Hanson took the underpass beneath 580, new graffiti—OAKLAND IS SOUTH AFRICA—spooling past, painted in turquoise blue on the bare concrete, and angled up onto the freeway, on his way in for the night, singing as loud as he could: “Gotta bop down the road, got a heavy load, bop, bop, pushing my truck,” cool predawn air roaring through the windows as he pushed the junker patrol car to seventy, seventy-five, until it began to shimmy. “Gonna bop my baby, and I don’t mean may-beee, bop, bop, I’m down on my luck…”
3L21, what is your 926? 3L21…
It was the third time Radio had called 3L21 in the past half hour. 3L21 was probably asleep in somebody’s garage. Or dead. Hanson laughed.
“Bopping with my baby out in LA. She lives just off the freeway, gonna find her today.”
His face was sunburned and stiff with dried sweat and grit from the wind that had finally gone away around 2 a.m. The patrol car began to crab to the right, and he slowed it down a little.
“Bee bop a lu bop, I’m down on my luck…”
He switched his Radio over to channel one just as 3L11 gave his location down in Chinatown, requesting another cover car and a supervisor.
3L11, I’m still trying to locate a supervisor. I’ll assign another car as soon as I have one available…Do you want to declare a Code 33 emergency?
Negative at this time.
“I say bee bop a lu bop, yeah, yeah, yeah…”
The off-ramp to Chinatown, the last exit before Grove Street and the Justice Center, was coming up fast, just up ahead.
Car to cover 3L11 on shots fired? 3L21?
“Beepin’ and a boppin’, down on my luck,” Hanson sang, taking the off-ramp on impulse, curious what 3L11 had, not telling Radio, knowing that it was probably a mistake.
Two patrol cars were angle-parked up the block from the address. He flipped his overheads on and off, so they’d know he was in the area and maybe not shoot him when he walked up to them, then continued around the corner where he pulled to the curb and got out of the car, gently clicking the door closed.
Chinatown at 4 a.m., the hot wind gone now, not even a breeze left, the pavement hot through his double-sole, steel-toed combat boots. Striding quietly—heel and toe, heel and toe—watching the street ahead, the doors and windows on both sides of the street, and the street behind, the barred windows of storefronts and the rear windows of parked cars.
He passed a phone booth, the armored cord—no receiver attached—dangling from the crowbarred coin box. A Christian fish symbol was drawn in Magic Marker on the wire-reinforced glass, JESUS LOVES YOU printed beneath. He’d been seeing them everywhere in Oakland the past few weeks, all three inches long, identical, done by a single person. He imagined the artist as a slightly chubby, fourteen-year-old black girl who believed if she drew enough of them they might make Oakland a better place. But then again, it might be a psychopath with a hatchet who’d gotten religion the last time he was in the joint, looking for people to Kill for Jesus when he wasn’t drawing fish.
He turned the corner into the sweet-rot nimbus of a restaurant Dumpster, toward the static of police radios, never breaking step as he raised up on his toes to glance inside the Dumpster. Winos sometimes slept in them on pieces of cardboard. Died in them too, for the day shift to find. “Baby, baby, baby, an’ I don’t mean may-beeee, bop, bop, a lu bop…”
He was off OPD’s clock now, doing this on his own time after twelve and a half hours going from call to call all across East Oakland, dealing with angry, frightened, insane people who always kept guns and knives close by. Some nights while he talked to them he saw their thoughts floating above their heads like cartoon captions. He’d had a protein powder milkshake and a candy bar that morning—yesterday morning—but he wasn’t hungry now, wired and jacked up on adrenaline. He didn’t need food. He didn’t need sleep. He had the momentum and the glow.
Two graveyard shift guys in their mid-twenties crouched behind a patrol car, their revolvers braced on the roof, pointed at a shattered second-floor window across the street. Hanson had never seen either of them before. Both of them were wearing their hats, the gleaming gold hat badges like aiming stakes for the center of their foreheads. But they wouldn’t get gigged for not wearing their hats if a sergeant ever showed up.
“Hey, what’s up, Occifers?” he said. “Looks like an episode of Adam-12 to me. You know, life imitating art.”
“Get down,” one of the cops hissed, keeping his stainless steel revolver aimed at the window.
“Grab some cover,” the other one said, “before he shoots your ass.”
“Wow. That’s a serious felony. He shoot at you guys?”
They stared at the spotlighted blown-out window.
“He shoot anybody?”
“Not yet.”
“He pumped some rounds through that window, and the door too.”
“Chinatown, my Chinatown, when the lights are low,” Hanson sang, pausing to make up the next line. “Chinamen with little feet, who knows where…they go…
“Is the shooter up there a person of the Chinese persuasion?”
“White guy.”
Broken glass glittered in the street. Hanson walked out into the street, his pistol still holstered, keeping an eye on the window but holding his head so that he looked like he wasn’t paying any attention to it. He crouched down and shined his Kel-Lite an inch or so above the asphalt.
Lead pellets the size of peppercorns glowed among the shards of glass. He turned off the flashlight, picked one up, and walked back, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, singing softly, “You gotta bop, and keep bopping, do it till your luck turns around, just don’t ever stop when you’re riding the bop.”
He popped the shot in his mouth and rolled it with his tongue, back and forth against his lower teeth, the sound reminding him of a girl back in Montana, when he was in graduate school. A barmaid at the Eastgate Liquor Store and Lounge, who had a steel stud in her tongue. The first one he’d ever seen. She’d come over to his table, picked up his long neck bottle of Coors, holding it like a cock, tilting it up against the light to see if he was ready for another.
“What’s that thing in your tongue for?” he asked.
She just smiled at him, licked her upper lip with the studded pink tongue, and asked if he wanted another beer.
“Yes, ma’am,” he’d said, “with a shot of Jameson’s this time, please.”
Before the night was over, he’d found out what the stud was for. He remembered how she used to run it clattering across her teeth when she was angry.
He tucked the shot under his lower lip and walked back to the car, leaning over the hood and looking at the two cops.
“You got a plan?”
“We’ve been waiting for a supervisor for half an hour.”
Hanson spit the piece of bird shot out and laughed. “Fuck this guy,” he said. “We look like dorks,” reaching through the open window of the car to turn on the overheads.
“Hey,” he said to them, “don’t ever stop when you’re ridin’ the bop.”
He sprung his clamshell holster open and walked across the street, pistol against his leg, almost invisible in the red and blue strobes that broke up his profile, seemingly carried across the street by the double sweep of lights, as if it was a colored wind.
The door to the narrow stairway to the second floor hung half open, splintered by the shotgun. The light up on the landing was still shining, even though the Sheetrock on both sides of the stairs was streaked and torn by shotgun pellets, powder burns, and black lubricant from the shot. The air was hazy with Sheetrock dust and the pepper smell of gun smoke, the white dust settling on his shirt and pants, puffing from beneath his boots with each step. He held his revolver two-handed, loaded with the illegal .357 hollow points all the cops carried, aimed at the closed door at the top of the stairs. The door was hinged to open inward, so in the time it would take the asshole to pull the door open and level his shotgun, Hanson could blow his heart out his back.
The landing was narrow, and kicking the door in would be awkward. He reached across his body with his left hand, tried the knob—not locked—backhanded the door open, and swung his pistol toward the double bed that filled half the room. A single room, sink in the corner, toilet down the hall, stinking of sweat, marijuana, and urine—decades of it. It seemed two-dimensional in the dispersed glare of the spotlight.
Three people lay on top of the dirty, bare mattress, the asshole on the far side, passed out, the shotgun, a Remington 870 pump, just like the po-lice carried, at his side in a sort of unconscious “shoulder arms.” He was big, going to fat, wearing pink boxer shorts patterned with swollen red hearts. Closest to the door, lying stiffly, legs together, arms at her sides, was a pretty white woman in her thirties, and in between them, a girl not more than twelve years old, skinny, both naked, their eyes on Hanson as he stepped around the bed.
He lowered his pistol to the man’s forehead, making quick eye contact with the two women, whispering hoarsely, “Get out,” gesturing with his head at the open door. “Get out,” his eyes now steady down the barrel of the pistol, holding it angled a few inches above the man’s left eye.
The woman grabbed clothes from a dirty pile on the floor, yanked the girl up out of the bed. The wall above the bed, lit by the spotlight flaring off the ceiling, was covered with Polaroid photos, some new and glossy, others curling, the thin layer of black-and-white emulsion—the photo itself—crazed and peeling away from the backing. Hanson looked at them as the woman and child went out the door and pounded down the stairs. For-shit photos of the asshole in various sexual poses with the mother, the daughter, or both of them, and some of just the mother and daughter doing sexual things with tongues and fingers and a dildo that was veined, realistic in detail but oversize and a bright purple.
The asshole was white, as were the woman and girl. A white guy. Bought and paid for. It would be a good shooting. Hanson would just say that the asshole raised the shotgun and he shot him in self-defense. He lifted the shotgun out of the man’s fat, open hand and pushed the safety on with his thumb.
The flashes of red and blue coming through the slats of the blinds cycled faster now, more of them, car doors began slamming. When he heard boots pounding up the stairs, he yelled, “Police officer! Police officer! Code 4. Suspect is in custody.” Now he wished he was wearing his stupid bus driver’s hat with the badge on it so the cops wouldn’t shoot him. “Police officer,” he shouted, leaning the shotgun against the filthy sink and stepping out into the middle of the room, still watching the asshole but holding his pistol by his side.
Two cops came through the door, one with a shotgun, the other with his pistol drawn. They made eye contact with Hanson, who stepped farther back as the cops rushed around the bed, jerking the asshole up and off the bed by his arms and his hair, grabbing for pieces of him. They slammed him, face-first, against the wall and punched him in the kidneys, the smack of their fists leaving red blotches, dragged and threw him on the floor.
They called him motherfucker and handcuffed him, stood him up like a log and hit him some more.
Hanson handed the shotgun to the next cop who came through the door, who, surprised, took it, and Hanson said “Good job” as he squeezed past him and down the stairs and outside, where the air didn’t smell as bad, and crossed the street past three empty patrol cars silently sweeping the street and store windows with red and blue lights, slipped past the Dumpster, and vanished.
He drove the few blocks to the Transportation lot at the Justice Center, telling Radio, “5Tac51 is 908.”
Copy, 5Tac51—908.
The locker room was empty, between shifts, and his boots echoed as he walked past a wall locker painted Mary Kay pink, a pair of pink satin high-heel pumps side by side in front of it. A sign on the locker door read FOR OPD’S FIRST FAGGOT COP. San Francisco was hiring them, but not Oakland. Not knowingly, anyway.
He took a shower and changed into jeans, running shoes, and a black T-shirt, threw a bag over his shoulder, slammed the locker shut and locked it, and walked the three deserted blocks to where his Travelall was parked. He got in, wrenched the door shut, and reached beneath the bench seat for the flat little half pint of Popov.
He drank it down in four swallows, the vodka blooming in his stomach as he studied the massive sweep of concrete spiraling up to the already busy freeway above him. His eyes relaxed, his shoulders relaxed, he slumped into the seat listening to the thump, thump-thump of cars and trucks on the metal expansion ridges in the freeway overhead.
With any luck, no one would mention him in the paperwork. He wasn’t there. The Department wouldn’t want to pay the overtime, the other cops would want the credit, and they could write it up as if it had been done by the book. Correct procedures had been followed, the suspect taken, professionally, into custody. An excellent felony arrest that a dozen officers could add to their monthly arrest quotas.
As usual, Hanson was behind on his arrest stats for the month, but he could scoop up a few junkies for track marks before the end of the report period. Or he could always talk a citizen into taking a swing at him. He never had to say anything he couldn’t repeat in court. It was what Hanson said with his eyes when he smiled at the citizen and violated his personal space. It was easy to pick out someone who wanted to hit him, then insult him into taking a swing. He could see the punch coming with plenty of time to avoid it, kick the guy’s legs out from under him, drop a knee into his neck, handcuff and arrest him. It was more work and riskier than an 11550 H&S narcotics arrest, but assault on a police officer was a solid felony stat, and it left him feeling better than he did after popping a junkie for needle tracks. A little better, once the rush of the fight wore off. Most of the people he talked into swinging on him were drunk or just stupid, but too bad. Arresting people for being addicted to drugs, or insulting and bullying someone into taking a swing at you, was just part of filling up your stat sheet. And he knew, of course, that he could have been the asshole with the shotgun on the bed, and the asshole could have been him in a police uniform, and it wouldn’t make any difference at all.
He took Grand Avenue, turned onto Lakeshore, parked the Travelall, and got out. Lake Merritt was silver and gray blue in the dawn.
A horse-drawn carriage turned onto the street, the slow clop, clop of hooves on the asphalt. It was Champagne, in brass-studded black harness and blinders, taking her time. Mickey, impeccable in tuxedo and top hat, stopped next to the Travelall, reins loose in his hands.
“Hey there, little girl,” Hanson said, his shoulders and arms relaxing, the whine and chirp of his tinnitus softer, further away. “I’ve got something for you. In my off-duty vehicle. Been carrying it around for days now.”
He walked over, reached through the open window of the Travelall, and took out a plastic Baggie—a dozen sugar cubes he’d picked up at All-American Burger earlier in the week.
“Okay if I give these to her, Mickey?”
“Of course,” Mickey said from the high seat of the carriage.
Hanson held out the cubes, one at a time, in his open palm.
“Late night, Officer Hanson?”
“One late call, in Chinatown, my own fault. Hoped I’d see you two here on the way in. I met this woman, out in East Oakland, got ‘involved’ with her, I guess you could say. She’s real good-looking and smart too. I like her and, well, we’re hot for each other too. I am, anyway, and I think it’s the same for her.
“Listen, I’m laying this on you because I trust you and I don’t know who else to ask about it. I apologize, so…”
“Just keep talking. We’re interested, and you know, I’m just a fool for romance myself, Officer.”
“Sometimes I just ache for her. And I don’t know if I can, or at least if I want to, keep hacking this job and life in general out here by myself anymore.” It was the first time Hanson had said anything to anyone about Libya.
“So what’s the problem with you and her?”
“She’s black and I’m a white cop and it seems stupid to even consider it.”
Mickey laughed. “It’s all stupid. With anybody. If you’re worried about getting fired by the OPD that you so enjoy working for, that’s one thing, but otherwise what have you got to lose? I’d recommend a direct course of action to see what’s possible and what’s not. Right or wrong, that’s my view on matters such as this. You gotta be prepared for consequences, but that’s nothing I have to tell you about. If I was you, the job you have, I’d sure give it a try. You’re not very happy, if you’ll allow me, and she might be great for you. Or not. Give it a try.”
Hanson nodded. A direct course of action was the best way to deal with anything.
“I have news too,” Mickey said. “We’re moving up to Lone Pine in a few days. Retiring. Both of us. We’ll be there for Fourth of July.”
Hanson fed Champagne another sugar cube and tried to take it in. He’d gotten used to seeing them once or twice a week, on his way home, by the lake. It made him feel less crazy, talking life over with a decent guy who was a queer carriage driver from San Francisco. “Well,” Hanson said, “you never mentioned that before.”
“I built a cabin and a barn up there twenty years ago, on land I inherited from my grandfather…came into a little money.” He leaned down toward Hanson. “One lucky bet, on a horse. Couldn’t afford to build anything up there what it would cost now. Have to live in a tent.” He clucked at Champagne. “Champagne, you’d be in a corral—no warm place for you when the snow comes.”
“I’ll miss seeing you here at the lake. But I’m glad you’ll be in a good, safe place.”
“Ah, the lake is lovely, isn’t it? Like that Yeats poem you’re so fond of. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ Hanson,” he said, “I’ve told my brother about you. I told him you’d make a fine deputy sheriff. We told him, didn’t we, Champagne? He’d find a job for you. A Peace Officer certificate would be superfluous. He can hire who he wants.”
“I’ve never been to Lone Pine. Only seen it in the movies,” Hanson said. “It’s a fairy tale to me.”
“I was thirteen, fourteen maybe, when they filmed High Sierra on the Whitney Portal Road. My brother got Humphrey Bogart’s autograph,” Mickey said, “and my first lover was a gaffer with the movie crew.” Mickey hadn’t talked about Lone Pine before. Mostly they’d talked about poetry and Mickey had told him stories about the gay scene in San Francisco.
“Lone Pine is real to us. It’s our home I think, eh, girl,” he said, turning to Champagne, the reins light in his hands as he raised them, both he and the horse straightening their shoulders, their posture perfect, prepared to go. Then he reached down to Hanson.
“It’s been a real pleasure,” Hanson said, taking his hand. “Good luck to both of you.”
“The pleasure’s been ours, Officer Hanson. You come and visit us. Any time. You’re always welcome.”
“Who knows? Maybe I will.”
“In the meantime, you be careful. This is no place for you, if you don’t mind my saying so, since I’ve said it before. Champagne thinks your talents are wasted here too.”
“Lone Pine. Maybe I’ll visit,” Hanson said, but he knew he’d never go. Maybe he would. Who knew? “Champagne,” he said, touching her again, then stepping back, checking for traffic.
Mickey clucked to the horse, twitched the reins with his fingers, and started to drive on. Then he checked Champagne and said to Hanson, who hadn’t moved. “Direct course of action, Officer Hanson. Why not?”
Lone Pine was halfway between Death Valley and Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower forty-eight. When he finally got his POST certificate maybe he should go for a visit, see Mickey and Champagne and introduce himself to the high sheriff. He was really going to miss Mickey and Champagne.
He got in the Travelall and was halfway through an illegal U-turn when he stopped in the middle of the street. Weegee was walking his bike on the other side of the lake. It looked like Weegee. It was Weegee, and he was with Libya.
He drove on, up Grand to the other side of the lake, where he pulled up over the curb, got out of the Travelall and jogged over to where he’d seen them on the walkway in the trees—or thought he had. He couldn’t find them. Just another hallucination.
Hanson is sleeping.
Across town, in East Oakland, Weegee and Libya are eating pancakes after getting back from Lake Merritt.
“We’re going to need a nap after getting up so early,” Libya said, “but it was worth it, to see the lake at dawn like that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Weegee said, finishing his milk. “Before the sun came up, I felt like I was invisible.”
“The lake,” she said, as they walked to the bedroom, “and that beautiful white horse. It was like a fairy tale. So quiet.”
“We haven’t heard the neighbor lady’s dogs lately,” Weegee said. “Why they so quiet?”
“They left town. Packed their little dog suitcases. Stole a car and drove to Texas,” she said, plumping her pillow and looking at the clock. Weegee lay next to her, his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling, thinking.
“Why they want to go to Texas?”
“They have a cousin in Dallas. He’s a real bad dog, named Red Spot, who robs banks and liquor stores, sells dope, everything you can imagine. The Law Dogs are always after him, but he’s too smart for a bunch of Texas cracker Law Dogs. The dogs next door wrote him a letter telling him that they wanted to be gangstas, and Red Spot’s momma, Arlene Pit Bull, said he had to help ’em out.
“Red Spot said, ‘But, Momma, what I’m gonna do with those spoiled little indoor dogs? All they know how to do is jump up on the sofa, poop on the carpet, and bark, bark, bark. How they gonna be gangstas?’”
Weegee laughed. “That’s what I’d say.”
“She’s a tough old pit bull, Weegee. She just told him, ‘Son, they family, that’s all that matters.’
“‘But they from Uncle Barko’s sorry-dog family down in Mississippi,’ Red Spot said, ‘an’ the best they could do was steal an old worn-out Chevy Monte Carlo with slick tires.’
“‘Red Spot,’ his momma say, ‘I know you’ll find ’em something.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”
“What the names of those dogs? That went to Texas. I never did know.”
“LeRon and JJ.”
“What’s that ole Red Spot gonna do with LeRon and JJ? They so high-strung all the time and make so much noise the po-lice would catch ’em right away.”
“I don’t know, but he’s gonna have to find ’em some kind of gangsta work. That’s all I know about it now, so let’s close our eyes and take a little nap.”
Weegee fell silent. He had the look he got when he wanted to tell her something serious. Weegee went everywhere and he kept his eyes open.
“How come you never say anything about Fee?” Weegee said. “Everyone knows him but you never even say his name.”
“Fee? You talking about Felix Maxwell?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I knew him a long time ago,” she said, “when we were both real young. He was different then.”
“Don’t you like him anymore?”
“Baby, he was different, a nice man sometimes. I got real sick once—from some of the stuff he sells now—and he helped me get well. But now, honey, it’s dangerous even to be around him. You know it would break my heart if you got hurt because of him.”
“Naw,” he said. “I’m too fast to get hurt. ‘Faster than a bullet’ is what Fee says.”
Her eyes got hard, but she softened them, collecting herself. “Honey, you should stay away from him.”
“I see him all the time,” Weegee told her, “all the time. He’s a hero. He gives money to people who live in The Ville. Buys all the poor people Christmas dinners. Everybody cheer when he drives by in his beautiful Rolls-Royce car, say he’s like Robin Hood, who was a gangsta in the olden times. He takes from the rich white people and gives to the poor black people. Just like old Robin Hood.”
“He’s not Robin Hood. He’s—well—he’s a bad man now,” she said, more sad than angry. “Now he sells that bad stuff to his own people. Takes their money and keeps it for himself. He kills people, Weegee.”
“He has to,” Weegee said, “or they’d kill him. He’s brave and smart, and he’s always real nice to me, talks to me like I’m grown-up and says when I get a little older he’ll give me a job and you won’t have to worry about money because I’ll take care of you.”
“Oh baby,” she said. “I love you so much that I think I’d die if you got hurt. Come over here and give me a big hug and let’s go to sleep and dream about that beautiful white horse and how we could ride him away from Oakland, to a place where everything is beautiful and nice—where it’s safe all the time.”