The Afterlife Read Free Page B

clotted with cholesterol. The cop was out of shape. His gut hung over his belt and his muscles were soft as water balloons. The guy must have liked his bacon and his ham thick as shoe leather.
    "Ahh," the cop cried, stepping back, his hand over his heart. The badge on his chest sparkled from that electrical charge of my hand coming out, bloodless.
    The wiry
cholo
staggered backward, nervous. "I didn't do anything."
    He hadn't. He was a little gangster, but that morning, sporting a black hat, he had just been walking across Chinatown to god knows where, his death for all anyone knew. Maybe his luck, like mine, would run out later that day.
Quien sabe?
    The cop examined the front of his shirt, surprised perhaps that his ticker was still thumping. He then winced at the
cholo.
    "Something wrong?" the
cholo
asked meekly, his arms still in the air. His tiny rat eyes were getting smaller. His goatee was twitching, and the tattoo of a snake on his arm was throbbing. The guy was terrified.

    "Get out of here!" the cop snarled.
    The
cholo,
hand on his hat, hurried away, scaring the dog that was now gripping in his chops the flattened milk carton.
    The cop rubbed his chest and got into his cruiser. I followed by the force of my spirit. This was also what I was learning, that to penetrate something solid you had to issue up a little grunt, like opening a heavy door or lifting a sack of my dad's cement. I grunted as my ghostly body lowered itself into the backseat. I smiled.
I'm going somewhere in a police cruiser,
I thought,
and I ain't even in trouble!
    The cruiser pulled away from the curb and the cop raised his attention to the rearview mirror. He was looking at me, but he couldn't see me. It was a trip, me in the backseat and laughing to myself. I have to admit that I had never been in the back of a cruiser before, and assessed the quality of the ride. Kind of nice, I judged. Then we hit a pothole and I sank into the seat and rose violently, my head for a moment jammed through the roof. It was like I was in a tank, my head out and searching the grubby west side passing before my eyes.
    The radio squawked and the cop picked up.

    "Car twelve," the cop mumbled, his trigger finger on the button.
    "Domestic on Yosemite," the dispatcher cracked. "Backup in five."
    The cruiser sped up but not by much. And by his groan, I was sure that he was thinking,
Yosemite, crackheads sitting on car fenders. Lazy-ass fathers already popping open their first beers of the day. Why hurry?
    The street was mostly Section Eight apartments with radios and televisions blaring in English and Spanish. Babies in strollers rocked back and forth by slightly older babies. Laundry hanging like the faded flags of defeated nations. The yards were cropped to dirt from bored dogs wagging their sorry tails back and forth.
Why hurry,
the cop probably thought. Maybe he was right. Unless someone got killed. Then he would be wrong.
    I hunkered in the back of the cruiser, hands on my lap, as I pretended that I was in a limo. The luxury of a free ride! If only my friends were with me, alive of course. I closed my eyes, then opened them quick, scared awake by the vision of the knife plunging just above my navel....

    THE COP WAS backed up by another cop, a Chicano, who was trim in his waist and all rocks in his shoulders. The guy was huge, nothing to play with, a guy so strong he could lift up a car if it, by chance, had rolled onto your foot. I followed the cops into the apartment where, we learned, the previous night a husband had slapped his wife once and not very hard. His wife then crashed a ceramic planter over his head as he slept off his
cruda,
his hangover. And that was the argument. Who was going to clean up the broken pot that lay on the carpeted floor? The plant in it was wilted, the dirt scattered like ashes.

    Dawg,
I thought. A couple arguing over who's going to pick up the pieces of a broken pot? What about their broken marriage? What about the two babies on the