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  “You want me to arrest him or shoot him?” He looked at the kid behind the counter. “Jimenez…” he began.

  “That’s not my name, I just gotta wear this Mexican piece of shit all night.”

  “Give him a couple of napkins,” Hanson said, speaking into the little microphone above the bulletproof window. “He can wipe it off real good, you roll it on in and take a corner that’s not bloody—just two fingers, right?” He raised his hand over his head, pinching his thumb and forefinger together. “Then lay it in the cash register before we get into any complex legal debates.”

  Neither one of them said anything. They both looked pissed off.

  “Think about it. Take my advice or argue after I leave, but right now I need a Coke and a Gangsta Burger. With cheese. Okay, Jimenez? Por favor?”

  He turned to the kid in the suit. “I apologize for jumping ahead of you in line, but I’ve gotta get back on the street, and you guys might be here all night. Okay?” The customer only gave him a bad look. “Or,” Hanson went on, his voice weary, “you can show me some ID right now. I think a bloody five-dollar bill is probable cause to run you for warrants and search your car. It’s up to you.”

  “Give him his Coke,” the kid in the suit told Jimenez, “and fuck you. I’ll take my business somewhere else.” He walked back to his car, carrying the bill between his thumb and forefinger. Hanson sipped his Coke, watching the Cadillac drive off, while Jimenez wrapped his burger.

  “Thanks,” he told Jimenez. “Feliz Navidad.” He waited till he was only a few blocks from his district before he cleared from his last call.

  Copy, 5Tac51 clear…and, 5Tac51, we’ve been holding this one for a while, a 245 Knife outside the Artistic Hair Haven at Sixty-sixth and Foothill.

  “On the way,” Hanson said, hanging up the mike, then pulling to the curb, where he flipped through his Thomas Guide and finished the cheeseburger in three swallows. He turned the Thomas Guide around, looked out at the street sign, and licked his fingers. He grunted, put the Coke between his legs, and accelerated up East 14th Street past a parking lot of dead-looking Christmas trees surrounded by concertina wire.

  He had to arrest the owner of the Artistic Hair Haven, charging him with ADW, CCW, and ex-con in possession, but at least he didn’t have to fight him to take him to jail. A lot of paperwork, though. Then he got a family fight where the husband had tried to set the Christmas tree on fire—his wife said—but he’d passed out before he could get it burning, and she’d thrown a pot of boiling water on him. He’d had to go to the emergency room with third-degree burns on the backs of his legs.

  By 2 a.m. things were quiet and Hanson was driving the alleys out by 96th Avenue. A police helicopter clattered overhead and banked down toward the bay.

  He had the seat belt unhooked and his holster pulled around toward his lap so he could draw his pistol quickly, imagining how stupid he’d look dead, shot to pieces behind the steering wheel, snugly seat-belted in against his holstered pistol. Lieutenant Garber and the boys would be rid of him. The constitutional scholar. The social worker. He smiled, imagining them laughing about it. He wondered if they’d have a bagpipe play “Amazing Grace” at his funeral.

  A garbage can rattled up ahead, rolling across the asphalt, spilling beer cans, Christmas season fast-food trash, and a hairy silver-white possum who humped and waddled through the headlight beams toward the shadows, huge and awkward, a segmented tail, his face smeared with something white so he looked like a rodent mime.

  Hanson drove slowly around the garbage can, leaning across the seat, and called out the open passenger window in a strangled whisper, “Hey, Possum…”

  5Tac51.

  He stopped the car and peeled the mike off the dashboard, still watching the possum. “5Tac51.”

  5Tac51, we’ve got a report of twenty-five to thirty people, fighting now, at Eighty-second and Bancroft.

  “Okay.”

  Car to cover?

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. Then to the possum, “Be careful out there, buddy. Merry Christmas.” He laughed and sat up.

  Car to cover, my ass, he thought, driving out of the alley. As if one would be available. As if one cover car driven by some cop he’d never even met would make any difference with that many people. Yeah, yeah, car to cover. If twenty-five to thirty people were still fighting when he got there, he’d have to call in an air strike to calm them down. Nobody could fight for fifteen minutes unless they were zombies. Who knew what was really the problem? What would he find? Could he handle it or would it kill him? It’s what he liked about the job. He forgot all his problems, the doubts and mistakes and regrets he couldn’t do anything about.

  It was a sad little strip mall of failing and already closed businesses. Twelve or fourteen cars were parked in a lopsided circle, all of their radios tuned to the same station. Couples were dancing, drinking, and smoking marijuana. The red cherries of their cigarettes and joints glowed and arced and danced in the dark parking lot. They saw the patrol car turn into the lot, of course, but pretended they didn’t. Hanson cut his headlights and pulled up a couple of car lengths from the outside of the circle. Donna Summer was singing, “She works hard for the money.” He got out of the patrol car, watching them dance and listening to Donna Summer’s song, which was about so many women, and men, in East Oakland.

  It was a beautiful night. The best time of day, Hanson thought. He hopped up onto the hood of the patrol car, where it was harder for them to ignore him, but they managed until he waved both arms above his head and shouted, “Excuse me, you all. Excuse me,” sweeping his arms up and back like a referee signaling a touchdown. “Excuse me, y’all, I need to tell you something.” He was willing to look a little foolish if it would solve a problem. Not many cops were, so it usually got people’s attention. Most cops would have stayed in their patrol car and given commands over the loudspeaker.

  Finally, everyone was looking at him, poised on the hood of the car, no longer invisible. He looked back at them, not afraid, reasonable, making quick eye contact with many of them. If people see that you’re afraid, they won’t hear anything you say.

  “Thanks,” he shouted. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Radio sent me out here, telling me that there were twenty-five to thirty people fighting…Now”—he paused, smiled—“I told ’em, okay, I’ll take care of it.” That got a few laughs and the tension began to drift away. A breeze coming in off the ocean was a little chilly at this hour, and the engine heat rising up from beneath his feet felt good. He thought he’d be able to write this up on an assignment card now, no major paperwork. It was just possible that somebody might shoot him, but not likely, and if they did, so what? “You’re not fighting. You’re just dancing and having a good time. But it is, you know,” he said, looking at his watch, “two thirty, so somebody around here must be trying to get some sleep before they go to work tomorrow, and they figured a fight would get the cops here faster than saying it was a dance.”

  He shrugged, held up his hands: What can I say?

  “Anyway, could you all do me a favor and go on home? I’m sorry about that, but if you don’t, they’re just gonna send a whole lot more cops, and it’ll be a mess then. You all know what I’m talking about.”

  Just then, the first six bass notes of “My Girl,” the great Smokey Robinson song, rolled out of all the radios like a sign from God.

  “Hey,” Hanson said, smiling hugely, “‘My Girl.’”

  My girl, Hanson thought, singing along with it for a moment, the song happy—but sad too—out in East Oakland, where…Well, maybe you could find some happiness here when you were young and had a girlfriend and things didn’t seem so bad yet. He looked out at the dancers.

  “I’d be grateful, y’all, if you’d go on home.”

  And they looked at Hanson, looked at each other, and began walking to their cars, finishing their joints, drinking the last of their Olde English 800, their Night Train, some laughing, a few even waving an arm above their
heads—Bye-bye—to Hanson as they walked away.

  “Thank you all very much,” Hanson yelled. “Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. You all have a good evening now. Good night. Hey, Merry Christmas too.”

  By the time he jumped back down from the hood, they were already starting their cars and turning on the headlights, which swung in arcs past and through each other, flashing off the storefront windows. Hanson watched as the cars pulled out of the two entrances, going in different directions, the bright headlights and red taillights passing each other, the radios fading.

  He looked up at the stars, familiar as old friends from his time in Idaho, where he’d gotten to know them, respecting their elegant dependability, trusting the ancient protocols they observed in their turnings. Jupiter was up there tonight too, brighter than the brightest star, regal and steady in its orbit through the constellations. And mighty Orion—shaped like an enormous hourglass, lesser stars seeming to tumble through its belted waist into the starry nebula below. “Rigel,” Hanson said, “Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Saiph,” paying his respects to its primary stars before getting into the patrol car.

  When he turned his headlights on they flared off the curve of the huge chrome bumper of a car not quite hidden back in the alley at the end of the strip mall. He popped the magnetic shotgun lock while he drove, unlatching his door so he could kick it open and roll out with the shotgun if need be, stopping at the mouth of the alley, where he was protected by the front end of the patrol car, lighting up the gleaming midnight-blue Cadillac with his high beams, its windows tinted and dark. He did all these things easily, without dread or indecision, content for the moment with who he was, the past and the future dismissed. Maybe he felt whatever it was that normal people felt when they said they were happy.

  The Cadillac’s window slid down and the driver said, “Good evening, Officer. A beautiful night.” He was about thirty, younger than Hanson, wearing a close-cropped beard and wire-rim glasses that slightly magnified his eyes. He looked almost like a young college professor in a thousand-dollar suit, except for the eyes.

  “Good evening, sir,” Hanson called out through his open passenger window, friendly but with his hand on the shotgun. “Are you waiting for someone?”

  “Just leaving, Officer, thank you. Now that the music’s over,” he said, assured but not arrogant, polite, a voice you wanted to believe. “I admired the way you were able to disperse the crowd so smoothly.”

  He was up to something, and Hanson wondered who he was, but it was late, time to go in, and he felt certain that they’d see each other again. “Most people are reasonable if you give them the chance,” Hanson declared, not believing a word of it.

  “So true, Officer,” he agreed. “That’s always been my experience as well,” which clearly it had not been.

  “Of course,” Hanson said, trying not to laugh. “Good night, sir. Drive carefully.” The tinted window slid back up, and the Cadillac rolled silently out of the alley, made a complete stop at the street, turned right, and drove on. Hanson had gotten his pen out to jot down the license plate number, but it was obscured by some kind of plastic cover. He clicked the pen closed and watched the Cadillac turn at the next block and disappear.

  Anyone who had been at the dance could have told Hanson that the man in the Cadillac was Felix Maxwell, drug lord of Oakland, homeboy out of the projects who had made his mark. No one could have told him, though, what was in the stars for the two of them.

  Chapter Four

  Temple Rabbit

  New Year’s Eve and Hanson was parked at the south end of the Mormon Temple parking lot. The clouds had blown away, and far below, the bay gleamed like blued steel. The Temple was off his district but a straight shot down to the freeway if he got a late call, a good spot to finish up reports. He was glad he’d found it. He’d backed the patrol car up against a waist-high wall at a twelve-foot drop-off where no one could come up behind him while he was writing. The Temple filled the sky above the patrol car, its spotlighted marble buttresses and blazing golden spires rising from the Oakland Hills like the City of Oz. The enormous parking lot was empty, thousands of lighting globes—pastel blue and green—hovering above the asphalt like UFOs, massed and waiting.

  It was cool and quiet there as he finished a domestic battery/resist arrest report. His knee throbbed, but at least the ninety-dollar wool pants weren’t torn. Tiny beads of blood had seeped through the material, but the dry cleaner could get it out.

  While he wrote, he kept track of Radio traffic, voices out there on the radio. Most nights he never saw another patrol car until he pulled back into Transportation downtown at the end of his shift. When he’d been a cop in Portland, in the heart of North Precinct’s ghetto, he’d had a partner. The same partner every night working the same beat, so they got to know the people who lived there, and the people got to know them. Nobody loved them, but they knew who they were and knew they could depend on them to be fair, or at least consistent—not just two more faceless white guys in uniforms.

  Shuffled from beat to beat, the OPD street cops rarely got to know each other, much less the black citizens they were paid to protect and serve or, more realistically, to keep them contained behind the freeways, in East and West Oakland, and out of downtown and white districts. The cops lived in various IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW suburbs twenty to fifty miles outside the city limits, and coming to work in Oakland was like punching in at the meat-packing plant for their shift, then showering, leaving bloody work clothes in their lockers, and driving the freeway for an hour to a thirty-year mortgage. With almost no contact at work, and none off duty, they were mostly strangers to one another. If one of them needed cover, the closest car would go, of course.

  When a cop got killed everything else pretty much stopped until the suspect was killed resisting arrest, had committed suicide, or, if the media got on the scene before it was cordoned off, was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. And usually dead within a year—stabbed repeatedly, thrown off an upper tier, or set afire in his cell by unknown assailants—because people on the street had to know if they killed a cop, they would die too. It was business, not personal.

  Oakland, with the highest proportion of ex-cons of any city in California, fielded one-man patrol cars, and there were never enough of them to cover the 35 beats in 5 districts and 360,000 people. Hanson didn’t know it, but a lot of nights he was the only cop out there for 20,000 people.

  He still was able to talk people into going to jail, like he had in Portland, but it was harder in Oakland. And some nights he could feel his mean streak growing. He had to be careful, he thought, or he might turn into what the OPD wanted before he realized what was happening. Every night it was life/death/life/death, but that’s what he liked, that’s when it seemed like all the bright lights came on for him.

  He looked around the lot, leaned his head back, took a deep breath, held it, held it, then let it out slowly. Happy New Year. He’d been off the street for at least an hour on the call he was writing up, much of the time waiting in the Alameda County Hospital emergency room while an East Indian doctor stitched up the cut over his prisoner’s eye and shoved packing up his broken nose so they’d accept him when Hanson took him to jail.

  He looked over the report forms once more, made sure all the correct boxes were filled in, and signed them Hanson / 7374P. He checked the rearview mirror and looked down at the red and white lights rushing like rivers past each other on the freeway far below.

  Everything between him and the freeway was the Heart of Darkness, where everybody was a suspect, even the victims. Even the cops were just another gang out there, as brutal—maybe more brutal—as any of them, so outnumbered they had to be in order to survive. In the end, organized and superior brutality was what allowed them to enforce the laws of another country.

  In the side-view mirror a new shadow appeared, wedged between the wall and the asphalt lot, changing shape as it moved toward the patrol car. It seemed to have a solid core that elo
ngated, shrank, sent out feelers then pulled them back, crabbing from side to side. When Hanson spotted the shadow it startled him, maybe even scared him for a moment before he slowed his heart, telling himself that it was probably just another trick of light, another illusion, omen, hallucination. Maybe a threat, maybe not. He put the flat of his hand against his pistol, shifting in the seat to be sure it would clear the holster against the seat back. He leaned toward the passenger window for a better look.

  A jet-black floppy-eared rabbit bounded out from the wall into the open. It was real, the biggest rabbit Hanson had ever seen. It hopped closer to the car, stopped. Hopped closer. Stopped and turned its head, regarding Hanson with a pearly black eye—looking right at him—aglow from the Temple lights.

  The Temple rabbit, Hanson thought. Of course. Like those monkeys that have the run of Hindu temples in India. The Indian doctor in the emergency room. Maybe some connection there?

  “Hey,” he called through the open window. “Hey, little buddy, is it true? You be the Temple rabbit?”

  The eye stayed on Hanson.

  “You speakeee English?”

  Somebody’s pet. Or raised for food in a backyard hutch. That’s all. Nothing supernatural, but still, a black rabbit in East Oakland at night? It hopped closer, and Hanson had to put his head out the window and look down now to see it. The rabbit tilted his head, looking up at him. He was beat-up, like a tomcat, but healthy looking. A jagged streak of white fur ran from beneath one eye and down alongside his nose, as if a cut there had healed, the fur growing back white. Hanson slid back across the car seat, opened the door as quietly and fluidly as possible, and got out. He walked slowly around the back of the car. Looking casual, he thought, smiling, cool and smooth. The way he might walk up on a drug deal. He knelt slowly down, his knees popping.