GUNNER WAS SITTING IN TRAFFIC on the eastbound 105 when he saw the helicopter. The traffic was nothing new and neither was the police aircraft, the latter cutting and recutting a circle in the gray sky ahead like a boat with a broken rudder. This was Los Angeles, after all, and well east of the great class divide that was La Cienega Boulevard, so inertia and signs of law enforcement in action went hand in hand.
People in the hood called the LAPD’s helicopters “ghetto birds,” and if feathered birds filled the air over the city in greater number on any given day, it wasn’t by a wide margin. At least, that’s how it sometimes felt to Gunner. Day or night, rotors booming and/or searchlights blazing, the choppers were there, doing their part to tighten the noose that forces on the ground were trying to close around the neck of some poor runaway miscreant. They drowned out the sound of televisions and rattled the panes in windows, and when they shook you from a restful sleep at two in the morning, they didn’t leave you in peace to drift back to base until all hope of finding sleep again was lost.
Still, like every other nagging inconvenience that came with being poor and of color in the City of Angels, a man eventually learned to live with the black-and-white flying machines. He could see them and yet not see them; hear the churning of their blades as little more than white noise. Gunner himself had long ago learned to marginalize them in exactly that way.
So this particular ghetto bird meant nothing to him at first. It was just a mild distraction from the gridlock that held him fast, only two exits away from the Wilmington Avenue off-ramp that would take him to his backroom office at Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop on Wilmington and 109th. He was in a foul mood and this delay would do nothing to improve it. Another potential client had offered him a job this morning he couldn’t do for twice what the person wanted to pay, and it had cost him $30 in gas just to hear the pitch and turn it down. The red Shelby Cobra he was driving today guzzled fuel like a wino drank Boones Farm, and Gunner was beginning to think it was an extravagance he could no longer afford. Garaging the car again was a thought that saddened him deeply, so few and far between lately were such small pleasures as getting behind the Cobra’s wheel.
He sat in the convertible’s open-air cockpit, inching forward on his side of the freeway like a child on an amusement park ride, and tried to clear his mind. He’d been a practicing private investigator for over twenty years now, operating out of the one corner of Los Angeles—what few wanted to call South Central anymore—that seemed to have no use for such services. He’d tried to quit a dozen times, a standing offer from his cousin Del to join his electrical maintenance business always on the table, but quitting never stuck. He couldn’t explain why. Something about the profession—if you could call doing the invasive dirty work few people wanted to do for themselves a “profession”—met a deep-seated need in him that nothing else could.
He watched the police helicopter carve another ring in the sky above, now not more than a mile off to his right, and wondered, as he always did, how much the target of the bird’s attention was worthy of such frenzy. Were the uniformed men on the ground pitted against a
killer this time or just another fool? When he read the story in the paper tomorrow, or caught some TV news coverage of it tonight, would he find out all this drama had been caused by a convenience-store robber who’d murdered three people, or a drunken mother of four threatening her neighbors with a garden hoe?
Whatever the case, the media had finally deemed it newsworthy, because now there were two more choppers in the air, each bearing the colors of their respective news agencies. They respectfully hovered just outside the wide orbit of the circling ghetto bird, reminding Gunner of nothing more than vultures waiting for death to deliver their next meal.
Prior to this moment, he had given no thought to what location on the ground might correspond to the police chopper’s flight pattern, but as he drew ever closer to his exit off the freeway, he found himself considering the question. By his calculation, it had to be somewhere in the vicinity of Compton Avenue and 118th Street, give or take a block or two. If he knew anyone who lived in that immediate area, their identity escaped him.
His thoughts turned back to more pressing matters.
He did a mental accounting of his finances, one of several he was doing on a daily basis as of late, and concluded that his situation was uncomfortable but not yet alarming. He had enough money socked away to survive the light trickle his workload had become for five or six months at least, and his bills were all paid up. He’d canceled his cable service a month ago and taken to eating all but a few meals per week at home, two legs of an austerity program that put a few extra dollars in his pocket if nothing else.
Things could have been much worse. He knew people for whom things already were much worse: ordinary people just like himself who’d lost everything—career, home, family—to the fallout of a federally mandated tax cut for the rich that could only be paid for in blood. Not blue blood but red, drained from the veins of the poor and the vanishing all-but-extinct middle class. That Gunner had work at all in the present climate put him well ahead of the game, and he knew it. If the end came for him tomorrow, if he never made another dime, that would still be more time than God or the fates had given many people better than he.
As for what the future might hold, it was hard to be hopeful under the thumb of the fools and madmen currently at the helm in the nation’s capital. Empowered and emboldened by the last elected president, racists and misogynists and neo-Nazis—Nazis!—had emerged from America’s shadows to take center stage, and men and women like Gunner were once again being forced to assert their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on a regular basis. This wasn’t America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by any means, but that was where the country seemed to be headed, following the lead of its commander in chief, a real estate huckster turned politician who made lying into the camera both an art form and a weapon of mass destruction.
Gunner’s cell phone had to ring twice to draw him back from the depths of his growing funk.
The name on the phone’s screen belonged to his cousin the electrician, Del Curry. He didn’t have his Bluetooth headset on, and his first impulse was to just let the phone ring; wind
noise made the device all but worthless in the convertible, and he didn’t want to risk a ticket for driving with the phone up to his ear. Still, any man as short on paying work as Gunner was had to look for opportunity at every turn, and Del had sent prospective clients his way before, so he snatched the phone off the seat and answered it before a third ring tone was complete.
“Del, what’s up?”
The man on the other end of the line was already talking over him. “Aaron? Cuz?”
It sounded like Del, but he couldn’t be sure. The voice had been faint and all but drowned out by some kind of stuttering background noise.
“Man, I fucked up,” Del said, and if the words themselves hadn’t been clear, the way in which he had uttered them—through a despondency that had him crying like a baby—would have been. And despondency wasn’t Del Curry’s thing. “I really fucked up.”
“Fucked up how? Man, what are you talking about?”
His cousin didn’t answer; all Gunner could hear instead was that same dissonant thrumming sound in the background, vaguely familiar yet hard to identify.
“Del!”
“They’re gone, cuz. My girls. They’re both gone and it’s my fault,” Del said, trying to pull himself together. “Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.”
He fell silent again, and somehow Gunner knew he had just heard Del’s voice for the final time. He shouted his cousin’s name into the phone repeatedly, trying now to steer the Cobra off the freeway by force of will alone, but it was hopeless. The cell connection died and Del was gone.
Just in time for Gunner to realize that the incessant droning he’d been hearing over the phone, and the buzzing of three helicopters flying high above his head, had been one and the same.
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