Green Sun, page 6
Chapter Eight
Felix Maxwell
A hot wind was gusting in from Lodi or Tonopah, lifting plastic bags and fast-food trash into the darkened sky. It blew into Oakland two or three times a year, every spring, from the desert, hissing through the trees, shaking screen doors and rattling windows, trying to get in.
Dust glittered in the patrol car’s headlights, and when Hanson turned south on High Street a pack of feral dogs broke cover, their yellow eyes flickering like pistol shots in his high beams. Radio whispered and snarled with calls for service, still backed up from the afternoon, some of them two and three hours old. Hanson had been going call to call across Districts Four and Five since the beginning of his shift, hungover and half sick from the brandy he’d passed out with the night before. He steered west on East 14th Street, microphone in one hand, poised to jump in between transmissions and clear from his last call, a drunken 245 involving a kitchen knife and a spray can of oven cleaner.
3L34, disregard that last call and cover 3L40.
3L34 copy…uh, the location again?
The horizon shuddered with silent heat lightning.
Yeah, yeah, Hanson thought, rubbing his eyes with the back of his microphone hand as Radio repeated the address for whoever was working 3L34. “Pay attention, dipshit. Come on,” his thumb on the push-to-talk button.
Car with the traffic stop?
4L14 at Sixty-Fifth and MacArthur.
Wait one, 4L14.
Up the block a pearly white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was double-parked out in front of Raylene’s Discount Liquors. Glowing an otherworldly purple in the neon light from the barred windows of the liquor store, it had drawn a crowd, people surrounding the Rolls, out in the street. Hanson hung up the mike and pulled to the curb half a block away, turning on just his rear amber flashers, watching the crowd grow, his eyes bloodshot and the knuckle he’d fucked up at the last call throbbing like a pulse. He made a fist to hurt the pain.
Getting out of the patrol car he stuck his citation book in his back pocket and slammed the door shut with his hip, leaving his nightstick in the car. There wouldn’t be enough room to use it in the middle of so many people. The amber flashers made a metallic tonk-tonk, tonk-tonk, and the radio PAC-set on his belt barked and hissed at him. He hitched the heavy gun belt up and turned off the PAC-set.
He tightened his fist on the jammed knuckle, looked down at it. Does that hurt? How about this? he thought, punching the fist into the palm of his other hand. He smiled at the pain, glad for the chance to get out of the patrol car, his back aching from the broken-down bench seat. And it was a relief to have the radio off, like shedding a headache he hadn’t realized he had until it went away. Radio didn’t know where he was, so if things went bad, he was on his own. Fine, he thought. Good.
The crowd wasn’t hostile yet, but it wasn’t friendly either. Not friendly, he thought, smiling at that. “My friends, may I have a word with you?” He laughed out loud, at the edge of the crowd now, and people who’d been acting like he wasn’t there turned to look at him. He felt the muscles in his shoulders and chest on-call. His eyes were smiling now. It was his mean smile.
“Hi,” he demanded, “how you doin’?” wading into the crowd.
Levon had been watching Hanson since he’d pulled the patrol car to the curb. From the backseat of the Rolls he could see two of him, one in each side mirror, coming their way through the crowd, bad smile on his face. It had been a while since he’d seen anyone move like that.
Felix and Tyree had driven up from LA that afternoon and picked up Levon just as it was getting dark. Felix had been in LA for three months and now he was back in town and wanted to drive around the neighborhood, get right back in touch.
Felix was working the crowd, up front in the passenger seat, window rolled down, talking to old Jessie Bacon, calling him Uncle Jessie, then palming a hundred-dollar bill into his hand to dismiss him.
Felix could think two moves ahead of everybody else—damn smart and a good politician when he felt like it. Other times, though—lately—even when it was important, he didn’t want to go out at all, brooding back in that concrete bunker of his. Some days he was good as ever, taking care of business. Other times he’d take offense over nothing, suspect plots against him for no good reason. Tonight he was fine—a little full of himself, which was how he’d always been, had to be to get where he was. Maybe the time down in LA had been good for him.
Levon was getting to be an old man, sixty-one years old in October. Had more money than he’d need for the rest of his life. Time to retire while he still could, somewhere nobody knew him and nobody could find him. Where it was warm and people were polite, but he couldn’t quit on Felix now, not for a few months, anyway.
He looked at the cop again in the right side mirror.
Felix shook hands through the window with a young player who wouldn’t live to see twenty.
“You do now,” he said to the kid, laughing.
“A real honor, Mr. Maxwell,” the kid said. “If I can ever be of help to you, please let me know.”
The kid actually made a little bow, took a step backward, then joined back up with his posse.
Levon kept a hand on his army issue Colt 1911 till the kid turned and walked away. Too many goddamn people to watch at once. He didn’t know why he’d brought that damn Uzi, it was worthless in a crowd like this. He must be getting old and stupid too.
“Felix,” he said, “let’s go.”
“Noblesse oblige, Levon,” Felix said. “I’ve known these people all my life. They expect to be able to speak to me.”
“You’ve watched those Godfather movies too many times. You see that cop coming this way?”
“Since he parked his patrol car. I’ve met that officer, Levon.”
“Take another look.”
Hanson’s jammed knuckle felt good now. His hangover was gone. A good-looking woman in a sequined halter top and hot pants pouted at him from the sidewalk, working her hips, shaking a finger at him like one of the Pointer Sisters. Hanson grinned at her, making eye contact.
“Great night, eh?” he asked, brushing past three guys who were trying to ignore him. When they didn’t answer he stopped, turned, and looked back at them. “Isn’t it?” he said, waiting for an answer, smiling, and looking at them with Shirley Temple eyes, wide-open-crazy, a trick he’d discovered years before. A look that was intimate and berserk, so unnatural no one had ever seen it before and didn’t know how to react. It was easy too, and fun.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then, and, hey, look at that moon comin’ up,” he said, pushing it, over the top now. “Moon, moon, moon,” he crooned, turning away, parting the crowd. Heat lightning flared like a pane of glass out over the bay. He had the glow tonight, and nothing could touch him.
Levon saw Lemon Lee push his way through the crowd, angling in front of the cop. He laid his big arms across the roof of the Rolls, leaned down, his big buffalo head filling the window on the passenger side. “Felix, I got a bone to pick with you.”
“Why don’t you talk to me, Lemon,” Levon said from the backseat.
“I want to hear from you, Levon, you’ll know it right away. My problem’s with your boy Felix.”
Levon had known Lemon Lee since they were kids. Lemon was already an asshole in the third grade. He had been recruited right out of high school to play left field for the Kansas City Monarchs, black baseball’s glamour franchise. Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige had played for the Monarchs, before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Lemon was the Monarchs’ power hitter for two years, until the money and his own hostility ruined him, and the team let him out of his contract. He got by after that, working for different people, doing different things, most of them illegal. Levon couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been killed years before now. He was big, true enough, but an angry one-hundred-thirty-five-pound sixteen-year-old with a 9mm doesn’t care how big you are.
Lemon would be happier dead, Levon thought. Maybe God was keeping him alive as punishment. He’d never seen much evidence for that kind of personal God, though, Levon thought, gripping the .45 and reaching for the door handle.
Hanson got through the crowd to the car just as a big man in his late fifties leaned down to speak to somebody in the Rolls, his tent-size yellow shirt pulled up, exposing his hairy black back. Hanson stepped up close behind him and said, “Excuse me,” but the man ignored him. “Excuse me, please,” Hanson said, touching his shoulder. He glanced around this time, to look at his shoulder, as if whoever had touched him had soiled the yellow shirt. “Get off me, motherfucker,” he said, flipping his hand behind his back at Hanson, dismissing him, waving him off.
Time slowed down for Hanson then, all but stopped. Usually he kept his mean streak chained and triple-locked down, where he didn’t hear it, but now its howls rose up with the whine and screech of his tinnitus.
He watched Lemon’s huge hand floating toward him, flexing at the wrist and knuckles, easy to catch. He gripped the wrist with his left hand and the middle finger—big as a cigar—with his right. He pulled back on the wrist to keep Lemon off-balance and broke the finger. Lemon yelled, turning away from the car, Hanson twisting his wrist with both hands now for control and driving the side of his boot into Lemon’s knee, dislocating the kneecap, on down the shin and through the arch of his foot, crushing that complex and delicate bundle of bones and tendons and nerves. He stepped away as Lemon fell to the street and found himself looking at Felix Maxwell, who looked back as if he was in on this joke, the guy with the eyes and wire-rim glasses who’d been in the midnight-blue Cadillac in the alley that night he talked the street dancers into going home.
Lemon was bellowing and flopping like a big yellow fish, and Hanson turned to the crowd. “Does anybody know this man? Heart attack. He needs an ambulance and my radio’s not working.”
Behind him Felix made a hand gesture to the crowd and some gang kid stepped out, him and his posse. A moment later they half carried, half dragged Lemon Lee away, heat lightning flaring overhead, stopping the moment like a camera flash.
“Good evening,” Hanson said, absolutely happy, stepping up to the car.
“Good evening to you, Officer. A heart attack you think?”
Hanson glanced down, to keep from smiling now, shook his head, looked back up. “Who can say?”
“Maybe Satan struck him down.”
“Satan’s always out there,” Hanson said, beaming.
Hanson nodded to the older gentleman in the backseat, then to the kid behind the steering wheel. “Looks like I should have approached from the other side of the ve-hickle. The steering wheel’s way over there on the other side. Anyway,” he said to the young driver, “since I’m here, could I see your driver’s license, sir?”
“Did I break some law when I wasn’t paying attention?”
“Show the officer your license,” Felix said, reading Hanson’s name tag. “My nephew,” he told Hanson. “Sometimes he speaks before he thinks.”
Hanson nodded.
“And may I introduce my mentor, Levon, always looking out for me.”
Levon in the backseat was bigger than Felix. He’d have been a much rougher looking man but for his demeanor and well-cut clothes, his suit coat draped across the seat next to him not quite concealing the outline of a 9mm Uzi. Another cop probably wouldn’t have noticed the outline or recognized what it was, but Hanson had trained with an Uzi years before. He nodded at the suit coat. “Starting to get warm. I’ll be glad when they decide to switch us over to short-sleeve shirts.”
“It’s my car,” Felix said. “The registration is in the glove box,” waiting to open it until Hanson indicated that was okay. When Hanson nodded, he opened the bird’s-eye maple glove box, took out the registration, and gave it to Hanson. “I bought it in LA last week. We’re just out for a drive tonight. Tyree wanted to see how it handled.”
Hanson looked over the registration and handed it back. The name on the registration was Felix Maxwell. He took the kid’s driver’s license, copied the information into his notebook: Tyree Raymond Stewart. “Thank you, Mr. Maxwell—and you, Mr. Stewart,” he said, nodding to the driver as he handed back the driver’s license. “It’s a beautiful car. I’m worried, though, with you double-parked like this, if some drunk driver drove down this street, with all these people you’ve attracted.”
Felix nodded. “We’ll get out of the street here and on our way. If you don’t need any more information. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Maxwell,” Hanson said, patting the hood of the Rolls, “for your help tonight with the crowd. I’m grateful. You too, sir,” he said to the man in the backseat, ignoring the Uzi so completely that he might as well have been staring directly at it. The shiny cover of a new book, on the far side of the backseat, caught what little light there was: Retire to Jamaica. “Okay, Mr. Maxwell,” Hanson said. “Be careful. This is a dangerous part of town.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Felix said.
“I hope that large gentleman is feeling better and on his way to the doctor. Do you know him?”
“Never saw him before.”
Hanson nodded, exchanging a smile with Felix, and walked away, the crowd making room for him this time.
The girl in the hot pants puckered her lips and blew Hanson a kiss. He gave her a two-fingered John Wayne salute and walked back to his beater patrol car as the Rolls pulled silently away.
There’d been no reason to bring up the Uzi. They were dope dealers and needed it for business. The only people they might shoot with it would be other dope dealers. If he’d called it in, there would have been a big deal for nothing. Maxwell would’ve bailed out of jail in an hour or two and he would’ve been doing paperwork till midmorning for the Feds at ATF, who would’ve been pissed about getting called out in the middle of the night. The OPD wouldn’t have been happy about involving the Feds, and nothing would have come of it anyway. No rush. Maxwell and those gang kids had probably saved his ass with the crowd. He’d run into Maxwell again.
Radio sounded like two or three auctioneers talking at once. Districts Four and Five still hadn’t caught up with the backlog of calls that always piled up before the beginning of the shift. Standing behind the open door of his patrol car, Hanson made some notes for himself about the Rolls and occupants, then he got in and slammed the door shut so it would latch. The car smelled of vomit and urine, cigarette smoke, fear, and salty blood. The sprung bench seat put him so low he could barely see over the steering wheel, as if he was too young to have a driver’s license. He thought he might buy a seat cushion for work, smiled at that, and started the car.
In the Rolls, now turning down 69th Street, Felix looked out the window, studying the stars.
“He saw the Uzi,” Tyree said. “I know he did. We’re gonna be up to our asses in cops as soon as he calls it in.”
Felix shook his head.
“He saw it, Uncle Fee.”
“I know he saw it, Tyree,” Felix said, tilting his head a little, still looking up at the stars. “But he’s not gonna call it in.” He settled back into the gray leather seat, the pearly white Rolls glowing like the moon, rushing past the wreckage of East Oakland, where Felix had grown up.
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“He thought it was funny. He was fucking with Levon about it, fuckin’ with all of us. He was all pumped up from walking through the crowd, like Moses parting the Red Sea. But if I’m wrong,” he told Tyree, glancing back at Levon, “we’ll just put it in your lap and say it’s yours. So either way I’m not worried.”
“What I tell you about that cop, the way he moved,” Levon said, laughing a little. “He fucked Lemon up. Broke his finger, then come down on his foot.”
Tyree looked at Felix. “I thought he had a heart attack or some kind of, you know, seizure or something like that.”
“That cop seized his ass,” Levon said. Then to Felix, “Lemon doesn’t have a lot of friends, but the cop was walkin’ on thin ice out there with that crowd. He was lucky you had that kid and his crew of thugs available to drag Lemon away.”
“Now that kid’s gonna want a job. A corner to work,” Felix said. “Did you look in his eyes?”
“I wouldn’t trust him either.”
“As a short-term employee,” Felix said, “we might be able to use him.
“I told you that I’ve seen that cop before,” Felix went on. “He’s the cop who stood on top of his patrol car and asked the crowd to leave. I’ve heard some things about him. New on the Department, but he’s worked somewhere else. Nobody to fuck with but not an asshole. Not well liked on the Department.”
“He’s okay in my book,” Levon said. “I thought I might have to kill Lemon back there, and go to jail for the night. I appreciate not being in jail.”
“You see, Tyree? Be polite to police officers up here. Don’t kiss their ass but be polite. And pay attention to everything—his eyes, the way he moves, not just the uniform. That’s one reason they wear a uniform, so they look all the same. But they’re not all the same.
“Let’s go home,” Felix said. “Officer say it be dangerous out here after dark.”
The electric seat hummed as Felix tilted it back and closed his eyes for a moment, pulling something attached to a gold chain out from his shirt—a little hourglass carved out of clear quartz crystal, caged in gold, filled with tiny diamond chips instead of sand. He opened his eyes, held it up between thumb and forefinger, and tipped it over, watching the glittering chips sift through the neck and drift down to the bottom.
“No matter what happens,” he said to himself, as if he was alone in the car, “it happens. But time always just keeps piling up.”
