Authors: Michael Crow
Hi-rez. Perfectly clear. Perfectly cold.
Desert Storm's almost blown out, our armored divisions have smashed the Iraqi army, our planes have made the road out of Kuwait City the Highway of Death. My job finished when the tanks shattered the lines we'd been operating behind. Me and my guys on the buggy had hit a dozen installations or communications posts or defensive positions, we'd wasted a lot of ragheads, scared the living shit out of a lot more, before the armor assault. Same as all the buggy teams. Swinging back now southeast out of Iraq toward Kuwait City. Mission complete.
Perfectly clear: cold gray light just before a desert dawn. We come up over a rise maybe three hundred meters away from a stucco building by a little back road. No traffic, no people in sight. Two Iraqi army vehicles outside.
Juke 'em.
JoeBoy floors it, Snake sprays the building with the twin-50s on the way in. Dust and stucco and all kinds of shit's flying all over the place. One vehicle explodes. Can't tell if we're taking fire back. We stop maybe twenty-five meters from a door, I roll out with an MP5SD in each hand. Adren-
179
aline at 100 percent. Duck and dodge inside. There's a dozen Iraqi soldiers, huddled and shivering, their AKs on the ground, hands clasped on top of their heads. Lots of babbling, sounds like begging. Perfectly clear: the bloodshot eyes full of terror, the unshaven whiskers on each face, the torn and filthy uniforms. One dude's holding up a piece of paper. A surrender leaflet. The air force dropped tons of them all over the desert.
Fuck it. Waste the cocksuckers. I squeeze both triggers, hose 'em down with 9mm FMJs. Two full clips, sixty rounds, all my strength keeping down muzzle rise. All the ragheads dead or twitching wounded, five seconds max. I drop one MP5, slip a fresh, full clip into the other, pop three-round bursts into anyone still moving or screaming. Snake comes through the door with an M4, JoeBoy with the SPAS while I'm doing this.
"Holy fuckin' shit, Luther. Oh man, you stepped in it," JoeBoy says. "How we gonna explain this? We weren't taking no fire. We're fucked, man." He's about to hit me when Snake shouts from the second room. We go over, see two girls, clothes all stuffed around their heads, bloody and ripped up between the legs from a gangrape, one bullet hole in each of their tits.
"Fucks you wasted deserved it. But you didn't fuckin' even know it, Luther. You just did it, man," Snake says. "'Cover-up time."
Snake and JoeBoy move gingerly among the Iraqi bodies, place AKs in their hands, press dead fingers against triggers, fire whatever's in the clips into the walls, the doors, out the window into our buggy. So it looks like a firefight. Then I'm standing in the doorway, looking at the holes in the buggy. I hear a click and turn. JoeBoy's kneeling, very carefully sighting an AK. Bam. A sledgehammer knocks my right leg out from under me.
"You crazy motherfuck! You asshole!" I scream. "You fuckin' shot me!"
180
"Hey, not me, man," JoeBoy grins. "A raghead did it. Firefight here, remember."
"Fuck you! Fuck you! I can't believe you shot me!"
Snake's beside me, slits open my camo pants. "Beautiful, JoeBoy," he says. "Right through the calf, clean exit. All meat, no bone. You could stick a pencil straight through, all the way."
"Sure looks like a firefight here," JoeBoy smiles.
Sort of. We radio, our CO arrives maybe an hour later, sees right through our shit. Just scans body positions, entry and exit wounds, buggy damage, hole in my leg, and
knows.
He just knows. But he doesn't want an atrocity on his unit's record, the army doesn't want any stains on its clean, glorious victory. I tell the CO the truth, clear Snake and JoeBoy. They skate, they get to stay in. No court martial for me, either. I'm just told to keep my mouth shut. I'm just told I do not exist, never did exist. Except they're rigging an honorable discharge soon as my wound heals. That's the cover-up.
I tell Annie all of it. She never flinches. She keeps her eyes steady on mine, while I'm having a hell of a time keeping mine on hers.
"They turned you into the guy who did that, Luther," she says when I quit talking. "They psyched you and tuned you and played with your mind and sent you into that shit cocked, with a hair-trigger. You
can
walk away from it."
"I have. Fuck the dudes I wasted. Only thing I regret is losing my career."
"No, no. I mean you can absolve yourself, you don't have to stay like you were on that one day in the desert. That wasn't really you, that day. You can get back to the real, you can get on with a real life instead of the movie you're living."
"Like I said, Annie. Too late now."
"They
fucked you up, Luther. Like I've heard you say, unfuck it. Unfuck yourself."
I can't tell her the whole truth. About the rush. I can't tell
181
her I like it when I drop someone, I get off on it. It wouldn't be cool. I'd lose her.
When Annie's left, I get dressed carefully, nice clean white shirt, clean jeans, suede chukkas. I drive down to the GBMC.
Soon as I walk into IB's room he starts laughing like a lunatic, smile so broad a couple of the butterflies on his face rip. "Who in the hell scalped you, Chief?" he says. "Man, I'm glad to see you. But not like this. You look like a nightmare. Listen up, I've got two beauties upstairs in the maternity ward. They're perfect, man. You never saw such beautiful kids. You go up there to see them and MJ, I swear on my life I'll crush your bones. 'Cause you'll scare 'em silly, the way you look."
Back and forth with IB like this for maybe ten minutes, he's so high on surviving and his new babies he's babbling stuff he'll never remember and be absolutely convinced he never said if I ever claim he did. Stuff about saving his life by capping those dealers. You know, just shit. He got hit anyway, didn't he?
I leave him and go see MJ. She looks wrung out but high and happy too. She babbles some nonsense she must have got from IB. I just smile a lot, tell her Allison and Sarah are beautiful and so is she, leave her some flowers.
Then I hit the station. Lots of uniforms looking at me funny and I know it isn't the haircut. The atmosphere in the squadroom's a little sour because of Taggert, nobody ever wants a fellow cop to go down even if he was an asshole, and there's always the shock factor—you know, "Christ, if it happened to him it could happen to me" thinking. But it's half-balanced by the good news about Tommy and IB. Funny eye action behind the smiles and nods of greeting, though. It ain't just the haircut.
I sit in my cubicle, switch on the Mac and call up a file to make it seem like I'm doing something besides staring into space. Annie at my place starts auto-replay in my mind.
182
It hurts. Stop button doesn't work. I drop two tabs with that bitter deli coffee I can't stand but drink every day anyway. I don't feel like doing anything or talking to anyone.
The phone fucks that.
Dog first. "Shit goes down even in the Valley, huh? Oh, you bad, Luther."
"You're vergin' on disrepect, Dog. Sure you got the stones to diss me?"
"Get down, shortie. Hear you lost one, popped three. Nobody fucks with my man, huh?"
"Deal goes bad, what you expect? What you think the guns are for?"
"You nice with your hands, too."
"That what you hear?"
"Saw. A while back, remember? What I wanna hear now, home, is what heaters the gangstas was packin'?"
"Same as the dudes who made that house call down where you hang. AK 5.45s. And they whities. We don't let no nigger gangbangers move in our 'hood."
"Hey Luther, what say you and I drop the street mouths? It's funny for a while but it gets old. Agreed? Have you got identification yet?"
"Not confirmed, just driver's licenses. Our print people are working on it."
"Are you gonna pass it on, once you get solid IDs?"
"Don't need to wait on that. Russians. And I called the Russian they worked for this morning. I think he'll be calling me back real soon."
Dog laughs. "No frontin', nigger. I'm beginning to like you again. Maybe you a homie after all."
"Get off my shit, nigger. I thought we were dropping the street jive."
Dog laughs again. "Can't seem to help myself. Too many years on that street, in the lane. And, oh yeah, you got me scared. Capped three. I dig it, homie. I'm around, you get callback."
"Later, Dog."
183
Dugal next. I suppose he doesn't want to start talk in the squadroom by hauling me into his office, so he calls instead.
"You fit, Luther? You are feeling right about what went down? Do you feel the need for counseling? Posttrauma?"
"Nan, LT. I'm good. Everything's cool. You, sir?"
"I've been better. I don't like a bust going bad. I hate losing a man. In fact, I never lost anyone before. This escalation to city-style violence is very disturbing."
"Affirmative, LT."
"We'll deal with it. In an orderly fashion. But the pressure is coming down from up top very quickly. Very powerfully."
"That's the way it usually comes."
Then it's Helen. "Hey, babe. I just heard on the radio about the cop getting shot last night. Got worried. You weren't involved or anything?"
"I was there."
"Oh my God! I didn't think things like that happened out here, only downtown. You're okay? You're sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine. Really. It wasn't such a big deal. You know how the media makes everything seem more dramatic. It's show business for them."
'If you're okay, prove it."
Suddenly I flash on that sketch. "How?" I ask.
"Invite me over to your place tonight."
"Can't tonight. But hey, pretty, how about stopping by my place tomorrow night? If you're free? We'll watch a DVD, maybe fool around a little?"
Helen laughs. "What time?"
"Say, seven-thirty?"
"I'll be there. Take care, babe. Okay?"
20
Nighttime, I'm home alone. Not brooding, just on low simmer. Sometimes it all gets too much for my fucked brain— the people, the connections, the way the world turns. Skewed, all of it. Panic flashes that I might be losing it. Fucking neurologists can't even tell me what exactly that dead gray matter controls, so they can't say if anything really weird is suddenly going to pop up, take over. Only thing they're sure of is the seizures. It's the uncertainty that freaks me.
Annie'd say I'm wallowing, sitting all by myself watching
The Professional,
starring that same French guy who played Victor the Cleaner in
La Femme Nikita.
In this one he's Leon, deadly assassin for the New York mafia, calls himself a cleaner. I like that. "Cleaner." Got a certain je ne sais quoi cool I appreciate. Doesn't matter that it's a movie maker's made-up term nobody ever used on the street. Young guys coming up in the trade will probably adopt it.
Phone rings just when Leon is doing an only-in-Hollywood job of taking out DEA agents in full military combat mode while hanging from a bar on the ceiling of his apartment, with a twelve-year-old girl as his backup.
I press
pause,
pick up. "What?"
"My friend, you are good?" It's Vassily. "Time, I think, we see each other."
"What I was thinking this morning."
185
Vassily laughs. "I got an idea for something we can do together. Some good friends of mine, they run into a little trouble down in the place you are."
"Friends of yours? Then I'm sure they know how to take care of any little trouble."
"Same thought for me! But the trouble for them, it was final. You were right."
"And you call it little?"
"Da. In the big scheme of things. Anyway, what I have in mind ... let's have a talk."
"So. My place or yours?"
'Take a vacation, why not? Come up here."
"Where and when?"
"Oh, say tomorrow? Anytime you like. What kind of car you drive?"
I tell Vassily a TT. He's never seen one. I describe it.
"You just park on Brighton Boulevard, across street from Palace nightclub. We find you, if you find place."
"I'll get a map. If I get lost, I'll just ask a cop for directions."
Vassily laughs. "Ah, little brother, always the humor. This is good. Too serious men, I don't trust. They break easy. Brittle, no?"
"More or less."
I hit
play
and see Leon the Cleaner take out a few more DEA guys with his pistols. Surround sound. Almost sounds real. But not quite.
Then I call Dog.
Around midnight I'm walking the Dog down Greenmount Avenue in the Waverly neighborhood. A movie theater, a supermarket that should be cleaner, lots of cheap stores selling clothes, mattresses, shoes, CDs and tapes. A pharmacy chain branch that stocks lots of hair-care products and too few Pharmaceuticals to fill the Medicaid presciptions old folks bring in. A few blocks to the west is the perfectly manicured campus of Johns Hopkins University, world-class institu-