Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [61]
Danny was headed back home, very slowly, because his arms were tired of pushing, when he found his path blocked by a pair of standing denim pants on the sidewalk. They belonged to a rather large and roundish teenage girl.
“You prick,” she said.
Danny looked up and gave her a quizzical, annoyed look. “Get out of my way,” he mumbled, without much conviction.
“Who’s going to take care of Beto, you prick?” The girl reached into the backpack that dangled from her shoulder, a pink affair decorated with a pouting Betty Boop, and produced a small chrome gun, barely bigger than the palm of her hand. “Who’s going to take care of him, you prick?”
Danny grabbed the rubber tires of his wheelchair and pushed backward, first calmly and then with panic, as the girl raised her toy-sized gun and pointed it at him. He looked at the tiny opening of the gun’s barrel and pushed harder, but couldn’t get any distance between him and the girl, who kept marching toward him, mascara rivers racing down her cheeks. He tried to turn around, bouncing the chair and its wheels the way a therapist at the hospital had taught him, but he succeeded only in tipping the chair over, falling to the ground with a thud and a crash, his cheek crushed against the cement sidewalk.
Without hearing the gunshots, he felt the impact of the bullets on his body, the first striking him near the waist, the second at the base of the neck, sending a starburst of blue light across his eyelids. His skull became a bell made of bone. All at once, everything turned mercifully quiet.
He slipped into a dream in which he saw himself sprawled on the sidewalk, being lifted by men in black suits, the girl with the Betty Boop backpack standing against a nearby tree, sucking her thumb. Small chunks of silver and brass dripped from his back. He saw Pedro’s brother standing waist-high in a ditch, his arms raised in a plea: Help me. Elliot came to place a finger inside Danny’s first wound, the one in his cheek, wiggling the finger about like a worm. Danny shook his head and tried to push him away, and startled awake to see he was inside an ambulance, a paramedic’s latex gloves pulling back his eyelids. “Hey, Louie, we got him back!” the paramedic shouted. Danny passed out, tumbling into a warm dreamlessness, and then woke up again, alone, months later, in a room with green walls. For a few minutes he listened to the beep of a machine that echoed his own heartbeat until the steady, soft sound made him drowsy and he closed his eyes again.
When Detective Sanabria came to the Children’s Hospital some time later, he spent a good two hours at the foot of Danny’s bed. He felt especially useless before the sight of this boy’s prone body. Sanabria was beginning to question his place in the world, the assumptions about goodness, strength, and perseverance that had informed his life up to now; the hours of study in community college, his struggles at Cal State L.A. in classes like Applied Psychology and Urban Criminology, his monklike devotion to the reading of prolix police manuals that had ended with his consecration as detective. Here on the bed before him was a boy who had managed to get himself shot not once, but three times, twice with Sanabria looking after him, as it were. The girl with the gun in her Betty Boop backpack was in juvie, learning to draw pictures of weeping girl-clowns from her fellow inmates, and as unwilling as the rest of the knuckleheads to give up the name of the person who had sold her the gun.