The sun was bruised and swollen after a long hot day, hesitating just above the horizon in District Four, where Hanson was standing in line at Flint’s Ribs. He was off duty, wearing jeans and a faded black sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off. It had been two weeks since his concussion, and the headaches were gone. Nobody knew anything about the Muslim whose throat he’d tried to crush. Or a car in the middle of the street. He’d been assaulted by a suspect or suspects unknown. Three months and three weeks and he’d have his POST certificate.
The line snaked out the door and down the broken sidewalk past a paved vacant lot fenced with eight-foot chain link anchored in concrete and topped with spooling razor wire. The asphalt had blistered and split over the years, the cracks erupting with weeds that were mostly dead from the heat now. Someone had spent so much money on paving and fencing that they must have gone broke before they could put up whatever it was they planned to protect so well. The Temple rabbit was over there on the other side of the wire, watching the line at Flint’s, scratching his ear.
Hanson, the only white person in line, was so obviously a cop that he was almost as invisible as the black rabbit. If he wasn’t a cop, why else would he be there? Some kind of white-boy victim-queer hoping to be beaten up by black people? Probably a common syndrome. Anything you can imagine, they were out there now, doing it, off their meds.
Or was he just another everyday frightened racist who projected his fear wherever he went, enabling—as they say—the latent hostility in what were normally pacific African American citizens? Maybe no one in the line even noticed he was white. He’d known professors and administrators at the university where he’d taught, academic colleagues who certainly were not stupid or insensitive, people with advanced degrees, who never even noticed a student’s race and couldn’t recall it without consulting a seating chart, if then. Maybe it was just a coincidence that conversation had stopped when he’d walked up the street and gotten in line. Who could know why? He didn’t know much of anything anymore. He did know that he was losing weight again, down to one forty. He knew he had a bleeding ulcer but pretended he didn’t know. The Pepto-Bismol didn’t help anymore.
The sun had begun moving again, slowly, easing itself down into the horizon. Three teenage boys behind him were glaring at the back of his neck, grumbling about po-lice.
Felix’s pearly white Rolls rose up out of the sun and down onto the street, coming their way.
“You know who that is? Officer?” One of the boys behind him asked, tentative, semi-friendly, feeling him out.
Hanson shrugged, shook his head without turning around. “A drug dealer?”
“The drug dealer…”
“Yeah. Uh-huh,” the others agreed.
“So smart, an’ proud, so bad…”
“Tha’s a fac’.”
“My man.”
“He beyond the reach of the law.”
The heads of everyone in line turned to follow the Rolls as it passed.
“Look here,” one of the boys said, almost aggressive now, emboldened by Felix’s appearance, “what you doin’ out here anyway?”
“On assignment to arrest some ribs.”
The sun slid out of sight, the glare gone. The line moved on.
Hanson got two slabs of pork ribs. He smiled and nodded at the three boys as he passed them on the way out, shook the bag of ribs. “In custody.”
Felix, in a tan linen suit, was standing on the curb just up the street from the Travelall, waiting for him. His driver was hugging the steering wheel, his head tilted sideways, watching Felix through the open window. The rear door opened, just slightly, then shut again, its tinted window flashing fiery blue-black from the last of the sunset, one of Felix’s security guys checking things out.
“Why don’t you just come over and work for me?” Felix said, falling into step alongside him.
“I’d be a terrible criminal.”
The Rolls followed just behind them on the street. Hanson told himself to relax. Watching them from the bus stop across the street, one of five or six people, was a skinny old man in work pants and a grimy white wife-beater, bent over with age, his shoulder blades folding open like wings. The bus pulled up, its doors hissing open, blocking him from view. The Rolls kept pace with them as they walked, tires grinding and popping over potholes and trash and broken glass.
“There’s something I want you to see.”
Hanson nodded, looked over at Felix, curious what would happen next.
Across the street the bus hissed, shuddered, and pulled away, the old man gone now.
“Take a walk with me,” Felix said, glancing at the sky.
“Lemme throw these ribs in my vehicle,” Hanson said.
Felix walked back to the Rolls. “You’re making me nervous back here,” he told the driver. “We’re gonna walk across the cemetery. Wait for us on the other side.”
“Levon will have my ass if something happens to you,” the driver said.
Felix walked alongside the Rolls for half a block, then stepped back on the sidewalk and under the awning of a shoe shop, where he waved the driver off, telling him, “I’ll worry about Levon.”
Hanson slammed the door to his Travelall and caught up to Felix.
“You drove that all the way from Idaho?” Felix asked him. “Wherever Idaho is.”
“It’s not pretty,” Hanson said. “It’s what they call a high-mileage vehicle, but it runs okay.”
“You worked for me,” Felix said, slipping into a slightly more black accent, “you could buy yourself a fine ride.”
“Pimpin’ ho’s an’ slammin’ Cadillac doors,” Hanson said.
They walked into the cemetery on the one-lane blacktop road that wound through the grounds, raised six inches above the grass, like a strip of volcanic lava. So that people could drive to graveside funerals and visit the dead.
“Let’s sit down over there,” Hanson said, indicating a cluster of Hell’s Angels tombstones, a little Stonehenge of black marble, winged skulls on each stone.
“Ruin my suit.”
“Well,” Hanson said, a little annoyed, adjusting his bag so he’d be able to pull the Hi Power out in a hurry. “You can remain standing or buy a new suit or take that one to the cleaners. It’s not that dirty here.”
Felix remained standing, watching the sky.
“What did you want to show me?” Hanson said.
“Be patient.”
The cemetery was on a hill. Hanson looked north to where, beyond the MacArthur Freeway, the Oakland Hills rose suddenly up, green and affluent. Chabot Park and million-dollar houses. “From East Oakland,” he said, thinking out loud, “to the cemetery. Then ascent into the Oakland Hills. Maybe that’s heaven in Oakland.”
“Just another cemetery,” Felix said. “The Muslim you chased the other night, who knocked you out but nobody else saw him?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s up there in the park now. With a couple of his bow-tie pals. Why would anybody wear a bow tie?”
“He’s dead?”
“I think that’s why he stayed in the garbage bag when we rolled him down the hill.”
“You know, Felix,” Hanson said. “You should just dump people in the bay, or better yet, take ’em out in the desert somewhere and bury ’em there. You’re gonna piss off the OPD, dumping bodies in the hills. They don’t care about dead black dope dealers, but dumping the bodies in upscale white neighborhoods—it looks bad. It’s like jaywalking in front of a police car. Purposely disrespecting them.”
Felix laughed. “Time runnin’ out. Could this be the end of Felix?” He pulled out his diamond chip hourglass, tipped it, and watched the chips glittering, pulsing, hissing through the neck and spilling out below. When the chips had filled the bottom bulb, he felt his chest, feeling for the beat of his heart, as if he was looking for something in a pocket. “Felix still alive.”
“Why didn’t anybody see him that night?” Hanson asked. “The Muslim in the hat.”
“OPD looks the other way when they catch Muslims in the shit. That’s how it is. Because they’re religious, which they aren’t. The city council, the governor, the president, the Rockefellers, all of ’em, made the decision to use the Muslims to be their niggers in Oakland. So now the motherfuckers taking over my corners. If I get rid of two or three of them, they recruit replacements out of prison. Give ’em a bow tie and a cheap-ass suit and tell ’em they’re the Sons of Allah, Masters of the Earth. And the cops come after me. The lieutenant I own—thought I owned—tells me, ‘It’s just business. Don’t worry about it.’
“Look at that,” Felix said, pointing up at the sky.
Two stars, suddenly there, bright in the darkening sky.
“Venus and Jupiter,” Hanson said. “You can see Jupiter’s moons through binoculars, and sometimes, like now, you can sort of see four of them with the naked eye. Looks like they’re attached to the planet with wires. Sometimes the two planets look like they’re coming head-on from different directions.”
“You sure that’s what they are?”
“As sure as I am about anything,” Hanson said, laughing. “That’s what the books say, and I had a telescope in Idaho.”
“Okay. But there’s something else, besides the planets.”
“I like it here,” Hanson said. “In the cemetery. Quiet. How come more people don’t come up here from the flatlands just to hang out?”
“A cemetery?”
“Some sort of cultural phobia, I guess, huh?”
Felix looked at him and saw that he was smiling. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a black thing.”
Hanson decided that Felix wasn’t going to kill him today. They were talking like normal human beings, something that neither of them ran into very often. Felix had Levon to talk to, Hanson thought. He could see just about where Libya’s house was down below.
He smiled at Felix, laughed, settled back against a Hell’s Angel tombstone, the evening coming on, considered the rows of tombstones, and thought about Doc, buried in the VA cemetery down in LA. The others? Sergeant Major and Krause probably rotted away in Cambodia, long ago now. He was the one stuck with still being alive. Here he was, sitting in the cemetery with Oakland’s major dope dealer, who drove a Rolls-Royce.
“I was fine in the war,” he said aloud. “Everybody was afraid of me, and maybe I was crazy, but the whole place was crazy, so if you were more crazy, well, that was good. The crazier you acted, the more they were afraid of you. You know how that works. If you’re crazy and mean, and don’t care if you live or die, nobody fucks with you. I could do anything I wanted to over there. I was special. I knew the secret handshake. And I wasn’t crazy at all. I wasn’t even confused after a while. I was absolutely, utterly sane in that place.”
An airliner headed east glinted at thirty thousand feet, catching the last of the sun from over the horizon.
“After that night in front of the liquor store,” Felix said, watching the sky, “where you fucked up Lemon and laughed about it, all those people just getting out of your way, I couldn’t figure you out. Levon did, but not me. I tried out all kind of, you know, scenarios. Like you were some kind of federal cop.”
Hanson laughed.
“Maybe the OPD hired you out of some secret agent school. Or prison.”
“I’m scared of prison. Life with morons and retards, the prisoners and the guards, no thank you.”
“That’s what I wanted to show you,” Felix said, pointing toward the dark eastern horizon. “It stays in one spot, then moves to another spot, and it’s got flashing red and green and blue lights on it, so it looks like it’s twinkling.”
“One of those phony stars,” Hanson said. “It looks like it’s twinkling, like stars do, coming up through from the horizon, all that atmosphere reflecting and refracting and distorting them. But that’s no twinkling star. In Idaho I took photographs of phony stars through the telescope. And that’s no twinkling star.”
“The counterfeit stars. They follow me everywhere. Tap my phone, listen in on everything right through walls wherever I go,” he said, looking up. “I don’t talk about them even to Levon.”
“They’re sure as shit up there,” Hanson said. “And who knows what they can do. But I don’t think they’re surveilling you. Whatever it is, the military puts it up there.”
A black Ford jumped up the curb off Camden, skidded on the grass, fishtailed, and straightened out through the arched entrance to the cemetery and up the little one-lane asphalt road, accelerating toward Hanson and Felix, its headlights off. Hanson was already on his feet, recognizing the Ford right away as the Muslims’ car from the neighborhood dispute on Monroe Street. There was still enough glow in the west to make out the driver and the two guys in the backseat, who seemed to be arguing, fighting maybe, confused, quick and erratic, really scared, two guys who didn’t know what they were doing.
“Well,” Hanson said, reaching into his bag, his eyes on the Ford. “Look who’s coming here.”
The Ford braked, jerked to a stop, rolled a car length closer, stopped again.
Hanson raised the Hi Power free of the bag, shrugging the strap off his shoulder, and ran toward the car, the bag falling to the ground, as the Ford lurched forward again. The rear door flung open and the passenger stumbled out, a pistol in his hand. Flame and smoke filled the car behind him, an automatic weapon, blowing holes up through the roof. Hanson put his front sight on the shooter as he got to his feet, holding the pistol sideways with one hand, like he must have seen in the movies, pointed at Hanson. It bucked silently in his hand each time he jerked the trigger, again and again, not having released the safety. He stood there, looking at Hanson, knowing he was dead. Hanson squeezed two rounds off, into the center of his chest, knocking him back against the car as it squealed off the asphalt, onto the grass across the road. The other shooter up on one knee, trying to get to his feet and swap hands on the smoking Uzi, holding it like somebody who’d never shot one before. He grabbed the barrel, red-hot from the burst of fire he’d put through the roof of the car. It burnt his hand and he dropped it.
Hanson ran past the first shooter, kicked his pistol away and put a round in his head. Dead. Then he shot the guy reaching for the Uzi in the forehead and neck, from four feet away. Dead.
Skidding on the grass, shifting his stance, he brought the Hi Power up and around, putting one, two, three, four, five, six rounds through the back window and trunk of the Ford, spinning it into an eight-foot marble obelisk. Hanson ran to the driver’s window, shielded his face with his left hand, and shot the already dying driver in the head as he tried to reach a pistol with his unbroken arm. Dead.
A little out of breath, Hanson stepped back, looked at the holes in the trunk, and lowered the hammer of the Hi Power. Nobody would be coming out of the trunk, but he watched it, anyway, backing away from the car, then spinning around, bringing the pistol up again at the sound of shots from behind him.
Felix stood over the two dead shooters, both sprawled half on the asphalt and half on the grass, shooting them, speckling his suit pants with blood and dirt and bits of asphalt. Hanson watched Felix empty his pistol, then stuck his Hi Power into the back pocket of his jeans and walked over to him. His ears rang from the gunshots and he was all but deaf, but he could hear Felix shouting down at the bodies, “Fuck you and your stars. Fuck the stars. Spy on this.”
Down in East Oakland the first tiny whirlwinds of red and blue lights appeared, formed into clusters, and spun silently up toward the cemetery.
Hanson still had the Hi Power in his hip pocket when the headlights of the unmarked car lit him up. Too late to set it down on the grass and back away. Not mine. They must have been watching Felix. The unmarked car stopped fifty yards away, its spotlight sweeping up into his face. The doors opened and slammed shut, but the car was invisible behind the glare. He felt a web of crosshairs brush his leg, pause, then crawl up his hip and stop in the center of his chest.
“Fuckin’ stars,” Felix said, behind him. “They what set this all up.”
Red and blue emergency lights flared up out of the dark flatlands below—little fires in the night—converging and burning toward the cemetery. Behind him patrol cars were already screaming down from the MacArthur Freeway, their sirens drowning out whatever it was Felix said next. Somebody must have declared a Code 33 emergency, sending every patrol car in the city. An opportunity for patrol car collisions and accidental officer-involved shootings. Chinese fire drill. Whoever was holding the rifle sight on his chest should have just shot him, then shot Felix. Problem solved. Send all the other cars back to work.
A patrol car jumped the curb down by the maintenance building, and another one came through the trees behind it. The next one blew beneath the arched entrance going way too fast, off the asphalt onto the grass, the rear end coming around, hammering down a row of tombstones.
He didn’t want to get killed in a clown circus like this, or participate at all. He focused his eyes on a genuine star, light years away from the cemetery in Oakland, and watched it all from there as cops piled out of their patrol cars, guns drawn and held in sloppy two-handed grips, crouched and kneeling, duckwalking, waiting for somebody to issue commands louder than the shrieking sirens.
Hanson knew they’d want him to interlace his fingers behind his head, then turn around—so they could check him for weapons—keep turning—then stop, get on his knees, then down on his belly in a prone position, but he wouldn’t do anything until he was told to do it. He didn’t want to confuse anybody. No accidental discharges. Wanted the sequence of commands and responses to go off exactly like it was supposed to, like it did in training drills.
Felix didn’t have his hands up. He looked pissed off, but he was keeping his hands out from his body while the cops formed a circle around him, weapons aimed across the circle. If anyone popped off a shot now, half the Department would be killed by friendly fire. My friends, Hanson thought. Felix Maxwell the drug kingpin and half the OPD wiped out in circular cross fire. He felt the crosshairs scurry up his cheek to his forehead. Four or five cops were shouting at him to clasp his hands behind his head, and so he did.
“Now, turn around…”
“Turn around until I tell you to stop…
“Do it now…”
He turned around, hands behind his head, ignoring a female patrol officer shouting, “Freeze, motherfucker.” Hanson silently sang a star song: Star of wonder, star of light, star of roy-al beauty bright, westward leading, still proceeding…
Then he was down on his knees, watching himself assume the prone position, textbook perfect, probably the best prone position any of them had ever witnessed. On his belly, arms out like a snow angel, legs scissored as wide as his jeans would permit, his cheek in the grass, the red and blue lights washing over his face and the cops’ boots. He listened to footsteps approaching him. Someone removed the pistol. He was cuffed and lifted to his feet, dragged to a patrol car, his head shoved to his chest, and then pushed into the backseat. Still alive.
Sergeant Jackson, he noticed, was standing by the car, watching him.