Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 9

  I don’t hide well. I’m too big and my signature appearance makes it all too easy for even the lamest of brains to instantly recognize me. Therefore, crossing the street at this point was a risk. They might be somewhere beyond the perimeter of my building waiting for that very event. I glanced around carefully. Everything seemed normal. Until I saw a guy in a red T-shirt driving a white van into the alley behind my building. I was fairly certain there would be more soldiers in the back of the van. They were coming to rescue Poon’s son. Poon’s men had a fix on my base camp. And they were by now finding Gregor, and telling somebody about it over his cell phone, and whoever he was telling was deciding what to do about me, who they doubtless by now knew lived just overhead on the tenth floor.

  I decided to continue straight on towards the Memphis bus. The neighborhood continued it’s ugly crawl through history. The ugliness was more apparent in what the neighborhood lacked than what it contained. It lacked niceness. It lacked courtesy and civility. For example, there were no Boy Scouts standing watch to warn me about the dangers of jaywalking. That’s okay. Crossing the multi-lane avenue Seventh Street would be safe enough. Evening traffic in this part of town was light. Nobody was going home after work because nobody in this part of town worked. Not at straight jobs. They’d all be out later, selling dope to each other, and killing innocent shopkeepers for the contents of their cash registers, or because they were from the wrong country.

  But all that aside, it seemed safe enough to cross the street. Until I started across. Before I was halfway to the opposite side, another white van screeched to the curb. There are no coincidences. Apparently Lenny Poon owned a number of identical white vans, the better to be innocuous with, my dear. It was the kind of vehicle nobody noticed, and most people assumed was delivering flowers, or boxes of auto parts, or porno films to any of the million or so cinderblock local retail distribution points available almost anywhere in the city. But I recognized it, having only recently driven one myself. They’d caught me by surprise, but for some reason they hesitated. The smart move would have been to simply speed up and run me down, stop, get out, and obliterate me with a careful placement of white-hot copper jacketed slugs, and simply drive away. Nobody would remember seeing a thing, and no citizen would follow them, or call the cops on a cell phone, or in any way connect themselves to the event of my killing in the middle of the street. Not in this part of L.A. Not on Seventh Street.

  Still and all, the white van hesitated, and I began to wonder why. Inside my bag, I fingered a grenade, figuring to make them pay for that hesitation, lay them out all at once inside a blast radius so hot it would melt the steering wheel to the driver’s hands after exploding a molten mess of airbag all over his torso, but something told me no. Somewhere down deep inside me, I still had a good impulse or two, one that did not want me to mistakenly kill innocents.

  Because I could be wrong about the van. Not likely, but it was possible. Hell, an hour earlier, I would have lit the van up. But I’d just killed a crippled kid. I was feeling the need to punish myself, to somehow make the tiniest of down payments on the enormous sin I’d committed. So I held my peace, thinking I’d best be careful not to kill any more innocents.

  Maybe the van was just a van, not a transport for a death squad. Maybe. Inside the van, I wondered what further surprises were going to be revealed in the space of the next several seconds. It could be the flat-eyed faces of Poon’s death squad, or it could be a vanload of illegals heading for the Calexico bus. Perhaps in an hour or so we’d all be sitting in the back of the bus together and enjoying slow, careful sips of Tequila together. But just in case not, just in case it was a van belonging to Lenny Poon, as a backup precaution, I slipped out the MP5, ready to spray the windshield, if indeed they tried at this point to run me down.

  It was not to be. Because under the iridescent, surreal glare of mercury vapor lamps, I recognized a familiar face, stretched with tension, and, beyond this face, from the jump seat of the vehicle, the profile of a large canine. Johnson. We stared at each other. I walked over. He was parked illegally, a thing cops do without giving it much thought. A Greyhound bus roared out of the rear lot toward us, upset at being blocked by the van, giving us some horn. I gave the driver a discreet look at the MP5 and the big bus swung out and around us, scurrying away like a giant mechanical rodent, leaving behind a dense cloud of unburned diesel smoke.

  “It’s hit the fan already,” Johnson said. “There were two guys waiting for us at Angela’s place.”

  “And?”

  “She’s safe,” he said. “I left her at the bank with my wife. They left for my wife’s sister’s place at The Colony in Malibu for the duration.”

  “They’re here, too,” I said. “Some guy just drove a white van into the alley behind my place. But I imagine we’ve got a minute or two while he phones the boss and tells him the bad news.”

  He didn’t mention what happened to the two men who met him at Angela’s place. Neither of us had to acknowledge the fact he was now driving the van Poon’s men had used to visit Angela’s house. I smelled something familiar. The smell of blood mixed with other notorious bodily excretions. I peered into the back, well-lit from a streetlamp shining in through the front window. The two assassins from Angela’s place were in the back. There was a lot of blood on the floor of the van, obviously none of it Johnson’s, being as his shitty white shirt was stained with only the coffee and whatever greasy thing he usually ate with his coffee.

  The two guys laid out in back weren’t doing so hot. One of the men was missing most of his face, the other guy most of his ass. They were both surprisingly well dressed, with suits of a quality which suggested they had been sent out from the Mayor’s office, expensive clothing, of a price which could make most people’s mortgage payments for three months or more. But it was the patent leather boots which gave them their bent appearance. Too long and pointy for somebody who worked for the Mayor. I’m not sure what it is about drug dealers and shoes. They either wear two-hundred dollar tennis shoes or pointy half boots. Perhaps the guys with the boots have better protection from street narcos and don’t have the need to wear something which allows them to run fast.

  “I guess you really were a Ranger, after all. That looks like the kind of crap a Ranger would pull. What happened to the guy with no ass?”

  “He was hiding behind that big clump of pampas grass by Angela’s front door, but the dog got him,” Johnson said. “It bought me a little time for when the other guy came at me from behind the fountain.”

  It was obvious why the other guy had no face. He’d received point blank a load from Johnson’s sawed off shotgun. And many people don’t realize this, but if a big dog gets you by the ass, he generally slices his way all the way through to your tailbone, and you’ll be dead in seconds from the nerve damage, if not the extensive arterial bleeding.

  “Okay,” I said. “Bad news. Gregor’s dead.”

  “You bastard. He was just a crippled kid. I knew we never should have taken him.”

  “Maybe you should have considered that when you pointed the shotgun at his face earlier today.”

  “I didn’t kill him. You did. You and your stupid idea of revenge. I never signed on for killing a kid.”

  “I caused his death, but not directly,” I said. “I didn’t finish him off. In fact I was working up to returning him to his home, but he bled to death when I was out getting him a burger. He was trying to crawl to a phone and the wound reopened.”

  “Good God. I’m not telling Angela,” he said. “It wouldn’t help her to know the kid died from the stab wound at her hands.”

  “Another thing,” I said. “Somebody stole the van with Nose still in it.”

  “You’re a piece of work, McDougal,” he said. “Does everything you touch turn to shit this fast?”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I learned something from
the death of that kid. I learned I just went beyond the pale of redemption. The only question for me now is, exactly what level of hell I’ll be assigned at the end of time. So I’m out of this thing. I’m going to have some peace in my life for the short time I have remaining. I’m heading back to Memphis in about an hour.”

  “Oh no you’re not,” Johnson said. “This thing is exploding all over me. You’re going to help me get the fire put out.”

  “Call your friends at Ramparts,” I said. “Hell, with your thirty years on the force, surely you’ve got an army at your disposal.”

  “No,” he said. “Even an army can’t guard me and my wife forever. This thing won’t stop growing until we tear it out at the roots.”

  He meant we had to kill Lenny Poon. Who was, although an evil drug dealer, also becoming well known in the higher echelon social circles, and had been seen at fund-raisers. Even had his name on a few brass donor slabs at places like the Norton Simon, and the Getty. And now, most recently, was going to feather his cap further by being Gorbachev’s host.

  “You’ll have to disappear,” I said. “Because you can’t get Lenny Poon now. He’s grown too big. And, like I said, you’re not the kind of guy who’s willing to die in the attempt.”

  “But you are,” he said. “That’s why you’re not going back to Memphis. Not just yet. You’re going to stay here and kill him. Or so help me, I’ll put my dog on you right now.”

  The explosion behind me took me completely by surprise. The cracking whump of it slammed me against the side of the van. I looked back and saw chunks of the roof of my former dwelling beginning to rain down around the apartment, the top of which vented enough flames and smoke to suggest that an active volcano had just erupted underneath the building.