you.

"I have to go," she said softly. "Bye."

The phone clicked.

Stepanovich set the receiver down and left the office. The drive to Gloria's apartment took about five minutes. "What's wrong?" he asked as she turned away from the opened door. Closing it behind him, he followed her.

Gloria picked a newspaper off the coffee table and handed it to him. The headline read: "GANG COPS KILL TWO." Below the headline was a poorly lit photograph of the front lawn of the Florentine Gardens city housing project. Lying on the steps leading from Greenie's apartment were two sheet-covered corpses. In the background, he, Arredondo, and Black were conferring together on the lawn. Because of the distance and the lighting in the photograph, their faces were blurry.

Gloria pointed at him in the photo. "Is that you?"

He nodded.

"One of the men you killed was a friend of mine," she said, her voice cracking. "Luis Nunez."

"Jesus."

"He and his family lived next door to me when I was growing up "

"I had no idea who he was when it happened," Stepanovich interrupted. "We were on a stakeout."

"He'd been involved with the White Fence gang since he was ten years old. His whole family was involved with the gang." She walked to the window. "I always figured Luis would end up this way. Strange, isn't it? Luis, who's never held a job, who spent his whole life hanging on street corners and getting in trouble never accomplished anything in his entire life will now be a hero. All because he got himself killed by the police." She shook her head. "It's so sick."

"He and the others had guns "

"Guns and shootings and gangs. Violence. I grew up with all that. It turns my stomach, Joe."

"Do you think I like it?" he said after a while.

Gloria brushed her eyes quickly with the back of her hand. "I think it's better if we don't see each other anymore," she said without looking at him.

"This is just, just something that happened," he said, "a one in a million chance "

She turned to him. "This is what always happens. You're the one who chose to be 'out there on the street,' as you call it. It's the same thing the gangbangers say. "

"It's my job."

"What kind of job is it to shoot people?"

"You act like we're from different worlds," he said angrily. "Don't forget, I was raised here too. This isn't Disneyland. This is East L.A. Your friend Luis and his homeboys shot three people."

"There's something you should know," Gloria said. "When I was growing up, the White Fencers were always around the house. My stepbrother Johnny ran with the gang. He was tough. He had a lowered Mustang and his nickname was Spider." She stormed toward him, her index finger touching the tiny scar close to the corner of her right eye. "See this? It used to be a teardrop tattoo before I had plastic surgery to remove it. I was a White Fence girl. A
cholita
."

"I don't care about that."

"But then Johnny killed somebody from the Clover gang. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sent to San Quentin for the rest of his life. Just like that, Johnny was gone. I remember my mother, who'd begged him not to hang around with the gang, sold his car and gave away his clothes. Johnny'd been devoured by the neighborhood, by White Fence machismo. From that day on, I never spoke to another gang member. In high school I kept to myself. That's how much I hate the violence."

"Then why stay here in the old neighborhood?" Stepanovich said. "Why not move out and work at a hospital in Palm Springs or Beverly Hills?"

"Because the people in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills aren't my people. I'm a Chicana. My people are here: the bad and the good."

"Your kind of people shot a little girl in church the other day."

"I'm staying here to help."

"What do you think I'm doing? If it weren't for the Department, East L.A. would have killed itself years ago. I'm not going to apologize for being a cop."

There were tears in her eyes. "You're in it for revenge, not for the law. You're a
veterano
like my brother Johnny and the man he killed. Shooters and victims vengeance going all the way back to God knows when."

Stepanovich moved close to her. When she looked up at him, her eyes showed a weary anguish he'd seen on the faces of a hundred women who'd lost men to violence. He could see them, generations of mantilla-draped Mexican widows comforting each other at the cramped gravesites of Evergreen Cemetery. He touched her cheek. "What happened two nights ago has nothing to do with us," Stepanovich said.

"My brother was drawn into the darkness," she said. Stepanovich tried to embrace her, but she held him away. "You're just like him."

"There's nothing we can do about the past."

Soberly she wiped tears from her eyes, "I don't want to be consumed by the violence and hatred of this neighborhood. "

"I can't help who I am," Stepanovich whispered.

"Being a policeman is more important than anything else to you. It's because when you're a cop, you're always in control."

"Do you want me to leave?"

"Yes," she said, her voice cracking.

****

THIRTEEN

Though it was sweltering outside, the air conditioner kept the motor home relatively comfortable. Stepanovich held the binoculars up to the opening in the black curtain covering the side window, and slowly he scanned the half block of brown spotted lawn that was Hazard Park: a baseball diamond, a windowless cement block public restroom, a swimming pool protected by a high chain link fence, the all day shadow cast over the eastern corner of the park by an elevated section of the freeway. The cement stanchions upholding it, the walls of the swimming pool, the aluminum bleachers behind home plate, the trunks of the park's eight trees, and every inch of sidewalk was sullied with spray can gang graffiti.