Tropical Depression (14 page)

“My name is Lin,” she said. “Lin Park.”

I held out a hand. “Billy Knight,” I said. She looked at my hand carefully, then touched it very softly. Her hand felt amazingly soft, warm and alive. She took her hand away.

“Lin, did you see the shooting?”

She bit her lip fractionally. “Yes,” she said.

“What happened, exactly? Do you remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, quietly. “I remember.”

“Hector was standing there?” She nodded. “What was he doing?”

She laughed a little. It wasn’t a very funny laugh. “He heard they were going to torch my father’s store and he came to stop them. That’s why my father is so mad—because he owes something to a black boy who is dead. And because—” It was all tumbling out, but she caught herself and stopped talking just before the real revelation, which was no revelation at all at this point. Anybody could have figured out by now that there was something between Lin and Hector.

I pretended I didn’t know. “Who were they?” She looked at me with eyes that were seeing something else, something that wasn’t there anymore. “Who was trying to torch the store?”

She blinked. I had never seen eyelashes like that before, like two great, graceful silk fans waving at me. “Just—you know. A bunch of bangers, I guess.”

“Gang members? How do you know they were?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what everybody was saying.”

“Okay. So this bunch of gangbangers comes up to the front of the store?”

She shook back her hair. I held my breath. “No,” she said.

“No? Who did show up?”

“Hector. With his posse,” she said proudly. “He had this group of kids like him, they were trying to like stop the violence and stuff. And they found out these bangers were going to like torch my father’s store. And they showed up to stop them.”

Something was slightly off and at first I couldn’t figure out what, but it bothered me. I chewed my lip for a minute. Then I got it. “You said he found out the bangers were coming here?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“How did he find out?”

She shrugged. She made it look like an elegant gesture. “I don’t know. Somebody told him, or one of his posse or something, I guess.” She shrugged again.

“Lin, I wasn’t here for this thing. But was the looting and burning and all that, was that usually planned ahead of time?”

She frowned, gave her head a half-shake. Her hair rippled. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t people just sort of get mad and then burn and loot whatever was handy?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Well, sure, I mean they weren’t like planning crimes or anything. They just did it, you know.”

“But somebody told Hector this was going to happen, and when. And then nobody showed up.” She didn’t say anything. I let it sink in for a moment. “How did it happen?”

She looked at me again. There was a new look in her eyes now, almost like she was seeing me for the first time, as she chewed on what I’d just helped her figure out. “How did it happen?” I repeated.

She was a little more careful with her answer this time. “Hector was standing there with his posse. He was like, waiting for the bangers. There’s one shot,
bam,
and Hector goes down.” There was a small catch in her voice as she said it.

“Did you see where the shot came from?”

She shook her head. “I was inside the store with my father. I couldn’t even hear what they were saying. But I could hear the shot.”

“Okay, you couldn’t see the shot. But you saw Hector. How did he fall?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when the shot hit him, how did he fall? Did he go straight back? Did he twist left or fall forward? What? How did he fall?”

She nodded. “I get it. He like twisted down. Sort of—” She showed me there on the sidewalk, in slow motion, a strange watusi of a fall. It was like she was screwing herself into the pavement. I nodded at her.

“Okay. So the shot came from above.”

“Hey,” she said, and looked very thoughtful. I looked up at the building, and then at the bank next door.

“Can I see the roof?”

She nodded again, suddenly very brisk. “Sure. This way.”

Lin led me around to the back of the building, where a fire escape climbed up the side to the roof. She pulled on a rope tied to a length of rusty chain and the lower stair slid down. I held it for her and then followed her up.

Halfway up a woman’s voice yelled something and Lin yelled back. She turned and gave me a small grimace of a smile. “My mother,” she said apologetically.

She led me up to where the steps turned into one last iron ladder bolted to the wall of the building, and climbed it to the roof. I followed, being very conscious that to look upward at the legs of a seventeen-year-old girl, no matter how gorgeous, was indecent beyond measure. Keeping that thought firmly in mind, I climbed out onto the roof a moment later, and I only looked once.

As I climbed onto the gravel roof I could see Lin ahead, about thirty feet away. There was a desperately ratty lawn chair and a few milk crates sitting in a clump. I came up behind Lin and she spoke without looking at me. “We used to come up here all the time. Just—you know, to talk.” She flashed me a furiously embarrassed look. “Not what you think. Just talking. It was like our hangout, the whole posse and everybody.”

I nodded and looked at the chair.

“Hector was an amazing guy,” she said. “But my father—all he could see was this black boy, and it freaked him out. Told me I couldn’t see Hector at all. So I had to like sneak away to talk to him. And Hector wasn’t just—he wanted—”

She stopped altogether for a moment. She frowned and stepped to the chair. A worn Dodgers baseball cap was underneath. She picked it up, brushed it off with the back of her hand, and set it on the seat of the chair. “Anyway, I guess he had something he wanted to prove to my father, which is like maybe why he did some of that, you know. Nonviolent confrontation. So my father would see, here’s a man. Who was tough and stubborn, just like my father. I don’t know,” she said, and sat on the milk crate.

So she was feeling guilty about Hector’s death, too. It wasn’t enough that she had to feel his loss and her father’s disapproval. Poor lovely child, carrying a weight so much heavier than herself. Carrying it quite well, too. Tough and stubborn—a chip off the old block. If he could only understand his daughter he would be quite proud of her.

I felt that I should say something, but I couldn’t think what. So I watched her for a minute. She just sat, looking down at the roof between her feet.

I turned away to give her some privacy. At the western edge of the building the bank loomed up. It was some twenty feet higher than the roof I stood on, and there was a gap of about twenty-five feet between the two buildings. I walked over to the edge and stood looking at the bank building. There wasn’t much to see, but I saw it anyway.

Screwed into the side of the building was a large and healthy-looking stainless steel eyebolt. I pulled at it. It seemed very solid, strong enough to hold my weight and a lot more. I tried to think what might go there that would need a bolt that big. Window-washing equipment? Not on a building like this. Bungee cord?

I gradually became aware of a strong smell of cheap cologne. I stood up and turned back towards Lin.

The two comedians and four of their friends stood facing me in a half-circle, about eight feet away. The friends were stamped from the same mold; young, baggy clothes, Raiders paraphernalia. One of them was Chicano, one of them Korean. The others were black. They didn’t look very friendly.

“What’s happening, ghost?” said Porkpie Hat.

I nodded. “Something on your mind?”

He took a step forward. “No, man, something on my
roof.
” The others laughed and inched forward. They smelled blood and they liked it. I smelled it, too, mixed with the cheap cologne, but I wasn’t happy about it.

“Did you know Hector McAuley?” I asked them.

They got very serious very fast. “What’s it to you, ghost?”

“His father was a friend of mine. He asked me to look into Hector’s murder.”

The kid with the backwards Raiders cap thought this was hilarious. He did a very loose-limbed comedy strut forward to Porkpie Hat. “Yo, check it out, dude thinks he’s Magnum P-fucking-I.” They cracked up again. And then Porkpie Hat took another step forward. “Look into
this,
motherfucker,” he said, and threw a spinning kick at my head.

Off behind my new friends I heard Lin call out, “Spider,
no!”
and then two of them stepped over to hold her arms. She was saying something more, but I didn’t listen. I concentrated hard on Porkpie Hat as he spun, stepped, and flung a foot at me.

I let the kick come very close to my head, stepping back a little at the last minute and trying to look clumsy about it. I wanted him to feel confident and try another one. High kicks can be very effective and painful—if the person you’re kicking is either intimidated or playing by the rules.

I was neither. And I knew a very good trick for stopping high kicks. You have to be very fast and a little lucky, but I’d done it in the dojo. I hoped it worked in real life, or I was going to have a very lopsided smile.

When the second kick came with all the quick tight moves leading up to it, I was ready. As Porkpie Hat went into his spin, I stepped forward, inside the arc of his kick. As he spun around to kick my face off, I was already too close for his foot to hit me. I let his calf smack into my open hands and then grabbed his ankle with both hands. I pulled hard, letting the force of his kick push him around and off his drag foot. Then I lifted.

Porkpie Hat’s hat fell on the roof. Maybe I’d have to call him something else now. He was dangling off the ground upside down, and all of a sudden all the cockiness was gone. “Put me
down,
motherfucker!” He almost squealed it, sounding his age for the first time.

“Why? So you can try to break my face again?”

“Damn right I will! You on my roof! Let the fuck go of me!”

I pulled higher, lifting my arms straight over my head so his face came higher. I wanted him to see my face, but I wanted to impress him with my strength, too. He was still young enough that the adult-child relationship might kick in if I held him up in the air like a bad uncle scaring his nephew.

“Listen, kid,” I told him. “Hector McAuley was murdered. I want to find out who did it. If you were his friend, help me. If not—” I paused here for effect. I was going to say something very tough but not too corny—just enough to make him a little wary of trying to kick me again.

It was a good plan. It probably would have worked. Probably—if I hadn’t been so busy thinking what to say I forgot about the other kids. I remembered a little too late. I heard a light whirring rattle and half-turned just in time to see the guy with the backwards Raiders hat. He had circled around behind me. He had some nunchuk sticks spinning, and as I registered what they were, he bounced them off my forehead.

From a long way off I heard an epic
boom!
sound, kind of slow and majestic like some great Cambodian temple gong. I thought I heard Porkpie Hat yelling something, too, but it was hard to be sure because the gong rang again.

It got dark very early today, I thought, and then I didn’t think anything.

There were a couple of vague voices coming from far down a dark hall. I couldn’t make out what they were saying at first, and I didn’t want to. I started to think maybe my head hurt, except it was hard to say if what I was feeling was really pain and anyway I wasn’t sure it was in my head.

One of the voices was really getting on my nerves; it kept saying, “Gee, that hurts. Ow. Gee, that hurts. Ow,” over and over again in a kind of weak, pathetic moan until I’d finally had enough and said, “Cut it out, you fucking wimp.” My voice sounded exactly like the annoying voice.

At that point I started to feel pretty sure it really was my head. And it was definitely hurting.

I tried to open my eyes, but that made the pain come roaring down at me, so I closed them again quickly.

I smelled rubbing alcohol and felt a gentle swab of cool across my forehead, where the thundering pain was blooming out into something sharper. It stung for a moment, and I heard one of the other voices say, very softly, “There.” I opened my eyes.

Nancy Hoffman stood over me. She looked so good to me that I forgot to hurt for a second. In her gleaming white nurse’s outfit she looked like an angel, except for one small detail: she was smiling at me like she thought it was all pretty funny.

“Hey, there you are,” she said as she saw me open my eyes.

“Pretty much,” I said. I made the mistake of trying to sit up. It brought the headache into very clear focus, very quickly. I wanted to throw up, except I knew that would hurt too much, too.

So I sat there for a moment with my eyes watering, my stomach clenching rhythmically, and my head hammering. I could feel my skin go cold and green as the thundering agony in my head went on and on until finally, after several weeks of torment, it slowed to a nearly tolerable level.

I opened my eyes again. Nancy was still smiling.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is this funny?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very funny.”

I didn’t feel like arguing. “How did I get here?”

Her smile got bigger. “Some kids brought you in. They looked like gangbangers.” She looked at me curiously for a moment; I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “Except for the girl, of course. She was amazingly beautiful.”

For a moment I tried to feel even worse, but there wasn’t room in my head for more than I had going, so I just looked at her.

“Why’d they bring me here?” My voice sounded weak and incredibly irritating to my ears, but I was stuck with it.

“Good question,” she said. She held up a crumpled three-by-five-inch card. “My name and the address of the clinic were on this. It was in your pocket.” And she put one hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow at me, like a first-grade teacher who caught the class clown with a handful of spitwads.

I tried to organize my answer. I was making some progress with my head, but it still took me a moment to put together a thought with as many parts to it as this one had. There were several different things to say, and I knew they had to go in the right order. So I let my head roll forward and I just breathed for a moment before I answered.