the door. “Call for backup, Jimmy,” she shouted over her shoulder.
“Screw that shit, Viking, you ain’t goin’ in there alone.”
Keely disappeared through the door. Jaime followed on the run.
The inside like the outside wasn’t going to set any trends on the LA après dark scene: One man down, not moving. Standing in the middle of the room an incredible hulk swung a fireman’s ax around his head like a child’s baseball bat. Two Hispanics with knives crouched in front of him.
The hulk charged and swung the ax at the closest. He missed by an inch and cut a three foot section from the bar.
Keely moved in behind him. The adrenaline soared. The hulk ripped the ax out of the bar and raised it over his head for another try. At the top of the swing Keely stepped behind him, grabbed the ax, wrenched it out of his hands and threw it behind her.
He whipped around, growling like a rabid dog.
“Bitch.” He moved toward her, hands outstretched.
Instead of backing away Keely stepped forward, grabbed the outstretched fingers, bent them back viciously and pulled down and in to her body at the same time driving her head into his face. There was satisfying crunch as she pulped his nose.
The hulk sank to his knees as if someone had dropped a five hundred pound weight on his shoulders. He cursed horribly in Spanish.
She drew back her right fist and hit him on the jaw full force and drove him to the floor. It was her signature. If you had asked her fellow officers what was the most outstanding thing about officer Keely, besides her spectacular figure, they would all have said, a sweet straight right.
Before the hulk could get up she whipped his hand behind his back, slammed her knee into his spine, grabbed the other hand and cuffed him. She clutched his hair and lifted his face to look in his eyes.
“Do not use bad language around me, shit for brains!”
Officer Sosa had the other men against the bar. He turned toward Keely.
“Always with the macho shit. I don’t know why I ride with you, Chica. I don’t do nothing except watch you beat the piss out of these pitiful savages.”
He turned back to the hood against the bar. “C’mon, rat breath. You’re lucky you didn’t grab. Even her boy friend don’t get to do that without he says, por, por, por favor.”
Keely gave Jaime a dirty look.
Two more squad cars, an ambulance and the wagon arrived and took the three men in custody. Sergeant Keely stood by the black & white looking at the hills above Sun Valley. Sosa finished the procedural detail and walked over.
“What’s the matter, Sargento, you did okay.”
She stared at the ground. “I don’t know, tired, tired of beating up hoods, and quit making smartass remarks about my boyfriend. You know I don’t have one.”
“Yeah, I know. C’mon, Teresa, get in the car, I’ll drive,” Sosa said.
Dusk settled in the hills as they left.
“You know what your trouble is, Viking? You’ve got it all. You’re smart, ambitious, a college grad, and as Lieutenant Epstein in burglary says, a body to die for.”
She gave him the, you’re thin ice, look.
Sosa ignored it. “That’s what I mean, Chica. You spend so much time making sure everyone knows you’re a bad ass, you’re no fun. Be nice, Teresa, lighten up.”
“I’m not that bad.” She got mad again. “Hey, I know how to lighten up, for Christ’s sake.” She banged the window with her fist angrily and pouted like a school girl.
“I didn’t say you were bad, Chica. I ride with you because I want to, not because I have to.”
Sosa drove so slow a line of cars stacked up behind him. Drivers cursed bitterly behind closed windows. A few gave him the finger which he ignored.
“Jesus, Jaime, pick it up. We aren’t dragging Van Nuys Boulevard in your pink pimpmobile low-rider.”
Sosa ignored her. “Don’t have a low-rider. I drive a piece of shit Chevy Caprice just like every right-thinking middle class gringo. When’s the last time someone rolled you around in the sheets? A year, more? Get out, fool around a little. The world don’t begin and end with that uniform.”
Teresa smiled wistfully, looked at large competent hands. “I’d like to, I really would.”
The sun went west in a rush leaving a soft afterglow in the hills above Burbank. It had been one of the wettest springs in California history. The perennial smog hadn’t begun to fill the LA basin like a dirty blanket.
In the orange trees below the house on Sunland the gray cat sought targets of opportunity: birds, mice, grasshoppers. A metallic tapping sounded in the distance. The cat stopped in mid stalk, turned and raced up the hill toward the house.
Wedges of light came from narrow windows in the second story of the tower. The cat shot through the open back door into the kitchen.
The man removed a tin of food from the refrigerator while the cat purred and stropped his legs.
“Patience, Bernie.”
After he fed the cat he left the kitchen and walked to the central tower where a narrow atrium went all the way to the roof. In the middle of the atrium was a small, deep pool. Around the outside of the three storey room a staircase spiraled upward.
He went up the stairs easily, two at a time. His movements were fluid and athletic, but not exuberant.
The entire second floor of the tower was a library. Painted panels divided the space into sections. The furnishings were an eclectic mixture of styles, colorful, yet too neat to be personal. The paintings were both modern and traditional, all devoid of people. Nowhere was the human form paid tribute. Of photographs, there were none. Not one.
Neatness replaced personality. The outgoing, the social would have felt uncomfortable, unwanted.
Vincent Vankelis stood in semi-shadow and looked out toward the city. He wore light weight cotton slacks, a polo shirt and canvas topped deck shoes without socks.
Standing, back to the light, square as a chunk of stone, broad across the shoulders and waist, yet without excess weight.
He turned away and walked back into the light toward a small free-standing bar. He removed a bottle of Meurseult les Gouttes d'Or from a small refrigerator and carried it across the room to the stereo. The melancholy voice of Brazilian singer, Caetano Veloso, filled the room.
Vincent’s face in the light had a slight olive cast. It was a Mediterranean face, full-lipped, strong narrow nose and a lightly cleft chin; thick black hair and a beard that required shaving twice a day.
In his early forties, one might have expected lines to mark the passage of time. There were none, no laugh lines at the corners
