The Ruthless

by David Putnam

  Also By David Putnam

  The Heartless

  The Reckless

  The Innocents

  The Vanquished

  The Squandered

  The Replacements

  The Disposables

  Copyright © 2021 by David Putnan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-406-6

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  This book is dedicated to Pat and Bob Gussin.

  My rocky journey to publication started decades ago, involving four literary agents and 156 rejections (before I quit counting). I was writing my thirty-eighth manuscript when Pat and Bob picked up The Disposables, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Thank you, Pat and Bob, for helping me—and so many others—see dreams come true.

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN THE ERRATIC world of a criminal, the bond of friendship is always tenuous; loyalty often tested by fire and blood. In the case of my friend Nigel Braddock that unfortnate trial came much too soon.

  I sat behind the wheel of the stolen Monte Carlo, my head on a swivel, watching, waiting. Nigel sat in the passenger seat, unable to stop moving. He fidgeted constantly, shifting in the seat, scratching his cheek, his neck, the top of his head. His long, sandy-blond hair was stringy and greasy and hadn’t been washed in at least a week, a classic paranoid tweaker on meth who perceived danger at every turn.

  “Come on, let’s get moving,” he urged. “We’re sitting ducks back here. The cops are always comin’ by this place. They’re always cruising this parking lot. And I mean all the damn time.”

  Odd, the term he chose. The cops called a stolen car without a suspect in it a “duck.” He was right that if a cop cruised the back parking lot of the Crazy Eight, there would be trouble. A black guy dressed as a trucker, sitting with a white meth freak in a new Monte? That scenario would pique any cop’s interest. No way could I afford to be caught in a stolen ride. I still had too much left to do.

  A strong chemical odor emitted from Nigel, from his clothes, from the pores of his skin, and from his breath when he spoke. Everyone on the street knew him as Nidge. He’d been chasing the dragon: smoking meth by heating it up on a piece of foil and inhaling the vapors.

  For the thousandth time, he spun in his seat to look out the back window. He spun back and checked the mirrors. I reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Stop. Just stop, sit back, and take a breath.” I knew it was impossible for him, no matter how hard he tried. He was in the grip of a five-day bender, probably on the verge of seeing phantoms and ghosts. In another day, if he made it that long without crashing, imaginary bugs would crawl out of his skin. Before his heart exploded, I needed to score him some downers and insist he take them. He’d sleep for a week—and that was something else I didn’t need. Nigel was too important to what I had going on.

  “I told ya,” he said. “I could cop you a gun just about anywhere. Even at the Big O Donuts on Alondra. We don’t neeeed to be doing this right here, right now. Not in the back of the Crazy Eight, not in a hot short, for cripes sake. This is crazy, man. And I mean crazy with a capital K.”

  He was an old hippie, a throwback from the seventies who came to meth late in life.

  “Shut up and sit tight,” I said, looking up in the rearview. “Here he is now. It’ll only be a minute more and we’ll be gone.” I opened the door and got out. I closed the door, bent at the waist, and leaned back in. “You all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m good. Just get ’er done so we can make like babies and head out.”

  I slapped the open windowsill. “Good. Two minutes, then we’re outta here.”

  The front of the Crazy Eight sat on Central Avenue at the corner of Eighty-First Street. No one parked out front: Central was too busy and the curb was painted red. The back of the bar comprised the bottom lip of an “L” configuration to a dilapidated strip center filled with parlors—one tattoo, two massage, and one beauty. The rest was made up of a donut shop with grease-smeared windows, a check-cashing place, and a pawnshop. The two high windows at the back of the Crazy Eight sported heavy wrought iron, the same as the door. Weeds grew in the cracks in the asphalt in the underused part of the parking lot, and artistic gang graffiti tagged the walls with brightly colored names that visitors from another country might misconstrue as intentional.

  The BMW that had parked in front of Jerry’s Pawn Shop fit right in with the other patrons of the strip center. It had scarred and sun-faded red paint and old crash damage to the right rear. I’d been hoping for a newer car, something to indicate a higher level of professionalism. The closer I got to it, the harder I ground my teeth. I’d been misled. This guy was a down-on-his-luck PI out there taking the dregs, the cast-off cases. I knocked on the passenger window, bent, and peered in. A woman—not what I expected from the street-side referral. She was a brunette who looked sixteen but was probably twenty-six or even thirty. She pushed the button on her door. The window came down so we could talk. “I’m Karl Higgins.” I lied about the name. “I’m the one who called you.”

  I couldn’t see her left hand, which she kept down between her seat and the driver’s door. “Pick up your shirttails,” she said, “and let me see your waistband. Then turn around slowly.”

  “Not gonna happen. I know you got a gun in your hand, so you don’t need to worry about me. I’m going to reach into my back pocket, so just take it easy.” I pulled out a bundle of hundreds, folded in the middle and kept together with a red rubber band. I tossed it on the seat. “Here’s my good faith. Now can we talk?”

  Her eyes never left mine as her hand snaked over to snatch the bundle off the passenger seat. She thumbed it with one hand seeing that it wasn’t a grifter’s con, that the bills in the center weren’t ones and fives. “Okay, step back. We’ll talk outside.” She rolled up the window.

  She wasn’t a fool. To let me into the car would’ve been a dangerous rookie move. She met me around the front of her battered heap and kept her distance. She wore a loose-fitting shirt that hid her curves and any weapons she carried. She had intense brown eyes and little dimples at the corners of her mouth. “You said you wanted someone found, a child, is that correct?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But I have to tell you that for this kind of money I was hoping for”—I glanced back at her banged-up Beemer—“Ah … someone a little more professional.”

  She smiled even though I had disparaged her character. It changed her entire personality. “So, let me get this straight. You are paying me in cash, meeting behind a bar that in the last year has had a murder in this parking lot and one inside, not to mention the nine other felonious assaults and two solicitations for prostitution, and I don’t meet your expectations?”

  So she was professional and smart and had done her homework. I liked that.

  I looked around and didn’t see any cars in the area that she might have brought along to back her play.

  “I’m here by myself. Who do you want found?”

  “Like you said, a child.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Does
n’t that kind of money preclude me from having to answer that question?”

  “Male adult, sure. Kids and women, not a chance.”

  I liked her more and more, but I couldn’t tell her the entire truth. Not with what I had in mind. “The child is in foster care right now, placed there by CPS, which is fine. For now, anyway.”

  “But soon,” she spoke the rest for me, “this child is going to be released into … a hostile environment?”

  “That’s correct. There is a very real possibility the child is going to be released to a dangerous predator and then Alonzo will be in severe danger.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.” I raised my voice. Just that quick I’d let loose some of that pent-up rage Doc Abrams talked about. I held up my hands. “I’m sorry. Really. It’s just this is a hot-button issue with me.”

  “Is this child your son?”

  “No.” That wasn’t a lie. From the way she handled herself, and based on the questions she asked, I wouldn’t be able to hide my identity from her for very long, not once she found Alonzo.

  “What’s going to happen when I find this location and give you the address?”

  I stared her in the eyes. “I have nothing but goodwill toward this child. I promise you nothing bad is going to happen to him. I only want to ensure his safety and have only the best intentions. There’s no subtext here, no hidden agenda.”

  She stared at me. The moment hung fat between us. I didn’t look away and returned her gaze.

  She took out a notepad and pen. “Okay, what’s his full name?”

  “Alonzo Sams.”

  “Black male? How old?”

  “Yes, and he’s just under two years old.”

  She closed her notebook and put it in her back pocket.

  “Wait. What’s wrong? Don’t you want the rest of the information?”

  “I’ll have the address where CPS has placed Alonzo no later than tomorrow.” She moved around the car and opened the door and stood looking over the roof of the Beemer.

  “Hey,” I said, “you don’t know how to contact me.”

  She reached into her pants pocket and took out the wad of cash I’d given her. She tossed it to me. I caught it, stunned. “No, please, I need your help.” I couldn’t get anywhere close to Alonzo without someone recognizing me or I’d have already found him myself.

  “The beard threw me off for a minute,” she said. “Bruno, you’re money’s no good with me. I used to work LAPD. Ned Kiefer was a great guy. I was there that night Ned died. That same night you beat JB’s ass in your front yard. I’ll get you your address. And if you need anything else, anything at all, you just ask.” She turned around to face Eighty-First Street and a used car lot on the south side. She stuck her index finger in the air and twirled it. A sleek, late-model black BMW with smoked windows, hidden among other cars, pulled out and drove away. She got in the banged-up red Beemer, started up, and followed.

  Huh.

  I got back into the stolen Monte and was met with the sweet scent of marijuana smoke. Nigel sat mellowed out and reclined in his seat smoking a fatty of high-grade sensimilla Kona Gold that we’d scored shortly after he picked me up in the Monte Carlo. I started the car. Nigel’s head slowly came around. “Where to now, Bwana?”

  “You said you were going to take me to get some guns.”

  “Yeah … yeah … that’s right. No. Wait? Did I say that? You sure I said that? That’s some heavy shit you’re asking for this time.” His eyes were mere slits.

  “Yeah, you did say that, and yeah, you’re going to do it. Now tell me where we’re going.”

  He stayed slumped down below the window ledge. “Take it easy, big man. Cool your jets, okay? Jumbo, man, he can get you whatever you want. Long as you got the green. You got the green, big man?”

  “Just tell me how to get there, Nigel, and let me worry about the rest.”

  “Jumbo’s got everything you need. He took off a train car of military-grade shit. You want M-4 rifles, nine-mil pistols, he’s got a ton of ’em.” He laughed. “Literally a ton. Get it?”

  “Just give me the directions.”

  Nigel tried to slap my arm and missed. “You got it, big man, head east. Jumbo’s got an auto parts place over in Norwalk. He’s sellin’ ’em out the back door.”

  I pulled out onto Central and turned south. I’d only gone a block when the quick chirp from a cop car’s siren caused me to check my rearview. An LAPD patrol car right behind us turned on its overhead red and blues, no siren. He wanted me to pull over.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Nigel, still scrunched down in the seat and unaware of the threat, said, “Hey, you know, I could eat. You wanna stop and get some tacos?”

  I pulled to the curb and stopped. “How does a sack lunch with a bologna sandwich on dried-out white bread sound?”

  “Nah, man, I ate enough of those in jail. Let’s get us some tacos.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BODY ODOR AND the sour essence of vomit never leaves the jail, no matter how hard the trustees scrub and scour. The scent particles permeate the natural pores in the concrete and tile grout. It stays there until the building grows antiquated and when demolished dies a silent death. Within months of opening a new jail, it too takes on that same essence, one that represents hopelessness and despair and all too often becomes a symbol of lost lives.

  I sat on the concrete bench in a holding cell next to my partner in crime, Nigel Braddock, and fifteen other unfortunates. Some of them sat on the floor or stood against the wall. A fat black man with his shorts down to his ankles shamelessly stood over the stainless-steel toilet, urinating. The humid reek rose up and mingled among the other men, who had nowhere to go to get away from it.

  The right side of my face throbbed from the kick the LAPD officer delivered while I lay facedown on the pavement, my hands out from my sides in a classic felony prone position. I had been taken out of a “rolling stolen” at gunpoint, and the cop gave me a little extra just because he could. Or maybe he had a thing against blacks or black truck drivers. I understood the concept, the theory of “them against us.” Had it been twenty years earlier, the odds were better than even that I’d have ended up in a hospital jail ward with sutures and broken bones. Back then, this little bit of curbside justice was the reason why some GTA—Grand Theft Auto—artists preferred to take their chances running rather than take a well-deserved beating. Now they just ran so they could be on live news and enter the jail a newly minted television star.

  The LAPD jailer, an older man with glasses and hair going gray, came to the bars with a big brass Forge key in his hand. “Karl Higgins? You got a visit. Get your ass up here.” Most LAPD stations had their own holding cells where inmates were kept for court or before catching the chain to County. This jailer had worked too long in one of the world’s many dungeons, and I could tell by the way he treated people that he no longer believed in the good of man; that, for him, only the dregs of humanity existed.

  I got up. My old bones popped and creaked as I moved slowly toward the bars. “A visit?” I prayed to God it wasn’t Dad. If he saw me like this—the guilt and shame of it—I’d melt into the concrete floor leaving behind tooth and bone and a pile of worn-out clothes and shoe leather. Then I realized the jailer called me by my aka instead of my real name. I let out a long breath, one I didn’t know I’d been holding. The jailer opened the heavy barred gate. I didn’t step out and held my ground.

  “Who is it?”

  “Not my problem, pal. You want the visit or not?”

  I leaned my head out and looked down the hall. “Ah, shit.”

  Robby Wicks, my old boss from when I’d worked the violent crime team, stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt. He shot me a hateful glare. He shook his head in disgust. He waved for me to come out.

  I stepped back into the cell. “I don’t want the visit.”

  The jailer looked down the hall to Wicks and nodded. Then he looked back at me. “You don’
t have a choice. You come out on your own, or I’ll get a couple of meat eaters and drag your ass out.”

  The day wasn’t working out like I planned. I trudged from the cell, not looking forward to the berating I had coming. Wicks turned and moved into an alcove where all the incoming fish were photographed and printed. My fingertips still carried smudges of black ink. I’d never been arrested before, and it made me sick thinking about that damn booking photo being part of public record. How it now stood a good chance of getting leaked. I just didn’t want Dad to see it.

  Wicks wore his trademark brown polyester Western-cut coat and pants and ostrich cowboy boots. He must’ve just come from court. Today he also had on a bolo tie with a gold nugget clasp he’d always said was real. He’d lost some weight, and the suit hung off him.

  He stood a head shorter than me and emitted a burnt tar and nicotine odor. His skin had aged faster than the rest of him, the ill effects of SoCal sun, cigarettes, and bourbon. He was one of that rare breed who thrived on the hunt, running down violent men, who, when cornered, would turn and fight. That’s what he lived for: that violent confrontation. For him, nothing else mattered. It wouldn’t be long before he was too old. He had already slowed too much and now survived merely on instinct and guts.

  We’d been a great team. I had grown up in the street and knew how the animals we hunted thought and moved. I acted as his bird dog and led him to the wanted murderers where he, or sometimes the both of us, took them down. Too many times we had stood in the parking lot of a liquor store or grocery after a violent takedown, drinking beers in a celebratory ritual. Through the long hours of tracking and surveillance—the microseconds filled with gun smoke, filled with air so laden with fear you could smell it—we’d developed a special bond that could never be broken. One that many wouldn’t understand.

  Looking back on that life, coupled with what had happened in the last few months with my daughter, Olivia, and grandson, Albert, I marveled at how it overshadowed everything else and made what Robby Wicks and I had been through seem juvenile and senseless, a couple of grown children playing at cops and robbers only with real guns and real blood and bone. What had it really accomplished?