All Involved (20 page)

“Let me have it back,” Suzuki says. “I'm gonna give it to my kid.”

I say, “Why do you want your kid having a bullet?”

“I don't know. Drill a hole through it, put it on a chain so he can wear it. Tell him it hit his old man once and he stopped it like Superman.”

It's still warm when I give it back to him. I don't know if that's because of his hand or that it was so recently fired. Then again, I don't know that I want to know.

When the flare-up down the block is overhauled, the STL tells us we're going to an RTD bus depot in Chinatown for some R&R because the forward command post at Fifty-Fourth and Arlington was too impacted with other emergency personnel vehicles, so we do a quick pickup and go up Vermont to Manchester, then Manchester to the Harbor Freeway and head north. We convoy to Downtown and instead of taking the 101, we exit at Fourth Street, take it to Alameda, and turn left. It doesn't seem the best route, all things considered, but I figure whoever is routing us knows something I don't, so I don't carp.

“Downtown isn't so bad,” Suzuki says from the back.

Cap smirks. He's riding shotgun again. To his credit, he hasn't said anything about the blood.

“Yeah,” I say, “I thought it'd be worse, but I guess there isn't much worth looting around here.”

Downtown has been bombed out since the '70s when building owners gave up, sold cheap, and took their money to the Westside or the Valley. At the same time, slumlords got to work making it the least habitable place in Los Angeles. Skid Row wasn't great to begin with, but it went from gutter to holding cell. The era of the seasonal worker and the hobo died when the city started knocking down cheap housing, the produce markets were slowing down or moving elsewhere as regional supermarkets took over, and Skid Row ceased
to be a place for migrant farmworkers and more a pit stop for the mentally ill, the drug inclined, or both. By the time the '80s rolled around, crack made all that permanent. Now there's not a whole lot left around but the courthouse, silent-film-era hotels that need more than a coat of paint to get their glamour back, abandoned burlesque houses on Main, and a bunch of empty warehouses.

As we cross over Third Street, I see two women pushing strollers with no kids in them but plenty of toys, boxes and boxes of them, just like they were out shopping at Macy's or something. One has a scar on her face, from her ear down her cheek. It's keloided and looks like a tusk almost. It's not the same, but it reminds me of the gangbanger's shoulder scar, and that starts the dominoes inside me. I hate him all over again. I want to drop a brick on
his
face and see how he likes it. The thought makes me smile a sick smile, but then I'm thinking of Gutes. The bloody aftermath. The way his tongue looked when it moved. And it's all I can do just to stare at buildings as they pass.

The slow motion is stuck in my head again. The cinder block dropping—the
sound
of it landing—I remember how it made two, a crunch first when it hit the jaw and then a thud when it hit the ground, and I shiver. That gangbanger's face was the worst part. I never thought it was possible to sneer and smile at the same time until I saw it, and I've seen the aftermath of a lot of desperate things done by a lot of desperate people, but this was something else. I make the promise to myself, he will pay for what he did. I will find him. A gangbanger like that? He has a record, guaranteed. You don't just roll out of bed one day and decide to brick a fireman. You work up to it.

McPherson interrupts my train of thought by saying, “Wonder what happened there?”

As we cross over the 101, I see what he's talking about and it suddenly makes sense why we didn't take it to get where we're going. Beneath us, a vehicle is on fire. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it being there, just a Jeep shooting up smoke. It's under control though. I read the number of the engine hitting it with a hose. It's 4s.

Suzuki points out how there's no one parked at Union Station, and no one at the Olvera Street marketplace either. When we pass Ord and Philippe's on the corner, my stomach tells me I'm hungry. The French dip sandwich was invented in L.A. Not many people know that. It was invented at Cole's, supposedly for a customer with dentures who couldn't eat a hard roll so a bartender gave him a little bowl of meat drippings to soak the bread in and soften it up, which eventually became known as
au jus
. Around here, you pick a side. Personally, I like to dip it in the
jus
myself, so I'm a Cole's guy, but it seems like everybody in 57s prefers Philippe's, where they prep the
jus
in the kitchen and slather it on the meat themselves, almost like gravy.

Our destination is a bus depot on North Spring Street between Mesnagers and Wilhardt. It's one of the only safe places to fill up in the city. Outside of emergency protocol, it's an RTD depot, but now, it serves as a temporary FCP for the LAPD, and for us, a place to do R&R—resupply, use the bathroom, call home, and get some food. Since it's a safe zone, it makes sense that it'd be relatively well protected, but it's almost like something out of
Mad Max,
that movie where everybody needs gas for their cars and they'll kill to get it. There's something about that premise that makes too much sense about a city as car-crazy as Los Angeles, so I mention it and Cap nods, but neither Suzuki nor McPherson have seen it, so I don't bother explaining and instead I tell the guys in the jump seats they'll just have to see it for themselves. When the sliding gate with razor wire on its top opens, I pull in, right around a group of green-uniformed men with M-16s.

It's later, while we're saying good-bye to our CHP escort before they head back to their main command post on Vermont and the 101, that somebody—Taurino's his name—calls the guys at the front gate ninja turtles.

This makes sense because they're decked out in army green from head to toe. They've got thigh pads and funny-looking military helmets with the same green fabric stretched over them and dark visors hiding their eyes. They really do look like man-size turtles from a distance. Taurino doesn't know if they're FBI or ATF, but he thinks they're federal because he saw them fly in to the National Guard base at Los Alamitos when they arrived from out of town.

“It looks like they're getting ready to deploy, who knows to where,” Taurino says. “All I know is I'm glad they won't be paying me a visit.”

I look across the lot to where he's looking and see the ninja turtles boarding a black vehicle that looks like a cross between a tank and a giant Jeep with a flat front. It doesn't have any identifying acronym on it. It's just black, like a metal shadow. There must be at least twelve of them and they are kitted out like Special Forces. One guy even has a bandolier of shotgun shells like a Mexican bandit in a western. They look scary. There's no denying it.

I bid Taurino good-bye and I turn away, but he says, “Hey, hang on a second.”

I turn back and he whispers to me that I've got dried blood on the back of my neck. He doesn't need to say any more. I know it's Gutierrez's.

I force a smile for Taurino, say thanks, and move to my rig.

I don't blame CHP for what happened to Gutierrez, but I don't not blame them either. It's complicated. When I've had a few days to process and replay it all in my head again, I can try to figure out who gets what blame and how much, because I'll need to when it comes time to write up the report.

I give my rig a once-over with some surface cleaner set aside for anybody who needs it, paying special attention to the dash, steering wheel, and the captain's seat where Gutierrez was. I'm okay through it. I keep everything in the right boxes and nothing spills out.

It's not even dawn yet and Cap's already off doing paperwork, but I head over to the chow station, grab some food, and have an early breakfast with Suzuki, McPherson, some 57s, and a couple more
from our light force, as well as a few guys on R&R who trickle in from other crews. The food's bearable. You can tell a fireman didn't cook it, because if he had, it'd be better. There's oatmeal, bacon, eggs, sausage, tortillas, salsa, and some potatoes that have been sitting for a bit. I pick oatmeal and load it with raisins and two packets of sugar.

With this many firemen in one place, taking up five picnic tables on the depot tarmac with nothing to do but eat and stare at each other, it's inevitable that we'll wind up trading war stories. Sure enough, some guy from 58s—I don't know him—starts it.

“You guys run into any trouble with human roadblocks?”

Most of us are chewing, but I nod yes and the other engineers do too, because of course we've encountered people walking into the road in front of us, trying to stop us from doing our duty at best, and at worst, turn us into sitting ducks for projectiles. One engineer tells a quick story about his rig getting pelted with rocks and how the two guys sitting in the back jump seats were basically exposed, but they just kept their helmets on and ducked down and nobody got hurt. Suzuki looks at me. McPherson doesn't. But it's obvious they're both thinking about Gutierrez. I'm not ready to talk about that though, so I nod back at the guy who started all this because I want him to continue.

“Well, last night I'm in K-town, right? We just knock the shit out of a department store fire in Beverly Hills and we're tracking back because we get told to handle something big on West Adams and Crenshaw.” He stops and checks to see if everybody's listening, and we are, so he continues. “So I'm chugging east on Sixth and right after the Western intersection this kid runs into the street waving a gun.”

I say, “Pointing it at you?”

“No, more like pointing it in the air because he's waving his hands frantically and trying to get me to stop for him. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure he knew he was holding it.”

Someone asks him what kind of kid.

“Korean kid. Glasses. Wearing a prep school blazer.”

This creates a thoughtful pause in our crowd because it's unexpected. It's not the image any of us had in our heads when someone brings up a gun-toting teenager.

I say, “What'd you end up doing?”

“What could I do? I aimed right at him, sped up, and prayed he'd get out of the damn way.”

“No other option there,” I say.

“Did he?” Suzuki wants to know. “Get out of the way?”

“Sure did,” the guy says and smiles.

Right after that, another guy from 58s says they've had reports of a Mexican gangbanger committing various acts of arson all over the city and claiming each one by shouting out the number and then his name like he was keeping score and he wanted everybody to know.

“Number twenty-one,” the guy says in an exaggerated Hispanic accent, “Puppet did it! Number twenty-six! Puppet did it!”

The name on his uniform is Rodriguez, so he's allowed to.

After a few sighs of disbelief, Suzuki says, “Man, every single
cholo
gang has at least two Puppets! Don't you just wish his name was easier to track down? Like, what if it were Spaghetti? How many gangbangers on earth could possibly be named Spaghetti?”

Most everybody laughs because we know it's true.

After that, the mood gets somber because this engineer from 94s asks us if we heard about Miller. 94s, by the way, couldn't even get out of their station because they took heavy fire from the surrounding neighborhood, and they might have stayed there all night if SWAT hadn't come and shot the street up.

“I heard Miller got hit, but I don't know much more,” McPherson says.

Even now, the details are sketchy but we get what's currently known. On Wednesday night, Miller was driving a truck and he got shot in the neck and had a stroke. The shooter drove up alongside and popped him for no reason other than he was wearing a uniform
and sitting in a truck, I guess. Miller's been through surgery and he's stable, but that's all we know.

I've met Miller a couple times and like him. He's not like your typical AO, all bluster and swagger—basically the same as an LAPD motorcycle cop, except they ride ladders instead. Not Miller though, he's mild-mannered. The worst part of it is, he just left 58s a couple months before for something on the Westside, something less wild, and then this happens.

“Sorry to hear that,” Suzuki says.

It's unanimous. Every one of us is sorry to hear it, but we're quiet about it. We don't say we all hope he pulls through, but it's obvious we do. It just goes unspoken. As I finish my oatmeal, conversation turns to bullets falling out of the sky.

This is Suzuki's cue to pass his bullet around, so I let it skip me and get up. I drop my bowl and spoon off in the mess tray set aside for dirty dishes, hit the pisser to wash the blood off my neck something thorough, and when I'm done, I wander over to the LAPD field command post on the other side of the depot, the back of my collar sitting wet and flush on my skin.

Over at the command post, I ask if I can borrow their cellular phone and a young police officer hands it to me. It's got an extendable black antenna, a little readout screen, a gray body, white number buttons with a little green light on underneath that lights them, a few other buttons that I'm only partially sure of, and a square mouthpiece that would cover all the buttons if it wasn't flipped down on a hinge. It's a remarkable thing, completely cordless. I key in the number to the station house and press the green button that says “SND,” which I guess means send, and it must be, because it's ringing.

When Rogowski answers, I say, “You heard anything about Gutierrez?”

“Surgery,” he says. “Just got out. His spine and neck are fine, but
his jaw's wired shut and they put a plate in it. Turns out it was dislocated and busted in two places.”

“But he'll be okay?” I catch a breath and hold it.