The Ruthless

by David Putnam

  “Forget about it. Just let it go and don’t do me any more favors, okay?” I left him there to do his house mouse thing with the guns, busywork that would take him hours. He’d have to work through the night to get it all done. He couldn’t leave it for tomorrow; that was how jobs stacked up and errors got made.

  Out front, Black Bart shook Leo’s hand and smiled. He turned for just a brief second toward the one-way mirror to allow the video recorder to capture the deal while he still held onto Leo’s hand. Bart would have RD freeze-frame the video shot and print a color copy for the sting’s trophy book, not unlike big game hunters in Africa who posed next to their kills—or Wicks with his Zippo lighter with the Marine Corps emblem.

  I said, “I’ll see Leo out.” I moved back around the counter and gently took Leo by the arm so he understood he couldn’t stand at the counter and yammer on. Bart liked to keep the marks talking after a deal; he even offered them free alcohol. Once the money changed hands, the marks relaxed and were more likely to give up other nefarious activities they were involved in, all of it also captured on video. We’d cleared many other cases besides our over-the-counter deals. Those stats helped pad the overall success of the sting.

  Not tonight. I needed to talk with Leo.

  Outside, Leo shrugged out of my grasp, laughing. “Hey, big man, what’s the deal? You see that I got a little money and now you want to party?”

  “No, come here.” I moved out from under the floodlight over TW’s door and into the shadows.

  He lost his smile and pulled away back into the light. “What? You’re not going to jack me now, are you, Karl?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you know better. I just need to ask you a couple of questions. Get your ass over here.”

  Leo came back, but he lost his smile. In the shadows I pulled out the Colt Detective Special and showed it to him. He pulled back like I’d just shown him a poisonous snake.

  “Whoa, man, take it easy.”

  “Knock it off. Where’d you get this gun?”

  His smile slowly returned. “Like I told you, I found it in the alley. Why? Why do you want to know about this particular gun instead of all the others?”

  “Listen, my boss in there is a great guy and sometimes he’s too trusting. I try to limit how much trouble he could get in. This gun stands out. It’s old and beat up and it doesn’t fit with all those others that are clean and hardly used at all.”

  “What does it matter? I thought you took all these guns down to Mexico to sell?” He just regurgitated the cover story we fed anyone who asked questions about our operation.

  “We do, but what if the cops hit us and find it before we get the guns down to Mexico? You see what I’m sayin’? I’m just trying to look out for my boss, he’s a good guy.”

  “What do you want to know about the gun?”

  “I’m worried that it might’ve been used in a shooting, a drive-by or a murder. They can check, you know, by comparing the bullets.”

  He looked at me as if trying to decide. “It’s cool. I’ll take it back and you won’t have to worry about it.” He reached for it.

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. Just tell me where you got it.”

  He again hesitated. “I like you, Karl, that’s the only reason I’m going to tell you. I found it hidden in a car.”

  “What car?”

  “A real clean ’63 Ford Galaxy, high-gloss black with fifteen coats of paint. The dude came into the shop and wanted his bumpers chromed. He had the gun wrapped in a rag jammed up close to the hinge in the trunk—you know, over the wheel well, back in there.”

  “Whose car was it?”

  “The guy’s a real freak. If I tell you and it gets back to him, he’ll come after me for sure.”

  “You know me. If I say I won’t tell a soul, you know my word’s good. I put this gun deal together for you, didn’t I? You owe me.”

  “He works out of an auto parts store in Norwalk. He wants everyone to believe that he’s workin’ for this dweeb with these big ears named Jumbo. You can’t miss him with those ears.” Leo held his hands up by the sides of his head about a foot away. “Jumbo’s not the main man, it’s this other guy.”

  “What’s this other guy’s name?”

  “Johnny. His name’s Johnny Sin.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I LEARNED EARLY on in life, criminals, like a lot of animals in the wild, flocked together. They also tend to frequent the same places: motels, seedy neighborhoods, and watering holes such as bars and drug houses. With TransWorld we’d created an oasis of sorts, a safe zone where skullduggery flourished. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to eventually see that particular .38 Colt Detective Special appear on our counter.

  Two days after Dad found my daughter, Olivia, on the floor of her bedroom with a needle stuck in her arm, I realized I could no longer stay in that apartment. The memory was like an open wound too fresh and difficult to deal with. I packed up Alonzo and all of his things, packed a bag for myself, and was about to leave when I realized I’d forgotten something.

  Working with Wicks all those years, I’d come to believe that when violence sought you out it was always best, no matter what the cost, to stand at the ready rather than to be caught flat-footed. I had cut out a rectangular piece of the inside doorframe to my bedroom along with the corresponding 2x4 inside the wall. I made it like a jigsaw puzzle with a cut so fine it was hardly discernable. This created a hole between both pieces of drywall in the middle of the wall where I hid a spare gun. A gun I’d taken from a traffic stop where it had been tossed out the window. I couldn’t make the case hold up in court because I didn’t know which of the five crooks in the car tossed it. Rather than turn the gun in as found property, I kept it for a rainy day.

  Olivia was the only other person who knew about the gun. She lived in my apartment with her two children, Albert and Alonzo, my grandsons. She was often there by herself. The way the gun was hidden, the children were far too young to get to it. Even if they did know of its presence, the puzzle piece was too difficult to remove. I showed her how to get to the gun quickly and quietly if she ever needed it. In the back of my mind, what I really wanted was for her to have protection against her nineteen-year-old dope-dealing boyfriend, Derek Sams. He’d been known to be volatile and unpredictable. Even so, my daughter had given him one more chance to walk the straight and narrow, a trial period where he lived somewhere else with only supervised visits with his sons.

  That day when I was ready to leave the apartment for good, move in with Dad, I went to retrieve the gun and found it missing. I figured Olivia had told Derek about it and he had taken it to fortify his position in his drug world or he’d sold or traded it for some rock. Derek had been forbidden to enter my apartment—our apartment.

  The missing gun was another circumstantial piece of evidence that pointed to Derek being involved in my daughter’s overdose. And now Derek was linked to Johnny Sin. Derek had sold him the gun or traded it for dope. Not such a big stretch. Derek and Johnny ran in the same circles and Johnny dealt in guns.

  The civilized part of the world has six degrees of separation. In the limited orbit of a criminal’s world, that separation equated to one or two. It seemed they all knew each other or knew someone who knew that other someone.

  I waited until Leo Martinez Jr. got in his truck and drove off before I reentered TW and threw the floor bolt at the bottom of the door and then the one at the top closing us down for business until the following day. I found Black Bart in his office with his size 13 EEE biker boot up on his desk as he reclined in his chair sipping a Yoo-hoo chocolate drink and munching on a bag of salted peanuts. I took the usual seat in front of his desk. He watched me with his coal-black eyes and his smile—if it was a smile—hidden behind his shaggy beard. He stroked his beard at the edges of his mouth again and again.

  He finally wagged his chin. “You going to tell me about the issue you have with Stool Sample?”

  “Nope.” Black Bar
t didn’t need to know how RD had misplaced the stolen yellow Corvette.

  He nodded and didn’t take his eyes off mine as he waited.

  I leaned forward, taking the pressure off my back pocket, pulled out the beat-up Colt Detective Special, and set it on the desk in front of him.

  He still waited. He knew how to interrogate, and even though I understood the concept and theory in what he was doing, I still squirmed a little and chose to wait him out.

  He finally reached over, picked up the gun, and examined it. “Were you thinking about keeping this as a throw-down?”

  “No.”

  His eyes shifted from accusatory to questioning. “Then you better tell me about it.”

  If I had worked with this man earlier on in my career instead of Robby Wicks, my life would have turned out differently, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t have all the suspects—the victims of violent takedowns, victims of blood and bone—coming to me every evening in my night terrors.

  “I did take it for a throw-down. But that was a while back, a good long while back.” I let him chew on that.

  “So then someone broke into your place and took this piece and it turns up here tonight, is that it?”

  I nodded. “I kept it in a wall-hide and the day … the day my dad found my daughter, the piece of wood was displaced. Not much, just a little. I didn’t think anything about it at the time and didn’t think to check on the gun. With all that was going on, I wasn’t thinking straight. When I got ready to move out two days later, I went to retrieve it and it was gone.”

  “So you’re thinking whoever took the gun might be involved in the thing with your daughter?”

  He called it “the thing.” What he really believed was that I was the distraught father who wouldn’t accept that his daughter had committed suicide, rather than my working hypothesis that she’d been held down and given a hot load of heroin. The missing gun took a big step toward proving my theory, only I couldn’t tell South Gate PD about an illegal gun that had gone missing, especially after I’d crushed three of Derek Sams’ fingers in the doorjamb of a sleazy motel in Victorville. In all my life I’d never made so many big mistakes.

  “What did Leo tell you outside?”

  Black Bart had seen me follow Leo out, something members of TW rarely did, if at all. We were too vulnerable outside the doors. They could grab one of us and come back in with a hostage to take all of our cash on hand.

  I played out all the options and their possible outcomes, leaving a long pause after his question. “Leo told me some dude brought his car into Sparkle Plenty to have some chrome work done. Leo found it hidden in the trunk of that car.”

  “Does he know this dude?” Black Bart wasn’t happy about where this conversation was headed, that his best roper was headed down the wrong path and losing focus of the job at hand to chase a dead-end lead in a make-believe case.

  I nodded. “He said it came from a guy named Johnny Sin.”

  He brought his foot down off the desk and set down his Yoo-hoo. “Isn’t that the guy you’re trying to rope for the big gun deal?”

  “That’s right.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BLACK BART SAT behind his desk staring at me as he tried to digest what I’d just told him and how to handle it, how to handle me. “Bruno, I don’t want to come off sounding insensitive here, but you can’t go after this Johnny Sin until the gun deal goes down. We have to get him on video and the guns have to change hands before you talk to him about this. And even then, I’d advise against it. You’re too close to this thing. It’s too easy to make a mistake.”

  Boy, did he have that part right. And there it was again, him calling my one-man crusade “a thing.” He still lived in the real world where the good guys always won and Justice triumphed. I’d lost my faith long ago. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter whether I had rock-solid evidence against Derek Sams. The way he had treated my daughter, coupled with his admission—coerced or not—about what he’d done to my grandchild Albert, was reason enough to cross that Rubicon into the no-man’s land of criminality. These thoughts allowed me to remain dead calm in front of my boss. Allowed me to act as if I would follow his rules and any edicts he handed down.

  I reached into my front pants pocket and pulled out the star Wicks had given me. I slid it across the desk to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Didn’t the deputy chief from my department call you?”

  “Heck no, he didn’t.”

  “Ah, man.”

  “What’s going on?” He opened his drawer and pulled out a plastic Ziploc baggie that contained my flat badge and the star like the one I’d put on his desk.

  “Wicks found me at the Crazy Eight. He said he cleared it with the deputy chief for me to work the shooting death of Judge Phillip Connors and his wife. I just assumed the chief told you about it.”

  Bart sat back in his chair, his eyes never leaving mine. “I saw that killing on the news. I knew the judge; he was our favorite when it came to skinny warrants no one else would touch. That’s a crying shame and the doer of that one is going to roast in hell.”

  “Yeah, the judge liked to sign warrants, he was a good man.” That was how I’d come to know Black Bart, from Judge Connors’ courtroom. That’s why he’d offered me the job at TW.

  “Bruno, you have a job here and you’re too deeply invested in this one to pull out now. I can’t spare you.”

  The department had signed an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding, which said under no circumstances could I be moved from my position until the operation terminated or supervision agreed on the transfer.

  I nodded. “You know, push comes to shove, we’re talking a superior court judge and his wife. Wicks will get his way on this.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I worked his courtroom for two years. He was a good friend.”

  Black Bart went silent thinking over the options, then he said, “You worked his court. You have any ideas who could’ve done this?”

  “I’ve got a couple.”

  He again went silent. “Okay, how about this? You help me put this gun deal together, we take it down quick and dirty, then I’ll give you all the guys on this operation and the rest of the grant money to run this killer down? We have a lot of street connections right now and we can open doors no one else can.”

  I smiled. “I can live with that.” I didn’t want those guns to get away. I also wanted a shot at Johnny Sin to find out where he’d come across my gun.

  “Then you better get home and get some sleep. You look like ten miles of bad road and you’re going to need to be sharp. That’s an order.”

  I stood. “How do you want to play Wicks?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Work with him on the judge’s killing, but as far as TW, leave him out in the cold. I don’t trust that son of a buck. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”

  That wasn’t true. Wicks was just difficult to get to know.

  I nodded and, not breaking eye contact, reached down and reclaimed my throw-down gun. I turned and left, sticking the gun in my back pocket, waiting for Bart to say something, to order me to check it in with RD. He didn’t. I’d never known him to stretch the rules and didn’t understand why he’d let me this time.

  Twenty minutes later, I turned down Nord, headed for Dad’s house, and spotted a beat-up red BMW that I recognized: the PI. Reynolds parked three doors down. I pulled up and parked. She got out and waited in the dark by her car, her arms crossed under her breasts. Tonight, she wore a Dodgers ball cap with her ponytail pulled through the back, worn denim pants with holes in the knees, and a dark-blue windbreaker, no emblems or decals.

  I came up on her and said, “That was fast.” It was too dark to see her eyes. I wanted to see the exuberance in them, that lust for life I used to have. She’d left the job at LAPD before she’d lost it.

  She handed me a folded piece of paper. “If you need help … I’d like to do this with you. With
two of us as a team, it could be finessed, and they wouldn’t know what happened until we got away clean.”

  I turned around and leaned against the car close enough to feel her body heat. “Who said I’m going be doing anything?”

  She nodded at the paper in my hand. “Take a look.”

  I unfolded it. 1897 Laurel, Compton. “Ah, man.”

  “So you know the place?”

  “Yeah, it’s a foster home, one of those county places that house twenty kids, too many kids to get the attention they need to keep them safe from each other.”

  “That’s right, it’s more like an overcrowded dog kennel. The place has been investigated twice and is on probation. One more violation and those people running it are going to lose their ticket; and you can bet twenty foster kids are bringing in some serious money. So I’ll offer it again. You want some help springing your grandkid, Alonzo, I’m here for you.”

  In the world I’d slipped into—the one I currently ran in, roping criminals and coaxing them back to TW—in that world, she made absolute sense, but not in the real world where most everyone else lived. I still had one foot in the real world that used to make perfect sense and meted out the appropriate amount of justice—well, maybe not a foot, maybe one toe. I took comfort in her idea, the concept and its execution, but what then? We’d forever be on the run. No, I still needed to play the game by the rules if for no other reason than to give Alonzo a chance at having a life.

  “Why do you want to help me?”

  “Because sometimes the good guys need to win.”

  “Thank you for your kind offer, but I’m not quite there yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m waiting for Alonzo’s biological father, Derek Sams, to get convicted of murder and go to the joint. Once that happens, my attorney said there’s a chance we could get Alonzo placed with my father. As long as I promise to stay far away from him; it’s a sacrifice I’d be willing to make.”

  “That’s a crap shoot and you know it. Even with the conviction, they could just as easily place him with Sams’ people. And the odds are that’s exactly what they’ll do.”