Elliot laughed, and then passed the gun on to the victim, this boy they called Danny but who Detective Sanabria would soon identify as Daniel José Cruz Jr., age fourteen and a half, born in San Vicente, El Salvador, a resident of 5252 Harold Way, Hollywood, California, and just as American as fried chicken and potato salad. The victim had taken the gun, and like the little boy and the knucklehead he really was, he had turned the barrel toward himself to look inside.
Knucklehead: It was not a word Detective Sanabria used growing up in this neighborhood, where Spanish and Armenian were starting to crowd out English, causing it to retreat from whole chunks of the day. Knucklehead was an appellation used at the station for bank robbers who got caught in the parking lot fiddling with the ignition in their getaway cars, shoplifters wearing pilfered sweaters with the price tags still attached, murderers who shot off their own fingers and their girlfriends with the same bullet.
If Danny had not been shipped away to intensive care at the Children’s Hospital (Detective Sanabria’s least favorite place to visit on earth), Detective Sanabria would have given him a good knucklehead slap at precisely the spot where the bullet entered his brain.
“¿Tienes miedo? No te agüites.”
Danny turned his wrist to look at the inside of the barrel, which was his way of answering Elliot’s taunt: No, he wasn’t afraid; he could stare into the most dangerous part of the gun, the part that could kill you. He wanted to show all the other boys his lack of fear. The circular cavity was coming into view when a light flashed and he heard a roar that somehow penetrated into the darkness that followed, the sustained thunder of a river tumbling over a cliff or a zoo of animals letting out a simultaneous roar, followed by the absolute silence of a dreamless sleep.
He opened his eyes to the soft glow of fluorescent lamps, and caught the sharp glint of light reflecting off stainless steel. He was on his back, suddenly, in a bed. His first fully formed thought was that it was not right that he could close his eyes and be transported from one place to the next, from the ditches and the dirt of the construction site to this strange room of glowing light with-what was this?-tubes taped to his arms. He fell asleep again, drifting in and out of wakefulness many times, and had the sensation that he was floating above the bed in a slow tumble. Finally, his eyes became fixed and steady and he could tell exactly where he was: a hospital. In a corner of the room, he saw a stocky and familiar figure, a woman in a blouse that fit too tight against her round belly, asleep in her chair, her open mouth facing the ceiling like the top of a snoring chimney.
“Mamá,” he said.
His mother startled awake. She looked at him with a perplexed, confused gaze, and he quickly understood that being awake was not something expected of him, that sleeping was now his natural condition.
“¡Hijo!” she shouted, so loud that the sound waves reverberated in his skull, which, he now realized, was covered with a helmet of gauze bandages. His mother brought her hands together and fell into prayer, closing her eyes, looking much as she had just a moment ago when she was snoring, words he could not hear drifting skyward from her lips like steam.
Danny soon forgot about her, raising his arms to inspect the tubes that fed a silky liquid into his wrists, lifting his fingers to touch the bandages, probing very gingerly for the place the bullet had entered. Inside his skull there was now an opening, a round path through his head, a cylinder as long and wide as the barrel of a gun.
“So you shot yourself,” Detective Sanabria said. “Good job, knucklehead. Do me a favor. Make that the last shot you ever fire from a gun.”
Children and guns were Detective Sanabria’s obsession, his off-hours hobby. The other detectives in Hollywood Division left copies of their reports on Sanabria’s desk whenever they handled cases in which children were shot, or in which children shot at other children. A ten-year-old shooting his sister in the shoulder with a.22; a two-year-old shot through the heart while in his playpen, the bullet crossing through three walls thanks to the penetrating power of an AK-47. Detective Sanabria could not explain why or when this obsession began, though his old partner Detective Nazarian knew perfectly welclass="underline" He had been Sanabria’s friend since way back in the academy, and had been at the scene of Sanabria’s first homicide (it was also Nazarian’s first), which just happened to be four blocks from the elementary school they had both attended, an old brick edifice built in the early glory days of Hollywood, with the dusty pictures of silent film star alumni growing moldy behind a glass case in the office. Nazarian had seen the stunned look on then-probationary Officer Sanabria’s face when he looked down at that bleeding, dying eight-year-old whose walnut-shaped eyes and copper skin bore a striking resemblance to Detective Sanabria’s own.
In the case of Daniel “Danny” Cruz, Detective Sanabria’s investigation and the trace of the nine-millimeter gun that had placed Danny in this bed had been as fruitless as it usually was. Manufactured by the American Patriot Gun Co. of Waukegan, Illinois, the weapon had been sold to the Guns R Us Mart of Phoenix, Arizona, and then to a certain Andrew Palazzo, who, when contacted by Detective Sanabria by phone, said that he had sold the gun at a swap meet in Mesa, Arizona some six years ago.
“Untraceable,” Detective Nazarian had remarked when Sanabria told him the results of his two-hour investigation. “Unknowable.”
Detective Nazarian had seen enough cases of children and guns that he wanted to get out of police work, which was why he was going to graduate school and starting to toss around words like “unknowable,” which everyone in the Hollywood LAPD station found annoying, especially Detective Sanabria. But it was probably true: How and why some idiot had left a loaded gun in the construction site across the street from an elementary school was probably unknowable. So that left the victim Danny to talk to.
Detective Sanabria could not pretend he was here for any investigation. He was here for something else-to do something he did not know how to do, that he felt queasily uncomfortable doing, which was to make the speech and twist his face into the angry I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-youngman stare that would keep Daniel “Danny” Cruz away from guns the rest of his life.
He stood staring at Danny with a lingering, pathetic, hopeless absence of words. “Now you know what a bullet can do to you,” was the best he could do. “Or maybe you don’t really know yet. Because you’re still alive, aren’t you? And you shouldn’t be.”
Only much later, days after Danny had taken his first, lightheaded steps away from the hospital bed, after the nurses had helped him walk through the ward, after listening to the doctor give his mother a much-too-long list of instructions for his care, when he was back in the familiar and messy nest of his room, did he realize exactly what had happened to him.
He had shot himself in the skull and survived.
He had been in a coma for two weeks, at one point nearly left for dead.