by David Putnam
Finally, the noise subsided, the room empty. The crowd left behind broken martini and highball glasses and clear glass plates with pâté and barbequed meatballs mixed with crumbled crackers. The two scared bartenders held their ground behind the bar. Jumbo regained some composure. “You really know how to ruin a celebration.”
“That right? What’re you celebrating?”
He moved to the bar, turning his back to me. In a lowered voice he asked the bartender, “Glenfiddich neat.” He waited until she poured and he slugged down the amber liquid and set the glass down for a refill.
“One of your overseas companies just post a huge profit?”
He took the bottle of Glenfiddich and moved to the couch. To the ladies he said, “You girls are excused for the evening. Sorry for the short night. You’ll, of course, be compensated.”
He poured another. If he kept it up, he’d be pickled by morning. The girls grabbed their stylish purses from under the counter and picked their way through the debris field to the front door.
“And to answer your question, yes, an overseas corporation just posted an excellent accounting for the last quarter.”
“I can imagine. What, a ten-million-dollar profit? Computer chips?”
He didn’t answer and took another long pull.
I asked, “Where’s Ned?”
“Don’t try and play games with me. I know why you’re here.”
I stepped over to an end table and picked up a bronze sculpture, an abstraction of what looked like an African gazelle melded with an African tribesman, and held it down by my side. I liked the heft of it.
“Detective Johnson, you are a true thug.” Now Jumbo looked really scared. Just the way I wanted him.
“What happened to calling me Bad Boy?”
“They asked me to try and get you to talk about Ned, but obviously you’re too smart for that.”
His words came out and entered my brain, but didn’t immediately sink in. Slow motion analysis because I knew their meaning and didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want it to be true.
Then Jumbo said the words I knew were coming next. The words that meant the end of my world as I knew it.
The end of everything.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Jumbo smiled when he said, “Looks like some bad weather. Might even be a tornado brewing out there.”
BMFs were a tight-knit team. They had to be to chase the most dangerous animals in the world. They read each other’s moves, knew what each team member was thinking, and used code words to operate on a covert level that at the same time confounded their prey. Robby Wicks had used the same code words from bygone days as a matter of flaunting his ability to outmaneuver me. “Might be a tornado brewing,” was the bust sign when the informant was in fear for his life and wanted the cops to swarm in and save him.
Jumbo was wearing a wire.
He was cooperating with the police.
I took a long step toward him. Before my foot had a chance to touch down, there came rapid crackling on the pool deck, storm troopers, their boots treading upon millions of little ice-cubed glass on the concrete. Behind me the thump of running feet. I was surrounded. Rage enveloped in a blanket of red. I raised the gazelle and advanced, determined to take out the rat who’d ruined everything.
“Freeze, don’t move. Asshole, don’t you move.”
I was focused on bashing in Jumbo’s head. In my peripheral vision I processed the words, the commands from Deputy Mack as he stepped into the living room, his large-caliber handgun pointed at my chest. The ugly image of the dead kid shoved up against the wall of Mr. Cho’s store flashed on the wall of my brain, the unstoppable revelation of how in a couple more seconds I, too, would be posed in the same manner.
I thought: go ahead and shoot. My Marie was gone from me forever. I took another long step. Jumbo lost his arrogant smirk, tried to scramble away from me. I was too quick. I was on him, pulled back for a deadly bludgeoning.
Mack, stopped, yelled, displaying a crazy man’s eyes, spittle flying, his gun, a large dark train tunnel pointed at my nose. Still undeterred, I took another step.
“Bruno, stop right there, or I’ll blow your black ass right to hell.”
For two years, these very same words in quiet moments alone in a cell, echoed in my brain. They triggered some kind of primordial survival instinct that froze all muscle and bone. Even if I wanted to act, I couldn’t. I couldn’t override the instinct put there to save my life. Those same words were said the last time a second prior to the bullet blasting through my shoulder and knocking me on my ass. The same words said by the same person. I held the gazelle cocked over my head and slowly turned my torso to where Robby stood in the entry, his gun pointed right at me, the same as the last time. Robby, my old friend and supervisor.
“Shoot me. Please shoot me.”
Robby smiled. “Can’t. We got video rolling. Or, believe me, I’d love to save the state all the money it’s going to take to put you on death row.”
I yelled and charged.
Mack tackled me from behind. Then two tons of rhinos fell on me.
I was handcuffed and hobbled, my hands behind my back, feet bound and hooked to the handcuffs, hog-tied.
One of the deputies involved in the dog pile skewered his upper thigh with the gazelle horn. He bled copiously onto Jumbo’s white Berber rug. Jumbo jumped around, “Get him out of here. Get him off the rug. You’re kidding me, right? Get him the fuck outside. Who’s going to pay for this? Who’s going to pay for the window this black bastard shattered?”
Robby stepped over to a lamp and draped a towel over it. One of the many towels a deputy retrieved from the bathroom to use as a pressure bandage on his partner’s leg. A motel-like lamp that I should’ve immediately noticed when I walked in, should have recognized. A lamp camera, the same model we had used on other operations, the county too cheap to buy the updated version. Another in-your-face detail Robby would gloat over and tell in war stories again and again. I’d been too intent on looking for the real threat, Crazy Ned Bressler. All the people at the party a distraction as well in Jumbo’s well-appointed house. Like a fool I’d been taken in by it all.
Once the camera was out of commission, Robby stepped over to Jumbo, C-clamped him with one strong hand around his throat, got up in his ear because there was still audio and whispered. Jumbo turned ashen and nodded again and again.
Paramedics clamored in with all their gear and immediately went to work on the African-gazelle-gored deputy who no longer moaned and lay absolutely still in a sea of turmoil. Two deputies leaned hard on blood-soaked towels that plugged the wounded leg.
Robby said, “Get this piece of shit out of my sight.” He kicked me in the side.
Mack and two other deputies picked me up like a suitcase. My arms and legs and wrists screamed in pain.
Robby looked at his watch. “Put him in my car. Mack, you stay with him. I’ll be right out.” He turned to the paramedic. “How’s he doing?”
The paramedic stood, his latex gloves splotched with blood and nodded his head for Robby to step aside. They moved with the group carrying me to the door. They stopped, but I heard the medic. “His femoral artery is severed. We have to scoop and run. We can’t wait on the airship. Can you give us a code-three escort?”
“Shit. Shit. Hell yes. Jenkins, you and Fong, you know the routine. Call ahead, leapfrog the intersections and don’t spare the horses, you understand? I mean haul ass.” I was outside in the cold night air and didn’t hear the response, if there was one. Robby was looking out for his own.
I didn’t hurt the deputy. It was an accident. But even so, I still owned a piece of that emotion.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I was in the car facedown and still I heard Jumbo yell, “My God, look at all the blood. There’s blood everywhere—There’s—” His words artificially choked off with outside assistance.
Car doors slammed, tires screeched.
The earth slowed on its axis. Af
ter a long ten or fifteen minutes that could’ve easily been only three, the two front doors to the car opened simultaneously. Mack and Robby got in. Strangely, I thought, in another time that would’ve been me with Robby.
We drove in silence until Robby said, “Reach back and take that hobble off. I want him sitting up. I want him to see this.”
“Pull over,” Mack said. “I can’t do it while we’re moving.”
“Cut the son of a bitch off. I’m not stopping. There isn’t time.”
Mack turned and leaned way over in the seat. With a razor-sharp knife he cut the nylon hobble. My legs sprang free from my hands and my feet kicked the door. My feet were still tied together and tingled as the blood returned to the nerves.
“Get him up.”
Mack leaned back over and tried to grab me by my hair, only I kept it cut too close to my pate. He took hold of my shirt and yanked. It tore. With both hands he pulled on my shoulder until I sat up. There was nothing in this world I wanted to see. Not anymore. All I could think about was escape. What it would take. What I had to do. Would I go through both of these men? Yes, I would. I had until they got me behind concrete walls, then it was truly over. I made plans.
Until I recognized the narrow street Robby brought us to.
We were headed down 133rd.
I couldn’t breathe. The thought of what was about to happened set me firmly down in my own personal hell, one I’d have to live with for an eternity.
Four cop cars, all at the same time, pulled up out in front of our safe house. We’d made it in time all right, in time to see what Robby wanted me to see. Two plainclothes cops came over with Marie handcuffed behind her back. I was ashamed. I was emotionally bankrupt. A long, low moan slipped past my lips. Part of me wanted to slide down into a deep, dark hole and stay there until the pain went away. The other part, the controlling part of me that was still sane knew this would be the last time I would ever see Marie. I tried to etch her image into my memory, as bad as the memory was going to be, I had to have it.
Her expression was at peace. There wasn’t any fear, no remorse. My brave girl. When the bright spotlights hit, she squinted, ducked her head.
Marie’s expression stayed the same for a second until the light illuminated the interior of the car. She saw me and broke from the cops’ grasp, screaming, keening, “Bruuunooo!”
It ripped my guts out. “Marie!”
Robby chuckled. “She’s got a nice ass on her. Don’t know what the hell a class act with a built-in money maker like that sees in a nigger parolee like you.” He put the car in reverse and backed down the street before the news vultures had time to pick my bones.
I leaned forward, put my forehead against the seat. “Tell me.”
Robby smirked, “Tell you what, partner?”
“Tell me what I did to deserve this from you.”
“You crossed over to the other side. You know how I operate. It’s us against them. You turned into one of them. Can’t say that I blame you, enticed by a world-class Puerto Rican piece of ass like that. I guess you might’ve been one of them all the time and I was blind to it. My mistake, but I just corrected that mistake. You were the best, my man, even better than this hunk of shit sitting next to me. He’s not half bad when he’s got his head outta his ass.”
I let his words sink in and tried to decipher their meaning. My voice croaked, “One of them?”
“That’s right.”
I looked up to see Robby smiling in the rearview. I saw an evilness I’d never seen before. It hadn’t been there. Not when we partnered. Something had changed him.
Mack stared straight ahead. He looked at me with short, little glances. He wouldn’t let Robby see his reaction.
I said to Robby, “If I’m one of them, then so are you.”
He laughed. “Now, just how do you figure? I’m not the one going down for the last time, kidnap, murder takes you out of the game for good, my friend. Me, I’m done. I’m taking a long, well-deserved vacation.”
“You’re no different than I am. Worse maybe.”
“Oh, is that right? This is rich, tell me, please.”
“All those times you—we, planted evidence, lied in reports, for what? To what purpose? To put some scumbag in the slam. Each time we snipped off a little bit of our souls. We convinced ourselves, each time we did it, it was for the better good. That’s what we told ourselves. At first anyway, then it became as natural as any other department procedure. We committed felonies, multiple counts. How are those felonies different?”
“If you don’t know, pal, I feel sorry for you.”
“We were nothing but a gang of street thugs ourselves, with tattoos, guns, and initiations, who constantly conspired to commit felonies.”
Mack squirmed in his seat.
“Those kids back there were in a bad place. I took them out of that place and gave them a chance. You—you—” Big hot tears blurred my vision and wet my face. “You put them right back in that hostile environment. They don’t have a chance now. You’re a big man, Robby Wicks, a big man. We stretched the rules to throw bad people in prison for the betterment of society. That was the theory, right? Tell me how it’s different?”
We pulled up to the secure parking at the Century Station and waited for the gate to open and admit us. My last chance.
He said, “It’s a lot simpler than some convoluted theory of yours. There has to be good guys and bad guys. These good guys just caught themselves a number-one bad guy, an ex-con out on parole for murder, a con who committed murder and kidnapping again for the last time. Our mission is accomplished. I’d like to say I felt sorry for what you now face. But I don’t. You made your choices. It’s Miller time.”
The gate wasn’t yet open all the way, but open enough, and he gunned the car through the narrow gap. Robby skidded to a stop, slammed the car in park, and got out. To Mack he said, “Book him. I’ll see you in four weeks. I’m en route to a vacation in Jamaica, mon.”
I’d been who he was after all along. I wanted to yell at him, ask him about the torch who still prowled the ghetto, dousing victims and lighting them up. How could it not matter to him? I thought I knew the man. When we worked together he would never take a vacation when a major case remained open, especially one with a psycho out on the street torching innocent folks.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
They let me cool out in an interview room, handcuffed, some of the black nylon rope from the hobble still tangled around my right ankle. The thought of my father in a cold, damp jail cell living out the last days of his life, all because of something I had done, something I had organized and put in play, made me look for a place to hang the rope. Not that it would help, as they were continually monitoring from the other room with a pinhole camera, waiting until I ripened for interrogation.
A while later Mack came in, t-shirt, Levi’s, his shoulder holster empty, his hands full with two cups of coffee and a thick, brown accordion file folder he placed on the table. He did well fighting the urge to smile. They had won, brought in their prize. He’d come from the bull pen gloating over their victory. What he wanted now was a little gravy. He wanted information so he could act the big man when the FBI came in to adopt the kidnap case, take everything federal. He uncuffed one hand and secured me to the ring mounted in the table and slid the cup over. He was trying for Mr. Congeniality. Only that personality wouldn’t fit, not the way I already knew him. I couldn’t meet his eyes. He didn’t know what to say to get it started. In the same situation I probably wouldn’t either.
“You like it black?”
“That some kind of slur?”
“No, man, it’s my attempt at being civil.”
“How’s the deputy doing, the one that hurt his leg?”
Mack grunted. “He’s going to make it, no thanks to you.”
“What do you want from me? You have your case. Book me and let’s get it over with.”
“You know the routine,” he said. “I have to read you your ri
ghts.”
“I’m not a fool. You’re wasting your time. I’m invoking my right to remain silent.” Saying the words brought me back into the real world. Far off in the back of my mind, I realized there was a chance, a slim chance with a good lawyer and a sympathetic jury that I could walk. The next logical thought popped up, I could make a deal, take all the heat of the case to get Marie and Dad off. I sat up straight.
Mack stood to leave.
“Wait. Can we deal?”
Mack couldn’t help himself, he looked up to the corner of the room as if asking permission. There was nothing there, the camera lens professionally camouflaged. This was a slippery slope. I had invoked and then asked for a deal, both of which were beyond Mack’s skill level and pay grade. He didn’t have the ability to negotiate nor know how to take a second waiver. Even so, he sat back down.
As a sign of good faith, with my free hand I sipped the tepid, acrid coffee.
He again pulled out his waiver card. “Because you initially invoked, I have to readvise you.”
“I used to be a cop. I know all about the Miranda admonishment.” I looked up at the corner of the ceiling. “I know my rights and I waive them.”
“Okay, then.” He sipped his coffee as a stall to collect his thoughts. “What kind of deal?”
I picked my words carefully, “I want my girl and my father cut loose.”
Mack waited, thinking it over. “That’s a separate issue.”
“What?”
“She’s up on separate charges. Aiding and abetting, you know the routine. We need to talk about this other thing.”
