Sing Her Down, page 22
Florida walks through it, blind to the disorder, her focus past the disarray. At what point does the disarray become the norm—when does it settle in, ushering a twisted sense of order?
In prison, things made sense. The chaos had its own sort of calm.
Here the calm itself is chaos.
She doesn’t hear the few city sounds. Her ears are filled with her boot strikes—the measure of time between life and death.
There are a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, scattered and guilty-stepping, in violation of the new world disorder. They stop to watch her pass, tracking her passage, aware that they are in the presence of a force that must not be disturbed. Something determined and determining, a decider of fates.
Florida takes no notice of those who see her. They are no more or less important than the empty buildings and peeling posters from an obsolete world.
She passes a shuttered Mexican restaurant built in the style of a Spanish mission. She passes a white two-story shopping plaza, spectral and abandoned.
She begins the final ascent to Olympic, past a piano store with smashed windows, past a bank where the plywood did its job, past a four-story shuttered shopping mall with LED displays and electronic billboards flashing in Korean and English for the forbidden customers.
She has arrived first.
But she is not alone. Two men are drinking on a bench outside the boarded-up bank. Someone has made camp in a tent in front of the gas station opposite. Six people keep their distance near a makeshift bus stop, leaning on the soaped-over windows of a defunct storefront.
Up ahead, a rattle. Florida’s eyes track the sound. On the wall behind the gas station a young man with tufted dreads has begun a mural, streaks of paint flying from his spray can.
Florida thought rage would flow in her and that her heart would beat hard and fast. But she is ready. She keeps her eyes focused to the north.
A loose board taps against the bank’s window, beating a countdown of hollow seconds, marking time in a place where time has paused.
Now she waits.
The people on the sidelines watch, wanting none of her business. They know bad when it comes. After it happens, they will have borne no witness.
Rattle, rattle. The hiss of the paint exaggerated by the silence. A streak of gray appearing on the wall.
A gust of wind summons a trash funnel, sending it diagonally across the intersection. It breaks across the tip of Florida’s boot, a mask settling like a steel cap. She shakes her foot free and resumes her watch.
Eight lanes of no traffic. This is not the city she dreamt of for the past three years. But she is no longer the person who inhabited those dreams.
The board taps.
The sun hides.
The moment stretches and spreads.
There’s a shift, a change in the air. The drinkers, the people at the bus stop, and the tent dweller reposition themselves to make room for a brand-new noise coming down Western from the north.
The artist keeps painting.
Florida stands, hand on hip, another on the makeshift holster of her waistband. Feet planted hard to the asphalt. Tree-solid and rooted firm.
The noise isn’t footsteps or a war cry, but a creak of wheels. Florida stiffens. The watchers on their corners gauge her tension. They brace and step or slide back as if what’s coming will be on them at once.
Florida checks her palms with her fingertips. Her hands are dry.
The wheels are coming closer—like Florida, down the middle of Western. It’s a woman pushing a shopping cart filled with four blue beverage coolers, her face swaddled in a cloth, revealing only her eyes. She calls out in Spanish as she draws near Olympic. Champorado.
The word sounds as if it has arrived after decades of transmission—a missive from another universe.
The woman halts her cart in the northern crosswalk of the intersection. She has stepped out of a different world, a pre-apocalyptic vision.
Champorado.
The woman lurches the cart to the left and heads for the sidewalk, leaving the street to Florida.
The people waiting for the bus crowd around her, forgetting to keep their distance as she fills cups from the coolers’ plastic taps. When she is done serving them, she wheels her cart into the painted crosswalk. Soon she has disappeared to the south, the creak of her cart’s wheels and her one-note cry swallowed and subsumed.
The loose board on the bank tap-taps away the seconds.
The wind rises, scuttling more trash—cups and paper bags, Styrofoam and plastic clamshells. The city is disgorging itself.
Behind Florida one of the men on the bench tosses his empty into the street, where it shatters, the shards skipping into silence.
Florida waits, a watcher at the crossroads. Her body has absorbed the beat of the board and she shuffles the toe of one of her boots in time, willing time itself forward.
There is action on Olympic—movement to Florida’s right. She cuts her eyes to see a bus, no signage, no decals. It stops on the corner. The passengers toss their champorado cups to the ground and file on.
The bus waits for the light, then continues west. The driver stops in front of Florida and rolls down his window. Seven sets of eyes try to meet hers. Seven sets of eyes try to break her stare.
The driver leans out.
¡Muevelo!
The board taps. The bus idles.
Move.
Florida stares at the bus as if she can see through it.
She moves her hand to her hip, where her gun is visible.
The bus screeches off, filling the air with a burned-rubber scorch and a cloud of criminal exhaust.
The smoke settles and there is Dios. Her black curls are braided in two plaits tight to her skull that fall halfway down her back. There are fresh scratches on her cheeks. The cut in her lip has reopened.
Still, she is beautiful like a fucking cobra is beautiful.
She’s wearing a tight black T-shirt with a pink ringer, gray skinny jeans torn at one knee, and flat red boots. Her clothes once belonged to Florida. A badge is hung around her neck. The name, of course, is not her own.
“Pero nunca se fijaron / En tan humilde señora.” Dios smiles. “You weren’t paying attention. I wasn’t saying that I was the humble woman. She was always you, Florida. No one saw you coming. Except for me.”
The time for talk is short. Words are a distraction. They are Dios’s trap. Their time is almost over. Their time was never meant to be but was inevitable.
Florida pulls out the gun.
It’s heavy. Her arm shakes with its weight as she extends it toward Dios, sighting her.
What does it feel like? A toy? An appendage that is not her own? A prop from a different story?
The wind rises.
Tap-tap.
Tap-tap.
The board beats faster.
Florida is aware of someone on the sidewalk scuttling away, someone for whom this is too much to witness. But others will watch, drawn like vultures to the promise of someone else’s pain. Sustained by it.
She coils her finger.
Think. Think back to all the moments that led up to this moment. The hundreds of thousands of seconds that made you you.
Look to the left and you might see Ronna’s ghost on Olympic, here to bear witness to the last stand of your ruinous course, understanding, at last, that she was simply an accidental obstacle to be knocked down. Collateral damage on your journey.
Feel the slight wind.
Imagine your foot on the gas, accelerating to your own destruction.
Press harder.
Drive blind.
It will be over soon.
Florida feels the gun’s weight. The cool metal. The nubbled grip worn smooth. She feels the weight of a decision already taken. Her life has moved on, past this point. She just has to do one small thing to cut the line to the present.
* * *
The woman by the freeway was right. There is no magic in the world, no point wasting time detangling patterns and problems, in rationalizing yourself for others, in explaining yourself away and prophesying your next move. No sense in saying because you handed Carter those matches you wound up in the here and now. There’s no reasoning about who and why we are. No point in puzzling it out. It’s time to take the next step on the journey. Make yourself solid.
* * *
Like the tree, for instance, the one outside the jail. It didn’t represent freedom. Everyone had that wrong. It was steadfast. It stuck it out against nature’s odds.
But it knew.
It understood.
It acknowledged its outrageous claim, its unholy state, and stood there until lightning took it down.
So see the tree. See it in your mind’s eye one last time. See it as it withstood and stood fast. See it proud even when bare. See it prouder in bloom.
See it.
See it as you pull the trigger.
* * *
They are calling to her, summoning her.
Florida hears her old name.
KACE
What will you remember? What will you take with you?
Feel the kickback, the reverb.
Feel the difference half an inch can make, an insignificant movement that contains everything.
Feel yourself explode into that negligible space.
Because there is no hiding in this heartbeat’s worth of time. No way to deceive or lie.
And before everything changes—everything ends—let the world know who you are.
FLORIDA
It’s not a lot—a simple coil of the finger, like scratching your forehead, picking a scab, flicking a piece of lint.
But in that space is a decision.
In that space there is room.
In that space there blossoms a whole world in which you can scream—this is me.
LOBOS
“Florence!”
How many things can happen in a single moment?
A second ago, Lobos and Easton screeched to a stop crosswise on Olympic and Western, zigzagging the intersection.
The bus was early.
She saw it pulling away as they raced up Olympic.
She understands that the bus was beside the point.
Her eye catches something in the distance. A young man painting a graffiti mural. No time for that now.
Together she and Easton spring from the car, their doors as shields, their guns drawn. Her fault that they are late in the first place. Her fault for being unable to speak openly to her partner about how she’d let Florida go. Her fault for trying to handle this on her own, to admit her weakness, her need for help until Easton wrangled it out of her.
And now … Baum and Sandoval stand off a few feet ahead. Neither turns at their arrival.
Sandoval is unarmed.
Baum is sighting her over a pistol that’s approaching antique.
Lobos hears Easton cock his weapon.
She hears herself do the same.
“Florence.”
Her eyes are on Baum’s trigger finger, willing it to be still, to stay the course.
Her neck prickles, alive to each and every movement in the intersection.
And then …
Baum’s finger coils.
It’s time or it’s too late.
“Florence,” Lobos calls again.
Florence turns to face Lobos as her gun goes off. Their eyes meet. Her shot flies low, burying itself in Sandoval’s upper thigh near her groin.
But Lobos’s shot is bang on the money, right in the dead-heart center of Baum’s chest.
She hears Easton exhale next to her. She knows what he’d been thinking. She wouldn’t take the shot. She’d fail at the last minute. She’d make her mess his problem.
She rushes to Florence Baum, whose blood is painting Western.
But it’s too late—the leak of life like the leak of light. In the end, darkness all the way down.
* * *
Lobos jumps in the ambulance with Sandoval. Through the back window she glimpses the artist still at work on his mural, showing the intersection of Western and Olympic. Why paint what’s right in front of you? Lobos wonders as the siren screams and the bus hurtles away.
Sandoval’s eyes are glassy with pain. Her voice fever-pitched.
“Shattered hip bone,” the EMT tells Lobos.
Sandoval tosses her head from side to side. She pulls off her oxygen. “Water.”
The EMT helps her sip. The water streams down her face. Sandoval clears her throat.
“They’ll be telling our story for generations. Yours, mine, and Florida’s. A tale of violent women. A song for the ages with a surprise ending.”
“I’ve had enough of stories,” Lobos says.
“How dark is the darkness in you, Detective?” Sandoval’s voice is tight with pain. “Was it always there, or did it grow when they started telling you how weak you were?” The ambulance hits a bump. Her eyes roll. “Do you want to hurt them? Do you want to hurt us?”
Lobos sets her jaw.
“How fucking good does it feel? Tell me, Detective.”
“Quiet,” Lobos says.
She signals to the EMT. He puts the oxygen mask over Sandoval, silencing her.
There is only the moment that something happens. Everything up until that point dwells in the haze of conjecture. A puzzle that tempts you with the promise of relief, only to confound you once more.
She looks down at Sandoval, furious in her oxygen muzzle. She knows there will be those who will read too deep into Sandoval’s deluded reasonings and make her crimes more important than they were. They will analyze and examine, making the unreasonable reasonable until they’ve found a palatable excuse for her violence. Leave it to the shadowland practitioners who moonlight in Lobos’s field to figure this woman out. Let them find every excuse for what she did except the simple fact of who she is. A violent woman. No different from a violent man.
In the end, what’s done is done and there will be no undoing.
Let others make a story out of it, if they will.
Let them sing their songs.
The siren screams, clearing the cleared streets.
Sandoval thrashes on her stretcher.
She has more to say.
Lobos had thought she’d ridden along to listen—to crack Sandoval’s code, to solve the puzzle. But it turns out she prefers the silence.
* * *
Easton is waiting by the desk sergeant when Lobos returns to Central. She knows what awaits—the protocols and procedures that follow the discharging of a weapon in the line of duty. The interviews and counseling sessions after killing a suspect. She knows that she will have to live with Easton knowing that she chose to let Baum go.
It will be months before she is officially free of this.
And a lifetime before she is free of it at all.
Except, he’s holding out a bottle of whiskey. “You were right. She came to us.”
“You’re kidding,” Lobos says.
“A bet’s a bet.”
She takes the bottle, knowing she won’t enjoy a single sip.
She’d given Florence Baum a choice. She’d explained the stakes.
One way to look at it is that she put Florence in death’s path.
Another is that she allowed her to finish her own story.
A grace we are not all granted.
She looks at her hand, flexes her fingers. If she hadn’t fired, Easton would have, and the outcome would have been the same.
“Lobos, you coming?”
She’s stopped midway to the desk sergeant.
“Got someone for you in interrogation.”
Already it’s starting. The bureaucratic tangle of the messiest cases. The interviews and paperwork, the protocols and conferences set in motion by the slight motion of a finger.
But it’s not one motion, is it? It’s all of those that came before added together. Right?
Wrong.
Lobos empties the last of her mints into her mouth.
There is only the now. Everything else is a trick of the light.
* * *
She follows Easton into the station. He leads her to the interview room, then stands back and lets her go in first.
The shades are drawn.
The lights are low.
Easton steps away, closing the door, leaving Lobos alone with her husband.
He is wild-haired and wild-faced, shaggy and spectral all at once. He is her husband and he isn’t. The stranger she always failed to see before her.
They face off over the table. The heavy two-way glass is dark. No one is watching. The station is silent behind the soundproof walls. Whatever happens in here is hers alone to do and know.
The anger rushes from her brain, coursing through her chest, down her arms, and ending in her hands. Lobos clenches her fists.
She squeezes hard, forcing her nails into her palms.
She pulls out a chair, ready to sit, ready to begin this, to end it, to drive the final nail into their splintered tale.
Where to begin?
What to say?
What—with all eyes shut and ears deaf to this room—to do?
She looks at the man across the table. The streets worn into his face. The smell not his own. His disorganized thoughts playing in his eyes, curling his lips. Who the fuck is he? And … and why does she care?
There is only one thing to do.
Her hands relax. She rolls her shoulders, closes her eyes, exhales a breath she’s held too long.
Nothing.
What’s done is done. This story too is over. However Easton found her husband is his matter. This is just another case. Another perp. Another stalker violating a restraining order.
There are protocols in place for this and Easton can handle them.
Lobos isn’t going to say a word.
It’s not weakness to walk away—to stay quiet and to do nothing. It’s not shame or disgrace. It’s not lack of confidence in herself or in her badge.
It’s time to close this book in silence.
KACE
