Authors: Scott Frost
Never Fear (14 page)
Lopez glanced at me and began to turn toward the figures pouring out of the van. As he turned the paper bag fell out of his right hand and I saw the shine of silver.
“No,” I started to yell when the first muzzle flash erupted in the darkness, followed quickly by three more. Lopez stood motionless for a brief second, then collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
The sound of the train passed and I heard a mockingbird shriek in the distance. The odor of spent gunpowder hung in the air. One of the LAPD SWAT team approached Lopez on the ground with his weapon raised to the shoulder, ready to fire. I stepped around the back of my squad holding my badge out yelling, “Police, I'm police!”
“Clear!” yelled the lead man standing over Lopez.
On the pavement a few feet from Lopez was the silver can of beer he had been holding in his hand inside the paper bag. I rushed over to Lopez as the screech of tires seemed to come from every direction.
“We need a paramedic,” I yelled, forgetting that I was wired.
Our tactical teams rushed up and surrounded us with their weapons drawn, not exactly sure what had just gone down. Within seconds of their arrival more LAPD units began pouring into the parking lot.
I heard someone say, “A beer, a goddamn beer.”
Another voice said, “I saw a gun.”
Lopez was lying on his back, one of his legs bent at the knee underneath him. His eyes held a look of astonishment, staring straight up toward the sky. On the front of his blue shirt four circular bloodstains were growing into one larger stain. I quickly patted him down. There was no weapon, no phone, not even keys in a pants pocket.
“Can you hear me?” I asked him.
He took a short, clipped breath and his eyes focused on my face.
“Do you remember the tape the policeman took from you?”
He blinked and I saw something approaching recognition in his eyes.
“Tell me what was on it,” I said.
His chest heaved as he struggled to take a breath. I reached over and took hold of his hand.
“You're going to be okay. Do you understand?” I said.
Lopez's grip tightened ever so slightly around my hand. His eyes found mine and instantly I knew he understood I was lying to him.
“Did the officer who took the tape give you a name?” I asked.
His lips moved but he didn't make a sound. Then I felt one of his fingers gently tap my hand.
“Pow . . .” he whispered. “Pow . . . l . . . l.”
He silently mouthed the name again, then his fingers gently lost all tension in my hand.
“Powell?” I said to him.
His eyes struggled to focus before darting upward and staring at the sky. I put my fingers on his neck to feel for the rhythm of his pulse, but there was only stillness.
“We need a paramedic now,” I yelled.
I quickly placed my hands on his chest and began to put my weight into the compressions.
“Step away, Officer,” a voice said from behind me.
“We need a paramedic!” I yelled.
“Step away now, Officer.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harrison step through the tactical team that surrounded me and kneel next to Lopez's head.
“I'm not getting a pulse,” I said.
Harrison placed a hand on Lopez's neck as I continued compressions. After a moment he looked at me and shook his head. “There's too much damage.”
I did two more compressions then stopped. Lopez's entire shirtfront was covered in blood.
“Step away now,” said the same voice.
I turned and looked at the source of the voice, a man about fifty, dark suit, crisp white shirt, blue tie, a nickel-plated 9mm in a speed holster on his belt that matched the color of his hair.
“I'm Lieutenant Pearce, Robbery Homicide. This is our scene,” he said. “I have paramedics on the way.”
I rose to my feet and started toward him but Chief Chavez stepped between us.
“You're goddamn right it's your scene,” I said. “Your men just killed a man armed with a can of beer. Do you know what you've done?”
“Alex,” Chief Chavez said, his eyes catching mine just long enough to break the spell of the violence that had erupted. “Walk away,” he said softly. “Just walk away.”
I turned and looked at the LAPD SWAT team that had done the shooting. Three were huddled together in conversation; the fourth was sitting in the open door of the van, staring straight ahead, smoking a cigarette.
“His mother trusted us,” I said, but none of them so much as looked in my direction. In their minds they had just gunned down a cop killer.
Chavez gently squeezed my arm and I turned and looked at him.
“We need to get your hands cleaned up.”
I glanced at them and saw that they were stained with Lopez's blood.
“There's nothing else we can do right now,” Chavez said. “We'll do everything we can to make this right.”
I looked back at Lopez lying on the pavement, his eyes quickly dulling with death, staring up at an unseen sky.
“How do we make up for this?” I whispered.
I glanced back at two of the SWAT team members as they bumped congratulatory fists, then as I turned to walk away, I saw a face in an unmarked LAPD squad pulling away.
“What is it?” Chavez asked.
I watched the squad until it was out of sight, trying to be certain I recognized the face.
“Hazzard,” I said. “Hazzard was in that squad.”
19
It took an hour to drive from Highland Park to Harrison's small house on a rise in Santa Monica. I had passed on driving back up into the foothills to see if my home was still standing. It seemed oddly unimportant now.
We should have known that LAPD would be tapping Lopez's mother's phone. We should have known they would be there. And he should still be alive. Had Hazzard played me to get information that would help to find Lopez?
I had tried closing my eyes on the drive but each time I did I heard the shots echo in my head, and I saw Lopez crumple to the ground.
Harrison walked out onto the small deck that looked out toward the Pacific and handed me a glass of wine. The inland heat had given way to a cool ocean breeze on the coast. The sliver of the crescent moon was just cutting into the horizon out past Catalina.
“Every time I close my eyes I hear those shots, I see him fall. I didn't do my job very well tonight.”
“You didn't kill him.”
“I didn't save him, either. Hazzard played us. He gave us those files, and we handed him Lopez.”
“Hazzard was Robbery Homicide. Most of those guys still carry their shield and weapon after they retire. He bleeds LAPD blue. We couldn't have done anything differently.”
“We could have been smarter.”
Harrison let the silence settle over us for a moment.
“Lopez said something to you, didn't he?” he asked.
I took a sip of wine and nodded.
“I asked him if the cop who took the tape gave him a name. I think he said âPowell.'”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“I think so, but I don't know why,” I said.
I stepped back into the small living room that was furnished as sparsely as a classic Japanese wood-and-paper house from the nineteenth century. Bamboo floors, a few simple pieces of furniture. It had the feel of a sanctuary more than a house. A retreat from the world of cops and all that comes along with it.
On the mantel over the fireplace was a photograph of Harrison and his young wife looking into a camera held at arm's length. They were both smiling broadly, frozen for a perfect moment in time before her murder shattered Harrison's world. It was the first time I had ever seen her picture. She had shoulder-length jet-black hair, an Asian face that I guessed was Japanese.
Harrison stepped inside and I turned away from the photograph, feeling like an intruder. He walked over next to me, his eyes on the picture as I looked back out toward the ocean.
“Her parents met at Manzanar during the war.”
“The relocation camp in the Owens Valley?”
Harrison nodded. “Her family lost their businesses, homes, everything.”
He stared at the photograph for a moment, leaving another memory unsaid. “Her marrying a white guy was a challenge for her parents. Then their only daughter was murdered, and I couldn't even bring her killer to justice.”
I started to reach out to touch Harrison's face but stopped myself. His eyes were far away, still wrestling with a past, torn apart by violence, that hadn't yet been pieced fully back together.
“You're a good man,” I said softly.
“You would think that would matter, but it doesn't,” he said.
“It did to your wife.”
His eyes met mine and held them as gently as if I were being cradled in two arms. Without realizing I was doing it, I took a step toward him, and then it hit me.
“My God,” I said in astonishment.
“What?” Harrison asked.
“Powell,” I whispered.
Harrison looked at me for a moment. “The name Lopez said?”
“The officer who took the tape.”
I ran it through my memory several times, trying to prove to myself that I was wrong. But each time I did, it became clearer, like a home movie coming into focus.
“It means something to you, doesn't it?” Harrison said.
I nodded, then stepped out onto the deck into the cool night air. Over the horizon the moon slipped out of sight into the ocean. The only light on the Pacific was a cruise ship lit up like a Christmas tree floating in the darkness.
Harrison walked up behind me.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Powell was the name of the cop my father played in the horror movie,” I said.
“You're sure?”
I nodded. “What are the chances that someone would know the name of a character who's on-screen less than five minutes in an obscure B monster movie?”
“Not very good,” Harrison said.
“I keep hoping that somehow he's dead, and all this can be explained another way, but every time that seems plausible, something happens to pull it back to the one obvious truth: He's alive, and he wants me to know it's him.”
I caught a wisp of movement over my headâa bat hunting insects. I looked up and saw dozens of them darting through the darkness like pieces of crepe paper swirling in the wind.
“What does he want?” I said.
“I don't know.” Harrison placed a throw over my shoulders, his hands resting gently on me for a moment.
“The tape,” I said. I had forgotten about it.
Harrison shook his head.
“From Crossâthe interrogation. I need to see it.”
“Maybe it would be better to let it go for a few hours,” he said.
“How do you do that?”
Harrison smiled gently. “I wouldn't know.”
Harrison slipped the tape into the VCR but hesitated for a moment before he hit play.
“Do you want to be alone with this?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I can tell you what a policeman fighting a Cyclops sounds like, or an Indian who falls in love with a white girl, but I haven't heard his voice since I was a child. I need you to remember the things I might be reluctant to, or unable to, hear.”
Harrison promised he would, then stepped back from the TV and pressed play on the remote. The screen was filled with electric noise for a moment, and then I heard the sound of a mike being rustled and the voices of several detectives uttering words I couldn't understand.
The image on the screen flickered and settled into a static, unmoving shot. At a table in a stark white interrogation room, a man sat looking at something or someone just off camera.
“State your name,” said a voice that could have been Hazzard, though I wasn't certain.
The man at the table turned slightly away from where his questioner must have been sitting and looked directly into the camera.
“Thomas Manning,” he said.
It wasn't the voice I remembered from television, but I knew it just the same. An octave lower maybe, less assured. It was the voice or a piece of the voice I had heard in dreams. The good looks that had fueled his ambition had faded, but his hair was still dark, his eyes as penetrating as pieces of coal on a field of white.
The off-screen detective asked if he had been read and understood his rights and my father acknowledged that he had.
“Did you murder Victoria Fisher?”
My father didn't hesitate. “No.”
“Did you kidnap and murder Jenny Roberts?”
“No.”
“Did you strangle Alice Lundholm and leave her body on the banks of the river?”
“I've done none of those things.”
“You did rip open Jenny Roberts's blouse and drag her across the stage at the Players Theater.”
“We were rehearsing a scene; that was part of it. She became frightened. I can show you the script.”
“A month after that she was murdered.”
“Not by me.”
“You asked Alice Lundholm to take off her blouse?”
“She came on to me. It happens all the time in the theater. Some people are unable to turn emotions off after intense work.”
He said the words with the practiced ease of an actor playing the same part in a long-running play.
“Why did your first wife file a restraining order against you?” Hazzard asked.
“You'll have to ask her.”
“Did you abuse her?”
Every muscle in my father's body seemed to stiffen. He looked away from the camera and glared at his questioner. I knew the look. I had seen it in my dream the other night when he was standing in the hallway of our house holding my mother by her throat.
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