The first thing I did with all that stuff: I put it back, and moved Gramps’s (my!) bed so that it covered the trapdoor (sometime in the hours I’d spent going through his stuff, the city had come and taken away that gross old carpet from the curb).
The next thing I did was try to forget about it.
Look, I had a lot going on. That box of gold, bullets, and guns had been sitting under the house for God knew how long, and a little longer wasn’t going to hurt anyone. I had a life to live and I was already spending a fair number of hours dealing with the aftermath of Gramps’s death.
After a lot of tossing and turning, I ate some indica gummies and dropped off to sleep. My alarm woke me at 7 a.m. and I found Milena at the breakfast table, eating tamales and drinking coffee. She’d made a pot and I tried some and it was way better than the bitter stuff Gramps drank, so I had a cup, leaving my jug of cold brew in the fridge for later.
“What’re you doing up?” she asked as I went back for a second cup, finishing the pot.
“I figured I should go and get a job,” I said. “I mean, there’s money in the bank for now and the bills are okay, but going through boxes of ancestral garbage is getting old. I need to get out there, you know?”
“Sure, makes sense. I was going to say something, even, but I figured it wasn’t my place to do so.” We were still figuring out what it meant to be roommates, but I was really enjoying having her and Wilmar around, just having people to play Boggle with after dinner or to mix a second cocktail for when I was making one for myself.
“I did a bunch of Jobs Guarantee gig jobs last summer break, just going to the website and taking any day labor they had. I was gonna do that again today. I’m not exactly sure what I want to do, so trying a bunch of stuff sounds smart.”
“That’s perfect,” she said. “Exactly what I did before I settled into doing the solar work. Try a bunch of stuff, get a feel for it. I’m doing the same thing myself today.” She gestured with her bandaged hand: she’d sliced it open on a piece of flashing the day before and had needed some stitches. “Doc says no more crawling around on roofs until the stitches are out.”
“Huh. Maybe we’ll get something together?”
“We can totally do that, it’d be fun. There’s always work in pairs if you want it.”
Which is how we ended up pulling home help duty for Vikram Sam. He was one of those Burbankers I knew to wave at, even though I hadn’t known his name until he buzzed us into his house on Avon Street.
“Come in,” he said, wheeling back from the door. “Nice to see you two.”
He was in his forties, I figured, youngish, with black wavy hair and a good smile. His house was a typical Burbank 3-and-2 with the odd grab-rail and other accommodations to help him live on his own. He offered us coffee or water and served us ice water from a nice earthenware jug in his fridge with a sprig of mint floating in it.
“From my garden,” he said, pointing at the screen door behind him, where I could see rows of neat, raised vegetable beds in boxes. “Raising up the boxes keeps the veggies out of the dirt, which is so contaminated from the Lockheed days, plus I can reach it to work without having to get out of the chair.”
“So cool,” Milena said. “So, Mr. Sam—”
“Vikram,” he said. “Please.”
“Vikram, how can we help you today?”
It was a pretty easy list, to tell the truth, mostly light cleaning, changing his sheets, fixing a hinge whose screws had worked their way out of the doorway. He insisted on cooking us lunch—warming up a vegan spinach and cheese curry that was incredible (“My father ran an Indian restaurant, but this is all I ever learned to cook”)—and generally hung around being pleasant company as we moved from room to room.
When we were done, Vikram made us soda water with an elderflower cordial from his own garden. It was amazing, ice-cold, refreshing, delicious. We were onto our second glass when he snapped his fingers.
“I’ve got it,” he said. I must have looked startled because he grinned apologetically. “Are you Gene Palazzo’s son?”
“Uh, yes,” I said.
“No. Way. You’re Gene’s son. Dammit, it’s been driving me crazy all day. You looked so familiar. Gene and I were really tight. We met in middle school at Huerta, and went to high school together. We used to get into some crazy shit.” He grinned again, far away now. Then the smile vanished. “I was really shocked when he died. I mean, so many people were dying back then, but mostly old people, you know? He was so young. And of course, no one even found out until things had settled down. I think I went to an online memorial for him and your mom, but I have to be honest, we were having so many memorials back then I might have got that one mixed up. But Gene, man, he was such a good guy, and you look so much like him. I can’t believe I didn’t see it at first.”
“It’s been a while,” I said. I knew a few of my dad’s old friends around town, but not many. Gramps didn’t like them, blamed them for his decision to go to Canada with Mom to be part of the Canadian Miracle.
He jolted. “Holy moly, I just remembered, didn’t your grandfather just die?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He shook himself. “I’m sorry, that was really insensitive. I’m sorry about it. It’s just—” He looked from me to Milena. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t get on so great with my grandfather.”
He laughed. “You sound so much like your dad. He and your grandpa fought all the time. Couple times he hit your dad, but then your dad got bigger than him—”
“Same thing happened to me,” I said, and Milena looked sharply at me. “I got some social workers involved, too.”
“Ugh,” he said. “That sucks. I’m sorry, kid. Do you remember your parents much? I think about your dad all the time, tell you the truth.”
It was a weird question, not one that anyone had asked me in a long time. I had the feeling that Vikram had transitioned himself from “Guy whose house I was cleaning” to “Dear old friend of the family” the instant he recognized me. He was certainly acting like it.
“To be honest, only sort of. I was eight, and then I was in a foster home for three months until the emergency ended, and then I came here. It’s all kind of a muddle. Some things I remember really well, and other things are fragments, and sometimes I don’t know if I’m remembering things that actually happened to me, or things that I was told about and that I turned into memories over the years.” I shrugged. A couple of my close buddies sometimes asked me about my parents, but apart from that I basically never talked about them. Talking about them with Gramps always turned into a fight, and everyone else wanted to know about things I couldn’t remember, and just thinking about that always made me sad.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I wasn’t sure for what.
“It’s okay,” I said, because it was the nice thing to say to my dad’s old pal.
He got a faraway look. “Can I tell you something? Something private from when I was running around with your dad?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Want me to step outside?” Milena was only half kidding.
“No, it’s okay,” I said.
He got another faraway look. “Gene and I used to cut class all the time together. Sometimes we’d go smoke weed, hike up the hills, ride our bikes together. Your grampa kept him on a tight leash, wouldn’t give him any money, and any time he got a part-time job or whatever his old man would start demanding that he chip in for groceries and utilities until he was broke again. So he started raiding the old man’s piggy banks, all the cash he kept hidden around the house. It was like some kind of stupid, toxic game.”
“Gramps never stopped stashing money around the house,” I said. “I’m still finding money between the pages of old books and in the back of the freezer.”
He laughed. “I remember! Have you checked his Heinlein books yet? They were always good for a twenty. Your dad thought maybe he was hiding the money there to get him to read ’em.” I made a mental note to check the Heinlein shelf. I hadn’t gone near it since middle school, when Gramps made me read I Will Fear No Evil because I was talking about transgender stuff we’d had in health class.
“Anyway,” he said, “one day I was flat broke and your dad was also broke and we were a hundred percent set on getting some pizzas from Monte Carlo and cycling up to the hills to get high and watch the sunset, and your grandfather was at work, so we really tossed the place.”
I got a cold feeling in my stomach.
“And after we went through the whole house, Gene was like, ‘Okay, the bedroom next,’ which was one place we never went, but he was on a mission, and after we looked everywhere, he rolled back the carpet—”
Oh, shit.
“—and there was a trapdoor under there, like in a movie, and we yanked it up and we found—”
Shit shit shit.
“—a whole stash there, some giant rifles, so much ammo, medicine, and get this, gold! Your dad was completely freaked by the whole thing, and we never did get up to the hills.”
“Seriously?” Milena asked. “Gold and guns?”
“Totally.”
She laughed. “Did you ever go back for it? I bet you could have bought a ton of weed with gold, though you might have freaked out the dispensary people.”
“Dispensary? Girl, weed was illegal. And no, far as I know, Gene never went back for it. The next week I had my accident—” He slapped his legs. “—and we had other things to talk about.” He looked back at me. “Look, I’m only telling you this because you’re on your own, and you’re just a kid, forgive me for saying so, and if your weird old racist grampa had a fortune in gold under the floorboards, I figure that rightfully belongs to you, and you could probably use it. I hope you don’t find that patronizing or inappropriate.”
“No sir, I don’t,” I said, hearing the tone I used to use when I wanted to placate Gramps coming out of my mouth. “Thank you.”
We left not long after and Milena didn’t say anything to me as we walked through the driving rain under our umbrellas, boots splashing in the streams running down the sidewalk.
We crossed Magnolia, crowded with rush-hour traffic that raced past and sent up sheets of water from the gutters, and then, after we turned onto California and things got quieter, she finally spoke.
“So, that happened.”
“Yeah.”
“Your grandfather sure sounds like a character.”
I snorted. “You could say that.”
“Look,” she said, “I don’t guess it’s any of my business, but I’m not entirely cool with living in a house with unlicensed automatic firearms hidden under the floor.”
I stiffened, and my first impulse was to tell her off for bossing me around while living in my house, but then I tamped it down. “Yeah,” I said.
“I mean, I guess things could have changed since your dad and Vik were teenagers. Maybe there aren’t any guns in there.” She stopped and turned to me. “I have to be honest with you. Even though the gun thing has me totally freaking out, I am so excited that there’s a hidden room under the floor of the house I’m living in. That is just unbelievably cool.”
I laughed. Ever since I’d figured out what Vikram was about to say, I’d been wrestling with myself, asking myself why I hadn’t done something with the box the instant I’d discovered it, and here was the answer. Having a hidden compartment under my bedroom’s floorboards was, as Milena put it, incredibly cool. “It is, isn’t it?” We jumped over a huge puddle and I snapped a pic and sent it off to 311 for flood abatement. “Let’s have an opening party when we get home. We’ll get Wilmar in, too.”
And even though I was pretending to be surprised by each of the things we took out of Gramps’s stash, Milena’s excitement at this weird relic of a different age was contagious, so by the time we had it all laid out on the floor beside the box, I was just as excited as they were.
Milena straightened out all the stuff, knolling it into perfect alignment, and then she got out her screen.
“No pics!” I said, too loud and too quick.
She put down her screen. “Oh. Sorry. I guess I shoulda asked.”
“It’s just…” What was it? “It’s just that it’s not nearly so cool to have a formerly secret compartment as it is to have an actual secret that’s actually secret.”
“Fair point,” she said. “Though it’s not secret now that I know about it, right? ‘Two may keep a secret … if one of them is dead.’”
“Okay, that’s creepy,” I said. “Also, quoting Pirates of the Caribbean two blocks from Disney Studios? That’s a little on the nose, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re thinking of ‘dead men tell no tales.’ I’m quoting Benjamin Franklin, you ignoramus. God, I can’t believe they let you graduate.”
And just like that, all the awkwardness drained out of the room, and we were friends looking at this bizarre legacy of my weird, cranky old grandfather.
After we’d finished giggling, I said, “So, I think those are real guns.”
“Yup.”
“Super illegal.”
“Yup.”
“I guess I gotta call the cops about them or something?”
“Yup.”
“Argh.”
“Yup.” She smiled.
The back door opened and Wilmar called out hello, so we both rushed out to intercept him and brief him and then he came back into Gramps’s room and stared and stared.
“Jesus. Fuckin’. Christ. Your grampa was a terrorist?”
“More like a wannabe terrorist,” I said. “I think. I hope. But I’m going to call the cops.”
He said, “Maybe you should get rid of the gold first, put it somewhere else so it doesn’t get seized.” I had the normal background level of mistrust for cops, but Wilmar had that Armenian thing of having been raised on stories of the Turkish genocide and he’d been trained to see every armed official as a potential mass murderer.
“Well now you’ve said that, I’m starting to freak out a little. I’m going to put this all back in the box and close it up until I’ve done some reading.”
“Good plan,” Milena said.
“Use an anonymizer,” Wilmar added.
* * *
I decided not to log in to the Jobs Guarantee site the next day. I figured that any wages I missed would be made up for once I figured out what to do with all that gold. I knew the price of gold swung around like crazy, mostly because of blockchain weirdos and stuff happening in the offshore Flotilla, but there was a pretty good whack of it there and it was bound to be worth something.
I half woke up when I heard Milena heading out to work, and then I heard Wilmar take off—he had a girlfriend who’d just rotated off shift at a plant in Sacramento and they were spending a lot of time together—and then I was alone in the house. I got up for a pee and realized it was 11 a.m. and I was hungry and the day was half gone, so I ate and coffeed and browsed headlines and socials on a couple of twitters my friends hung out on, and then I went to go find a full-sized screen and keyboard to do some real research with.
I was just googling which anonymizers were still considered secure when the doorbell rang. I peeked out the cam and saw a couple of familiar faces: ruddy white guys who’d spent endless hours in our kitchen playing poker with Gramps, or turning out on Food Truck Friday with their faded Maga hats to hand out flyers. I couldn’t remember their names, though.
The bell rang again. The guys were looking at each other, then back at the camera. One of them waved at it.
I answered the door.
“Hey, guys,” I said.
“Hello there, Brooks,” one said. He was rail-thin, with a sunburned, deeply lined face. Of the two, he was the one I remembered as being kinder, but I wouldn’t have bet money on it. He put out his hand.
“Hi there.” I shook. Gramps’s generation were big on handshakes. He put a lot into this one, drawing it out and I imagined the microbes hopping out of the creases in his palm and finding new roosts on mine.
“It’s Kenneth,” he said, “Ken. I was a friend of your grandfather’s.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” the other one said. He was beefier, in that way of old gym rats who’ve started to sag. His bald head shone with sweat. The rains had stopped, but they’d left behind brutal humidity. I was already starting to wilt.
“Come in, guys,” I said.
They kicked off their overshoes at the door and left their umbrellas on the porch and came in, steaming in the cool and dim of the house.
“We’re sorry about your grampa,” the other one said again, awkwardly giving me his hand. I shook it. His hand was wringing wet. So gross.
“Thank you,” I said. “Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee.” They knew the way to the kitchen but they let me lead them anyway.
After I had coffee in front of them—I saw them smirking as I pressed out three individual cups from the AeroPress instead of making a whole pot—and sat down, the other guy introduced himself (“Derrick”) and they got to it.
“You heard anything about the city infill program?” Kenneth asked.
I knew all about it, and had sent a letter of support to the council over it. Anything to get more density in Burbank. Once we hit critical mass, they’d replace our bus lanes with light-rail. I could tell these guys wouldn’t like it. Gramps’s friends hated that kind of thing.
“Yeah?” The question mark on the end would keep ’em guessing.
“Thing is,” Derrick said, “it’s targeting this area. This street. They wanna tear down these houses, all these houses, your house, and put up apartment buildings. No parking, either—they’re saying it’s part of a new public transit corridor.”
Survival instinct kept me from saying yessss!
Kenneth took over. “All these houses on this block, they’ve changed hands. They’re not old Burbank, they’re yuppies and hipsters who don’t care about the city, its history.”
I’d heard this business so many times. Gramps’s friends were the militant wing of the Burbank Historical Society. To hear them talk, you’d think that Burbank’s streetscape was famous for its Revolutionary War battles, not because they shot the B-roll for Father Knows Best here.
Back to Derrick. “Thing is, if there’s even one holdout against eminent domain, we turn ’em into a martyr, someone who’s having their family home stolen out from under them to pave the way for a neighborhood that Burbankers don’t want. We can make a case out of it, force ’em to back down. You’d get to keep your family home and the street you grew up on.”
I’d been hearing this kind of thing since I was eight years old, these brainwashed dinosaurs were convinced that every idea to save the planet and our species was secretly a plan to turn them gay and force them to live in a slum. It was a miracle I’d come out of it unscathed, though of course it was so obviously stupid that I couldn’t see how anyone believed it.
When Gramps died, I’d figured that I’d finally be free of the tedium and unpleasantness of having to put up with this kind of bullshit. But so long as I had the house, it would tie me to these guys. It gave me an idea.
“So, you’re saying that if I don’t do anything, they’ll tear this house down and replace the whole block with high-rises? And once that happens, this whole way of life, Gramps’s way of life, it’ll die forever?”
“That’s the size of it,” Derrick said. Kenneth looked alarmed, like he’d just figured out what was coming.
“Well all right then,” I said. “You’ve convinced me. Thanks for coming by, guys.”
They looked startled as I took their cups and dumped out the dregs in the sink and headed for the door, but they followed me. I opened the door as they put on their overshoes and stepped out onto the porch to get their umbrellas.
“I’m glad you’re doing this, son,” Kenneth said. “Your grandfather’d be proud.” But he was looking at me through narrowed eyes. He knew. Even before I said it, he definitely knew.
“Guys, I’m not going to help you with this. I’m going to figure out who it is at City Hall I need to call and I’m going to let them know that I am one hundred percent behind the plan. That I’d be proud to sacrifice my family home to make Burbank a better city. I know that’s gotta disappoint you, but seriously, thank you for filling me in. I’ve been struggling with what to do with this place when I go away for school. I don’t wanna be someone’s landlord, so this is just about perfect. Seriously, thank you guys.”
“Brooks—” Kenneth managed, before I firmly, gently closed the door in both of their faces.
I felt light as a feather.
* * *
It was actually the best idea I’d ever had. Selling the house would give me enough money that I wouldn’t have to worry about money—for a while—and it would finally get me out of the orbit of Gramps’s Maga Club pals. And I wouldn’t have to worry about the fucking guns under the floorboards.
I went back into Gramps’s/my room and moved the bed and opened the trapdoor. Handling the guns again felt gross and good at the same time. They were relics of another era, when America had been full of these, back before President Uwayni had packed the court and shown the plutes that she wasn’t messing around. I was only seven when it happened and we were living in Canada, and I remember Mom and Dad doing a lot of triumphant air-punching and dancing every time the President—our President, as I’d always thought of her—scored another victory. The gun thing had been huge and there’d been street parties in Canada and more in the USA when it happened.
President Hart had been a disappointment, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. I was living with Gramps by then, still coping with my orphan’s grief, and to hear Gramps talk of it, Hart was Uwayni’s third term in office, continuing her agenda as he had when he was her VP. It was bullshit, of course. Having lost the Senate and the House, Hart was hamstrung, with neither Uwayni’s killer instincts nor her gift for rhetoric. They’d called him President Nothingburger.
Gramps had whooped and woken me up when Rosetta Bennett won in ’34, more glad than I could have ever imagined him being for a woman president. For Gramps, the first Republican in the White House in sixteen years was cause for celebration, regardless of their gender. She’d vowed to roll back gun control, but two years into her administration that promise was broken, along with so many others. Everyone thought she was gonna get pasted in the midterms. Certainly, I was planning to do everything I could to make that happen.
So these guns were strange machines, relics out of a historical movie, the religious artifacts of an extinct cult. Everyone knew that America still had more guns than anywhere else, and would for generations, as these old troves were rooted out and beaten into plowshares. I remembered seeing the blacksmith at the county fair doing that, methodically working a huge pile of shooting iron into gardening implements, displaying a permit for the CO2 emissions from her forge. Gramps had scowled every time we passed her. I’d snuck away and bought a trowel later that day.
I should just call Burbank PD now and say I’d found them in Gramps’s closet when I moved into his room. It would be a paperwork nightmare and there’d be a record of it, but this wasn’t uncommon. Demographics are destiny, and almost every remaining musketfucker was Gramps’s age, and whenever one of them popped their clogs, some unsuspecting xillennial or stormie would discover a trove of high-powered, radioactively illegal guns in their sock drawers. I’m sure Burbank PD wouldn’t bat an eye.
Ever since I’d discovered the guns, I’d handled them like spoiled meat, touching them as little as possible, holding them by the barrel rather than the stock. Now, my hand stole over to one of the big rifles and picked it up by the rear grip. It molded perfectly to my hand. I took hold of the front grip and fitted the stock to my shoulder, my finger next to (but not on) the trigger. I posed for the mirror. Okay, this is so stupid, but I did look like a complete badass. Like an action hero (or, I guess, a school shooter). I picked up another one and held them akimbo, like a double-wielding video game character, fully ramboing for myself. I wanted a selfie. They were cool machines. No wonder dudes worshipped these things.
Ugh.
I carefully set one of them down. Then as I was bending to set down the other, the doorbell rang.
I know, in theory, that there are ways that cops can see through walls, using Wi-Fi interference or millimeter-wave radar. In practice, I don’t think Burbank PD has those capabilities. But at that instant, I was sure that someone was about to put a battering ram through the door. I fumbled out my screen—and nearly dropped the remaining rifle—and then broke out in an allover sweat as I saw the fish-eye view of two Burbank cops standing on my doorstep.
I felt light-headed, blood in my ears, cold and then hot. I worked as quickly as I could to get everything into Gramps’s secret cache, and of course I did a shitty job so the lid wouldn’t sit flush. The doorbell rang again. I pulled the bed back into position over the trapdoor and then unmade the sheets, so they hung down over the side that faced the bedroom door. I closed the bedroom door and walked slowly to the front door, breathing deeply, trying to get my thundering pulse under control.
I opened the door.
“Hi there?” I said. My voice came out in a squeak. Shit.
“Are you Brooks Palazzo?” The cop was another old white guy, could have fit right in at a Maga Club, but his partner was young and Latino and a little gender nonconforming, with earrings in both lobes and clear nail polish on their short fingernails.
“Yes?” Not as squeaky.
“Can we come in? We’re investigating the death of Mike Kennedy and we wanted to go over your statement from your incident with him.”
“Oh.” Oh. Right. “Okay, sure. Come in.”
And so there I was, back in the kitchen with two more strange dudes, making them coffee and wishing they were gone and I was gone.
The nonconforming one, Officer Velasquez, waited until we were all sitting with our cups in front of us before they started talking, first getting my consent for the officers to activate their bodycams, then having a slug of coffee before getting down to business.
“We’re here as part of a second-level investigation at the request of the Department of Homeland Security; their anti-terror office keeps official statistics on white nationalist violence. Based on the footage you streamed, we believe that Mr. Kennedy’s attack fits.”
They paused, which I knew was a cop trick to get me to say something, but they do that trick because it works. I was so goddamned anxious about the guns, felt like I was going to pit out any second. I just had to say something. “I don’t know if Kennedy was a white nationalist. I think he was just a Maga guy who went over the edge.”
The other cop, the older white guy, grunted. “Yeah, well, we know that not every Maga Club member is a white nationalist and not every white nationalist is in a Maga Club, but Mr. Kennedy’s message board history doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Kennedy was an old-fashioned, Charlottesville-type Nazi peckerwood.”
It was weird to hear “Charlottesville” coming out of the mouth of someone who wasn’t one of Gramps’s buddies. They talked about it all the time, but outside of AP history, I never heard anyone else mention it.
“Okay, I believe you. But guys, you’ve got my video and my statement. I’m not sure what else I can tell you?” My heart was thundering.
Back to Velasquez: “We watched your video, Brooks, and we couldn’t help but notice that Mr. Kennedy was pretty good friends with your grandfather.”
“He’s dead,” I blurted. “Gramps, I mean. Also, Kennedy, but you knew that. Gramps died a couple days later, right after Mike.”
“We know that too,” Velasquez said, looking appropriately grave. “We’re very sorry for your loss. We also looked into your grandfather before we called on you. He also had some pretty extreme views.”
“He was an old white guy,” I said, then involuntarily looked at the old white cop, who glared at me. I was mortified. I caught Velasquez smirking before they composed themself again. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
Velasquez smiled. They were handsome as hell and clearly knew it. “It’s okay, Brooks. We know it’s a difficult subject. How did you and your grandfather get along?”
I shrugged. “We didn’t, to tell the truth. He didn’t get along with my dad, either. Dad used to make me zoom Gramps from Canada on his birthday and on my birthday and I think we all hated it. To keep telling the truth, it didn’t get much better when my mom and dad died and I came here to live with him. I mean, I’m grateful that he took me in and I guess I loved him, he was family, but we weren’t exactly friends, if you understand me.”
Velasquez nodded encouragingly. “I get that, sure. Family, right? But Brooks, with all due respect, your grandfather is dead and Mike Kennedy is dead, but there are some people out there who they used to associate with who are bad guys, scary guys, the kind of people who go out and murder people they don’t like. Terrorists, Brooks. Our colleagues in the DHS put a lot of energy into finding those guys and dealing with them and we want to help them. So that’s why we’re here, because you need to help us so we can help them.”
“Okay, but I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Brooks, you lived with your grandfather for a decade. You heard things, saw things. These guys—again, all due respect to your grampa—they’re not the brightest guys. They talk a lot. We want you to help us figure out what they might be up to, by telling us everything you heard or saw. Then we’ll tell the DHS about it and they’ll do their thing.”
It was really hot in the kitchen. I’d forgotten to close the blinds at the front of the house and now it was sweltering. I felt like my ass was squelching in a puddle of sweat. “Look, the only thing I heard was that Mike Kennedy might be helping you out with something like this, and then someone put a bullet through his forehead.”
The older cop grimaced. “Mr. Kennedy was given some very specific instructions about how to keep himself safe. He didn’t follow those instructions. It’s very unfortunate, what happened to him, but to be honest, it was his own damned fault. You can’t help someone who won’t let you help them. Some people are just too damned pigheaded to help. But not you, Brooks. We’ve seen your transcripts from Burroughs. You’re a bright kid. And we can tell your heart’s in the right place. Your city and your country need you to do the right thing here.”
“Uh, all right. How about this. I’ll think it over and write down everything I remember and send it to you.”
They traded a skeptical look, like this kid will not send us shit. They were right, of course.
“Thank you, Brooks,” Velasquez said, and they stood to go. I shook their hands with my damp, nervous palms and felt like they were both staring into my soul as they met my eyes. Once they were gone, I went to draw the blinds to cool the house off, then I realized how guilty that’d make me look and so I left ’em up.
Well, there was no way I was going to tell Velasquez and their partner about the guns under the floorboards now.
* * *
I rearranged the guns and stuff until the trapdoor shut properly, washed the sweat off, and pulled out my work placement application for San Juan Capistrano, which I’d abandoned after my run-in with Mike Kennedy and Gramps’s death. I just wanted to get the fuck out of Dodge. Let the city tear down the house, get rid of all this crap that was tying me to it, and put in a year or two doing something I could be proud of. I tapped and typed my way through the application but I kept getting distracted by daydreams of what it would be like to visit the new, inland San Juan Capistrano, with its weatherproofed, solarized buildings, public transit, smart infrastructure, and community spaces—to return as a grown man, maybe with a small child, a son or daughter, pudgy hand holding mine as we wandered the streets. Maybe we’d be there for a ceremony honoring all the workers who’d come from across America and all over the world to rebuild the city. Maybe the ceremony would be held in the mission, painstakingly relocated, one brick at a time, to a safer, more permanent site. Maybe we’d go snorkeling through the old city. Maybe there’d be mangroves, like the ones they planted in Florida after they lost Miami.
I was deep in this silly daydream when I got a buzz, from Milena.
> MUDSLIDE. MOUNT UP.
She’d included a pin for a location, way up by Brace Canyon, and for an instant I wondered how Armen and Dave could have triggered a mudslide, but that was stupid. I yanked open Gramps’s closet door and tried to remember where I’d put my all-weather work gear when I’d moved into the room. A few minutes later, I was out in the pounding rain in a mud suit, lit up with dangling all-weather LEDs that reflected prisms of light off the fat raindrops that thundered out of the sky.
I walked as quick as I could through the streams coursing down the sidewalk and streets until I got up to Magnolia, then turned east, making it a couple of blocks before an all-weather bus with EMERGENCY RELIEF on its destination sign pulled over and picked me up.
I recognized a few of the faces on the bus, and we all nodded to each other and tapped at our screens as the bus labored off toward Brace Canyon, winding up the hills and slowing down to drive around smaller slideouts and fallen trees. As we got to higher ground, the wind started to howl around the bus, making it rock whenever it caught like a sail.
The slideouts got bigger and harder to get around, and we passed a house that had shifted off its foundation and slid/rolled down Parish Place, sending up rubble that had shattered the roofs of several more houses. Eventually an emergency captain pulled the bus over and told the driver that was as far as they could go. We debarked and lined up in front of a pair of volunteers who were directing work gangs, squinting at their screens as the rain pelted them. The bus turned around and headed back downhill, its air brakes squealing and its tires crunching as it sought purchase on the slick mud that coated the street.
When it was my turn, I told the dispatcher that I had a couple of housemates already working and I got assigned to Milena and Wilmar’s detail, which was sandbagging at the top of a hillside to try to divert the runoff to detour around a seriously eroded area that was already undermining a couple of houses’ foundations and a pretty ambitious swimming pool (these hill houses were pretty chichi). I collected a map-pin and got out a screen and followed it to Milena and Wilmar, detouring a couple of times to get around blockages in the road—overturned cars, fallen trees, racing torrents of sludgy rainwater—and caught up to them on a ridge that had been fenced into several backyards, and was now being energetically unfenced by a wrecking crew that was going ahead of the sandbaggers with wire cutters and chain saws to clear the way.
“You made it!” Wilmar said, and gave me a one-armed hug, then handed me the load of sandbags he was carrying in the other arm. They were black fabric bags filled with hydrophilic “sand” that would absorb several hundred times their weight in water. All I had to do with them was hold them in place until they were wet enough to stay put, then lay the next one, and the next, building up a tall triple-thick wall. Milena was already on it, and had built up a few sections to waist height. She took my armload off me and sent me back with a wheelbarrow to get more. Soon I was working on a line of people bringing the bags out, lining them up, holding them down.
The watercourse we were trying to divert was not so bad at first, but every now and again someone uphill from us would suffer a breach and we’d get a wave of slimy water that could rise to waist height, even sweep you off your feet, and I got knocked down three times before I rotated out to join the fence-clearing crew. That third time I’d hit my head pretty hard and I was feeling too shaky to stay on the line.
I wasn’t checked out for chain saws, but bolt cutters were self-explanatory and soon I was snipping away at chain-link, rolling up the fence as I went. I got out ahead of the rest of the crew, into an empty lot, and so I was all on my own when I fell into the sinkhole.
I’m guessing it was originally a cellar or a septic tank, but it had been filled in a long time before, back when the lot was cleared. The rushing water must have scoured it free from fill, leaving only a treacherous borehole that seemed no deeper or muddier than the surrounding area, but which sucked me in to the waist in an instant, even before I could call out. I lost the bolt cutters in the soup, but I was able to lever myself out of the borehole and I limped to Milena to get some hazard stakes, tape, and LEDs to string around it. When I explained to her what I was after, she made me show her the sinkhole, then she sent me off to find a rest trailer, so I stamped through the rain until I reached one and went inside and skinned out of my rain gear in the steamy heat, hanging it all up and then accepting a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows. I realized that I’d forgotten to bring a whiskey flask. I always forgot to bring a flask, even though every time there was a mudslide there came a moment when I was drinking free hot chocolate and relaxing in a folding chair with sore muscles and scrapes and bruises, and the only thing that could make the moment more perfect was some whiskey in my drink.
I groaned and stretched out my back, leaning forward in my chair and then back again. Before I knew it, I’d nodded off.
I woke up a few minutes later, when my head dropped onto my chest, and then jerked upright. While I’d been on the nod, more relief workers had come in and filled up the space, making it louder and more crowded. I stood up to give someone my chair and get back to the sandbag line, but when I did I realized that I was now standing amid a large group of my grandfather’s old Maga Club buddies, and they were all staring at me.
I had warmed up in the trailer, but now I was suddenly cold, my clothes clammy and sticking to me all the way to my underwear. And yup, there were Kenneth and Derrick, hate-fucking me with their eyeballs. I suddenly wished that I’d left them on better terms.
But of course they were out there. The Maga Clubs always came out for emergencies, it was their thing, being “guardians of the community.” Some of those guys—the ones who’d worked construction—were strong, too, and knew how to build things well and quickly.
“Chair’s all yours,” I mumbled, and pushed past them. A couple of them deliberately crowded me, made me dance around them, and they all kept staring at me as I pulled on my rain gear. I was ten paces from the trailer before I realized that I still had my hot chocolate cup. I went back to the trailer and set it on the bottom step, but before I could get away, Derrick had me by the wrist. His rain gear was a lot less advanced than mine, old and worn, and his belly strained at the Velcro down the front.
“Kid,” he said, “you got a minute?”
“Actually, I gotta get back on the job, sorry—”
“No, kid, you have got a minute.” His grip tightened. “I hear the cops came by your place after we left.”
Now how the fuck did he hear that? “Uh-huh.”
“I hear they wanna know about Mike Kennedy, about his friends. Your grandfather’s friends.”
“You heard that,” I said.
“I did. And I just wanted to tell you, the thing that happened to Mike was really terrible. I mean, just so damned bad. And because your grandfather meant a lot to me, I feel some obligation to you, to keep you safe.”
“Safe.”
“I’m saying, what happened to Kennedy was a damned shame.”
“And you want to keep me safe.”
He grinned. “You get it. Bright kid. You’re Richard’s grandson, all right. It’s good blood. The Palazzos have good blood.”
Gramps loved to talk about his blood. Never mind that he died when some of it clotted in an inconvenient fashion.
“I gotta get back to the line,” I said. He didn’t let go.
“Look, I’m just saying, cops come by, the smart thing to do is get a lawyer and say nothing. Everyone knows that. Bust Card 101. ‘I invoke my right to counsel. I invoke my right to silence. I do not consent to a search of my person or my home. I would like to see your warrant.’ That’s what smart people say, and you are a smart guy.”
I hated this. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, which was totally infuriating. I really should have called a lawyer when those two cops showed up at my front door. That was the smart thing to do. Even if you were a nice, middle-class white kid whose family had been in Burbank since the Lockheed days. Even if you owned a nice, three-bedroom, two-bath house in Magnolia Park.
But I hadn’t lawyered up, and things had gone okay. I think. And the idea that the next time the cops were at my door, I should call a lawyer because this old mouth-breathing irrelevancy wanted to protect his half-assed white nationalist terror cell?
“Thanks, Derrick. That’s good advice.”
Still, he didn’t let go.
“One more thing before you run off?”
“Sure.” God, make it end.
“Your grandfather, he meant a lot to us. I’d meant to talk to you about this at the funeral, but some of his things, things you’re not going to want, Maga Club things—I was wondering if me and some of the guys could come and get ’em? So we can have something to remember him by? It’s what he woulda wanted.”
Gramps had put everything in a family trust in the twenties, during one of the pandemics. If there was any way to beat taxes, Gramps was into it. I was the trustee and the trust’s beneficiary, which meant that I got to decide what to do with Gramps’s things. I’d been planning on paying someone to truck most of it to a thrift, so maybe Derrick could save me some time and energy. But I also didn’t want him and the rest of the Maga Club in my house, going through my closets.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re after and I’ll put together a box?”
“No, I think it’d be better if we came by. It’s what Gene woulda wanted.”
The guns. They wanted the guns. That’s what they were worried about, why they were freaked out about the cops. This wasn’t “snitches get stitches.” They just didn’t want part of their private arsenal getting sent to the county fair to be beaten down by the blacksmith lady. They needed them for their civil war.