Free Among the Living by Dan Vining Page B

extra antennas on the roof.
    Saint Thomas’s last name was Connor. He got out. He looked to be in his fifties, handsome in that cops and firemen way, self-assured good looks, clear eyes, skin wrinkled not from worry but from being on the boat on the lake on days off, or on the sidelines coaching kids.
    “You called?”
    Jimmy nodded toward the Kinko’s and asked if Connor had known the DJ who’d turned into a cop. And then a dead cop. It wasn’t that Jimmy thought it had anything to do with the case, he was just curious. It was a good story, in that Movie of the Week way. Or maybe as a pilot for a cop show. Connor didn’t know much about Tone Espinosa except that he’d been killed. Cops all knew who’d been killed, almost all the way back to the beginnings of LAPD.
    “ Perversito, ” he said.
    “What’s that?”
    “ Little Evil, ” the cop said. “That’s who killed him, a gangbanger. He went away for it.”
    Jimmy told him what he was working on, a version that left out almost everything but the murders and the execution and kids orphaned. Connor nodded.
    They both looked at the nightclub-turned-Kinko’s.
    “Disco sucks,” Jimmy said, but he was just quoting.
    “I just remember getting laid a lot less for a year or so there,” Connor said.
    “You couldn’t dance?”
    “I guess not. Whatever it was, what I was didn’t work for a while there.”
    Sergeant Connor gave Jimmy a name or two, people who knew about the club scene back then, the drugs, the money. The bar business was a cash business and tended to have bad people around its borders, but Big Daddy’s had been a safer, tamer, brighter version of the seventies club scene than some of the others.
    Jimmy told him about the woman in the Rivo Alto house, asked the cop if he’d run a check on her, see if she had a history in the Naples neighborhood, in Long Beach. Maybe somebody had spotted her coming and going.
    “You want her chased out?”
    “No,” Jimmy said, and then wondered why he’d said it.
    And that was it. A ground fog started to come in around them. It wasn’t cold but it looked cold.
    Connor asked Jimmy how he was doing. Jimmy answered the question for real and asked the cop the same and listened to what he said. They both knew each other’s story. When the radio called the sergeant off to something somewhere out there in what was left of the night, the two men stood up and embraced and held the embrace for a long moment.
    Where was that sun?

SEVEN
    A Cessna landed. Badly. The right wheel touched first, the plane bucked, then the left wheel hit hard. On the grass between the runway and the taxiway, four old men sat in white plastic lawn chairs. They took a minute then held up handmade cardboard squares with numbers, grading the landing as if this was the Olympics. They had all been fliers or had built planes. It was all very unofficial but the understanding was that the old guys had earned the right to rag on the youngsters. Every pilot who landed tried not to look over but all of them did.
    This time the scoring fell somewhere between a four and a five.
    Jimmy walked up.
    “You look like an undertaker,” one of the old men, Kirk, said. Jimmy wore a black suit.
    He stuck out his hand.
    “How are you?”
    Angel had called Jimmy from his shop downtown at noon. He had come up with a name for him, somebody who might know about Bill Danko and what had been called Clover Field.
    Kirk pumped the hand once. “I told Angel I’d come in to your office.”
    “Don’t have one,” Jimmy said.
    “Well, let’s do it,” Kirk said, and then looked at his friends as he made a joke, “I don’t have all day.”
    They walked down the taxiway. They were on the B-side of the airport, businesses in old wooden buildings and World War II Quonset huts, every third or fourth one vacant, airplane maintenance, radio repair, aerial photography, a skywriting company with one plane. Vines covered half the buildings. Most had peeling paint, gloriously