by David Putnam
Robby stopped. Blood had pooled in the lap of my apron. I got out, flopped it out on the ground in a wet little splash, and closed the door. He rolled down the window. “Don’t be a stranger, huh?”
I turned and waved over my shoulder, more interested in seeing my Marie than to dredge up hot, angry memories with the likes of him.
Inside the packed emergency room sat a sorry lot of humanity, the sort in every ghetto across the US. Folks on the lower socioeconomic scale, who drank on Saturday nights to forget their hunger, folks in a dead-end life with nothing to look forward to and who picked up a knife, a club, or brick and took it out on their neighbor.
I checked in with the overworked receptionist then wedged myself into the only seat available, an unwanted half-seat next to a big mama who had one child clinging to her breast and a second on her lap, cute well-fed children who looked like they might have a touch of the flu.
An hour later when a seat with a view of the ER room door vacated, I jumped over to it. Thirty minutes after that I got a glimpse inside of a harried Marie who did a double take when she saw me. The ER door closed on automatic hydraulics as she approached, blocking her from view. It opened again. She cautiously ventured out, looked around, afraid the cops were about to jump her.
All because of me.
I had come into her life and fed her an idea, sold her some fantastical plan. I used her love for me to seal the deal. She’d agreed for only one reason, to help save the children. Guilt in the pit of my stomach overrode pain in my lacerated hands. She asked with her eyes if it was all right to contact me. I nodded and stood. We hadn’t seen each other in going on two weeks. A long, lonely two weeks that now made my heart ache just to see her.
A hot-blooded Puerto Rican fifteen years my junior, put her right about thirty-three. Five four and a little too lithe, she was feisty and not afraid to speak her mind, in rapid-fire English, heavily accented with Spanish.
She rushed out with a big smile. Until she saw the blood, the chewed-up hands, the eye all but welded shut with purple. Her face melted into sympathy that enlarged a lump, made it rise in my throat, and choke me. I didn’t deserve a woman like her, not after all I’d done in my previous life, not with what I had in the works and was now too afraid to tell her. She knew some of it, but not all. And she had already warned me if I held anything back, we would be “kaput.”
She hugged me and kissed the uninjured side of my face. “Come on.” She tugged me toward the ER door, hesitated, looked around, said in a low tone. “You sure it’s … it’s okay?”
“Yeah, I was all wrong about who was watching. It wasn’t me they wanted. The kids are safe. It was just the Boulevard, Long Beach Boulevard. A two-eleven team was staked out for a hood pullin’ robberies. They gunned him tonight, right out in front of my store. Shot him dead. There was nothing I could do, Marie. Just a kid.”
I tried hard but couldn’t stop the tears as they welled in my eyes and burned in trails down my cheeks. I had degenerated to nothing more than a tired, shot-out, overemotional old man.
“Aw, babe, come on in here and let me get you cleaned up.”
She guided me past the long queue in the hallway behind the ER doors, folks in chairs and on gurneys, who had waited hours in the waiting room and now waited their turn to see the overworked doctors in another line on the inside, their angry eyes blazing a path right through me for the unfair favoritism. We went on past all the curtained-off beds and into an empty trauma room with a hard door, that when closed gave us privacy. My Marie was a physician’s assistant and went right to preparing the tray to suture my hands.
She looked behind us one more time, even though the door was closed. I’d done that, made her paranoid to the point of distraction. I wasn’t any good for her. If I kept it up, before too long she’d need tranquilizers and a good shrink.
“You sure it’s okay now?” Her eyes big and brown yearned for a positive answer.
“Relax, okay.” Her paranoia turned contagious. And maybe I wasn’t so sure. Maybe they had been set up outside the store watching me, and the kid they gunned was nothing more than collateral damage, words from the BMF—a bonus.
She sighed. All the tension left her shoulders, and the muscles in her face, tense for the last two weeks, finally relaxed. In the next instant, her Puerto Rican blood flared. She pulled back and socked me in the stomach.
Not too hard.
“Then what the hell you doin’ gettin’ hurt like this?”
I didn’t have the nerve to tell her and make things worse. Tell her that I was going to court day after tomorrow, on Monday. In reality, it was already early Sunday morning. I’d be in court in a few short hours. I used to face down armed and dangerous suspects who would not hesitate to drop the hammer on me, and yet I didn’t have the guts to tell her.
To top it off, if she knew what I had in my pocket, well, she’d be done with me for sure. No questions asked. I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Not one damn bit.
Chapter Four
The cuts were jagged around the edges and time consuming to stitch up. I watched her closely, her every move, her hair, the way her hands moved, her delicate fingers inside the latex gloves, the gold ring on her finger. We’d been together six months, and she’d still not taken it off.
She didn’t look me in the eye the entire time. I knew what she wanted to ask. But it was still too soon to see each other. Too dangerous. Too much at stake, other lives besides our own to consider. I had to be absolutely sure it had been a robbery surveillance for the kid, that the cops I’d seen for the last two weeks out in front of the liquor store weren’t really out following me. Hunting me. I needed to make sure the kid robbing the store wasn’t collateral damage who’d just wandered into the wrong place while the team was watching me.
“Cho fired me.”
She stopped, looked up, “Ah, Bruno, now what are we going to do? You didn’t make a lot of money but you needed the job to keep—” Again, she looked around at the closed door. “—to keep that punk Ben Drury off our backs. And the money. We need every penny.”
“Ben’s not that bad a guy.”
I leaned forward and gently bumped her forehead with mine, “I told you I got the money thing handled.”
The corner of her lip came up in a snarl. She pointed a latex-gloved finger brown with Betadine antiseptic. “You promised. No more stealing. We’re hurting enough people with what we got going on.”
“I can’t come over tonight.” We’d planned to meet, the first time in two weeks because of the surveillance.
She stepped back, mouth open.
I hated to hurt her even a little bit. She was everything that was right in my life. I wished every day I had met her years before. But back then she’d have taken one good look at what I was at the time and run away screaming.
“You said it was all right. You said not five minutes ago that they were looking for a robber. You said—”
I held my hand up. “There’s too much at stake to be careless. One, maybe two more days, and I’ll be absolutely sure.”
“You think that’s fair to me? You think that’s fair to the children?”
“One more day’s not going to matter.”
“To them it will. You don’t remember what it’s like being their age.”
She went back to work on my hand, shaking her head in disgust. After a couple of minutes of thinking about it she said, “I know it’s not right but—” Her brown eyes were vulnerable and the most beautiful I had ever seen. With my other hand I gently pulled her into me and kissed her long and hard, a kiss I wanted to go on forever. She kissed back, the heat rising between us. I’d missed her so. In a way, I wished I had not set in motion the events that now threatened to overrun us both. Only, I realized a long time ago this had been what I was put here for, what I was made for. Fait accompli.
At 117th Street I stopped under a streetlight and looked around. Nothing moved. It was too early in the morning. I stepped out of the yellow halo into
the shadows and waited twenty minutes. Nothing. I walked across the street on a diagonal over to an ancient pepper tree to check, the way I always did every time I came home. The way my night had gone, I knew it was going to be bad before I looked. Lately, things had been going too well.
The empty Gatorade bottle stuck up in the Y of the thick boughs, the red-labeled punch flavor signified an emergency. The last five days the tree cradled the green-labeled bottle, and meant, “Situation still okay.” Yellow meant hurry. Red meant emergency. I’d half expected the yellow, but the red scared the hell out of me. It made me want to run full-out until I got there.
Shit.
What else could go wrong?
I suppressed the dangerous urge to throw caution to the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and started the long tedious process of bob-and-weave to make sure my tail remained clean. In and out of side yards, into backyards, cutting across streets, stopping, waiting, and listening, a different path each and every time. There wasn’t much time. It would be dawn soon. I cut it short, shorter than I should have risked.
In the last backyard, just north of 133rd, I moved quietly along the familiar path.
I saw the glow of his eyes moving fast right at me. I was downwind. He hadn’t caught my scent. “Junior, wait, wait, it’s me. Junior!” He skidded on all fours in the dirt.
“Keyrist, dog.” He snuffled and jumped with his huge paws up to my chest. I’d almost been eaten by my own dog. I gave him as much love as the little time I had left allowed. I hadn’t planned on coming, so I didn’t have his treat. He didn’t seem to mind. He was in it for the lovin’. He was a good friend with a big heart, as long as you were on the good-guys team. I shoved him off and moved to the back door. Just in the few months I’d been coming, I knew every inch of the place, and still the porch wouldn’t let me by without a creak.
I turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. My heart skipped a beat. Damn, he knew better than that.
The stuffy air inside the small lath-and-plaster house smelled of bacon grease, okra, and greens. It sparked a nostalgic moment that took me back many years and made me wish I was back there, away from all the pressure, these problems. The feeling hadn’t happened in a long time. The shooting of the kid at the liquor store, the sudden realization of being old and helpless was what set me off.
The dim orange-yellow glow from the living room lamp filtered into the kitchen on the floor. I eased the door closed. The house was absolutely quiet, minus the snore. I stopped and opened the refrigerator. The bright light near blinded me. Just as I thought, they were out of milk and low on just about everything else. I was a fool. The old man had begun to panic. I couldn’t blame him.
I peeked around the corner. He sat in his easy chair his head back, his mouth open, gums exposed. His teeth were on the end table next to him as he quietly snored. His short-cut afro was cotton white. I carefully put my hand on it and remembered a time when it was jet black and glistened, a time when he was built like a world-class boxer and wasn’t afraid to keep the neighborhood safe from the thugs. Feeble now, and too old to care about anything but the two small children asleep on his lap and the others, two over on the couch in a makeshift bed and three more on the floor with pillows and blankets. Dad slept too soundly to be an effective night watchman. I felt bad that he was left with the job of caring for the children. I felt even worse about what I had to do to him in a couple of weeks. He knew the plan. He was unafraid to be alone looking into the backside of forever. My old man never complained, never.
Because of the situation, he wasn’t allowed to leave the house and had to pay the neighbor kid to buy the groceries. Had to pay him extra so the neighbor kid wasn’t inclined to talk and ruin the good thing we had going. The cover we wanted people to believe—crazy old man living by himself, a recluse who doesn’t want to venture out into the real world—so far it had worked fine. It just cost double for the food and supplies.
The kids looked as if they’d grown in the two weeks I’d been away. The responsibility of their safety caught me up short. How could I keep them safe? Who was I to think I was better than the county system? Was I doing the right thing here?
Of course, I was. Each one of these kids had been returned, by a judge no less, to an abusive home. Returned to parents who only wanted custody to keep the welfare checks coming. Some people were just plain wired wrong, mentally and emotionally. They did not consider kids to be living, breathing human beings. Children were disposable, even their own. Of course, I reassured myself, the kids were better off with Marie and me.
The kids needed to be in their beds in the bedroom. Dad was a soft touch and had let them stay up late watching TV and he’d fallen asleep with the rest of them. One at a time, I picked up the Bixlers, Ricky and Toby, two black boys, six and seven respectively, and carried them to their bedroom. They’d been taken into custody after their mom’s boyfriend’s PCP lab caught fire in their apartment. They hadn’t escaped unscathed. Their arms, legs, and backs rippled with scar tissue. They’d spent two months in the burn unit and were then dumped right back with the same mother who still lived with the same boyfriend, now out on bail.
I came back and lifted Sonny Taylor. He’d almost died overdosing on some meth his mom had left out on the living room coffee table. I’d found him in a closet where his mom had left him while she went out foraging for dope money.
Little Marvin Kelso was so light in my arms, so young to be a victim of abuse. Even though there was a court order keep-away, his mom, Julie Kelso, had snuck the molesting slime ball suspect back into her house.
Wally Kim, a Korean kid, lost his mother, a prostitute who died of an overdose, and left him without relatives to care for him. And half-Mex-half-white five-year-old Randy Lugo came to our attention after his fifth visit to Killer King hospital for a broken bone.
I carried them all into their bedrooms and tucked them in. Alfred was conspicuous by his absence. I missed him dearly.
In the six months we’d had the kids, I treasured every minute I had with them. We wrestled on the floor, tossed a ball in the house, and played silly games. It didn’t matter what we did so much, what mattered was the laughing, giggling, and cheering. And the hugs. It wasn’t complicated. They hungered for attention and love. For me, maybe they partially filled Alfred’s empty place, but I’d come to love them as my own. I gave all I had and wished I’d had more time to give. I couldn’t imagine letting anything bad ever happen to them again. I wouldn’t allow it. These kids’ lives and security were more important than any petty crime I might commit to keep them safe.
I lingered a little longer with Alonzo, my grandson, Alfred’s twin, and watched him sleep. The gentle rise and fall of his chest, the baby softness of his pudgy cheeks, his pure innocence, he was pure vulnerability.
I left Dad asleep in the chair and went into the kitchen. From my pocket, I took out the wad of bills, that if caught with, I couldn’t explain and would violate my parole. I peeled off twenty hundreds from the roll of two hundred and fifty bills, 25K, and laid them on the table. Two grand would be more than enough to last him until I could make it back the following week. I started for the back door, stopped, went back, and added another ten one hundred dollar bills. The money was important but not more than my dad’s peace of mind.
I had my hand on the doorknob when the old man’s voice from around the corner reached out, “Chantal called, said it was real important.”
Dad had been so proud when I joined the Sheriff’s Department, even more proud when I was promoted to detective on the Violent Crimes Team, working the South Central Los Angeles area, making the ghetto safer by putting away the violent predators. He told all his friends over and over, told everyone on his mail route, as well.
I’d been out of the joint now six months, had seen him on many occasions in those six months, and still I felt overwhelming guilt for having let him down. He’d lived by a code of honor with a strong work ethic like I’ve never seen in anyone else. He never missed
a day in forty years as a mail carrier for the post office. He never backed down from what was right.
The worst part of it, after it was all said and done, I was nothing more than a common street thug, now an ex-con on the dodge trying to keep from going back.
I let go of the doorknob and went back into the living room. He had his teeth back in and smiled broadly, his brown eyes clouded with cataracts. He was always happy to see me, even from behind the thick glass wall in visiting.
“I got your message at the tree and came over directly. I put some cash on the table out there and didn’t want to wake you. Sorry it took so long to get over here. Thing … things have been a little out of control.”
“You touch my kids, you’re going to wake me. You should know that.”
I got down on one knee, put my hand on his. “I know, Dad. I’m sorry, but we’re almost through it.”
I’d taken off the apron in the hospital and thrown it away, but some of the blood had soaked through to the dark work shirt and left unmistakable blotches. His eyes scanned my swollen eye, the bandaged hands. His palsied hand came up involuntarily to touch my face but stopped short. “I know you would’ve come sooner if you could’ve. I didn’t want to give you the emergency signal but … but I was worried about Alonzo, his asthma medicine is running low, and Alonzo, he wants to see you something fierce. I know it’s not fair to you with what you got going on, but it kills me to see him so sad.”
“It’s okay. You did right. I left you enough to last you through.”
I fought a lump rising in my throat and tried not to think about Alonzo or I’d probably tear up again. “Did Chantal say what it was about?”
“Yeah, something about a guy named Ben something.”
