by David Putnam
Robby reached over with his foot and slammed it down on top of mine holding it to the floor after I’d eased off a little. The car leapt out, grabbing asphalt faster and faster.
“It’s going to be crazy when we get there,” Robby said. “Here, take this.” He handed me his sheriff’s gold star on a chain and I put it around my neck. It felt strange, warm to the touch as if a religious medallion. I didn’t want it, not at all. There had been a time when I worshipped the fraternity. He was right though, without it I became fair game.
Ten years ago we would’ve just driven over the curb and into the projects. Nickerson was now surrounded by ten-foot wrought iron and could now only be accessed by a few streets.
I took a couple of fast corners, the tires squealing, the passengers inside getting batted around. It didn’t stop Robby, “Tell me who’s throwing gas and lightin’ up the people for initiation.”
“Man, what the fuck are you talkin’ about? Is this what all this shit’s about? You’re crazy. Swear to gawd, you’re off your rock.”
“Gimme something good and I’ll let you go. We know it’s Grape Street doin’ it.”
“Someone’s playin’ you a fool. You got it all wrong.”
Robby leaned over and punched the Crip right in the chest. The thump sounded hollow and followed by a long groan. The Crip lay across the backseat.
We were in the Nickerson driving west on 115th.
“There. There.” Robby yelled and pointed to a throng of blacks moving toward two deputies with their guns out, a suspect down at their feet. They stood back to back right in the center of a quad area. I went over the curb and headed right toward them, fishtailing, kicking up grass clods. Robby reached under his dash, down by my right leg, and hit the siren to disperse the crowd and to keep the deputies from misinterpreting who we were and opening up on us. A half-empty forty-ounce beer bottle bounced off our car. Yellow foam rolled down across the windshield.
Robby said, “This is going to get real shitty before it’s over.”
The crowd moved out of the way for us. The deputies held their guns at the ready. They would shoot into the crowd if it got any worse. I recognized Carter Bingham, a good old white boy transplanted from Tennessee who’d finally made it off of patrol and into the Gang Enforcement Team. They called him Pig Farmer because of his faint accent. He wouldn’t let the mob overrun them, not without taking a few with them.
The guy on the ground was shot in the back. He was dressed in denim pants and a Raiders jacket with a purple rag tied to his belt. He didn’t look too hurt the way he thrashed around in the handcuffs, screaming bloody murder how he was shot in the back and that he was going to sue.
Robby popped the trunk button, jumped out, pulled a riot gun from the back, and racked it. The loud, metallic noise made everyone in the crowd moving toward us freeze. “Get his ass in the car. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Half a red brick hit the windshield and shattered it. Red grit mixed with yellow beer foam and clung to the spiderweb damage. The Gang Enforcement Team deputies didn’t have to be told twice. They each grabbed an arm of their victim, drag-carried him over to the car, and threw him in on top of the other guy. Then Robby got in standing on the running board with his door open. The deputies followed suit in the back doors. I gunned it, spinning a brodie. The crowd took their cue. Rocks and bottles rained down. As we bounced back onto the street in our headlong flight, LAPD rolled in six cars deep. Behind them came all of Century Station Patrol, their heads large in the windshields from riot helmets. All of them braked, pulled U-turns, and exited. We met up in the shopping center parking lot on Wilmington where the ambulance came to tend to the wounded Crip gang member bleeding in the backseat. They put him on a gurney and rolled him out.
I stood by the car watching the other crook while Robby met with some of the Operation Safe Streets guys wearing jeans and green raid jackets. I was close enough to see the LAPD guys staring at Robby as he talked animatedly with his hands. I cringed at what they might be telling him and confirmed it when his hands froze in mid-explanation. He slowly turned to look over at me. OSS was a tough, well-organized group. They had their informants. They gleaned the intel fast, told Robby his info was bad. Robby figured it out, how I had stabbed him in the back, made him a horse’s ass in front of everyone. Mobilized half the department, got a gang member shot, and almost started a full-blown riot. I held his gaze until he broke and gave his men additional instructions. He would try to bolster his position, bully his way out of the embarrassing situation, insist he wasn’t wrong.
Other LAPD officers joined the group staring at Robby. Some pointed at him.
OSS and GET started to break up and head for their cars when a string of unmarked cars slid into the parking area. Unmarked with tinted windows. The way they rolled in told it all, the elite Violent Crimes Team. They pulled up in adjoining parking slots and stopped in unison, one after the other as if they had choreographed the maneuver. The men were the same from the other night at Mr. Cho’s. Mack, in Levi’s, t-shirt, his shoulder holster with a large-framed automatic, got out and swaggered over, not with the rest, but over to Robby who stood alone, not taking his eyes off of me, waiting. When he came in range, Robby made a quick-step over to Mack and with one hand grabbed him behind the neck and escorted him away from the others, away from their ears. Mack hunched his thick shoulders and knew better than to resist, even though Robby was no match for him. Mack, if he put his mind to it, could break off Robby’s arms one at a time and beat him senseless.
The throng of LAPD officers watched with an unusual intensity.
Mack finally had enough and shrugged Robby off. They were far enough away. Their words, though loud, were still indiscernible.
The urge to hop in Robby’s unmarked car with the Crip still in the back was almost too strong to suppress.
Robby pulled back to strike Mack. Mack brought his arm up to block. Robby stopped himself before he let the genie out of the bottle, one he could never put back. Not with all the LAPD witnesses. Robby and Mack both took some deep breaths and calmed down. More words were exchanged, Mack doing most of the listening. Then they turned, looked at me, and smiled.
Time to go. I turned to get in Robby’s car, make a wild dash for it, but had waited too long. My attention had been focused on Robby while the other members of the Violent Crimes Team casually, instinctively, deployed in easy striking range. They crowded all around, their arms folded across their chests, leaning up against both sides of the car where I stood.
Robby shook Mack’s hand. They both walked over, their path right by the LAPD officers who had just started to disband now that all the action was over. They stopped to take a close look at Robby. After Robby passed, they moved on, talking in low whispers, shaking their heads.
Robby stopped in front of me, his eyes angry. He didn’t take them off of me as Mack came around and took the crook out of the backseat, took the cuffs off, and let him go. The other members without prompting went back to their cars, got in, and left.
Robby and I were alone in the vacant parking lot. He continued to stare.
“What?” I said.
“This what you learn in the joint? How to fuck over your friend? A friend who has gone out of his way to help you?”
His words hurt. I wanted to throw my ace, the fact that his real motivation was to find the kids I had stashed, that he was working with the FBI, and if successful, he’d put me away for the rest of my life. Tell him to kiss my black ass. Instead, I stood and gave back his stare.
He shook his head. “The bitch didn’t know a thing, did she? You fed me a woof cookie that I gobbled up and went off half-cocked, without covering her because I trusted the information.”
I said nothing.
“You let her get away.”
I walked from the car, leaving him, waiting for him to draw a blackjack or a gun. Come up on me fast, jack me in the head, take me in. Give me the BMF treatment, get me to talk, tell him what he really wanted to know, where the kids were. But
that was the point of this whole charade. I knew where they were, and they didn’t, and nothing they could do to me could make me tell him. Robby, more than anyone else, knew that. I didn’t know how they had gotten on to me, but somehow they had.
I’d made a slip somewhere along the way and I think I knew where. When they ran all the information in the computer, my name came up. Along with what I had done to my grandson’s father, the crime that put me on the criminal path was also the last piece to the puzzle. The crime that put me in prison was the key. A blind man could’ve figured it out. They were only guessing, that’s why they surveilled the market where I worked. All the countersurveillance I had done, the codes, and cutouts I’d put in play that Marie thought was pure paranoia had been exactly what had kept her and me and Dad out of the can. But, most important, it kept the kids safe a little longer.
Robby didn’t come after me as I walked across the parking lot. He had simply put me back into play. He’d given the Violent Crimes Team a head start to get set up, ready to follow me. He had also forgiven Mack for his little transgression, coming over to Chantal’s apartment. Worst of all, Robby had just unchained Mack. For a brief second I wondered if the whole thing wasn’t all a setup. I looked up in the air, trying to see the cherry-red light of a helicopter and heard the careful footfalls as Robby slowly followed. He said, “I sent the team out to find her, told ’em do whatcha gotta do.” Another BMF idiom that meant they were free to do what was necessary in order to make the streets safe, which included deadly force with impunity.
I stopped, wanting to turn, walk back, and beat his face in. Instead, I couldn’t look at him. I said, “You know what this means, don’t you?”
He said, “That it’s on?”
“That’s right.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. You forget, I taught you everything you know.”
I turned, the reflection in his eyes a strange yellow in the sodium vapor light of the parking lot. “Did you teach me to put contraband cigarettes filled with rock cocaine behind my ear and act like an out-of-control madman in front of an allied agency that will surely call Internal Affairs to report a dope-smoking lieutenant? When IA calls you in for the interview, give them my name, I’ll give them a statement and character reference.”
His hand jerked up to his ear as his eyes went wide with shock. He’d forgotten about it.
I walked away.
Chapter Thirty
I walked down Wilmington, wondering just how much they knew about the operation, “the life of Bruno,” post Soledad Prison. I thought about hot-prowling their office. They’d have a situation board up with photos, maps, and bullets of information in order to see at a glance, “who was who in the zoo.” Intelligence was power, and at the moment, I was powerless. I shifted my thoughts to the problem at hand. First things first. I had to lose them and be sure they stayed lost. Then I had to think about Chocolate, get to her before they did. I had the edge there. They’d believe her a coked-out street whore with nowhere to go. They didn’t know about all the money I’d given her. She’d be laying her head in a nice warm motel in South Gate with an eight ball of rock and a bottle of sweet wine.
I sat on a bus bench and waited for the bus that now roared down the street not thirty seconds away. I didn’t look for the net thrown up all around. The bus pulled over and stopped. I got up when the door hissed opened, stepped inside, the door closed. The part of the team on foot would be scrambling for their cars while the mobile units jockeyed their cars in a position to tail. The bus picked up speed. The black woman at the wheel of the bus with a pie-pan face, overflowing her seat on all sides, said, “Sit down.”
I changed my mind. Can you open the door, please?”
“Sit down. You can get off at the next stop.”
“Open the damn door. Do it now.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine for several long beats. For a second, I wondered who was driving the bus. Then she braked hard, pulled the door handle to expel the large, angry black man who’d just scared the hell out of her.
I ran back full-tilt to the bus bench where I’d started and cut down a long dirt easement overgrown with bushes, trees, and vines. The second house in, I rolled over a fence covered with vines into a yard with an elm large enough to shield everything under its overgrown umbrella, an umbrella that kept secret three bull mastiffs. Their thick chains rattled, dragged in the dirt toward the intruder in their yard. I clapped my hands, “Manny, Moe, Jack.” It paid to know the neighborhood and to make friends with its inhabitants. The closest dog bowled me over, the others jumped on, their mouths soft on my wrists and ankles as I struggled through them to their doghouse, a toolshed-size building with a low roof covered in asphalt shingles. I crawled in and curled up on top of their smelly, dirty rugs and went right into a fetal position. I tried to imitate the shape of a bull mastiff. At the same time, I worried about the spiders, the large waxy black widows with their bright-red hourglasses on their bellies, disturbed by the new presence, me. Phantoms began to crawl on my skin. The dogs bounced around, excited with the presence of a friend who wanted to play. After a while, they calmed down as the novelty wore off.
Jack, the one with a mauled ear, stayed with me, curled up close almost in a lover’s spoon, his body heat a comfort.
The helicopter came in low, its spotlight searching. Its onboard Flir device displaying heat-signatures of all beasts, four legged, and otherwise. The equipment showed crooks hiding under cars, up in trees, even in houses.
Outside the large doghouse, Manny and Moe’s chain rattled. Jack’s head came up. He bolted out, dragging his thick chain. When I didn’t come out of the other end of the alley or pop out on to the side street, the Violent Crimes Team decided to send a man down the dirt easement to see if he could pick up my trail. Robby was right, “it was on.” This was a maneuver they would never have tried had they wanted to remain strictly sub rosa in their investigation.
I didn’t know the time, didn’t carry a watch, one with a luminous dial or the kind with little techno-specialties that Robby called a deadman’s watch. You carried one on an operation, the alarm could go off, or the luminous dial could give you away at a critical time. He was right, I had learned a lot from him. I tried to track the time in my head. I had to meet Marie at two o’clock.
How long would Robby keep his team in the area thinking I went to ground? How long to wait them out? This is where I had the upper hand. I knew him. Without someone to calm him, explain the options, he always went for the mobile search, too uptight and antsy to sit in one place. I’d always been the one to choose the more logical option for him. Without me, he would send one man to each of the locations they had me down for on his corkboard back in the office, places I’d been confirmed to frequent. Then he’d drive from each of those locations, checking up, always on the move, while his men sat static.
After an hour, all the time I could spare, I crawled out and listened. The fresh air tasted amazing, much better than confinement with Jack’s hot Purina Chow breath. The wide open reminded me that under no circumstances would I ever go back to a concrete cell.
Twenty minutes later the cab dropped me three blocks from the Landmark in Huntington Park, code red rumba south side. The Landmark was in Little Cuba, the Rumba. North of Willowbrook, which is opposite of south side, the code Marie thought I was being paranoid about making her memorize. Along with five others that would now never be used. This was it, our last day in the States. We were on our way. Not necessarily the land of milk and honey but freedom just the same, a different sort, for all of us.
The Landmark, as with most all motels in Huntington Park, was a hot-pillow fleabag, populated by the bottom rung of society. It’s a mildewed structure with rotting doors and peeled dull, institutional lime-green paint that no longer wanted to stick to its corrupt walls.
If Robby and his crew had outsmarted me, it no longer mattered. I walked right up to the large, majestic queen palm with the dried out yellow uncut drooping fronds,
a graceful lady too embarrassed to show her base trunk, and pulled out the green Gatorade bottle. Inside was a balled up paper that meant absolutely nothing to anyone else. Written on it was 212.
I walked up the stairs, wiping my sweaty hands on my pants. When I saw her regularly, I didn’t question her love for me. The Gatorade bottle reaffirmed her desire to hang with an old, overly obsessed, broken-down black man on the run from a society he once coveted. Three weeks apart renewed the anxiety, let the insipid fear of rejection weasel-wedge into my common sense. Why would a woman of Marie’s caliber even give me a second look, let alone fall in love?
At the top of the stairs a big man, a white supremacist in a white wifebeater t-shirt and broad, youthful shoulders, entered the stairwell. We both paused, enemies confronting each other, his face tattooed with AB for Aryan Brotherhood, and three teardrops at the corner of his eyes, his large arms sleeved with black ink, jailhouse tattoos touting his hate for his fellow man, the mud people. His blue eyes reminded me of Deputy Mack.
The two were one and the same, each working the opposite sides of the street yet on the same side. The man hesitated, the hate oozing from him as he decided, made a choice, the business that brought him to the Landmark was more important than the oath he’d sworn allegiance to. We passed, me going down the hall, I stepped backward, watching as he continued on down the stairs, his awful glare on me as it disappeared lower and lower with each step until he was gone. I waited by the door marked 212 until I was sure he wasn’t coming back, then rapped softly, two, one then two.
“Bruno?” Her voice barely a whisper, made my heart soar.
“Babe, it’s me.”
The door jerked open. She froze, her soft brown eyes large and teary. The code red, the signal to drop everything and run for it, had scared the hell out of her. To talk about it was one thing; to live it was all together something else. She had not known if I was going to make it or not. A lump rose in my throat. The woman genuinely cared for me. She reached out, took my hand, and pulled me into the room. At least her brain was working on the right level, at the moment enough for the both of us. She closed the door and gently put her head against my chest. I hugged her. She felt so damn good.
