End Time (4 page)

2 Mins 30 Seconds to Back Up—an ice age:

All my Frenz know the Low Slider

That Low Slider skins 'em always better

The Low Slider skins a little slower

Low Slider is a real goer.

The powerful thump of the jumping car hydraulics and the low beat of “Low Rider” caught her by surprise, and Cheryl stepped back. The other half of Sweet Jane lolled around in the backseat like an armless broken doll. The music kept rocking on, the grinning face of Felix staring at her from the kid's forehead.

Low Slider knows every street, yeah

Felix is the one to meet, yeah

That Cat don't use no mask now

Low Slider make Jane his bitch now

Then the Chicano boy did the second stupidest thing of his life. A gun appeared in his real hand and pointed out the window.

“I got something for you, chica.”

Cheryl didn't think; she drew and fired. The kid's face exploded. Bye-bye grinning kitty. But the car kept pumping away, and the girl in the back rolled from side to side. As the hydraulics sapped the battery, the car jumped lower and lower, the song fading on the radio:

Take a little tip, Take a little tip

Take a little tip from me

Smack her on the lip,

Smack her on the lip for me

Cheryl's three minutes were up, and two San Bernardino black-and-whites screeched to a halt behind her. She sensed the officers at her back, guns drawn but pointing at the Chevy. The Chino car dead on the pavement.

One of the backup cops examined the orange Chevy. Glanced at Sweet Jane in the rear and had to turn away for a moment. Then mastered himself, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and reached into the front seat. He showed Cheryl the young man's weapon. A fake gun from a magic store, the little red flag poking from the muzzle; the flag read:
Bang
.

And that's when Cheryl thought she would gag. But the spasm passed, just a spell of dry mouth, shortly washed away with a couple of gulps from a water bottle fetched from the black-and-white. The real gagging came a little later.

*   *   *

That first night was okay. Rachel held her in bed, the idea pretty clear:
I'm just so glad you're alive.…
She might have even said it out loud. But Cheryl was a little foggy on the details; it was a tequila and Mexican night. How friggin' appropriate. Finally curling up in bed with the TV droning and the blue light flickering against the walls. She thought she heard Rachel tell her, “You've got time coming. Take a tip from me. When this settles down, let's take a little trip.” And for a fleeting second Cheryl shivered. Did Rachel really say,
Take a little tip
? God, she never wanted to hear “Low Rider” again.

The noose tightened about three days later; her departmental paperwork had been filed, time for the official Internal Affairs Q&A. The Inquisition. Her required taped statement with Internal Affairs didn't go smoothly. Lots of photos of the fake gun with the imbecilic bang flag sticking out the muzzle. The pictures looked more and more absurd as they were shoved across the table at her. The Internal Affairs officer stared at her with the face of a ferret, lean cheeks, pockmarked from an ancient bout of chicken pox. Didn't listen to Mother when she told him not to scratch.

“Whattaya mean you didn't see this?”

“Didn't notice anything wrong?”

“How many times have you discharged your weapon in the line of duty?”

Answer, obvious, just look at the record: first time. And now, maybe the last.

Worse than that there were two other jackals at the hearing: a division captain from the LAPD sat in, some politically connected friend of the mayor's, along with a suit from the Department of Justice, Los Angeles Civil Rights Division. This last sit-in probably because a local civil rights group was making ugly noises and planted a few protesters across the street from the crumbling Parker Center at the new HQ. The photos of the Bang-Flag-Gun had magically appeared, blown up as homemade protest signs. Not good. And every day the rent-a-mob left for the afternoon, Felix's face in chalk grinned up from the pavement.…

The light from the windows threw bars across the interrogation table, blinding white against black field; motes of dust stirred lazily in the air. Nothing was going to be settled that afternoon. Cheryl's eyes wandered from the men in front of her, and she stifled the urge to yawn. The urge came on by surprise, and it took all her will to stifle it. Yawning
very
bad. What every cop knew: yawning during an interrogation meant you were guilty.

But apparently she couldn't mask her glassy eyes.

“Are you sleepy, Officer Gibson? Are we boring you?” the pockmarked ferret asked her; and then out of the blue, a curveball: “Take a little tip from me, don't yawn.” That damn “Low Rider” lyric, like he'd been listening to the same old tunes as Chico in the Chevy.

The police captain, the mayor's crony, a well-fed man, full of himself, played at being her friend. Telling the ferret, “Oh, I think we've covered what we can today, Felix. Let's let Officer Gibson off for the weekend.”

Felix? The Internal Affairs agent's ID tag said, Frederick. A nickname? And he took his cue from the Captain, “Sure, whatever.” Then to Cheryl, “Thanks for your cooperation.”

The ride home seemed endless: miles of snaking traffic, of glinting chrome, and a cap of yellow smog over all. Rachel wasn't in from work yet. No surprise; she often worked late, lawyer's hours. Cheryl watched the sun go down from the patio; this time of year it always set between two yucca plants. The landscaper had planted their canyon backyard in Sonoran colors, sandy shale, rocks, cactus, and a large sitz pool with a horizon edge, water bubbling from a crack of boulders, running off the edge of sight seamlessly into the Pacific. A 100K in “pretty sand” Rachel called it. Hell, she was allowed—her Hollywood lawyer salary made it happen.

Too many times Cheryl felt like the spare tire in their jalopy, safely there in an emergency but not on the axle. Rachel's firm was A-Minus List, so for society's eyes Cheryl had to buy a closet full of clothes to match. Things she'd never have bought on her own. Never mind afford. The curious aspect of people relations, the subtle way class still seemed to matter. Not so much race, but the right schools, the right opportunities, the thousand clubs and associations. And of course, the right clothes. Did people talk to her differently, look at her differently? Not really. If anything they bent over backward to bring her into the winners' circle. In LA cops were movie stars; she'd even been tapped for a profile on the latest police show,
Lady Blue.
But that stoked the coals too; a lower-middle-class insecurity lingering in the Big Box Store of her mind.

“Don't worry, Sugah,” Cheryl always teased Rachel when they were getting dolled up for some function, whether it was the Media & Entertainment Counsel of the Year Awards or say the Southern California Paperclip Counting Conference, “I still have all my teeth. And they're all mine.”

The tequila bottle came too easily off the shelf that night she got home alone. One pull after another as the sun did its sinking thing and the streetlights came on down below. Cheryl felt her eyes grow heavy and her chin nodding to her breast as she lay on the lounge chair. But still, she seemed to see out across the vast expanse beyond the canyon. Dark blue-and-gray clouds rushed in from the west, rolling over themselves, the sound of galloping hooves coming in wave after wave.

A figure stood at the edge of the patio. And Cheryl knew exactly who it was: Sweet Jane from the backseat of the Chevy without her shoulders or her arms. The young lady looked plaintively at her, begging her for something. To come earlier, to have found her before it all went bad, before she lost her arms to this crazy Chico. Now the scene shifted to an abandoned warehouse with pigeons cooing on the rafters, Sweet Jane tied to a metal cot, mewing behind a gagged mouth; now the knife was going in, now the arms were coming off.… And somebody was singing, “
Take a little Tip”
—

Sweet Jane stood over her, touching her shoulder, somehow touching her without arms. The pigeons flew into Cheryl's face and she woke with a shout of
Wait!

*   *   *

No, it was
Rachel stood over her,
leaping backward in surprise. “Jesus!”

Rachel. Home at last.

They both paused for a moment. Rachel standing, hovering, Cheryl half up in the lounge chair. Rachel dragged its match over and sat on it, so their faces were level. Cheryl's heart still pounded in her ears. And she stared back; Rachel's eyes wide, lips a thin line. She glanced at the tequila bottle standing on the stone patio. “You gotta lay off that stuff. It's no good.”

Cheryl's hand drifted to the bottle; she picked it up and contemplated it. About three shots gone, her mouth a wad of cotton. She nodded silently; you're
right as rain,
searching in vain for the bottle cap. Rachel's eyes glowed a little in approval; always a lot better when people knew they'd had more than enough. “Here.” She found the cap, which had rolled away somewhere. Cheryl's heart was slowing to normal as Rachel's smooth and melodious voice came at her again with that same line, “When this is over; take a tip from me. When you're done, we should take a little trip—”

The rubber band inside Cheryl's gut finally snapped—and she smacked Rachel's face.

“Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up!”

Rachel started, tears leapt to her eyes, her face gone white and her hand went to her cheek.

When the doorbell rang.

Cheryl lurched from the lounge chair, finally stood, trying to mouth
I'm so sorry.
But Rachel was already marching through the house toward the front door, wiping her eyes on her suit sleeve.

The front door stood open, a nosy young man in a cheap suit and tie and bad black JCPenney shoes peered into the house, smiling insincerely. He held a sheaf of papers, bound in a blue folder.

“Cheryl Gibson?”

She came forward. “That's me.” The blue folder with the papers came into her hand. “The family of Ricardo Montoya. Wrongful Death. You've been served.” So the family was going after her, and the bloody house and unspecified damages. Christ, she couldn't even afford the bloody payments or the taxes, not on her yearly copper 40K. This was citizens' revenge, pure and simple. If she'd been a single occupancy renter, the family might not have bothered at all. Sued the PD and left her alone. But 100K in pretty sand was too attractive to pass up.

In a few short days things went from bad to worse. The Sweet Jane nightmare, the tequila bottle that seemed to slide off the shelf on its own. Cheryl just folded into herself, and Rachel's sullen eyes stared at her from the bathroom mirror in the morning when she thought Cheryl wasn't looking. But she was.

“You want a divorce? Will that fix it? I'll go back to living on my salary, move down the hill. Financial separation, something.”

Rachel finished her eye makeup. After a breath, “Don't be an ass.” But that pause, that tiny second, crushed Cheryl's heart.
Her gal'd thought about it already.
How to get out of this crap.

Have a nice day.

*   *   *

Herman, her union lawyer, met her at Canter's Deli so they could prep for the departmental hearing. The process had slid downward a couple of notches. Cleared by Internal Affairs with a personal reprimand that wouldn't go on her record, assigned to temporary desk duty—but the mayor's crony captain still wanted to show the people of Los Angeles his boss loved every stinking one of them. Even Chicano arm choppers. And Sweet Jane turned out to be nobody, a runaway, a Jane Doe. Not even a councilman's daughter. Not even a studio head's estranged trophy chick who put on shows for all his pals. So a departmental hearing open to the public would be held. A show trial. Star witness Officer Gibson and the Bang-Flag-Gun.

Herman and Cheryl sat along the wall of the delicatessen, her on the long black leather couch, him in the brown leather chair. Herman, a once-upon-a-time New Yorker, haunted Canter's like so many of his Manhattan and Brooklyn brothers transplanted to Gollywood. Too fat for pot roast anymore, he tried to satisfy himself with cottage cheese, a canned peach half, a maraschino cherry, and a pickle on the side. Good luck with that.

Cheryl felt no such compunction, shamelessly ordering corned beef and chopped liver with a slice of tomato and a slice of Bermuda onion. Plain, no sauce. Back in New York, one deli called it a Joan Rivers. A real “Joan Alexandra Molinsky” of a sandwich. That schmear of chopped liver made it slide down the gullet right proper. A cholesterol coma on rye.

Herman stared at it lovingly, smiling sadly. “Oh, those were the days.”

Which made her laugh. But Herman sighed and went back to his cottage cheese plate in measured denial. Getting on with business.

“Look, this is where we stand. Let's start with the obvious. You're African American, you're a gal, you're gay, you're a friggin' rainbow Rambo—they can't touch you. You seen the news?” He slid a newspaper clipping across at her. A printout of the LA Times.

“I haven't turned on the television, no newspaper. Nothing.”

Herman nodded in approval, “You're one in a million.” Demonstrably true. And he wasn't kidding about the Rambo thing. The headline:

RAINBOW
RAMBO
—
F
REEWAY
CH
I
P
S
C
HIPPY
B
ANGS
B
ANGER.