The Safety Expert

by Doug Richardson

  But what of her partner, Romeo?

  It was Romeo’s habit to cover for Gonzo and that duty included running through her inter-office memos. If he had checked in to his desk on Wednesday, he would have read the news of Stew Raymo’s overnight incarceration and surely forwarded it on to Gonzo’s personal email. But Romeo had chosen to turn Gonzo’s sick day into a golden opportunity to impress the lieutenant who ran the downtown division’s Gang Suppression Unit. So instead of a day in his low-backed swivel chair writing and filing e-reports from the gray windowless detectives’ cubicle he shared with Gonzo, he drove to downtown’s Parker Center and volunteered to assist his new homies in the G.S.U. A transfer, promised the lieutenant, would come with a reduction in both pay and estrogen, and a decided increase in adrenalin.

  And since Ben didn’t appear interested in picking up his cell phone and nobody in his office was answering calls, Gonzo went patrolling for him disguised in that Valley Checkered Cab she had borrowed from the PD. She first went by Ben’s home, then the nearby coffee haunts, followed by the gym where they first met and became friends.

  Gonzo reasoned that Ben was merely underground and licking his marital wounds. Or maybe with a therapist, working some healthy mental exercises. Gonzo even tried to picture Ben in a rented Mustang convertible, top down and roaring up Pacific Coast Highway to air out his newfound loneliness in the ocean breezes. None of her thoughts, though, quelled the pit that was growing in her gut. Gonzo liked to think she could trust her instincts. Cops, after all, survived on training and intuition. And Gonzo’s intuition was scraping at her stomach lining, forming an acid reflux tsunami—all reminding her that Ben was on some dangerous, self-destructive collision course with a psychopath. Why had she visited Raymo in the hospital? And why had she confirmed Ben’s suspicions about the prick?

  “Dispatch,” called Gonzo over her radio.

  “Identify,” replied the dispatcher.

  “Gonzalez. Six-Mary-Zebra-Two-Four-Seven-Seven.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Requesting North Hollywood street address. Raymo, first name Stew or Stewart. R-A-Y-M-O.”

  “Subject is listed at two-one-two-three Morrison Street. Cross street is Lauren Canyon.”

  After a warmish Southern California winter, where rain had come in fits and starts, those perma-tanned TV weathermen were predicting that come Wednesday, the skies would darken and unleash something on par with a mild hurricane. Winds, thunder and heavy downpours, flooding intersections and increasing the possibility of mudslides. But until the first raindrops fell, experienced Angelenos would likely keep the tops stowed on their convertibles, umbrellas in the broom closets, and favor outdoor recreation over the certain depression that came with days bunkered inside their workplaces and homes

  Outdoor malls—or destination sites as city planners called them—were popular. Themed mosh pits of retail stores, pricey chain restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and movie theaters advertising state of the art, ear-crushing sound and cushy, stadium seating with loads of legroom. City Walk was such a junction for commerce and crowds.

  Annexed to the hilltop Universal Studios theme park, City Walk at night was Blade Runner-esque, its thousands of linear feet of colored neon second only to New York City’s Times Square. And with parking aplenty, the tourist attraction seemed to draw an equal concoction of locals and international visitors alike.

  Increasingly xenophobic, Stew hated the place. He hated sharing the same oxygen with so many Asians and Hispanics, none of who, to his ear, spoke a word of English. He hated the noise. He hated paying for the parking. He hated the twisting sea of constant foot traffic. So if there were twenty square acres of San Fernando Valley real estate where Pam felt relatively safe from her husband, it was City Walk at night.

  “I’m thinking of keeping the baby,” said Pam. “I mean, I know I don’t have the baby yet. But I want to go ahead with it, you know? The adoption part.”

  “Of course,” said Ben, finding it difficult to fully concentrate on Pam without constantly scanning the parade of humanity that meandered by their dinner table as if caught in the flow of a muddy river.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Pam. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”

  “No,” answered Ben. “Why do you wanna know?”

  “Is it hard to look at me? The big glasses and all?”

  Though it was nighttime and the light at the sidewalk-styled table was dim enough to make young eyes strain just to read the menu, Pam insisted on wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses she had purchased during her stay at the nearby Universal Hilton. Understandable, thought Ben. Despite coats of heavy makeup, the wide shades and a blazing white bucket hat with an embroidered yellow sunburst, there was little hiding the damage Stew had done to Pam’s face. Ben felt silently responsible—an accessory to the crime—as if Stew had passed along the beating he had received from Ben to Pam.

  “Force of habit,” said Ben. “Always on the lookout for danger.”

  “I told you. This is the last place on earth he would ever come look for me.”

  “Been awhile since I’ve been up here,” shifted Ben. “Any more people and we could start a new area code.”

  “Makes me feel invisible,” said Pam. “Not the getup. You know, the glasses and the makeup. All the people. They make me feel like I can disappear.”

  “You’re pretty hard to miss,” complimented Ben. “Even with the...”

  Pam nodded. She understood Ben’s inference.

  “Once a sucker, always a sucker,” smiled Pam.

  “Sucker for what?”

  “Compliments. I like compliments.”

  “And your taste in headwear,” quipped Ben, quick on the uptake. “Cutting edge. Next year’s fashion.”

  “Are you...” Pam leaned across the table. “Are you flirting with me?”

  Ben straightened. Was he flirting?

  “It’s okay, you know,” said Pam. “Flirting is good.”

  “Been awhile,” said Ben, uncertain.

  Before either could think of something witty to add, the square-jawed server-cum-actor appeared with a tasting platter of shrimp. Fried, sautéed, skewered, sizzling in butter.

  “Yum,” said Pam. “Smells awesome.”

  Pam’s invitation for Ben to join her for dinner was less a request than an insistence to somehow repay him for saving her from her own deadly thoughts. Not that she had fully told Ben what kind of precipice she had been teetering on the moment her phone rang. Nor did Ben feel inclined to explain to Pam that he had made the rescue call when he was blindly drunk and had zero recollection of doing so, let alone what he might have said or why in God’s name he had dialed her number in the first place.

  “You still staying at the hotel here?”

  “Just last night. I’m over at the Beverly Garland now. Burning up Stew’s credit card at two bills a night.”

  “I can understand not wanting to go back to your—”

  “Enough about me,” interrupted Pam, forcing a girlish voice. “On my way here I was thinking, What the hell do I know about this Ben the Safety Dude?”

  “Oh. So now I’m the Ben the Safety Dude?”

  “Unless you mind being Ben the Safety Dude?”

  “No no. I’ve been the Safety Man, the Safety Guy, Mister Safety. Guess I can add Ben the Safety Dude to the lexicon. Of course, only if it suits your purpose...”

  “And what do you think my purpose is?” grinned Pam, eyebrows raised. She clearly enjoyed the playful banter. It had been some time since she had allowed herself.

  “Now who’s flirting?” asked Ben.

  “I am sooo busted!” Pam peeled a large steamed shrimp, dipped it in sauce, then sucked it before popping it into her mouth. “But I’m also curious.”

  Ben paused, making sure he appeared more thoughtful than terrified that she would see through him.

  “You want to know if there’s more to me than being a widowed repository of useless safety tips.”

&nbs
p; “No such thing as a useless safety tip.”

  “No?”

  “Bring it, Safety Dude.”

  “Okay,” said Ben, hardly challenged, but maybe allowing himself to get a little lost in her charm, which was direct without coming off as pushy or controlling.

  “After beefsteak,” quizzed Ben. “What would you say is the number one choking hazard for a woman?”

  If only Ben could have seen Pam’s eyes behind those dark shades. Her face slackened just enough. Her eyes, narrowed. Her lips were suddenly pursed and stiff.

  Could he know about me?

  At least, that’s what Pam wondered. Could Ben have known all along about her porno half-life? Was that why Ben was brave enough to call her at home—where she lived with her husband—at midnight of all hours? Pam looked harder at Ben, dark as it was through the smoked lenses, certain that if he was some kind of perv, she could read it on him.

  “What?” asked Ben, innocently.

  “You think that’s funny?” she asked, sounding a bit harsher than she had planned.

  “Funny how?” Ben shook his head.

  “It’s not like I’m some kind of prude. I mean, it is funny, I guess...”

  “Not without a punch line,” said Ben, completely clueless of his own rude suggestion.

  “There is a punch line?” asked Pam, forcing herself to soften. She liked Ben. She felt she had read the fine print. Her instincts instructed her as much. “A punch line I gotta hear. See, I thought the question was the joke. Women. Meat. Choking hazard.”

  And Ben finally got it. He had been handed the key to his own subconscious vault of bad double entendres, yet still needed some stunner of woman to unlock it for him.

  “Oh, crap,” announced Ben, his ears flushing red with embarrassment. “Did I ask what I think I asked?”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” said Ben, laughing aloud at himself. “Wow. Not at all what I was thinking.”

  “So there really is a punch line?” asked Pam.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, shaking his head. “Shrimp. Other than beefsteak, the second most common choking hazard for women is—”

  “Shrimp?” Pam joined in with the laughing, but still not entirely certain that Ben was genuinely chagrined at his gaff.

  “Something to do with the shape and the size of the air shaft...”

  “You did not just said shape, size, shaft,” she pointed in a mock accusation, eyebrows raised high above those wide, black rims.

  “You asked for a useless safety tip.”

  “And the tip is?”

  “Chicken,” said Ben. “Eat more chicken.”

  Ben shrugged and cut into some of the sautéed shrimp.

  Pam leaned a little bit forward.

  “You don’t really know, do you?” she asked. “About me. Who I am. Where I’m from. What I’ve done and all that.”

  “Guess that makes us a little bit even.”

  Pam agreed, nodding. But before returning to her meal, she had to ask:

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Big question,” answered Ben.

  “Big subject.”

  “Suppose,” began Ben before doubling back and rethinking his answer. “Suppose I do. But there’s a lotta questions I’d want to ask Him before I’d vote Him in as the one and only true deity.”

  “Like why do bad things happen—”

  “Something along those lines, yeah,” finished Ben, feeling wholly uncomfortable with the subject. So he retreated into glibness with, “And if God answered my initial question satisfactorily, I’d follow up with who killed JFK? I’d also ask Him to explain the popularity of golf and NASCAR.”

  Though Pam laughed willingly, she wasn’t yet ready to let the subject die.

  “I believe,” she said. “I believe He rescued me from my addiction. I believe He wants me to have a baby of my own. And I believe, for whatever reason, He sent you to rescue me from Stew.”

  “A nine-one-one operator would’ve given you the same advice,” said Ben, matter-of-factly.

  “The nine-one-one operator didn’t call me,” said Pam. “But you did.”

  “You’re not eating,” said Ben, desperate to shift the conversation.

  “Neither are you.”

  “Guess I’m not hungry...” said Ben.

  “You like movies?”

  “Sure,” said Ben.

  “Wanna go? I feel like I could eat a tub of popcorn.”

  But Ben didn’t answer.

  From Pam’s perspective, Ben was locked-off at the neck, staring into space, appearing as if he hadn’t heard her offer.

  “I said, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’ You, me. Dark room. A box of five-dollar Junior Mints?”

  “Will you...” Ben pushed his chair out, left his napkin on his plate. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  Without so much as looking at Pam for permission or even acknowledging her invitation to the movies, he was climbing over the chain that separated the diners from the flow of pedestrian traffic.

  “No problem,” said Pam to nobody in particular.

  With Ben gone, Pam fought the sudden sense of abandonment, looking to flag down a waiter to refill her glass with iced tea.

  It was a tattoo that stole Ben’s attention.

  A flash-frame moment that tripped Ben in the middle of his conversation with Pam about God and movies. Amid the constant wash of City Walk visitors cruising past their sidewalk table, Ben thought he had seen a Wile Coyote cartoon character peeking over the back of a woman’s red blouse. In his life, he had seen only one other tattoo like it. And that was on Josie on the rare day she pinned her dyed black hair into a curly updo.

  But the minute Ben had jumped the chain and pushed into the crowd, he thought he had already lost her. It was a disorganized mass of flesh that moved in all directions. And with every step, regret crept in about leaving poor Pam in an uncomfortable lurch. All because he had wanted to apologize to Josie for sending her home without an explanation on that awful day and for his months of inconsistent behavior. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had asked how she was doing, an obvious failure at Employer 101: How to Keep and Care for Your Valued Workers.

  Sum total: Ben had been a lousy boss and wanted to say, “I’m sorry.”

  Ahead, Ben caught another glimpse of his ex-assistant in a spot where the walking lane widened. He saw her wobble slightly on a pair of stiletto heels. Not her usual footwear. In truth, he couldn’t recall having seen Josie wear anything other than Converse All Stars.

  “Josie?” Ben shouted out. His voice was swallowed by the music pounding from a giant screen playing music videos mixed with live camera shots of the crowd. So Ben shouted her name, “JOSIE!”

  Josie heard him, twisting and nearly tripping over her own tangled feet, all while trying not to drop her neon pink, frozen strawberry daiquiri served in a foot-long plastic tube. Josie released the straw from her mouth in surprise.

  “Ben?”

  Ben’s mind rehashed the last day he had seen her. Monday. The day Stew came to apologize for murdering Ben’s family. Ben recalled Stew using Josie as an example of recovery. That Josie had a year of sobriety under her belt. And later, when Ben was letting Josie go for the day, he had taken note of her keychain, and, indeed he had seen something that looked like a recovery chip. Not that he was any kind of expert. Not until Josie was standing feet from him, teetering on her unusually high heels, and sucking on what looked like a gallon of frozen rum and strawberry mix, had the short memory been reborn in living color.

  “Josie,” began Ben, uncertain of his next words, what he wanted to say or how in the world he would say it.

  Then somebody from behind squeezed Ben’s arm. Pam, he thought. She had bounced out on the check and chased him through the throng. But the grip on his arm was less than feminine, with a force that spun Ben around.

  Stew Raymo stood inches from Ben, one large hand gripping Ben’s arm, the other holding an eq
ually obscene concoction of frozen blue booze.

  “What the fuck?” said Stew, not necessarily directing the comment at Ben.

  “We just bumped,” said Josie, stepping up. “Just this second.”

  Heat rose in Ben’s face, turning prickly across his skin and radiating inside until he felt his shock turn to fear. Ben’s fight-or-flight instinct manifested in a clockwise swing of his arm that broke Stew’s viselike grasp. Only Stew released his blue tube, gathered handfuls of Ben’s shirt and stuck his face close to Ben’s, grinning through his black-and-blue complexion.

  “’Bout that apology,” growled Stew. “Takin’ it back.”

  “Murderer!” hissed Ben. And in the utterance of that single word, Ben was never more convicted.

  “Ready for Round Two?”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  The next ten seconds were a blur.

  Stew drove the peak of his forehead into Ben’s skull with such efficiency that, in what seemed like a mere blink of an eye, Ben was on the ground and unable to force his eyes to focus. First he saw shoes. Then streaks of neon. And then Josie pushing herself in between him and Stew.

  “What you do that for?” asked Josie, angrily.

  “That was nothin’,” said Stew. “Stick around, honey, and watch me do a helluva lot worse.”

  “No! I won’t let you!”

  “Let him,” shouted Ben, staggering to his feet and pointing to the ground. “Let him kill me right here!”

  Stew shoved Josie aside. And with clenched fists and a drunken resolve, he approached Ben with a tunnel vision so extreme—so deviant—that he hadn’t yet noticed the crowd drawing a wide circle around him.

  “Do it!” goaded Ben. “Got me a thousand witnesses. Got camera phones all around. I may die here and now, but you’re gonna spend the rest of forever in prison!”

  Ben stood his ground. Defiant, determined, and—though it may have been only for that adrenalin-fueled moment—fully prepared to meet his death if it meant justice and the end of Stew Raymo.