by David Putnam
“Huh.”
Dad stood and stretched. “Here, give her to me.”
I didn’t want him to take her but let her go anyway, after I kissed her forehead.
Dad took the empty cup from her and set it on the counter. Her eyes were already at half-mast. Her head lolled and rested on his shoulder. “When Ned comes in, tell him I need to talk to him about Beth, okay?”
“Sure. But how—”
“Joe and Lucy and Kelly send us Christmas cards every year. You know that.”
I let it sink in. “Oh, you mean Joseph and Annie and their two little—that was them? I thought you said they were friends from work.”
“I never said that. I guess that’s just what you assumed. Goodnight, Son, see you in the morning. Don’t stay up too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
AN HOUR OR so later I still worked over the Thomas Guide making notations right on the map book.
From outside, Ned said, “Coming in.”
You never walked, unannounced, into someone’s house. Not in the ghetto. His feet clumped on the wooden steps. He appeared in the doorway, his hair a little disheveled, and lacking the famous Ned smile.
“Sorry I’m late picking up Beth.”
I put the pencil down next to my revolver on the table. “I told you she could stay as long as you needed her to. Come on in, have a seat.”
He came in the rest of the way and sat across from me, automatically facing the open door. His eyes looked a little bloodshot, and an odor of beer followed him in, and filled the room removing the softness from the scent of warmed milk and Olivia.
I reached in my pocket, took out a wad of twenties, and slid it across the table to him. “I stopped at the ATM on the way home tonight. If you need more than that, I’ll go to the bank in the morning. Just tell me how much you need.”
“What’s this for?” He picked up the money.
“Don’t play me, Ned. Something’s going on. You stormed out of the office this afternoon. And I gotta tell ya, I wouldn’t talk to Wicks like that again. He’s got a long fuse when it comes to his men, but when he goes off, he really goes off.”
He tossed the money on the table. “You think this is all about money?”
“I don’t know what it’s about. You won’t let me in, and I’m kinda gettin’ angry about it.”
His voice went up a little. “Oh, I see. This morning when you asked for my fed money, I’m shy forty bucks. So now it’s that old warning they drilled into us at the academy, ‘watch out for the deadly three Bs: booze, broads, and bills.’ And you think it’s the bills running me down. Keep your money, Bruno, my friend, and thanks for the offer.”
“If it’s not money, then what is it?”
He kind of stared off, his eyes going a little blank, in a semi-trance.
I watched him.
He finally said, “You ever think about Olivia? I mean, who would take care of her if something happened to you?”
“Sure, all the time. What brought this on?”
“What? Oh, something that happened on patrol in Lakewood. I never used to let those old calls bother me, but they come back on me now, more and more, since I have Beth to think about.”
“Sometimes it’s better to talk about it instead of keeping it all bottled up.”
He nodded, still not looking at me. “I don’t think so.”
“Try me.”
He shrugged, still not fully engaged. “It was a call of a med aide, ‘man down.’ This guy, about thirty years old, a dumbshit, really, for not turning off the electricity in his emptied pool before he changed out the light. Electrocuted himself. He was dead. This left his five-year-old son there by himself. The poor kid didn’t know what to do. He only knew that when someone was hurt you put a Band-Aid on it.” Ned turned to look at me, his eyes vacant as if he relived it. “When I got there, the dead dad was laying in the bottom of the empty pool, with Band-Aids all over his face and arms.”
I hadn’t been present at the call Ned described, but it resounded deep inside me.
Dad wandered into the living room and broke the spell from the story. He stood in his pajamas, sleep heavy in his expression. “What’s going on?” He rubbed his right eye with a fist.
“Nothing, Dad. Sorry, we didn’t mean to wake you a second time.” I looked at Ned. “Me and Ned are just reviewing what we’re going to do tomorrow.”
Dad said to Ned, “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about Beth.”
Ned took a couple of steps closer to Dad. “Is something wrong with her?”
“Maybe it’s nothing, but she seems more skittish than a little girl should be. She spooks real easy.”
“I haven’t noticed anything like that, but then I’m not real used to having a little girl around. You think it’s something important? Should I do something?”
“Like I said, it might be nothing. We’ll just keep an eye on her for now, okay?”
“Sure, you know better than I do, so I’ll defer to your experience. And thanks again, Mr. Johnson, for helping me out with her.”
He waved off the gratitude and came further into the kitchen. He looked at the map book on the table and saw my more recent notations. “That’s our neighborhood. Son, who are you hunting this time? Is it someone we know?”
Ned said, “We’re looking for a girlfriend of a bank robber.” Ned turned to me. “Hey, did your informant come through with a name?”
“No, after you left, Ollie called me back. She only caught a whisper on the street. A big maybe is all she could get for us. She got a possible first name, that’s it, and it’s paper-thin at best. She gave me ‘Bea,’ as in Bea Arthur, like the actress, or bee, like the insect. Don’t know which. Now we have to go door to door to find her, so we can get her real name. It’s a long shot. She might not even be the girlfriend of the Bogart Bandit.”
Dad leaned over and squinted. He put his finger on the map. “Bea lives right there just off of Mona, 1500 block of 115th.”
My mouth sagged open in awe. Dad could do that to me, right out of the blue, step up and make my world just a little easier. He’d been doing that since I was a kid. Way back, I started calling it daddy magic.
“Son of a bitch,” Ned said.
“Watch your language, Ned,” Dad said, “we got children in the house.”
“Sorry.”
“Dad, you really know a Bea who lives in this area?”
“Just said I did, didn’t I? Nice little gal, everyone calls her—”
“Honeybee?” I said.
“That’s right, that’s the one.”
The skin on my back and neck prickled at the confirmation and the abrupt shift in the situation.
Dad said, “But she doesn’t live there anymore. Her mama doesn’t know where she got off to. Ran away with some street gangster. It’s really sad. Her mama thinks she’s pregnant. That’s why she took off, ran away from family and friends who are just tryin’ to help her. Thinks she went somewhere south, maybe Moreno Valley or Hemet. Somewhere like that.”
“Do you know her last name?”
With his knuckles, he knocked on my head. “’Course I do, Son. I’m a mailman, remember? They call her Honeybee Holcomb. Bea Holcomb.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NED STARTED LAUGHING. “If this isn’t the shit. This is it, isn’t it, Bruno? This is a lead the Feebs don’t have. And all they had to do was ask the local mailman.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Ollie had a big hand in it, and I’d still owe her the money, and the favor with her nephew.
Dad shook his head at Ned’s language.
“Yeah, I think we can work this,” I said. “It’s going to be a little easier to track her than the Bogart Bandit, but not by much. So don’t get your hopes up.”
Ned stood, wandered over to the couch. “I have faith in you, partner. Mind if I sleep here tonight? We’re gonna want to get an early start tomorrow.” He didn’t wait for the perfunctory “yes,” stretched out on the couch, and l
aid his arm over his eyes.
“Sure,” Dad told him. “You’re welcome anytime, Ned, my boy, as long as you come back with a brush and a bucket of high gloss white, to repaint our walls.”
Ned chuckled. “Oh no, old man, my lovely and perfect little Beth doesn’t know how to draw, especially on walls. That’s all on Olivia.”
My turn to chuckle. “You have any proof of that?”
He raised his right hand as if testilieing in court. “I don’t want to be a rat, but I saw the whole thing, Your Honor.”
Dad smiled and waved his hand. “Sure, you’re right. See you all in the morning. I’m going back to bed.”
I waited for him to get down the hall and his bedroom door to close. “You going to tell me what the problem is, the one Wicks knows about and I don’t?”
“Naw, why ruin a good high. I mean, I can’t believe you came up with a name like that, right outta the blue. Hey, after I left, did Wicks chew your ass like we thought? Over disrespecting the FBI?”
“Not at all. He said he thought it was great. In fact—” I stopped short. I didn’t want to give Ned, of all people, the go-ahead to disparage the FBI at every opportunity. He already did that too often.
“Then what did he want?”
I pulled a chair over, closer to the couch where, at the same time, I could still see out the door, if unwanted guests tried to approach the house from the street. “I guess I should tell you what’s going on.”
He didn’t look too concerned. He pulled his arm down, opened one eye to gaze at me. “Damn straight you better fill me in.”
“The FBI is running a game on us.”
“And you’re surprised because why? I’m not. Go on, give it to me.”
“They started up this whole bank robbery team for one reason. They want us to chase one particular crew that’s causing them a problem.”
“Okay … and?” He closed his eye, unconcerned.
“No, this is a real turd they handed us. This crew they want us to take down is made up of fourteen- fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids.”
Ned sat up. “You’re shittin’ me?”
“No, and it gets worse, a lot worse. A guy by the name of Amos Leroy Gadd recruits these kids off the basketball courts, right here in my neighborhood. Well, a little north of here anyway, Rollin’ Sixties turf. Good kids from good families. He brainwashes them. Then he offers them a thousand dollars each—more money than they’ve ever seen. He arms them with real guns and gives them a stolen van. He tells them no matter what happens they can’t go to jail ’cause they’re juvies. He follows them to the bank, watches from a car down the street, and follows them back here to the ghetto. They’re doing two banks a week. He rotates the whole bunch of these kids, so they never work the same job together. This makes it harder to identify them, and to backtrack to Gadd.”
Ned whistled and shook his head in amazement.
“The bad part,” I said, “is that a couple of those kids have gone missing. Word on the street is, Gadd snuffed them to keep all the others from talking, and it’s worked. No one is saying a word. No one. And we’d need a witness to arrest Gadd for conspiracy, or he’s just going to keep on corrupting and endangering these children. The children will go to jail, and Gadd won’t. If we don’t flip one of the kids, there’s no way we can touch Gadd. And even then, I don’t think testimony alone will be enough to put Gadd away. We’ll need some kind of corroborating evidence that isn’t there.”
Ned moved to the edge of the couch. “So, let me get this straight. We’re supposed to follow some armed kids around until they rob a bank and then take them down in progress? What if they shoot at us? We can’t fire back, not at a bunch of kids. And what if they flee in a van? We can’t chase ’em. They might crash, and get hurt or killed.”
“Exactly.”
“FBI. Those bastards.”
“No, but listen. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and this might be for the best.”
“How in the hell do you figure that?”
“Another team on these kids might not give them the chance we would.”
Ned looked away from me and out into the night through the front door. After a moment he said, “That means … I mean if it’s what I think you’re saying, they can shoot at us, and we can’t shoot back at them. And we still have to try and take them into custody.”
“Something like that …”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, as he pondered that dilemma—the same one that continued to bang around in my head. Put in that situation—where it’s the kid or me—could I pull the trigger? Not likely. Then what happens to Olivia?
Ned finally said, “Hey, I need to ask a big favor.”
“You got it.”
“If anything ever happens to me, will you take care of Beth?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
He looked back at me. “No, I’m serious, will you?”
“Of course I will. You didn’t have to ask. That’s a given.”
The sad part was that I couldn’t, in clear conscience, ask Ned to look after Olivia if something happened to me. I loved Ned like a brother, but I couldn’t do it. He was a sharp street cop, but he tended to make the wrong decisions in his personal life.
Ned said, “Looks like we need to go after this Amos Gadd and light his ass up. That’s the only way we can stop this violent scenario he’s put in play. He called the game, so I won’t feel bad about it one bit.”
“Wicks left it up to me, but he said, if he were chasin’ Gadd, it would be all about the blood and bone.” A term Wicks used when he caught up to a crook who didn’t want to go to prison, and the crook, weapon in hand, took a stand against Wicks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I SHOULD NOT have gone to sleep thinking about the terrible confrontation: the one looking down the top of my gun at a kid running out of a bank with a bag of money in one hand and a gun in the other. The image remained vivid, alive, the expressions of fear and hate, the smell of despair and gun smoke, as I drifted off. It mixed with the other nightmare, one that I’d finally beaten back, and had not seen for at least three or four months.
The one set in the parking lot behind Lynwood sheriff’s station.
* * *
Two aisles over in the main driveway, Blue came running in from the street, looking over at us as he ran on by.
Wicks stiffened. “Bruno, you wait right here.” He took off his suit coat and let it drop to the ground. He walked with deliberation toward the trailer, his gun hand now free to draw his Colt .45.
Blue turned, running backward, slowed, and then stopped. He faced Wicks.
I followed along behind. “Wait. Wait.” I didn’t want Wicks to gun Blue. I got to within a half a step behind him when he stopped about thirty feet from Blue. I still wasn’t thinking too clearly.
Wicks said, “Blue, I need to take you in, now.”
“I don’t think so. You okay, Bruno? You look like hell. You’re bleeding. What happened?”
Wicks said, “Thibodeaux’s dead.”
The light in Blue’s eyes shifted to that same look I saw that night in the alley behind the gas station on Mona; shifted to pure predator. “That’s too bad. Dirt was a good friend, a good man to have in a pinch. He’ll be missed. You have something to do with that, Wicks?”
“Of course I did. But if you’re asking if I dropped the hammer, no, I didn’t.”
“You, Bruno?”
I shook my head. “Thibodeaux put Mo Mo down.”
“Like I said, Dirt was a damn good man.” Blue started walking closer.
“You don’t seem too broke up over it,” Wicks said.
Blue shrugged. “Such is life in the ghetto.”
That’s when I saw the sock over Blue’s hand. Adrenaline dumped into my system, clearing my head and making every muscle in my body hum with tension, ready to act.
“Wicks?”
“Not now, Bruno.”
“Wicks?”
“Bruno, I said—”
Blue raised his hand, the one with the sock. The one with the small .38 hidden inside.
In one motion, I shoved Wicks to the side and drew my gun, the stock slick and at the same time sticky in my hand.
Blue fired.
The bullet zipped by my ear, inches away from being a fatal shot.
I fired one time. The bullet caught Blue in the stomach. He went down hard.
Wicks fired from the ground, and hit the trailer behind where Blue stood, not a moment before.
“He’s down,” I yelled. “He’s down.” I moved into the line of fire so Wicks wouldn’t have another shot. All the energy drained out of me.
The first time I ever shot my gun on duty, and I shot a cop, right behind the sheriff’s station.
Wicks scrambled to his feet and over to us. “Jesus H. I didn’t know he had a gun in his hand. I thought it was just a sock.”
On my knees, I took the smoking sock, and gun, away from Blue, who said, “You shouldn’t have stuck your nose into it. Wicks needs killin’. You’ll regret it; believe me, you’ll regret it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Wicks said. “Look who’s on the ground, gutshot, pal.”
Wicks turned to me. “What did I tell you? Never leave it unfinished. If he’s good for one, he’s good for all six. You understand me? Always finish it.”
* * *
The next morning, I woke early without the alarm, my body slick with sweat, shivering in a hot bedroom, the metallic taste of burnt gunpowder on my tongue. Not real, just a memory.
I showered and shaved and put on a comfortable pair of jeans and a khaki shirt, with the name patch “Karl” over one breast pocket and “Hammond Trucking” over the other. I now had eight of these kinds of shirts hanging in my closet. In the two years working with Wicks chasing murderers and violent degenerates, who lacked any sort of moral compass, I found I looked and acted too much like a cop. When I put on the Hammond Trucking shirt and donned a green John Deere ball cap, I could virtually blend in anywhere, as an innocuous truck driver.
