Kris Saknussemm - Private Midnight

E L M IEDO

I caught myself saying, "I want to be the first to know about anything that's not above board," and El Miedo said, You would. That'd be just like you. You pussy.

I heard a mention of "prior convictions" ... and I didn't think suspended sentence or time off for good behavior, I thought about my convictions. I'd had infractions. I'd had warnings. I'd been written up. But convictions.... Had I ever had any of those? Really?

Even when I had the shakes I hadn't been as shaky as I'd been at the grand jury that morning. Coming back to the Precinct, it just got worse. The whole welter of phrases and faces. Arraignments. Bail postings. Extradition orders. Interstate flight.

I was trying to get up to speed on the Whitney case when the Captain fronted me for a chat. He called our prep briefing sessions "chalk talks," as if we were back in high school. He'd come up through Alcoholic Beverage Control and COMP-STATterrifically appropriate training for someone heading a major case squad like Robbery-Homicide. He looked, dressed and tried to talk like Larry King, and could recite every section of the California Penal Code. He was waffling on to me about some "regulation," when I got hand-delivered the final divorce agreement from Polly's lawyer. Their office, on her instructions no doubt, was always sending the stuff to work, so in case anyone in the station house just might've happened by some mad chance not to have heard, they'd get the picture.

And what a pretty typical picture it was. Especially for a cop. It felt like cold paper to me, but coming not long after my partner on the job had requested a transfer, it didn't make me feel so hot. Bruce Wyburn, who'd worked with me less than a year, had given me the heave-ho. A guy named Bruce, for God sakes. I signed on the dotted line and tried to focus. But I couldn't. The song had crept into my mind again. The tune. Her voice.

It was one of those obscure jazz weeperswith the kind of sentimental lyrics you hear when you're weaving out of a fern barthe melody something a spare change saxophone would do in a tiled tunnel by a bus stop ... always wavering and wandering, getting away from you ... then slipping an evening-cool hand back into your pocket when you were well past. That's what it sounded like. The past. Lost secret moments that hurt you to recall and yet you longed to regainand believed you could recapture ... like an escaped felon ... but only while the song lasted. As if, just beyond the bars of the music, she ... whoever she was ... was waiting beneath a streetlight for you. Time had changed its mind ... summer was back for a refill and the precious sorrow was about to begin again. "Wayward Heart... always leads me in danger ... of staring fondly at strangers ..."

It was nothing that some goat hair and dynamite couldn't fix, but I'd taken the pledge. Not even El Miedo could scare me back in the gutter again. That made it line ball which I hated more ... the emptiness of the weekend or ...

... also referred to as ... perdida del alma ... Susto is an illness attributed to a frightening event that causes the soul to leave the body. Individuals with susto also experience significant strains in key social roles. Symptoms may appear any time from days to years after the fright is experienced. It is believed in extreme cases, susto may result in death ... Ritual healings are focused on calling the soul back to the body and cleansing the person to restore bodily and spiritual balance.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR)

THE
DARK
WAY
HOME

IT WAS WHAT MY MOTHER WOULD'VE CALLED A "BIG floppy" day. As in hotbrutally hot for only early May. I called it ball-sweating, and out of the scorching blue, in struts Jack McInnes. I might not have recognized him if it hadn't been for the Brut 33. Can't say what it was exactly that was different, but something. Hadn't seen him in just on a year and then he stunk into my cubicle as if I was expecting him. As if. I was getting ready to go meet Padgett to take a statement in the Whitney case. As soon as I realized that it was in fact Cracker Jack, I tried to look even busier. But I was on my guard from the get-go. Jack had this unearthly ability to start shitto get you in over your head before you even knew it. He laid a business card down on my blotter and walked out. Not one word. I was relieved. At first. The smell of the Brut was enough to deal with. It brought back the whole dark tangle from before.

Once upon a crime we worked Vice together over in Wetworld, the street name for the Warfield districtpartners in an op to take down Freddy Valdez. I'd been seconded because I speak decent Spanish. Things were cooking along

OK until Jack got a little too cozy with Raven, Valdez's favorite whore at the Jaguar House. She tipped him off to a score he could skim and wound up with a police caliber bullet in her left breast on a ruptured waterbed with red satin sheets soaked in even redder blood. A wad of hundred dollar bills that smelled suspiciously like those bags of stale peanuts they sell at the racetrack found its way into my pocket. Exactly $10,000 when I counted it over a bottle of Vat 69 behind the Chicken Shack.

The guy who set up the deal was known as the Mongoose. Whether he had a personal beef with Valdez I don't know. But he got greedy. Then Raven got her thong in a knot about Freddy dissing her somehow. McInnes caught a whiff of opportunity and cut me in before I had a chance to say no, gracias. As my oldest and pretty much only friend, Jimmie One-Leg, had once told me, "McInnes is what you could become, if you're not careful." We were shooting eight ball at Jimmie's club at the time, and I remember I almost gouged a strip in the putting green.

How much old Cracker pocketed I never asked, and whether he pulled the trigger or the Mongoose, I didn't want to know. The 10 G was my take for keeping quiet and not asking questions. The first serious felony I'd ever been party to. I'd like to think my last.

Of course Valdez was no fool. News was out on the street by the time I finished throwing up in a little park near my house. My wife Polly was just as quick, but she didn't ask any questions. Sweet Polly Purebred never did.

Two days later, the Mongoose was found with his forehead blown off, his own wiped down Colt Cobra beside him. The next day McInnes and I were sitting in a bar at Frontera and 6th waiting to meet a snitch when a Columbian in an aluminum gray suit walks in. I figured this was it. Out of towner hired to do the deed. I half wanted to let him. Then he spilled. Valdez's fat frijole heart had attacked him when he was doing the nasty with some new black chick. His contract on us wasn't going to be paid and there was actually a bit of celebration amongst the Latino Brothers about his demise. The op was a bust but we were in the clear for the moment in Wetworld, and as far as we knew, no one on the Force was the wiser. McInnes ordered a double. I vomited my guts out on the way home. The next week I went back to Robbery-Homicide and never said another word to Jack. Didn't want to see him again, and hadn't until he came in with the card. I should've thrown it out, but you can't turn your back on a guy like that. Old friends like Jack make you paranoid, if you're smart. I slipped the card into my pocket and hurried to meet Chris.

We were going to interview a fresh widowa special breed I always enjoyed. It was usually a snap to get a squirm of submission out of them. If there was anything that wasn't kosher, they'd be working the grief show hard. And if there was any real change on the table, the squirm could be particularly satisfying, with an almost guarantee of some titty getting flashed.