The Viking Funeral

Chapter 29

SHANE'S FRAGILE PSYCHe fell in on him. He remembered Lisa's kneeling over him, feeding him something… Maybe more pills, or tabs; he wasn't sure. He vaguely recalled signing the agreement, the paper swimming in blurred vision, and Lisa's voice, musical but furry. He wasn't sure how he got back to Papa Joe's house. He had a momentary recollection of Lisa's dashboard clock, wondering if it could really be four A. M. He guessed she'd driven him. His mind buzzed and snapped like a broken speaker.

A few memories stood out.

The front door, with Tremaine standing in the threshold holding a.38 snubby, muttering, "You're fucked up, too?"

Jody, sprawled in a lawn chair in the bright midday sunlight, moaning and crying, then suddenly leaning over and vomiting into the pool.

Victory Smith standing over him, whispering softly: "It would be so easy now, motherfucker… So easy."

The fog he was swimming in didn't clear until almost six that evening. When it did, it was all at once, as if somebody had yanked up a shade. He was suddenly back behind the wheel, driving a swerving, disabled brain.

He was with Jody in mid-sentence when he snapped back, and Shane had no idea what they'd been discussing. His own words lingered in his head like a remembered dream: "… I could do…" was what he had just said. One moment he was nowhere, and the next he was stretched out on the sofa in Papa Joe's borrowed room, feeling like shit while Jody, sitting on the bed, scanned a two-page document.

"The best you could do?" he said, throwing the papers back onto the bedspread. Shane could see his signature scrawled on the bottom.

"She jacked you up, man. I hate this deal… It was signed under duress. You're still babbling like an idiot."

"I'm okay… I'm better now." Shane's head was pounding, but the real pain, the one deep inside him, was an unbearable feeling of loss-this time not for Alexa or Chooch, but for himself.

"This bitch got the full three hundred dollars. Leon Fine said he bargained her down to two seventy-five. Leon woulda got an extra twenty-five bucks a case on his deal."

"Yeah, Leon's doing great. Let's hear it for Leon."

Shane sat up, then stood and went into the bathroom, washed his face, and glanced at himself in the mirror. He looked as bad as he felt; three days of stubble under furtive eyes that belonged to a frightened loser stared back at him. Shane couldn't bear to look at the wreck he had become, so he left the bathroom and returned to the living room. Jody was still holding the papers, scowling down at them.

"I ain't gonna do this deal. Call her back."

"Jody, she says Petrovitch won't renegotiate."

"She says? Like I give a shit what she says. Fuck her… But of course, you've probably done that, too."

"Jody, remember what Captain Clark always told us?"

"Y'mean that prick from the Fiscal Support Bureau who kept running audits on our expense sheets in Southwest?"

"He said dollars are fungible. And they are." Shane's head was at least functioning now.

"What does that mean?"

"It means, it doesn't matter where they come from as long as you get to the same number in the end. We got a seventeen-dollar-a-case discount on ancillary services. Leon says he woulda got twenty-five dollars off on the sale price, which, since he never closed the deal, is questionable. But he probably woulda paid full boat on all this other shit-the warehousing, insurance, and shipping. That means, if he wasn't lying to you, he mighta done eight dollars a case better than us. Who fucking cares?"

"I care," Jody said as he stood up. "These people are crooks. They're laundering money for scumbags, putting it back in the hands of greaseball cartel bosses who're using it to sell more drugs to kids."

"So are we. Let's just take the deal and get on with it."

Jody walked to the east window and looked out at mountains that were slowly turning purple in the evening light. "Yeah…" he said, softly, "so are we." Then Jody turned and faced Shane, changing the subject abruptly. "You're still fucked up over shooting Sergeant Hamilton, aren't you?" Shane's muscles froze; somewhere deep in his psyche, survival instincts took over.

Jody didn't wait for an answer. "At first that pissed me off. I wanted you not to give a shit, but I've been thinking about it, and now I know if you weren't fucked up over it, you'd a'been faking. Since you're unwinding, taking drugs and balling a skank like Lisa St. Marie, I know you're on the level. Otherwise I'd be suspecting a setup. I can see inside you, man. You're eating yourself up, just like you always did when things weren't John Wayne perfect."

Shane didn't answer.

"'Member all that night music… Back when we were kids… Planning what we were gonna be?" Jody went on.

"Yeah…"

"You always knew. 'Cept at first. At first it was a fireman, remember? Then you switched to a cop, and you never changed. I never knew what I wanted. I became a cop because you did. Dumb fucking reason, huh?"

Shane's head was killing him. He could barely think.

"It's funny… When you grow up with everything, you don't know what to wish for." Jody was studying Shane while he spoke. "I mean, pitchin' for the Dodgers… What kinda bullshit dream was that?"

"Maybe you could've done it if you'd tried."

"'Cept I never wanted anything bad enough to put out for it. Things just sorta always happened for me. You worked selling ice cream at Huntington Beach t'get that old piece-a-shit Ford you loved so much; handwashed that pile a rust three times a week. I got a new Mustang convertible for my sixteenth birthday. I never washed it once, 'cause I never really cared about it."

"Right." Shane didn't want to hear any of this. Worse still, he suspected Jody was working up to some kind of soul-cleansing confession.

"You always had a code. When you fought for shit, it was for honor or something corny like that. You never just beat on some kid for his lunch money. Underneath all my jokes, I guess I admired that."

"Can we give it a rest?" Shane muttered.

"I never told you this, Salsa, but I always envied you. I wanted things to matter for me like they did for you. I wanted them to be more important. But they never were, and the funny thing was, the less I cared, the more people seemed to do what I wanted. You were the only one who didn't completely buy into my bullshit. I had to really work to capture you, 'cause you had all those lofty ideas. Used to piss me off, too, 'cause I never could understand what the big deal was… And then one day, I found out why I could never care." He turned slightly and was now looking out the window at the mountains. It was almost half a minute before he continued: "'Member that course at the Academy on criminal psychology?"

"Yeah."

"That was a real wake-up call for me 'cause I fit one of the criminal classifications dead on. You know which one?" He turned suddenly to look back at Shane.

"No."

"Sociopath. That was me. No feelings, no emotions, all the time pretending; acting emotions I couldn't feel, but knew I was supposed to… Pretending sorrow when my dog died, pretending love on Mother's Day… Never feeling anything. Not one damn thing. We were from opposite ends of the spectrum. What a team-the bleeding heart and the sociopath, the ultimate high-low block. No wonder we always kicked ass."

"But here we are in the same room, both doing this same shit, so let it go. Please… I don't need to hear this." Shane desperately wanted to end the conversation; he was afraid of it.

But why?

A few years ago, when they had the arguments over SIS, Shane suspected that Jody had lost his conscience, but it had never occurred to him that Jody never had a conscience to begin with.

So, does it really matter now if Jody felt anything back in sixth grade?

But it did. It was critically important, because Jody's boyhood friendship had been one of the only pillars of strength in Shane's youth. It had formed a significant part of his value system.

More night music: "Y'know one of the other reasons I fucked up?" Jody said softly. "It was my dad… Good old easygoing Fred Dean. What a world-class jerk." Jody shook his head in wonder. "What a train wreck that guy turned out to be."

"I loved your dad. Your parents treated me like I was their own."

Jody shrugged and turned again to look out the window. "When he went broke, he left me hanging out there with no fuckin' values… Nothin'. You didn't have money or parents, but you had everything. You had beliefs. You had your code, corny as I thought it was. I cared about nothing. Worse still, I couldn't settle for less than we'd always had, and couldn't find any legal way to get that standard of living back."

"So you make this score and then all your problems go away?" Shane's headache was pounding, but Jody's confession was even worse.

"You always loved being a cop," Jody continued.

"Yeah," Shane answered softly. "Yeah… It seemed like a great profession. I thought it was noble… Blue knights standing up for the innocent. I thought the battle was about right and wrong. But it wasn't about right and wrong; it turned out to be about legal and illegal, rules of evidence… The Police Discretionary Clause… The Miranda. Make some tiny technical mistake, and a confessed child molester goes free. I loved it until it turned me into a cynic."

"I never loved being a cop," Jody said quietly, turning back to study Shane's reaction. "I loved what it let me do. Turning on my gum-ball, and running a red light to get to a ball-game on time. I loved being able to get some asshole down on his back in an alley with nobody watching, then shove my piece in his mouth and listen to him beg. I loved seeing that look in his eyes. The look, man… Better than sex or drugs. It validated me, y'know? The look said, 'I know you can do it. You can light me up and walk away, and nobody will even ask why.' The look said: 'I know you're all that's between me and eternity. I'm alive for only as long as you allow it.' Shit, nobody had to say anything. It was there, pure and clean… No misunderstandings, no technicalities, just a beautiful fact." His eyes were almost glowing as he spoke. Then he paused and studied Shane. "You never felt that on the job, when you pulled down on some asshole? Never felt the pure joy of that?"

"No," Shane said. "I was in it for something else."

"Yeah." He snorted. "'Service in the public trust.'"

"Maybe we could've stood for something, Jody. Maybe we still can. Chief Filosiani's different. He wants to try and put it back the way it should be."

"Chief Bada-bing? You're dreaming, Salsa. You trust Filosiani and he'll fuck you over just like the rest a'them swivel-chair heroes on the sixth floor of the Glass House. And that's not cynicism; it's truth. But, hey… Go ahead and fantasize. That's what I always liked most about you. You knew how to have dumb-ass dreams." He turned and, without another word, walked out of the bedroom, snatching Papa Joe's contract up off the bed as he passed.

Shane turned on the TV news.

He never should have, because Alexa's funeral was the headline story. Shane sat, mesmerized, as Chief Filosiani spoke about her courage under fire:

"It is with tremendous regret that I am here this afternoon," the chief said to almost two thousand of L. A.'s finest, who were standing in their dress blues on the Police Academy training field. Even Chooch was there. Shane caught a glimpse of him standing with his head bowed as the TV shot panned over to Buddy. Chooch looked as though he was crying. Shane put out his hand and touched the TV screen.

The blond female news anchor came on camera, continuing the story with a slide show over her right shoulder: "Sergeant Hamilton, a recent Medal of Valor recipient, was gunned down by her ex-boyfriend, Detective Sergeant Scully."

No! What is this? Shane was on his feet.

He leaned forward and stared. Shane's picture appeared over the shot of the Police Academy memorial service. It was his Academy graduation picture. He looked youthful and proud. "Sergeant Scully had been undergoing a psychiatric review and was deemed by his LAPD commander to be emotionally unstable when apparently he was driven to murder."

No… It was an accident. Why are you saying this?

The shot switched to the police brass band playing "Taps." There were shots of a Helicopter Air Unit fly-by: five black-and-white Bell Jet Rangers and a Hughes 500 passed low over the field. Then more shots of Buddy dressed in a black suit, somber and grief-stricken… Shots of the ceremony later, at Forest Lawn, as the casket was lowered with a twenty-one-gun salute. Buddy was handed the flag off the coffin, folded into a tight, career-ending package.

Shane stared in disbelief at the screen until the newscast switched stories.

His mind kaleidoscoped. His thoughts tumbled. Images flashed before him:

Lisa on top of him, her head thrown back-guttural and feline: "Fuck me, you bastard!"

Chooch standing in the airport, carrying his helmet and shoulder pads: "Give her the ring, Shane."

Jody, just a minute ago… His words soft, but horribly prophetic: "You trust Filosiani and he'll fuck you just like the rest a'them swivel-chair heroes."

And finally, Alexa… In her dress-blue uniform, standing before him, disapproving and remote: "There's darkness in you, Shane. It would never have worked. You went your way, I went mine."