Seattle Noir (9 page)
The drawbridge? She came from Queen Anne?
We all did. But the drawbridge went up—
You didn’t mention that.
Nobody asked, says Petey.
I’m asking now. Tell me the whole route.
Petey does. Cosby nods and stands up.
He calls for Officer Bestock and Damon hurries over.
There’s a bank on Nickerson Avenue and they’ve got a security camera out front. Tell ’em we need the tapes from last night. He looks at the movie stars and raises his voice. If that woman was over there, we’ll know. And if someone was following her, we’ll see who it was.
Mineo starts to cry. Widmark tells him to shut up, but it’s too late.
Cosby turns to Petey. How’d you know my name is Bill?
It’s in the credits.
Petey tells them he has no insurance, which usually saves him from medical care, but this time they insist he’s going to the hospital.
Cause you’re a hero, says Fox.
Indeed, says Strabo. A veritable Hercules or Adonis.
The paramedics strap him on a gurney and are ready to wheel him into the ambulance when another cop comes up, one who doesn’t look like anybody.
Jesus, Petey, is that you?
You know him? asks Cosby.
Yeah. I do security shifts at the clinic downtown. He used to be a regular. Remember me, Petey? Officer Lazenby.
He shakes his head.
You went off your meds, didn’t you, pal?
Had to. My friends didn’t like them.
What friends?
Fox and Strabo.
They aren’t your friends, pal. They’re just voices in your head. You don’t have any friends.
Thanks a lot.
I didn’t mean it like that, says Lazenby. Oh, Jesus.
Should we notify anybody? asks the ambulance guy.
About what?
Tell ’em you’ll be in the hospital.
No. There’s nobody.
What about your ex-wife? asks Cosby.
Ex-wife, Lazenby repeats.
He said her name was Abby.
Jesus. Lazenby shakes his head. Abby wasn’t his wife. She was just a nice barista who used to sneak free coffee to the homeless people. When she quit and moved away, Petey went on a one-man WTO against Starbucks. He got locked up for a while for throwing rocks through their windows. Didn’t you, pal?
They took her away from me.
Lazenby pats his arm, the one that isn’t cut. It’s gonna be okay, pal. The drugs keep improving. You just listen to the docs and pretty soon you’ll be back in the real world.
What else’ve you got? asks Petey.
I
t was a blue night, a blue car, and Danny was full of shots of blue tequila.
“Slow down, man. Aren’t you going too fast?”
“Can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”
“Shit, man, I thought I was the crazy one. Just get me back to my old lady in one piece.”
“No problem, bro. How’s she doing, anyway?”
“Good. She’s happy to see me alive.”
Chucho gunned it to make a light. That’s when a cop car came out of the parking lot and the sirens started.
When Danny came to, he was lying on the ground.
“Get up… I said get up!”
A foot prodded him.
“Okay, okay,” said Danny.
Danny was on his back. He slowly rolled over and got to his hands and knees. Chucho’s car was nearby, the passenger door open next to Danny. He vaguely recalled Chucho’s nervous laughter as they had careened past the fancy new condos on 23rd, past Garfield and the fire station to Jackson. The Seven Star Mini Mart was still open. Chucho made a bat turn left onto MLK in front of half a dozen cars and flew past the playground to Cherry.
“Híjole
, man, that cop is mad!” he had said gleefully.
Danny wondered where his cell phone had gone. The last he remembered was Catfish Corner.
“Get up!” the policeman shouted again.
“Okay, I’m getting up now,” said Danny as he began to rise. “I’m going to get up.”
The policeman fired three shots into him.
“Shut the fuck up!” the cop shouted. “Shut the fuck up!”
Dying had seemed easy in Iraq—people did it every day. And when people were not dying in front of you, your buddies, the cooks, the officers, or the civilians who brought in supplies, they were telling you stories about people dying. About how they died, how long it took them, and what it looked like afterwards. Who killed them, or who might have killed them.
There was no death with dignity, only death. Danny spent most of his free time pretending he was someplace else. He plugged his iPod into his head, turned on some tunes, and tried to think about Aimee and the kid they were expecting early next year. Would it be a boy or a girl? It was too soon to tell, but when he went home on leave, they would visit the doctor, and maybe have an ultrasound done. Danny was ready to think about a little life—a little life after Iraq, if that was possible.
The next thing that woke Danny was sirens. A lot of them.
I ain’t dead yet, he thought. A collar was clamped around his neck, and he was rolled onto a stretcher. “Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!” yelled a woman. “I need an IV here, as soon as he’s in!”
Some more jostling, then a sharp pain in his arm.
“Go!” screamed another voice.
The ambulance, because he must be in an ambulance, started up, the siren more muted from inside, and they flew. It reminded him of the cab to the airport in Iraq, but with fewer potholes. He wondered if Chucho was okay.
Danny wakes in a bright, noisy room. People keep leaning over him and yelling in his face.
“I’m not deaf, you know,” he finally says.
“Oh good, he’s conscious. We thought we were losing you there,” a male voice barks at Danny. “Just keep talking to us.”
Danny is in a curtained-off area, and he can hear people near him yelling. Triage.
“Uh, what do you want me to say?”
A bright light is shined in one eye, then the other. “No concussion. Let’s give him some fluids… Are you in pain?” the man asks in that voice you use for the deaf, elderly, and foreign born. Danny recognizes it as the way he spoke to the Iraqis, as though it would somehow bridge the gap between his English and their understanding.
Danny has to think about this. “Actually, I’m kind of numb on one side.”
“Not good,” says the man.
Danny decides to pretend this man is a doctor.
“Can you feel this?… This?” The doctor pricks him with a pencil tip from his shoulder down his right side.
“It’s my arm. I can’t feel my arm,” says Danny. Damn, he thinks. Back from Iraq just in time to die in Harborview. The room grows dark again.
Danny could say “stop” and “open” in Arabic. And, of course,
“Insha Allah”
—If God wills it. Sometimes, when he listened to the Iraqi men talking and smoking, he could hear them say to each other simply,
“Insha… insha…”
a sort of running refrain, an affirmation of hope, with a strong note of fatalism.
Danny had gotten used to stepping in front of speeding vehicles. Iraqi drivers seemed to have two speeds—stop and go flat out—so he, taking their fatalistic attitude, assumed the drivers of speeding trucks would stomp on their brakes before hitting him at the base checkpoint where he was usually stationed. If not, his fellow MPs would open fire. It was that simple.
This habit of driving as fast as possible was soon picked up by the Americans. It started when you got out of air transport and on the road. Since the highway between the airport and the capital was mined, and also without cover, you felt as vulnerable as an ant as soon as you hit the ground. The drivers stepped on it and went at a suicidal speed, swerving away from suspicious objects and people, even if it meant driving directly into the path of oncoming traffic. But the trucks and cars coming the other way were doing the same thing.
Danny becomes aware of a shooting pain down his left side. It jolts him from sleep, or wherever he has been. He remembers the doctor poking him along that side, and feeling nothing. The pain jolts him again. Is this good? Pain is probably better than nothing at all—it means he’s still alive.
“Danny? Danny?” It’s his sister Sirena’s voice.
He feels a cool hand on his right arm, then against his cheek. He opens his eyes, then shuts them again quickly against the glare.
“Can you hear me?” she asks. Then a note of her old, mischievous self, his little sister: “Are you in there, Danny?”
He opens his eyes again, sees her silhouette against the window before shutting them again. It is raining outside. Good. This means he’s not in Iraq. Where is he, then? He remembers the car chase. The police.
“Chucho… happened to Chucho?”
“My cousin Chucho? He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Only you were hurt.” Sirena leans over him.
He can feel her breath on his face, and tries again to open his eyes, fluttering his lids briefly. “What?” he says.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“Yeah. Somebody shot me.”
“A
cop
shot you. For nothing. Someone taped it, and it’s been all over the news.”
Danny grunts.
Sirena pats his hand. “Are you thirsty?” Without waiting for a reply, she reaches for a glass and places a straw to his lips.
Danny realizes he’s in a neck brace. He opens his lips and sucks.
“Is my neck broken?”
“No. I don’t know why you’re in that thing. Maybe we can get them to take it off soon.”
Danny can see a nurses’ station, more bright lights.
Sirena looks up at the clock. “Aimee will be here pretty soon, as soon as she drops off the kids.”
Soon. Soon. Soon. Her words echo in his head.
“Soon,” he says, then closes his eyes.
At Sarge’s urging, Danny tried driving the truck. After grinding the gears around the compound for a while, he got the hang of it. It was loud and hot inside. It was a hundred degrees outside. He had never learned how to drive a stick shift back home. His cousins in L.A., when he e-mailed them, teased him, told him he was finally a real man.
Danny met Aimee when he was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Her friend was dating another reservist and the four of them went out one night. The other couple broke up after about two months, but Danny kept seeing Aimee, simply knowing that he felt better when he was around her. This must be love, he thought.
At twenty-five, Danny was one of the last in his family—of the cousins—to marry, except for his little sister. The relatives blamed it on their college educations.
“Gotta get ’em while you’re young,” said Freddy, a sleeping baby balanced on his thick forearm. “Gotta get ’em while you still have hair!”
At twenty-nine, working fifty hours a week in a detailing shop, Freddy already looked old to Danny. Danny had gotten his degree in industrial design and was starting to pay back his debt to Uncle Sam. Aimee was a Cajun girl, not the sort anyone thought Danny would fall for, with wild red hair and a husky voice. She ordered up a plate of garlic shrimp and a mug of beer for each of them, and taught Danny the fine art of peeling shrimp. Then she taught him how to two-step to a zydeco band. It might have been the way she placed her boots on the sawdust and shrimp shell–covered floor of the nameless crab shack where they danced. It might have been the way she placed her hands on his chest during a slow number and took the wings of his collar between her fingertips before looking up into his eyes. But probably it was the way she double-clutched her pickup truck without ever glancing at the gear shift that won Danny’s heart.
Winning over Aimee’s family was another matter. Where Danny grew up, the place they lived would have been called “the tulees.” In Louisiana, it was called the bayou. Aimee drove the two of them south from Shreveport to the end of a paved road, then onto a sandy track that ended in water. Swinging her vehicle off to one side, she parked next to a stake truck that could have been there five minutes or five years.
“Daddy’s home,” she said. Wading into the shallows, Aimee retrieved a flat-bottomed boat from the reeds and they climbed in. They set a bag of groceries and Rikenjaks beer at one end and tucked their coats around it to keep it upright. Then Aimee grabbed the oars and steered them out onto the dark waters. Danny felt like he was in a movie, or at Disneyland, and waited for the giant, audio-animatronic gator to rear up out of the water and snap its plastic jaws at them.
“Don’t you think they ain’t real gators out here,” said Aimee, as though reading his mind. “Cause they is.”
Danny kept his hands well within the boat as the sun slipped lower on the horizon.
Danny wakes to Aimee’s kiss.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers.
“I feel like Sleeping Beauty,” he says, “except woken by a princess.”
“Were you dreaming?” she asks, pulling her fingers through his short hair.
“Yeah. About you.”
“You seem better,” she says, dragging her chair closer. Danny notices that he’s in a regular hospital room with a door, not the ICU.
“What about Chucho? Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“They arrested him, but he’s out on bail. Your uncle put up the money.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Drunk driving. Speeding. Resisting arrest. The works. You were too, you know.”
“I was what?”
“Under arrest. You were chained to the bed. Don’t you remember?”
“No. How long have I been here?”
“Five days.”
“Am I still chained to the bed?”
“My God, no. Someone taped the whole thing. A police officer shot you without provocation. Now he’s on leave and under investigation. Don’t you remember anything?”
Danny tries.
“I can get flashes of things, like little snapshots. He told me to get up. I put my hands up, exactly like he said. But he shot me anyway.” Danny feels himself heating up just thinking about it.
“Well, a couple of lawyers have called. They want us to sue the bastard. They say we have a good case.”
“I’m supposed to rejoin my unit in a week.”
Aimee throws back her head and laughs. “Soldier, you ain’t going nowhere.” Then she leans over and hugs him, and bursts into tears.
Danny itched even after he’d had the good fortune to shower, which happened maybe once a week; the constant dust and grit irritated his skin. It worked its way under his watchband, under his waistband, under the sweatband of his hat. When he took his boots and socks off, there was a fine mud between his toes that he tried to remove with baby wipes.
Danny wanted to wear a bandana over his face when he worked the checkpoint, but his sergeant said no, it would spook the Iraqi civilians if they couldn’t see his face. When he coughed and spat, his phlem was brown.
A man Danny doesn’t recognize reaches up and pops a videotape into the slot in the television bolted to the wall. Gray screen suddenly goes to black with white walls, an upswing motion as the camera seems to be thrust upward, then pointed down.
Danny recognizes Chucho’s metallic blue Corvette, the front bumper crumpled, white streaks from side-swiping something.
“Get out. Get out!”
A figure on the right is holding a gun with both hands. The door opens and Danny puts his feet on the ground. He doesn’t see Chucho, although he can hear him yelling.
“It’s okay,” says Danny. He has his hands up.
“Get out of the vehicle and down on the ground.”
Danny hesitates.
“I said get down on the ground!” The voice is agitated, angry.
Danny kneels down slowly, then rolls onto the ground.
He remembers how he had been asleep, or so drunk as to be virtually asleep. That’s why he had left his car and ridden with Chucho.
The camera is jostled as the operator tries to focus on the policeman, on Danny lying on the ground. He is a light-colored, prone figure on a black background. The quality is poor, bluish for lack of light. It reminds him of night vision goggles.
“Get up!” the voice barks. It cracks with tension, near hysteria.
“Okay, I’m getting up now,” says Danny. “I’m going to get up.”
He rises to his knees, starts to put his hands up again.
That’s when the shots ring out, three of them. The camera wobbles wildly, but Danny does not see this part, because he’s shut his eyes and turned away.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” says Aimee, clutching his right arm, the good one without all the tubes in it.
Danny can hear Chucho yelling again. He must still be in the car. Danny opens his eyes and sees himself slumped sideways, close to the open door of the car.
“I told you to lie down!” screams the policeman.