The Vanquished

by David Putnam

  In the bedroom Sonja stood over by the nightstand, the phone to her ear. “Have paramedics roll in, it’s Code-Four here, suspects fled the scene. More to follow on the broadcast.”

  On the street out front, the patrol unit’s PA blared out into the neighborhood and repeated some of her disposition of the call. “Two-Fifty-Three, Two-Five-Five is Code-Four, shut down your Code-Three and continue for an area check. Broadcast of suspects to follow.”

  The man’s wife lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her nose, her eyes clouded with cataracts. Her overly wrinkled skin made her face sag, hound-dog style, her wispy white hair in disarray. “Maury,” she said, “it’s not your fault. Quit talkin’ like it’s your fault.”

  This man and woman had no business living alone in the ghetto. They needed to be in an assisted-care home. I eased him down to a sitting position at the foot of the bed. Something out of the ordinary caught my attention. I raised my head and sniffed the air. The house smelled of old age, that hint of sour and dust combined with musty clothes and mothballs. But something else layered in with it that I couldn’t quite place, and it niggled at my brain.

  The old man patted the bed. “Sit. Sit.”

  I got down on one knee. “Please tell me what happened. What did they look like? Which way did they run? What were they armed with?”

  We’d been in the house for about three minutes and needed to get out the broadcast update.

  “Sit, sit.” He patted the bed again.

  I sat down next to him. I got a closer look at his injury when he took his hand away. He’d been whacked with a long and slim and heavy weapon that had torn his paper-thin skin. The wound sagged open with an ugly goose egg underneath. When he’d pulled away the wad of paper towels, a rivulet of blood ran down next to his eye, filling the wrinkles and branching out like a river delta to meet up again and roll down to his chin, where it dripped in fat droplets on his pajama leg.

  The unit PA outside blared again. “Two-Fifty-Five, shots fired, man down, 14367 Rose Avenue cross of White, tag one-zero-two, handle Code-Three.”

  Sonja started to move on past us and hesitated, not knowing what to do, conflicted with going to the call or staying to help the old couple. She chose correctly to respond to the call. She picked up the old man’s hand and said, “Listen, we have to go, but we’ll be right back, I promise you we’ll be back. The paramedics will be here in just a minute.”

  “No, please, don’t go. Please.”

  She looked at me, expecting me to say it was okay, we could stay. I shook my head.

  She said to the old man, “Sorry, we have to go.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE RAN OUT to the car and got in. “I hate like hell to leave them like this,” she said.

  I started up, slammed the car in gear, and stuck my foot on the accelerator. The car leapt forward. “I know, but that’s the job. This call’s only three blocks away. We’ll secure the scene, let Two-Fifty-Three handle it, and we’ll come back.”

  “It’s our tag. We can’t let them handle our call.”

  “Johnny’s in Two-Fifty-Three, he owes me, he’ll do it this time and not squawk about it. Now look sharp, here we go.”

  She put the mic up close to her mouth. “Two-Five-Five is going ninety-seven on tag one-zero-two. Two-Five-Five.”

  A small crowd of neighbors, all black, stood in front of the house and waved to us to hurry as we pulled up. I got out and said, “What’s going on?”

  “Out back,” a man in a maroon robe said. “Go around to the rear. There’s some poor child gunshot. It’s horrible. Horrible, I tell you.”

  The cedar-plank gate stood open. Around back, the owner had put on the patio floodlights, which lit up the grass area with an intense white. A black kid writhed on the ground and tried with his hand to get to the wound in his upper back. Sonja shoved the lookie-loos aside and went down to her knees next to him just as he went completely still.

  Except for his chest. His breath came shallow.

  The kid, who was seventeen or so, started to convulse. Thick red chunks came out of his mouth and made a small pyramid on the grass. Lung shot. His odds weren’t good, no better than ten-to-one against.

  I turned to a black man who held a ball bat and took it from him. “What happened here?”

  “Whoa, hold on there, pal. I didn’t hit him. Someone shot him. You can see that. I didn’t hit him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was asleep and heard something out here in the backyard at my gate.” He pointed to his cedar-plank gate. “I turned on the lights and grabbed my bat. You know what kind of neighborhood this is. I wasn’t gonna come out here with nothing in my hand. And I found this kid just like this.”

  “Kowalski, put out a Code-Four, no description at this time.”

  “Roger that, boss.” She got up and ran for the car.

  She passed Two-Fifty-Three, Johnny Cane coming through the gate with his trainee. “What’s up, Bruno?”

  “The kid here took one in the back somewhere on the street and . . . ah shit.”

  “What?” Johnny asked. He stood two inches shorter than my six-three and wore his sandy blond hair down across his forehead like a kid.

  “Ah, man,” I said. “I missed something. I missed something real important, because I was distracted. We gotta go back to that last call. Can you handle this one for me? Just take a face page and my trainee will follow up at the hospital.”

  “Not a problem, and don’t worry about the follow-up, we’ll handle it.”

  “Thanks, Johnny, I owe you.” I headed toward the gate. Johnny said, “Bruno?”

  I turned back to look. “You’re the man.” He winked.

  “Ah, shit.” I turned and hurried to the car and met Sonja halfway, coming back.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I kept hustling to the car. She came along, skipping in her step to keep up.

  “Looks like the cat’s outta the bag,” I said.

  She grabbed my arm. I stopped.

  “They know about us?” Her words harsh, angry.

  “Yeah, they know.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, come on, let’s go.” I moved around to the driver’s side and opened the door.

  She opened the passenger door. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Shit.”

  We got in. I started up and headed back to the White Street address. She looked straight ahead, pondering this new information, what it would mean, how it would impact us. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to get my mind back in the game. I’d missed something too important, and that only further confirmed that we needed to split up.

  Out in front of 16637 White Street, paramedics worked at loading their truck with gear from the medical aid run for the old man’s lacerated head.

  “How is he?”

  The paramedic closed the exterior door to the red county fire truck. “He needs some serious sutures and an X-ray, but he won’t take the ride in the ambulance.”

  Sonja came up next to me and said, “He won’t leave his wife.”

  The paramedic nodded. “That’s my guess. We’ll leave you to it.” They got in their truck and drove off. The front door stood open. We found the old man sitting on the bed with a Ruger .357 in his feeble hands, tears running down his wrinkled cheeks. The paramedics had patched up his head, the gauze already splotched red with seep-through.

  Sonja saw the gun and said, “Ah, shit.” She’d figured out what I already knew, what had dawned on me while looking down at the gunshot kid in the backyard, where that thing that niggled at my brain locked in solid. I’d smelled burnt cordite, gun smoke, when I’d first entered the house on White, but the acrid odor had been mixed with the old-person smell, the musty and mold and little bit of sour. So I wanted to believe it that way, but I knew different.

  Had I not been thinking about Sonja, would I have still missed it?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I SAT
DOWN on the bed next to the old man and gently took the gun from his shaky hands. I handed it to Sonja. She broke open the cylinder. “Two fired.”

  I sat there and waited for him, to let him tell the story in his own way. I said, “I’m sorry, my fault, I should’ve slowed down, took a minute with you when we were here last time. You were trying to tell me. I know that now. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. I gave him another long minute. He said, “The kid knocked on my door . . . said his friend was out on the sidewalk, gut-shot. I could see his friend out there, lying on the sidewalk writhing in pain. The kid at the door on the other side of the bars, said he needed some towels . . . or . . . or his best friend would bleed to death . . . said that there wasn’t time for the paramedics to get here.” The old man turned and looked at me, his eyes wet with tears. “He looked like just a kid, Deputy, just some young kid who needed help.”

  Sonja stood close and muttered, almost too low to hear, “Those little sons of bitches.”

  The old man looked from me to her. He spoke to her. “I opened the door to hand him a roll of paper towels. He hit me over the head with my own hedge pruners I’d left out in the yard. Why did I leave those things out in the yard?” He moved a shaky hand up to his head and gently probed the bandages. “They both came in. They shoved me down as I tried to get up. They danced and yelled and ran in and out of all the rooms like . . . like banshees, like this was some sort of game. Scared the hell out of my dear Rose. My dear, frightened Rose.”

  “I’m okay, Maury.”

  He waved his hand over his head to her on the bed behind him. “They said they were going to kill us both . . . they said it would be easy. They said we were already so old we were almost dead anyway.”

  Sonja, next to me, clenched her fists.

  I held my hand up to silence her and said to him, “Then what happened?”

  He looked back to me. “They wanted the keys to my hoopty. I could only guess they meant my car. They said, ‘Tell us, old man, or we’re going to cut off your wife’s fingers.’ He snapped those shears and cackled like he was insane. I had no doubt he intended to do it whether I gave him the keys or not. That’s what I believed, Deputy. Then they ran into the bedroom.

  “I was dizzy, too dizzy to stand. He’d whacked me good, knocked the sense right out of me. I’m not making excuses, you understand, I’m not.”

  “It’s okay, Maury, it’s okay,” his wife said from the bed.

  The old man continued, “In the living room, I crawled over to the cabinet by the door. I didn’t want them cutting off my Rose’s fingers. No, I didn’t. I got my gun and stood up. When I came into the bedroom, one of them was jumping on the bed, bouncing my poor Rose in the air. The other was in my closet right there, rooting around. They didn’t even see me, didn’t even care.

  “Until I shot the first one, the one jumping on the bed, the one with the garden shears in his hands. The one who was going to cut off Rose’s fingers.”

  He had his back to me.

  “I just pulled the hammer back and shot that poor young man right in the back. I’m not a bad man, Deputy. I’m not.”

  “You did what you had to do, Maury, don’t you dare feel bad about it.”

  “Those sons of bitches,” Sonja whispered.

  I put my arm around him. His frailty caused a small knot in my stomach. He continued, “That gun kicked like a mule and fell out of my hands. They ran out, one helping the other. I guess they were friends. A horrible thing, I’d shot him. I never in all my life thought I’d have to shoot someone in my own house.” He shook his head in despair. “They ran out, but stopped in the living room. The second one . . . the second left his wounded friend and came back. He came back down the hall with the fireplace poker in his hand.

  “Why would he do that if he knew I had a gun. Crazy. They both had to be crazy.”

  “They were crazy, Maury.”

  “I picked up the gun and shot the second one. He fell back. Got up like it was nothing at all, grabbed his friend, and left.”

  He nodded his head again and again. “I got them both, Deputy. Are you going to take me to jail now? Who’s going to take care of my Rose? Who? There isn’t anyone.”

  Sonja said, “You’re not going to jail. You didn’t do anything wrong here, Mr. Abrams. But we do need to get you to the hospital.”

  Sonja stepped over to the phone and called for an ambulance. When it arrived, we helped them both out of the house on gurneys. We watched the ambulance drive away. On the unit, PA dispatch said, “Two-Fifty-Five go to Charlie for Two-Fifty-Three.”

  I turned to go to the radio. My flashlight picked up fresh paint on the sidewalk.

  Trey-Five-Seven.

  And underneath that gang moniker in fresh and runny script, that same gang member had written, 187. The penal code section for murder. They’d marked the house for death.

  Sonja saw it, too. “Not this time, Bruno. I’m not going to let them get away with this.”

  I’d never seen her so angry. She looked pale and her body vibrated with pent-up anger. She suddenly went over to the chain-link fence and threw up. The emotions of the situation hit her hard. The violence in the ghetto could do that to a person not yet familiar with it. I patted her back.

  Dispatch spoke again. “Two-Five-Five, did you copy? Go to Charlie for Two-Five-Three.”

  “You okay?”

  Sonja waved me off. “Go, get it. I’m good. I think it was that cat taco from Lucy’s.”

  “Sure, sure, you’re probably right.”

  I went to the patrol car and switched the channel down to the talk-around frequency, channel three, called Charlie. “You there, Johnny?”

  “Bruno, this guy is Nine-Twenty-Seven-D. I’m callin’ in homicide.”

  He was telling me that the kid shot in the back, the kid Maury Abrams shot, had just been declared dead.

  I let the radio mic sag to my lap.

  “You copy, Bruno, Nine-Twenty-Seven-D, as in David.”

  “Affirm, I copy. It’s related to my tag, one-zero-one, but it’s a straight-up One-Ninety-Six.” Justifiable homicide. “Advise homicide the shooter is my two-eleven victim who’s now en route to St. Francis with a head wound.”

  When I let off the mic, dispatch said, “Dispatch copies, we’ll make the notifications.”

  “Put this location down for heavy extra patrol,” I said to dispatch. “The Trey-Five-Sevens have already marked the victim’s house.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Sonja got in on the passenger side. “What are we going to do? These old people don’t have a chance in hell of defending themselves. Not against the Trey-Five-Sevens.”

  We sat in the car and waited for homicide to arrive to take over the scene. “All we can do is turn it over to OSS.” Operation Safe Streets was the department’s gang detail.

  “What are they gonna do? What can they do? They can’t sit on this house twenty-four-seven.”

  She shook her head in frustration. “Those people can’t come back to this house, they can’t. We can’t allow it. The little bastards snuck up and tagged the sidewalk with our patrol unit parked right out front. They did it while we were inside, for crying out loud. No, no, no, we need to hunt every one of these punks down and—”

  “And what? There’s nothing we can do, not under the law. They’re protected until they commit a crime.”

  “That’s not fair, Bruno. That’s just not fair.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  TWO HOURS LATER, I turned the patrol car down Bullis Road from Century, and half a block after that, turned into the Lynwood Station entrance. Neither of us spoke on the drive back. All the emotions of the evening had caught up to us and smothered any conscious thought that didn’t deal with injustice on the street and the soon-to-be loss of our heated love affair. I steered around back and parked in the unit’s slot.

  We grabbed all of our gear. Sometimes the watch commander making out the watch list kept the
overtime crew in the same car, but more often than not, they wouldn’t notice that the same crew was staying over, so then we’d have to change units. I didn’t mind. Hopefully, we’d get assigned a newer car, like a Chevy Malibu, which, unlike the big Dodge Diplomats, didn’t stall out when you made a sharp left turn at high speed.

  We carried our war bags down the stairs into the basement briefing room, where the graveyard shift had started to trickle in from the locker room.

  Good Johnson sat at the briefing table and smiled that shit-eating grin of his when he saw Sonja come in. “Hey, there she is, Lynwood’s newest chrome-plated mama. What’s it like ta burn a little coal?”

  Sonja dropped her war bag, her eyes going large, her mouth sagging open.

  Too much had happened in the last three hours that had stretched my emotions beyond their tensile strength. And now he’d just insulted the woman I loved. I dropped my bag, my hands turning to fists. I took short deliberate steps around the table and headed toward Good.

  The other deputies jumped up from the table and stood back, some murmuring, “Oh, shit,” and “Good, you done fucked the pooch this time.”

  Good still grinned but with less confidence. He stood, knocking his chair back, and said, “Don’t worry, boys, this smoke doesn’t have the balls to go head to head with ol’ Black Bart Johnson.”

  I didn’t slow and kept moving right at him. He lost his grin, backed up to the wall, and let his hand drop to the handle of his service revolver in his holster. I stopped, my chest six inches from his, my face looking down at him, his breath sweet with Red Man chewing tobacco, his eyes a little wider with fear. I hesitated, scared of my feelings or the lack of restraint present. I double-checked my “give-a-shit” meter and found nothing left. He mistook my hesitation for fear, a big mistake.