SUICIDE HILL

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terial witnesses to avoid that, then all hell broke loose. By the way, we’re being tailed. There’s a Metro unit in back of us.”

Kapek looked in the rearview. “Is that what this is all about? And what’s

‘Metro’?”

Passing out of downtown into the East L.A. industrial district, Lloyd said,

“Metro is an L.A.P.D. special crimes unit, a diversified attack force. Gang fights in Watts? Send in Metro. Too much dope in schools? Metro shakes down bubble-gummers on their lunch hour. The unit is effective, but it’s full of right-wing wackos. And what this is all about is me being watchdogged. We’re going to the L.A. River and park. Follow me and do what I tell you.”

Now Kapek was silent. Lloyd turned off Alameda and skirted the Brew 102 Brewery, then took the Water and Power Department road to the embankment that overlooked the bone-dry “river.” The tail car remained fifty yards in back of them, and Lloyd slowed and parked at the embankment’s edge. Checking the rearview a last time, he said, “I’m hoping they’ll think we’re meeting a snitch. Come on.”

They walked down the concrete slope sideways, plaster debris crackling beneath their feet. When they reached the riverbed, Lloyd got his bearings and saw that the old maintenance shack was still there and still mounted on a cinderblock foundation to keep it from washing away during flood season. He pointed Kapek toward it, and they trudged over through an obstacle course of empty wine bottles and beer cans. When they were standing in the shade of the shack’s corrugated tin door, Lloyd tilted his head sideways and caught sight of the two Metro cops peering over the edge of the embankment. “Stand here,” he said. “Keep looking in the direction I take off in, and keep looking at your watch like you’re expecting someone.”

Kapek nodded, looking befuddled and slightly angry. Lloyd walked around the edge of the shack, then climbed the embankment on its opposite side, coming onto level ground behind a line of abandoned cars. Squatting low, he moved down the row to the end, then stood up, seeing nothing but a short patch of pavement between himself and the Metro unit, with Collins and his partner fifty yards away, still holding surveillance on Kapek. Lloyd sprinted to the car and opened the driver’s-side door. The two cops turned around at the noise and started running. Lloyd flipped open the glove compartment—nothing—then noticed an attaché case on the floorboard, “Sgt. K. R. Lohmann” stenciled on the front. He opened it and tore through blank report forms and plastic evidence bags, and was about to give up when his hands brushed a bag that held two glossy photographs. He fum-570

L.A. NOIR

bled the bag into his inside jacket pocket and backed out of the car just as Collins loomed in front of him.

With the open door between them, Collins halted, then approached on tiptoes. Lloyd saw his partner ten yards in back of him, looking scared. When Collins moved into a cautious streetfighter’s stance, Lloyd slammed the door into his legs, knocking him backward onto the ground. Collins got to his feet and started swinging blindly; Lloyd sidestepped the blows and brought him to his knees with a left to the solar plexus. Collins sucked air and held his stomach; Lloyd balled his right fist. The old pain was still there, so he swung a short left uppercut instead. Collins grabbed his nose and fell prone, his legs twitching. Lloyd stood over him and hissed,

“Tell Captain Fred I don’t need a backup.”

The other cop was trembling beside the car. Lloyd stepped toward him, and he backed away. Then Peter Kapek walked over, stationing himself squarely between them. Shaking his head, he looked at Lloyd and said,

“Don’t you get tired of walking all over people? Aren’t you a little old for this kind of shit?”

18

At first he thought it was an awful new kind of rage that took over his whole body, making him ache from head to toe and vomit and see double. Then he thought it was something even stranger—a defense mechanism put out by his brain to keep the truth from driving him where everything was bright red and skunk-stenched. A tagalong puto cold-cocked him and took off with his woman, and if he freaked out and went crazy he was stone fucking dead, because he was the most wanted man in L.A., bullet bait for every cop who breathed.

But confronting the truth and driving the Trans Am skillfully through the hottest part of town did nothing to kill the revolt inside his body, and he couldn’t tell if he was in a hallucination or was the hallucination. At dawn he’d awakened, sprawled across Stan Klein’s body. It all came back, and he got to his feet, reeling, stumbling and puking, and ran outside