Chasing China White

by Allan Leverone

  “You need to think about what you’re going to say to the cops when they call back.”

  “What I’m going to say?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing to fucking say, Greg. I’m not going to prison. It would be a death sentence. I might as well stick this gun in my mouth and pull the fucking trigger.”

  “Don’t even think ab—”

  “Don’t worry, Greg, I don’t have the balls for that. I’m a weak-ass junkie, remember? My point is that I can’t give myself up, and what else is there to talk about with the cops?”

  “They’re going to get impatient. They know one of their own is in here, and I’m sure they’ve spoken to enough witnesses already to know he’s hurt badly.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You need to let them come and get the injured cop. Build a little goodwill with them by allowing two guys to come in here with a stretcher and take him out to be treated.”

  Derek looked at Greg like maybe he’d pulled his own ear off the side of his head and begun chewing on it. “Give up the cop? Are you outta your fucking mind? He’s the only leverage I have. He’s the only reason they haven’t come in here and filled me full of bullets already.”

  Greg shrugged. “I’m still in here.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Thanks.”

  Derek kicked a chair in frustration. It skidded across the floor. “You know what I mean. If the cops know who I am, they know who you are as well. They know you’re my brother.”

  “So? By now they would have talked to Brenna. She would have told them about you coming into the house and waving a knife around and forcing me to go with you. As far as they’re concerned, I’m a hostage, too, and that’s to your advantage. That’s why you can afford to give up the cop.”

  “And what about as far as you’re concerned?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you feel you’re a hostage?”

  “Dude, you took me out of my house at knifepoint after threatening my wife, and you’re waving that gun around in front of my face like John Dillinger. What do you think?”

  “Fine. Get out,” he said. “Get up and walk out that door.”

  “I’m not leaving unless you walk out with me.”

  And then the phone rang again.

  11

  Derek jumped, exactly as he had the first time the cops called, and Greg wondered how many more phone calls it would take before the gun accidentally went off and blew him to kingdom come.

  “Goddammit!” Derek screamed. “Why can’t they just leave me alone for five minutes?”

  Jesus, he’s right on the edge. “They’re not going to leave you alone, Derek.” Greg spoke as calmingly as he could, which was not easy. “Not with a cop bleeding out on the floor and you pacing around with a gun in your hand. I’m surprised it took them this long to call back.”

  Derek stomped to the phone and yanked it off the cradle. “What now?”

  He listened for a moment and said, “Why ask me my name? You already know what it is.”

  Another short delay and then he laughed. “Establish trust. That’s a good one. You’ve got fifty guys out there with guns all pointed at me, but all I have to do is tell you my name and then we’ll trust each other?”

  He listened some more and then glanced over at the cop on the floor and Greg knew exactly what had transpired. The negotiator had told Derek that if he really wanted to begin building trust, he should allow the injured cop to be removed.

  Greg nodded encouragingly. “Do it,” he mouthed.

  “Fine,” Derek said suddenly. “Two medics and a stretcher. Unarmed. They come in, they load the guy up and then they carry him out. Nobody threatens me, nobody talks to me, nobody even fucking looks at me. Those are my terms. Anybody violates them and I’ll blow my brother’s head off.”

  He listened a little longer and then said, “Right now. Let’s do this.”

  Then he hung up the phone and waved the gun in Greg’s direction. “They’re coming in for the cop,” he said. “Get over here behind the counter and let’s wait together.”

  It didn’t take long. Not three minutes after the phone conversation, two men wearing flak vests and carrying a stretcher walked out from behind an ambulance parked alongside several police cruisers. They moved slowly to the diner’s front door and knocked twice. Then they entered without waiting for an invitation.

  Derek had placed himself directly behind Greg, who stood at the back of the counter at a forty-five degree angle from the front door. His brother’s breathing was fast and labored and he smelled as though he’d just run a marathon on a ninety-degree day. Even with all that had happened, Greg felt certain Derek would never follow through on his threat to the cops to shoot him, so his tension was understandable: he was giving up his security blanket.

  The medics—Greg didn’t doubt they were really police officers, and wondered whether they were armed despite Derek’s demands to the contrary—worked quickly. They placed the stretcher on the floor next to the cop and then slipped him onto it, doing their best to keep from jostling him any more than absolutely necessary.

  One thing they did not do was address Derek. They were all business, and inside of ninety seconds had secured the patient to the stretcher. Then one man moved behind the wounded cop and the other to the front and they lifted on a whispered count of three. They held the door open awkwardly and slipped through. Greg watched their backs through the plate glass window as they approached the ambulance and disappeared behind it.

  And Greg and Derek were alone.

  Derek sighed deeply, and before he’d finished exhaling the phone rang again. This time there was no fearful jump, no angry rant. He seemed to be expecting the call.

  He looked at the phone and then at Greg, and Greg said, “Gonna answer it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not ready to talk to them yet.” He walked toward and then past the phone and resumed pacing.

  Greg watched him for a few seconds and said, “You need to give yourself up.” He wasn’t sure why he tried again. His brother had made perfectly clear that he was terrified of what would happen were he to go to prison. But he had to know there was no reasonable alternative to surrender, because there was no way in hell the police would allow him to walk away from the diner now that they’d spirited their comrade to safety and had the Boxford killer in their sights.

  Derek ignored him and for a moment said nothing. When he finally spoke, his words came out of left field. “Why do you think Dad always hated me?’

  Greg shook his head. “Don’t you think you have bigger problems than worrying about a guy who’s been dead for three years?”

  “Pretend it matters. Why do you think he hated me?”

  “He didn’t hate you.”

  “He never treated me the same as you.”

  “He understood me, Derek. He just didn’t understand you. But he never hated you.”

  “Could’ve fooled me. When you fucked up he gave you break after break. When I stepped out of line, even a little, he was on me like a ton of bricks.”

  “I don’t remember it that way,” Greg said. He still didn’t understand why they were having this conversation now, but it seemed to be calming his brother down, talking him off the ledge in some weird way, so he kept going. “I don’t remember him treating us differently at all. He was kind of an asshole to both of us, really.”

  “You just didn’t see it, then.”

  “Even if that’s the case, Derek, even if he was tougher on you than on me, maybe it’s because he could see you needed more guidance, like somehow he could sense your tendency toward addiction and self-destructive behavior.”

  Derek snorted derisively. “Guidance? He never gave me a second’s worth of guidance the whole time I was growing up. All he ever did was criticize and nitpick. It’s like he was
trying to drive me away. Eventually he did.”

  “I’m not saying he handled you in the right way. I already agreed he was kind of a dick to both of us. But that doesn’t mean he hated you. In fact, it was just the opposite.”

  Derek stared at Greg like he’d sprouted a second head. “How can you say that? He never had an encouraging word to say to me, ever.”

  “Dude, you have no idea how many times after he found out you were using that I caught him crying when he thought nobody was around. When he was in the garage supposedly working on the car, or pacing the house late at night when he thought nobody was awake, or behind a locked bathroom door. I would hear him sobbing or walk around a corner and he would turn away and wipe his eyes trying to hide it.”

  Derek had stopped pacing and now stood perfectly still. He continued to gaze at Greg through unblinking eyes. “I never saw Dad cry. Never. Not one time.”

  “Neither did I. Not until you sank so deeply into addiction you were oblivious to everything around you. Then you left home, and how would you know after that?”

  “I didn’t ‘leave.’ He kicked me out.”

  “He never wanted to do that, Derek. I know exactly what happened when all that went down. He offered you the chance to go to medical detox and then to long-term rehab, which he was going to pay for, and he was by no means a rich man. When you refused to go, he felt he had no alternative than to kick you out.”

  Derek hadn’t looked away during the entire time Greg spoke, and now he continued to stare wordlessly at his brother.

  “You can disagree with how he handled aspects of your addiction,” Greg continued. “I know he certainly never understood it. But my point is that there’s no doubt what caused a man who never cried to start acting like a teenage girl who can’t get a prom date. He saw what drug use had done to his son and it broke his heart. And he never forgave himself for kicking you out, either, even though he went to his grave believing he had no other choice at that point.”

  Derek licked his lips and finally blinked. He still said nothing.

  “I’m not saying he was Gandhi,” Greg said, speaking softly now. “But Dad never hated you, Derek. He hated what heroin had done to you, he hated what your life had become, but he never hated you. He loved you. It’s just that the only way he could show it was to drive you away.”

  Derek wasn’t listening, Greg could tell. His eyes had taken on a faraway look and he was mumbling something under his breath. The words were soft and hard to understand, and to Greg it sounded like his brother was talking about China. “Chasing off to China,” or something like that.

  “Dude…what?” Greg shook his head in confusion. “You need to focus right now. That’s your plan? To run off to China? Get real.”

  Derek fixed him with a sorrowful gaze, almost as if he’d forgotten Greg was there. “I didn’t say I wanted to run off to China. I said I’m tired. Tired of chasing China White. I’m so fucking tired.”

  “China White? Who’s she, a stripper or something? You need to get your head in the game, Derek. You’ve got much bigger problems than some hooker or dancer or whatever she is.”

  “China White is not a person. It’s heroin, Greg. I said I’m tired of chasing the next fix, of feeding an addiction that’s never going to be satisfied. Monkey on my back, my ass. It’s a fucking two thousand pound gorilla.”

  “You can get clean. You can do it.”

  The phone had stopped ringing during their conversation but now it started up again, clanging on the wall like a bad dream. Greg noticed that sometime during their conversation Derek’s constant shaking had stopped. He seemed to stand taller, more erect, still ravaged by heroin withdrawal but somehow dignified, or at least resigned. When he walked to the phone he did so with his head up and his shoulders square, rather than slumped as they had been since Greg first walked into the kitchen this morning.

  He picked up the receiver and rather than barking into it as he had done previously, he spoke to the hostage negotiator softly but clearly. Firmly.

  What he said surprised Greg.

  “I want to give myself up.”

  He listened for a long time, occasionally grunting his concurrence with some term the cop was insisting on. Eventually he said, “Yes, I understand. That’s all fine. I’m coming out in just a minute.”

  He hung up the phone and Greg said, “You’re doing the right thing, Buddy.”

  Derek ignored him and said, “They want me to go out alone. You’re supposed to stay in here until it’s finished.”

  That’s an odd way to phrase it. Derek seemed suddenly completely at ease. Something about his utter sense of calm bothered Greg, particularly after his brother had been so adamant about avoiding prison. But Greg wasn’t about to rock the boat now that he was getting what he’d been pushing for, so he set his unease aside and said, “What changed your mind?”

  Derek shrugged. “You said it yourself. What choice do I have?”

  He took a couple of steps toward the door and then reversed course. He reached out and wrapped his arms around Greg, squeezing him tightly and whispering into his ear, “I apologize for involving you in this. Tell Brenna I’m sorry.”

  “You can tell her yourself,” Greg said as Derek released his grip and again turned toward the door.

  “I’ll be sure to do that.” He slipped the cop’s handgun into the waist of his filthy jeans at the small of his back and began walking away.

  “Wait a second,” Greg said. “Should you be carrying that with you? There’s no way the cops want you coming out armed. Didn’t they tell you to leave the gun here?”

  No answer. Derek picked up his walking pace and as he reached a point halfway to the diner’s front door everything clicked into place in Greg’s head. He couldn’t believe it had taken this long.

  “NO!” Greg shouted. He broke into a sprint just as Derek did the same. Derek had a significant head start and a short distance to travel, but Greg was healthy and strong and Derek was neither. Greg would catch him, and when he did he would pull his brother back behind the counter and toss him to the floor, gun or no gun. He would scream at him or reason with him or kick his ass or do something.

  He was almost there, reaching for Derek’s shoulder, when he slipped in the blood of the injured cop. His right foot slid and he lost his balance and dropped to the floor, rolling and springing to his feet immediately, knowing all the while he’d missed his chance and was now too late.

  Derek yanked open the glass door as he was reaching behind his back. He ran through the entrance and into the parking lot, gun held high in his right hand, screaming something Greg could not make out.

  Then his voice was lost in the roar of dozens of weapons firing virtually in sync. Greg watched in horror as his little brother danced like a marionette, his forward progress stopped by the bullets slamming into his emaciated figure. He stayed upright for what seemed an absurdly long time before dropping to the ground and lying still, the gun falling next to him.

  Greg heard himself screaming when the din of the police weapons faded away. He stood in the doorway, staring at his brother’s lifeless body, angry with Derek, furious with himself for not seeing until it was too late what should have been obvious.

  He was still screaming when the cops came to the door and led him away.

  EPILOGUE

  “You couldn’t have saved him, you know,” Brenna said. The statement sounded almost foreign to Greg as he sipped his drink. He understood the words but couldn’t quite wrap his head around their meaning.

  “I should have seen it sooner. The way his whole manner changed almost instantly, the way he morphed from nervous and desperate and stressed fugitive junkie to calm and accepting human being. It should have been a tip-off.”

  “They say people who are suicidal become calm and pleasant, cheerful almost, once they’ve committed to the decision to take their own lives. It sounds like that’s what happened with Derek.”

  �
�That’s exactly what happened,” Greg agreed. “And I should have recognized it sooner.”

  “But you still couldn’t have saved him,” his wife insisted.

  “That’s not true. I almost had him. If I’d started out from behind that damned counter a half-second sooner, or if I hadn’t slipped on the blood, or if—”

  “But that’s my point,” Brenna insisted. “Even if you’d managed to tackle him and keep him inside the diner, you would only have delayed the inevitable.”

  “He admitted to me that he didn’t have the balls to do it himself,” Greg said miserably. “If I had managed to keep him from bolting out the door, he wouldn’t have committed suicide.”

  “He would have found a way to make it happen. Maybe not at that moment, but later in the day, or the next day, or next week or next month. He’d made the decision, Greg.”

  He nodded, not sure he agreed with his wife but not sure he didn’t, either. One thing he was sure about was that he loved the sound of her voice. Over time he’d forgotten how much he enjoyed just chatting with her. The circumstances were ghastly but the company was special, just the two of them, sitting in a dark corner of a dive bar, talking like they hadn’t taken the time to talk in months.

  Years, maybe.

  And while he didn’t think he would ever get over the horror of seeing his brother ripped to shreds by dozens of bullets right before his eyes, in some strange way he felt as complete as he had in a very long time. Seeing his wife held at knifepoint had crystallized his feelings about her, and about his marriage, in a way that probably nothing else could have.

  Brenna was the one he wanted. He’d been impetuous and stupid and hurtful with his affair, as she’d been with hers. But between seeing her in danger, and then seeing the events unfold at the diner—he still didn’t know the name of the damned place, even after all that had happened there—Greg’s eyes had been opened.

  He was grateful she had agreed to try to work things out, and while there was a lot of work to be done to repair the damage they’d both caused, he was committed to doing so and he knew Brenna was as well.