New Year’s Eve and Hanson was parked at the south end of the Mormon Temple parking lot. The clouds had blown away, and far below, the bay gleamed like blued steel. The Temple was off his district but a straight shot down to the freeway if he got a late call, a good spot to finish up reports. He was glad he’d found it. He’d backed the patrol car up against a waist-high wall at a twelve-foot drop-off where no one could come up behind him while he was writing. The Temple filled the sky above the patrol car, its spotlighted marble buttresses and blazing golden spires rising from the Oakland Hills like the City of Oz. The enormous parking lot was empty, thousands of lighting globes—pastel blue and green—hovering above the asphalt like UFOs, massed and waiting.
It was cool and quiet there as he finished a domestic battery/resist arrest report. His knee throbbed, but at least the ninety-dollar wool pants weren’t torn. Tiny beads of blood had seeped through the material, but the dry cleaner could get it out.
While he wrote, he kept track of Radio traffic, voices out there on the radio. Most nights he never saw another patrol car until he pulled back into Transportation downtown at the end of his shift. When he’d been a cop in Portland, in the heart of North Precinct’s ghetto, he’d had a partner. The same partner every night working the same beat, so they got to know the people who lived there, and the people got to know them. Nobody loved them, but they knew who they were and knew they could depend on them to be fair, or at least consistent—not just two more faceless white guys in uniforms.
Shuffled from beat to beat, the OPD street cops rarely got to know each other, much less the black citizens they were paid to protect and serve or, more realistically, to keep them contained behind the freeways, in East and West Oakland, and out of downtown and white districts. The cops lived in various IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW suburbs twenty to fifty miles outside the city limits, and coming to work in Oakland was like punching in at the meat-packing plant for their shift, then showering, leaving bloody work clothes in their lockers, and driving the freeway for an hour to a thirty-year mortgage. With almost no contact at work, and none off duty, they were mostly strangers to one another. If one of them needed cover, the closest car would go, of course.
When a cop got killed everything else pretty much stopped until the suspect was killed resisting arrest, had committed suicide, or, if the media got on the scene before it was cordoned off, was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. And usually dead within a year—stabbed repeatedly, thrown off an upper tier, or set afire in his cell by unknown assailants—because people on the street had to know if they killed a cop, they would die too. It was business, not personal.
Oakland, with the highest proportion of ex-cons of any city in California, fielded one-man patrol cars, and there were never enough of them to cover the 35 beats in 5 districts and 360,000 people. Hanson didn’t know it, but a lot of nights he was the only cop out there for 20,000 people.
He still was able to talk people into going to jail, like he had in Portland, but it was harder in Oakland. And some nights he could feel his mean streak growing. He had to be careful, he thought, or he might turn into what the OPD wanted before he realized what was happening. Every night it was life/death/life/death, but that’s what he liked, that’s when it seemed like all the bright lights came on for him.
He looked around the lot, leaned his head back, took a deep breath, held it, held it, then let it out slowly. Happy New Year. He’d been off the street for at least an hour on the call he was writing up, much of the time waiting in the Alameda County Hospital emergency room while an East Indian doctor stitched up the cut over his prisoner’s eye and shoved packing up his broken nose so they’d accept him when Hanson took him to jail.
He looked over the report forms once more, made sure all the correct boxes were filled in, and signed them Hanson / 7374P. He checked the rearview mirror and looked down at the red and white lights rushing like rivers past each other on the freeway far below.
Everything between him and the freeway was the Heart of Darkness, where everybody was a suspect, even the victims. Even the cops were just another gang out there, as brutal—maybe more brutal—as any of them, so outnumbered they had to be in order to survive. In the end, organized and superior brutality was what allowed them to enforce the laws of another country.
In the side-view mirror a new shadow appeared, wedged between the wall and the asphalt lot, changing shape as it moved toward the patrol car. It seemed to have a solid core that elongated, shrank, sent out feelers then pulled them back, crabbing from side to side. When Hanson spotted the shadow it startled him, maybe even scared him for a moment before he slowed his heart, telling himself that it was probably just another trick of light, another illusion, omen, hallucination. Maybe a threat, maybe not. He put the flat of his hand against his pistol, shifting in the seat to be sure it would clear the holster against the seat back. He leaned toward the passenger window for a better look.
A jet-black floppy-eared rabbit bounded out from the wall into the open. It was real, the biggest rabbit Hanson had ever seen. It hopped closer to the car, stopped. Hopped closer. Stopped and turned its head, regarding Hanson with a pearly black eye—looking right at him—aglow from the Temple lights.
The Temple rabbit, Hanson thought. Of course. Like those monkeys that have the run of Hindu temples in India. The Indian doctor in the emergency room. Maybe some connection there?
“Hey,” he called through the open window. “Hey, little buddy, is it true? You be the Temple rabbit?”
The eye stayed on Hanson.
“You speakeee English?”
Somebody’s pet. Or raised for food in a backyard hutch. That’s all. Nothing supernatural, but still, a black rabbit in East Oakland at night? It hopped closer, and Hanson had to put his head out the window and look down now to see it. The rabbit tilted his head, looking up at him. He was beat-up, like a tomcat, but healthy looking. A jagged streak of white fur ran from beneath one eye and down alongside his nose, as if a cut there had healed, the fur growing back white. Hanson slid back across the car seat, opened the door as quietly and fluidly as possible, and got out. He walked slowly around the back of the car. Looking casual, he thought, smiling, cool and smooth. The way he might walk up on a drug deal. He knelt slowly down, his knees popping.
“Hey, Rabbit,” he said softly, duckwalking closer. “Freeze. Police officer,” about to laugh, when the big rabbit sprang straight up in front of him, turned in the air, and vanished over the wall. Hanson fell backward, catching himself with both hands, his heart pounding. He jumped back up, hurried to the wall and looked down. Somebody’s backyard twelve feet below. A shadow, the black rabbit, compressed the grass as it hopped, like the footsteps of an invisible giant, around the side of the house, then streaked across Lincoln Avenue and was gone. A black rabbit on New Year’s Eve at the Mormon Temple. An omen far too complex to consider now.
Over the wall, from way down along the freeway in the flatlands of East Oakland, the whisper of celebratory gunfire. A distant crackling that Hanson could hear through his tinnitus. Hundreds of citizens down there welcoming in the New Year with pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Firing them into the night sky. Yellow and orange fire rising from yards and windows far below. Two people in Oakland would be wounded and one killed before dawn by spent bullets streaking back to earth. The first death of the New Year. He looked at his watch. Time to go in. Past time.
Hanson lived in Oakland, up above Grand Avenue. His flat was a few blocks from the border of Piedmont, a separate incorporated little town with its own police force and fire department. A little island of rich white people surrounded by the dark ocean of Oakland.
Just past the Safeway he turned off Grand, up Sunny Slope Avenue and left on Jean Street, where he drove past his house and parked a few houses away, on the opposite side of the street. There were no strange cars parked nearby, no one on the sidewalks yet. He got out of the Travelall, slung his bag over his right shoulder, slipped his hand inside, around the rubber Pachmayr grip of the Browning Hi Power and walked across the street to the flat he rented, the main floor of an elegant house built in 1907 after the San Francisco earthquake and fire—a real beauty back then, he imagined, long before the current owner chopped it into three apartments. Dust motes sparkled undisturbed in the entryway. He walked down the silent hall, checking windows and locks, to the kitchen, where he thumbed the safety on the Hi Power and put it in his hip pocket.
He poured three fingers of green tequila into a heavy, slab-sided jelly jar and tossed it back. It burned down his throat and blossomed in his stomach. Holding the thick glass up to the light, he considered the teardrop-shaped bubbles in the sides, air that had been trapped forty or fifty years ago. He had another, filled the glass again, and walked down the hall to the bedroom, where he took off his shoes and stretched out on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head, watching the ceiling, and fell asleep in his clothes.
Hanson is sleeping.
He doesn’t mind so much going to sleep during the day, after working the street all night. The muted sounds of others leaving for day jobs—the open and close of their car doors, the engines when they start them and drive away—are reassuring. He feels safe and rarely dreams during the day, even waking up in the early afternoon sometimes without any sense of dread and no hangover at all. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. Most people see that in his eyes and reconsider, they hesitate, try to explain themselves. Those that don’t, well, he survived so long when others haven’t that his response to threat is instinctive, faster than thought, a life-force beyond his control. There are nights when he knows he can’t be killed. He worries that he’ll live forever.