Alpaca Sunrise by Jon Wesick
Alpaca Sunrise by Jon Wesick
Detective Dirk Steelcage hated knitting even more than he hated Brussels sprouts and he hated Brussels sprouts. He was the kind of cop who didn’t let sissy rules like the Fourth Amendment stand in the way of justice. No matter what the limp-wristed politicians at city hall said, he’d never seen a jaywalker reoffend after a few dozen jacketed hollow points in the back. His unorthodox methods earned him a few nicknames in the department such as thug, asshole, and trigger-happy motherfucker. In spite of his efforts, crime was rampant. It was going to be a long day of searching department stores for contraband scarves and pepper spraying managers who ask to see a warrant. What better way to start it off than with a hearty breakfast of sugar, coffee, and sodium nitrate at Flo’s Five Spot?
Shock greeted him like a punch to the jaw when he climbed out of his thirty-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Instead of the plate glass window that hadn’t been cleaned since the Sam Yorty administration and the burned-out neon sign that read, “Flo ive pot,” he found a tapestry woven of nightmares covering the diner’s façade. This wasn’t the Bayeux Tapestry but a ghastly crochet of a knight jousting with a unicorn in front of an audience of Belgian Surrealists that would make the most hardened gunnery sergeant’s blood run cold.
“Ever seen something like that, Dirk?” Flo wore an apron over her margarine-colored polyester dress. Her hair was a chemically enhanced auburn and her eye shadow was the color of the LA sky.
“You mean yarn bombing? Yeah.” Dirk touched the .50 caliber Desert Eagle nestled in his shoulder holster for comfort. “In Cali, Colombia.”
“Yarn bombing?”
“It’s a kind of graffiti that uses knit or crochet to deface public objects.”
“Well, isn’t that the cutest thing?”
“Damn it, Flo! These yarn bombers are nothing to sneeze at. If you don’t remove those stitches pronto, your diner will be Knits Templar territory. I don’t need to tell you what that means. It means thugs shaking down your patrons in exchange for cheap mittens and rest rooms occupied in spite of the customers-only sign.”
& & &
“Steelcage, get in here!” Clive Pelican-Smythe called from his office.
A thin man who wore a deerstalker hat and smoked a meerschaum pipe, Steelcage’s supervisor had been on the job since “Prime Suspect” debuted. Poaching him from Falklands Yard had been the department’s attempt to appease PBS viewers. Like most British actors, Pelican-Smythe spoke in a flawless, American accent when he wanted to.
“This is FBI Special Agent Tormy Sigh.” Pelican-Smythe gestured to a short-haired woman wearing a polyester pantsuit. “I’m assigning you to help with her investigation. She’ll fill you in.”
“Robin Purl, head of the Knots of the Round Table.” Sigh slapped a photo of a dead man on Pelican-Smythe’s desk. As she did, her sleeve hiked up revealing a jagged scar on the back of her arm. It was the kind of scar you got from blocking a machete or broken bottle in a bar fight. The stitches were uneven as if done one-handed in a public bathroom. At least the medic wasn’t a goddamn knitter. “Ralph Lapel.” She slapped down another and then added a third for good measure. “Jonah Sock, head of It’s Knit Fenny. All leaders of yarn-bomber gangs and all killed by a knitting needle through the temple.”
“Who’s behind these killings?” Steelcage asked.
“Someone using the alias, the Sheriff of Knitting Ham,” Sigh said. “Washington thinks it’s a powerplay to take over all the yarn bombers in the southwest.”
“I don’t need to tell you what it would mean if this Sheriff succeeds,” Pelican Smythe said. “It means thugs selling sweaters outside elementary schools, mass shortages at fabric stores, innocents caught in the crossfire of knitting-needle rumbles, and a twenty percent increase in the janitorial budget to clean this mess up. Steelcage, I want you to find this Sheriff of Knitting Ham and unravel his scheme.” Pelican-Smythe stared Steelcage in the eyes. “Unravel with extreme prejudice.”
& & &
“So, what kind of guns do the FBI let you Feds carry?” Steelcage asked as they drove past the Hollywood sign. Food trucks serving Korean tacos, stands displaying healing crystals, and men in straw hats with a team of llamas corralling the Goodyear blimp into its hangar lined the freeway’s shoulder causing rubberneckers to slow traffic to a crawl. In other words, it was a typical day in LA.
“.44 magnum, just like Dirty Harry.” Sigh opened her jacket so Steelcage could see the Smith and Wesson 29 strapped to her hip. “I named her Wrist Breaker.”
“Yeah, I suppose that dinky revolver is okay for a lady.”
“This is your town,” Sigh said. “Where do you want to start?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Steelcage could see how the blue cotton-polyester blend fabric stretched over her breasts. Thank God it wasn’t wool. He knew she was a Fed and thus off limits and that they’d only known each other for twenty minutes but, damn it, the sexual tension was so thick you could spread it with a spatula, not the fat kind used to flip pancakes but one of the thin ones that you frosted cakes with. Mmm cake! He recalled the carrot cake at Flo’s and wondered if it was too soon for lunch.
“Um, what was the question?”
“Where do we start?”
“Oh yeah! We start like any investigation, with legwork. Not the cheap theatrics that panders to a TV audience but the mind-numbing routine of collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, checking alibis, sniffing out inconsistencies, looking for correlations, and running down leads. Expect weeks of fourteen-hour days cross-referencing samples found at yarn bombings with products sold at Federally Registered Yarn Distributors and chasing down credit-card receipts.”
“Attention all units,” the dispatcher said over the radio as Steelcage drove past the control tower at LAX. “Reports of a one nineteen in progress at Sepulveda and Huitlacote. Shots fired.”
“That’s by the Getty.” Steelcage took the microphone. “One Whiskey Bender responding.” He rolled down the window, attached the magnetic flashing light, he’d bought on eBay, to the roof, and dropped the pedal to the metal.
After a three-minute race through LA traffic, Steelcage slammed on the brakes stopping his Crown Victoria in a scene of chaos between a Porsche dealership and a Beverly Hills fabric store. The air smelled of the Semtex that had blown open the armored car and two guards lay dead from the knitting needles that had punctured their throats. Keeping low, Steelcage moved forward to the uniformed officer sheltered behind his patrol car.
“Robbery went down just as I arrived,” the officer said. “I shot out the getaway car’s tires and the perps are holed up in that lingerie store.”
Steelcage peered over the patrol car’s hood. A trail of maroon yarn led from the armored car to the lingerie store two shops down from the fabric place. A knitting needle shot into the patrol car’s sheet metal penetrating inches from Steelcage’s head. Sigh’s .44 magnum thundered and the attacker went down.
“Back away!” Sheltered by a hostage, a perp appeared in the door way. “Or the lingerie model gets it!” To underscore his point, the perp dug a knitting needle into the soft flesh of the woman’s neck.
Like her hair, the lingerie model’s skin was the color of honey. The beige bra and bikini bottom she wore revealed the flushed, toned flesh of an athlete. There wasn’t a microgram of cellulite on her body. She must have been a runner or Women’s Professional Beach Volleyball player. At this distance, he could barely make on the fine, blonde hairs on her arms. Was the lingerie nylon? No, at a high-end shop like this, it had to be silk. Ah, silk! Steelcage could almost feel its texture against his cheek. The perp wore a knit cap.
“This doesn’t have to end in bloodshed,” Steelcage yelled. “Turn yourself in and I’ll see you get a fair trial before your execution by lethal injection!”
“No deal! I’ll release her once you meet my demands. I want a takeout lunch from the French Laundry, maybe the Dover sole or the Wagyu and don’t skimp on the wine, a limousine with sound system, and first-class tickets on a flight to Paris where I’ll enjoy an all-expense-paid stay at the Hotel Palais Royal within walking distance of the Tuileries.”
Sigh’s .44 magnum thundered shattering the perp’s knitting needle and the hand that held it. Steelcage rushed forward to comfort the hostage while Sigh dealt with the wounded suspect. After holding the firm, female flesh against his body, Steelcage’s sense of duty took over and he turned to see Sigh kneeling on the perp’s shoulders while shoving her revolver’s barrel down his throat.
“Who do you work for?” Sigh screamed.
“Grrp Grrp,” the suspect replied before his body shook in a seizure of death.
“Hey, you did the best you could,” Steelcage told his partner. “Why don’t you wrap up here while I see that the hostage gets home safely?”
& & &
The hostage declined further comforting so Steelcage had to accept that everyone heals in their own way. He’d always considered himself a working-class guy who remained loyal to his working-class roots so when he returned to his six-thousand-square-foot home atop the Malibu hills, he poured himself a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon and gazed at the Pacific through the picture window.
“Hey, dad,” his daughter said.
When Steelcage turned, his heart dropped through the teak floorboards. Chelsea was wearing a cardigan embroidered with a snowflake pattern. Good God! The poison had made it even into his home. This was a delicate situation that needed subtlety and caring. Steelcage took a breath and recalled the training he’d received from the child psychologist.
“Where the hell did you get that filth?”
“All the kids are wearing them,” Chelsea replied.
“No child of mine is going out in public like some two-bit, yarn whore!”
“I hate you!” Chelsea retreated to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Steelcage poured himself another bourbon and muttered, “That went well.”
& & &
“Our Lady of Perpetual Ovulation,” Sigh read from the pamphlet. “What’s that?”
“Private school run by nuns who used to be drill instructors.” Steelcage turned onto Wilshire Boulevard. “I’m thinking my daughter needs more structure in her life.”
“I hear you.” Sigh put the pamphlet in the glove compartment next to the ammunition and condoms. “If only parents realized that most of all teenagers want someone telling them what to do. Those fifteen-hour days I spent sewing running shoes in an Indonesian high school were the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Well, I guess it’s back to police work. Not the cheap theatrics that panders to a TV audience but the mind-numbing routine of collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, checking alibis, sniffing out inconsistencies, looking for correlations, and running down leads.” Steelcage stopped at a light. “Hand me that list of knitting stores, will you? It’s under the box of condoms.”
As always, Steelcage’s awareness was honed like an electron microscope. The smells of garlic and bibimbap wafted from the cafes on Bulgogi Avenue. Even though it was 8:19 AM, could he stop for a bite and call it brunch? A woman carried a bouquet of flowers into the crosswalk. Her yoga pants sculpted her body into something firm yet yielding as a queen-size elastomer-gel mattress but there was nothing queen-sized about her figure. This reminded him that he needed to change his sheets. You never knew when a hostage lingerie model might stop by. Out of nowhere, a teen wearing a knit cap with earflaps hopped the curb on his skateboard and entered the crosswalk against the light. He’d seen that snowflake decoration before. Good God! It was the same one that was on his daughter’s sweater!
Steelcage stuck the flashing light on the Crown Victoria’s roof and set off in hot pursuit but the skateboarder reversed course, heading opposite to the police car’s direction. Steelcage braked, did a one eighty, and drove onto the sidewalk crashing through a fruit stand and two men carrying a plate of glass in the process. He caught a flying apple and bunch of Concord grapes, took a bite of one, and handed the other to Sigh. The apple was crisp and tart, probably a Granny Smith or Pink Lady but definitely not a Golden Delicious. The perp led them on a merry chase from Sunset Boulevard to Topanga Canyon, from the La Brea Tar Pits to the Hollywood Bowl, from the Venice Canals to the Watts Towers. Sigh fired at the fleeing suspect. The roar of the .44 magnum punctuated Kenny Loggins’ lyrics in “Danger Zone,” which Steelcage played on loop in the cassette deck on all such occasions. The shot went wide penetrating a BMW i8’s engine block and a golden retriever named Oswald. At City Hall, the suspect jumped his board on a staircase railing and slid down. Women in knee-length skirts dropped their briefcases and dodged as Steelcage, his shock absorbers taking a beating, followed down the concrete stairs. Now desperate, the fugitive opened his knapsack and dropped dozens of knitting needles on the road shredding the Crown Victoria’s tires but Steelcage kept on his tail, the car’s steel rims spitting sparks from the pavement. Then the skateboarder made a blunder and turned onto the Santa Monica Pier. Steelcage drove onto the wooden planks and followed past clam shacks, souvenir stands, and gawking tourists, lined up for their turmeric-soy sorbets, until he had the skateboarder cornered. Steelcage bailed out of his car and drew down on the suspect.
“Game’s up, punk!”
The skateboarder smiled and stepped over the edge. Steelcage rushed forward to look. Instead of floundering in the cold Pacific, the perp climbed aboard a Russian Akula submarine. From its sail, Spetsnaz commandoes opened up on Steelcage with semiautomatic crossbows loaded with knitting needles in thirty-round magazines. Tourists in Hawaiian shirts stared at their smart phones while filming the event. Steelcage and Sigh returned fire but their shots only wounded an endangered sea turtle and a passing right whale. The submarine got away.
“This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought,” Steelcage holstered his pistol. “Care to fill me in on the details?”
“Cocaine wasn’t profitable enough for the Colombian cartels so they reached out to their neighbors in Peru.” Sigh ejected the spent brass from her revolver and reloaded. “I’m talking alpaca, uncut! Coast Guard’s been catching narco submarines. That’s where the Russians stepped in with their Akulas to transport the wool. They’ll do anything to destabilize America.”
& & &
“Endangered Species Act, my ass!” Steelcage muttered as he added his signature to the incident report.
Instead of busting heads and tracking down leads, he and Sigh had spent the entire afternoon filling out the paperwork that the Washington pencil pushers required. To make up for lost time, he’d need to work a late night but late nights were nothing new to him. They weren’t the cheap theatrics that pandered to a TV audience. Instead fueled by caffeine and nerves he’d pour through the case book in the mind-numbing routine of sniffing out inconsistencies, looking for correlations, and identifying leads. But first, he’d need food.
“Hey Sigh, want to grab dinner. I know a place that serves the best meatloaf in southern California.”
“Thanks, Steelcage but I have to attend a ceremony at the local field office. It’s a hallowed moment when the Director awards new agents their theme songs. See you tomorrow.”
The LAPD had a similar ritual for new detectives. Steelcage thought back to his promotion and how he would have got “Way Down in the Hole” if he hadn’t lost out to Detective McNulty from Baltimore. Oh well, he needed to get his long night started.
& & &
Steelcage drove to Flo’s and noted with relief that she’d cut down the yarn covering the diner’s façade. He pushed open the glass door and the bell hung over the entrance tinkled.
“The usual?” Flo carried a carafe to where Steelcage sat at the counter and filled his cup with coffee.
It tasted burnt as a charcoal briquette exposed to a ten-megaton nuclear explosion, just the way Steelcage liked it. He nodded. Flo scribbled his order and clipped it to the metal wheel over the window that opened into the kitchen.
“Order up!” the cook called minutes later.
Flo slapped the plate on the counter and Steelcage dug in. It was just the way he liked it with green beans boiled to the consistency of apple sauce, mashed potatoes with enough salt to raise a yogi’s blood pressure to that of a fire hose, and meatloaf so dry it scraped the tissue off his esophagus on the way down. Halfway through dinner, his tongue felt something foreign in his mouth. He retrieved the piece of paper and unfolded it. There was a message that said, “If you want to find the yarn bombers, meet me at the Battleship Iowa at midnight. Come alone!”
& & &
“If I had one of these,” Steelcage looked up at the sixteen-inch guns in the USS Iowa’s aft turret, “I could send punks, hooligans, and scofflaws to meet their maker by the dozens.”
Except for cleats and capstans, the museum ship’s teak deck was deserted at this hour. The only sound came from moths batting their heads against the lights like Sufis twirling themselves into a stupor in a quest for union with the divine.
“Pity it wouldn’t fit in my holster.” He chuckled.
Steelcage looked at his watch. He’d waited over an hour and the informant hadn’t shown. Maybe it was a prank or even worse a diversion. His cell phone rang. It was Sigh.
“Steelcage, get over to the Michael’s on Alameda. There’s been a robbery! I don’t need to tell you what this means. It means mitten junkies burgling honest citizens to pay for their habit and a jump in scarf-related homicides.”
As he put the phone away, Steelcage spotted a man in black escaping over the gangway. He pursued and stopped by a lifeboat to draw a bead on the informant with his Desert Eagle. From behind, someone wrapped a scarf over Steelcage’s face. It was itchy like wool and smelled of chloroform.
& & &
Steelcage woke up sitting in a steel-walled cabin painted gloss white. He struggled but couldn’t stand or move his arms. A bald man who resembled Wo Fat, Steve McGarrett’s nemesis from Hawaii Five-O, stepped into his field of view.
“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Bu Ji Dao.” He gestured to the man in black, who Steelcage recognized as Flo’s cook. “And this is my assistant Daijobu.”
“So, you’re the Sheriff of Knitting Ham,” Steelcage said.
“That’s right but if you think I’ll reveal my plot to you in some kind of cheap theatrics that panders to a TV audience, you’ve got another thing coming. You need to earn that information from the mind-numbing routine of collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, checking alibis, sniffing out inconsistencies, looking for correlations, and running down leads.” Bu Ji Dao clasped his hands behind his back as he paced back and forth. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for too long, now. With you out of the way, nothing can stop me. You see, if China is to rule the world economy, we must distract America. Knitting is the perfect way to do that. With you making sweaters and scarves, we can build steel mills, oil refineries, and automobile factories without competition and take over.”
“You fiend!” Steelcage struggled against his bindings. He looked down and realized with horror that he wore a wool straightjacket decorated with a garish, Christmas-tree pattern. “But, what about your alliance with drug runners and Russians?” Steelcage asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Bu Ji Dao said. “Criminal conspiracies are not the cheap theatrics that panders to a TV audience but a mind-numbing routine of bribes, meetings, and business-class travel. Daijobu! Get my bags!” Bu Ji Dao turned the thermostat to eighty degrees. “Goodbye, Mr. Steelcage.”
Steelcage started to sweat. The dampness and dry, overheated air caused the knit straightjacket to squeeze his chest like a boa constrictor. He struggled to breathe and the room dimmed out.
He was nine and it was Christmas morning, which happened to be his birthday as well. Eager to find the Red Ryder BB gun he’d asked for all year, he rushed to the tree but had to wait. His parents weren’t up yet and he’d catch hell if he opened his gifts too soon. After a wait longer than the lifetime of a red dwarf star, his mother came downstairs and made a breakfast of fiberglass topped with strawberries, powdered sugar, and motor oil. He and his brother Nathan wolfed down their meals in mere nanoseconds. Finally, it was time to open his gifts. “What’s in the box?” Nathan yelled. Steelcage selected the first present, removed the bow, ripped away the gold wrapping paper, and opened the box to find feminine-hygiene products. “What’s in the box?” The next box contained more feminine-hygiene products. “What’s in the box” Even more feminine-hygiene products.
“No!” Steelcage struggled in the chair but it was bolted to the deck. “No!” He came to. “Must … fight … fatigue.”
He looked around but saw only a cable run, insulated pipes, flaking paint, and rust spots on the walls. Then he spotted a loose thread on his shoulder. He craned his head but the thread was still a tantalizing quarter-inch away. He remembered that Houdini used to dislocate his shoulder to escape straightjackets. Steelcage gave it a try. Pain washed over him and he found himself back on that dreaded Christmas morning so long ago.
“Thank your mother for your presents.” Steelcage’s father smiled, loaded his pipe with ball bearings, and lit a match.
“No, I won’t do it! No! No!” Couldn’t his parents see that all the kids at school would mock him for wearing feminine-hygiene products on his head and hands?
“No! No!” Wait a minute. Those weren’t feminine-hygiene products but mittens, a cap, and a sweater. Steelcage had repressed the trauma for decades. No wonder he hated knitting. Still, he couldn’t let the bastards win. He gave a tug and felt something wrench loose. Pushing through the agony, he clamped the thread between his teeth and pulled. The woolen straightjacket began to unravel.
Once free of his restraints, Steelcage dashed to the Iowa’s deck. He needed to stop the villains. But how? Bu Ji Dao had taken his cell phone and beloved Desert Eagle. Steelcage’s eyes settled on the Iowa’s sixteen-inch guns. Bu Ji Dao couldn’t have gotten far in LA traffic so he and his henchman would be in range. Still, firing a gun that hadn’t been used in over thirty years was not the cheap theatrics that pandered to a TV audience but the mind-numbing engineering task of getting power to the turret, descending into the gun pit, raising ammo from the magazine via the powder elevator, and ramming the high-explosive projectile and the charge into the breach. Formidable as these obstacles were, they couldn’t stand in the way of a cop with a penknife and a can-do attitude.
From inside the turret, Steelcage adjusted the azimuth and elevation. Aiming the sixteen-inch gun was not the cheap theatrics that pandered to a TV audience but the mind-numbing routine of using the range finder, gyro, and fire controller to correct for wind speed, direction, temperature, pressure, and even the rocking of the ship on the waves. Steelcage stared at the analog computer, that collection of gears and gauges engineered by slide rules in the 1940s, but he couldn’t make sense of the readings so he aimed by Kentucky windage and dead reckoning. After all, what was the worst that could happen?
& & &
“Steelcage, I don’t know how you did it.” Pelican-Smythe took a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon from his desk drawer and filled Steelcage’s coffee cup to the brim. “Losing that children’s hospital was a small price to pay in order to put an end to that knitting posse. As we speak, the President is loading Bu Ji Dao’s remains into the nosecone of a Minuteman II missile and sending them special delivery to Communist China.”
“And Special Agent Sigh, what happened to her?”
“Transferred to Los Alamos, something about missing plutonium.”
“Just as well,” Steelcage said. “The craft stores and fabric shops of the big city are no place for a lady. It’s a man’s world, a world of calloused fingers and thread that never fits through the eye of the needle no matter how hard you try.”
“Steelcage,” Pelican-Smythe topped off his glass, “you got me in stitches.”
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Jon Wesick 2024
