(Late last year, a couple friends asked me to look at their script and give them notes. I don’t want to say too much because it’s their story to tell, but all you really need to know is that it was an homage to the intersection of martial arts movies and blaxploitation in our culture, and was set in 1990s Los Angeles as a fictional mayor took extreme steps to combat crime.
I read it, gave some notes, and kept thinking about it. With their permission, I wrote a side story to the script to get it out of my head. It runs parallel to the script, between the frames of the film, but hopefully stands alone, too.)
Officer Joe Brown rubbed his chin and barely stifled a laugh. He knew when the kids in his neighborhood were screwing with him. He pulling the same tricks when he was a kid, hanging on the same corners and walking the same streets. “Y’all li’l negroes are ridiculous. You know good and well there ain’t no ninjas running around the hood.”
The six kids talking to Joe fell out, telling him how he doesn’t even know how wrong he is, and throwing knowing glances at each other and disbelieving smirks at Joe. One voice rose above the chatter—Tanya, who made up for being short for a middle schooler by being the loudest person in whichever time zone she happened to be in at the moment.
“Hold up, hold up!” Tanya said. “Hold up! Officer Brown, you need to be more careful with how you talk to us!”
Joe winced, not sure how he’d managed to step on a toe this early in a conversation. “Do what now?”
“You can’t be saying en-ee-grows around us. That’s not cool! That word is offensive!” Tanya hit every syllable of offensive like it owed her money, hammering the three syllables into the hardest weapon on Earth. Joe briefly flashed back to high school and sharing classes with Tanya’s mother. He could hear the resemblance clear as day, even if he couldn’t already see it.
“Tanya,” Joe said, “I hear you calling these boys you run with nigga this and nigga that every single day of the week, and only half of y’all are even black. How you gonna get at me over ‘negro’?”
“I chose nigga, nigga! Negro’s some word the white man put on us years ago, trying to keep us in shackles. You should read a book sometime, Officer Brown. We can’t let these people hold us down no more.” Tanya looked at Jamie, a towheaded white boy who was on the cusp of graduating from middle school to high school. “No offense, bro. You still my nigga, Jamjam.”
Joe laughed for real this time. “Well, fair enough, li’l nigga.” He shook his head as their shared laughter trailed off, looked away, and looked back. “So what’s up with these ninjas, then?”
Connor, “Con” for short, piped up this time. His voice bounced from gravel to soprano and back again, depending on how excited he got as he spoke. “My cousin saw ’em! They ran up in Tony’s house last night. Tony lives on the fourth floor too, in the Towers? Bro, he said they ran up the wall hella fast. Like hella, hella fast, though. It was two of ’em, and they came in through the window. He heard ’em fighting, and it was mad loud, like bam bam bam, and then they came back out the same way they went in, this time with Tony handcuffed and knocked out.”
“I bet Tony ain’t even fight back,” Tanya said. “My mama was telling me about him, he ain’t done nothing right in his whole dang life.”
Joe waved Tanya off and kept on Con. “Where was your cousin while this whole kung fu movie was going on?”
“Aw man, Officer Brown. It’s like that? You don’t believe me? Why, ’cause I got held back last year?”
“Nah,” Joe said. “I believe you, Connor. But I know your cousin Jodie, too, and the last time I saw that fool sober he had just left the liquor store and was on his way to go buy some weed, too.”
“Well yeah, Jodie smokes some, but that don’t make you blind. It ain’t like it’s crack. Plus it’s ninjas, not kung fu. That’s totally different.”
“Man, what you know about crack?” Joe laughed again. “But all right, all right. What’d these ninjas look like?”
Con shrugged. “Like ninjas, nigga.”
Joe facepalmed. He never had kids of his own—never had the time or interest, really. “We talking: black mask, black pants, black shirt?”
Another kid chimed in: “Ninjas don’t wear shirts. They wear armor.”
“And swords?”
Con looked thoughtful for a full ten seconds. “Maybe. I don’t know. Nobody said nothing about no swords.”
“Y’all need to hurry up talking about ninjas kidnapping people,” Tanya interrupted. “You the police, Officer Brown. You should probably investigate and let us get back to watching this basketball game before it’s curfew and you get me in trouble with my mom again.”
She was right. Joe went out of his way to talk with the crew every couple days, usually on his meal break, just to take their temperature. This conversation had already gone on for a while, so Joe dapped them up one after the other (he made Tanya jump for hers, and she threw a playful-but-not-really punch at his stomach in exchange), walked to his car, and drove off.
When Joe was a kid, just eight or nine years old, six kids in their early teens followed him home after school and asked to see his bike. Joe knew better, and declined, so one kid held both of his arms while a second slapped him in the face. Joe begged for him to stop, and got slapped harder. The third hit was a punch directly to the nose, the fourth to his stomach.
The teenager let go of his arms and Joe fell like dead weight. The teen who threw the punches crouched down and grabbed a handful of Joe’s short afro, forcing Joe to look in his face. The teen gave Joe a minute to catch his breath and asked again. Joe gasped “Garage” and the teen dragged him over, waited for him to open the door, and rode off on Joe’s bike. The other teens followed on foot, or rode their own bikes.
At first, Joe wandered to his room in a daze, sat next to his bed, and sobbed. The tears mixed with the blood pouring out of his nose and split lip and stained the floor and his bedding. After thinking about it and plugging his bloody nose with tissue, Joe went to the kitchen, picked out a knife from his mother’s patchwork set, and walked outside. He didn’t know what he wanted to do—just that he needed to do something. Kids made fun of him at school, but he wasn’t a punk.
Joe made it halfway down the block before he ran into Officer Knight on his way home. Joe knew Knight’s son from school. Ikenna was a dick, but he didn’t push Joe around like Fox and the others sometimes did. Officer Knight had a daughter, too. She was older, and Joe thought she was beautiful, but was too shy to ask her name and knew Ikenna wouldn’t tell him anyway.
Knight lived in the neighborhood and was friendly with Joe’s mother, which is why all he said was “Hey, youngblood, where you headed?” when he saw Joe’s bloody face, shirt, and the gleaming knife in his hands. “You all right? Is that your blood?” Joe froze, looking at the older man. Officer Knight looked so unbelievably tall to Joe at that moment that he could’ve been Superman or Shaq.
The knife fell to the ground and bounced into the gutter as the whole story spilled out of Joe like a flood. Officer Knight sat on the curb next to Joe and held him while he wept again, using a handkerchief he pulled from his uniform’s chest pocket to dab the blood and tears from Joe’s face.
“You wanna be tough, kid?”
Joe sniffed too hard, coughed, and had to spit before he answered. “Yessir. Sorry.”
“Grabbing a weapon and doing somebody harm ain’t toughness. You know your mama taught you better than that.”
“I guess.”
“Yeah, you guess. Being tough is about being able to stand up for yourself, but also knowing when to fight and when to ask for help. You got that knife to stick the kid who hurt you?”
“No. I guess. Maybe.”
“But there was a group of them, right? So you’d get him, and then his friends would get you, and then your mom would have to pay for another funeral.”
“Yessir.” Joe had no idea what to say, so he fell back on what he knew.
“I’ll make you a deal. You go home, get cleaned up, and put some ice in a ziploc bag, right? Then you wrap that bag in a washcloth and put that your face for two minutes at a time, then two minutes off, then two minutes on, you got that? What’re you gonna do?”
“Two minutes on, two minutes off.”
“It’ll help the swelling. You might have a little black eye but you’ll be okay. Ladies love that stuff.”
Joe laughed.
“In the meantime, I’m gonna go see a man about your bike. But I wanna make a deal with you. If I get your bike back for you, you gotta do me a solid. Okay?”
“What’s a solid?”
Officer Knight sighed and laughed. “It’s like a favor. And that favor is this: there’s a martial arts studio around the way. I know the guy that runs it, and he’ll hook you up. You go there after school twice a week and get strong for real, not this weak stuff these li’l neighborhood hoodlums try and practice.”
“Martial arts like what you and Ikenna be doing in the park on Saturdays?”
“Not exactly, but similar, yeah.”
“And it’ll make me strong?”
“It won’t make you strong, but if you pay attention, you’ll learn how to be strong.”
“Okay.”
Three hours later, long after dark, Officer Knight came home with Joe’s bike. The cop had a brief conversation with Joe’s mother, shook Joe’s hand, and said, “You gonna be a good little man, kid. Don’t rush it, though. And remember the deal.”
“Yeah, I’ll do you a solid.”
“Good looking out.”
From that night on, all Joe wanted was to be more like Officer Knight. A couple years later, Knight was shot and killed while in pursuit of a suspect with his partner. Eight years after that, Joe enrolled in the Los Angeles Police Academy.
“You tired, Officer Brown?” asked Lieutenant Bennett. “You look tired.”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The lieutenant frowned. “You sure? It’s all right, Officer. We’re on the same team here. If you’re tired, you’re tired.”
“No, sir. That’s just my face. Ever since I was a kid.” Joe looked around the office and rubbed his hands together, working the joints.
“Well, all right.” Bennett picked up and flicked through the files Joe brought to him. He chewed the inside of one cheek while he speed-read, looking for keywords. He exhaled and tossed the papers on his desk. “You say we’ve got six CIs and twelve known dealers and gang members that just…what, exactly?”
“Disappeared, sir. No traces, no sign of a struggle, no witnesses. Just gone.”
“Is this a problem, or is this just migration? You don’t think they rotated to some other hole, set up shop there? Pasadena, Long Beach?”
“No, sir,” Joe said, and shook his head. “Definitely not. Two-thirds of the missing have a history of beefing with rival sets around the greater Los Angeles area on account of being relatively small-time. If they were making moves like that, we’d have bodies stacked in the streets. Doesn’t matter whose.”
“Rival action, then? Some enterprising Piru clearing the deck, one of them Rollin’ clowns getting back at these small fry?”
Joe rubbed his head. His hair was freshly cut, just an eighth of an inch long. The buzz felt good on his hands. “I don’t think so, sir. Gangsters aren’t really known for quiet, no matter where they’re from. I’ve got a buddy who works anti-gang and he poked around for me. Nothing out of the ordinary, violence wise. Nobody’s making statements.”
Lieutenant Bennett frowned again. “Then pardon my impatience, officer, but what the fuck is this I’m looking at, then?”
“A pattern, sir.”
“A pattern.”
“Yes, sir. Every one of the missing had contact with police in the past six weeks.”
“A lot of people have contact with the police.” After a moment, Bennett’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. “You think cops did this.”
“No, sir. I don’t know, sir. But it’s organized, efficient, and I’ve got third party witnesses who say they wore something like high tech tac gear.”
“‘Third party witnesses’? That’s not even hearsay, officer. That’s gossip.”
“It’s unreliable but consistent. It’s a lead, I think. My…informants said they moved and looked like ninjas, and—”
“Officer Brown.”
“I know how it sounds, sir. Believe me. But I have a hunch this is real.”
“A hunch. Ninjas. Officer Brown, how would you like to be the youngest detective in LAPD history?”
Joe jumped and squirmed. “I’d like that…very much?”
“Then table this bullshit, leave the fairy tales to kids, and do your fucking job, which is not bringing me nonsense that distracts from real police work. Whatever this is, it does not concern you one whit.”
Joe winced and looked around the office again, trying to organize his thoughts and formulate a reply.
“Officer Brown…Joe, you’re good police. You care, but you need to make sure that you don’t care yourself right out of the game. You’re gonna psych yourself out if you follow every little rabbit hole down to Never Neverland. Wonderland. Whatever.”
Joe was silent for a moment, and said, “Yes, sir.”
“You are not to pursue this. You are to do your job. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
When Joe rose to leave, Lieutenant Bennett held up a hand. “One second, son. You updated your file at all recently?”
“No sir. No changes to report.”
“This zip code…you live north or south of the old tracks used to run through there?”
“South, sir.”
“Why? We not paying you enough?”
“It’s where I grew up, sir.”
Lieutenant Bennett looks Brown up and down and purses his lips. “Hm. Get back to work, officer.”
After a week, Joe was still angry. He had nothing to go on, no primary witnesses, and no idea where this was going, but he still fumed around his apartment. He met up with the neighborhood kids when he could, played a bit of pick-up ball, and hit the weights to burn off frustration, but he couldn’t get the conversation with Bennett out of his mind. There was something going on, he knew it, and to be dismissed so utterly…there was something there, too.
So Joe cheated. When he had a day off, he spent the night before observing citizens known for dealing or gang violence. He made a list of the worst offenders and staged a series of one-man plainclothes stake-outs. He needed to not just find the so-called ninjas, but to photograph them, to get proof of their existence and their methods.
He spent a month sleeping in his car once a week for nothing. No proof and no sightings, just more disappearances happening when and where he wasn’t looking. There was no pattern that he could see, no rhyme or reason to suggest who would be next. Just men and women who quickly passed from known quantities to memories, with nothing left behind to mark the transition.
On his way home from his last night out, Joe paused at his front door, the key half in the lock. He felt something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and his forearms explode into goosebumps. His body was screaming danger but his mind couldn’t quantify it. He drew his sidearm, half on instinct, and paused. He listened.
After a moment, he heard a voice from behind his own door. “You might as well come in, Officer Brown.” Male, educated, older, and a little loud, as if the owner of the voice had to project to be heard…if Joe had to guess, whoever it was had settled into the chair Joe kept near the TV and perpendicular to the door. He closed his eyes, created a mental image, opened them, and hit the door hard.
It swung open and Joe ran inside and broke left, hoping to escape the killbox of a backlit doorway and position himself catty corner to the voice so he could cover the door and windows simultaneously. It was a good plan, up to a point. Joe made it three steps into the room, six steps shy of his goal, when he felt a fist shoot out of the darkness. He tried to duck the incoming blow and nearly did, but the impact still sent him spinning toward the TV. He reached out a hand to steady himself and turned the gun toward the fist. He froze when he saw the badge.
Black pants tucked into soft black shoes. A tactical belt with a police badge instead of a buckle. A black vest over a black…was it a sweatshirt, maybe? The badge looked real enough to Joe, despite having had his bell rung not two seconds ago.
It was enough to make him pause, and the pause lasted long enough for Joe to finally feel the effect of the hit. His mind swam. Joe opened his mouth, but the question died on his lips. He worked his jaw, fighting to find something to say.
“They’re police, Officer Brown.” The voice again. “Just like you.”
Joe swung the gun toward it, turning back and forth from the voice to the ninja. Another arm reached out of the darkness and applied an arm lock, forcing the gun down and away from the voice. Joe felt the barrel wedge into his hip and groaned. He counted two ninjas and one voice and cursed. He couldn’t feel the two ninjas at all, but the voice radiated anger. He had jumped the gun, and now he was stuck.
“What is this? Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize your mayor?” the voice said, and suddenly, Joe did. The light was dim, and the arm lock had him seeing spots, but he knew the face. Mayor Walter Joyce. “Do you remember when your lieutenant told you to back off and mind your own business? Why didn’t you follow orders, Joe?”
“It was you?”
“You didn’t mind your business at all. Those little half-hearted stake-outs—my squad clocked those from a mile out, maybe more. They’re better trained than you, and they definitely follow orders better than you do. They laughed at you, Joe. They walked right past you and you never even saw them.”
“What is this?”
“Are you ready to behave?” Joyce nodded toward Joe’s gun, whose barrel was still buried in Joe’s hip. “Agree to lower the gun and we can talk like men. You can even hold onto it if you want. If it makes you feel like a man.” Mayor Joyce’s face was flat, only the tightness of his jaw communicating his anger. Joe winced and nodded, and the gun made a flat thud when it hit the carpet at his feet. Joyce raised a hand. The pressure on Joe’s arm disappeared, and the ninja moved behind Joyce faster than Joe could see. He still felt nothing from him. One minute he was there, and the next, behind the mayor.
“It’s a pilot program, Joe. I had an idea, and for the past three months, we’ve been testing it out. Ten arrests of violent offenders a week for three months. That’s one hundred and twenty bad guys behind bars.”
“That’s impossible. I checked the arrest records. They would’ve been in the system if they were arrested. There was nothing out of the—”
“We needed new weapons for new wars. So I built the most efficient police force in the world.”
“You built a ninja army.”
“Don’t call them that. Don’t be disrespectful. They’re police, same as you, same as me. They do the job.”
“This is crazy.”
“Hmm.” Mayor Joyce looked Joe up and down. “All right. Officer Brown, do I have your word that you will remain silent about what you’ve uncovered?”
“You break into my place, you assault me, and you tell me I should keep quiet? What the fuck do you think?”
“Okay. Do you want to join my new unit, receive training that will elevate your talents, and eventually take part in—”
“Fuck no. Fuck you.”
Mayor Joyce laughed. “Okay. Here’s how it’s gonna be. Officers Mohr and Silva here? They’re going to take you off the table for me. I’d suggest you not go for that gun again. If you touch it, if you raise it, if you point it in my general direction, they’ll beat you into a coma instead of just breaking your arms and legs.”
Joe instantly dove for the gun, but before he could wrap his hand around it, he felt a sharp shock on the back of his right hand. The gun spun across the room this time before hitting the wall hard enough to dent it. Joe reared up with all his strength, raised his left hand to throw a punch, and felt his world turn upside down.
He landed flat on his back, looking at the ceiling. He felt Mohr and Silva move closer more than he heard them, and within seconds, he passed out from the pain.