Zeroville Read Free

abandoned and still. “Hello?” he calls to the trees.
27.
    As the minutes pass, there’s not a sign of life for as far as he can see …
    … until in the distance, at the end of the canyon boulevard, a police car appears and then another behind it, and another, stealthily winding their way up through the hills, sirens silent but coming fast, determined in their approach.
    Vikar watches the police as they grow nearer. They stop below at the foot of the stone steps that lead up to the house, a dozen cops emptying from four cars and fanning out at Vikar’s feet …
    … then one looks up and spots him. Then they all stop to look. They draw their guns and charge the hillside.
28.
    Below, the closest cop points his gun up at Vikar and tells him to raise his arms. In the mouth of the cave, overlooking the canyon, Vikar is too stunned to move. “Arms in the air!” the cop repeats. Other cops emerge from the trees at the foot of the hill, their guns also pointed. Vikar raises his arms. “Get on your knees!” says the first cop.
    “I have to pee,” Vikar says.
    The cop says, “Get. Down. On. Your. Fucking. Knees.” Vikar lowers himself to his knees. Looking around, he can see hippies come out of their houses all over the canyon to watch, he can see in the doorway of the house across the street the beautiful woman with the small girl. The cop tells Vikar to lie on his stomach and keep his arms away from his sides, then slide slowly down the hillside on his stomach.
    “Slowly?” Vikar says, apparently to no one as he comes hurtling down the mountain, face skimming dirt and rock all the way. When he finally stops at the base of the hill, one cop lands hard on Vikar’s back and another cuffs his hands behind him. Another tells him he’s under arrest and has the right to remain silent and to a lawyer. “Can I pee?” Vikar says as they shove him in the back of the patrol car.
29.
    The Grim Game .
30.
    At the police station they draw a sample of his blood. For three hours he waits in a holding cell before he’s brought to an interrogation room.
    This is for hitting that man with my food tray, he believes. Or perhaps for the others, the ones before Los Angeles. It’s the end of righteousness . But he decided long ago that if righteousness means no movies, he would rather be damned.
    Three white men and a black man and a white woman wait for Vikar in the interrogation room. All the men wear suits. A graying man, distinguished looking, like the chief of detectives in a movie, appears in charge. The woman, who never says anything, seems to be a kind of doctor.
31.
    Vikar is seated at a table with the woman on the other side and the men standing around him. “Is Jerome,” the chief asks, “your first name or last?”
    “Someone asked me that before,” says Vikar.
    “Well, now I’m asking you,” the chief says.
    “It’s my last name.”
    “Ike is your first name?”
    “Someone asked that as well.”
    “Well, if you had some sort of identification, Mr. Jerome, like a driver’s license, we wouldn’t have to ask.”
    “I don’t know how to drive.”
    “Ike is short for …”
    Vikar shakes his head: It’s not short for anything . “It’s just Ike,” he says.
    “You say you’re from Ohio?”
    “It’s not short for anything,” Vikar says.
    “O.K.,” the chief says, “it’s not short for anything. Where in Ohio you from, Ike? Cincinnati?”
    “I didn’t say Ohio. I said Pennsylvania.” He knows I didn’t say Ohio.
    “How long you been in town?”
    They asked this before as well. “Four days. Five.”
    “Is it four or is it five?”
    “It depends.”
    “Not really, Ike. It’s either four or it’s five.”
    “No,” Vikar says, “it depends. Do you count the first day I got here as the first day, or after the first twenty-four hours—?”
    The good-looking movie-star chief brings the back of his hand crashing across the side of Vikar’s head, catching Elizabeth Taylor just under the chin.