No Angel (2 page)

He wore a black leather jacket whose top rocker, that curved cloth patch that spanned the shoulder blades, read
MONGOLS
.

I asked, “You think he’s dead?”

Timmy said, “Dude looks deader’n disco. Shit, those look like his brains in the dirt.” Timmy leaned in closer. “Yeah, I’d say he’s pretty dead.” He spat a stream of phlegm into the brush beyond the grave.

“Dude, no fucking around here. We go home and show the boys we killed a Mongol, then we better be dead-nuts sure it doesn’t look like he’s coming back.”

Timmy smiled. “Relax, Bird, we got this. Like Lionel Richie said, we’re easy like Sunday mornin’.” And then he started to sing. Badly:

I smiled and said, “You’re right, you’re right. And even if you aren’t, I don’t see how it matters. We’ve come too far.”

He thought about that for a second. “Yeah, we have.”

We threw a couple shovels of dirt on our corpse and took some pictures. We relieved him of his Mongol jacket, stuffing it in a FedEx box. We got in the car and headed home, to Phoenix.

TIMMY DROVE
. I made some phone calls.

I lit a cigarette and waited for someone to pick up at the clubhouse.

Inhale. Hold it in. Click.

The voice said, “Skull Valley.”

I said, “Bobby, it’s Bird.”

“Bird. What the fuck?”

“Teddy there?”

“Not now, no.” Bobby Reinstra’s voice was humorless and empty.

“We’re on our way back.”

“‘ We’ who?”

Inhale. Hold it in.

I said, “Me and Timmy.”

“No Pops?”

“No Pops. He stayed down in Mexico.”

“So Pops is gone.” I heard him light a cigarette—he’d only started smoking again since he’d met me.

“Yeah, dude.”

“Wow.” Bobby smoked. Inhaled. Held it in.

I said, “We should probably talk about this later, don’t you think?”

He snapped out of it. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. When’ll you be back?”

“Soon. I’ll call when we’re back in the valley.”

“OK. Get home safe.”

“We will. Don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“OK. Later.”

“Later.”

I flipped my cell shut and turned to Timmy. I said, “He bit it. Pops’s death should work to our advantage.”

Timmy barely nodded. He was probably thinking about his wife and kids. Above all else, Timmy was decent. I looked past him. The asphalt and brown California pines, the late-afternoon grid of Phoenix, Arizona, moved beyond him like a sunset movie backdrop.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
, JJ, Timmy, and I chowed at a Pizza Hut. We hadn’t seen Bobby or any of the other boys yet. We wanted their tension to build.

JJ’s phone rang. She looked at the ID, then at me. I shrugged, stuffed a pepperoni slice in my mouth, and nodded.

She flipped open. “Hello?” She grinned. “Hi, Bobby. No, I haven’t heard from him. You have? When? What’d he say? He said
what
?! Bobby, what the fuck do you mean? Pops is—
Pops is dead
?” She lowered her voice and choked out the words with a frightened stutter. “Bobby, you’re scaring me! I don’t
know
what the fuck’s going on. All I know is a FedEx box came to the house this morning. It was sent from Nogales, Mexico.” She pulled the phone away from her ear and placed a slice of roasted green pepper in her mouth. She sipped more iced tea. “No way, Bobby! I’m not opening shit. No. Forget it. Not until Bird gets back.”

JJ’s fear was convincing and effective. Our plan seemed to be working.

I leaned into the leather banquette. We weren’t your average-looking cops—we weren’t even your average-looking undercover cops—and we painted quite a picture. Timmy and I were bald, muscular, and covered in tattoos. JJ was cute, buxom, and focused. My eyes were blue and always lit up, Timmy’s brown and wise, JJ’s green and eager. Each of my long, bony fingers was armored with silver rings depicting things like skulls and talons and lightning bolts. My long, straggly goatee was haphazardly twisted into a ragged braid. JJ and I wore white wife-beater tank tops and Timmy wore a black, sleeveless T-shirt that said
SKULL VALLEY—GRAVEYARD CREW
over the heart. I wore green camo cargo pants and flip-flops, and they wore jeans and riding boots. We each openly carried at least one firearm. Arizona’s open-carry, so there you go.

JJ continued. “No way, Bobby. I’m not coming over there with the box. I’m waiting till Bird gets home. All right. All right. Bye.”

She hung up. She turned back to us and asked sarcastically, “So, honey, when can I expect you?”

I grinned and said, “Any time, now. Any time.”

“OK! Can’t wait!”

We laughed and finished our lunch. We’d been running ragged for months and were in the homestretch. With any luck, Timmy and I were about to become full-patch Hells Angels, and JJ was about to become a real-life HA old lady.

With any luck.

NOVEMBER 19, 1987

I DIDN’T COME
from a line of cops. I wasn’t raised in the projects, and an alcoholic father didn’t beat me. I grew up in white, middle-class America with a bike and a baseball glove and family vacations. I played football and played it well. I went to college as a wide receiver for the Arizona Wildcats. In that first year, 1982, I showed up at fall camp for two-adays in a 100-degree hellhole in Douglas, Arizona. The practice field was smack in the middle of the desert. Turf, sidelines, one or two feet of desert scrabble, and then cactus.

Most wide outs want to outrun the defense for game-winning passes, catch the ball over their shoulder, and screw the prom queen. I wouldn’t have minded the prom queen, but I wasn’t that kind of receiver. The coaches knew this, and they’d put me at number six on the depth chart. That had to change.

I jumped in the play rotation whenever a slant over the middle was called or a crack on a linebacker was needed. I got the dog snot beat out of me, down after down. One play I got an out-route and the ball was overthrown. I ran out of bounds, into the desert, and dove, grabbing the ball but landing in a patch of cholla cactus, which are the nastiest of all cacti. I spent the rest of practice with the trainers pulling needles out of my face and arms with pliers. The other players laughed at me because what fool chases an overthrow into a cholla?

I checked the depth chart the next day. I’d taken the first spot, and for the rest of my college career, I wouldn’t give it up to anyone, no matter how fast he was.

By the time I graduated, I was All Pac-10. I was lightly scouted and I went to the NFL Combine, but from the minute I walked onto the field I realized that my chances were slim to none. One scout put it perfectly. He said, “I can coach these guys to catch like you, but I can’t teach you how to run faster.” Next to the guys coming up that year, I looked like molasses poured into cement. Guys like Vance Johnson, Al Toon, Andre Reed, Eddie Brown, and Jerry Rice. Maybe you’ve heard of some of them.

I knew I could cobble together a career of two or three years, but every year I’d have to re-prove myself in camp, and at best I’d be a third-or fourth-string option. My dreams were crushed and I didn’t know what to do. I’d gotten too used to crowds screaming for me, too addicted to adrenaline, to just let it go.

Eventually I turned to law enforcement. I was young and I bought into the Hollywood vision of being a cop. I considered the FBI and the Secret Service, but ultimately I ended up at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—ATF. This was where I’d transform from star college athlete to hardened undercover cop.

It happened on one of my first training missions, and it went down like this:

We’d gotten a warrant for one Brent Provestgaard, who’d just gotten out of prison and was rumored to be in possession of a used.38 Rossi. We were going to bust him on ATF’s bread-and-butter violation: felon in possession of a firearm, 18 USC section 922(g) (1).

I was assigned outside perimeter cover with my training officer, Lee Mellor. We rode in a crappy 1983 Monte Carlo. We interviewed Provestgaard’s mom at her house south of the Tucson airport, at the intersection of Creeger Road and Old Nogales Highway. She said he wasn’t in and he’d be back sooner or later. We left and staked out the place.

What Mrs. Provestgaard declined to tell us was that her son had sworn he’d never go back to prison, and that he was out in the Tucson scrub shooting his .38.

He came home on his motorcycle. We swarmed and he bolted on foot. I took off, passing everyone and disobeying orders to stay back. While a 4.6 in the NFL is nothing special, it’s sick speed for a cop. It was a full-blown foot chase, but he knew the area and I lost him. I reassembled with my team and they ribbed me about how I was supposed to be some sort of star athlete, but I couldn’t catch a 150-pound junkie in motorcycle boots? No wonder I was in ATF and not the NFL, that kind of thing.

As we restaged, a neighbor yelled from her window that she’d just seen Provestgaard. We took off.

First rookie mistake: no matter how out of breath you are from chasing a perp, never, ever take off your ballistics vest when there’s a lull in the action.

Which is exactly what I’d done.

The team split up. I walked behind our much-loved boss, Larry Thomason, through an overgrown tract between a development and the road. Tall grass and low trees were everywhere. We crept past the hidden Provestgaard. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye but before I could react he was up with his gun on me.

“Drop it, motherfucker!”

I knew better. I held my gun, a. 357 Smith & Wesson revolver, at the ready position: pointed to the ground at a 45-degree angle. He cocked the Rossi’s hammer, yelling, “Motherfucker, I will kill you where you stand! Drop the fucking gun!”

I holstered my revolver and put my hands in the air. Thomason cocked his hammer. He had Provestgaard in his sights, but he was toting a two-inch-barrel revolver and he was thirty feet away. Thomason knew that if he fired there was a good chance he’d hit me. He held. It was the right decision, but one that gravely altered his psyche: He was a committed leader in charge of showing a young man the ropes of a dangerous profession, and he never forgave himself for not taking that shot. I’ve always told him that the blame was mine, but he never accepted that.

The others, searching an adjacent area, responded. When Provestgaard saw the empty Monte Carlo, his eyes—intense, bottomless specks—lit up. He was going to get out of there.

Provestgaard’s gun was thrust out in front of him. When he got close enough, I planned on pulling his arm and using it as leverage to disarm him. That plan died when he tucked the gun to his side. Before I knew it he had me in front of him, his arm around my neck, the cold barrel of the Rossi at my temple.

I didn’t like that. I suddenly realized that it had rained earlier and the desert brush smelled like a clean backyard, which is what I imagine heaven must smell like. I hoped I wasn’t about to find out if my imagining was correct.

We moved to the car. Provestgaard shoved me into the driver’s seat and squeezed into the back, keeping the gun on my head. ATF agents surrounded us, their weapons drawn and their mouths running.

Provestgaard said, “Close the door and drive, motherfucker!”

I didn’t. The car wasn’t running. The keys were in the ignition. He shoved the barrel into the hollow of my neck. I wondered: Should I drive, put the seat belt on, and run into a telephone pole? Or get shot here and let my partners waste him? Or hope one of them gets a clean line on him
right this second
? Or lie down and try to stay out of the way of everyone’s bullets that were sure to puncture the Monte Carlo any second? Or, or, or … drop the keys? Yes, drop the keys. If I was going to die, then he was going to die too. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and let them fall into the footwell.

I said, “I dropped the keys.”

“Motherfucker—”

I leaned forward and Provestgaard did too. Mellor, who was closest to the passenger’s side of the car, stuck his revolver in the rear window gap and emptied it. Others fired. Provestgaard, his body shocked from the bullets cleaning out his heart and lungs, reflexively squeezed the Rossi’s trigger. The bullet went in between my shoulder blades, just missed my spine, punctured the top of my left lung, and exited under my collarbone.

Provestgaard had the death rattle.

I had a hole in my chest.

They call it a sucking chest wound because when you inhale, air is sucked through the wound directly into the void of a collapsing lung. Blood gushed out of the hole like water from a garden spigot.

We were dragged out of the car. Provestgaard was cuffed (you have to love police procedure in times like this), and laid in the dirt faceup. I was shoved into the backseat, in pools of Provestgaard’s blood and bile and tears, and Thomason jumped into the front seat and took off. I was in and out of consciousness as Thomason channeled Dale Earnhardt Jr. through the Tucson dusk.

I said the Lord’s Prayer and apologized to my parents for not being a good enough cop to make them proud. Then I took a little nap.

I came to at the hospital. I was on a gurney, the ceiling rushed by in blue and white streaks, the soft but anxious pitter-patter of nurses’ and orderlies’ feet on linoleum filled my ears. There were two black nostrils above me, and above them a tuft of brown hair, and around that a half-moon of white paper. A hat. My nurse. Her gaze was locked on the horizon.