The Reckless

by David Putnam

  THE RECKLESS

  Also by David Putnam

  The Innocents

  The Vanquished

  The Squandered

  The Replacements

  The Disposables

  THE RECKLESS

  A BRUNO JOHNSON NOVEL

  DAVID PUTNAM

  Copyright © 2019 David Putnam

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-288-8

  Cover Design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  This one’s for my favorite brother, Van, the bravest cop I know.

  THE RECKLESS

   CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

   CHAPTER ONE

  SUMMER

  I SAT ON the couch holding my four-year-old daughter, Olivia. As I often did, I caught myself staring at her, marveling at her beauty, her innocence, and her utter vulnerability. I held a love for her so pure that it rose in my chest and caused a little ache. She brought her perfect tiny hand up and playfully shoved my cheek. “Come on, Pop Pop, be ungry. Be ungry.”

  I closed my eyes: the start of the game. She squirmed in my arms trying to get me to put her down on the floor so she could flee the now sleeping beast.

  “Oh no. Oh no. Let me go.”

  I set her down as she shrieked. Her legs pumped in the air. She took off as soon as her feet hit the carpet. I gave chase. She ran around and around the living room. I stopped. She waited, her eyes wide with excitement. I raised my hands as claws. She bent over, tucking her elbows into her tummy, and shrieked again.

  In a much different, deeper voice, I said, “Suddenly, I’m feeling kinda hungry.”

  She screamed and ran for cover. She didn’t make it. I scooped her up, swung her around once, and gently tossed her on the couch. She tried to back up, but I grabbed her leg and held her in place. “No. No monster.”

  I slowly moved up the sleeve of her arm. I moved quickly, put my mouth there, and blew, my lips blubbering against her skin. She laughed so hard she lost her voice.

  Dad came in the room dressed in his US postal uniform. “Son, I wanted to tell you something last night, but you came home too late.”

  I stopped terrorizing my daughter and looked up. She patted my face. “Come on, monster, you’re still ungry. Come on, monster?”

  “Just a minute, baby girl. I know. I’m sorry, Dad. We were on a surveillance, and the target came home right as we were about to call it a night.”

  “Did you get him?”

  A glimpse of last night’s violence flashed before me. The open eyes of the man wanted for murder lying in the street, staring at nothing—no breath, no heartbeat, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. The damaged grill of our car, inches away, steam and water hissing out as if the radiator were angry.

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  He knew I didn’t like to bring my work home. I worked on a violent crimes team. Describing what happened, saying the words inside my home, my safe zone, would somehow corrupt what I held most dear. And last night hadn’t gone well. We had to take the guy down hard—what Robby Wicks would call, “Blood and bone.”

  Dad held up his hand and waved. “That’s okay, never mind. I forgot the rule.”

  I got up. “No, Dad, it’s not that. It’s—”

  “No, Son, you’re absolutely right. I … I just forgot.”

  The doorbell interrupted. I stepped over to the door. “That’ll be Mrs. Espinoza.” She watched Olivia on days Dad and I both worked.

  “Son, wait?”

  I opened the door and took a step back, startled.

  “Ned? What the … What the hell? What are you doing here?”

  Ned Kiefer stood on my porch holding a small child.

  I hadn’t seen Ned for years, not since the night I left him in St. Francis Hospital, beat to hell from the encounter with Willis Simpkins.

  My mouth sagged open all on its own.

  Ned stepped in. “Hey, Bruno, you’re gonna catch a lot of flies with that mouth.”

  “Ned, geez it’s good to see you. I mean geez …” I hugged him as best I could with the little blond girl in his arm. “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s what I was tryin’ to tell you, Son. Ned came by last night and asked if he could use Mrs. Espinoza for a few days until he got settled with a new sitter. I told him you wouldn’t mind.”

  Ned moved deeper into the living room where Olivia stood watching, entranced with the little blond girl. Ned said, “Hi there, Olivia, remember me from yesterday? This is Beth. I told you all about her and here she is.” He set Beth down. The two children looked at each other. Olivia raised a hand to touch her, as if she didn’t believe Beth was real.

  Beth looked exactly opposite of Olivia, with light skin, blond hair, and hazel eyes.

  Olivia took after me with dark skin and brown eyes, though not near as dark as me.

  Olivia was half-black, half-Caucasian. Her mother, the woman I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, ran off without saying a word. She’d been my partner on patrol. That particular night came at us hard and he
avy, bloody even for a hot summer night in the ghetto. Blood and bone. She’d resigned without a word to me, and I didn’t see her again until seven months later when she knocked on my apartment door and handed me Olivia. She said, “I can’t handle raising a girl in this kind of world.” I hadn’t seen her since. That was almost four years ago. Dad and I had been raising Olivia, loving every precious minute of it.

  Ned straightened up and looked at me.

  “So, you have a kid?” I said.

  “Yep, and they’re almost the same age.”

  “You and … a—”

  “Hannah, that’s right.”

  I was glad he’d said Hannah’s name and I didn’t have to. Although, I couldn’t see how he could’ve gone back to her. Not after that night several years ago when he and I caught her with another man at an apartment in South Gate.

  I moved over and shook his hand. “Congratulations, pal.”

  “You, too.”

  I said, “I guess we kind of lost track of each other.”

  “Yeah, I caught that midnight transfer to Lakewood station after South Gate PD ratted me out to the captain.”

  Back then, I’d called Ned after his abrupt departure and left messages. When he didn’t answer them, I went to Lakewood station and hung around waiting to see him. He’d managed to dodge my every effort. I sort of understood what he was going through: guilt over breaking up our partnership and ultimately our friendship with his bonehead choices. When we found his wife, Hannah, with JB, Ned went a little berserk. At the time, JB was a deputy with us at Lynwood station, and a friend of Ned’s, which made it all the more hurtful. The number one rule in law enforcement was that you didn’t cuckhold your brother in arms.

  He dodged my every effort back then to reconnect. Even though I understood it, I still felt a little angry to have been cast aside that easily. We’d been close friends, and friends didn’t cut you adrift like that.

  And here he stood, years later, as if nothing had happened.

   CHAPTER TWO

  WE WALKED OUT to our cars, parked at the curb in front of the house. Ned kept looking at me in a strange way. I stopped. “Okay, what’s the matter?”

  “What?”

  “You’re looking at me like I got leprosy and my nose is about to fall off.”

  “It’s just that … no, never mind.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You, ah … look different, and I … can’t figure out what it is.”

  I hadn’t said anything to him, but Ned had aged ten years, with more wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and across his forehead. He’d also lost a small part of his youthful exuberance. Even so, Ned’s eyes still held that mischievousness that reminded me so much of our old friendship.

  Ned snapped his fingers. “I know what it is. You’re all grown up.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, partner.”

  “No, no. You look more confident now, more like Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry. Confident, assured, in charge.”

  “Again, thank you for that. I have to get to work.” I got in my Ford Ranger pickup. Ned followed along and stood at the window. He said, “So I guess I’ll see you tonight when I pick up Beth.” He shot me that old Ned smile.

  I couldn’t help it—I still liked the hell outta him. “Maybe, but I don’t know. I’m working the violent crimes team now, and my schedule is really crazy.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. How do you like working for the infamous Robby Wicks? Is he really as ruthless and quick on the trigger as everyone says he is?”

  I didn’t like that description, nor what people thought of Wicks, though I could easily see how they might think that way. Wicks did nothing to disassociate his image with the perception that he’d just as soon shoot you as handcuff you.

  I started the truck. “Good and bad,” I said. “There’s always the good and the bad no matter where you work. Wicks is great to work for. Best job in the department.”

  “That’s great,” Ned said. “All you can do is hope that there’s more good than bad, right, partner?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “So maybe I’ll see you tonight. Maybe we can go to dinner and catch up.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  I pulled away. I didn’t want to ask him anything about his job. I’d heard the rumors that traveled around the department just like everyone did. Ned had finally worked his way out of his hole from patrol at Lakewood station and got promoted to detective on a street narco team, his life’s dream. He made it a full year before he pissed off the team sergeant, and got bounced to the narco desk at headquarters. A real pogue’s job, he answered the phone and handed out case file numbers to the narcs in the field doing real police work. I knew Ned. That job had to be dampening his soul from the inside out. Snuffing out his flame. If he stayed on the desk too long, he’d be broken, with no way to come back.

  I stopped at the dry cleaners and picked up two sets of uniforms I kept on hand in my truck just in case. Next door to the cleaners, I grabbed a cup of coffee and an apple fritter. I got back in the truck and headed for work. The first bite of the fritter brought on a smile. Ned always ate snowball cupcakes, pink marshmallow-and-coconut-covered devil’s food cake. He washed them down with a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink.

  I’d been rude to him, by flaunting my assignment to the violent crimes team. I hadn’t meant anything by it, but now it sounded elitist, especially given his desk job at narco.

  * * *

  Six months after the violent crimes team started up, Wicks called in a favor, and the team moved from Lennox station to an abandoned grocery store in Downey, one next to the Donut Dolly donut shop and a check-cashing place run by an ex-cop.

  Wicks didn’t come right out and say it, but the team had to move away from the Lennox sheriff’s station because of me. In one of my first investigations as a detective on violent crimes, I went undercover into the Lynwood narco team to ferret out a group of dirty cops—deputies taking money for contract killings. At the end of the investigation, I shot the leader, a fellow deputy sheriff whom I’d grown to like and, in a skewed kind of way, respected a great deal. My bullet took him in the stomach, in the parking lot, at the back of the station. As a deputy, the violent act against a brother is something you didn’t easily come back from, an act that forever tarnishes your reputation, your soul. A kind of stigma that follows you like a dog’s tail infested with mange, making you never want to look back.

  Wicks and the higher-up brass thought an off-site location would be better, easier to stay off the radar. Some of my peers didn’t understand what had happened and blamed me. The guy I’d shot had been popular with the deputies. Now he was doing twenty-five to life in a wheelchair, in Chuckwalla state prison, a prison located in the butthole of California. The saying went that if California ever needed an enema, they’d shove it in Chuckwalla.

  * * *

  I parked next to the China Gate in the same strip center, a restaurant not yet open for the day. I opened the door to our office. Eight desks, all with phones, sat in an island amid a vast unimproved slab of concrete floor. The place echoed every little sound. Seven men turned to look when I came in—Wicks had yet to allow a woman on the team. I checked my watch. I wasn’t late. I had five minutes left.

  Up front, Wicks stood next to the group of six men clustered in chairs. Ned Kiefer turned around, smiled, and said, “Hey, Bruno, thanks for showin’ up.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Ned? Here?

  What the hell was going on? He’d said nothing at my house when he dropped off his daughter, Beth. He’d not said anything on purpose, just to see the look on my face when I entered the office.

  I wandered in, stunned at this sudden change of events. As I got closer, another deputy stood. It took a long moment for me to recognize him in street clothes: Levi’s, a short-sleeve print shirt, and work boots. Sergeant Coffman.

  He was an ex-Marine who’d fought on Iwo Jima. He still kept his gray hair high and tight like in the C
orps. And when he wore his uniform, he kept it pressed and clean, his black shoes polished to a high sheen. The whole package made him look like a World War II drill sergeant caught in a time warp. An absolute cliché, but he couldn’t be more genuine. He’d never retire. They’d have to take him out in a box. The guy looked around fiftyish, when he had to be in his sixties.

  I smiled and stuck out my hand. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  The taciturn Coffman’s smile changed the whole concept of his wooden expression. He came toward me and offered his hand. “Good to see you, Bruno.”

  We shook, his hand strong as ever. “Are you two really on our team now?”

  “That’s right,” Coffman said. “Just transferred in. Today’s our first day. Me and Ned both.”

  I couldn’t help but remember the last night I’d seen Coffman in the ER of St. Francis, hollowed out, shell-shocked, and asking how many men we’d lost in a long-ago battle from World War II.

  “Now that we’re done with old home week,” Wicks said, “you mind if I get back to the day’s briefing?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant.” I took my seat.

  “As I was saying before Johnson interrupted, we have been asked to assist the FBI in solving one of their little problems. The FBI has heard about the effectiveness of our team and decided they need our help.”

  Johnny Gibbs, one of the original members of the violent crimes team, let out a low groan, and said under his breath, “Not those assholes.”

  No one liked the FBI.

  “That’s right, Gibbs,” Wicks said. “Those assholes. This is a chance for some real good PR. Something we need.”

  Gibbs said, “Aren’t we supposed to come up on Frank Duarte today? He’s wanted for three murders, in three different cities. Now that’s a threat to public safety if you ask me. I think the FBI can wait.”

  I watched Ned watch the exchange. He kept his mouth shut. This must be the new and improved Ned. That, or he wanted to bide his time, see where the cards fell, before he interjected what he really thought.

  “With our two new transfers, we have enough to do both,” Wicks said. “Gibbs, Johnson, Kiefer, and Sergeant Coffman will now be an independent team. Coffman will be the supervisor. The rest of you will stay with me, and we’ll go up on Duarte within the hour. Questions?”