Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  “Screw that,” said Beemer. “I’m gettin’ more ice and walkin’ out. Nothin’ I got can’t be fixed by a Korean doc with a needle and thread.”

  Lucky regarded the man.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Beemer. “Looks like I got into somethin’ outside a bar. But no. Turned the corner and whammo.”

  “The blast wave?”

  “Goddamn Bob’s Big Boy fell on me.”

  “Bob’s—”

  “You know. That fat boy holding the hamburger.”

  Lucky rewound his memory to his counterclockwise loop around ground zero. He recalled seeing the Bob’s Big Boy diner. He’d gotten a nose full of some kind of bread baking. Sweet. He’d questioned if he was hungry enough to stop and eat something just moments before pushing on with his reconnaissance.

  “One second I’m walkin’,” continued Beemer. “And the next this big plastic statue drops me. Next thing I know I’m in an ambulance comin’ here.”

  “Did you see the explosion?”

  Beemer shook his head. “But somebody here said it was a terrorist thing,” added Beemer. “Suicide bomb. That right?”

  Lucky showed no response. It was a mystery to him why the murdering S.O.B. had blown himself and Lord knows how many others to unholy hell. But then again he had stopped questioning the motives swimming inside the minds of criminals after the little sister of a gunned-down Grape Street Crip drove her Mercury Sable through a bus stop crowded with what she thought were Compton Bloods. Instead, they were in a high school Christmas choir on their way home from a middle-school performance in Baldwin Hills.

  “Can you believe that shit? Here? In America?” asked Beemer.

  A thin streak of blood trickled down Beemer’s arm, across the inside of his left wrist and his circled tattoo, spiraled around his thumb, built up into a gravity drop, then splatted on to the floor.

  “Might be better off hangin’ around,” said Lucky, gesturing to the man’s obvious injuries. “Seein’ a real doctor.”

  “Thanks. But all I need right now is some more ice.”

  “Hope you leave your name with the cops. Cuz they’re gonna need to talk to you,” said Lucky. “You were there. You’re a witness.”

  “You work for the hospital?”

  “Deputy sheriff. Kern County.”

  “…Sure I know Kern. Kinda far from home aren’t ya?”

  “Long story.”

  “Listen,” pleaded Beemer. “I didn’t see nothin’ but Bob’s Big Ass droppin’ on me.”

  “That’s what you think but never know,” said Lucky. “All I’m sayin’ is that you should stick around to—”

  “Know what I am?” said Beemer, leaning in closer to Lucky, his voice dipping into a hush. “I’m a truck driver who’s behind on his child support. So it’s my lousy luck I get wrong-turned into a traffic jam. If I hadn’t gotten out to check my tail lights…”

  “I’m sure whoever you’re haulin’ for will understand—”

  “Dude. Thanks for the advice. But I got an old Freightliner fulla frozen peas and maybe an hour left of fuel before it all turns to guacamole.”

  “The load ain’t covered by insurance?”

  “Sure as shit it is. But my salary? Not a chance.”

  Lucky scanned across Beemer’s eyes, looking for dilated pupils behind the dangling strands of sweaty hair. But the redness from bloodshot hours of driving gave away nothing.

  “Where’s your destination?”

  “San Diego.”

  From his breast pocket, Lucky produced a business card and a ballpoint pen with the phone number of a Bakersfield taxi service silk-screened on the barrel.

  “Name, address, and contact info,” suggested Lucky. “I’ll pass it on to the FBI in case they need another witness.”

  Beemer bent over and scribbled a bogus name, address, email, and telephone number.

  “There you go,” said Beemer, handing the card back to Lucky. “Got one for me?”

  “You want a card?”

  “In case I remember something,” said Beemer. “Oh wait. Maybe I should just call the FBI? Or do I call the local cops? Like Long Beach PD?”

  “Never hurts to call everybody,” said Lucky, fishing for another Kern County Sheriff’s business card. The acceptance of which was interrupted by the crashing of a bus tub full of ice being dumped into the soda machine.

  “Finally!” said Beemer, who was quick to refill his plastic bag. “Nice meeting you…”

  “Detective Dey,” said Lucky. “It’s on the card.”

  “Right. Cool. Thanks.”

  Beemer raised his bag of ice in a farewell salute, stepped out of the cashier’s line and slipped away.

  Lucky released a few half-gallons of fresh ice into his plastic bags, twisted the tops into knots, then made his way out of the cafeteria. Yet something nagged at him about that five-minute encounter with the wounded stranger. He recalled some advice his training officer had drilled into him during his first weeks at Lennox. All cops are installed with a bullshit detector. Trust it with your life.

  Lucky’s bullshit detector was pinging.

  Not necessarily an unusual occurrence. Lucky had pegged the truck driver as a drug user of some kind. Probably holding. The average Joe with a Ziploc full of weed usually tripped Lucky’s alarm the moment he discovered Lucky had a sheriff’s shield in his back pocket.

  Whatever, Luck.

  He was gassed. Operating on empty. He needed to get the ice back to Gonzo, arrange her return to Pasadena and her boy Travis, then begin his way back to Kern County where he’d have to face the dreadful tragedy of burying his little brother.

  28

  Beemer was So spooked by his run-in with the Kern deputy, he decided to forgo the elevator and take the stairs back to the first floor. Descending them made his right knee want to bellow in pain. Beemer’s dust-up with that Bob’s Big Boy statue had dislocated his patella, exposing what little meniscus tissue he had left to excruciating punishment with every simple step.

  A cop from Kern fucking County?

  Beemer was plenty familiar with the counties of California, particularly Kern because when plotting his route from Reno to Long Beach, he’d planned to spend a significant number of predawn hours cruising the back highways of Mono, Inyo, and then Kern County. Precisely the same real estate where he’d been delayed by a flipped Porsche SUV and a Ready Eddie deputy who’d innocently asked the truck driver for assistance.

  But damn. A Kern cop?

  His exhausted brain reeled. He knew that both the LAPD and FBI had been on to him. That they’d been hooked into him by Danny Palomino’s asshole dad. He’d seen the trap, drawn them all together, and unleashed hell upon them. But how in Moses does a deputy sheriff from bumfuck Kern County make it into the mix so damned quickly? Was it because he’d killed a cop?

  No matter. Everybody thinks you evaporated yourself with two hundred pounds of ANFO.

  The past two hours might’ve been the most excruciating of Beemer’s thirty years. From the few minutes following his abandonment of the Freightliner truck and from every step he traveled eastward in hope that he could trigger his fertilizer bomb to the breathless moments he’d traded post-apocalyptic small talk with a Kern County Sheriff’s deputy. Every second of it had been more emotionally hellish than all his days fighting Middle Eastern insurgents.

  The explosion itself had been shock enough to the system. The blast wave had caught him by surprise, sending him hurtling backward into the comical figure of Bob’s Big Boy. In an effort to protect his eyes from the debris, he’d twisted his neck hard to his left, not realizing how close he’d been standing next to the rough stucco exterior walls of the restaurant. He could only imagine the skid mark his torn flesh had left behind.

  Though he didn’t recall it, Beemer’s knee must have also contacted the same surface, tearing a credit-card-sized hole in his jeans and forcing his kneecap to rotate out of joint. Once he’d come to his senses—Lord knows how many clock-turns aft
er the detonation—he was already being attended to by an off-duty paramedic who, moments earlier, had been mulling over the decision to order the Super Big Boy Combo for lunch or the huevos rancheros as a second breakfast.

  The twisted irony that the man who’d concocted and set off the devastating bomb would be one of the very first to be rescued by EMTs was lost on both men.

  Before Beemer had wits enough to protest, he’d already been strapped to a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance and delivered to St. Mary’s Medical Center. Before long he was just waiting for the most inconspicuous moment to get up and walk out of the hospital. He knew the Freightliner, if still undiscovered, would be operating on little fuel—its precious cargo in danger of spoiling if left unattended for much longer.

  Beemer was easily able to pocket vials of both the anesthetic numbing agent, Lidocaine, and the narcotic pain reliever Demerol along with a few disposable hypodermics to manage his pain. His one error was the detour to the cafeteria to refill his melted bag of ice. But that had been all he could imagine would assist in relieving the aching his neck had suffered from tangling with Bob’s Big Boy and his platter full of plastic burgers.

  On the hellish mile and a half walk back to the scene of the crime, Beemer had to slip into an alleyway and behind a dumpster twice to jam a fresh needle full of Lidocaine under his crooked kneecap. He calculated that the needles must be missing the proper nerve or else the horrible pain would’ve subsided to a dull ache. Instead, with every flex it raged like there was boiling grease in the joint. Beemer would have to rely on his post-military experience. He’d been inches from being court-martialed out of the service. But then he’d been resurrected as a private operator and re-immersed in a training regimen culled from the Navy SEALS. He’d learned to bury his pain and push his body to greater levels of endurance. So what was a sharp pain in the knee compared to nearly six months of swallowing shit on the Navy’s Coronado Island?

  As he neared ground zero it appeared that chance was once again working in Beemer’s favor. The federal crime scene perimeter stopped a mere block from where he’d abandoned the Freightliner. However, he’d been dangerously mistaken as to how much diesel fuel he had left in the reserve tank. When exactly the engine had gagged and stalled was unknown to Beemer. And though the hood was still hot, so was the midday sun at its 2:00 P.M. apex in the sky.

  Thank the devil for the backup battery.

  The semi’s refrigeration unit hummed, working overtime in the summer heat. Soon, the battery would be sucked dry if Beemer didn’t get on the hoof to the nearest filling station. That’s when Beemer reached deep to squeeze the mean. One of his trainers had once whispered the secret to him. When a certain kind of man felt his last ounce of will was exhausted and hope had been reduced to a pinprick of dimming light, that was the time to grab ahold of his own testicles and crush ’em until he found the stuff that made him mean. There, in that place of excruciating pain, only the toughest of soldiers could find his final reserves.

  Screw the knee. Screw the pain beneath my skull.

  With that—along with every wincing step—Beemer allowed his brain to flood.

  Every bully he’d ever encountered.

  The men who’d questioned his manhood.

  The women who’d spurned his amorous affections.

  Authorities he’d never respected.

  The foster mother who’d molested him.

  The government that had abandoned him.

  The Savior the chaplain claimed had died for him.

  Each memory flashed in Beemer’s brain in high-def—the faces a live-action kabuki show of emotional insults. And from the images a warmth began to spill from his core, creeping into his extremities until the spasms in his neck eased and his right knee found four more inches of flex.

  Gas can in hand, Beemer completed his four-block trek to a Chevron gas station where he paid cash for two gallons of diesel. All the while, his jaw was so clenched, testing the tensile strength of the enamel covering his molars, that when the cashier asked which pump to switch on, Beemer answered by holding up three bloody fingers.

  “Hey man,” expressed the cashier. “Were you there? Did you see the bomb happen?”

  Beemer just shook his head tersely, swept the change off the counter and returned to his task.

  The gas can filled in a matter of seconds. Then as Beemer was screwing the cap firmly into place, his ears picked up the sound of a throaty four-cylinder engine, in low gear, slow-turning into the filling station and stopping at the opposite bank of pumps. It was a vintage Porsche convertible. Out of which stepped none other than Rey Palomino.

  Beemer stood at a frozen distance, involuntarily observing the pool man shove his credit card into the pump, punch up a billing zip code, and insert the nozzle into the Porsche’s gas receptacle. It would have been nothing for Beemer to cross the five yards, douse the pool man in diesel and scratch a match. The fire and screams that would surely follow would provide distraction enough for Beemer to hobble away with minimum notice. Then again any violent deviation from Plan B could set off a new string of dominoes with no way to tell where or how they would land.

  Yet the venom stirred inside Beemer. And as much as the mean was enough to quell the anguish in his knee, the malice inspired by the sudden proximity to Rey Palomino could’ve killed more pain than an acre of heroin poppies in full bloom.

  Patience, Beems. Put a lid on it and stick to the plan.

  Obscured by the gas pumps, Beemer watched the pool man top off the tank of his hobby car, sink the nozzle back into the cradle and disregard the display when it offered to print him a receipt. Then Rey flopped back behind the wheel and seconds later was back on the boulevard, wind busting through his hair as if he’d just spent another day visiting the beach.

  Because he had a new plan, Beemer was sanguine enough to shuffle off in the opposite direction, trudging the four blocks back to the old Freightliner.

  Once back in the driver’s saddle, he meant to point the stolen rust-bucket south, cross the border at Tijuana, then last leg it to the shipping yards of Mazatlan. With his blood cargo finally on its way to a North African port, Beemer could choose his next move. Maybe time off to heal at a Central American surf resort. Or he could quietly reinsert himself into Los Angeles where he would be free to stalk and kill the betrayer, Rey Palomino, at his leisure.

  With a gas can brimming with enough diesel to revive the dying reefer truck, Beemer set a course back to the alley where his cargo awaited. He wouldn’t have had an inkling if his pain receptors were still switched to positive. The warmth he’d felt in his extremities had advanced into a glandular-born numbing agent.

  Mother nature, man. She mixes a motherfucker of a pain killin’ cocktail.

  When he turned the corner into the alley, Beemer was again encouraged to hear the whine of the Freighty’s compressors fueled by a healthy battery. He set the gas can on the ground then prepped his wracked body for a climb into the semi’s cab where he recalled the fuel lock lever sat near the hood release.

  But his foot slipped on the first step, before he even had a handhold. Gravity did the rest, sending the vet backward and into a puddle of syrup. A warm and viscous goo that had greased the bottom of Beemer’s Nikes now seeped into his pants up his backside. His first thought was that he’d slid on some used cooking oil the restaurant cooks had surreptitiously dumped in the alley instead of disposing of it properly through city recycling services.

  A second assault by that fat ass Bob.

  However, after boiling up thousands of servings of fries and chicken wings, old cooking product smelled. The gunk that had Beemer crawling back to his feet was sticky and had a sweet odor on par with something more sugary.

  Corn syrup?

  Beemer examined his hands. Through the tiny bits of dirt and black asphalt, the sticky stuff was a somewhat cloudy yellowish-green. Like snot from an allergy-prone whale.

  Animal byproduct?

  What made Beemer wonder if
the gunk was some kind of mammal extract was little more than gut fear. He lifted his gaze from his hands to the trailer’s steel door. The thermal barriers dripped with the very same swill he’d fallen into.

  My blood product! Aw, fuck!

  Not only was Beemer’s cargo melting before his own eyes, but clearly some of the packaging had been compromised. The alley was slowly flooding with a mix of spun blood and human plasma. And under the blaze of the late afternoon sun, the goo was quickly congealing with the tar in the alley’s asphalt, bubbling itself into a hot black useless slick.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!!!!

  Beemer swung around to the rear of the trailer, lifted the latch and swung it outward. The insulated door squeaked and swung wide, clanging against the façade of the office building.

  He didn’t even need to feel for the light switch. His nose told him everything. What had smelled almost sweet and sugary in the hot air of the alley was a pungent fist to the face once Beemer saw the utter failure of the old Freightliner’s refrigeration system. The trek for the diesel had proved utterly useless. Despite the truck’s relatively new batteries and that the compressor’s motor was obviously still engaged, a catastrophic malfunction had occurred, leading to the coagulated mess that lay before him. The best Beemer could calculate was that the meltdown had begun some hours earlier. Possibly before even arriving in Long Beach.

  By the stench alone, Beemer could tell the spoilage was complete. A total loss. All efforts from Reno to Long Beach—not to mention the hiccup in Kern County—had been for naught.

  Instead of turning from the stench, Beemer forced himself to breathe it in as if he wanted to remember the smell of such a massive personal failure on a cellular level. And with each subsequent whiff, Beemer purposefully allowed his dangerous inner friend to pry the lid off the hatch that kept him at bay. Something in him knew that before he could move on to Plan C or D, The Idiot would need some time outside himself to rant and rage…