Violent Spring by Gary Phillips

Kodama’s parents.
    â€œYou know, Ivan,” Kodama began, “this city scares me more now than at any other time.”
    He caressed her hair. “How so?”
    â€œThere’s too many trains running. Black leaders like Linton Perry who play the nationalist card when it suits him. And the next week saying how badly he wants to build coalitions with Latinos and Koreans.”
    Monk said, “And cats like Luis Santillion writing editorials saying in effect that African-Americans are incidental when it comes to numbers and therefore why worry about alliances when they have 41 percent.”
    She laid her head in his lap. “It’s all so depressing. Los Angeles’ capitalists trying to desperately leverage this place as the center of Pacific Rim finance and kids going hungry and people sleeping in their cars. And where I’ve had bricks thrown at my car because black people thought I was Korean.”
    â€œLearning is always a tortuous process, an old ship’s captain told me once. All we can do is keep going forward.”
    â€œFor a cynical private eye, you carry around quite a bit of hope in your back pocket.” She looked into his face and kissed him for a long time.
    They made love, there in the study, spread out, their hips on the sofa, their legs across the coffee table. They sweated to climaxes while Muddy Waters sang “Baby Please Don’t Go” on the stereo, his voice rich as the Delta fields he came from.
    In the bedroom, a circle of light illuminated them by the Tensor lamp on Jill’s nightstand. She straddled him wearing black lace panties as Monk lay naked underneath her. She bent over him and finished trimming his goatee with the small scissors, then put them on the nightstand. Monk cupped her breast in his hand.
    â€œThat’s it, isn’t it?” she said, rocking to and fro on him.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œYou took the job because you want to prove a point. You get off on the idea of out-maneuvering Li, Perry, all of them and still find the real killer.”
    â€œI’m not that deep, baby. I need the business. You’re the one who sits on the bench, keeping the snarling dogs of Aryan fury from being unleashed on us poor citizens.”
    He pulled her close, and she bit one of his nipples. “You’re full of shit, Ivan.” She nuzzled his neck. Jimmy Smith, jazz master of the Hammond electric organ, played a steady, driving beat underneath their conversation, “Eleanor Rigby.”
    Her fingers rubbed a spot over his left rib cage. It was an elliptical section of flesh that had the consistency of a dried orange peel, the legacy of a .22 slug which had fragmented on impact. It took the doctor who worked on Monk more then two hours to dig the pieces out of him. Further up on his torso, a .38-caliber ricocheting bullet had ripped into his collar bone. The result was a bone chip that caused him arthritic inflammation in cold weather. But the wounds, and the ones who caused them, were far from Monk’s mind.
    She inched her body forward until the ‘V’ of her legs covered Monk’s head. Dexter Gordon’s wails of urban angst filled the room. The judge turned her body so that she was on her knees over him, taking him in her mouth as he did her. The saxman preened notes, dove in and out of sections as a race car driver might take a raceway.
    Afterward, they lay side by side in the bed, each staring at the shifting shadows on the ceiling thrown by the votive candles on the nightstand and the diffused light coming through the curtained bedroom window.
    â€œI was in this Greek village once, back when I was a merchant seaman. It was called,” he searched his memory, “Kilada.”
    Jill rose up on an elbow to take a sip of her wine. She smiled at him and put her head on his chest.
    â€œWe were walking around—”
    â€œLooking for Mediterranean babes.”
    â€œTaking in the sights,” he