Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“What I can’t understand is how we handled it so bad. You know the department, Billy. Good cops, most of ’em. Damned good.”

“Tell that to Rodney King,” I told him, and took a long pull on my mineral water. It was a cheap shot, and Roscoe’s smile said as much.

“You never work midnights, Billy? You never hear about the kind of pumped-up halfwits get dumped on that shift? All the losers and discipline problems the PBA and the ACLU won’t let us fire?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew it as well as he did. A lot of cops who shouldn’t be cops were stuck on the late shift where they were out of sight and, in theory, out of harm’s way. A lot of good cops were on that shift, too. I’d worn the uniform long enough to know you couldn’t tell by watching thirty seconds of videotape whether the Rodney King beating was done by the bad cops or by good ones gone temporarily nuts. Sometimes I had trouble telling the difference anyway.

“Get on with it,” I said.

He nodded like he’d won the point. Maybe he had.

“I know you wondering, whether you want to admit it or not. So I’ll tell you, I don’t have any idea how it got so bad so fast. Chain of command didn’t just break down—it was never in place. Almost like it was deliberately sabotaged.” He stopped and shook his head. He looked puzzled, a little hurt, like a man betrayed by something he cared about and was sure of.

“Was it?” I asked him. He just looked at me for a moment and for the first time he was a cop looking at an outsider. I’d never been on the receiving end of that look before. It made me nervous. “Come on,” I said. “If it makes you happy I’ll say you’re right, okay? I am curious. I read about it and I don’t see how it could have happened like that. What went wrong?”

“Billy,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. Far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. But it makes no sense for somebody to try to fuck things up like that. Anyhow, they didn’t need to. Morale has been real bad, everybody keeping their heads real low. Maybe when we came up against something definite like that it should have snapped us out of it. You know, action instead of thinking. Maybe it should have brought us back onto our feet again. It didn’t. It knocked us on our asses. We folded, Billy. We just cut and run. The first few hours, when we might’ve turned it around, we were getting mixed signals or no signals. Nobody took charge. So we just kept pulling back and pulling back and all of a sudden we were back too far to get in again and do anything and we got four days of anything goes. This area about the size of Rhode Island, and it’s total anarchy.

“But then something started happening in there.” He paused here and looked away toward US 1. There was a steady stream of traffic going by. There always was. A Conch Train turned the corner and went past. I sipped my water and waited for Roscoe to go on. The people on the Conch Train seemed to think they were having fun. I didn’t correct them.

“I’m kinda proud of this part,” Roscoe said at last. Something about the way he said it jerked my head back around and I looked at him hard. But his face was still closed, except for that half-smile. “With no police presence in the area at all, and I mean none, you’d expect they’d all just go totally loco in there, burn everything, loot everything, shoot, rape, slash and shit on the kitchen table.”

“Isn’t that what happened?” I said, and now he swiveled to look hard at me.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “That ain’t what happened at all. That’s just what TV said happened. But nothing is TV-simple. They just gotta make it look like it is or they can’t explain it in thirty-second sound bites. What really happened was that the majority of people in the area started coming together. I mean, even in the worst areas of Watts, ninety-some percent of folks hate like hell what’s going on around them. You know that. But they never seem to realize they got the bad guys outnumbered. There’s always been something missing, some little spark or—you know, a little grain of sand for the pearl to grow on. They never had anything like that. Then this happened and there was this kid.

“This kid. This sixteen-year-old black kid. He organizes this group so when there’s attacks, looters, shooters, whatever, he shows up with a group and does a nonviolent confrontation thing until the outlaws back down. Black kids like him, some Korean kids, some Chicanos. And they’re all working together. They out-policing the police. Making a difference in a way that looks like it’s going to last. You know, a new community coalition.

“And then somebody shot him.”

Roscoe took a deep breath. It sounded a little bit ragged. I looked hard at him but could see nothing behind the deep hurt in his eyes.

“It was an assassination, Billy. With a high-powered rifle from a rooftop. Somebody went to big trouble to get a shot and they shot down this kid. And I can’t find out why.”

“Why not?”

Funny smile again. “Not much evidence for starters. And this isn’t exactly what I do, you know. But mostly the pressure’s coming down from upstairs not to stir things up, for political reasons. The city is getting back to normal, they say—like that was good. They say the kid was just another looter at worst, or at best somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time who got popped by a nervous Korean shopkeeper.”

There was something that sounded almost like pain in his voice now, and he started talking faster, more deliberately, like a lawyer who thinks he’s already lost the case but has to pull out all the stops for the jury anyway.

“I say no way. No way in hell, Billy. They shot him too good, and with the wrong kind of weapon. Koreans mostly have assault rifles or shotguns—they don’t know what they’re doing with these weapons. They just want something that sprays lead. This boy was dropped with one clean shot from a hunting rifle. This was murder, Billy. Somebody didn’t like what this kid was doing, and they hunted him down and they killed him. Somebody murdered this kid and I want them.” He must have heard his own voice shaking and stopped for a moment, taking a breath and giving me an apologetic smile before he went on.

“But they won’t even let me go after it. Not even me…And they won’t put anybody good on it. They’re trying to sweep it under the rug, make it go away, make sure nobody remembers, that nobody sees clearly who that boy was and what he tried to do, and that’s—”

He stopped here, like asking me the real question was too hard. He’d come three thousand miles to ask me a favor and now he couldn’t do it. Pride kicks in at funny times.

So he was quiet for a long time. So was I. I figured there had to be more to it than that. But there was no more. Roscoe stayed quiet. When I looked at him again he just gave me that strange half-smile. It looked bitter now.

My bottle of mineral water wasn’t quite empty, but the half inch on the bottom was warmer than spit and suddenly less appealing. I put the bottle on top of the ice machine.

“Why, Roscoe?” I asked him, trying to look at him hard enough to get behind the mask his face had become. “Why did you come all this way? Why not just write this one off like every cop in the world writes off a couple every day? Why me?”

“The politics on this one are bad, man. Nobody in the department is allowed to touch it. They don’t want nothing stirred up. But it’s important, and it’ll take a good cop to hang it on somebody. You still a good cop under there, Billy. You don’t quit,” he said, and he said it so seriously, so completely straight, that for a minute I believed him, believed he was talking about some other Billy Knight who never quit and always got his man. That’s how good Roscoe was, even when he wasn’t working at it.

I shook my head. “There’s lots of good cops in L.A. Some of ’em are black, and they can go where I can’t on something like this. I’m not that good.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “You were that good. You were about the best street cop I ever saw. ’Sides, I need somebody on the outside who knows what the inside looks like and can’t be waved off by the chairwarmers.”

“Roscoe, you are a chairwarmer.”