Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

Things got ugly from there. Rebecca told me later that she’d been leaning forward over the dashboard, trying to see through the fog, when she’d accidently blown the horn with her chest.

  “That’s that doctor bitch right there,” one of the Delaney brothers shouted. He was pointing out over our heads, at Rebecca and the BMW. The brothers weren’t big on meaningful discussion. Without another word, they forgot about poor Snowdrift Dawson, spittin’ teeth there onto the asphalt, and started our way at a trot.

  “I’ll take the elephant,” I whispered to Gabe. “Just keep little brother occupied while I—”

  “See now, there you go being a sexist again,” Gabe said. “I’ll take Jumbo.”

  Before I could protest, Gabe cut in front of me and headed for big brother like a Scud missile. I thought later that it would have made a good public service message.

  “What the fuck is this?” big brother growled through his chin whiskers. “Some kinda dyke bitch perv—?”

  That was as far as the dazzling repartee got, because that’s when Gabe hauled off and hit him full in the throat. Bluto brought both hands to his windpipe, took an unsteady step backward, and started making noises like an air compressor.

  I was two steps behind the action when little brother emerged from the fog bank. “Hey, asshole,” I said.

  He lumbered my way. I closed the distance quicker than he anticipated and led with a stiff left jab that caught him coming in and spread his nose all over his face. It got his attention, but that was all. This ol’ boy had been hit before.

  He dropped his shoulder and bull-rushed me like a linebacker. My high school offensive lineman muscle memory kicked in. I got my feet moving and fended him off with my hands. He stumbled to one knee.

  On my right, Gabe executed what I believe MMA fans refer to as a spinning back fist. Sounded like somebody’d dropped a Sunday roast from the roof as it connected with the side of big brother’s head; the impact sent the older Delaney’s Skoal ball cap flying into the air and hideously contorted the outline of his skull. When he dropped to one knee, Gabe drop-kicked him in the face. He went all the way down and stayed there.

  The sight of his big brother napping in the street brought my guy up short, torn between trying to finish what he’d started with me and going to the aid of his brother. I was about to help him decide when the first siren began to wail in the distance.

  And then another and perhaps a third—it was hard to tell them apart once the whoops wound together.

  “You two have already gone a couple rounds with the boys in blue,” I said to the guy in front of me. “Maybe you ought to collect your brother and get the hell out of here before you two end up spending another night in Casa Vomit.”

  He had a muley look to him. I half expected him to be stubborn about it and give me another try, but I was wrong. Something about how easily Gabe had handled his big brother had given him pause. Me too, for that matter.

  He pushed himself to his feet, sidestepped me, and helped his brother up. He threw a shoulder under Bluto and began to half carry, half drag him toward the truck. He fixed me with an angry glare on the way by.

  “This ain’t over,” he said. “That bitch gonna pay for my brother.”

  The bitch in question was out of her car now, around back with the rear hatch open. I kept a wary eye on the Delaney brothers until they were both inside and their truck had melted into the fog.

  With Gabe following along in her wake, Rebecca jogged past me carrying the red blanket she always kept in the back of her car for emergencies.

  There was enough adrenaline in my system to float a paddleboard. I closed my eyes and sucked in a couple dozen lungfuls of fog. Kept at it until I couldn’t hear my pulse in my ears anymore. By the time I refocused, Rebecca had slipped the folded blanket under Dawson’s head and was dabbing the area around his mouth with a handkerchief.

  That’s when the first wave of cavalry skidded to a halt behind the BMW. First to arrive were a pair of SPD uniforms, combat-stancing their way through the gloom, pointing drawn guns in all directions at once, like you see on TV.

  Dawson’s cameraman took one look at the approaching cops and began screaming at the top of his lungs, “Not them. Not them.” He pointed furiously in the direction the Delaney brothers had gone. “That way. That way.”

  Took a while to sort things out. By that time, another police cruiser and an emergency-aid car had joined the vehicle conga line in the middle of the street, at which point somebody had a spasm of lucidity and suggested we get the cars the hell out of the street so the aid car could get up here.

  My car was offender number one, but Dawson was still semiconscious in the mouth of the driveway, so Gabe and I and the first pair of cops had to pick him up and ease him over to the grassy edge of the street so I could pull both cars into the driveway and clear the way for assistance.

  I pulled into the yard, took my car all the way to the back and locked it in the garage, then jogged back to the street and got the BMW. I stopped in the gateway and got out. Gabe and Rebecca were standing against one of the stone gate pillars watching as the emergency personnel trussed Snowdrift Dawson and carefully rolled him onto a gurney. The noises he made when they moved him would stay with me for a while.

  Somewhere along the line, a couple of plainclothes cops had arrived and taken statements from Snowdrift’s cameraman and the other TV crew, who by this time had decided it was safe to go back to work as professional carrion eaters and were now tiptoeing across the street with a microphone and camera at the ready.

  The medical crew had Snowdrift up in the back of the aid car. The backup lights came on. The light bar snapped on. Red and white. The aid car started to move. Rebecca and I made eye contact.

  I nodded at the open door of the Beamer. “You guys better go inside,” I said. “I’ll finish up out here.”

  She was about to get ornery when she spotted the camera crew approaching and made a dash for the car. Gabe was hard on her heels when a new voice intervened.

  “Gabriella,” the voice said.

  I turned toward the sound. One of the plainclothes cops had wandered over. Cheap suit. Maybe forty. Only five-ten or so, but thick in the torso like a Turkish wrestler. Not somebody you wanted to end up rolling around on the ground with.

  “Detective Greenway.” Gabe flashed a crocodile smile. “’Fraid I’ve gotta go.”

  I watched as Gabe got into the passenger seat and Rebecca threw it in gear.

  “You’d be Mr. Waterman,” the cop said, as they disappeared into the gloaming.

  “I’d be.”

  “Nice company you’re keeping there.”

  I tried to sound shocked. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Gabriella Funicello.”

  “Like Annette?”

  “What?”

  “Great tits.”

  “Gabriella?”

  “Annette.”

  “She’s a hitter for Joey Ortega.”

  “And here I thought she was a Mouseketeer,” I said.

  I started walking toward the gate. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said without turning around. I walked to the far side, found the “Close” button, and pushed it. Took the gate about ten seconds to roll all the way shut. Ahead in the gloom, the house lights were dim and fuzzy and inviting.

  I heard a loud snap, crackle, and pop when the aid car backed over the remains of the TV camera. I couldn’t help but smile.

  Took less than an hour for them to get Snowdrift Dawson’s dental realignment on the air. Nice to see they were every bit as willing to compromise the dignity of their own people as they were that of the general public. Equal opportunity jackals somehow seemed more palatable to me. Somebody’s camera had been rolling when the bigger Delaney brother dropped the unfortunate Mr. Dawson like a bad habit.

  They put up the old THIS MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME VIEWERS sign and then pixilated the moment where Delaney’s fist blasted Snowdrift’s front teeth and half a wireless microphone down his thr
oat, but the rest of the disaster was pretty much cinema verité. The public’s right to know and all that.

  Somewhere along the way, we remembered that none of us had eaten a thing all day and called Bite Squad to remedy the situation. Forty minutes later enough mediocre Chinese food to feed a Polish artillery division arrived at the front gate. We ate like a pack of wild dogs, after which Rebecca repaired to my office with her computer files, Gabe headed upstairs for a shower, and I went in and turned on the tube again.

  When I woke up about two thirty, she was still pecking away at the keyboard and wasn’t in any mood to chat, so I tottered into the bedroom, crawled up under the comforter, and slipped into the arms of Morpheus.

  She was still at it, and still crabby as hell, when I woke up a little after eight in the morning, so I took a shower, got dressed, and headed for my car. Along the way I stopped in the kitchen, grabbed a semistale pancake from the counter, filled it with leftover mu shu pork and plum sauce, and stepped out into the morning, in a full chomp.

  “Whorehouse,” George said. He downed a draft beer and ran a hand over his shaggy head. “Hundred bucks a pop. Little Korean girls. Some of ’em don’t look no older than twelve. Don’t none of ’em speak a worda English neither, so they probably ain’t legal.”

  Above us, the line of old-fashioned windows that ran along the Zoo’s mezzanine began to tick, tick, as raindrops from the west began to throw themselves on the ancient panes.

  The clock over the restrooms read 10:09.

  “You’re sure?” I pressed.

  “I have it on good authority.”

  “Such as?”

  “Red,” he yelled. He made a come-over-here gesture with his arm. Red came weaving over from the snooker table, dragging the big end of the pool cue along the floor as he made his way.

  Red was a native of somewhere up in the Northwest Territories. The poster boy for genetic intolerance for alcohol. Just a few drinks and he was either puking outside in the alley or drooling among the peanut shells on the floor. As if that weren’t enough of a social impediment, Red also had a lifelong penchant for exposing himself in public, an unfortunate fetish pretty much guaranteed to put a stop to upward social mobility. His habit of whipping it out and asking “Ain’t that a beauty?” proved to be a social faux pas of truly epic proportions, earning him both repeated stretches behind bars and a level-one sex offender designation. He and I had long ago reached an area of accommodation. I wouldn’t show him mine if he wouldn’t show me his.

  “Tell Leo what you seen inside that joint on South Main,” George said.

  Red lurched closer, leaned the pool cue against the nearest pillar, and then took a seat. “Ain’t right, Leo. Ain’t right,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I like dipping my wick as much as the next guy, but these wasn’t even growed-up women. These was just kids.”

  “So you didn’t . . .”

  He looked horrified. “That ain’t nice, man. I may be a drunken bum, but I ain’t stealin’ nobody’s childhood from ’em. I got kids a my own, Leo.” He shrugged. “Someplace. They doan let me see ’em no more. Not since they was little.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I done like George said. I slipped ’em a yard at the door, and a thick little Asian guy took me upstairs, where the whatcha-call-her was.”

  “What whatcha-call-her?”

  “You know, like the head honey.”

  “The madam.”

  “Yeah, madam. Real painted-up Chinese broad. Meaner than a snake.”

  “Yeah . . . and so?”

  “They sent me down the hall to this room. Little tiny Korean girl.” He looked up at me. “Poor thing wasn’t even haired over.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he went on.

  “So you know . . . I was tryin’ to do what Georgie tole me—you know, pick up as much info as I can—so I told ’em I wanted some other girl. Somethin’ a little older, maybe. Somethin’ with a thatch. So we went to another room. I kept doin’ that till I could tell the musclehead bouncer was thinkin’ about throwin’ my ass out, so I stayed with the last one he took me to. I figured I could at least talk to her and maybe find out somethin’ about what was goin’ on.”

  The pool cue slipped from where Red had leaned it and clattered to the floor. Nobody in the joint batted an eye. Gotta love it.

  “Well . . . turns out she don’t speak nothin’ I speak, and the poor little thing’s so fuckin’ scared of these people she’s whoring for, she keeps tryin’ to get my meat outta my pants, and I’m tryin’ to keep it in, and she’s tryin’ to get it airborne, and I ain’t lettin’ her, and she starts wailin’ at the top of her lungs, and then that leg-breaker motherfucker shows up to see what in hell’s goin’ on, smacks her one upside the head, and throws my ass back out in the street.” He shrugged. “That was it.”

  “Nice work, man,” I said.

  “And the building,” he said. “I forgot about the building.”

  “What about it?”

  “Up on the third floor—you know, up where the girls are doin’ their thing with the customers . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, up there, that building is connected to the buildings on the next block south. You can walk all the way through and go out a door on Jackson Street.”

  “No shit.”

  George leaned close. “When Red told me about it, I checked it out myself. Went through the alley, out on to Jackson. Only thing open that time of night was an all-night falafel stand. Guy workin’ the counter told me they bring the girls out about two every morning. Load ’em in a big old van and drive ’em off someplace. He don’t know where.”

  “How many girls?”

  “Somethin’ like ten or twelve.”

  “Your shot, Red,” somebody shouted from over by the snooker table. George and I watched in silence as Red started across the room, remembered his pool cue, came back over, fetched it from the floor, and stumbled back over to the snooker table.

  “I took the C-note I gave Red from me and Ralphie,” George said.

  I took the hint and forked out another hundred. “What about the other joint?” I asked as he pocketed the cash.

  “Now that’s where things get interesting,” he said with a twinkle. “That Walter Street joint is just a low-rent crib. Got about twenty-five rooms to rent. Grifters. Pimps. Outta work Arthur Murray dance instructors. That sorta trade. That’s where me and Ralphie started out last night. Red and Harold were handling the whorehouse for ya. Anyway . . . right . . . so we’re just hanging around. Ralphie’s panhandling anybody looks like he might have two nickels, when out of four oh seven comes this guy I know named Henry the Hittite. So he takes one look at me and goes, ‘Hey, Georgie Boy, what’s up?’ and we get to yakking. Henry says this Frost guy is a nasty little son of a bitch. Likes to smack people around. Lives up on the top floor, but just sometimes. Henry lives up there too and says Frost don’t sleep there but a couple times a month. Rest of the time he sleeps at wherever it is he works.”

  “Why rent a room if you’re not gonna sleep in it?”

  George held up a grimy finger. “’Cause we hear he don’t pay no rent. Henry says he lives there gratis—on the owner.” He paused for dramatic effect. “So I ask about this owner, and you know what I get?”

  “What?”

  “I get the exact same description I got from Red when he told me about the whorehouse madam. Middle-aged Asian broad, too much makeup and mean enough to frighten feral swine.”

  “Be interesting to find out who owns the buildings,” I said.

  “If your aunt Jean were still running City Records, I coulda found out in five minutes.”

  “Oh, we can still find out. They’re public records. It’ll just cost a hundred fifty bucks and take three weeks.”

  “Progress,” George muttered.

  Sometimes I think the world can be divided into people who have a desire to tell other adults what to do and those who don
’t. I’m one of the latter, a live-and-let-live guy all the way. You do your thing; I’ll do mine. The twain don’t have to meet.

  Don’t get me wrong: if you’re about to step in front of a bus, I’ll stick out my am, but that’s about it. Otherwise, you’re pretty much flyin’ solo, as far as I’m concerned. As long as whatever you’ve got in mind involves other consenting adults, I say go for it.

  When it comes to kids, however, I get downright medieval. I fall right into line with penitentiary convicts, who consider it to be full-time open season on child molesters. I once asked a counselor who worked up at Twin Rivers prison in Monroe if she had any idea why they hated pedophiles so much, and she told me that she thought an ungodly percentage of them, whether they’d admit it or not, had been victims of some sort of abuse. She said she thought that they, at least on some level, knew better than most what the experience of abuse did to a person’s soul, and that was why they were willing to accommodate decapitators, disembowelers, and every other kind of despicable dirtbag, but they don’t tolerate baby rapers.

  So I was a man in an emotional quandary. Part of me knew how desperate Rebecca was for some good news and how much I wanted to be the one to come up with it. Another part of me couldn’t bear thinking about somebody’s kids giving blow jobs for a living. Just flat-out gave me the willies, it did.

  I was still kicking my feelings around when my car pulled itself to the curb across the street from Ibrahim Durka’s townhouse. It wasn’t the first time I’d driven somewhere on automatic pilot, but the older I got, the scarier those moments seemed to become. Like wherever it was I went to got farther away as the years passed. I looked around and heaved a sigh of relief.

  I got out of the car and ran both hands over my face. The fog had blown away, leaving everything adrip. Ibrahim’s front door was closed today. Somebody had left a pot of red geraniums on the porch. Nikka was sitting on the top step, playing a video game on a blue tablet.

  A block up, in the entrance to the park, city workers were installing bright yellow concrete poles designed to prevent motor vehicles from driving into the park. At the insistence of the legal department, I was betting. Talk about a day late and a dollar short.