Monica’s neighborhood was Abbot Kinney and Venice Boulevard. Down side streets were framed views of the beach. Boats. Cafes serving gluten-free organic everything. Walker had to navigate through a street blocked off for a farmers’ market and side streets lined with food trucks. A lot of yoga pants on display and upscale frozen yogurt in hand. Old rich guys wearing velour in a non-ironic manner. People with laptops at outdoor cafes running their start-up ventures and looking for shared studio space to run said start-ups out of, as though if only they had said space then their ideas would really take off. Shops that stocked the fancy things that hipsters didn’t yet know they liked.
He parked around the corner from Monica’s place, on a hill that ran four blocks down until it petered out. He locked the car and pocketed the key ring. Looked around. The afternoon was warm. The air had a tinge of gold to the particulate in the Los Angeles air. He headed to Monica’s street on foot.
Walker liked the LA weather, but he preferred defined seasons. He’d grown to like Colorado in his three years there, but some said it had twelve seasons, where in winter you would have an eighty degree day and the next there’d be a blizzard. He didn’t miss Houston summers, and that place had but two seasons—hot and less hot. It was the Philly weather that always felt like home. And every place he’d lived in across the US all trumped the time he’d spent in Iraq, where he’d been during the 2004 summer.
The scene on Monica’s street was different from that on General Brokaw’s. There were no marked police cruisers at either end. In fact, there were no uniformed cops nor police cruisers in sight. There were cars parked along either side of the street. Walker figured there must be either FBI, or plain-clothed LAPD officers in unmarked cars. Probably the former, given the FBI’s involvement in running this. He scanned the windows of cars as he walked, searching for faces.
The cars seemed empty, no cops. Residential area. Cars belonged to those still home or those who commuted to work some other way; while LA was no doubt born and raised and matured as a car town, this neighborhood was the type that looked as though communal carpooling was the vogue thing to do, driving around in their electric Toyotas or bio-diesel Mercedes, using some kind of app to organize who was driving who to where on any given day.
He counted down the houses. Monica’s would be the seventh on his left, going by the street numbers.
He was two houses away when he saw motion. A guy, emerging from a hedge, a house before Monica’s. There was a flash of something shiny. A badge. A plain-clothed cop. A young guy, in casual jeans and polo shirt, bulge at his hip, showed an LAPD badge and put a hand out to Walker to signal he was to halt like traffic. Walker stopped. The cop glanced around, making sure that Walker was alone.
Walker said, “I’m a friend of Monica’s.”
“She can’t see friends today. Move along please, sir.”
“I just came from her father’s. She needs to see me.”
“I’m sorry sir, no visitors. Come back Monday.”
Walker looked up and down the street. “There may not be a Monday.”
“Excuse me?”
“You haven’t seen the news? You know what they’ve got Monica’s brother doing?”
“Sir . . .”
“Just knock on the door, and you’ll see that—”
“You have to leave, sir. No visitors. That’s my orders.”
“I’m just here to—”
“I’m gonna count to three.” The cop reached to his hip opposite the gun and returned with a weapon—he flicked out an extendible carbon fiber baton.
“You ever serve?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Navy. Four years.”
“I won’t hold that against you. I was Air Force. Monica’s father was a General. He’s sent me here to check in. You can verify that.”
“You have to leave.” The cop held the baton out. “Last warning.”
Walker sighed.
“No,” he said, looking down at his feet, his voice low. “You’re either knocking on that door and seeing that all is well with me being here, or I’m going to shove your badge up your nose, and the baton up your butt.”
The cop smiled, said, “One.”
Walker didn’t wait for three. Or even for two. He reached out, spun the cop and put him into a one-handed choke hold that had both the cop’s hands fighting at the grip, the baton falling to the ground. Walker used his free hand to field strip the cop’s Glock as he marched him onto Monica’s property and dropped the weapon into the potted plant at the top of her steps. He then used that hand to take the cop’s badge and held it under his nose, building the pressure there to the point where the cop, when they were at the door, went to stand on his tiptoes to try and alleviate the pain. Walker relaxed the grip on the guy’s larynx and said into his ear: “Who’s in the house?”
“Monica.”
“Who else?”
The cop was silent. Walker increased the pressure.
He said, “You want me to go get the baton?”
The cop replied, “One officer.”
“Okay. You knock on that door, gently, three times,” Walker said. “Don’t try being stupid. Don’t think. Just do this and you’ll see that all’s right in the world.”
“You’re making a big mistake.”
“You made the mistake. You weren’t listening to reason. You were provoking me. And you let me get too close. And you sure as hell don’t have enough security out here.”
The cop knocked on the door, a big old green-painted thing. Tap-tap-tap with the brass knocker.
Silence.
“Yeah?” said a voice from behind the door. Male. Similar tone and timbre to the cop he had in the hold.
“It’s me.”
“Can I help you?”
“Tell them you need the restroom,” Walker whispered into the cop’s ear.
“I need the restroom,” the cop called.
“Hold it in,” the other voice said.
“Tell them you can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“Piss in the gutter. Or a shrub.”
“It’s not that,” the cop said.
Walker smiled. He quite liked this cop. He had spunk. He would learn lessons from this encounter and be better for it. Navy always were a little slow at learning. Quicker on the uptake than Army though.
“Okay,” the cop on the other side of the door said. The door hardware shifted: a bolt, a chain, then two key locks.
The door opened.
Walker applied more pressure to the choke hold and rushed the room, pushing his cop into the other and pinning them against a hallway wall.
“Don’t move!” Walker said to them.
The other cop, uncertain as to what was going down, and what the intruder was armed with and how his colleague had been subdued and used, raised his hands and didn’t fight.
“Monica!” Walker called out. “Monica!”
A head appeared from around a corner. Monica Brokaw. She looked at Walker and did a double-take, as though she were seeing a ghost. That’s how it felt for Walker too. A face he’d not seen in so many years. Similar but different. Familiar but foreign. Even from here, her light blue eyes took him back to memories of shared intimacy.
“Monica,” Walker said. “Tell them I’m here to help you.”
“But . . .” There was hesitation in her eyes as she stayed in the doorway at the end of the hall.
“Your father sent me,” Walker said. He kept his attention on the face in front of him, the back of the head and the two bodies, a few hundred pounds of LAPD flesh pressed against a wall. “I left there just over an hour ago. Tell them it’s okay. That I’m here to help.”
Monica looked at the scene. She could see that the cop pinned against the wall was slowly moving his hands down, his right hand to his hip holster.
Walker noticed it too, and he shook his head at the guy.
“It’s okay,” Monica said. “It’s okay. This is a friend.”
Walker released some of the pressure. His eyes were locked onto those of the pinned cop who, Walker could see, was computing that he hadn’t seen a firearm on this intruder and that both his hands were holding his comrade.
“It’s okay,” Monica said, moving toward the three men. “I know this guy. He’s okay. It’s all okay.”