something they could not live with afterward. Out of deference, because he was a cop’s cop, they gave him a break and took his weapons, and we all followed in a caravan — my car, him in his car with Lieutenant Barry Loomis, and two vans of Santa Monica officers, over to the closest strip mall we could think of that would be in Los Angeles County, out of the jurisdiction of the Santa Monica police.
It was one of those neighborhoods where the haze is always hanging low, scouring the eyes and the hoods of dented cars with patched-up ten-year-old paint jobs, where wide commercial avenues, built for a dense mix of fast food and retail, instead are empty and scrawny as cheap Christmas trees. Everything seems to be on a slant. Signs are broken or defaced. Figures do not walk upright, unless they are mothers dragging double loads of grocery bags; buses don’t stop very long and drivers keep their eyes straight.
There was a Laundromat and a Lucky supermarket, a used record store, a bright blue Caribbean restaurant with beaded curtains and exuberantly painted suns and moons and fiery cockatoos.
Andrew’s car pulled into the center of the lot. It was mostly empty, the middle of the afternoon, except for indigents who were lounging at the outdoor tables at McDonald’s. Too early for the hookers. Barry got out quickly, turning his anguish into clipped, efficient movements, getting on the radio and telling everybody where to go.
The vans had rolled in and the guys were keeping their distance, waiting for the LAPD captain to arrive.
“Ana!” Barry snapped his fingers. “Andrew wants to say good-bye.”
Andrew was sitting alone in the car, fingers drumming the steering wheel.
“How’re you doing, babe?”
“I’ve had better days,” he said.
“I am serious. I want to marry you.”
He snorted. “Is that your ambition now? To be a prison wife?”
“I don’t care. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” He gave me an unreadable look. “Do I have safe passage?”
“Always,” I assured him, and waited for the question.
It was not an answer that he wanted but a promise.
“One last time?”
“Don’t say that.”
We kissed through the open window, then he turned the ignition.
“You better not do that.”
He had me by the neck—
“Andrew!”
— and pulled me halfway inside the car and with the other hand, he steered.
It was a muscle car, in seconds we were going in treacherous, widening circles.
My feet were lifted off the ground, yet I was pinned through the window by his desperate strength.
“Kill me,” he said.
We were going faster, wider, a death spiral.
But it didn’t stop anything or change anything. Figures were scattering and weapons were drawn and there were shouts,
“Kill me. Please, just do it.”
There was shouting. Gunfire. They blew out a tire and the car veered crazily.
He pulled tighter so I could not breathe. My body flew like a rag doll as he relentlessly and with purpose kept doughnuting the car in wilder circles. The glass facade of the supermarket came rushing at us, gleaming shopping carts and spinning women grabbing babies.
His hands dropped. His head slumped forward. He lost all animation, his foot put no pressure on the gas. The car slowed and coasted into a parked truck and I rolled free, to stare up at the empty sky. Andrew’s buddies tried to cover the hole, but the contact shot had penetrated the aorta and spinal column. He did not have fifteen seconds to imagine that his life might continue; that the wound might not be grievous, his case might be dismissed or won, or that he could save his partner or his father, or be given any other kind of freedom, any kind of chance. In an instant, oblivion, not love, had flooded his chest.
Twenty-eight
The sky was growing lower, as if it would touch the ground and reclaim the planet, sucking up the horizon and everything that lay before it in streaming tunnels of ashen cloud. Whippy branches of ocotillo cactus jerked in spasms in a sweeping wind-colored brown. Raindrops sleeted the windshield, and then it went dry. I detested California.
We were moving at a good clip down the slick highway — a sheriff’s van, the prisoner in an unmarked sedan and then the coroner. We were hunting bodies. Andrew’s funeral had been the day before, but the harvest was not done. There were still more corpses in the ground for the digging, or at least that is what Ray Brennan had boasted to his cell mate.
I was free. The DA dropped the charges based on Andrew’s confession, taped in the living room just before his surrender, in which he stated that he had attacked me with intent to commit bodily harm because I had knowledge of the Mission Impossible bank robbery. Our relationship was falling apart at the time, he said, and he was fearful that I would expose him.
Andrew took sole responsibility for the heist, providing details of how he had planned it, all the way back to the class he gave on bank security. He trained those two managers so when he appeared as a robber wearing a ski mask, they would unwittingly follow his commands. He used a weapon to threaten them, so he would not have to speak; so they could not recognize his voice. He had severed the hinges in the rooftop hatch weeks before, waiting until he knew there would be a large delivery of cash. Since Andrew had taught the opening procedures, he knew exactly how many minutes he had inside the vault and how long it would take for the police to respond. He expected a take of over a million dollars, but all he finally put in the trunk of his official car before driving to the police station to report for work that morning was $52,674 because the rest had been locked in empty safety deposit boxes overnight. He had given the money as a gift to Margaret Forrester to care for her children in the aftermath of the death of his best friend.
Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch was forced to concede that I had responded to the attack in self- defense, and except for the obligatory blast from Galloway for violating policy, and serving time off without pay, reinstatement at the Bureau had all the drama of renewing your driver’s license. There were mumbled condolences, mostly avoidance, taking refuge in the work. Now I was rolling in the sedan with Ray Brennan and Special Agents Todd Hanley and Jason Ripley on a tip from the snitch who had been placed in Brennan’s cell, a giant three- hundred-pound murderer named King Tut.
King Tut had been a popular and lovable custodian, a really sweet guy, who bludgeoned two kids to death with a shovel when he found them having sexual intercourse in the high school parking lot after a basketball game. King Tut had sad, puzzled eyes like an elephant who does not understand what he did to deserve being an elephant. You might mistake the look in those eyes as kindly, when actually they just rolled around in their sockets like wet black marbles, expressing nothing. When you had two head cases locked up together, neither could read the other
