penetrating power of an AK-47. Detective Sanabria could not explain why or when this obsession began, though his old partner Detective Nazarian knew perfectly well: He had been Sanabria’s friend since way back in the academy, and had been at the scene of Sanabria’s first homicide (it was also Nazarian’s first), which just happened to be four blocks from the elementary school they had both attended, an old brick edifice built in the early glory days of Hollywood, with the dusty pictures of silent film star alumni growing moldy behind a glass case in the office. Nazarian had seen the stunned look on then-probationary Officer Sanabria’s face when he looked down at that bleeding, dying eight-year-old whose walnut-shaped eyes and copper skin bore a striking resemblance to Detective Sanabria’s own.
In the case of Daniel “Danny” Cruz, Detective Sanabria’s investigation and the trace of the nine-millimeter gun that had placed Danny in this bed had been as fruitless as it usually was. Manufactured by the American Patriot Gun Co. of Waukegan, Illinois, the weapon had been sold to the Guns R Us Mart of Phoenix, Arizona, and then to a certain Andrew Palazzo, who, when contacted by Detective Sanabria by phone, said that he had sold the gun at a swap meet in Mesa, Arizona some six years ago.
“Untraceable,” Detective Nazarian had remarked when Sanabria told him the results of his two-hour investigation. “Unknowable.”
Detective Nazarian had seen enough cases of children and guns that he wanted to get out of police work, which was why he was going to graduate school and starting to toss around words like “unknowable,” which everyone in the Hollywood LAPD station found annoying, especially Detective Sanabria. But it was probably true: How and why some idiot had left a loaded gun in the construction site across the street from an elementary school was probably unknowable. So that left the victim Danny to talk to.
Detective Sanabria could not pretend he was here for any investigation. He was here for something else-to do something he did not know how to do, that he felt queasily uncomfortable doing, which was to make the speech and twist his face into the angry I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-youngman stare that would keep Daniel “Danny” Cruz away from guns the rest of his life.
He stood staring at Danny with a lingering, pathetic, hopeless absence of words. “Now you know what a bullet can do to you,” was the best he could do. “Or maybe you don’t really know yet. Because you’re still alive, aren’t you? And you shouldn’t be.”
Only much later, days after Danny had taken his first, lightheaded steps away from the hospital bed, after the nurses had helped him walk through the ward, after listening to the doctor give his mother a much-too-long list of instructions for his care, when he was back in the familiar and messy nest of his room, did he realize exactly what had happened to him.
He had shot himself in the skull and survived.
He had been in a coma for two weeks, at one point nearly left for dead.
“You cheated death,” his mother said. “We even had a priest here.”
Danny remembered the first time he had understood what death was, in bed under his covers when he was still in elementary school. In the darkness of his room, hours after watching a movie filled with medieval battle scenes in which one of the protagonists had exited the world of the living with an especially poignant soliloquy, the abstraction of death had become real for the first time. It was perfect blackness, a sleep from which he would never awaken, forever tucked under the football helmets on his comforter, the bedroom lights permanently off.
Danny the hospital patient had a new appreciation for what death meant and, at the same time, could now see the possibility that he might “cheat” it. He could run away from death like those quick-footed boys in that game they used to play in gym, “War,” where you stood with your friends in a cluster of bodies and dodged the rubber balls your classmates threw at you, until only one boy was left-the winner. Danny had done something like that: A brass bullet spinning through the air, on fire, had taken aim at his brain and he had twisted away just enough to avoid being killed.
The more he thought about it, the more he saw his survival was an act of will, rather than a stroke of luck. Danny was not yet fifteen and unprepared to accept the idea that his life could end so stupidly. He noticed adults shook their heads when they looked at the scar under his eye socket, a pushed-in nub of darker, stringy flesh. He saw in this a gesture of admiration for his strength and courage. Elliot looked a little afraid of him, which made Danny feel happy and triumphant. “Jesus, man, you lived,” Elliot said. “I don’t know anybody who’s taken a bullet in the head and lived.”
Before he had been shot, the most daring thing Danny had ever done was back in his days at LeConte Junior High School when he broke into the campus after hours-with Elliot-walking through the empty hallways trying to crack open the odd locker or two. He had never been a good vandal because he always heard his mother’s voice when he tried to do those things. In the years since his father had left for El Salvador, never to return, Danny’s numerous Los Angeles relatives had reminded him that a boy should respect his mother, that he shouldn’t dishonor her: They were all alone, a working woman and her young son, and any bad thing he did would be a reflection on her. His mother, in turn, doted on him. She bought the blankets and curtains printed with the logos of football teams that decorated his bedroom, with their one-eyed pirates and stylized birds of prey. She had bought him the dragon poster that loomed over the bed on which he was now sitting. These things belonged to a boy, and he wasn’t a boy, not anymore. He was suddenly angry at his mother, for no other reason than he felt her protective presence everywhere in his room.
Danny stood up and walked out of his room, then through the living room and the smell of soup and cooked meat that always lived there, and out the front door. Reaching the sidewalk, he stopped for a long time to examine the other stucco bungalows on the block, the palm trees that all leaned toward the south, the cars and vans parked in the driveways, their dented bodies covered with white patches. It all looked familiar, and at the same time, completely different. The pinks and yellows and blues of the houses were faded and sun-bleached, the palm trees were sad and weary. For his entire life he had lived on this block, he had pushed toy trucks and ridden tricycles and bicycles up and down the sidewalks. Everyone on the block knew his name.
Beyond this quiet little neighborhood was the real Hollywood, the thoroughfares of liquor stores and hotels, motels and sex shops, which had always existed on the fringes of his boy consciousness as a forbidden, dangerous hinterland of gaudy marquees. Danny the boy used to ride the bus home from school and stay away from the freaks on Vermont and Western. Danny the wounded warrior decided it was time to take a walk, toward the thick metallic sound of traffic on the avenues and the rising cry of firetrucks and police patrols. In a few minutes he found himself facing the din and the carbontinged air of Hollywood Boulevard, its long parallel rows of street lamps just beginning to glow white in the twilight. He was standing near the bottom of a gentle slope several miles long, the boulevard a buckling line of asphalt rising into the distant hills toward a gleaming array of billboards and hotel towers that clung to the mountainside, far away but reachable.
Danny had walked just half a block when he stopped, frozen in place by an image glowing from the side of a bus shelter. It was an illuminated movie poster depicting a man in a charcoal suit who held a gun at his side, a thin woman in a short skirt leaning against him, holding a gun too, but with two hands instead of just one.
When he drifted back home and turned on the tiny television in his room, he saw the gun-holding couple from the poster in a commercial.
Danny had become a member of the fraternity of gunslingers, and, like the people on the television screen, he
