Valley of Lights

THREE

Of anywhere in the city, Produce Alley is probably the first area to come alive in the mornings. It's a low-rise zone of warehouses and sheds close to the freight tracks, and in the hours before dawn all of its doorways and shady corners fill up with people in thick jackets and baseball caps who squat with their bundles and wait for the citrus trucks to come in. The trucks unload their boxes and then, if the waiting hopefuls are in luck, they'll load up again with documented workers who are prepared to go out to the valley farms as cheap non-union labor. Mostly Chicanos, the workers can look forward to a few weeks of fruit-picking as they live either in dormitories or in makeshift camps.

I hadn't been able to sleep. This was a long shot, I knew, but it had occurred to me that this was one possible way that Mercado might make his way out of the city in darkness without either getting his hands on a car or showing his battered face at a ticket window.

The pavement was still wet in patches from last night's hosing-down; right now it was sharp and cold, a chill that would vanish into the dusty heat of the coming morning. I was out of uniform and in my own car, and nobody paid me much attention as I cruised slowly by and tried to make out faces in the gloom. I didn't have much chance of seeing detail, but what I had in mind was the application of what an old sergeant of mine had called the Heat Factor; he mostly applied it to people in cars, zooming up close behind them and staying tight on their tails to see if guilt would provoke them into some kind of panic reaction. Most of what I was getting back here was no reaction at all, until I came around, by a row of what looked like shutter-fronted garages with big zinc garbage hoppers alongside. As I slowed and stared, I saw somebody giving me a half-hearted wave.

It was Rafael, my so-called informant who had rarely given me much more than promises. He was grinning and shivering as I stopped the car and got out, and the people around and behind him seemed to fade back into the shadows as I walked over.

'What's this, Sergeant Volchak,' he said, 'you moonlighting now?'

'Couldn't sleep,' I said. The first streaks of the dawn were beginning to tear up the sky over in the East beyond the tower of the Hyatt Hotel, and the people in the alley began to rise like prairie dogs as the sounds of truck engines came through the still air. I said, 'I'm still looking for a line on Gilbert Mercado.'

Some people were starting to move, others were staying where they felt their chances were better. Rafael said, 'How'd you know I'd be here?'

'I didn't. But I thought he might be. Have you heard anything?'

'Honest to God, Sergeant Volchak, it's a big city.' Rafael gave a nervous glance as a big six-wheeler made the turn into the alley, with another one close behind; their sound rattled the shutters on either side, forcing him to shout. 'If you people don't know what's going on, who does?'

'Okay,' I said. 'Just don't forget that I asked.'

'Please, sergeant. I'm missing all my chances here.'

I let him go, and had to move my car so that the trucks could get by. The first one made a show of almost scraping me for getting in the way in the first place; I couldn't see any driver up there, just this big metal monster that could easily have been rolling along on its own dim intelligence with nobody in the cab. I briefly thought about getting out my badge and giving him a hard time, but I let it go. Back in the old days I wouldn't even have hesitated, but the satisfaction goes out of it.

Instead I got out again and walked around, looking more closely at faces now that the light was starting to cut contrasted areas out of the gloom. More trucks were arriving and would-be workers were scrambling around them to help with the unloading and so, they hoped, improve their chances. The turnover would be fast, and by nine the Alley would be fully daylit and close to dead again, its main business already over. I walked along the rows, my hands stuck deep into my windcheater pockets, feeling the chill. They say that your blood thins in this kind of climate. Takes a couple of years if you come from somewhere cooler, but then anything below seventy degrees has you reaching for a sweater.

I'll be honest, I was starting to lose interest. I was circling back towards my car and ready to go home or to find an all-night place for some breakfast when a figure broke out from the shadows in front of me and started to run. I couldn't see his face, but his size and his speed instantly said Mercado; and I started forward, cursing myself for my slow reaction and my loss of faith in my own obviously godlike powers of deduction.

He was dressed like all the others – that is, much as he'd been yesterday with a jacket added – and if he'd kept his head down I expect that I'd simply have walked on by without even noticing him. I don't think a rat could have scampered down the alley as fast as he did; I was doing my best, but I could already see that it wasn't going to be good enough. He jumped some boxes, elbowed some people out of the way, and squeezed down by the side of one vehicle to get out the other side and into the wider access road. I slammed through after him, and gained a couple of yards; he'd skidded on some dumped skins in the gutter, but he hadn't stopped and he'd picked up his balance again as he ran.

There were more people out here, and more illumination from head and tail-lights as business hit its noisy peak. The Alley was transformed, like a graveyard that had suddenly pulled its covers away to reveal some coarse and brutish fairground. Nobody tried to stop Mercado or to interfere with him, or with me; they simply moved aside when they saw us coming and probably looked after us when we'd passed, a common piece of street theatre with some curiosity value.

We'd covered maybe two hundred yards and I was doing better than I'd expected, holding the distance even if I wasn't gaining any. Mercado had looked back once, and it had cost him time. Now, as a wagon swung out ahead of him with a number of shapes huddled under the canvas in the load area behind, I saw him put on a spurt.

He was going to try to get aboard, before the wagon picked up speed and got out onto the main street. I was close to being finished, but he didn't know that. I saw him take three long steps, and then jump; he caught the edge of the tailboard and quickly brought his legs up, hanging on tight and kicking around for a foothold.

I couldn't swear to what happened next. The wagon was making the turn and I was slowing down, knowing that I had no chance of catching it and wondering if I'd even be able to get my car out of the market in time to follow. Mercado had got himself a foothold in what looked like the loop of chain from the tailboard pin, and he was struggling up and over when suddenly the tailboard slammed down and Mercado went with it.

My first fear was that he'd bounced on his head; on hard pavement, that's never a good sign. But almost immediately he was making weak moves to raise himself up, and my guess was that he was probably stunned or winded. The truck had stopped about fifty yards further on; someone in the back might have knocked on the cab, but it was more likely that the driver heard the tailgate fall. It was possible that Mercado, kicking around with his foothold on the chain, might have jerked out the pin. Then perhaps his weight had sheared the second pin, or maybe there hadn't even been a second pin. It was an old-looking vehicle, well-used.

There was another possibility, that of somebody already on board giving him a little help. I looked over toward the truck as I reached Mercado, and a dozen blank faces stared back. I knew the answer before I even had to ask the question. Nobody saw anything.

Mercado was still struggling to rise, and I crouched down beside him and helped him to sit about halfway up. That seemed to be all that he could manage for the moment in his winded state, which meant that I had to stay where I was and support him. As long as he didn't cry out or start spitting frothy blood from deep in his lungs I was hardly likely to be complicating any breakages. He seemed to have lost his sense of place for the moment, and needed to see where he was to get his bearings again.

Let me explain that I wasn't feeling too good about all of this. I said, 'You're not in any trouble. Why did you run?' And his eyes came around to my face and focussed on me hard, as if seeing me before had meant nothing but now he was looking with an intention to remember. He tried to speak normally, but there was so little breath in him yet that it came out no louder than a whisper.

He said, 'I don't like questions.'

'I only wanted to ask you what happened back there at the Paradise.'

'Well,' he said, 'now you'll never know.'

And then he did the weirdest damned thing I'd ever seen. He simply rolled up his eyes and died on me.

My arm was under his shoulders and I could almost swear that I could feel the life flood out of him all in a rush; but still it was several seconds before I fully understood what had happened, and it was with disbelief that I lowered his sagging weight and felt by his throat for a pulse. There was nothing.

I'd seen people die before. Not many, but in my line of work it's inevitable. I'd never seen anybody go like Mercado did; he was suddenly an empty glove, a discarded thing.

And this was the tough part to accept – he'd shown every sign of doing it deliberately.

I laid him flat and closed his eyes, and then I pulled somebody out of the crowd and told him to find a phone. A fatal accident with an off-duty officer in attendance, I told the man, and then I made him repeat it. By the time that I turned to look at Mercado again I think that I'd more or less rewritten the last few minutes in my own mind, giving myself a set of reactions that I could more easily live with.

The crowd didn't last as long as most; these people were here to catch a job, and watching was getting them nowhere. They'd mostly drifted away and I was into an argument with the truck driver as to why he couldn't do the same, since he was at the other end of the vehicle and facing the other way and hadn't actually seen anything, when no less than six night-shift PD cars with their howlers running appeared like banshees out of the dawn and converged nose-in on the scene. The driver clammed up fast and was suddenly the soul of co-operation; the reason for the heavy turnout, I found, was that the man I'd sent to the phone had misreported the whole thing as a fatality involving a cop. I decided to be charitable and assume that the expressions on the faces of the various patrols as they climbed back into their units were of relief that I'd been found walking and in one piece; but wasn't there also just a little bit of disappointment that their cavalry charge had led them to nowhere?

My opposite number on the night shift, Bernie Horowitz, radioed in for the ambulance call to be moved down a notch of priority. If it came down to a choice between someone in a serious accident and Mercado, Mercado was the one who'd complain least if he had to wait. Bernie was the same age as me, with a similar length of service; back in the early days he'd tried to persuade everyone to call him 'B.J.', which inevitably meant that he acquired the lifelong nickname of Blowjob Horowitz.

'You see any of this, Alex?' he asked me afterwards.

'I saw it all,' I said. 'I had the best view of anybody, if you don't include the victim.'

He shook his head at the marvel of it. 'A witness with a fixed address,' he said. 'That's a novelty, on this piece of turf.'

Bernie and I stood and chatted for a while as his patrolmen did all the marking and measuring and statement-taking that the book calls for. When the police photographer and the woman from the medical examiner's office had arrived and seen all they wanted, Bernie and I went over and I confirmed my identification. Everybody on the team had heard about the Paradise mystery by now, and they all came around to take a look at the face of the little guy who'd held the key to it.

Nobody was any the wiser for looking.

It was a full hour before the ambulance came to take him away, and we'd covered him with a blanket by then. When they'd reversed it in and the paramedic came around to open the doors, I said, 'Are you the only ambulance in this city, or what?'

'The only good one,' he said, and then he looked at me again. 'Didn't I see you in uniform yesterday?'

'My other life,' I said.

'Well, here's something you won't know. We just came over from County General and the place is like, unbelievable. They've got the big guys stalking through the corridors looking for little guys to nail to the wall, and out in the parking lot you've got to zigzag to avoid the malpractice lawyers scrambling out of cars in their pyjamas.'

'For what?'

'All because one of the zombies walked.'

'Say again?'

'It happened about an hour ago. One of them already died, right? Just quit breathing in the Emergency Room when a couple of nurses turned him over. Well, one of the others decided that he disagreed with the doctor's diagnosis. He got out of bed, helped himself to somebody's clothes, and then walked out.'

'Did anyone actually see him?'

'Two witnesses, one of them a Reverend in for minor surgery. Said it restored his faith in the resurrection.'

If there was a witness, then it could hardly have been body-snatching. I've heard of weirder things.

The paramedic added, as they brought out the folding stretcher for Mercado, 'I'd have liked to have seen it myself. Yesterday I'd have laid a bet with anyone. Between the ears, those guys were just dead meat.'