The Vanquished

by David Putnam

  And as the words came out I realized maybe my mind had seen all the pieces as a whole and put them together without me.

  Bobby Ray lost his grin. “Yeah, sure, you’re right. Don’t even. You’re one mean son of a bitch, tryin’ a simple shit game like that when your back’s to the wall. It’s gonna be a pleasure to take the knife and pliers to you pal, a real pleasure.”

  “That right? Well, ask her then. Go on, ask her.”

  Sonja stopped and turned, gave me a look of pure hate.

  I’d somehow hit it just right. “That ATF agent,” I said, “the one she told you was going after Bosco, that agent? He entered a couple of bullets into the Drug/Fire data bank and came up with her name . . . eh.” I grunted. The pain started to spark and snap in my vision. Shock wouldn’t be far behind. I said, “Sonja wanted Bosco outta the life anyway she could, so she flipped . . . eh, Jesus. She . . . she made a deal for herself and for her son. The price? That’s right, it’s you, fatass. She’s tossed you to the wolves to save herself.”

  Bobby Ray shoved Marie down and came at me, his gun pointed right at my head. “You’re a liar. You killed my son. You killed him and now you’re makin’ shit up to save your own skin.”

  “No. Ask her. Go on, ask her. Back when we worked a patrol car together, she shot at a robbery vehicle, an AMC Hornet station wagon with three suspects. Ain’t that right, Sonja? That’s where they got the first bullets, the ones Gerber entered into the Drug/Fire system. When was the second time? What other shooting did they hold over your head? Who did you shoot? Did you go after some of those Trey-Five-Sevens after you quit? The gang that torched Maury Abrams and his wife?”

  From her expression of contempt, I could see I’d hit pretty close to home.

  Bobby Ray saw the same thing I did.

  “That right, Sonja?” Bobby Ray asked, turning angry at the prospect. “That what happened? You flip on me? You flip on the president of the Visigoths?”

  She shoved her gun in the air like a pointer, not aiming, but in his general direction. “Don’t be a dumbass. You’re going to listen to this piece of shit, the man who tossed Bosco out into the traffic to be run over? Our Bosco? The same guy who, right after he did that, came to our place like nothing happened at all and pretended to be our friend?”

  Bobby Ray looked from her to me, his brain working overtime to suss out the truth. Except that he didn’t have the brainpower to do it. Sonja had been the woman behind the president, her hand up his back like he was some kind of puppet.

  The pain reached up through my spine and now threatened to shut my lights off. I fought it. “Okay,” I said to Bobby Ray. “You don’t believe me, call your truck, the one with the flying elephant painted on the side, and talk to your driver. The FBI has that truck now, and your multimillionaire status has just been permanently revoked.”

  Bobby Ray, no more than three feet from me, pulled his phone out of his pocket and took his eyes off me to dial.

  Sonja shot him in the chest.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  BOBBY RAY THUMPED to the floor ten feet away from me. For a second he looked dumbfounded, like a dog kicked for the first time by his master, until the light went out in his eyes.

  He’d landed not far from Marie, four of us on the floor now, Sonja the only one left standing.

  I needed to get to Marie. I tried to crawl over to her. My hand on my numb hip brushed against something hard in my pocket. Jumbo’s lady gun, the little .25 Raven, the same gun that had brought down the great and loyal Drago. I stopped and struggled to pull the little gun out.

  Sonja walked over and stood right next me. A white curl of smoke came out of her gun. “Why’d you stick your nose into this, Bruno? Why?”

  “What are you talking about? You called me, remember?”

  She squatted down and grabbed onto my hand, pulled it out of my pocket. “What’s that you got in there, Bruno?” She reached in and got the gun. Our last chance. Our last hope.

  “I called you,” she said, “because I wanted you to talk some sense into Bosco. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore.”

  “He was a grown man of twenty-five,” I said. “What could I say to him? That . . . wait, what? Why me? Why would you call me? I wouldn’t have any sway over your son.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. “You had more than enough information to figure this whole thing out long before now. And you didn’t. And you still don’t know, do you? You want to know why you couldn’t figure it out? Because you didn’t want to know, that’s why. You’ve always tried to live in that perfect world, that morally correct world, saving all those kids from abusive parents. What a big joke. That’s irony, Bruno, the very definition of irony, and it makes me sick.”

  She stuck the Raven .25 up against the left side of my chest, her finger on the trigger, and spoke through clenched teeth. “That’s right, Bruno, I can see it in your eyes that you’ve finally figured it out. And if I were really mean and wanted to milk every ounce of revenge outta what you’ve done, I’d let you live. That’s right, let you live with what you’ve done. But I’m not like that. I live for the moment, always have. You know that. And I want my pound of flesh now, right now.”

  I wasn’t afraid of dying. But I wanted her to shoot before she said the words I knew were coming. I did know all along. I didn’t want to hear the words that would bring the truth out into the light of day. I turned my head away from her, brought my bloody hands up to my ears, and closed my eyes tight.

  “That won’t help, Bruno. You can still hear me.” She raised her voice. “So here it is. I had twins, and I named them Sebastian and Olivia. Twins run in families, I know you know that. You should’ve realized it long ago. That was the big clue, Bruno. Olivia had twins, remember? Alonzo and poor little Albert, remember?

  “I tried to tell you in the hospital, but you cut me off, and I didn’t push it, remember? Go on, think back on that conversation, I was going to tell you then. What I did tell you was that I couldn’t imagine raising a girl, not in this crazy, screwed-up world. So I gave Olivia to you to raise and I kept the boy. Our boy. And you screwed that up, too, didn’t you, Bruno? What do they call it? I remember from my patrol days. Failure to supervise. That’s what happened with Olivia. Ain’t that right, Bruno? But that wasn’t good enough, you killing our little girl, was it, Bruno? You had to go and take my son, Bosco, away from me, too, didn’t you?”

  I shifted around to look at her, awed at her intense hate, awed at her ugly words.

  She drove the gun into my ribs and gritted her teeth even more. “You tossed your own son out into traffic, Bruno. You killed your own son. That’s what I wanted to tell you when I called and asked you to meet me here tonight. I wanted to look you in the eye and tell you that you’d killed your own son, just before I dropped the hammer on you.”

  She took a deep breath and said it again, said it for the last time. “You killed our son, Bruno.”

  She pulled the trigger.

  The round parted skin and muscle and burrowed past the cartilage between the ribs. The small lead round, fired point blank, entered my chest cavity with a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before. I welcomed it as the darkness slammed down on me one final time.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Robby Wicks sat on the tailgate of a truck and tilted back a beer at ten o’clock in the morning in the parking lot of the Safeway, a short two miles from where we’d taken down Myron Hobbs, the hard way.

  Robby and I had been on Myron’s trail for forty straight hours with no letup. At eleven thirty the night before, we’d tracked him to an apartment in Cerritos. We’d only been set up on the apartment for an hour when Robby wanted to go kick in the door, see if our information was correct, see if Myron Hobbs was in there. I’d talked him out of it, told him that if Hobbs wasn’t there and the apartment was empty then we’d have burned our last lead and wasted the last forty hours. It was better to wait, far more logical. Robby wasn’t good at waiting, or at going with the logic of i
t. He always acted like a shark—if he quit moving, he’d drown. I’d no sooner talked him down when he said, “I’m goin’ in, check it out.” He got out and walked in the street in the shadows under the overhanging trees.

  Fatigue hung in my bones like some kind of incurable disease that would never go away. I hesitated, not more than sixty seconds, and then got out to back him in his folly.

  Down the street, a dark shadow came out of the apartment we’d been watching. Robby kept walking, not missing a step, not going to cover as any sane cop would. He slung back his brown suit coat with an elbow and drew his Colt Combat Commander from a pancake holster on his hip. He held it down by his leg.

  The shadow must’ve seen Robby, saw his move, ready to go to guns.

  The shadow moved out to the street anyway.

  “Robby!” I drew my gun and ran.

  The shadow came out under the streetlight.

  Myron Hobbs, the man wanted for the brutal double murder of his wife and mother-in-law. He’d used two feet of chain as a mace.

  Neither Robby nor Hobbs said a thing. They threw down and fired. The guns lit up the night. They banged away at each other, the instant violence sharp enough to taste, wet and metallic on the tongue.

  Hobbs spun as a bullet took him high in the chest. His gun arm swung wild toward the ground and continued to fire into the asphalt. Robby hesitated for a millisecond, took aim, and fired. The round took Hobbs in the neck and ended it.

  In our time together, that had been the third incident when Robby had gone head-to-head with a violent predator. And it took three times for me to realize that’s what Robby lived for, that moment out on the edge. He only used the law to facilitate his insatiable need.

  In that parking lot, sitting on a truck that belonged to some random guy who’d gone into the grocery to buy food, Robby tilted his beer and finished it. He tossed the bottle in the back of the truck. He wore a Band-Aid on his left ear where the lobe had been shot off by Myron Hobbs. “What’s the matter with you, skillet?”

  That’s when I knew this had to be a drug-induced dream, Robby never called me skillet, not to my face. Johnny Mack had been the one to tell me that Robby called me skillet behind my back.

  “I don’t like the violence anymore,” I said. “I want out. I gotta get out or go insane.”

  Robby opened another beer. “You need to man up, skillet, and quit being such a pussy.” He took another long chug of the beer, held up the can, burped. “Too bad, skillet. Once you join the club, you can never get out. Once a BMF, always a BMF.” He chuckled. “Remember . . . Remember? I remember when you signed up. You remember?” He always talked giddy like this right after a violent confrontation.

  I shook my head.

  “It was that nigger cowboy you tracked down, remember now? That guy hit that little girl so hard with his big ol’ Cadillac it ruptured the radiator. You tracked his radiator water for two miles on foot on a hot summer night, running your ass off before the water dried up. You tracked him right to his house. By the time I caught up to you, you’d damn near kicked a lung outta that asshole.”

  “I killed my own son, Robby.”

  “Oh, shit, you’re not bemoaning that old saw again, are ya? I’m gettin’ tired as hell of hearin’ about it. You’re killin’ my buzz here, skillet. Okay, okay, this kid, he might’ve been sired from your loins, but he was still one of them, he was an asshole, am I right or am I right?”

  The man who owned the truck came out of the store with a few bags in his hand. “Ah, excuse me, but you’re sitting on my truck.”

  Robby gave him that predator stare, the eyes of a hunter fresh from a kill. The guy moved off, back toward the store.

  “I don’t need your macho bullshit right now,” I said to Robby. “You have no idea how I feel, what it feels like to—”

  He threw the second, half-empty bottle into the back of the truck, trailing a stream of foam. “How the hell do you know that, skillet? You only know me from the time we’ve worked together. You don’t know me for shit. You don’t know my past.” He slid off the tailgate and got right up in my face, his breath hot on my chin. “Son, here’s what I do know: if you don’t pull your head outta your ass soon and quit cryin’ in your Cheerios, they’re gonna put you away for good. Slam your black ass into a concrete room and lock the door. Now get up off your dead ass, skillet, and get movin’. I’m ashamed of you, lyin’ there like some kinda Democrat. Get up off your ass and do something. You’re BMF, remember that. Always remember that.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  THREE WEEKS AFTER I woke for the first time in the county jail ward, Dan Chulack came as like he always did on his lunch break, sat and read over FBI reports from his agents submitted from a multitude of different cases, and waited for me to break my silence.

  Which I had no intention of doing.

  He looked up, saw my eyes open, and put down his papers. “How you feelin’ today, Bruno?”

  I said nothing, just like all the other days when he’d tried to talk to me.

  “I knew you’d break down and talk to me eventually, but we’re out of time now. It’s today or not at all. Come on, talk to me. Please?”

  I said nothing.

  Every other time after he attempted to talk to me and I didn’t engage with him, he’d simply put his readers back on his nose and go back to his reports. This time he moved over to the bed and took my hand, secured with a soft restraint to the bed rail. Both my hands stayed restrained due to my “unstable mental state.” Even though I’d not given them any overt cause to think otherwise. I’d sunk into a depression so deep and dark I’d never rise up again to see the sunlight.

  Dan had never touched me before. This act of pure friendship pinged at my emotionally barren body.

  Physically, I’d healed quickly, the docs and nurses had said. They always talked without any reply from me at all. The .25 cal bullet missed my heart and lodged in a lung, now removed. The 9mm in my hip caused them more problems. An infection had set in after surgery, and after five days of me in a delirium, the docs got it under control with intravenous antibiotics. Five days of out-of-control nightmares where I relived old cases with Robby Wicks—all those violent confrontations, nightmares that always ended with a shift to Bosco’s expression, inches from my face, and ended with his plea for his life: “Don’t. Don’t.”

  And every time in the dream I did it anyway. I tossed him out into traffic and the Honda snatched him out of the air.

  Last week, detectives came in to interview me about the children I’d kidnapped—rescued really—from abusive parents and foster care. The same children who now lived a happy and safe life down in Costa Rica.

  I told the detectives nothing, not so much as a word. They left after they said I’d be arraigned as soon as the docs cleared me—arraigned on eight counts of kidnapping. They told me they had me cold on eight and didn’t mention anything about the other two children. They told me I’d go away to the big house for a stay that would last a couple years past the other side of forever. Dan couldn’t do anything to help. Not with the county attorney, who had a big ax to grind. He’d petitioned for intervention from the Attorney General, who declined to enter the dispute—not with someone with my past.

  Dan said, “I came today to say good-bye.”

  I stared straight ahead. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I couldn’t, because I didn’t feel anything at all.

  “Bruno, Drago’s going to be okay. He’s out of danger and doing great.” Dan hesitated and then said, “Marie went back to Costa Rica. She had to, to take care of the children. She’d been away from them too long. She said she’d be back for the trial though, said for you not to worry, she’d be back.”

  I said nothing.

  I’d not heard anything about what happened after I was shot in Bobby Ray’s warehouse. Or maybe I had and I either tuned it out or erased it from my memory, or the fever and drugs kept it from sticking. Or I just plain didn’t want to know. This was the first I’d
heard that Marie walked away from it safely. For the first time in three weeks, I thought about Marie. I let her image, her smile, her warm kisses play in my memory. The thought of her finally broke through. Skin on my legs and back tingled. I did feel some emotion after all.

  Dan looked back over his shoulder, then back at me. He lowered his voice. “I gave her the Valvoline box and . . . and, Bruno, she took your grandchild with her. He’s safe.”

  Bosco’s son, my grandson.

  A lump rose in my throat and tears blurred my vision. Dan saw them and gripped my hand tighter. “That’s good, Bruno, that’s real good. You’re getting better. So let me tell you again. I need to explain what happened—how you ended up in custody. I feel real bad the way it went down.”

  I didn’t answer. His conscience bothered him.

  He said, “We got to the warehouse too late. Marie had already called paramedics. You were critical; she had to make the call. The Pomona police were on scene, and they’d already transported you to County.”

  I turned my head to look at him.

  Dan said, “Pomona identified you and had you in custody. They took your prints and ran them. Your real name popped with the warrants.”

  He waited for a response.

  I didn’t give him one.

  “We got the truck, Bruno, the one with the drone and the missiles, thanks to you. That was a neat little trick with the phone.” He squeezed my hand. “We missed the Arab connection. We’ll backtrack him, though. We still might get him.”

  He glanced away, then looked back at me and squeezed my hand again. “Bruno, you’re being transported tonight to the hospital ward at MCJ. Today’s Friday. You’ll be arraigned on Monday. I’m sorry, but I have to go now. I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  I nodded.

  Dan turned, scooped up his reports, and headed for the door.

  I tried to speak. Only a croak came out. Dan rushed back to my bed and said, “Yes, go ahead, what?”