The Highway Kind(71)

THE TWO FALCONS


by Gary Phillips

Present—Four Days Ago

Evening and two men sat slouched on a pleather and chrome couch. They had their legs up on the Goodwill-purchased coffee table and one of the men was barefoot, revealing a little toe missing from one of his feet. Laminated onto the table’s surface were numerous baseball trading cards covering various eras. There were several empty beer cans on the thick lacquer as well as a family-size bag of barbecue chips they’d been munching from steadily. The chips rested on two cards of the stolen-base king Maury Wills. The elder of the two men, the one with the missing toe, was an uncle of sorts to the other one via a long-dissolved marriage. He’d bought the chips and beer on sale at Vons.

A corner lamp threw off weak light in the tidy living room as the two were entertained by a program on the flat-screen before them. It was one of those fact-based efforts that revisited historic and modern-day crimes through conjecture and on-screen re-creations. The men shared a joint while a segment unfolded on the television.

“Get your hands up and nobody will get hurt!” the man wearing a Hulk mask yelled as he underscored his command by firing rounds from his MAC-10 into the bank’s ceiling.

“Whatever happened to him?” the younger man asked the man he still called uncle, referring to the robber re-created on the program.

The older one shook his head side to side, pulling on the joint. “Not sure. I know they never found that money he ganked. Eight hundred grand.”

“Jimmy Moore liked to live large and dangerously,” a bass voice informed the viewers. There was a montage of the actor playing Moore in prison as the narration continued.

“Inside, the former police officer was able to avoid confrontations with prison gangs, as he did the bulk of his time away from the general population. Indeed, he was something of a model prisoner who read, played chess now and then, and generally kept to himself. Moore never applied for parole because he never once gave a hint as to where he’d hidden the bank-job loot.”

The prison images gave way to a 1964 Falcon Squire station wagon with the fake wood trim on its flanks and rear drop gate. The car drove along a scenic mountain highway as the narrator continued, “When James Moore got out of jail after serving nearly nine years, he was secretly followed by law enforcement, who believed he’d soon try to retrieve his ill-gotten. But Moore seemed to have anticipated this. He moved around from town to town, taking menial jobs such as washing dishes or doing janitorial work.”

The uncle cocked his head, remembering something, as the Falcon on the screen crested a rise, the sun low on the horizon.

“Authorities believe that he never retrieved the money, but they ultimately would lose track of Moore near Amarillo, Texas. He was last seen driving the restored Falcon station wagon that had belonged to his mother.”

“That’s like your ex’s wagon,” the uncle remarked as the Ford went over the rise and the program faded out to a commercial. He grabbed some potato chips.

“It sure is,” said the young man, having finished the joint.

The older man glared at him, a handful of chips hanging before his mouth. “It might be more than that.”

“What?” his nephew said.

“That Falcon,” his uncle muttered. He sat back, staring off, slowly eating one chip at a time as an idea assembled itself.

1989

Overhead, the police chopper veered left from the northwest and swung back by the row of modest homes on Fifty-First Street between Main and Woodlawn in South Central LA. Its powerful searchlight cut through the warm, humid night, fixing on one specific house as the helicopter maintained a tight pattern above the dwelling with peeling stucco. Starkly shadowed forms moved just beyond the cone of the aircraft’s high-intensity beam. There were knots of people anticipating the rock-house raid, including the Secret Service, uniformed officers in riot gear, and several reporters from local TV news, the Los Angeles Times, and the Herald Examiner. The Sentinel, the black newsweekly, hadn’t been invited. Too often they’d been critical of the LAPD and the tactics they employed in this community.

Police chief Daryl Gates jutted his jaw as he stood in his full regalia next to former First Lady Nancy Reagan. While he forced himself to keep his mind on the events happening before him, he couldn’t help but consider how clips from tonight might be woven into his first commercial should he announce his bid for the governor’s chair. He’d come a long way since he’d started out as Chief William Parker’s driver in the fifties. A long way indeed, the creator of SWAT reflected as the six-ton armored “mobile entry device,” as the vehicle was euphemistically known, goosed up the curb on its big tires and rumbled across the house’s dried lawn, churning up turf in its wake.

“This is how we will cleanse our more disadvantaged neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs,” Gates said, nodding at Mrs. Reagan, who minutes before had been hunkered down with the chief in an RV parked nearby where they’d nibbled on fresh fruit salad with kiwi—she loved that fruit. The word had come via the two-way and as Gates went over his notes, she adjusted her makeup before they stepped out. The Establishment was plastered in flowing script alongside the RV they’d walked away from to make news this night.

“We will return this community to its citizens, and take it out of the grip of the handkerchief-headed gang members and dope slingers glorified in this trash, this rap music misguiding the young people.”