NightSun Read online

  Every CRO had an armed-up bodyguard to watch his back and get him downstairs and through the crowds on the sidewalks. They were called “gunners.” Or, impolitely, “killers.” Nate Cole had been through five gunners in the past year, three killed on the job, one who never showed for his second day—even though the job paid more than what a high school teacher made—and a fifth who lasted a month before he put in for psych disability. Gunners weren’t CROs. They weren’t even like street cops or bike cops, who were a big step down in power and prestige from the cops in the air. Gunners were hired guns. Bodyguards. Meat. Gunsels. They were there to look fierce and identify targets and shoot straight, skills most of them brought to the job from the street. Or video games.

  A Long Beach Samoan, Isaako Tauiliili, was Nate’s gunner now, though Nate had a rule that he never learned their names until a month or two in. So he just called him “Gunner,” or “you big dumb mother-humper,” a term of endearment in Isaako’s case. In spite of himself, Nate was growing prematurely attached to this one. Isaako had been with him three weeks and hadn’t made a bad move yet. And there he was, standing in the weak drizzle beside the rig, fully alert, a fat finger resting on the trigger guard of the full-auto rifle in his hands. A short-barreled Streetsweeper shotgun hung off his shoulder, upside down on his back, making him look like a Sicilian mob guard in an old movie. Nate had set down the bird on the roof of a brick apartment building next door to the story bar.

  “You don’t have a hat?”

  Isaako grunted some kind of answer.

  “It’s not like anybody is going to jack the Crow,” Nate said. “It hasn’t gotten that bad yet.”

  Nate slapped a remote control switch sewn into the left sleeve of his jumpsuit. The helo’s engine started, the side-by-sides began rotating, and the cockpit hatches came up automatically, gull-wing style. Nate wasn’t in any hurry to go anywhere. He stood under the upturned hatch, using it as a porch, and looked out across the grayed city. He liked the rain—even a pitiful little squirt like this—liked the look of it and the smell of it, liked to fly in it, liked to look at it out the window when he was home, liked to walk rainy streets. Truth be told, he liked to splash through puddles in his oiled Doc Martens when no was around to see. He put his palm out, thinking maybe he’d catch the last raindrop to fall on LA. Maybe he’d put it in a bottle, donate it to The Museum of Rain.

  Isaako started to walk the perimeter of the craft, a by-the-book security routine.

  “Forget it, get in,” Nate said.

  The Crows had the cop/pilot up front and the gunner behind them in a slightly elevated second seat, stowed like luggage. Gunners had nothing much to do as long as they were up in the air. Some took catnaps on the short hops across the city or just stared at the floor when they were cruising looking for trouble. The designers hadn’t put a window in back. A gunner had to lean forward for a view of the rooftop as they were landing to see what they were getting into.

  Nate flew out of DTLA toward South Central, staying above the all-but-stalled traffic on the 10. Below, the freeway was a river of white on one side and red on the other. The red side looked like slow-flowing lava.

  “They have volcanoes in Samoa?” Nate said to the back seat.

  “Vailulu’u,” Isaako said.

  “What?”

  “Vailulu’u. Near where my father was from.”

  “I’d like to buy eleven vowels,” Nate said.

  “What?” Isaako said.

  “You never saw that show, when you were a kid? Wheel of Fortune?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” Isaako said.

  There was a number Nate was now wishing he didn’t know. He pivoted and dove down, slowing as he moved over the tops of the creeping cars. In the air, behind the stick, was the only place Nate was anything near this graceful. He hovered, the down-tilted nose of the rig just twenty feet above the traffic, the spotlight hung from the undercarriage shining right in the motorists’ eyes.

  “Hey, Killer,” Nate said. “You know what they used to call the inside lane?”

  “What?”

  “The fast lane, swear to God.”

  Isaako grunted a laugh and leaned forward to see what Nate was seeing.

  “Look at them,” Nate said. “Happy as pigs in shit.”

  A dozen cars crept along underneath, like embarrassed house pets slinking away from an “accident.” But Nate was right, the drivers were all smiling.

  “I don’t get it,” Nate said.

  Then one guy, eyeball to eyeball with Nate—a guy in a business suit with the tie pulled to one side—flipped him off.

  “There you go,” Nate said. He pulled up and killed the NightSun, kicked the Crow into a hard turn, and headed off toward Hollywood on the diag.

  After ten blocks, the screen in the heads-up display came to life, a blue-eyed beauty with black hair in a cut that was all zigzags. She didn’t really exist. How could she? She was there all shifts, seven days a week. She didn’t exist, but they called her “Carrie” and treated her as if she did. She was as much of a steady girl as most of the CROs had.

  “One down, Nate Cole,” Carrie said. “South Central. No CVA.” She spoke out an address as it was printed across the screen. “No CVA” meant No Continuing Violent Activity. “Down,” of course, meant dead.

  www

  Eighty-eight.

  Six minutes later, Nate was standing over a dead boy laid out in his momma’s bed. He’d been shot somewhere else, brought home by friends. Nate guessed he was still officially a boy. He looked thirteen or fourteen. He was dressed like a boy, but a boy pretending to be a man who still dressed like a boy. He was sure enough dead, a hot one right through the head, back to front: not the most attractive way to do it. The bedroom was crowded with mourners. There were two aunts and three cousins, including a little girl with her backpack still on who’d probably started the day in a classroom. They were all Blacks. The women and girls looked alike—strong genes. They looked like decent people. Family. The womenfolk had put the boy on his back in the bed, a pillow under his fouled head, on top of a patchwork quilt, the kind nobody made anymore.

  “How old?” Nate said to the woman standing closest to the bed.

  “Thirteen,” she said, not lifting her eyes from the body. She was the only woman in the place who wasn’t bawling her eyes out. It would turn out that she was the boy’s mother.

  Nate let her be, stepped away a couple of feet. They were in a ten-by-ten front bedroom. The house at 5163 South St. Andrews Place was a neat, kept-up, one-story Craftsman bungalow with a little patch of mowed grass between the porch and street, in a neighborhood of similar homes. It wasn’t what most people pictured when they heard “South Central” on the news. Gawkers were on the lawn outside the iron-barred bedroom window, peeking in, as if they were watching a scene on TV. Nate looked over at them, about to shoo them away, but thought better of it. Some of them were crying too, and it wasn’t because it was a good show. It was their neighborhood, not his.

  “What’s his name?”

  Nate didn’t get an answer because in the next second something happened that made his whole body rock back involuntarily, a plot point, a turn of events there was no way for a man to be prepared for, even a man who’d been in rooms like this time and again.

  The dead boy came through the bedroom doorway. Fast. With a gun in his hand. Same face, same clothes, same body. Same boy—or so it seemed.

  “Samuel, no!” the mother said.

  Isaako was right behind the boy, trying to get a hold of his gun hand. Nate dropped into a crouch with a hand over his head as if the ceiling were falling in on them and went for his service pistol, deciding without deciding that he’d figure out who was who and what was what later. Probably after he shot somebody.

  “Samuel!” the mother screamed
again. The boy looked her in the eyes, then looked at himself on the bed, then at Nate the CRO on the floor with the gun in his hand.

  The boy’s gun hand started to come up. Isaako dove at the back of the kid’s knees.

  In his mind, Nate had already fired the gun in his own hand.

  Next, quick, all in the same crowded moment, the looky-loos outside started screaming and saying, “Oh no!” ducking and diving, turning, looking up the street, in the direction of a sound, a motorcycle sound.

  Nate turned. “What the—”

  A heartbeat later, bullets started coming through the bedroom windows and walls. The sound caught up with the visuals, the sputtering of machine-pistol fire and a shattering, splintering noise on top of the swelling motorcycle racket. Getting louder. Was there a second motorcycle? The answer came immediately and along with it a new sound, a pounding, like somebody beating on a steel door with a hammer.

  Nate was about to put a name to it when he took one in the calf. He was still only halfway to the floor. His gun was ready to go in his hand but there was no place to point it. Isaako dropped, shot, two or three rounds in the chest plus one more punching a hole in his throat, which was already blowing out blood. Other bodies started falling, aunts and cousins. One skinny woman—no more than a teenager—was blown against the dresser, breaking her spine so that she was left draped over it backward.

  Nate landed on the brown carpet, right in Isaako’s face, eye to eye.

  Somehow the boys’ mother was untouched. She hadn’t moved from where she stood when she’d answered Nate’s first question. It was as if she were in a steel bubble.

  Then it was quiet again, save a dying moan or two.

  Nate stood up, the useless gun still wrapped up in his white, bloodless fingers. He didn’t put it away for another three or four minutes.

  Chapter Three

  Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety. Ninety-one. Ninety-two. Ninety-three.

  Four CRO units showed up. An EMT wagon, an ambulance—they were called Dittbenners for a reason lost to time—landed in the street and the techs went in to fetch the surviving twin. The second boy, Samuel, wasn’t badly hurt. With all of the old-school lead flying in the bedroom, it didn’t make any sense that he hadn’t been killed, but there it was. A minute after the techs went into the house, they came out with the boy snugged in a hold-suit and strapped onto a gurney. They clamped the gurney onto the skid of the ambulance, jumped in, and lifted off for KingMem. A coroner’s rig dropped in as soon as the Ditt was out of the way. The coroner’s office techs—they were almost all women, so the CROs called them coronettes—stepped over a body or two in the front yard and went into the little box of a house. They would bag up Isaako first, before the women and girls inside or the three men killed outside. Professional courtesy, even for a gunner.

  The murder room got too crowded for Nate, so he went into the kitchen and found a beer in the fridge and stepped out onto the front porch, using the toe of his boot to open the screen door. He took in a deep breath. The nothing rain was long gone. In LA it was always a little cool after any rain, cool in a way that made you feel a bit more alive, as if you’d survived something, as stupid as that was. It likely had something to do with Los Angeles being in the middle of a desert. Over on the grass, someone was pushing on the chest of one of the dropped spectators, but the young man was way gone, Nate could tell from twenty feet away. The other dead spectator was an old man, his gray head resting on the younger man’s leg, as if he were taking a nap at a picnic, leaning against his son.

  Ninety-four. Ninety-five.

  “Shit,” Nate said, standing there on the porch. He meant it in an amazed way. He never twisted off the cap of the beer.

  He had blood all over his arms, most of it Isaako’s. He bent down and turned on the garden hose. With the miser valve the water only came on for ten seconds and then shut itself off for a full minute, so it took a while to clean up.

  “Sir,” a voice said in front of him.

  Nate just waited, squatting in the grass, head down. He knew from the shape standing over him who it was and what the kid was going to say next.

  “Sir, I’m your new gunner. My name is—”

  Nate said, “I’m just going to go on home. You too. Tomorrow.”

  “But, sir,” the kid began.

  Nate stood. He wiped his wet hands on the kid’s shirt. “Tomorrow. Go. Go away. Come back ten years older.”

  “I understand,” the new gunner said.

  Nate thought about shooting him. The kid retreated just in time.

  Nate went back inside, did what he had to do at the scene, his part of the wrap-up. The mother had already been hustled out the back door by one of her people. She wasn’t going to talk to the police anyway, Nate knew. He scanned the dead boy’s fingers, the one in the bed, pulled prints, stuck a DNA straw up the boy’s nostril and inserted it into the scanner for quick read. It came back: Nathanial Wallace, DOB: 07/16/2012.

  Nathanial Wallace. The kid’s name was Nate. It always added something when you shared a name with one of the dead. He stepped back and played dumb when the CSI team came on scene. He left it up to them to come up with the official, ordinary version of what had happened, leaving out the poetry. Nate had a bad attitude about forensics. He’d been a cop a long time—twelve years, a lifetime in cop years—and knew that most of the time it wasn’t about science or cells or DNA or fingerprints. The why was human nature, the ways of the beast. It was anthropology, if you wanted science. You “solved” murders one way: by leaning on murderers and the people who knew murderers, got them to blurt out something, some unfiltered something.

  Nate walked down the middle of South St. Andrews Place, heading back to his rig. He’d parked it on the pitcher’s mound on a homemade ball field the neighbors had built on a vacant lot. He hit the button on his upper sleeve and the doors lifted and he got in; he was up and out of there, almost before the tach and roto-gauge went green for go.

  He circled the murder house and clicked on his fake sun. Three cops in the backyard, who were shining their silly little flashlights at an illegal barbecue grill for some reason—probably because they were thinking of getting one like it—looked up at him. One of the men was a cop on the gang squad—the GU—whom Nate had some history with, a Black named Whitey. He looked up at Nate and put his hands together in front of his face in the yoga prayer pose and bowed, like an asshole.

  Gang members were gathering in front of the house, wearing white tees and black rags on their heads, a crew called the Twenties. The Twenties were a multiracial group: Blacks, Latins, Islanders, Mixers, even a few Armenians. The Twenties were supposed to be defunct now but here they were, big as hell. They were standing atop some fresh/fast street art, apparently left by the shooters; a ten-foot drawing of a hooked-beak eagle, under it the word “Inca,” in case anybody didn’t get it. The Incas had been around since Nixon, too, like the Twenties. In the old days, the Incas had been mostly Mexican. Now they were from every other Latin American country, including Blacks from Cuba and Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

  Nate circled the gangsters for another look. Something about this wasn’t right. Who was the dead kid, and what did he have to do with a gang that everyone had said was dead and gone? Out in the street in front of the house was the beginning of an army, and it had come out of nowhere, while the bodies inside were still warm. Why had Whitey and the GU shown up right away? Why did the dead boy in the bed matter? Why had he been killed? Who were the motorcycle shooters? This was so…2015. In the old days there would always be retribution for a drive-by, but it usually came later rather than sooner. But that was then. Gangs didn’t bang anymore. Now they were self-regulated criminal enterprises combined with social clubs. A few more Twenties showed up, nodding greetings to the others in the street, older men. Tribal elders?

  As one, they glared up at Nate in his sculpted seat behind t
he plexi of the cockpit.

  He doused the spotlight and steered east toward downtown.

  www

  Nate could smell Isaako’s scent in the cockpit, probably some kind of sports-themed “body wash.” He said Isaako’s name out loud, not because he was sentimental or grieving—he was long since past that, or thought he was—but just because the name had an interesting sound. Isaako. Rest in peace, you big dumb mother-humper.

  Carrie came on the screen. “Are you going home?” she said with surprising warmth and familiarity. Concern. Empathy. Nate wondered for the thousandth time who had programmed her this way and why. Not that he was complaining. He needed a friend about then, even one that didn’t actually exist.

  “Where did my wounded single go?” Nate said.

  “King Memorial,” Carrie said. “First name, Samuel. Last name, Wallace. Date-of-birth: zero seven sixteen, two thousand twelve. Twin of deceased. Tissue damage. The projectile exited clean. He is about to go into an OR. He is not fully cooperative, asked to be released multiple times, third-level agitated.”

  “I like your hair,” Nate said. “It’s shorter.”

  “No one else noticed,” she said, putting her hand behind her head, lifting her ’do. “I did it a week ago.”

  They both let a moment go by, a moment and ten blocks. She sat up a little straighter. It was the middle of the night and they had it all to themselves.

  “So he was agitated,” Nate said. “Agitated how?” Now he was flying over USC and what was left of the Coliseum.

  Carrie said, “He wanted out of there. He thought his wounds could be treated by himself or by others. He twice said he was prepared to decline protective custody, if the custodial officer would release him.”