It was dusk when Radio sent him to The Ville. He’d never been there and he’d never heard any patrol car dispatched down there, a strip of land wedged between East 14th Street and the bay. On the beat maps it wasn’t clear whether The Ville was in the jurisdiction of the OPD, the Oakland Housing Authority Police, or no jurisdiction at all. The black marker pen used to draw the map boundaries cut a swath through the middle of The Ville, five or six blocks wide, along the southern border of District Four. It was another country.
All the beat maps were elusive, the way the boundary lines started and stopped, beats varying so much in size and shape, in the angles and panhandles and peninsulas. The beats were gerrymandered in or drawn at random, and always getting bigger the farther east into the ghetto they were, out in Districts Four and Five. At a glance, there appeared to be thirty-five beats, but there were only thirty-two. The numbers jumped from Beat Twenty-Eight in District Four to Beat Thirty-Two in District Five. There were no Beats Twenty-Nine to Thirty-One. The official beat map was drawn and numbered in such a confusing jigsaw pattern you wouldn’t notice three missing beats unless you studied the map.
Radio told him they had a “neighborhood disturbance” down there, phoned in by several anonymous complainants, a call they’d been holding for a while. When they got more information they’d let him know.
“Okie-doke,” Hanson said. “Got it. 5Tac51 be on the way.”
Copy, 5Tac51.
The horizon was a band of gunmetal blue as Hanson angled down from MacArthur onto Seminary, his eyes relaxing from color into shades of gray. A bat streaked across Seminary just ahead of the patrol car, then banked away and vanished into the treetop and billboard clutter. Six or eight more caught his eye, gone in the instant he saw them, bats coming out now from attics and garages, chimneys, abandoned houses, out from under the freeway overpasses and bridges, fragile little mice with wings. In the time it took to drive two more blocks, the darkness closed over them, but they’d be up there all night.
“Call me in the darkness, I’ll help you find your way…” Hanson sang softly, making up and filling in words from a song he and his dead partner, Dana, used to play on the jukebox whenever they ate at the Top Hat Café back when he was a cop in Portland. “Call me in the darkness, I’m waiting here for you.”
His headlights surprised the first lookouts along the perimeter of The Ville. They spun and ducked into the shadows, calling out in their soprano little-boys’ voices. “Rollers.” “Rollers.” “Rollers, Rollers.” Their calls reminded Hanson of summer evenings when he was a little boy, the neighborhood children playing hide-and-seek. But these boys, ten and twelve years old, made three hundred dollars a week as lookouts, warning the project drug dealers when cops were in the area. They gave most of the money to their mothers, at first, anyway, if she was still alive and out of prison. Or to an auntie, a substitute mother in the neighborhood. But all of them saved up to buy a “nine,” a 9mm pistol. Once they got a nine, they saved for an Uzi, because with an Uzi, they thought, nobody could fuck with them. If they survived long enough to take over a corner franchise to sell cocaine or heroin, the Uzi would keep the other motherfucker from taking it away from them. They were the smartest, most ambitious, hardest working children in the ghetto. They would do well in their world, but few of them would live to be twenty. They’d never grow up and they’d die like soldiers.
Hanson turned into the entrance to The Ville—there seemed to be one way in and one way out—and the calls of “Roller” were fewer and softer, following him like doves down the street, wondering what was he doing there in a one-man patrol car. They were accustomed to task force assaults by the OPD, DEA, FBI, DOJ—convoys of marked and unmarked cars, communication trucks, armored SWAT personnel carriers, and the helicopter overhead with its spotlight, issuing commands from the night sky.
The Ville was spread out, hundreds of row houses and little two-story duplexes on curving streets and cul-de-sacs. It was an old lowest-bid project, built at the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a self-contained ghetto within the larger ghetto of East Oakland, where the houses had begun falling apart the day they were finished.
An enormous full moon was rising. It dwarfed The Ville and, silhouetted against it, the weather-ravaged roofs and carports looked almost thatched, reminding Hanson of a Vietnamese village.
He didn’t know what he was looking for as he slowly drove into the place, maneuvering through parked and junked and stripped cars on both sides of the already narrow streets. Street numbers above the doors had all been torn off long ago, and there were no street signs still standing, if there ever had been. Dead grass and bare dirt yards, the smell of trash fires, their smoke drifting across the face of the moon.
In the dark it would be impossible to catch someone running away if they had any kind of lead at all. Behind all the chain-link fencing, the project would be a labyrinth of ditches, dead hedges, discarded appliances and furniture, clotheslines, ankle-high trip wire strung through the weeds, foundation crawl spaces, culverts, and dark, abandoned apartments where the walls had been sledge-hammered through to other houses.
He found a space where he could angle-park the patrol car out of the street, pulling partly up over the curb, and told Radio he was there.
“Any name or address on a complainant?” Hanson asked.
Negative, 5Tac51.
“What is it you’d like me to do, then? Since I’m here and all.”
Wait one.
He could hear a muffled exchange in the Radio room, urgent and curt, almost an argument, then Radio came back and she sounded like she was reading instructions word for word:
Surveil the area for a disturbance while displaying a police presence.
“Right,” Hanson said, almost laughing. “I’ll advise.
“Hello, moon,” he said. “Moon, moon, moon,” singing as he got out of the car, pulling a sap glove onto his left hand, flexing his fingers and tucking the right glove behind the heavy brass buckle of his gun belt. He snatched his nightstick from the driver’s armrest and kicked the door shut. If the patrol car got trashed he’d be up past dawn doing paperwork, but he wasn’t going to drive around, a doofus cop, waiting for something to happen. He’d rather move out on foot and make something happen.
He’d been in worse places at night. The darkness is your friend. As he walked down the cracked and buckled sidewalk, shadows were tracking him, like children in Vietcong villages, just doing their jobs.
A kid on a big-wheeled bike came around the corner, leaning into the turn, surprising Hanson and himself, too late to stop or turn around, so he reared up into a wheelie, spinning the bike on the back tire, his eyes on Hanson, cutting them away and back again, like a twirling dancer.
“Whoa,” Hanson said, startled but almost laughing, “how’s it goin’, young man? You seen any kind of problem for the po-lice?”
“You the problem,” he said over his shoulder, dropping the front wheel and vanishing back the way he’d come.
Hanson walked on, deeper into The Ville, and picked a row house at random. The windows were dark, and the door was reinforced with sheet metal, with no doorknob or handle. The moon was behind him, his shadow growing to meet him as he walked up onto the concrete stoop. He rapped with his short wood on his shadow, listened, knocked again, heard the dead bolt turn, and stepped to the side, hand on his pistol. The door opened the width of a night chain.
“Good evening,” Hanson said. The chain rattled off, the door opened wider, and the moon threw his shadow inside and past the hunchback dwarf who’d opened the door. He cocked his head back and looked up at Hanson through thick, smeared eyeglasses, one eye magnified more than the other. Squat and bow-legged, he was grinning like a primitive leprechaun with rotting teeth. Hanson recognized him. He’d been watching Hanson in the parking lot of the Black & White Liquor Store. He wore two watches outside the right cuff of his buttoned-up long-sleeve shirt.
“Yaw raw,” he said, hitching his pants up. “Purloin,” he said, bowing slightly and stepping aside, sweeping one hand down and out like a courtier. When Hanson stepped inside someone yelled down the stairs from the second floor, “What the fuck are you doing, Robert?”
“Nawp.”
“Nothin’ my ass. Close the goddamn door.”
The dwarf hopped from foot to foot, rubbing his hands together, laughing silently to himself. “Kepler,” he whispered to Hanson, “renoun.”
“God damn it, Robert.”
The dwarf put a finger to his lips, reached past Hanson, and quietly closed the door.
“Jesus,” the voice upstairs said, speaking to someone else, but loud enough so the dwarf would hear him, “I should have smothered the dummy motherfucker with a pillow when he was a baby.”
The dwarf gestured for Hanson to follow him, danced on his toes, then swaggered ahead, hitching his pants up again. He led Hanson through a curtained doorway into a room lit by a blue light bulb dangling from a ceiling fixture.
“Repart,” the dwarf said, “Roger roo.”
The walls were raw concrete, still patterned with the grain of wooden forms from twenty years before, the loops and whorls like giant fingerprints. The concrete floor was littered with fast-food trash, old newspapers, comic books and human feces. A three-foot machete hung from the wall by a nail over a bare mattress. The odor Hanson had noticed when he first walked in the front door was stronger here, nothing he’d ever smelled before.
“Yup. Roo,” the dwarf said, gesturing grandly, clearly saying All mine. He turned and shouldered through another curtained-off doorway into a kitchen lit up like a bus station with one-hundred-watt bulbs—hell’s gourmet kitchen. The stench made Hanson’s eyes water, a stew of chemicals—Lysol, vomit, rotten food, and something so sour it tried to close his throat down. Tiny ziplock plastic bags shimmered like dying moths on the counters and floor. The dwarf took Hanson by the hand to the refrigerator and opened it, dancing from foot to foot, wringing his hands as if he was soaping them. Cheap frying pans covered the wire shelves, each of them crusted with an inch of something that looked like dirty plaster of Paris fudge. It was crack cocaine, the new drug from the East Coast.
The dwarf laughed and turned a circle on his toes, closed the refrigerator, pantomimed smoking a pipe, drawing hard on it, then threw his shoulders back, his face slack with theatrical stupor. Then he raised one hand, perked up, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the gesture meaning “money.” “Mop, mop, mop,” he said, giving Hanson a sly glance. Wheezing with laughter, he lowered his arm and studied the two watches on his wrist. “Bog. Ron,” he said, and Hanson heard and felt the shudder of people coming down from upstairs.
“Bogron. Tawp,” he said, cocking his head to look up at Hanson, grinning with delight.
“Tawp, bog,” Hanson said, “retort.”
The dwarf took his hand and shook it vigorously, nodding in agreement before opening the back door. “Rap, rap, retort,” he said, unlatching the screenless screen door and pushing Hanson out.
The door closed behind him, and after the glare of the kitchen, Hanson stood there on the concrete stoop, blind in the moonlight. He hopped down, twisting his ankle in a tangle of wire and plastic, and stood close to the house, listening, until his vision returned. He thought that he knew where he was in relation to where the patrol car might be. He imagined the car destroyed, windows broken out, tires flat, in flames. He had no idea where he was. The moon filled the sky, rows and rows of back doors and concrete stoops glowing in its light.
When he stepped away from the house, dogs began to bark. Of course, he thought, they must have been waiting their turn. He walked into the open, passing toppled and twisted swing sets, the ruins of a Great Society playground, thinking that he’d crossed the border to another country so illogical and dangerous that every decision is the wrong decision. Time slowed down, and he controlled his adrenaline like an IV drip—getting just what he needed but no more—feeling good.
When the three dogs came rocketing out at him from the dark he held an open palm out and they stopped, stiff legged and snarling at first, then quieting down, then coming closer, still on guard.
“Good evening, boys or girls,” he said, kneeling, petting them with both hands when their eyes softened and they came to him, their tails wagging madly. “Thanks for showing up at this thing.” They licked his hands and smiled their doggie smiles, as if Hanson was an old friend come back from the dead. They were night dogs, coyote-size urban survivors, ghetto dogs. “Lost my patrol car. Lost myself. Wearing the badge and uniform of the oppressor. Deep in the shit, down the rabbit hole, guys,” Hanson said.
Tyree stepped out of the gloom and the dogs ran off.
“Your car’s okay. It’s being looked after. Fee said he would like to talk to you, if you have a moment.”
“Fee?”
“Felix the Cat.”
Hanson shook his head.
“You know,” Tyree said, smiling, “Uncle Felix. Owns the Rolls.”
“Why’s he want to talk to me?”
“He’s worried about you, walking around here like this.”
“Well,” Hanson said, “I’m glad my patrol car isn’t on fire. But I always expect the worst, you know? Let’s go, then. I’m ready to leave.”
Tyree seemed to be leading him deeper into The Ville and Hanson thought that the first person he’d shoot, if this was some kind of ambush, would be Tyree. And he liked Tyree. Then he’d kill as many of the others as he could before they killed him. Too bad.
Then they walked through a break in the row houses, and the patrol car was there, next to the Rolls. Felix was alone. It was three months since he and Hanson had spoken to each other, the night that Hanson fucked up Lemon.
“Officer Hanson,” he said. “This is a bad neighborhood. I grew up here, so I know. You shouldn’t be walking around here after dark, by yourself.”
“Radio sent me.”
“We heard that, but why would they send you here? The police never come down here, unless it’s a whole lot of them, and I know ahead of time when they plan to arrive. That keeps things simple but interesting.”
“Thank you for looking after my patrol car.”
“I’ve heard that you are not well liked on the Department. Would you say that’s true?”
Hanson nodded. “Three more days and six months till I get my POST certificate, then I’m gone.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’m looking for a smaller department with a different perspective on enforcing the law.”
“If you live that long. Since we first met, the Department has consistently sent you, by yourself, to extremely dangerous situations. I think someone on the Department is hoping you’ll be killed.”
“I can’t be killed.”
Felix smiled, not so much with amusement as something like affection. “Who can say? I’m more pessimistic about my own mortality but just as certain. What troubles me is the feeling that whoever sent you down here tonight hoped you’d be killed and then they’d put it on me. I’ve got a little cottage industry started. Creating jobs, as they say, in my old neighborhood. I’m telling you this in confidence. I hope I can depend on your discretion, because I know you walked through one of my employees’ houses.”
“Where’s Levon?”
“Taking a nap. I picked him up at the airport this afternoon—he hates airplanes. He’s been talking about retiring and was looking at some retirement property, far from here. But listen, I think you should work for me. I don’t trust anybody I’ve got in the OPD anymore, and I’m still paying out a lot of money. I confess I’ve checked you out from before you came here and think we could—”
“You wouldn’t trust me as soon as I went to work for you. Because then, as much as I don’t like the Department, if I worked for both of you, I wouldn’t be trustworthy. I couldn’t do that, and besides, I’d get caught in no time. I’m no good at lying. I might as well wear a neon hat flashing guilty, guilty, guilty. I was stupid to get out of the patrol car. And again, I appreciate you looking after it. So I’ll just go back to work now, no harm done one way or another. Fair enough?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Tyree, for finding me wherever I was,” Hanson said. “Good night.”
Hanson got into his patrol car and started it up, keyed the microphone, told Radio, “5Tac51 will be 908. All problems solved upon departure.”
Copy, 5Tac51—908.
Back at the Justice Center, the lieutenant who is on Felix’s payroll stood looking out his office window on the seventh floor, listening to Hanson’s voice on his police scanner.
Hanson is sleeping
He’s back at The Ville, invisible this time, transparent as air, and alone in the deserted projects. He doesn’t know why he’s there or who sent him, but he assumes the worst. His senses are fine-tuned to threat as he moves silently from shadow to shadow. This is what his life is like when he sleeps—another full-time job. He’s always working.
Water whispers through the corroded pipes in the wall next to his bed. The refrigerator clicks on down the hall in the kitchen, shudders, and begins to hum, heating up as it once again tries to pump a vacuum with a cracked compressor.
Across town, up in the regional park, Felix Maxwell and three of his men remove bodies from the back of a windowless van. They are wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and silver duct tape, heavy and limp and hard to carry. Rigor has come and gone and the bodies are beginning to bloat. Felix’s men line them up on the hilltop and, one by one, try to roll them downhill like logs, but they bounce and twist and tumble into the brush, upending, sailing into the trees where the hillside drops off, branches breaking, tearing the bags, until the body wedges to a stop and it’s quiet again. These men don’t see the green and blue aurora curtains over the bay, swaying above the dark water until the charged solar wind rips them apart on its way to the North Bay electrical grid.
They’ve just launched the fourth bagged corpse down the hill when, far below, the flatlands of East Oakland—that dreary jigsaw pattern of light and dark—go black and disappear into the horizon. Downtown goes dark, the billboards and motel signs along the highway vanish. The darkness, like a tide, races up from East Oakland, across the freeway, and past, turning off all light in the hills above them.