Another rainy night. The weather’s changing. Radio traffic busy as always. Hanson drove past the address Radio had given him and pulled to the curb half a block down, his eyes on the house in the rearview mirror. Another 415F—Disturbance, Domestic—a family fight. People who needed someone with a club and a gun to make their decisions for them. The overheated engine dieseled out, pounding wipers stopped, rain hissed and steamed off the hood of the filthy patrol car. Radio went silent.
Closed up in a wall locker, his wool shirt and trousers didn’t have time to dry out between shifts. They’d stayed damp, heavy and hot. He was hungover, with a headache and diarrhea, wishing he’d called in sick. He made a fist with his right hand—making it hurt—to put a little more edge into his attitude. It seemed to help, so he did it again, squeezing the festering blue puncture wound in his palm, which he’d gotten chasing a rapist over a chain-link fence two nights ago.
Reaching into the black leather pilot’s case on the seat beside him, he pulled out a sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepto-Bismol and for a moment saw his dark reflection in the curved windshield as a brooding magician producing a pink rabbit. He slugged down the chalky antacid, tilted the bottle and squinted at it—already half empty—screwed the cap back on, and put it away. He licked his lips, checking them in the rearview mirror for pink residue, and his stomach cramped up again. Maybe, he thought, he should design a holster for the pink bottle, like the one he carried Mace in.
Channel three came back with his record check.
No outstanding wants or warrants on your subject. He is on probation for 245, 148 PC, and 11550 H&S. Be advised, he’s been arrested twice for 242—by your complainant—in the past nine months. Charges dropped both times.
“904,” Hanson said, switching back to channel two. He pulled on his left sap glove, eight ounces of powdered lead stitched into five pouches, one behind each finger, and a single, bigger pouch across the back of the hand. He kept the other glove tucked under his belt buckle—freeing his gun hand—the glove’s cuff hanging out so he could snatch it out and swing it backhand, his best weapon by far for close quarters.
He got out of the car and quietly closed the door, stepping into a puddle of water dammed up with leaves and trash. The cold water poured over the ankles of his steel-toed boots, and when he walked up the street he felt one sock work its way down past his heel. He listened at the door for a moment, called out “Police officer,” knocked three times with his short wood, then slipped it back into the little pocket along his leg when he heard the clatter of locks opening.
She opened the door the width of the night chain and looked out at him standing in the rain. Barefoot, wearing cutoffs, no bra under a black T-shirt with white letters across the front, EAT SHIT AND DIE, she had a cigarette going between her swollen lips, the lower one split but scabbed over.
“Did you call the police,” Hanson said, “or is this the wrong address?” She unhooked the night chain and stepped back just enough to let him squeeze in next to her out of the rain. She was a little heavy, her breasts filling up the T-shirt, the jeans cut off so high the pockets hung down along her chubby white thighs.
Hanson shrugged impatiently. “Okay?”
She opened the door wider so he could brush past her into the overheated, stinking house, where she looked at him as if she didn’t know why he was there or why she’d let him in. She was out of shape, pale, and she looked tired. Her black eye was a couple of days old, and the bruises on her arm had turned blue-green and yellow. “What?” she said.
Hanson shook his head. “Nothing.” He stepped around her, checking to see that no one was hidden behind the half-opened front door.
“I want him outta here,” she mumbled, cigarette bobbing between her swollen lips. “I want the fucker outta here. Now! Right now!”
Yeah, yeah, Hanson thought, her voice exactly what he should have expected. “And what is the problem this evening?” he asked, his stomach seizing up again.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, looked at Hanson, then shouted over her shoulder, “He’s the problem. He’s an asshole! And I want him out.”
“And fuck you,” a man yelled, his voice coming up through the floor.
How many times, Hanson thought, trying to will the cramps away, had he been in this movie before? With these same dumb motherfuckers?
He tried to breathe—a stress-reduction technique a psychologist had taken an hour to explain one day in the Academy—and inhaled a lungful of her menthol cigarette smoke. It was just about impossible to know where a bathroom was in East Oakland, the way they moved you from beat to beat, and Radio too busy to give him time for a 908B, anyway. OPD had a number for everything.
Maybe he could take care of this quick, whip it out on an assignment card—Problem resolved upon departure—then use the bathroom before Radio sent him to another call.
His stomach calmed for a moment, and it was only then that it dawned on him why the house seemed even stranger than what he was used to. It was filled with Elvis memorabilia. More than a collection, it was a museum, an obsession, like some kind of celebrity death trip roadside attraction out in the desert. Visions and versions of Elvis through different countries, crafts, and art forms. The paintings on the walls were mostly done on black velvet, Elvis’s features slightly Hispanic or Asian. Tijuana Elvis the matador. Saigon Elvis walking with a sad-eyed ghost soldier. Green Beret Elvis armed and deep in the jungle. Deer-Hunting Elvis in a Ford F-150 with a gun rack. Elvis with Che, with Mao, with Richard Nixon, and with Malcolm X. Preaching with Billy Graham, crossing the river with Dr. King, high in the clouds with the dead Kennedys, and kneeling alone beneath God’s own light down in the garden of Gethsemane.
There were porcelain busts, hand-painted by machines, the red enamel on one not quite aligned with his pouting lips, the blue of his eyes slightly off-center in another, his nose, his smile, his sideburns—on all of them—unfocused, out of sync, so he seemed to be disassembling into other dimensions.
Molded rubber figurines—Barbie doll Elvises dressed in period doll clothes—many from the last Las Vegas period in the spangled white jumpsuit, boots and sunglasses. But there was Hillbilly Elvis too. A GI Elvis. Elvis in a Hawaiian shirt and lei, from the movie Blue Hawaii. Karate Elvis in a black-belted gi, with cocked, deadly-weapon arms that rotated at the shoulders. The foot-high sheet-metal Elvis rode a wire strung from the kitchen door to the ceiling, ascending to Rock-&-Roll Heaven in a flowing-robe-like leisure suit, legs spread, bell-bottoms wide as wings, that lock of black hair over one eye, holding a glittering guitar at arm’s length just below his crotch, rising to Glory.
Movie posters, collector’s edition Elvis liquor decanters—filled now with colored water—behind a sad little plywood bar covered with red, white, and blue Naugahyde. Hanson looked at himself in the Elvis-profile etched mirror behind the bar. He looked awful, sick, and beat-up, worse than the woman.
The clang and boom of free weights in the basement shook the house like a minor quake.
“Could I please have your name, ma’am? And date of birth.”
She stubbed out her Kool in an ELVIS ON TOUR ashtray from the Circus Circus hotel and took another from a musical cigarette box that plucked a few hesitant notes—maybe “Love Me Tender”—before the spring wound down.
“I’m the one who called the cops,” she said, twitching the unlit cigarette between her fingers, her red nails chipped and chewed to the quick. “Why do you need my date of birth?”
“I need the complainant’s information to complete my report. For the, uh, database…”
She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and rewound the cigarette box. It was “Love Me Tender,” but now, spring-tight, it played at double speed, like music in a Chinese nightmare. Hanson was starting to twitch himself, flipping the ballpoint pen between his fingers. Elvis. Everywhere. Watching him. The bang of iron on concrete shook the house again.
“Can’t you just tell him to leave? That’s all I fuckin’ want.”
The clang of steel on steel rattled the Elvis dolls. Again. And again as he slammed more weight plates on each end of the bar. A lot of weight, Hanson thought.
“What’s his name,” he asked her. They studied each other as she gave him the information he needed.
His name was Paul. Her name was Racine and she was twenty-three years old. He would have guessed she was thirty. The underarms of the black T-shirt were wet with perspiration, and her smell, mixed with sweet perfume, rose up around him like a guilty memory, bringing him closer.
“He do this to you?” Hanson asked, reaching over, his voice a little hoarse, tracing the edge of the bruise around her eye.
“He got laid off at work,” she said, looking up at Hanson. “At the door factory. He’s been laid off three months.”
“And this?” Hanson asked, closing his hand over the swelling on her arm, up where the bruises disappeared into the cotton shirt.
“Uh-huh.”
“He using steroids?”
“Steroids?”
“I’m not a narc,” he said. “I don’t care if he uses steroids or not. Or if you smoke dope or whatever you do.”
“Whatever?” she said.
“I just need to know what to expect from him.”
She nodded, her hair brushing his chest. “Yeah,” she told him, her lips against his breast pocket. “He likes to hurt me,” she said, her leg touching the erection bobbing against his wet wool trousers.
“I’ll go down and talk to him,” he said and almost tripped turning away. Jesus Christ, stop it, he told himself. Stop. She’s more trouble than that tattooed woman up in Missoula.
“You stay up here,” he told her. “If you come down with me, it’ll just start an argument. You can listen from the stairs.”
Got fired from the door factory? The fuckin’ door factory, he thought, walking to the basement stairs, the whine of power saws and planers in his ears, the bang, bang, bang of staple guns. He imagined waking up in bed every morning next to Racine as she lit her first cigarette of the day. Goin’ to the door factory.
She was giving him that look. She wasn’t bad, really. A little skanky, but skanky was okay. It was all, pretty much, okay. He was going to need all the help, all the diversion, all the going-away he could find to get through his probation period, still seven more months. Seven months and five days.
“Just don’t talk,” he told her. “Let me talk.”
The stairway, constructed of warped, knotty, unpainted lumber and about forty pounds of bent nails, shuddered as they started down. She was right behind him.
Hanson wondered if the materials had come from the door factory, then realized of course they did.
The windowless, concrete basement was bleak as a torture chamber, blinding at first, ten thousand watts of warehouse guard lights hanging from the ceiling. They probably came from the door factory too, one at a time, every Friday after work, in the trunk of the car. Half the shit in Oakland is stolen, he thought, ducking his head to clear the overhang, a trickle-down, drug-trade economy.
The walls on either side of the weight bench were paneled with narrow Kmart door mirrors, dozens of them mounted edge to edge with black-tar flooring adhesive. A four-foot Nazi flag hung on the far wall, behind the weight bench. Weight, Hanson thought. Every house east of High Street came with a set of weights for staying in shape till the PO violated you back to the joint with a random 4 a.m. urine sample.
Paul was being cool, like he didn’t even notice them, halfway through a set of bench presses, maybe two hundred fifty pounds on the bar. He raised it slowly, held it at arm’s length without a quiver, lowered the bar, then lifted it again. Slowly. Impressing them. It was a lot of weight. He slammed the bar onto the rack, sat up, shiny with sweat, and studied them, thick blue veins wriggling like night crawlers along his arms.
Dark blue spandex shorts to the knee and a white tank top with Nazi SS lightning bolts bracketing the word BLITZKRIEG! Eighty-five IQ. Blue eyes. Blond. The crew-cut, and, of course, a Fu Manchu mustache. Maybe six foot one. Arms as big as Hanson’s legs. Bat-hooded no-neck neck.
“Hi,” Hanson said, his mouth dry, the stomach cramps back with a vengeance.
“‘Hi’? Fuckin’ ‘Hi’?” Paul said, a little out of breath but trying not to show it. “‘Hi’ doesn’t cut it. How about ‘You got a warrant?’ Dude.”
“Don’t need a warrant. Sir,” Hanson said. “This isn’t TV. Your wife called the police and let me in.”
“Wife? That what she told you? I’m not married to the cunt.”
“What’s your name again, man?” Hanson said.
“Paul, okay? My name’s Paul.”
“Right. Paul. Paul. Your…uh…Racine called the police. Asked me inside. So I don’t need a warrant…Paul. She wants you to leave,” he said, stepping off the stairs onto the concrete. When his stomach seized up again, he clenched his tender, swollen hand into a fist, beating the cramps. The worst pain wins.
“I pay rent, dude. So fuck that,” Paul said, lying back again, looking up, into the lights, doing three quick, angry presses.
“He hasn’t paid rent in four months,” Racine said from the stairs. “He sleeps mornings, hangs out with his buddies at the gym all afternoon, gets drunk, then, hey, it’s time to come home and give me shit.
“I’m fuckin’ through. Payin’ the rent, fixing his special high-protein meals, walking on eggshells. Watching TV. Every night. Alone. While he’s down here grunting. Ugh,” she said. “Ugh. Watching himself in those cheap-ass mirrors like a faggot.”
Paul sat up like he was spring-loaded.
“Fuck you, you dumb cunt. You’re the faggot. Queer for Elvis. You must use him for a dildo. ’Cause that’s the only way you’re gonna get any. Look at yourself! I’m a queer?” he said, hitting himself on the chest. Like a bow-legged chimpanzee, Hanson thought. What was it called? Aggressive display. If they were outside he’d be throwing handfuls of dirt and leaves over his shoulder. “I’m hard. I’m bad. That’s just how it is. Nobody gives me shit.”
“Oh, Paulie,” she said. “Not that I’ve—”
“Fuck you. And what did I tell you about the next time you called the fuckin’ cops? Huh!” The sound came from deep in his chest, pumping up the anger. “Huh?” he said, pressing both hands, palms down, on the bench between his legs, lifting his body off the bench like a gymnast.
Hanson watched it in the mirrors like it was a movie. His uniform looked like shit, creases steamed out by the rain, the shirt hanging on him, baggy pants, like hand-me-downs from a big brother. With all the weight he carried—the pistol, nightstick, PAC-set, Mace, handcuffs, speedloaders, the short wood in its own little pocket. In this rain his sodden pants kept slipping over his hips, and he had to hitch them up, hooking his thumbs in the belt loops. Must be down to one forty-five, maybe less, he thought, burning adrenaline instead of food. Most of his calories came from Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor, the flat little half-pint bottles of oily Popov vodka he sucked down after work, and the tequila he drank while watching dawn come up over the Oakland Hills before passing out in his bed.
“Huh?” Paul said again. “Huh!” working it, lifting and lowering his body—the alpha chimp, Hanson thought. Finally he pushed up and off the bench onto his feet, as if he was about to come up the stairs after her.
The stairs shuddered as Racine ran up and slammed the door. Paul sneered, spit on the floor. Very classy, Hanson thought.
“You call a cover car, dude?” he said, looking at Hanson, the tough guy again, the Fu Manchu mustache and the bunched jaw muscles. His Gold’s Gym badass look.
Hanson opened his eyes wide, slightly unfocused, innocent—psycho innocent. His Shirley Temple eyes. “Say, you must be of German heritage,” Hanson said, big eyes, nodding at the Nazi flag, the black swastika on a red background. Starting to have fun now. Deadly serious, life/death/life/death serious, not that phony workaday “Get serious now” bullshit. The hangover was gone, his stomach was okay. Because his body understood serious.
Paul hesitated, looked at the flag, back at Hanson.
“Deutschland. Jawohl,” Hanson said. “Of course. I can see it in your physiognomy, the shape of your head.” Surfing the wave now, the wave that could collapse beneath his feet and kill him if he lost his focus or his nerve. Just a moment of random bad luck could kill him now.
Paul held back, his eyes wary, then he ignored whatever warning had gone off in his head. He flexed his arms, shuffled like a boxer, to the left, the right, then toward Hanson. But Hanson only smiled.
“German. That’s a fuckin’ rodge, dude. Pure white Aryan. Both sides of the family. I asked you if you called a cover car. ’Cause after I kick your punk ass, I’ll kick the shit outta him,” he said.
“Not tonight,” Hanson said. An addiction to curiosity is what it was. Betting everything on What’ll happen if I do this? Curiosity will kill you like it killed that cat.
“Call one. Call two, dude. I’ll take ’em as they come, one at a time. Like an assembly line, motherfucker, like poundin’ fuckin’ doorframes.”
“No, Paul.”
“No? No what?”
“No, you’re not gonna kick anybody’s ass.”
Paul laughed. “Why is that?”
“Because you’re gonna be dead,” Hanson said as he pulled the sap glove from behind his belt buckle and backhanded Paul across the throat with it.
Paul froze, his eyes empty, huge, then full of fear when he realized he couldn’t breathe. With an easy, casual, contemptuous wrist motion, Hanson flicked the leaded glove into Paul’s face, dropping him—gagging, sobbing, whooping for air—to one knee.
He tucked the glove back behind his belt, wrapped his hand around the grip of the stainless steel .357, and popped the clamshell holster open. He owned this bleak little split second of time.
“I want to explain something,” he said.
A bubble of blood swelled from Paul’s nostril, then popped.
“And it’s very important that you believe me, because I’m finished with verbal persuasion for tonight. If you see it in my eyes, maybe you’ll understand. Right here,” he said, “look here,” pointing, his fingers in a V at his own eyes. Then, when Paul looked up, Hanson turned on his eyes, locking into Paul’s.
“Turning them on.” That’s what he called it, but what he did was release them, let them go where they wanted to go—the way a compass needle sweeps north and holds—back to the eyes they’d become during the war, when Hanson was free to do anything he wished, already dead, with nothing to lose. Nothing had changed. They were still and always would be the same eyes, but he had to control them now, conceal them, contain them. But sometimes—those times when the world, when everything, seemed hopeless, and Hanson picked up his off-duty Hi Power 9mm, just to feel its cool weight in his hand, thinking it over—just once in a while, he’d let his eyes go free. Let them go to that place not many people ever visit, but once you do, it’s always there, waiting for you. He’d look up from the pistol and the eyes would take him back there, to the walking-dead killer he would always be. Two, maybe three seconds was all he could risk, before they could—he knew—take him over. Where the eyes go, the body follows. He’d always made it back—holding, holding, then coming back—so far. And afterward he’d feel good, sane, for a few hours, like he was home.
Paul was looking up at him.
“I’m hungover, Paul. Sick. You know how that is, right?”
Paul nodded.
“I’ve got diarrhea, man. If I had to arrest you tonight, instead of just shooting you, if you forced me to arrest you, you know, I’d grab you, you’d grab me, yeah, yeah…” Hanson sighed. It was always the same old dance. “I’d get you cuffed, but I’d shit my pants, my OPD uniform pants, and I’d never live it down. That’s the only thing anybody would remember about me. Fifty years from now rookies would still hear the story. ‘Hanson was so scared that he shit his pants.’
“So you gotta leave now and not come back till tomorrow morning, or I’m gonna shoot you. Six times. Kill you. Because you can’t testify in court if you’re dead. That’s how it works. It’s that simple. I’ll say you came at me with a weight plate and I had to shoot you in self-defense. There’ll be powder burns all over you. This thing,” he said, glancing at the pistol, “might even set your shirt on fire. ‘He was on me, man.’ That’s what I’ll tell ’em. ‘Didn’t have any choice.’ You weigh twice as much as me, all those big muscles you worked so hard for, steroids in your blood. Roid Rage. And you’re white. No problem with the black community. Nobody’s gonna care how it happened. You’re already bought and paid for.
“What do you think, Paul, do I have to shoot you?”
Paul shook his head.
“You got somewhere you can spend the night? Paul?”
“I can sleep down at the gym?”
“Good. And I think I can trust you to keep your word,” Hanson said. “I think you’re an honorable man.” He looked at the Nazi flag. “Meine Ehre heisst Treue.”
Paul looked at him—still working for every breath—respectfully.
“My honor is loyalty. Waffen-SS. The soldiers, not those fuckin’ concentration camp guards. That was the creed they lived by. Some of the best soldiers in the world, and that stupid fuck Hitler,” Hanson said, nodding toward the flag, “used ’em for cannon fodder there at the end. They were soldiers, man. So I’m gonna trust you not to come back till tomorrow. Not before noon. Can I do that, Paul?”
Paul nodded. “Right,” he croaked. “Absolutely.”
Hanson sat on the toilet, exhausted, the diarrhea gone for now. His pants hung down below his knees, the heavy pistol resting in the crotch of his trousers. He’d enjoyed breaking Paul down, disassembling the motherfucker. It had been a while since he’d done something like that. Since he’d had the opportunity and the excuse. He was pretty sure Paul would wait, at least till midmorning, before he came back and pounded on the door, told Racine to let him in, then beat the shit out of her again when she did. A night-light glowed above the sink. A translucent bust of Elvis wearing a red-and-black-checked bandanna around his neck. Elvis was smiling.
“Okay,” he said, back in the living room.
Racine looked at him, biting her lip. She was still barefoot.
“I’ve gotta get back on the street,” he said. He knew he should get out the door right now, but his feet wouldn’t move.
“I watched you and Paul-ee,” she said, “through the floor vent in the kitchen.”
His Kevlar vest was damp and heavy and interfered with his breathing. He must have pulled the straps too tight.
“He isn’t coming back tonight.” She looked at the bedroom door. “Anything you want,” she said. “What do you want me to do? Come on. Tell me.”
“I think,” he began.
“This?” she asked him, pulling her shirt over her head, shaking her short bleach-blond hair out, the shirt in her hand. There were bruises on her ribs, beneath her breasts. “Or this,” she said, popping the buttons on her cutoffs, one by one, her eyes on his. She let them slide down her legs to the floor, then stepped out of them.
“Come here,” he said.
She pressed in against him, looked up, and he put his thumb against the split in her lip, softly, barely touching it but feeling the heat, the tiny pulse in there. She gradually increased the pressure, pushing her lip against his thumb, watching him, her pupils growing, until the lip cracked open and began to bleed.
“Gotta go,” he said, stepping back, his voice hoarse. “Gotta clear from the call. Get back on the street.”
“Give me your hand,” she said, taking his wrist in her hand. “Relax, honey,” she said, bringing the hand down on her breast. Blood collected on her lower lip into drops that fell, one by one. “Do you like…?”
“Here’s my card,” he said, fishing it out of his wallet with one hand. “Call me if you get in trouble.”
“Come back later,” she said.
“Lock the door behind me.” He handed her the card with his bloody thumbprint on it. “Get some sleep. Don’t let anyone in,” he said, letting himself back out into the rain. Especially me, he thought, pulling the door shut, feeling her eyes on him as he went back down to the sidewalk.
The rain was coming down heavier than it had been and felt good, washing the sweat from his face and neck, cooling him off. He didn’t have much longer before he went in for the night. He’d put on a clean uniform tomorrow. He could get the bathroom warm, hang the vest from the shower rod, and turn a fan on it. Should be dry overnight. He was lucky, he thought, glancing back at the house, to get out of there alive. He could commit suicide in a place like that. Another tattooed woman, he thought. And that’s why he was still thinking about going back when he got off his shift.
He drove a few blocks, pulled to the curb, and filled out an assignment card. Problem resolved upon departure. When he cleared from the call Radio sent him to check for an ambulance, a man down by the Dumpster behind Carl’s Country Market. Drunk and passed out, probably. They were passed out everywhere you looked—sidewalks, gas station bathrooms, city parks, and front yards—sometimes in the middle of the street where they got run over by drunk drivers. A drunk in the street run over by a drunk in a car. There’s a night’s worth of paperwork.
We’re getting reports of possible shots fired at that location. We’ve dispatched a 945, inbound from Highland Park.
“904,” Hanson said. “Got it?”
Car to cover…
“I’ll advise. On the ambulance too. I’m almost there. You are advised, though,” Hanson said, looking at his watch, “that I’ll be on overtime in fifteen minutes,” he said, turning on his overhead lights. The driving rain and the water thrown up by the patrol car looked like a red and blue fireworks display moving through the dark at fifty miles an hour.
If the guy was DOA, maybe a 187, they’d try to send a beat car from graveyard shift, if there was one tonight, and he’d only have to fill out a supplemental report. The city wasn’t handing out overtime if they could help it. They couldn’t afford time and a half for a murder in East Oakland, not when they had one hundred twenty a year. If they did assign him as the primary officer, he already knew he’d have a hard time getting the OT money. He’d have to do all the paperwork for the call, then the paperwork for the OT and they’d find some way to deny the OT.
Behind him a pair of blinding headlights appeared out of nowhere, coming way too fast, the car bearing down on him in a nimbus of spray. He hit his brakes and skidded up over the curb, popping one of the patrol car’s pie-plate hubcaps off before the wheels dug into a muddy front yard. The car flashed by through the rain, blazing, throwing spray, and in that frozen instant Hanson recognized the huge pristine old Lincoln from the rock shop, saw Reverend Ray clearly, no dark glasses tonight, smiling at him as the car flashed past and was gone, and Hanson knew for sure that an ambulance would be way too late to help that man down. It would take an ambulance ten minutes to get there, and Reverend Ray…he was there already.
5Tac51.
“Yeah…”
We’ve got two graveyard shift cars en route to the scene.
In his mirror he saw the overheads and high-low, high-low headlights of a patrol car coming up fast.
“Ten four. One of ’em just passed me. If you don’t need me, I’ll be 908…”
Copy, 5Tac51 is 908…
Hanson spun his tires in the mud, fishtailed around, back onto the street, and headed toward the freeway, glad he wouldn’t be doing all the paperwork on a 187. And he would not be dropping by to see Racine. Not tonight. Maybe another time. Tonight he’d go home, get drunk watching the sun rise, and pass out in his own bed.
Angling toward the freeway, he thought about Racine and Paul. Paul down there in his mirrored Nazi basement. Elvis Hitler. There’s a name. People would sure remember you with a name like that. Gott Mit Uns.
On the freeway, he heard one of the cars that had taken the man-down call request an ambulance, even though the victim was already dead.