Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  “My mom,” he said in response to not-so-subtle questioning from Rose, “is half-black and half-Indian. She’s from eastern Oklahoma. My dad is half-white and half-Vietnamese. His mom, my grandma, was a Catholic missionary, a nun, who fell in love with Khanh Pham, my grandpa, whose family came from Hanoi. She renounced her vows so they could be together. He was a doctor. He and his parents fled to the South after the French left Vietnam because the Communists were trying to put them all in a re-education camp. That was back in the 1950s. My grandparents met in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, during the Vietnam War. They settled in Lawrence, her home town, in the late 1960s.” He grimaced. “My great grandparents disappeared after the fall of Saigon in 1975.”

  Emery, who knew and liked Juwan’s parents, said, “Tell them how your folks met, Juwan.”

  The young man smiled, his eyelids narrowing to slits. “They met at KU, back in the 1980s. Dad and Mom were both in pre-med. They went on to the KU medical school in Kansas City, during which time they got married. After they did their internships as ObGyns, during which my older brother Malik was born, they opened a clinic for women in Lawrence, which has done well. I came along in 1990.”

  “Well,” said Rose, “you certainly have an interesting and complex family history.”

  “I’ll say,” Sadie chimed in from across the table. She regarded him with undisguised ardor. J-3, meanwhile, sat beside his father in silence, following the conversation with his eyes, which glistened with amusement.

  Emery could understand why Sadie was so taken with Juwan. He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. His foldless eyelids were the only Asian feature of his face. His nose, a bit on the large side, was slightly hooked. He had soft, sensuous lips, a wide forehead, and bold cheekbones and chin that seemed to have been carved from sandstone. A shaved head completed the look. He could realistically aspire to be a movie star. Maybe one day he would be.

  Emery could also understand the culture shock that Juwan and J-3 had engendered upon the Brody-Clark clan, among other Ouimet residents, as they zoomed into town Wednesday afternoon in Juwan’s immaculate black Civic with dark-tinted windows, tailpipe thrumming, hip hop pounding the subwoofer. The young men had emerged from the Civic wearing hoodies, baggy calf-length denim pants and Converse All-Star sneakers, green for Juwan and red for J-3.

  After he and Carol made love Wednesday night and were dozing off, she murmured, “I hope Sadie’s infatuation with your son’s friend wears off.”

  “Why? He’s a good kid with a good heart and a bright future. He treats her with respect. Would it be so bad if they struck up a real relationship?”

  She propped herself up on an elbow and stroked his chest. “If they become a couple, I doubt they could make a life here. Most people around here are suspicious of anyone who’s non-white.”

  “So this is more about your fear she won’t stay here because of him than about his racial makeup?”

  She poked his sternum. “Of course. They’d make beautiful babies.”

  “She might not stay here anyway. The lure of the big cities can be irresistible for a smart young person like Sadie.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I was part of that, too, when I moved to Denver in the late 1980s, as you know.”

  “You were working for an insurance company, right?”

  She nodded. “As an actuary, a job I got after graduating from FHSU in math. It was interesting work, to me, at least, and it paid well. I had several great boyfriends there. I only came back here because I met Mike during a visit home and fell for him – hard. I’m glad I live in Ouimet. Life here is good, especially since you’re now part of it.”

  “If Sadie and Juwan do become a couple and come back here to live and make babies, people will just have to deal with it. Small towns like Ouimet are going to need new blood to survive.”

  “Your son and Juwan are so … different from the young people around here.”

  “Believe me, I know,” he said. “They seem to be inventing a new way of life. They’re a kind of tribe. They’ve sworn off traditional roles and take the opportunities that arise. They'll probably grow out of it and become solid citizens. But for now, they make do. They seem to have plenty of money.

  “J-3 and his girlfriend, Shirrone, for instance, find run-down houses no one else wants and fix them up as tribal crash pads. She handles the paperwork; he’s the manager. She’s a law student at KU. And Juwan specializes in making computers and cell phones truly private. People pay him good money to disable GPS systems and set up their browsers so no one, including Internet providers, can track where they go or who they e-mail. He shares what he makes with the tribe, as do all the others.”

  She smiled. “No wonder Sadie likes him so much, besides his gorgeous looks, that is. She’s a coder, he’s a hacker. They have a lot in common.”

  She lay her head on his chest. He drifted off to sleep, believing that her misgivings had abated.

  But late Thursday afternoon, as he stood at the head of the table carving the turkey – Ted declined the honor – he watched Carol, Rose and Ted cast occasional worried glances at the couple. Sadie sat close to Juwan, the edges of their chairs touching. Her hand clasped his upper arm – like mother, like daughter.

  The members of the Thanksgiving assemblage dug into their meals. As they ate and drank, they chatted about the weather, the haplessness of the Kansas City Chiefs relative to the mighty Denver Broncos, the bumper yield of the fall corn harvest, the perfidiousness of the feds (a topic that Ted threw into the mix) and the makeup and nature of J-3’s tribal band (a topic that Carol brought up).

  Abruptly, Sadie, brown eyes blazing with fury, declared, “I can see you all looking at me and my friend here with disapproval (she squeezed Juwan’s arm) and I want you to know that I really, really like him. And you can’t do anything about it, so don’t try.” Beside her, Juwan was blushing.

  There ensued a silence, which Carol broke. “I’m happy for you, sweetie. And I, for one, wouldn’t dream of trying to stop it. He’s a wonderful young man.”

  Astonished, Sadie said, “Really, Mom?”

  Carol smiled. “I’d be a fine one to try to stop you from loving the man of your choice when I’ve decided to marry Joe.”

  Emery could feel his face burning. “Oh, Carol, that makes me so happy. Thank you.”

  “I love you, Joe.”

  J-3 said, “Good for you, Poppy. You deserve a great chick like her.”

  “Thanks, kid,” Emery said, “but …”

  The sound of the front door splintering, followed by loud voices, threw the room into chaos. As four men, hooded in black ski masks, burst into the front hallway, Emery saw Juwan kick open the French doors that gave onto the rear patio. He pushed Sadie outside and followed her, J-3 on their heels. As Emery rose to his feet, one of the invaders punched him on the jaw. His glasses flew onto the floor. The pain was excruciating. As consciousness sagged, he heard Carol screaming and Ted shouting.

  Chapter 24: Home Invasion

  November 25, 5:10 p.m.

  Emery shook the cobwebs from his head and staggered to his feet. The house was in chaos. The men had tipped over the dining room table and broken several chairs. He could hear crashing in the kitchen and front parlor. Ted was fighting with one of the two intruders in the dining room. Emery jumped onto the back of the other man, who had Carol backed against the wall by the door to the kitchen and was punching her in the stomach. He gouged the man’s eyes. The invader released Carol, who sunk, moaning, to the floor, her face contorted with pain, blood streaming down her chin.

  The man, who smelled garlicky, roared and twisted his shoulders, slinging Emery into the wall. He landed next to the remains of the turkey, inches away from the French doors. Rose was lying on the floor at the foot of the upended table. The intruder was rubbing his eyes. He stumbled over a chair and fell across the table.

  Emery crawled to Carol and pulled her toward the study. Along the way he retrieved his glasses,
miraculously unbroken. He lifted her gently onto the inflatable bed where J-3 had slept, opened his tech bag and extracted the revolver.

  Back in the dining room, he pointed the gun at the man whose eyes he’d gouged, clicked off the safety and increased his finger pressure on the trigger. Changing his mind, he pointed at the ceiling and fired the gun. The roar was deafening.

  The man fighting with Ted looked at Emery, who leveled the gun at him. Holding out his hands and edging toward his partner in mayhem, he rasped, “We’re leaving.”

  Emery nodded, keeping the gun trained on him. The intruder helped his buddy to his feet and led him through the archway that divided the dining room from the front hallway. Emery edged closer to the two men, keeping his back to the dining room wall.

  “C’mon. We’re leaving.” one of them shouted toward the parlor. A third intruder emerged from the parlor, then, seeing Emery with the gun, sidled toward the other two. Emery heard the door between the kitchen and dining room, which was mounted on 180-degree hinges with springs, open beside his right shoulder. As the fourth man came through, Emery showed him the gun and said, “Keep moving, asshole.”

  The man, who had blue eyes, snickered. “Are you Joe Emery?”

  “That’s right. And if you don’t think I’ll drill you in the guts, try me.”

  “You won’t shoot. You’re too civilized. We just wanted to express our irritation to you and your loved ones. You know, take you by surprise, bust up the place, punch you and your girlfriend out to show you we're serious. Back the fuck off with your stupid blog or we’ll come after you in bigger numbers, with guns of our own.”

  Emery aimed his gun at the man’s right foot and pulled the trigger. Boom! God, it felt good. A half-inch hole appeared in the man’s boot, near the toe. Blood bubbled out of the wound. He screamed. Ted, across the room, shouted, “Yeah. Put one in his ear.”

  “If your group of thugs does come back,” Emery told the wounded man, “you won’t be with them. You'll be in rehab, assuming they don’t kill you like they killed poor Lazlo.” The man’s eyes widened. Emery pointed the gun at his left foot. “The only question now is how many toes will have to be amputated.”

  The man groaned and began shuffling toward the archway, giving Emery a wide berth and leaving a smear of blood on the carpet. The animal in Emery wanted to plug him in the stomach. But his human side won the struggle and he allowed the man to go past him. One of the two unwounded intruders put and arm around his shoulders. The four exited through the broken front door.

  Emery ran to the front door and peered out. The men were getting into a white Dodge van – the white Dodge van? – parked at the curb. He noticed Juwan’s Civic half a block down the street, exhaust thrumming. J-3 was with him. Emery couldn’t tell whether Sadie was in the car.

  Then he heard her behind him, in the dining room, screaming, “Grandma!” The van tore away. The Civic flashed past the house in pursuit. Hoping that J-3 and Juwan would have the good sense to write down the tag number – and not to engage the intruders – he ran into the dining room. Ted and Sadie were kneeling beside Rose, who was moaning, eyes open – a good sign. She had heart problems. Emery had feared she was dead.

  “Call for an ambulance, sweetie,” he told Sadie. She extracted her cell phone from the pocket of her slacks.

  In the study, Carol writhed on the air mattress, holding her abdomen and ribcage. “Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

  Eyes awash with tears, which ran down her face and mixed with the blood, she whispered, “No,” then passed out. He heard the wail of a siren.

  The Ouimet Volunteer EMS unit took Carol to the regional trauma center in Garden City. Emery rode in the back of the ambulance with her. After coming to, Rose refused to ride to the hospital in the ambulance’s other gurney, saying she was fine.

  Emery held Carol’s hand all the way to the hospital. She gave him a weak squeeze from time to time.

  Blood was drooling from her mouth, a sign of internal bleeding, according to the medic attending her. He had elevated her head and torso by about 30 degrees so she wouldn’t choke on the blood.

  At the hospital, the admitting nurse sent Emery to the waiting room, promising that a doctor would report on her condition as soon as possible. First, they had to get her stabilized. The good news, said the nurse, was that her vital signs were steady.

  Perhaps 20 minutes after he slumped into a chair, his phone chirped. A strange number showed in the display. The caller was a male reporter from the Garden City newspaper, whose name Emery didn’t catch. Ted had given him Emery’s number. Emery, remembering the old days when he was the one begging for information, gave the reporter a digest of the assault on the house and its occupants. He held back key details for his own use on The Vindicator.

  After that, he dozed awhile. A little before 10 p.m., Juwan and J-3 joined him in the waiting room. He hugged them both. “Tell me what you found out.”

  “They went north out of town. We got the license number,” J-3 said, handing Emery a gum wrapper. On the back was scribbled “3293 ADU.” The “ADU” strongly suggested that this was another tag in the secret database at the Department of Revenue. He put the wrapper in his wallet.

  “Great work, guys. How far did you follow them?”

  “Just far enough to make sure Juwan’s homing device was working,” the kid said. “He had it in the gadget bag he keeps in his car. It’s a little old-fashioned, but it was all we had. We stuck this little magnetized sending unit in that van’s glove box, where it’ll be hard to find, if they think to sweep it for bugs at all. We can track it with its receiver, but the battery in the homing device is only good for a week, maybe eight days.

  “Poppy, I hope you don’t feel like we abandoned you. My man here pulled Sadie outside to make sure she’d be safe and I followed him. We got her stashed out in the back yard shed and were coming back in to fight them when we saw you fire your gun into the ceiling. You had things under control. On the way out the door, I noticed that they weren’t armed. So we decided to take countermeasures.”

  Juwan nodded. “They were counting on brute strength and intimidation to control the situation.” He looked admiringly at his best friend’s dad. “Obviously, they underestimated you.”

  “Thanks to the kid here,” Emery said, smiling for the first time in hours, “I was strapped.”

  Both young men nodded, grinning.

  “We heard two shots,” J-3 said. “Are they both in the ceiling?”

  “Last one’s in the floor, I think. I shot the man who was wrecking the kitchen in the foot. He said they’d come after us again and implied they'd kill us. I think the projectile went all the way through.”

  “How did it feel to shoot him?” Juwan asked.

  “Good. What’s the situation back at the house?”

  “We got back a little after the ambulance left,” Juwan said. “Sadie’s shook up and really worried about her mom. Ted’s OK. He got into a fistfight with one of them and did some damage. He’s got a couple of bruises on his face. Two sheriff’s deputies came over and took a report. We, um, told them we didn’t know who fired the shots. I don’t know what Ted told them. We stashed the gun in your backpack before they got there. Found it on the floor in the study. They said the sheriff may want to follow up with you tomorrow about what happened.”

  “The local doc came over and took at look at Sadie’s grandma,” J-3 said. “Ted called her. The doc said Grandma Rose has a chronic heart murmur and she probably fainted. But she’s no worse off than she was before. Doc gave her a sleeping pill and sent her to bed. Sadie’s sitting up with her. We were going to help clean up the mess, but the deputies declared the downstairs area a crime scene and called for some techs to come from the regional crime lab up here and look it over. So we came over here to see how Carol’s doing so we can let them know.”

  “Tell them we’re waiting on word about Carol,” Emery said. He was weary. “If you guys don�
�t mind, I’m going to snooze for a bit.” He slid his butt to the edge of the chair, extended his legs and fitted his neck onto the top edge of the chair back. Juwan was speaking into his phone.

  As he drifted off, J-3 said, “We’ll watch over you, Poppy.”

  A little after midnight, someone gently touched Emery’s shoulder and murmured, “Mr. Clark.” The blogger-cum-gunman awoke to find a squat brown-faced man in a white coat looking down at him. “I am Dr. Jayaraman.” Emery struggled to his feet. J-3 and Juwan were on their feet already.

  “It’s Emery, not Clark,” he said. “Is Carol going to be OK? She’s my fiancée.”

  The doctor said, “Two ribs are cracked. She coughed up some blood, so we performed an endoscopy on her esophagus, stomach and upper intestinal tract, but found no ruptures or clotting. We think the blunt force trauma to her abdomen ruptured a blood vessel farther down in the upper intestine, but the bleeding appears to have stopped. So, yes, she will be all right. She is very strong.”

  Relief swept through him. “She is.”

  Jayaraman looked sternly at Emery. “Who did this to her?”

  “Dude,” said J-3, “we had a home invasion. Four men. My Dad here ran them off. Check with the sheriff’s office down in Ouimet. They’ll tell you what happened.”

  The doctor nodded. “We will do that.” To Emery, he said, “We will keep her overnight and possibly Friday night. We need to make certain the bleeding has ceased before we release her.”

  “May I see her?”

  “All right. She is awake, but you must stay only two minutes.”

  He found her in an emergency room bay. Her face was swollen, her hair a tangled, bloody mess. But she managed a smile when she saw him tiptoe in. “Hi,” she whispered.

  “Hi. I’m so sorry they hurt you to get at me,” he quavered.

  “Not your fault,” she whispered. “Everyone else OK?”