The sun never left. Every morning, it would slip through the blinds of the fifth floor of the Oakland Police Department, float along the aquamarine tile floor, climb the file cabinet, creep across the wooden desktop, and reflect off the white sheets of paper that Cole could never get around to. Then, in the afternoon, the sun crept around to the windows on the building’s other side, and the process was reversed. And the sun was hot and it made him sweat and it made the other men and women on the floor sweat. And the detectives had a habit of eating lunch at their desks and throwing the wrappers and leftovers into their wastebaskets, and when it was really hot the sour stenches of lunch mixed with the sweat. And that’s when Cole knew it was time to leave each day.
The sun would follow. It always did. It had done so since his surgery, at least, when the sting of displaced fractures in his hand were at their greatest, and the fuzz of painkiller medication was at its thickest, and when the inside of his new apartment in the Eastmont neighborhood felt its emptiest. It would follow into rooms without windows, into the shower, and into his skin. It would follow into the evening represented by way of the ceiling lights at the Gazzali’s grocery store. It would follow on his walk home as he carried his red grocery bag with cereal and pre-made lunches when he would stop at the Evergreen Cemetery and read the names of the victims from the Jonestown Massacre, buried there. The sun’s thin purple trickle would bounce off an engraved name: Jim Jones. Their leader and executioner. Memorialized with the rest, though his body was not located here. Surrounded by them to the very end, whether his victims would want it that way or not. And then the cemetery would close and Cole would go home and the sun would still be there.
He had taken to wearing an eyemask when he slept. At first, he had jimmied one out of an old t-shirt he never wore anymore. Then he found one online that he kind of liked. It was black. There had been other colors available but he hadn’t really understood at the time why someone would want one that was yellow or white or red. Who did you need to impress while asleep, and how would that impress them?
“Keep the color out of it,” someone once said.
In the morning, he brushed his teeth. He couldn’t remember the last time he bought floss.
He had taken to sunglasses when he was out. He had bought a cheap pair at the market in Jack London Square one weekend and only realized later the right lens was scratched on the inside. It was not visible to anyone else but wherever he looked, he saw the scratch and it bothered him and it made him feel like a fool. He still wore them.
He hadn’t thought about Mia for a really long time, he realized. He was leaning back in a stool outside a brunch cafe on Piedmont Avenue, gazing through his scratched lens at his date, Stace, a woman ten years his junior with short red hair, recently cut, a new look, and tilted teeth that never took to braces but probably should have. She was still a knock-out, even when she smiled. She ate with elbows on the table.
“This is heads-and-tails better than last time,” she said, forking at her Denver omelet.
“Told you.”
“It’s got a certain faux pas.” See: je ne sais quoi. She knew better. It was an inside joke, something they’d heard someone at another table say at a different dinner in a different place.
“It ain’t cold this time?”
“That’s not it. It isn’t cold either, but it’s something else.”
“It’s the Bloody Mary,” he said. “It’s enrichening your experience.” He grabbed her straw and had a sip. He had refused to get his own and now he regretted that decision.
“It’s omelet-specific.”
“You’re omelet-specific.”
“It’s got more flavor,” she said. “Like they got more ham and they just packed it in there. Here. Try.”
He didn’t like ham.
“Enrich your experience.”
And he still didn’t like ham.
“Maybe you’re becoming a vegetarian,” she said.
“Maybe I’m … what?”
“No ham. And look, you didn’t touch your bacon, you dummy. You look at it, you see a pig looking right back at you. Those eyes,” she said and made jazz hands, which didn’t feel appropriate.
Then he ate his bacon out of spite.
“I see those things everywhere now,” she said later, gesturing at a black Honda Odyssey minivan parked at the corner while Cole threw down the tip. “They’re breeding. Or someone is.”
“What if,” Cole thought aloud while they walked hand-in-hand down the street. They were headed for a new record store at the corner. “What if one day babies just stopped growing up? Like, they get to six months, and then they stay that way for the rest of their lives.”
“I don’t know. I guess that’d be weird. Do they die?”
“They die like normal people. When they’re eighty or whatever.”
“But they would always look like babies?”
“Yes. And so you have this last generation of adults caring for all these babies, and they just stay that way, and then there’s more of them, always more, because people aren’t going to just stop having babies, you know? And then what, Stace?”
“More birth control?”
“Yeah, but the babies themselves. The ones we have. And then what? Does the world become one big nursery? Until there’s only one caretaker left? And then all those babies. Do they just die? Do you think, like, care animals and guide dogs would still tend to them? Can we teach them to do that? Dogs with bottles … I don’t know.”
“Maybe that’s how it all ends,” she said, flipping through electro-funk albums once they were inside. “A world full of babies.”
Screaming and crying and laughing all around him.
“Baby!” he’d once said, sitting at the dinner table with Blake and Jean.
She’d have given birth by now.
“Another Odyssey,” said Stace, looking out the window of the record store. “Or maybe it’s the same one. I don’t know.”
“It’s a popular street.”
“Rachmaninoff?” She was peering over Cole’s shoulder later, after he had drifted into the used records section.
“Parents used to make me listen to this. My ma did.”
“It’s following you.”
“The record?”
“The Hoffer lineage, Hoffer.”
“Don’t, Stace.” A week earlier, he’d told her about his falling out with his brother. None of the details. Just the overview. She seemed to regret bringing it up and squeezed him from behind.
“You’re not the only one with bad blood,” she said, running fingers through records a moment later. She meant her own family. They were the Rangers Motorcycle Club.
“Don’t you goddamn dare,” she once told him, on their second date.
“I think it’d look cool. Me on a chopper, badge above the headlight.” They’d mission-crept that night to a motorcycle dealership after a bar crawl. She wanted to go to an auction she heard about in Jingletown. Even if he wouldn’t tell her why, Cole knew better. (If he had known then that the Vigilance Committee would shut down shop mysteriously later that month, he might’ve thought differently.) Anyway, the dealership had been about to close for the night. Cole was swimming on spontaneity for the first time in a very long while. For her, for him, for life.
“You so much as sit on one,” she said, “she’s the only date you’ll be bringing home.”
“Are you saying I could take you home tonight?”
“To Eastmont? Fuck that. You’re coming to my place.” She watched as Cole teased fingers on a handlebar. “Cole?”
“Why the bike aversion?” he said later while she got a glass of water from the kitchen sink, both of them half-naked, before they floated to her bedroom.
“Do me a favor and don’t play dumb.”
“Okee-doke. You’re a Denison. I get it.”
While he pulled off his socks at the edge of the bed, she said, “You’re not just seeing me because of the surname. You’re not just trying to associate yourself with a bunch of … red-neck, wannabe motorcycle chumps. Are you, Hoffer?”
“Would I be the first?”
“Aw, Cole is mad crushing on gangsters.”
“I don’t actually care,” he said between liplocks. “It’s just you and me, toots. But your family, you should be nice to them. Being nice is free.”
“I haven’t seen them in two years. And it’s been nice. Does that count?”
Meanwhile, Cole had racked up six months. That was half a year of no contact with Blake, Jean, the lineage. He’d lost almost ten pounds, which he thought he could rack up to his cemetery walks, but then he realized it was because he never came to his brother’s for dinner anymore. He’d sent them a gift when he saw the baby was born on Facebook. Nice little girl. Name of Callie. He didn’t know what to get. He almost bought them a wall calendar. Instead, he went with a video baby monitor. Like a body-cam for kids. So they could keep an eye on the bambino from anywhere. From your phone, laptop, whatever. Top of the line stuff. You could even flip the camera, let the baby see you, and you look at your screen, and the son (or in this case, the daughter) is right there.
“Don’t put it off,” he said to Stace as she whistled and perused another aisle of records.
“Don’t remind me.”
“No skipping class.”
“Teacher’s sick.” She looked him in the eye. “Honest.”
“Berkeley’s sure got a lot of sick teachers.”
“You have no idea, detective.”
“Is it a vet thing? Being around all those animals. That what gets ’em sick?”
“It’s missing those cute little animals,” she said. “That’s what makes me sick … Still got class tomorrow, though.”
“No homework tonight.”
“No way, Jose.”
“So that means, tonight …”
“You got it.”
“You love me.”
“Madly,” she said with a smile and she whistled again while she checked the records. She always whistled when she was thinking. The tune was unintelligible, but always the same, as if learned a long time ago.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
She stopped and looked ashamed.
She eventually found a vintage copy of Sinatra’s Trilogy and they bought it. And then they went back to Cole’s place in Eastmont so the place wouldn’t be so empty anymore. They fucked with little issue. She fell asleep. He looked for his eyemask.
In the morning, she dressed herself and she kissed him and she went back to Berkeley. On the way out, she told him to meet her later at the botanical garden where they first met.
He said he would.
After she left, he realized he hadn’t thought about Mia for a really long time.
***
“There’s my blood brother,” said Inspector Kinsey. He was waiting for him inside of an empty winery on Treasure Island, which was a manmade glob of land smackdab between San Francisco and Oakland. It was only seven in the morning, but Kinsey had made a “deal” with the owner to let him in early every Tuesday.
“Victor!” Kinsey shouted at the owner, who was counting inventory behind a push door. He was also the bartender during these weekly morning appointments. “Pinot.”
Victor poured Kinsey and Cole two glasses, nearly to the brim, not stopping until Kinsey grabbed the stem of his glass. Then Victor padded away, toiling with other morning responsibilities.
“That motherfucker was going to kill his wife. Can you believe that?”
“I thought you said he was buying ghost guns for a robbery,” said Cole.
“Yeah. Robbery. Then boom, shoot the wife. Then boom, disappear.”
“Is his wife in … in danger?”
“No! Jeez. Not anymore, I guess.” He seemed to think about it. “I mean, I told him not to do it.”
“But they’re still together.”
“Well, yeah. He loves her.”
Kinsey lifted his glass to drink, not bothering with any sensory pretenses, but the glass shook in his fingers as he brought it to his lips. He’d been like that ever since the murder. He seemed to cover it up by acting aggressively calm. His skin had become increasingly pale.
“How’s Noldey?” Kinsey meant Lieutenant Nolden, Cole’s new superior in Oakland. Cole said he was fine. “And he isn’t asking anything else about … you-know-who?” Kinsey meant Grunk. Cole said he wasn’t. “Good. The bastard was good about that. Staying under the radar like that. Uncle Sam’s never known their ass from their elbow.”
Kinsey was talking about the federal monitor, Mr. Wayne Foley, put in place by the U.S. government back in 2010 to oversee reform implementation in the Oakland Police Department. The city had largely been viewed as corrupt, or at least racist, before that. Still was today. Even the federal monitor was perceived to be a racist. So the reform thing was done on a minimum-action-only basis. Just enough so that everyone could keep their jobs. Racism was the main thing they tried to put the brakes on. Or at least make it less obvious.
“And if you’re smart enough to not be racist,” Kinsey had said to Cole the first time they met at the winery, months ago, “you can get away with anything in this city. Keep the color out of it.”
“How’s your inroads?” Kinsey asked now, slurping on his wine, skin pale.
“I still haven’t agreed to do this,” said Cole.
“And yet you keep meeting me here.”
“Yeah.”
“That tells you something.”
“Yeah?”
“It tells me something. It tells me you’re a man who doesn’t know how to make a decision. And you like it when someone makes those decisions for you. And buddy, I’m your man. You and me, Cole and Kinsey, making it rich. So, tell me. How’s your inroads?”
“I’m not Grunk.”
“That’s what makes you so special.”
“I can’t … talk to people like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know.”
“Black people?”
“No.”
“Racist.”
“I’m not racist!”
“And that’s why I liked you. That’s why I didn’t need you-know-who. You know?”
“I can’t talk to criminals.”
“It’s your damn job!”
“I can’t talk to ’em like that, though, dealing with …” Cole waited until he was sure Victor was out of earshot. “… bribes? And coercion? And—and—and evidence tampering?”
Kinsey laughed and drank his pinot again and shook.
“You’re right, you’ve never done that,” said Kinsey.
“Not anymore.”
“You’re a good cop.”
“That’s right.”
“You want a better deal?”
“No. What?”
“We’d be fifty-fifty. That’s a good deal.”
“Kinsey …”
“And you don’t want to hear the bad deal.”
“No. I don’t.”
Cole drank. Kinsey drank and shook. His whole fatty arm jostled, along with the Dogtown Great Dane tattoo that roped around it, faded from the decades since he walked the beat. The Great Dane had a stick-like body and a giant cartoon head with mean eyebrows.
Cole absently felt up his Bayview Bulldog and the ever-present 7K.
“You’re just going to keep it that way then, huh?” Kinsey asked later, noting it.
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Listen,” Kinsey said later as they left and returned to where the sun still was. From the outside, the winery looked like a tan military compound, and likely once had been, evidenced by the faded U.S. Coast Guard imprinting on the old asphalt parking lot. “I’ve been patient with you. Right?”
“I keep coming. Don’t I?”
“Well, maybe I’m not gonna keep coming. I don’t think I really like this dump. Yeah. I think I’d rather just put Victor behind bars.” Kinsey looked at the compound again and laughed at the thought. “But what that means is that I need an answer. And if I don’t get the one I want, well … I start doing stuff.”
“What could you do to me that isn’t already done?”
Kinsey seemed to think about that, which unsettled Cole. Then he gazed out at the water, which the winery overlooked. San Francisco’s thick fog was far ahead and slowly incoming. In spurts, they could make out the long, red Golden Gate Bridge in the distance with boats puttering underneath.
“Ever wonder where the rabbit goes when the magician puts it in the hat?”
“Not once.”
“It goes into rabbit fucking stew.”
“I don’t think I care for magic.”
“It ain’t magic. It’s a trick. Making something disappear.” Kinsey left the Golden Gate Bridge alone and unlocked his Impala. And then he stopped again. “Hey,” he said. “You hear about evidence in Central?”
Cole hadn’t.
“Someone got in there. Smash and grab. Ballsy.”
Cole didn’t care.
“You oughta,” said Kinsey. “They came for your old case. Body-cam footage. It’s gone. What do you make of that?”
Cole didn’t make nothing at all.
“Uh-huh. Get your inroads.”
Cole returned to his Honda Civic and drove east back into Oakland and arrived at the station a half-hour early. He checked his lips in the rear-view mirror for splotches of red wine, then rubbed them until he seemed satisfied the redness was undefinable. To cover his breath, he popped in two strips of old sugar-free gum he found deep in the pocket behind the passenger seat. He didn’t notice the red stain on his jacket until he was in the elevator headed for the fifth floor.
“Tell me good news,” said Lieutenant Nolden, a thin man with an early onset turkey neck. He had a way of hovering too close to his detectives and always smelled like he’d just come out of a tool shed, earthy and pine and pungent and metallic. He had the white, crusty, calloused hands of a man who’d long worked with them.
“The good news?” said Cole, at his desk. “The good news is that I’ve got a great boss.”
“So, bad news then?”
“Well, Lieutenant …” Cole sifted through paper until he came across one with a black-and-white photograph of an old woman. “The bad news is that these cases are so cold, I could toss them in a glass and serve them with a drink. This lady? Bettie Cartwright. Been missing since 1984. Even if I run the races and talk to the POIs, all of whom already recorded useless testimony a decade ago, again, I’m not gonna grab anything. And we both know it.”
“So … that’s good news then.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Cole had been part of a small, fledgling division uselessly called “Special Projects” since his transfer to Oakland. His official mission: investigate and “close” cold cases. All he had to do was go through the motions, make an argument that each case was unsolvable, and Nolden would report Cole’s findings to the federal monitor, who would then zip up the case into a storage unit once and for all. Cole was the division’s only detective, specifically chosen because of his special ability to accomplish jack shit.
“Any others?” Nolden asked.
Cole absently grabbed at a file on the top of a stack.
“Gus Shulman. I guess I was gonna look at that one next. Give me an afternoon of doing nothing and I’ll let you know.”
“My hard little worker,” Nolden mumbled. He returned to his office on the other side of the floor where he’d look up model train set pieces on eBay (Cole had caught him once). Other detectives were starting to file in for the day, all of them different divisions, more useful divisions, protecting the city and saving lives and making a difference. The sun began to creep through the blinds.
Cole looked long and hard at the stapled picture on the Gus Shulman file. The face seemed so familiar. He reasoned to himself it must just be the case’s notoriety among Bay police. A beat cop in the Mission. Part of the Mission Pinschers. Missing since 2011. Guy had the nickname of “Shooter.” You don’t talk about Shooter. But no, there was something else about his face. Like it was an old friend or a guy at Gazzali’s he saw by the fish section. But that couldn’t be it, either. Gus Shulman was dead … Most likely. Shot or strangled or stabbed, and then whoever did the deed got scared, lost the body.
Right?
So why did Cole feel this sudden urge to fold up the file and put it in his pocket and hit the street and ask questions and figure it out and find his man and bring him back to the people who loved him?
Why did he feel like this could bring him, and a hell of a lot of other people, happiness?
“Here,” he said, tossing the Shulman file on Nolden’s desk. “You can tell ’em that one’s dead as John Belushi.”
“Even better news. A-plus, Hoffer.”
Cole left the building and the sun was still there. He drove west, along the Bay Bridge, and the sun was just ahead, dunking itself into the ocean. He passed yellow taxi cabs and VROOM sedans and SFPD squad cars and tourists and prostitutes and a million nobodies. He kept his windows up, else he might invite that San Francisco air that had become alien to him at some recent point. He would not and could not allow himself to touch this city; but he had to see it.
He headed down a one-way street and passed by Tong Hall and he turned down the volume on the radio even though the radio wasn’t on. The Mighty Kings crowded his thoughts like pink elephants. Peng, Ben, Eastwood, Dups, Amy, and Jun. Alive and dead and allies and wives and Cole in the middle, still, even when he hadn’t been inside in months. The revelation that his 7K and water were one and the same, a thought that came to him during the Fillmore Fire, never reignited his desire to close the Hattaran case, no matter how many times he revisited it. Instead, it filled him with doubts. Ben, as the killer, didn’t add up. He knew Cole knew about the 7K. They’d talked about it. That’s how Cole received his ink in the first place. If that was the truth …
Ben would’ve killed Cole a long time ago. It was fog and mirrors. But why?
Cole fought off the urge to press the brake pedal and look inside the gift shop windows that served as a front.
Stace’s voice drifted into his thoughts. “Aw, Cole is mad crushing on gangsters.”
Be there in an hour, he texted her. By the big cactus.
Let yesterday become yesteryear, he thought. But then, as he hooked a left and a left and a right and made his way back for the bridge, out of San Francisco, he could’ve sworn he saw a beat cop he recognized walking along the street. Not Gus Shulman.
Blake Hoffer.
“Good to see you,” he could’ve said.
“Baby!” he could’ve said. “How’s the baby? You get that present?”
But Cole hit the bridge, returned to Oakland, up to Berkeley, and kissed Stace on the lips under the big cactus in the botanical garden and the sun was there.