Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (54 page)

This morning, after several days of not drinking, I call Bob. I need to find out something, to ask him a favor, and I am
not
going into the station to deal with this. Everybody drinks, but once you're labeled as an alkie, people look at you as if you were a leper or something. Yeah, right. They're all one drink away from ending up like me.

Still today my obsession comes back. The dead girls. Unfortunately, the department pulled me out of the investigation just when I thought I'd hit on something. But it was nothing I could share with the world at the time. Now, sober, suspended, babysitting this espresso coffee, I know what I have to do. And I need Bob to help.

“Hey, Tim, we have ourselves a couple of suspects,” Bob says excitedly as he barges into Timothy's media office. “Those guys somebody called in … you know, Hispanics, in their late twenties, both with rap sheets. One kinda loony. Well, they're in separate interrogation rooms right now. You want to watch from the two-way glass as we deal with one of 'em?”

“Of course, it's about time we nailed those punks,” Tim responds with a smile. “I'll be right there.”

In a few minutes, Timothy enters the adjoining room to where one of the suspects is supposedly being detained. Captain Tate and members of the department's internal affairs are already standing there along with Bob and myself, which Bob arranged despite some opposition. Tim gawks at the chief and the IA guys, at Bob, then me. But as he takes this all in, you can see a wave of acceptance cross his face, a kind of relief, resignation. Uniformed officers walk in, in case Tim tries to make a run for it. But he doesn't. He sits down, expressionless, while the captain reads him his Miranda rights.

“You ought to feel good, Sammy,” Bob suggests one day at the Little Tokyo Starbucks, now my favorite hangout. “The way we cornered Tim—who'd have thought?”

Bob is writing down what I say for an upcoming press conference he's doing with the captain, now that Tim's been removed from the job. It took a whole day of hankering, but Bob's finally been given permission to speak with me before they tweak the final statement.

“It was a good idea to pull Tim out of his office without him knowing,” Bob ruminates. “I really thought he'd find a way out of the building if he knew what was up. You don't ever think one of yours would do something like this … man, I still can't believe it.”

“Well, I actually thought the old captain was the guy,” I recount between sips of a steamed latte. “The captain once told me how he'd lost a teenage daughter when he was with the police department in Indiana. That the girl was beaten, cut, tossed about like she was nothing. No suspects. Tate apparently went nuts for a while. Then, after a long rest, he returned, renewed, organized. He seemed the right guy for the captain's job, but I felt he was still crazy, maybe with pain, resentment, who knows?”

“That's why you can't have preconceived notions in this job.”

“You ain't kidding,” I continue. “I also had to look elsewhere than where all those so-called leads were taking us, false information that Tim paid winos and junkies to call in. The kicker was that heart-shaped locket I noticed one day on Tim's keychain. I thought this odd, didn't seem to fit a cop. But I let it pass. Men have been known to carry photos of their loved ones in lockets.”

“Although that still strikes me as weird.”

“After we confronted Tim with DNA evidence linked to him, the dude had to fess up. Although his ramblings didn't exactly explain anything—something about corrupt police getting away with shit and how the heart-shaped burns were a dare to the force to look at our own. I really don't know what he was talking about.”

“Well, you did a hell of a job,” Bob adds, placing his pencil down, grabbing a large cup of joe on the table.

I glimpse beyond Bob's head to the nearby skyscrapers, a few glaring in the afternoon sun, many of them recently constructed. After the riots I heard people complain that not much has changed in the city. I guess if you're still poor, this is true. But the LAPD has changed. So has the city council—now run with a handful of black and brown members. Today we have a mayor and school board president of Mexican descent. Big things have come our way, although I agree—more has to happen. Yet some things never change. People die. Some people kill. And good police work often revolves around the most mundane of facts, one small twist, sometimes when you're looking the other way.

Summer Brenner
was raised in Georgia and migrated west, first to New Mexico and eventually to Northern California where she has been a longtime resident. She has published a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and novels for youth including
Ivy: Homeless in San Francisco.
She is the author of the critically acclaimed noir thriller
I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex.
Gallimard's Serie Noire published Brenner's crime novel,
Presque nulle part,
which PM Press will release by its English title,
Nearly Nowhere.

Cory Doctorow
(
craphound.com
) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (
boingboing.net
) and the author of Tor Teens/HarperCollins UK novels like
For the Win
and the bestselling
Little Brother.
He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

Rick Dakan
is the author of the Geek Mafia trilogy, published by PM Press, as well as
Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Obsession
from Arcane Wisdom. He writes books and video games and angry comments on the Internet. More at RickDakan.com.

Larry Fondation
is the author of the novels
Angry Nights
and
Fish, Soap and Bonds,
and of
Common Criminals
and
Unintended Consequences,
both collections of short stories. His fiction focuses on the Los Angeles underbelly. His two most recent books feature collaborations with London-based artist Kate Ruth. Fondation has lived in L.A. since the 1980s, and has worked for nearly twenty years as an organizer in South Los Angeles, Compton, and East L.A. He is a recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction Writing. He can be contacted at
[email protected]
.

Barry Graham
is an author, journalist and blogger whose novels have received international acclaim and whose reporting has helped more than one corrupt politician leave office. Born and dragged up in Glasgow, Scotland, he has traveled widely and is currently based in the U.S. His previous occupations include boxing and grave-digging. He is also a Zen monk, and serves as the Abbot of the Sitting Frog Zen Center. He has witnessed two executions, invited by the inmates, not the state.

John A Imani
is a long-time revolutionary living and working in Los Angeles and is a member of the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities-Los Angeles (RAC-LA). Under the name of S John Daniels he has written and produced six plays and is the author of three novels.

Penny Mickelbury
is the author of ten mystery novels in three successful series: The Carol Ann Gibson Mysteries, the Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mysteries, and the Philip Rodriguez Mysteries. Mickelbury's short stories have been included in several anthologies and collections, among them
Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction
(Paula Woods, ed.),
The Mysterious Naiad
(Grier and Forrest, eds.), and
Shades of Black: Original Mystery Fiction by African-American Writers
(Eleanor Taylor Bland, ed.) The character in the story in this collection, “Murder … Then and Now,” Charles “Boxer” Gordon, so far lives only in short story form, but he's feeling ready to step out—and into his own novel.

Michael Moorcock
was born into the London blitz, came to maturity during the swinging sixties, editing
New Worlds,
spearheading the New Wave in SF, contributing regularly to the underground press. As a musician he was part of the Ladbroke Grove “peoples' music” movement, performing free gigs with Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies and his own band The Deep Fix, the only bands respected by people like Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux and Gay Advert. He received a gold disc for
Warrior on the Edge of Time
and worked with Calvert and Eno on various albums. His new album with Martin Stone and Pete Pavli,
Live from the Terminal Café,
will appear from Spirits Burning Inc.

Like Gwendolyn Brooks,
Sara Paretsky
moved to the South Side of Chicago from eastern Kansas. Paretsky has published fourteen novels featuring her detective V.I. Warshawski, along with two other novels, a book of essays, and numerous short stories. Credited with helping change the image of women in the contemporary crime novel, Paretsky founded the advocacy group Sisters in Crime in 1986 and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger, the MWA Grand Master and
Ms.
magazine's Woman of the Year.

Kim Stanley Robinson
is a science fiction writer from Davis, California. His novels include the Mars trilogy, the Science in the Capital trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy,
The Years of Rice and Salt,
and
Galileo's Dream.

Luis J. Rodriguez
is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, children's book writer, nonfiction writer and essayist with fifteen published books, including the best-selling memoir
Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.
His latest memoir,
It Calls You Back: An Odyssey of Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing,
is from Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster.

Michael Skeet
is an award-winning Canadian writer and broadcaster. Born in Calgary, Alberta, he began writing for radio before finishing college. He has sold short stories in the science fiction, dark fantasy and horror fields in addition to extensive publishing credits as a film and music critic. A two-time winner of Canada's Aurora Award for excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Skeet lives in Toronto with his wife, Lorna Toolis (the head of the internationally renowned Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, a reference collection of the Toronto Public Library and one of the world's best SF libraries).

Paco Ignacio Taibo II
is an eminent historian and professor, and a journalist and writer of worldwide renown. He has won many literary awards, among them three Dashiell Hammetts for his detective novels, a Planeta Award for best historical novel, and the Italian Bancarella Book of the Year Award for his biography of Che Guevara. His novel
Calling All Heroes: A Manual For Taking Power
has most recently been translated and published by PM Press. He resides in Mexico City.

Benjamin Whitmer
was raised by back-to-the-landers in southern Ohio and upstate New York. He now lives with his wife and two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. He has published fiction and nonfiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections.
Pike
is his first novel, published as part of PM Press's Switchblade imprint in 2010.

Kenneth Wishnia's
novels include
23 Shades of Black,
an Edgar and Anthony Award finalist;
Soft Money,
a
Library Journal
Best Mystery of the Year; and
Red House,
a
Washington Post Book World
“Rave” Book of the Year. PM Press will be reprinting the complete series of these novels starting in the spring of 2012. His short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Politics Noir,
and elsewhere. His latest novel,
The Fifth Servant,
was an Indie Notable selection, won the Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO (Premio Ragazzi category), and was a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award (Macavity Awards). He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island. Website:
www.kennethwishnia.com
.