Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [55]
In the case of Daniel “Danny” Cruz, Detective Sanabria’s investigation and the trace of the nine-millimeter gun that had placed Danny in this bed had been as fruitless as it usually was. Manufactured by the American Patriot Gun Co. of Waukegan, Illinois, the weapon had been sold to the Guns R Us Mart of Phoenix, Arizona, and then to a certain Andrew Palazzo, who, when contacted by Detective Sanabria by phone, said that he had sold the gun at a swap meet in Mesa, Arizona some six years ago.
“Untraceable,” Detective Nazarian had remarked when Sanabria told him the results of his two-hour investigation. “Unknowable.”
Detective Nazarian had seen enough cases of children and guns that he wanted to get out of police work, which was why he was going to graduate school and starting to toss around words like “unknowable,” which everyone in the Hollywood LAPD station found annoying, especially Detective Sanabria. But it was probably true: How and why some idiot had left a loaded gun in the construction site across the street from an elementary school was probably unknowable. So that left the victim Danny to talk to.
Detective Sanabria could not pretend he was here for any investigation. He was here for something else—to do something he did not know how to do, that he felt queasily uncomfortable doing, which was to make the speech and twist his face into the angry I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass-youngman stare that would keep Daniel “Danny” Cruz away from guns the rest of his life.
He stood staring at Danny with a lingering, pathetic, hopeless absence of words. “Now you know what a bullet can do to you,” was the best he could do. “Or maybe you don’t really know yet. Because you’re still alive, aren’t you? And you shouldn’t be.”
Only much later, days after Danny had taken his first, lightheaded steps away from the hospital bed, after the nurses had helped him walk through the ward, after listening to the doctor give his mother a much-too-long list of instructions for his care, when he was back in the familiar and messy nest of his room, did he realize exactly what had happened to him.
He had shot himself in the skull and survived.
He had been in a coma for two weeks, at one point nearly left for dead.
“You cheated death,” his mother said. “We even had a priest here.”
Danny remembered the first time he had understood what death was, in bed under his covers when he was still in elementary school. In the darkness of his room, hours after watching a movie filled with medieval battle scenes in which one of the protagonists had exited the world of the living with an especially poignant soliloquy, the abstraction of death had become real for the first time. It was perfect blackness, a sleep from which he would never awaken, forever tucked under the football helmets on his comforter, the bedroom lights permanently off.
Danny the hospital patient had a new appreciation for what death meant and, at the same time, could now see the possibility