The Fallen

29

I sat with Stella for a while in the hospital that evening. I had the feeling she wanted me to stay and was talking to keep me there.

Her right eye socket was purple, her eye was swollen almost shut, and there was a three-stitch cut on her brow. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but she did remember trying to drive a fingernail file into Van Flyke’s back and being hit in the face for her trouble. She had clear memories of the first part of her abduction, followed by hazy recollections, courtesy of the Valium-morphine cocktail he had injected into her. She had attacked him two or three times. He had struck her. He had choked her unconscious at least once. He had kissed her forcefully and seemed to be preparing to rape her, then stopped and apologized. He had cursed and talked to himself a lot. He had not seemed sure what he was trying to accomplish.

McKenzie came by around seven. She looked just as drained and suspicious as she had looked after the officer-involved-shooting interviews we gave to Captain Sutherland and his Professional Standards team. She brought a yellow rose in a slender vase and set it next to the plastic water pitcher on Stella’s rolling tray. Stella offered her a very small nod and that was all.

After the hospital I got drive-through food and took it home. I called McKenzie and we talked for quite a while.

The aftermath of a fatal shooting is a tricky thing. You think you’re okay with what you did, and then you feel tremendous doubt that you did the right thing. You tell yourself there was nothing else you could have done. But you wonder. You think about all of the life you’ve taken away — the weeks and months and years that you’ve denied someone. You feel guilty for being alive, then angry about the guilt. You build yourself back up, one thought at a time, until you believe again that you did the right thing, and you remind yourself that you agreed to take this responsibility when you were sworn to serve and that you were the tool in what happened, not the cause. This is what you have to believe in order to go on. I shot and killed a man in the line of duty when I was very young. He had a knife, out and ready. He was three steps away from me and coming fairly fast. He had threatened to kill his girlfriend, then himself, and then he came at me. He had a long history of mental illness. They called it suicide by cop. It happened down in Logan Heights when I was on patrol. I was twenty-two, and he was twenty-five. He was baby-faced, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. His name was Duane Randolph. I thought about him on the way down from the Las Palmas.

On the phone that night, McKenzie covered her pain with bravado. She was eager to put the shooting behind her but I knew it would keep coming back. The counseling that the department gives us really helps, though it takes time. McKenzie talked awhile about Hollis Harris and how his world was bytes and gigs and jets and toys, and hers was crooks and guns and take-out food, and what sense was there in mixing the two?

“Maybe good sense,” I said.

“I love him,” she said.

“Then there you have it.”

“Not everyone ends up happy like you and Gina,” she said.

“You did the right thing today, McKenzie. You were alone up there and it wasn’t easy. You did the job. You got her out of there alive.”

McKenzie was quiet for a while. “How about you, Robbie? You okay?”

“I’m good.”

I watched the TV without sound until late. I fell asleep right there on the couch and dreamed of men falling from bridges and buildings into rich green jungles.

Late Sunday afternoon I called Vince. He sounded brusque and bothered and said he’d have to call me back. Ten minutes later he did, and his voice was changed.

“Sorry, Robbie,” he said. “Dawn and I been at it again about this. Look, Gina’s got a place of her own right here in Las Vegas. Nice little apartment. I’m going to give you the address but I need your word you won’t do something stupid, you won’t get loud or something with her. She’s my girl and I can’t let that happen.”

“I can’t get loud with Gina, Vince. You know that by now.”

“Maybe you two can work it out. Dawn says no, but what’s she know? Two people are two people. They find their own ways of doing things.”

“Thank you.”

He gave me the address. I wrote it down and stared at it: 414 Villa Bonterra, #B-303, Las Vegas.

I had just enough time to hit the Horton Plaza mall for a new suit. I had to buy one as is so I could put it on a few hours later, but I’m a forty-four tall, so it wasn’t hard to find. All of the forty-four tall trousers were too big in the waist but the salesman said safety pins and a snug belt would do the trick. The suit was navy wool and expensive. I got a new white shirt and a light blue tie in honor of Garrett Asplundh. A pair of new black shoes. When I got home I turned the trouser cuffs under and used duct tape to hold them in place. I looked in the mirror, tried to get the safety pins right, examined the finished product, and shook my head.

Dream Wheels opened at nine the next morning. I rented a silver Porsche 996 Twin Turbo because Gina had always wanted one. Cass said the new suit was sharp and my date was lucky. The car cost me nine hundred dollars for one day. I felt powerful and potent. I now understood why Garrett Asplundh had rented fancy cars and purchased expensive clothing to impress Stella.

I made the Las Vegas city limits in five hours and eight minutes. I was stopped by the California Highway Patrol and proffered my law-enforcement ID, which is a cheap trick when you’re driving a rental car over ninety. The CHiP looked over the Dream Wheels registration while telling me about a brother-in-law in National City who had season tickets for the Pads. He told me to cool it and get to Vegas alive. Heading into town I felt like a TV-show detective with my cool suit and killer car and the casinos wobbling up to greet me through a mirage of crisp desert air.

I found the B building of the Palacio Toscana apartments and drove the perimeter of the carports but didn’t see Gina’s car. The apartments were salmon-colored and new, with faux shutters swung back from their windows. There were flowers along the walkways. The Palacio Toscana smelled of fresh asphalt. I parked in the shade and spread a newspaper across the steering wheel. The afternoon was sunny but not hot.

An hour and fifteen minutes later Gina’s little blue coupe bounced off the street and into the lane of carports. I lifted the newspaper and watched her over the headlines, and she drove past me without turning. She swung wide right, then pulled hard left into her space.

As I walked toward her across the black asphalt she got out of her car. I could tell by the sudden stop of her head that she recognized me. I waved and couldn’t keep myself from smiling and walking faster. I remembered that there had been times like this when she’d run to greet me.

She had on a pretty blue sundress and blue shoes. Her hair was drawn into a ponytail that rose from a jeweled tube atop her head, then spilled over like a wild orange fountain.

“I’m not here for a scene,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be here at all. Nice car.”

I looked at her for a moment. “You take my breath away, Gina.”

“That’s why this is so difficult.”

“Should we talk inside?” I asked.

“Okay.”

Her apartment was upstairs. It had a view of buildings A and C, and the swimming pool, and a grassy park with a big pavilion for shade. A couple about our age sat in the shade of the pavilion, kissing unhurriedly.

I saw from the bland tan harmonies of the interior that Gina had rented the unit furnished. I looked at her. She was bright and radiant and as out of place as a ruby in a bowl of oatmeal.

“What?” she said.

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

How disappointing, to watch the red squares of dishonesty pouring out of Gina’s mouth. I watched the colored shapes flow toward me, then slide over a rounded edge, like water going over a fall.

I remembered times when she’d meet me at the front door when I came home from work and actually pull me inside.

Gina took a deep breath and looked down at the tan carpet. “Here. Have a seat.”

I sat at one end of the tan sofa and Gina sat at the other.

“How’s work, Robbie?”

“It’s good.”

“Catch any bad guys lately?”

“One.”

“Do you still see the shapes when people talk?”

I nodded. “Kind of wish I didn’t. It just seems to get in the way.”

She looked down.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you explain it to me?”

“I can try.” She crossed her pale legs and folded her hands in her lap.

“I came here for a new life. I think there must be more.”

“More what?”

“More everything. I know that sounds really shallow but I’m aching inside for something I can’t see and can’t identify and can’t touch. But I know it’s there. It’s right there, just past my ability to understand. Just out of reach of my words.”

“I’d be happy to help you look for it.”

“It’s something I want to do alone. I’m sorry, Robbie. I fell out of love with you. I was planning to call. I’m going to file the papers and I don’t want anything — you can have it all. I don’t want it to be expensive for either of us.”

I could barely formulate a reply. Something inside me took over the task of communication while my heart withered and died.

“Everything we have is community property,” I heard myself say.

“But I don’t want any of it. Not one thing.”

She bent her face to her hands and the orange fountain pitched forward. She reached up, yanked out the jeweled ornament and her lovely hair spilled down. She put her face into her hands again. Her back heaved but she made very little sound.

“Got another guy?”

She shook her head and her back heaved faster.

I sat for a while, feeling the rhythm of her crying relayed to me through the couch springs and the frame and the cushions. Because her face was buried in her hands, I was able to stare at her, as I’d been wanting to do for some time. I can’t accurately describe her beauty in that moment, but to me it was unique and entire. I wanted to take her in my arms until the tears stopped but I understood that they wouldn’t. I could smell them from where I sat, the same humid perfume of the Sonoran thunderstorms that sometimes towered over and burst upon Normal Heights early Septembers when I was a boy.

“Was it something I did?” I asked. “Or didn’t do?”

She shook her head again.

“I know I’ve got my faults.”

“No, you’re perfect. You really are.”

We sat without talking for a long minute or two. During that silence my thoughts organized themselves and I could tell that my heart was not dead, just wounded. A great relief began to spread inside me.

“Look at me,” I said.

She uncovered her face, wiped her tears and held me with her bloodshot green eyes.

“I’ve never told you this before, Gina, but I lost something in the fall, some kind of purchase or traction that other people have, and I used to have. What I have now is the opposite of those things. I’m not even sure what to call it — the power to let go, maybe. Because, you know, at the very end of that fall, that’s what I did. I just let go. I gave up and I understood that my own life was out of my hands. I never told anybody that, because I was too busy being a hero. Heroes fight all the way down. They never give up. So I wasn’t really a hero at all. But now I see that sometimes letting go gets you just as much as fighting does. I don’t know why that’s true, and I can’t explain it, and it goes against everything I was taught. There was only one thing I knew I’d never let go of, and that was you. But I’m going to do it now, Gina. I can’t keep you. I can’t give you what you need, because I don’t know what it is. So good-bye. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll start over.”

I stood and took a step and sat down close to her. As the cushion under me compressed with my weight, the cushion under Gina lightened with her departure, and she swept around the end of the couch and ran into the bathroom. The door slammed and the lock clicked.

I stood, as my parents taught me to do when a woman enters and leaves the room. I looked around the apartment once. I lifted my nose to gather in the smell of her. I locked her door from the inside and tugged it closed behind me.