Edge of the Pit

by Bill Thesken

  “He got nicked,” said the head of the agency. “He’s injured. That bartender deserves a medal.”

  “We’ll check the local hospitals to see if anyone was treated for gunshot wound.”

  “Probably a waste of time, but might as well. I don’t think Badger would risk a hospital. He’s probably got something else figured out. Hell, I’ll bet he takes out the bullet by himself with a pocketknife. My bet is that he’s going deep underground for a while. We better call C-Dub and let him know.”

  “He knows all about it. He’s the one who gave us the surveillance tapes,” said the chief. “He’s pretty ticked off that his club got shot up by the guy who stole his girlfriend.”

  “Put out an award,” said Mason. “Print up the best image we have of this guy and put a price on his head. Ten thousand dollars, we’ll pay it, and it’ll be well worth it. Get it to all the newspapers and local TV stations. Someone saw that guy. We’ll find him.”

  14.

  Charles H. Washington II sat brooding in the back of the limo as it made its way silently through the dark streets of the inner city. Whenever life took a turn for the worse and seemed a little tenuous, he liked to take a trip down memory lane to refresh his sense of being, his sense of self-worth. The past few days were draining on him, the events weighing him down. The limo stopped outside a dilapidated and worn tenement building, grey and cold in the middle hours between midnight and dawn, and the driver looked into the rear view mirror.

  “Should I pick you up at the same place Mr. W, in an hour as usual?”

  “That will be fine Carl.” He got out of the limo, and straightened his overcoat, tapped on the top of the long car and watched as it sped away. This is where it all began, for him, the ghetto, where he was born on the street long ago. He checked the Glock 44 in his pocket, the cast stainless steel handle crosshatched for comfort felt reassuring to his hand, the silencer was tightened onto the barrel just right. This was very dangerous place to be at this time of the night, and he walked straight into the nearest dark alley, looking for trouble.

  It didn’t take very long. Up ahead in the darkness he could see the glow of a lighter and a pipe, and a couple of crackheads gathered around it, taking turns sucking off the smoky venom emanating from the end of it.

  Demons, twisted and lost. As he got closer and they sensed his presence, they conspired among themselves to rob him. Whispering to each other in hushed tones they made their plans. He had on a nice new overcoat after all, he must be rich.

  They spread out and blended into the shadows to wait for his passing, one grabbed a knife, another a long steel pipe from the gutter. The third and most ruthless held a cord of rope in which to throttle the rich guy.

  C-Dub calmly pulled out the Glock and shot them all methodically and silently. Two shots each, once in the abdomen and once in the head. When he was satisfied that they were terminated, he continued on his walk into the ghetto. Dogs barked here and there but he kept on through the night.

  At the corner of the second block he spied a small group of men next to a lamp post. Four of them. Silent and wordless, they seemed to be waiting for something to happen. He waited in a dark doorstop and watched. A car pulled up and stopped next to the group, one of them reached into the car, an exchange took place, and the car took off down the road. The men counted the money and it changed hands between them. Then not long after, another car came slowly up to the lamp post and the same routine was performed as before, one of the guys reached into the car, an exchange occurred, and the car drove off, then they counted and changed the money between themselves again. It was an old fashioned corner drug store. Selling crack or heroin or whatever the client wanted.

  Charles H. Washington II reloaded the Glock 44 one bullet at a time, and strolled down the boulevard towards the dealers. They eyed him suspiciously as he approached, and two of them put their hands in their coats. They were the muscle and obviously packing guns of their own.

  C-Dub’s eyes narrowed and he gripped the Glock in his overcoat and kept walking forward. His momma died of an overdose from a hit of crack from guys just like these, and he couldn’t think of a worse form of animal. He stopped ten feet away and they all eyed each other.

  C-Dub shrugged his shoulders. “I’m looking for a couple of hits.”

  “You got any money?” said the one who was doing the car exchanges, and he took a step forward. “It’s minimum five for a hundred.”

  “Sure I got cash,” said C-Dub. and he pulled out a big wad of money with his left hand, it was thick and folded in half with a hundred dollar bill on the outside, and he held it up high in the air for all to see.

  The whole group’s attention went to the wad of money in the left hand and they missed the gun coming out with the right, and he shot them all quickly and methodically before the muscle guys could get their own guns out. Two shots each as before. One of them lay gasping for air, and somehow gathered the strength to throw a bottle that broke on C-Dub’s leg, and he gave that animal a third bullet for good measure. Right between the eyes.

  He walked quickly down the street keeping to the shadows and in the corner of his vision he could see someone watching from one of the windows above. They quickly ducked down under the windowsill, closed the drapes and turned off their lights.

  Every now and then, when he felt the world closing in on him he took a walk down memory lane, into the ghetto where it all began. The police always thought it was gang related, these shootings and they could never find enough clues to pin it on anyone, besides it was the worst of the worst who were getting shot, the drug dealers, the animals in the street who preyed on people with their narcotics and poison. The dead still had big wads of cash and unused drugs in their pockets and it didn’t take much to put two and two together. The police didn’t put much effort into investigating the murders.

  He was a billionaire vigilante, and it brought him no real pleasure, but it did bring a measure of strange satisfaction, a heartfelt revenge for his mother, who got caught up in a web she couldn’t seem to escape from.

  An hour later he was at the other end of the ghetto, three miles of walking and the limo was waiting for him at the cemetery where his mother was buried. It was a simple graveyard across the street from the Catholic Church. Thirty years earlier it had filled up and stopped taking new inhabitants, and his mother was one of the last to be interred there. She was three rows in from the end He lay a simple white carnation on her grave, then got into the limo and drove away into the morning.

  15.

  When I woke up, I had that strange elephants on my eyelids feeling again, only this time I wasn’t in a hospital bed. It was a bed alright, but in a semi darkened room, and the mattress was soft and smelled nice, not like hospital formaldehyde and bleach, more like flowers and perfume and a pretty girl.

  Filtered light came through the curtains that fluttered with the breeze and I could hear kids playing in a nearby park or school. I tried to get up but my leg felt like it was in a vice and I remembered. I’d been shot. Bob Marley was right, don’t awaken love in a woman unless you intend to love her, and definitely don’t kiss her if her boyfriend, wanna be or not, is standing nearby with a gun. Somehow I’d made it to my nurse’s apartment. My beautiful nurse Amber.

  I could hear water running in the kitchen and I made another attempt to get up. Gritting my teeth and helping my injured leg with my hands interlocked under my calf so I wouldn’t bend my knee, I was able to swing my legs over the edge of the bed and sit up. Blood rushed downhill out of my brain, there was a ringing in my ears, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I fought it and regained a semblance of independence and took a couple of deep breaths. After a few moments of stability, the cloud left my head and I could almost think straight again. But I had no idea what time of day it was, or even what day it was. I’d lost a chunk of my existence.

  I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and my leg was bandaged above the knee, bandaged and holding in a ball of pain in the mid
dle of my leg. I made the next move and stood up and steadied myself by holding onto the end of the four poster bed and started limping to the door. It squeaked when I opened it and she looked over from the kitchen, startled. She was wearing her hair up and a baggy t-shirt and shorts, just like me, we were like twinsies.

  She started to smile and then frowned and rushed over to me putting her arm around my back and helped me to the chair next to the couch.

  “You should take it slow, you’ve been out for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Well, you fell through my front doorway at around two in the morning and it’s nearly nighttime now, so about sixteen hours.”

  “I had a little problem.”

  She whistled and shook her head. “Really now. If you call taking a bullet a little problem.”

  “Someone took a shot at me. You bandaged me up. You saved me. Again.”

  “I called a friend at the hospital, she took out the bullet and stitched you up. You lost a little bit of blood, and since we know your blood type from your last little visit to our hospital she brought along some plasma.”

  “She took out the bullet?” I narrowed my eyes. “A fellow nurse?”

  “She’s pre-med, almost a doctor. She actually jumped at the chance to operate on a real person, and don’t worry she can keep a secret.”

  Then she smiled and narrowed her eyes at me conspiratorially “But you can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Keep a secret. We kept you sedated for the operation with sodium pentothal. You were pretty blabby.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I kissed the girl and he shot me, Bob Marley. You babbled it over and over again till you fell asleep.”

  “It’s from a song.”

  “I have all his albums. Me and Bob go way back.”

  “I shot the sheriff? Remember that song?”

  “You’re not a sheriff. And there wasn’t a girl in that song either. Look Badger, I don’t care if ‘he’ shot you for kissing the girl. It’s actually kind of funny if you did, and he did.”

  “Getting shot aint funny Amber.” I took a deep breath let out a sigh, and searched her eyes. There was no malice there. “Alright look, I owe you big, very, very big, so here’s the whole story, take it or leave it, throw me out on the street if you want. I’ve got a weakness for girls like you with big brown eyes, and she called my bluff. I’m stubborn and prideful, and I tend to joke around a little too much, especially when things get tense which seems to be happening a lot lately. I’m in a lot of trouble and I don’t know how to get out of it. I like being in control of the situation, no matter what that situation might be, but right now the situation is in control of me. I’m looking for answers and running into a stone wall.”

  “Yes, I kissed the girl and her boyfriend shot me from behind, but it sounds more loose than it really is. I went to the club because that’s where we were heading with the star before she got kidnapped. I wanted to find out what the people who worked there knew, and it turns out they never, ever saw her there and didn’t even know she was going to visit that night. None of which means a damn thing either way. A couple of tough guys got in my way and tried to rough me up, and here I am.”

  She bit her lip, seemingly missing most of what I had said and repeated my first line. “A weakness for girls like me with big brown eyes?”

  I nodded and smiled. “Usually gets me in trouble.”

  “There’s something you need to see.” She grabbed the remote and turned on the TV and the DVR. “I recorded it for you. Your big night on the town made the morning news.”

  On the screen was an anchor newsman and on a pop up screen next to him was the black and white CCTV footage from the security cameras at the bar, the bouncer getting zapped and thrown into the bushes, me grabbing the shotgun and blowing out the ceiling. Like a rampaging bully. They showed the shotgun scene twice. I was an out of control madman with a shotgun.

  Then there was a still shot of me that filled the entire TV screen, with my name in bold lettering at the bottom under the words: WANTED. Then in smaller letters below, ‘Ten Thousand Dollar Reward for information leading to capture.’ And then in smaller letters, ‘Armed and dangerous.’

  “You’re a popular guy.”

  “I never realized how selectively presenting the news could skew public opinion till right now. They should have shown the part where the bouncer was trying to twist my head off before I zapped him, and then firing a pistol at me before I blasted the ceiling with the shotgun.”

  “So the bouncer is the girl’s boyfriend?”

  “No, that’s another guy.”

  She laughed and I shook my head and looked at the floor in shame.

  “Yeah, I made a lot of friends last night.”

  16.

  Nine AM on a hazy morning at the top of the tallest building in the city.

  C-Dub gazed at the computer screen that was filled with numbers and graphs, holdings and assets with his name on it. The graphs and numbers were flexing, changing and going up and down, stocks, housing prices, record sales, the myriad of graphs turning red when they edged down, and green when they were edging up. Going up and down, but mostly going up, edging higher and higher. At the top of the screen next to the word TOTAL and an equal sign was a ten digit number.

  One thousand million dollars equals one billion dollars. It had a nice ring to it. One billion dollars, and he said it over and over a few times for good measure. Just saying those three words when they actually belonged to you made them kind of pop out with authority, and then roll off a person’s tongue, the largesse of it all magnified by ego.

  He’d read once that a billion single dollar bills laid end to end would circle the globe four times. Still it wasn’t anything to gloat over. A billion dollars was chump change in some circles. Trump had ten billion, and his wad of cash laid end to end would circle the globe forty times. Four times around was peanuts. Still, Trump didn’t own a professional basketball team, and very soon if everything went well, the name Charles Washington II would be a minority owner of one of the biggest sporting franchises in the world. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Trump.

  Still, a billion was nowhere near enough, not by a long shot. He needed more.

  The range of liquid cash, the operating funds fluctuated throughout the day and throughout the hours and minutes and usually ranged from fifty to seventy five million as payments were received and payments were made. In one hand and out the other, like anyone else, just on a bigger scale.

  His mind wandered back to the billion dollar number, usually he wasn’t this sentimental about the past, but he was at a certain turning point in his life where it made sense to think about how he got this far. Except for the seventy five million or so in liquid operating cash, it wasn’t a billion in cash with his name on it that he could throw in the air and take a bath in, it was all in assets. Real estate, and restaurants, bars, entertainment, clothing lines.

  The first million was easy, he almost fell backwards into it with Kid Rapper and the number one single in the nation for a couple of weeks. The second million was way tougher, and so he formulated a plan.

  If he could find one rapper hanging out in front of a tattoo parlor, a rap club should able to attract more talent, unknown talent that he could mold and shape and ride like a horse to the money store, so he used the proceeds to buy an abandoned warehouse across the street from the tattoo shop and transformed it into the Rap House, kind of like the House of Blues in New Orleans, but here in LA where rap started.

  It turned out that running a club was lot tougher than he’d planned. Just to get it up and running took all the cash he scooped from Kid Rapper. He had to renovate the building and that took permits and contractors, a liquor license, live music license, kitchen license, parking license, business license, tax license, name license, health inspection, building inspection, and that’s when he realized that the city government was the biggest racket in the world. Everyone
had their hand out, legally, and you couldn’t question them or they’d shut you down. Pimps and thieves and crack dealers had nothing on these guys.

  And on top of that, you had to man the joint. You needed employees to staff the place and insurance up the ying yang for fire, flood, theft, contents, earthquake, liability, health, workman’s comp, all necessary and required by the head city of Los Angeles racketeers. He was down to his last penny when the doors opened, but when they did open, the money flowed like a jackpot.

  The place went off the charts, there was a city limit to how many people you could cram into the place and there was a waiting line around the block to get in, and they were netting five grand a day after expenses.

  Things were a little rough around the edges in the beginning like any restaurant business, some of the first staff hired tried to scoop some of the profits here and there, taking cash for the drinks and putting it into the tip jar instead of the register, and if there were fights or violence the cops shut the place down and the bottom line suffered and so order needed to be installed and maintained on a primitive level, and it became known to one and all that you did not go to the Rap House and cause trouble, because you might end up missing or dead, or both.

  That’s why it was a little unnerving that the place got shot up last night, and made the morning news in such an unhappy manner. Something like that hadn’t happened in a long time.

  Still the lessons learned opening up the club proved invaluable for the empire he was building. Once you figured out how to allocate personnel and resources, you could look at tightening up the bottom line profit margin. The money, the cash flow. The moolah.

  Five thousand per day, one hundred fifty thousand per month, turned into one point eight million dollars by the end of the year which was some serious cash, and he invested everything in more bars and restaurants, and within five years he owned ten restaurant bars outright which were generating fifty grand per day, eighteen million per year, and he took that cash and started investing in cheap apartment buildings.