Judgment (3 page)

Brett grinned. "What's the workload like this week?"

"Not too heavy. I'm flying some exec types to Fort Lauderdale in the morning, and some movie crew wants to take the chopper on a spin over the valley. The rest of the week looks pretty light. I dunno."

"So we'll be spending some time in town, then?"

"Yep."

Brett straightened up and stretched. "Finished. How's she look, Mort? Beautiful?"

"It's just an old Caddy. Just like the three others on the front lawn."

"Maybe to you." He caressed the hood. "But this is a fuckin' car."

The phone rang.

"Gotta go, Brett." Mort waved and headed for the side door as Brett dashed inside the house to answer the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hi, it's me." It was Ronny Shaw, Brett's oldest and closest friend. They'd met in the first grade when Ronny, a quiet black boy with few friends, came to Brett's aid when he was attacked by three third graders after his lunch money. They later went to UCLA together, Brett on a track scholarship and Ronny on a minority fellowship. Brett graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering, while Ronny, a philosophy major, drifted among nowhere jobs before becoming a police officer and eventually a homicide detective.

"How's your Caddy running, Ron?" Macklin had given Shaw one of his completely restored classics, a '55.

"Great. Are you ever going to sell one of those heaps or are you just going to keep giving them away to everyone you know?"

Shaw's lightness seemed unnaturally forced.

Brett's heartbeat inexplicably quickened. "I'm going to sell 'em, really, all of 'em except the Batmobile. I was just working on it when you called."

"Listen, ah, I've got some bad news. Jesus, I wish I didn't have to tell you this."

Score one for instinct. Brett Macklin's chest suddenly felt hard and tight.

"What happened to Dad?"

"He was killed, Mack."

"How?"

There was a silence.

"How?"

"Ah, Jesus. Listen, it looks like some kids . . . ah . . . set him on fire."

Macklin winced, didn't know if he could breathe. Suddenly a wave of images, a high-speed slide show of his experiences with his father, flooded his thoughts. And then they disappeared. A deep, profound emptiness washed them away. He wanted to cry, he
needed
to cry, but anger held back his tears and made his head throb.

"Where?" Macklin finally coughed. "Where and when did it happen?"

"An hour ago in the neighborhood. There was . . . ah . . . also a bad accident with a bus. A bunch of people are hurt. Two others are dead."

"You there now?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'm coming down."

"Mack—"

Macklin hung up. Elias Simon smiled.
"Children of God, rejoice in His name!"

# # # # # #

Brett Macklin was flying.

Somehow he hoped the freedom of flight would make the deep ache disappear, that he could soar above the hurt and anger and take refuge in the skies that had always soothed him in the past.

This time he just couldn't soar high enough. There was no refuge. His father was dead, a lump of charred flesh smoldering on the pavement.

He had seen what fire does to a body. If you fly long enough, you eventually see the aftermath of a crash. Macklin remembered the featureless black corpses and the acrid, stomach-wrenching odor.

A cruel, twisted image tortured Macklin, his father's body, skinless and hairless, sizzling and crackling on the street among uncaring, smiling onlookers.

Macklin brought the helicopter down in a clockwise arc towards South Central Los Angeles, towards the insignificant little patch of lights his father had devoted his life to for two decades.

If Macklin had a bomb, he would have dropped it with no regrets. He would have reveled in the fireball consuming the neighborhood, scorching the land the way they had scorched his father's flesh.

The press copters buzzed over the neighborhood like flies to a rotting corpse. Macklin dove in the path of one copter, causing the "Channel 7 News Spotter" to veer left suddenly, nearly dropping the cockpit cameraman into the night.

Lighting the street was a fountain of flame. The fire roared amidst a pulsing circle of water. Macklin swooped low over the scene, arced sharply upwards and to the right, and then ped down over the street again through the laser-beam-like crisscross of flashing red lights.

The ground below Macklin looked like a scene from a grade B war movie. World War II. London. The Luftwaffe had leveled streets into ash piles.

Cinders glowed where buildings and life had been. This was no movie. But to Macklin, it was very much a war zone.

Macklin landed the copter in a parking lot, forcing a throng of reporters, gawkers, and police away from his path. He jumped out of the copter and strode past the angered crowd, stepped over the police barricade, and moved towards the fire-engulfed bus.

"Just who the fuck do you think you are?" A plainclothes cop grabbed Macklin by the shoulder and spun him around. Macklin punched the man in the mouth, sending him sprawling, and continued walking.

"Hold it, fucker, or I'll blow your goddamned head off!"

Macklin stopped. He turned around slowly.

Behind Macklin, legs spread and gun pointed at him, stood a mustached man in a beige polyester knit suit. The man's lips were thin, so tight and narrow you couldn't shove a Nabisco vanilla wafer through them, and drawn into a satisfied smile.

The man stormed up to Macklin and pointed the gun right in his face. Macklin was motionless, eyeing the man with cool reserve. "Do you want to get out of my way," Macklin whispered, "or do I have to walk over you?"

"So you're a comedian." He stepped aside, lowering his gun. "Sure I'll move. Excuse me. My mistake."

As Macklin passed him, the man raised the gun like a club and brought it down towards Macklin's head. Macklin caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, sidestepped the blow, grabbed the man's wrist, and pinned his arm behind his back. The gun clattered to the ground.

"Let him go, Mack." Macklin felt a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Let him go."

Macklin released the man with a push, nearly knocking him down.

"Jesus, Mack." Shaw sighed.

The man picked up his gun and pulled a pair of handcuffs from inside his pocket. "You're under arrest, hotshot."

"Relax, Sliran. No one's getting arrested." Shaw stared at his flustered partner on the homicide detail. "Put the cuffs away. This is JD Macklin's son, Brett. He's a little agitated."

"A little agitated," Sliran said. "Jesus fucking Christ, Shaw, your agitated friend came real close to sharing a slab with his daddy tonight. Tell your agitated friend that next time he'd better pray you're around to save his neck."

The cop adjusted his glasses, holstered his gun, and walked away. "I'm sorry, Ron," Macklin said tonelessly. "Fill me in."

Shaw put his arm around Macklin and led him towards the flames. "It looks like your father was walking his beat and was crossing that alley over there when some kids . . . ah . . . must've jumped him and dumped gasoline on him."

Shaw and Macklin stopped just beside the firemen, who had nearly succeeded in drowning the flames.

"How did this happen?"

Shaw looked into Macklin's eyes. All he saw there were the flames. "Ah, your dad ran into the street. The bus tried to avoid him, and, well, there was an accident."

An ambulance screeched away from a nearby curb and screamed down the street. From within a huddle of men surrounding a row of cars, a black body bag was carried by two officers and hefted into the back of the coroner's wagon.

"What have you got?" Macklin said, barely audible.

"A few leads. We'll have more tomorrow." Shaw tightened his grip on Macklin's shoulder. "Mack, there's nothing more you can do here. Go home."

Macklin sighed. "I want the people who did this Ron."

"Mack, I'll get 'em. I promise. Now, go home, please."

The headlights of the coroner's wagon flashed in Macklin's eyes, momentarily blinding him. "I want a call tomorrow."

Shaw nodded as Macklin turned and headed back to the copter, its blades still spinning.

"Goddamn it!" Shaw growled, looking into the bus's smoking, gutted hold and then at the receding lights of the coroner's wagon as it took away the best cop he ever knew. "I hate this fucking job."

". . . James Douglas Macklin was a humanitarian, devoting his life to the protection and care of others. He was more than just a police officer doing his job. JD was a trusted friend to the people he dealt with on the streets and among those he worked with on the force. Officer Macklin was a role model for all young officers to aspire to, a man who . . ."

Brett Macklin, his arm around his daughter's shoulders, wasn't listening to LAPD Chief Jed Stocker's praise-laden eulogy. It was an empty charade for the press and made Macklin feel nauseous. Stocker had hated JD Macklin.

Stocker and JD had gone to the academy together, and while Stocker desk-hopped to the top, JD preferred to remain on the streets. Although technically JD was a peon, he freely (and frequently) criticized Stocker to his face. To JD, Stocker wasn't a policeman but a glorified publicist, an armchair general who had no idea what the urban battleground was like. To Stocker, JD was an obnoxious, disrespectful, old-fashioned, simpleminded, big-mouthed pain in the ass.

"How are you doing, kiddo?" Macklin whispered to Corinne, his eight-year-old daughter. Her blond hair was cut in what her classmates called "Olivia Newton-John style," and she wore a white sweater over her black dress. Her eyes were red, her puffy cheeks tear stained.

"Okay, I guess," she whispered, blinking back tears.

Macklin looked past Corinne to Brooke, his ex-wife. She caught his glance and smiled thinly. Stocker's an asshole, their eyes agreed. It was one of the few things they had agreed on for some time.

For a moment, it was easy for Macklin to see in Brooke the woman he had married. She still had the youthful face, the dark skin, and the slim, athletic body that had caught his attention a decade ago when they were in college. That wasn't it now, though. It was a sparkle, an almost guilty flash of sly cleverness and childish mischief, that flickered in her eyes for just a second.

In that instant, he felt his need for her again, the desperate ache in his chest. Then it passed, and the years and the barrier between Brooke and Brett fell between them like a shroud.

It was a different Brooke who had said "I do"—not the Brooke he had loved.

The magic was gone. The air between them never seemed to be clear of the debris from some argument or other. The fact that they stayed together for three years was a testament to their love for Corinne.

Macklin tightened his grip on Corinne's tiny shoulder. She leaned against him and sniffed. He scanned the faces in the crowd, ignoring Stocker's litany. There were several cops. Among them was Shaw, who stood solemnly with his live-in lover, Sunshine, her white gauze dress standing out like a flashing neon sign amongst all the black-clothed mourners.

Sunshine played nervously with her long hair or fingered the tassels at her neck, casting speculative glances at her sheepdog, Guess, who was panting happily inside their orange Volkswagen Bug parked fifty yards away. She always felt uncomfortable away from Guess.

Sunshine tried, as least superficially, to embody the flower children of Berkeley, circa 1967 (she bought Bob Dylan's last album out of respect and then broke it into pieces in a teary tirade when she discovered he'd "sold out to Jesus, goddamn it"). She seemed quite happy in this self-made time warp but managed to irritate the hell out of Macklin, who often wondered if she slept with Shaw just to be sixties hip.

Shaw, for his part, grudgingly put up with it out of love, loneliness, and a casual ambivalence. He even put up with his mother's frequent tirades about him "living in sin—with a
white
woman, no less!" She prayed he'd someday "stop playing cops 'n' robbers and sleeping with crazy white women" and help run his parents' fish market. After growing up around fish all his life, just thinking about the smell made him nauseous. When Shaw heard in junior high from Petey McGrew that pussy tasted like anchovy pizzas, he groaned, "Just my damn luck . . ."

Shaw met Macklin's gaze and smiled awkwardly, trying to be reassuring.

Macklin didn't seem to see him, his eyes searching the faces in the crowd.

The look in Macklin's eyes disturbed Shaw. It was as if Macklin was a cobra waiting to strike.

Macklin was seeking those faces he didn't recognize, those faces from the neighborhood his father had protected for so long. He looked at the short man with the basset-hound face, his yarmulke-capped head hung low. He looked at the fragile Mexican woman with the deep-set brown eyes and rock-hard face. He looked at the man shifting his weight, his hands plunged into the pockets of his wrinkled slacks. Macklin looked at each face, one by one. Behind one of those faces Macklin believed was the trail to his father's killer.

Stocker finished his remarks and glanced at Macklin with a sympathetic expression he'd picked up from Chad Everett in
Medical Center
.

Macklin didn't even notice.

Stocker stepped back among the mourners, sliding past a big bear of a man whose appearance caused a rustle in the press corps huddled a few yards away on the access road.

Lucas Breen was unmistakable. There wasn't a face anywhere like his.

His thick, blond eyebrows, sideburns, mustache, and beard were one, nearly hiding his bright, beady eyes and full-lipped mouth. At times, under a certain light, all you could see of his face was this mass of hair with a long, narrow piece of flesh sticking out of the middle. It was no wonder every reporter and underpaid city worker in town called him Prickface.

Breen had stepped out of his lair to pay his respects to a slain officer of the law. It was an expression of his deepest feelings, feelings he shared with his gubernatorial campaign manager, who figured a graveside appearance and some sympathetic words to the barbecued cop's family were good for a few headlines in the
Los Angeles Times
. If Breen brought along his starlet squeeze, the one whose acting abilities rested in her 38D cups, maybe a second or two on
Entertainment Tonight
.