Cold Hit

Chapter 24

When I got home my head ached and my eyes felt grainy. All I wanted was a glass of scotch to wash my treachery away. But getting wasted was my old solution. I'd moved past that now. In a gesture of determined sobriety, I settled for a Coke and a bag of chips and walked out into the backyard where I sat in one of my rusting patio chairs and looked out at the wind-ruffled water on Venice's narrow canals, thinking you really did need a sense of humor to appreciate its corny charm.

Every time I have problems I find myself sitting here, drawn to Abbot Kinney's faded dream, as if some part of my soul will be reborn in the stagnant water of these shallow canals. Sometimes, I feel as if he had designed this strange place with me in mind. I fit right in, a romantic in a fast-food world, lodged hopelessly in a moral cul-de-sac just like the McDonald's wrappers that collected under the fake Venetian bridges. But there was a sense of past and future here. The throwback architecture, the scaled-down plot plan from the 1400s, all managed to coexist in some kind of insane proximity to the strip malls two blocks away and the Led Zeppelin music that drifted across the narrow canals from my hippie neighbors windows. If only I could find such an easy truce with my disparate emotions.

Half an hour later I heard the back door open, and then Alexa dropped into the chair beside me and heaved a deep sign. She had a beer in her hand, and I listened while she pulled the tab, the chirp mixing neatly with the sounds of a hundred keening insects.

She grabbed a handful of chips and said, "I'm fucked with these crime stats. The chief is gonna redeploy at least twenty of my detectives. It's gonna foul up my whole grid plan."

Tony Filosiani was famous for his constant shuffling of manpower after COMSTAT meetings. He had installed a big, electronic map board of the city in the sixth-floor conference room. It was a complex son-ofa-bitch, which almost required a Cal Tech graduate to operate. Different colored lights represented different categories of crime that had occurred in the previous two weeks. One little light for every criminal incident. Murders and Crimes Against People were red; Burglaries-blue; Armed Robberies-green. While car-jacking was technically a CAP, it was also such a growing category it had acquired its own color-yellow.

The division commanders would walk into the darkened COMSTAT meeting and see the board twinkling like a desert sky at midnight. Then Chief Filosiani would flip a switch and white lights would appear all over the map in clusters. The white lights indicated our deployed police presence. In one glance you could see if you had your troops in the right place. If a street gang like the Rolling Sixties went hot and started jacking cars and houses, you could see if there were enough cops at Sixtieth Street and MLK Boulevard to handle it. If there were too many white lights where nothing was happening Tony would move people around. Just like that, cops got transferred to new divisions.

At the end of this light show, the chief would extinguish all of the cleared cases and embarrass any commander who still had too many colored lights burning in his area.

It was Alexa's job to move detectives and balance caseloads. The short-term problem for her was handing off old cases to new detectives and all of the confusion this produced.

"I need to cover some business," I finally said, setting my Coke on the table next to us. "I've got a couple of things to discuss."

"Look, baby, I'm sorry about this afternoon and Zack. I understand what you're feeling, I just don't agree, that's all. Can't we leave it at that?"

"I went by the hospital to see him after work."

"How'd you get in? He's supposed to be incommunicado."

"I told the psychiatrist I was his brother."

I waited while she sipped her beer. Finally, she responded. "I keep forgetting how stubborn and resourceful you are."

"I don't usually get slammed and complimented in the same sentence."

"You're also an asshole who's kinda cute," she said, doing it again.

"I give." I didn't have to look over to see that she was smiling.

"Okay," she said. "Gimme the second chorus."

"Zack's really screwed up. Wouldn't look at me. Wouldn't even talk. I was there ten, fifteen minutes, and he didn't say one word."

"Unless he's gone completely over the falls, he'll get over it."

"I don't think so. His psychiatric evaluator thinks he has a narcissistic personality with cognitive disassociative disorder, whatever the hell that is. I thought it was BS until I saw him. He's beaten, and he hates me."

"He doesn't hate you," she said.

"Yeah, well, you weren't there."

She thought for a moment before she turned to face me. "A while back, when I was in patrol, I caught a payback hit in Compton. This was two, three years before we met. The mother of one of the dead boys was this big, floppy soul with drooping eyes. I'm trying to take her statement, she's crying because she lost a son, and I say to her, 'These kids must really hate one another.' It was just nervous chatter. But she turns to me and says, 'Where you been, child? It takes powerful love to do a thing like this.' Then she said, 'Hate needs love to burn.'

Alexa stopped and put her beer down. "At the time, I thought that was nuts, but you know something? Working murders all day long, I've come to realize that she was mostly right. Hate is just a few degrees past love on the dial. Hate and love feed on each other."

"And all of this tells me what?" I said, frustrated.

"That Zack loves you. He's stressed and feels abandoned, so yes, right now there's some hate, but it's built on love, Shane. Right now, you both have the volume up too high. Turn it down and see what happens."

I sat next to her and tried not to argue. I remembered what Zack said to me in the bar. "Everything I say, people hear too loud." But I also remembered the psychiatrist's words: "His personality type doesn't treasure relationships." I was too confused to sort it out, so I just said "Okay" and moved on.

"You said there were a couple of things," Alexa pressed. "What's the other?"

So I told her about Rowdy and Snitch, and the strange guest list at the funeral.

"Sounds interesting," she said, softly.

"Whatta I do?" I asked. "I've got Deputy Chief Mike Ramsey on one side and Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke on the other. Broadway and Perry are gonna try and get me conferenced in, but they have to clear it with their lieutenant."

"And since John Doe Four turned out to be an Israeli spy, the case falls into some kinda no-man's-land between CTB and the Fingertip task force," she said. "So what do you want?"

"I want off the Fingertip case. I want to work this homicide out of CTB with Broadway and Perry. I really can't stand that task force. I'm not doing any good. The boss doesn't like me. He's gonna backwater all my leads anyway."

"Shane. . I can' t take you off the Fingertip killings and I can't reassign you to the Andrazack case."

"Why not?"

"Armando Cubio runs a tight operation at CTB. He won't want you in the mix."

"I think you're wrong. He'll want to work it, but he'd also just as soon keep Andrazack in the Fingertip case. Strange as it seems, it's lower profile if it stays there, lost in the mix with five others. I had to tell Underwood what's going on and he's agreed not to make Andrazack's name public. CTB doesn't want a news story on how some black ops Mossad agent in the U. S. without permission got murdered."

Alexa looked beautiful, her black hair picking up fleeting specks of moonlight, her mouth soft and inviting. But she wasn't about to answer, she was mulling it over.

"Okay, then here's another plan," I said. "How 'bout we skip dinner and get naked. Maybe I can change your mind in the bedroom."

"You mean sexually entertain your division commander in an attempt to affect a duty assignment?" "Something like that."

So we went into our bedroom, took off our clothes, and lay on the bed holding each other. She nuzzled my neck.

"This is beginning to make my Southwest crime problem seem irrelevant," she said, reaching for me.

I was already breathing hard when she stopped suddenly and looked into my eyes.

"Sometimes we're going to be on opposite sides of things."

"I understand," I said softly.

"But I want you to know I respect where you're coming from. What I treasure most are your complexities."