The Vanquished

by David Putnam

  I struggled to my feet, looked left to the gun on the ground. I didn’t have time to make a move toward it. The redhead crouched and sprang at me. I let him come, grabbed onto his denim vest, and fell backward as I stuck my foot in his chest. His eyes went wide as he saw the move unfold. He said it fast, pleaded with me, “No, mister, please don’t. Don’t.”

  Three against one didn’t make a fair fight. I had to even the odds or die. I flipped him high overhead, right out into traffic.

  A black Honda Accord took him. Snatched him right out of the air. He smashed the windshield, flew in the air again, and landed on the hot concrete. The Honda with the shattered windshield skidded out of control and crashed into the three motorcycles on kickstands parked on the shoulder.

  I rolled over to the gun and scooped it up just as the older biker came in fast with his ball-peen.

  I shot him in the forehead.

  Flipped off his lights.

  Sirens, still miles away, reached out to me. They’d be on scene in minutes. I didn’t feel sorry for killing the older biker. He’d called the game and lost. The redheaded biker, though, bothered me a great deal. His eyes, his voice, the way he pleaded. And I’d gone ahead and done it anyway, flipped him out into oncoming traffic.

  I struggled to my feet, my knees weak, not wanting to cooperate. I hurried over to the downed officer and took a set of cuffs from the handcuff case on her belt. Dirk, on his hands and knees, spit teeth and blood onto the sandy earth. I put my foot on his shoulder and shoved him over. I pointed the Glock at him. “You saw what I did to your partners. You want some of this?”

  He held up his hand and said, “No, man, no. I’m done.”

  I put the gun in my waistband, cuffed his hand, and dragged him over to the patrol unit. I ratcheted the cuff to the pushbar, securing him until backup arrived.

  I went back to the patrol officer and eased her onto her back. Her eyes rolled open. “Hey, kid,” I said, “it’s all over. You’re okay. You understand? You’re okay and you’re gonna make it just fine.”

  I unclipped her shoulder mic and keyed it. “Eleven-ninety-nine. Eleven-ninety-nine, shots fired, officer down, shots fired, officer down.”

  I took her gun from my waistband and stuck it back in her holster. A cop always felt vulnerable without her gun in her holster. “Help will be here in about two minutes,” I said. “Just lie still and try to stay awake. It’s real important that you stay awake. I don’t need you going into shock.”

  Her color drained as I watched. Shock could kill her faster than any bullet. I needed to elevate her legs. I dragged over the older biker, the dead one, laid him on his side, and put her legs up on him. “It’s the best I can do for right now, kid. I’ve gotta run. You gonna be okay?”

  She gave me a barely perceptible nod.

  I stood. Far off down the freeway, headed our way, a conga line of cop cars drove the shoulder, kicking up a huge dust cloud. All the cars on the freeway had stopped now. I hadn’t noticed at what point that happened.

  I ran for the Ford Escape, got in, slammed it in drive, and steered to the right side of the Highway Patrol car, to the far and extreme part of the shoulder, the only way out.

  In the middle of the freeway, on the westbound traffic lanes, two Highway Patrol cars stopped parallel to the incident. The officers pulled their shotguns, jumped out of their cars, and climbed the center divider. They wove their way through all the stopped traffic, approaching with caution as I gunned the Ford Escape.

  The black Honda Accord had shoved one of the downed choppers into my path, blocking my way out. I pulled the gearshift down into low and gunned the car. I drove right over the motorcycle. The Escape jerked and rattled. I banged into the right front of the Accord, shoved it out of the way, and made it clear. The driver of the Accord shot me the finger.

  I took the speed up to fifty, too fast for driving on the shoulder, zipping past all the stopped cars on the freeway, but if I didn’t get away, I would never see freedom again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THAT REDHEADED BIKER, the kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He had a smooth complexion, with a spray of freckles across his nose. I’d been too close to his face, no more than a foot or so in that split second before I flipped him. Pleading eyes. A grown-up Opie, the redheaded kid on The Andy Griffith Show, only with a little darker skin. Not so much a kid really. When I took hold of him, he had muscle under his biker vest, built stout like a weightlifter. A hidden strength most people would miss. I know I did. He didn’t try that hard to take me down. As I played it back in my head, he didn’t seem to have his heart in what the old biker told him to do. And yet he died for it.

  The worst part about it, though, was his eyes. I couldn’t shake his eyes. And his last words, as he begged me not to toss him into traffic. Those panicked words continued to haunt me. And they would for a long, long time to come. I needed to talk to Marie, tell her about what happened. She’d understand. She’d know just the right things to say to talk me down. Not to make what I did right but to make me understand this had to be done. And most important of all, to make me believe her.

  Robby Wicks would’ve called me a pussy for not letting this caper just roll off my back. No time for emotions, Bruno, not in this job. You want emotions, get a job as a nurse, you pussy.

  I made it to Central and turned south. I slowed my speed to blend in. Montclair and Chino police cars passed me going Code-Three—lights and siren—responding to the incident on the freeway with the downed CHP.

  My arm still tingled with numbness from the blow from the ball-peen hammer. The fingers on that hand still didn’t respond the way they should. The side of my face throbbed where the older biker kicked me. I realized my one foot registered a kind of draft. I looked down. My foot wore only a sock, the shoe gone. That’s right, I’d lost it in the melee.

  I dialed Marie on the burner phone Drago gave me. She didn’t recognize the number and answered with a tentative hello.

  “Babe, it’s me.”

  “Oh, Bruno, are you okay? I haven’t heard from you in a while. It seems like hours and it’s only been a few minutes. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah, sure, everything’s fine. That’s why I’m calling, to tell you I’m fine. Are you still in the room?”

  “Yeah, and Karl’s here with me.” Her tone suddenly shifted. “That wasn’t the deal, though, Bruno. We’re both mad about you taking off like that. Hold on, I’m going into the bathroom.”

  I came to a stoplight and closed my eyes. I really didn’t need a scolding right now, not with that kid’s words burning a hole in my conscience, burning a hole right down to the bone. I’d done a bad thing. But I had to do it, right? What choice had they given me?

  In the background, the bathroom door closed. “Bruno, you said we’d both go see Sonja together. That was the whole reason why I came along, remember?”

  I heard the tears in her voice.

  “I know, I know, but you’re pregnant and don’t need to be exposed to this kinda emotional stuff. I’ll find out what she has to say and then we’ll be done with it and we can move on to the bigger problem, The Sons.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Marie?” I wanted to tell her about the kid I’d just killed, but I couldn’t get the words to come out.

  The light changed. I drove in silence. Sometimes all I needed was to be connected with her even if only through the phone, the silence traveling miles and miles through the air. I made it to Pipeline and turned east.

  “Bruno, what’s wrong? What’s happened? There’s something wrong. Are you okay?”

  Amazing. She’d sensed something through the quiet over the line.

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re not telling me something. What’s happened?”

  “Your right, something has happened, but I can’t talk about it over the phone. I’m almost to the meet, so I have to go now. I love you, Marie. You know that, right
? And you don’t have to worry about me. I’m good.”

  “I love you, too, Bruno. Be careful and get right back here.”

  We let the line hang open for a long minute. She never ceased to amaze me. She didn’t continue to give me a hard time. She’d sensed a problem, assessed the situation, and backed me the best way she could under the circumstances, by letting the silence hang between us.

  I hung up.

  I pulled into Joey’s Barbeque, the parking lot almost empty, the lunch rush over. An older woman, with sun-damaged skin and gray hair in a ponytail pulled through the back of a baseball cap, came right up to the front passenger door and tugged on the handle. She wore a khaki utility vest with a blouse underneath and Levi 501s worn soft from too many washings.

  I waved my hand. “No, go away. Whatever it is, I’m not buying any.”

  “Bruno, you son of a bitch, quit fuckin’ around and open the door.”

  What?

  I looked again at her.

  Sonja.

  Life had not been kind to her. I looked at her a second more, and some of her old beauty reappeared, mostly through her eyes.

  She jerked on the handle again. I hit the door locks. She opened the door and jumped in. She still washed her hair with that green apple shampoo, the scent fleeting but there.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.” We checked out each other for a moment, top to bottom.

  She said, “What the hell, Bruno, you look like someone just put the boot to you. Are you okay?”

  “You look great,” I said, my voice coming out lower than I wanted.

  She smiled. “You always were a poor liar, Bruno. Your dad ruined you that way. Go ahead then, don’t tell me what happened. Come on, start this thing up, let’s get goin’. You’re late and they’re going to be waitin’ on us.”

  “Where we going?

  “I’ll tell you how to get there.”

  I didn’t put the Escape in gear and I waited. “No, tell me what’s goin’ on.”

  She looked at me long and hard and then said, “A very dear friend of mine is in trouble, bad trouble, and we need your help. So come on, let’s quit doin’ the dick-around and let’s go.”

  “I told you on the phone, I’ve got something goin’ right now. I don’t have time for this right now.”

  She lost her smile. “I know all about your trouble, and if this works out, we can help each other.”

  “What? How can you possibly know what I have goin’ on?”

  “Bruno, just drive.”

  I hesitated as my mind spun, trying to put together any and every possibility, and nothing, I mean nothing, fit. I put the Ford in reverse, backed up, stuck it in drive, and headed for the street.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SOMEHOW THIS OLDER version of Sonja riding in the passenger seat of my car corrupted the youthful memory of her along with my version of the normal world. Something seemed broken. We’d slipped past that delicate edge of reality and into some parallel universe where time bent and curved backward.

  She hadn’t been in my car for going on . . . what, twenty-three, twenty-four years? Back when she did ride with me, I couldn’t think about anything but her. And more important, how I thought that feeling would never change, that it was so strong it could never change.

  She fed me directions and I followed them, snatching peeks at her whenever I could. Each time I looked, I caught her watching the street or checking the mirror, like some sort of predator. Yes, just like a predator. Was her behavior a carryover from our patrol days? She’d only been a cop for a few months before she hung it up. Had that been enough time to gain that predator mentality? Or had she somehow evolved into a criminal, as described in Robby’s oversimplified classification system?

  Robby Wicks broke the world down into two basic categories: predators and victims. Cops could be a kind of predator, but in a good way. Most were not. Most wrote citations and took drunks to jail. The real cop predators acted like the detectives on Robby’s Violent Crimes Team, and there were only a few of those in the entire world.

  And criminals, of course, fit into the predator category, no question.

  Everyone else, all the other humans, fit safely into the victim category. If Sonja wasn’t a cop and she acted like a predator, then according to Robby’s theory, she fit in as a criminal predator.

  She gave out the directions in a devil-may-care tone, almost too late for me to make the turns, her mind chewing on something far more important. Within a few blocks, she guided us north out of Chino and into the county area of Pomona. Dinky houses on long, narrow lots turned older. They had large, majestic trees out front and poorly maintained shrubs. There was painted concrete and empty dirt where there should’ve been grass in the short front yards. Kadota Avenue didn’t have any curbs or gutters.

  The whole area looked oddly familiar. Not long ago, on the same Kadota but in Montclair, we’d taken down the serial kidnapper Jonas Mabry. Couldn’t have been more than a mile from where we’d just pulled up and stopped.

  When I worked the streets, I sometimes thought there might be a sort of malignant vortex that attracted criminals to a particular area. They’d swirl around and around in this toilet bowl until the justice system flushed them for good.

  Out in front of the house, parked on the street, sat a Toy Box, a fifth-wheel trailer hooked to a one-ton truck. The camping trailer had a drop-down rear that turned into a ramp that allowed ATVs and motorcycles to be wheeled inside. The bumper of the truck sported a Good Sam Club sticker.

  The house looked too squatty in comparison to the ones on either side, built out of two single-wide mobile homes put together to make one. The owner had covered over the aluminum sides with wood siding and painted the whole thing a light blue in a feeble attempt to make it look like a normal house. A wind chime hung from the wooden porch, giving off a pleasant sound. A sun-faded yard gnome sat at the base of the two steps that led up to the porch, the gnome incongruent without any grass or shrubs or anything even green close by. The place worked too hard at trying to be quaint.

  Sonja got out, didn’t say a word, and walked down the long driveway toward the deep backyard. When I didn’t follow, she turned around and scowled at me. Still in the car, I said to no one who could hear, “Jesus, just tell me what it is I need to hear, what you got me down here for, so I can be on my way. I gotta get outta here. I don’t need the rest of this shit right now.”

  Emotionally, I had already started to transfer the stress from The Sons of Satan problem and the death of the redheaded biker. The kid. That’s what Marie would tell me once I had time to call and talk with her, that transference thing she continually warned me about.

  Sonja had told me she could help me with my problem with The Sons, otherwise I wouldn’t have been there at all. And I’d never have come upon that problem backing the CHP. I would have still been back at the hotel with my lovely and sweet Marie.

  “I’m coming, dammit.” I got out of the car, slammed the door, and followed along. My arm throbbed.

  I stopped and looked back at the Escape when the brief thought of fleeing returned, the need to move on to the next pressing issue and leave this one far behind, the feeling almost too strong to resist. The left front of the Escape no longer matched the right. I’d caved it in when I rammed the Honda Accord out of the way on the freeway in my mad dash to get away. How would I explain that to the rental car folks? Why did I care? The damaged car problem was minute in comparison to this one.

  “Bruno?”

  I turned back and said, “I’m coming.”

  The long driveway led to a prefab metal building large enough to house a small manufacturing operation: furniture, welding, auto repair, that sort of thing. The big roll-up door, once opened, looked wide enough to allow four cars side by side to enter at the same time.

  I clumped alongside Sonja.

  She looked down at my feet. “Hey, your shoe. What happened to your other shoe?”

  “I d
on’t wanna talk about it.”

  She nodded and kept walking as if my answer made perfect sense.

  Sonja bypassed the big door and went to the smaller, pedestrian entrance. She didn’t knock and went in.

  The air conditioner mounted in the window cooled the place down too much. Chilled the air enough to instantly dry the sweat on my forehead. A large man with an unruly mop of curly brown hair sat behind a desk too small for his bulk. He wore a long-sleeve, blue chambray shirt, the arms tight like fat sausages. In the web of his right hand he sported a tattoo, a crude little black cross, the kind of mistake kids make. He looked at least fifty; only his long black eyelashes gave off a false impression of youth. Even in the overly cool environment, sweat beaded on his face.

  A couch and two easy chairs sat along the walls in front of the desk. Above them, pictures in cheap frames depicted the inside of the manufacturing area just on the other side of the wall. Pictures of the design and manufacture of custom motorcycles, the sixty-to a hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar kind of bikes. Custom-designed frames, built from the ground up, with fat tires and sensational airbrushed paint jobs.

  Sonja took a seat in one of the easy chairs as if she owned the place. The big man stood and leaned over the desk, offered his hand. I took it. His grip rivaled Drago’s, and I’d never experienced a grip like Drago’s.

  “M’name’s Bobby Ray Kilburn. You can call me Bobby, Bruno. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. Your reputation is legendary. Sit. Sit.”

  “Thank you, I prefer to stand. I’m not going to be here long.”

  Bobby Ray looked at Sonja. She shrugged.