The radio vibrates on the counter next Vargas’s side of bacon, calling out something about a suspicious young black ma—Vargas turns the dial off, signs the check with To Joaz my one true love and his phone number, and motions Whit back to the car. He turns the radio back on when the doors are safely shut and locked, but there’s no chatter, nothing to indicate the count has gotten any closer to its terminus, and Whit discovers something about himself: he wanted the awful thing to be over so much that a part of him had wished for it to happen.
He wants so badly to throw up that he rolls the window down and sticks his head out, but what’s in his stomach won’t fit through his throat. They’re farther south now, and farther inland. The air has lost its mossy smell. Now it’s just the day’s exhaust. Looking out through the blank night air he sees scattered big luxurious windows of the hillside houses lit up from the inside, insomniacs with their cable televisions on. They don’t need to worry about rising sea levels up there, but Whit remembers—he was a kid, but he remembers—when the whole range lit up like a quick-burning log in 1991, and three thousand houses dissolved into crackling black paper.
Cops up there give warnings if champagne parties go too loud too late. Cops up there make sure no one up there is from down here.
The dead streets quiver with a useless electricity. There’s no squeal of street-racing tires, no thumping of steroidal subwoofers, no rattle of shopping cart casters or calls of birds or even the grapey hiccupping of crickets. Engine noise and an open window. Vargas never runs the radio, neither music nor talk, and the squad radio has gone so quiet Whit imagines some sort of dread cloud hanging over the city soaking up all transmissions. He feels alone in the world.
Vargas rolls up Whit’s window from his armrest, and its cool slate catches the skin of his forehead and lifts it upward. Vargas’s posture is stiff as a startled deer’s, and he’s looking past Whit, out the passenger window down Fremont, and Whit follows the tether of his gaze to the crew of seven marching down the middle of the street, and there’s no word for it but marching. This is a mission, not a stroll. They are headed south toward norteño territory. Something bad is going to happen. Vargas coasts to a stop. Thirty seconds later Whit’s watching them through the windshield, twenty feet in front of the bumper. They eye the squad car skeptically but keep moving. Whit waits for Vargas’s hand to go to the PA.
“Don’t get crazy,” Vargas says. “I’m not putting money on a twoon-seven game of basketball.”
“This is our job,” Whit says.
“They do our job for us.”
“Kids get killed in their beds. Stray bullets.”
“Anecdotal.”
Whit wants to spit in his face. Vargas’s eyes narrow. He asks: “Has anyone ever told you that when you get pissy, your mouth looks like a butthole?” He puts the car back in gear, and they creep north, opposite from where the crew was headed. Driving back that way, back in the direction of downtown, of the bridge, of the ghost silhouette of a more civilized city, he no longer feels alone in the world. He feels crowded in the car. His hands itch. His face itches. He tries to check his imagination, as his partner has recommended. He sees Mrs. Nguyen in front of a casket. He sees Whalen’s fiancée, and Whalen sedated and intubated on the table, breathing that robot breath, the rise and fall of his ribs too perfect, too regular. He can’t help but see as well the possibility of a line going flat and half a dozen nurses rushing into the room and setting to work with a defibrillator. He can’t help but see that possibility of them shocking only dead flesh that bounces, rubbery, but won’t come back. The possibility that with two dead cops, the law of threes will demand six.
Ten minutes later, the radio crackles. A gunfight between gangs, not far south of where they just were, broke up on its own with no casualties. Vargas smirks. One of his great amusements is how gangbangers who love to pose tough with their guns have no idea how to aim them. But the smirk disappears into teeth as he chews his bottom lip. Perhaps he’s remembered that the 11th Street Boys who gunned down Whalen and Nguyen figured it out well enough. Dispatch wants a car to respond and set up a crime scene. Vargas calls in cross streets four miles north of their actual location and asks if they want him to head down. They decline. Closer cars, they say.
He finally reaches a half-decent neighborhood and parks under the lights of a twenty-four-hour grocery. “We should while away some time,” he says. “Get in a better headspace.” He does this on nights when he doesn’t want to get mixed up in anything that might result in paperwork. He calls it his special union break. Tonight, he’s got a story to tell. His wife went snooping through his oldest son’s closet this last weekend and found a stash that would have garnered their captain a press conference: a two-and-a-half-foot water bong, half an ounce of weed, ultra-sensitive condoms, and a travel-size shampoo bottle filled with olive oil—Whit will never guess what the olive oil was for, Vargas says, or maybe he will. Whit tunes him out. Vargas doesn’t remember telling him the exact same story in May.
Whit closes his eyes and thinks: evidence, conclusion, assumption. Logical flaw. Parallel reasoning. Method of argument. The quietest times his mind has had in months have been during the practice tests he’s taken: perfect silence, the timer set for thirty-five minutes per section, with one question in front of him to be dispatched, and then the next. He wonders if they can spend the rest of the shift like this: camped out. Hiding out. If Vargas relaxes into a certain mood Whit might even be able to crack open the books.
But of course that’s a dream. Just after 3:30 a.m., the radio sparks to life again.
Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours? Whit’s mind keeps heating up until he thinks it will catch flame, then going blank and cold. He presses the button to roll down the window. Nothing happens. Vargas has the child lock on it. Whit tells him to roll down the window. Vargas tells him to calm down. “Roll down the fucking window,” Whit shouts. Vargas rolls it down halfway.
After the last radio call, Vargas said he wanted to get a damn donut. His eyes have reddened, and the sacks under them are puffy. It’s wearing on him too, Whit thinks, but not enough to exculpate him. They’re headed back north on a main avenue, and it feels like coming out of the depths, like coming up from a dive, even as Whit’s mind tangles itself with red thread. He’s thought already about all the things he could do: call someone at the Tribune; go through the upper brass; document, document, document. These options all seem to have the weight of impossibility on them. But they don’t, he knows, and that doesn’t absolve him. They are all logistically simple. The impossibility is inside of himself.
As they pass back through Zombieland every soul they see is haunted in Whit’s mind by an officer with his pistol to the back of his head, and none of them has the slightest idea. There are fewer out now, few for whom 4 a.m. isn’t either too early or too late. They see the same bum sleeping next to his Christmas tree on the sidewalk, his basset hound using his thigh as a pillow. A few early bread trucks are out, something that’s always seemed out of place here, a relic of a charming old New York or Chicago, rather than this stripped-down urban wasteland. The lumberyard is closed, but under the security lights it looks like a dinosaur graveyard, and Whit watches one tired security guard patrolling the aisles.
“What’s that kid’s name?” Vargas asks. He’s keeping pace with a kid strolling on the right-hand sidewalk. Whit recognizes him.