Green Sun Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Winter—Idaho

  Chapter Two: The Academy

  Chapter Three: My Girl

  Chapter Four: Temple Rabbit

  Chapter Five: Weegee

  Chapter Six: Post Certificate

  Chapter Seven: The Rock Shop

  Chapter Eight: Felix Maxwell

  Chapter Nine: Wind

  Chapter Ten: Friendly Fire

  Chapter Eleven: Stats

  Chapter Twelve: The Liquor Store

  Chapter Thirteen: Run Piedmont

  Chapter Fourteen: The Weather’s Changing

  Chapter Fifteen: Elvis Hitler

  Chapter Sixteen: Go Along to Get Along

  Chapter Seventeen: Libya

  Chapter Eighteen: Lake Merritt

  Chapter Nineteen: Felix and Levon

  Chapter Twenty: Weegee’s Bird Book

  Chapter Twenty-one: Solstice

  Chapter Twenty-two: The Ville

  Chapter Twenty-three: Chinatown

  Chapter Twenty-four: Devils & Angels

  Chapter Twenty-five: Direct Course of Action

  Chapter Twenty-six: Downtown

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Lost Car

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Neighborhood Beef

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Felix Thanks Hanson

  Chapter Thirty: Narc Car Stop

  Chapter Thirty-one: I’ll Go Back Anyway

  Chapter Thirty-two: Thinking About Libya

  Chapter Thirty-three: Counterfeit Stars

  Chapter Thirty-four: Second Time

  Chapter Thirty-five: Overtime

  Chapter Thirty-six: Libya Tells Weegee a Story

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Concussion

  Chapter Thirty-eight: Weegee Visits

  Chapter Thirty-nine: Flint’s Ribs

  Chapter Forty: Everything’s Fine

  Chapter Forty-one: Secret Government

  Chapter Forty-two: The Lion

  Chapter Forty-three: Medal of Valor

  Chapter Forty-four: Red Porsche

  Chapter Forty-five: Weegee in Peril

  Chapter Forty-six: I’m Done

  Chapter Forty-seven: Lone Pine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kent Anderson

  Newsletters

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2018 by Kent Anderson

  Cover design by Allison J. Warner

  Cover photographs: Trevor Payne / Arcangel Images (neighborhood); Reilika Landen / plainpicture (police car)

  Author photograph by Manolo Mylonas

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: February 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-46682-0

  E3-20180130-NF-DA

  For my sweet Elizabeth

  Chapter One

  Winter—Idaho

  It’s winter in Idaho, past midnight, and it should be dark, but the wind-driven snow crackles with lightning and shakes the clattering glassy branches of frozen trees. Green and blue curtains of aurora borealis flare and furl and curtsy across the northern horizon.

  Hanson appears out of the hissing snow with a double armload of firewood, on his way to the cabin. An owl, back in the trees where the wind doesn’t seem to touch him, watches with great yellow eyes as Hanson drops the wood onto the porch, opens the door, and goes inside, pushing the door closed against the wind. He hangs up his coat and feeds chunks of split locust into the cast-iron stove, watching the fire leap up before closing and latching the door. The only light in the cabin comes from the crazed mica window in the hinged stove door, flickering the cabin walls in and out like an old movie projector. It had seemed like April, spring on its way, when the storm blew down from the Hi-Line. He sits cross-legged in front of the fireplace, drinking tequila from the bottle, looking at his books stacked and shelved against the walls, the titles on their spines glittering in the firelight.

  He’ll be leaving in another six weeks, as soon as the quarter is over and he’s turned in his grades. He’ll miss his students—he knows that—and the cabin too, half a mile above Boise, where he walks the hills through all the seasons, watching the weather roll in from the northwest. But after three years as an assistant professor at the university in town, he’s leaving. The English Department will be glad to see him go. He isn’t anything like them and wonders how he ever thought he was. He’s going back to the only work he could find after the war, a job where people understand pain better than rhetoric. So much for the life of the mind, he thinks, smiling—time to go back to what he was good at.

  He reaches into the neck of his wool shirt and pulls out a compass the size of a dime that he wears on a cord. An army issue survival compass he’s had since the war. The olive-drab enamel has chipped off the edge of the brass case, but the compass still works like it should, something he can trust if he thinks he’s lost. He holds it level, watches the arrow turn, twitch, reverse itself, and steady up on north. Good old north, he thinks. You can depend on north, where it’s always ice and howling wind and polar bears out there, white shadows deep in the blowing snow.

  Finishing the last of the tequila, he stands and walks to one of the bookcases, considering the titles in the firelight, touching them, pulls out his Yeats, still warped to the shape of his leg from carrying it everywhere in Vietnam, wrapped in plastic, in a pocket of his tiger suit. He taps it with his knuckle, smiling, and slips it back into its place between The Oxford Book of English Verse and a King James Bible he picked up one night in a Motel 6 in Salt Lake City.

  He’s lived in isolated A-camps where he was always awake, even when he slept, in cities where he booby-trapped his apartment with trip wires, shotgun shells, and blasting caps behind the Sheetrock. And once, in a cabin by the Rio Costilla in the Sangre de Cristos in Northern New Mexico, seventy miles from the nearest supermarket, he had to make peace with ghosts. Their bodies had been buried on the property during the wars between the Spanish and the Ute Indians two hundred years before, and for the first week or so he slept outside by the river while they watched him, chanted, tore their own arms and legs off in display, and one night called an icy wind down from the mountains that uprooted three of the ancient cottonwood trees growing by the river. After that they left him alone—accepted him, he liked to think—and he was glad to have them out there a
t night, watching over the place.

  Outside, the snow blows silently in the wind, rushes, spins, whirls away, and gone. The distant glow of lights in the town below.

  In the partitioned end of the cabin that is the bedroom, he shucks off his jeans and long underwear, slips between crisp pale-green sheets and, with his hands clasped behind his head, studies the flickering shadows on the log-and-plank ceiling. His ears chitter and chirp and ring and whine with the tinnitus the VA doctors told him would never get better, only worse.

  Death is in the cabin, on the other side of the wall. Hanson had heard him opening and closing the drawers of his desk, reading old mail. He’s looking at the books, talking to them in his ancient language. When he begins to sing Hanson smiles, closing his eyes. Death is watching the fire. In the sky above the cabin, far beyond the storm and earth’s concerns, the constellation Orion, huge and magnificent, is keeping time.

  Chapter Two

  The Academy

  Running third now, Hanson picked up his pace. He could talk to the pain. He could hurt the pain if he had to. He could step out of his body, watch himself run, and leave the pain behind. But Hanson trusted pain. It was real, not some abstraction or metaphor or clever analogy at a goddamn English Department cocktail party. On the street, whoever takes the most pain wins, simple as that, and Hanson could take as much as anybody wanted to serve up. So he was singing:

  “Well, I had an old dog an’ his name was Blue,

  Had an old dog, an’ his name was Blue,

  Had an old dog…”

  He jogged across the street, crossed back again. He couldn’t see the runners ahead of him or, looking back, behind him. Well.

  “Had an old dog, his name was bluuuu,

  Betcha five dollars he’s a good dog too…”

  Come on, he told himself, come on. Run. He angled across Railroad Park, running parallel with a ten-foot hedge, its dusty leaves mutated with pollution. On the other side of the hedge a massive steam locomotive—silver and gleaming black—seemed to move with him, picking up speed, flickering through the branches.

  Third place, fine, he thought. Good. I like third place. Gimme third place, it is only running, after all. Who kills who is what it comes down to. It doesn’t matter how fast you can run if you’re dead. Nothing matters if you’re dead—who you were or thought you were, what you believed, which gang you belonged to. That’s all over. The good thing about death is that you no longer have to deal with your failures—the times when you were scared, uncertain, drunk, when your memory or social skills let you down, all the times you should have done better than you managed to do. That’s all over too. When you’re dead you can relax finally and get some sleep.

  But he felt good today, running, good and mean. The harder he ran the better he felt, and when he felt really good he didn’t want to dance or laugh or sing—he wanted to kick ass. He’d tried to explain that to normal people but couldn’t even explain it to himself. The reason why didn’t matter, not in combat or alone on the street with a badge and a gun. He was fine out there. “No problem, Your Honor, good as gold, sir, ready to meet the public,” he announced, laughing, as he ran.

  Just up ahead McCarty, who had been in second place, limped toward downtown, one hand on his hip. Hanson snarled and pushed a little harder, looking for Byron Fernandez, ahead in the lead somewhere. Fernandez was his only friend in the Academy. You’d think he was Hispanic with that name, but he was a middle-class black kid who’d grown up over in Alameda. He’d better catch up to Fernandez soon, though, because the high-rise Oakland Police Justice Center was in sight now, rising above the trees and traffic, blocking the sun.

  A deputy chief had made the decision to accept Hanson’s application and hire him unseen over the objections of Lieutenant Garber in Training, the officer in charge of the Academy. He was, after all, a deputy chief, and subordinate officers like Lieutenant Garber needed to be reminded of that fact from time to time. Besides, Hanson had four years of previous police experience working the ghetto of Portland, Oregon, a city roughly the same size as Oakland, that like Oakland had brought in trainloads of black families from the South to work in the shipyards and defense factories of World War II. When the shipyards and factories shut down, they were stuck. In Portland he had received a number of citations for valor and innovation. He’d been a Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam, winning two Bronze Stars. He had a master’s degree in English literature and was teaching English at Boise State University. True, he was thirty-eight years old, but many of the OPD’s best officers were in that age group. Hanson, he had declared, would be an asset to the Department. The reasons this deputy chief had approved Hanson for the Academy were the reasons Lieutenant Garber didn’t want Hanson. He’d learned the job in a different police department—he was too old—he wasn’t going to be trainable.

  By the time Hanson arrived in Oakland and discovered that he would be required to go through the five-month Police Academy, with twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-old recruits as classmates, the deputy chief was no longer with the Department.

  Every Tuesday afternoon for several months prior to Hanson’s arrival, the deputy chief had been meeting a woman named Brandi in a comped room at the Marriott Hotel. Brandi had been introduced to the deputy chief by a DEA mutual acquaintance, a crony of Lieutenant Garber. Under Lieutenant Garber’s direction, surveillance was set. Video cameras were installed, and Lieutenant Garber, along with a sergeant from Vice, watched the crime-in-progress: accepting a gratuity, free use of the room at the Marriott. The deputy chief was not charged or arrested, but the week before Hanson arrived he resigned from the Oakland Police Department to take a job with the Detroit PD.

  Hanson knew nothing of this, of course, but he had realized that signing up for the OPD was a mistake. He was not what they wanted, and they were not what he wanted, but he needed the job. They thought he had a bad attitude, and he did. Lieutenant Garber and the Training cadre had started in on him from his first day in the Academy, trying to coerce him into resigning, but good luck on that, he thought. He was tougher than they were.

  At one of the first formal inspections, Sergeant White, a senior cadre, told Hanson that the hideaway pocket in his new wool pants wasn’t deep enough to accommodate his “short wood,” a ten-inch lead-filled billy club they’d been issued in addition to the longer nightstick—for close work. When Hanson said, “Yes, sir, I’ll have it fixed,” White reprimanded him for unnecessary talking in formation and put a memo of reprimand in his file. Most recently White had written a memo for Hanson’s file about the last inspection, when he’d told Hanson to pull his uniform pants pockets inside out and pointed out a union label sewn into the bottom of the right pocket, a uniform violation. Hanson had to respond in writing, explaining how he’d been derelict in not removing the pocket label.

  He’d made White look bad at the outdoor firing range when White had picked him to use as an example of how difficult it was to fire a handgun accurately after running thirty yards and back. Hanson had put all six rounds in the black, and all White could say was “Normally it’s difficult to shoot accurately when you’ve been in a chase and are under pressure. Remember what I’m telling you, not Hanson’s dumb luck. There’s no luck out on the street.” Hanson realized then that he should have blown a couple of shots, but when he started shooting he’d gone into point-and-shoot muscle memory, his body taking over, faster than thought, into survival mode.

  He’d felt a little bad about making White look stupid at the firing range. Some days White started drinking after lunch, Hanson could smell it on him. White’s life, he imagined, was difficult enough. But Hanson was getting weary of it, and he’d never had any such compassion for Lieutenant Garber.

  Lieutenant Garber, several years younger than Hanson, had not done much time on the street, as was the case with most officers above the rank of sergeant, but had instead spent the years preparing for promotion exams and learning how to navigate the internal politics of the Department. His
official objection to Hanson, voiced frequently to the Training cadre, was that Hanson was insubordinate. Hanson could be ironic sometimes when he shouldn’t be and he asked too many questions in class just to stay interested and awake, but it wasn’t insubordination. Hanson could follow orders and maintain a respectful demeanor.

  It was late in the afternoon on a Friday, and Hanson, along with most of the class, was having trouble staying awake after the run that morning and a two-hour lecture on traffic law. Lieutenant Garber had come in at five to teach a class on writing search warrants for a test Monday morning, but he digressed into a rant about a recent probable cause ruling by the California Supreme Court and its “Communist” Chief Justice Rose Bird that had, once again, further eroded police powers.

  The rest of the class leaned forward in their desks, listening intently, encouraging the lieutenant to go on so that the search warrant test might be postponed. Hanson sat back and listened too, skeptical as usual of Lieutenant Garber’s politics, but telling himself to just listen and not ask any questions—this wasn’t a college classroom. It hadn’t been but a couple of weeks earlier when he’d suggested to a lecturer that police officers were basically armed social workers whose job was to interpret and enforce the social contract of the community they patrolled. Fernandez saw Hanson thinking, and when the lieutenant turned to close the hall door, he grinned and made a “slow down” gesture with his hand, warning Hanson not to comment. Hanson smiled back at Fernandez and shook his head: Not today.

  The lieutenant was in uniform, beautifully tailored, and so wearing, of course, his OPD lieutenant’s badge, a solid gold star. He stepped back up behind his podium, removed his hat, and looked the class over silently, in a manly, military manner, Hanson thought, establishing his excellent “command presence” as he went into more detail about the stupidity of the California Communist Supreme Court’s latest assault on police powers.

  A police officer, Lieutenant Garber told them, had stopped a black man walking in Beverly Hills at 11 p.m. because he was dressed inappropriately and was clearly not the type of individual who belonged in that neighborhood. The suspect claimed that he was a screenwriter, staying not far from where he’d been stopped. He had the odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath, the officer testified, and based on the officer’s past police experience, he believed the suspect was under the influence and asked him for some ID. The suspect responded to his request by saying, “Dream on, motherfucker, I’m going home,” and began walking away, ignoring the officer’s commands to stop. A cover car arrived and the officers now at the scene, observing the suspect’s demeanor, his appearance, and his refusal to comply with the primary officer’s commands, justifiably concerned that he might be armed, subdued the suspect and placed him under arrest. A resident, a somewhat elderly individual, who claimed to have observed the arrest—from his porch, almost a block away, under nighttime conditions—testified that the officers, brandishing their service revolvers, had assaulted the suspect for no apparent reason, slamming him repeatedly into the side of a patrol car while making racial slurs.