Vertical Coffin

Chapter 50

Royal mortenson helped me get Sonny back to the SWAT truck. He used his tractor to pull it out of the sand, but he didn't want to go with me.

"Towns're like a booger you can't shake off yer finger," he said, charming and understated to the end. We shook hands and that crazy bastard walked out of my life forever.

I raced to the hospital in Brawley with Sonny in the back of the SWAT truck. Like my other partner, Jo, he went right into ICU. I sat in the waiting room while doctors were paged and people ran back and forth. Too many nurses were running.

The two SWAT teams arrived an hour later and sat with me in the waiting room. They told me they had seen the Super Hornets bombing the desert from the mountain as they climbed down. I explained that we'd chased Smiley onto the gunnery range and that Sonny was hit when Vincent opened up with the big Browning. I told them we'd been trying to get away with Smiley chasing us when he had unexpectedly hit the wire and decapitated himself. It fudged the truth but nobody had asked too many tough questions. At least not yet.

I called to check on Jo and was told that she'd taken a turn for the worse. She was having a lot of secondary problems, low blood oxygen and a troublesome infection that was slowly taking her resistance down.

After Sonny was out of surgery the doc came back and told us that he was going to make it. The good news was they had been able to save his knee so he would eventually be able to walk with a prosthesis. I left Sonny with his fellow sheriffs, Scott Cook and Rick Manos, then caught a ride back to L. A. with SRT.

"The military really strings cable out there to stop these guys from scrapping metal at night?" Gordon Grundy asked, having trouble believing it. "Why would they want to decapitate people?"

"Because of the C-four," I explained. "They don't want terrorists to get their hands on it. The whole place is posted. You enter at your own risk."

"Well, if somebody had to lose his head, I guess Smiley's a good choice," Rosano said, putting the best spin on it.

The news treated the story and me very kindly. ATF was in charge of all investigations involving stolen C-4. That gave Brady Cagel control of the case. A good break for yours truly. Nobody seemed inclined to question EOD's description of the event. The way they told it, Smiley had been scrapping out there for months. They had tried to run him off, even got him on a radio frequency once and warned him about the wires, but he had cut off the transmission.

They had tried to apprehend him, but he worked mainly at night and had always been able to escape. EOD said Smiley had stolen the sand rail he'd been driving when he died. It belonged to a local Coachella Valley resident named Royal Mortenson, who the newspaper said was a Vietnam vet and recipient of the Silver Star.

When Smiley's truck was finally found in Cactus West, all four of the tires that I'd shot out had been miraculously replaced. I'd been worried about what questions would be asked when that Dodge was found full of.223s.

Who had done that little piece of cleanup for mef Royal? EOD? The gunnery range good fairy?

I'm not asking, so I'll never know.

Life settled, more or less, back to normal. My overweight partner, Zack Farrell, returned from Miami. He was wearing a new dark green outfit, and he filled his swivel chair across the desk from me, looking like three hundred pounds of gristle wrapped in a GLAD bag.

"Man, I leave town for a minute and all the action starts," he groused. His mother had made a miraculous recovery, so Zack was back in my life.

Jo Brickhouse continued to lose ground. I spent most of my spare time at the hospital, looking across a chipped linoleum table into the worried eyes of Bridget Bollinger.

"I know she's going to get better," Bridget said. "She just has to."

"We're not in charge," I told her. "It's in God's hands."

Platitudes. Why do people think they have to say stuff like that? I've been on the receiving end of those same remarks, and they never help.

Bridget looked more frightened every day. " Y'know, Jo really liked you," she said one afternoon, unexpectedly. "She said you were attractive. We even had a fight about it."

"You never had anything to worry about there," I told her. "Our friendship worked on different levels."

Every evening after visiting hours Bridget and I went down into the little chapel at the hospital and said prayers for Jo's recovery.

She lingered like that for days, sometimes rallying before taking a turn for the worse. And then, slowly, we started to lose her.

Two days later she was gone.

Bridget and I were sitting in the waiting room, playing Gin, when Jo's surgeon came in and told us she had passed on. Bridget started to cry and I held her, feeling the huge, wracking sobs, realizing my own tears were mixing with hers.

# # #

The Rams' first game with Chooch as a coach was against the Chargers. Sonny Lopez was on the sidelines in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap. Alexa and I wheeled him onto the field. The sheriffs who were there, and all the players, came over and shook his hand.

Darren Zook had taken over for Sonny and was coaching the defense. He and Chooch had the Rams in pretty good shape, but they were behind by seven points at the half. I walked over to the end zone where the team had their helmets off, sitting on the grass eating oranges and getting instructions from the coaches for the second half.

"Who has that middle linebacker on the inside blitz?" Chooch was saying as I joined them. "He's killing us."

"I do, Coach," a tall Mexican kid said. "But the guy's been using his hands and the refs don't call it."

"Forget that. Knock this guy on his butt. He can't sack our QB if he's seeing sunshine."

Chooch made the halftime speech. "You guys are playing great. But they have a good team, some great athletes, so we gotta dig a little deeper. Emo's up there watching," he said simply. "He'll give us the plays. He knows the game plan, and his offense rocks."

"Coach," Deshawn Zook said, and Chooch looked over at him. "Thanks for sticking with us," the boy said softly. "We're gonna win this for Emo, but we're also gonna win it for you."

An hour later, with ten seconds left on the clock, they did.

A week after the game, on Sunday morning, we were sitting around after breakfast looking for something to do with the day. Delfina and Chooch decided to go to the park to study under the trees. I went out to the backyard with Franco and sat looking at the Venice Canal. So much had happened. So many people had died, and I had to figure out how to accept my part in it. What could I have done differently? I had prayed for Jo and Sonny until my knees were sore, but one had died and the other was in a wheelchair, and the answers still hadn't come. I felt culpable and out of touch with myself. I was in an emotional echo chamber-a moral cul-de-sac.

Alexa came out to join me and handed over a beer. We clinked bottles.

"Chooch was really happy about winning the game," Alexa said, smiling. "With three college coaching visits scheduled this week, his cast coming off on Tuesday, and Delfina's play about to open, things are definitely looking up in the kid department."

"Yep." I was trying to feel the upper, but not getting there.

"And Tony-yesterday he actually called me in and apologized."

"Really?"

"Yep. He said he knew that he was acting like a jerk, that he was just passing his misery down, and that it was lousy command tactics. He promised he'd never do it to me again."

"Tony's a good guy, but if he hadn't eased up on you he'd be wearing a few new knots on that shiny bald head."

She hit me in the arm. "Cut it out, tough guy."

"Sorry, some parts of me won't ever change. You gotta take the good with the bad."

She looked over, sensing the strange place I was in, seeing how uncomfortable I was with how all this had ended.

"You know, Shane," she said softly, "we can only do the best we can. If life was so easy to predict, nobody would ever get hurt. You can only view your culpability in any situation by the choices you made looking forward. If you view it looking back, it's called second guessing."

"When you look into the future, what do you see?" I asked her.

"I see things I want to do. I see Chooch in college, getting married, raising children. I see us growing old together, always being in love." She reached over and took my hand. "What do you see?" she asked.

"Nothing. I see nothing. I've always been afraid to have dreams, to look too far into the future."

"We'll just have to work on that." She smiled sadly, but I could tell she was worried about me when she said it.

"From the time I was a baby, my future only held disappointment," I said, trying to explain. "Maybe if I'd seen more, felt more, taken more chances… maybe I coulda changed what happened."

"Honey, don't go there. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. You're not to blame. Jo Brickhouse was a good police officer, she signed on to do a dangerous job. She made a mistake and she paid the full price. I didn't know her, but from what you've told me, she'd tell you to let it go. She'd want you to know it's not your fault."

"Okay," I said, but I was just ducking her now, and she sensed it.

"I know something happened out there on the gunnery range, because a lot of this doesn't add up. But Shane, whatever happened, whatever you had to do-you did the right thing. You reached down into a vat of goo and pulled out a rabbit. You saved this for me and for Tony, and you kept something terrible from happening. What happened to Jo and Sonny wasn't your fault. You could just as easily have been the one to get hit."

"Cut one and we all bleed," I said softly. I finally understood the full extent of that slogan.

Later that afternoon, there was a knock at my door. I opened it and Darren Zook was standing there.

"Come outside, I want to show you something," he said.

I followed him out.

Parked in my driveway was Emo's beautiful red Harley Softail. The chrome glittered, the lacquered black paint sparkled in the sun.

"Isn't that Emo's?" I asked.

"Not anymore," he said. "It's yours."

"Mine?" Looking at the bike, not understanding.

"Elana Rojas is grateful for all you did. She wants you to have it if you'll teach Alfredo to ride it when he's sixteen."

He handed me the keys.

An hour later I was riding Emo's bike through Trancas Canyon, going fast, leaning hard on the turns. Not oversteering this time-taking chances, just letting it all happen. The wind was tugging at my shirtsleeves and flapping my pant legs. The engine filled my ears with its throaty roar. Finally, I pulled into the place where we'd started the Iron Pig ride last summer. It was a spot high in the Malibu hills that overlooked the ocean. I shut off the engine, kicked down the stand, and reached into the hand-tooled saddlebag, taking out the beer I'd brought with me. Then I opened it and walked over to the lip of the hill, sat on a boulder, and looked out at the Pacific. The sun was just setting, turning the water and sky a purplish-orange.

In my heart and head I was always racing toward something I could never quite define, my ambition and ego pushing me, my final destination, unsure. Along the way, there were many places to stop. Some of them were havens where people I loved were waiting-Alexa, Chooch, Emo, and Jo-places where lessons could be learned. Others were simply hideouts. There were also dangerous spots where demons waited. Where I stopped, and what happened to me when I did, was not only controlled by fate. I had a lot to do with those decisions. They defined my destiny. All I had to do was simply own it. I had spent two hours with the ghost of the future, and knew I didn't want to end up like Royal Mortenson. In the end, life was all about choices. Alexa was right. I had done the best I could, and it hadn't quite worked out the way I wanted. I had to find a way to accept that, but not second-guess it.

I had told Jo that in order to grow she needed to be vulnerable. Maybe that's all this was. Vulnerability. Maybe I didn't have that down quite as well as I thought. Maybe vulnerability was just going to take some more getting used to.

The funerals had all been delayed by the forensics. In the next week, after the coroner finished with the bodies, I would stand at four grave sites while more empty words and hollow platitudes were spoken.

But this was my time.

I raised my beer and said all of their names softly.

"Emo Rojas, Josephine Brickhouse, William Greenridge, Michael Nightingale." Soldiers who had fallen while I marched on. It was just the way it was.

As the sun went down, I said good-bye to all of them.

God, how I hate cop funerals.