The Ruthless

by David Putnam

  People coming to court stopped to watch and a small crowd had gathered.

  Wicks slid into the driver’s seat. “Get in the car, Bonzo. We’re going to be late for that interview at MCJ.”

  I tossed the tire iron in the back seat and got in. He drove us out of the parking lot and headed east. He made a right on Alameda and took it north. He smoked his brown cigarette and kept moving his head trying to see around the starred indentations in the windshield’s safety glass, the opaque divots I’d inflicted. He drove no differently than he always drove, as if someone bashing in his car was an everyday occurrence. After a time, and still watching the road, he said, “I’m guessing you found out about Sams?”

  I said nothing and continued to look out the missing passenger window, the summer air blowing soft against my face. His cavalier attitude about something so serious started in again on my anger.

  Wicks said with a half-chuckle, “I guess I should be glad it was my car and not me, huh?”

  “I know better. You’d have shot my ass and then gone for coffee and donuts.”

  “Yeah, I was going to get my baton out and crack you over your thick skull and realized, hey, what for? All I have to do is file a report that some thugs beat my car with ball bats while I was in court. The county will fix it up good as new. And you’ll have gotten it all out of your system so we can go to work. Win-win as far as I’m concerned.” His ability to shut off all emotion and not truly care about anything or anyone except the current target in his sights stunned me yet again. This unnatural ability had been one of the reasons I’d left his violent crimes team. I should have been more angry with him; instead, I felt sorry for him.

  We drove on.

  “Bruno, are we even now?”

  “Not by a damn sight, but let’s get this other thing done and then we can revisit the scoreboard.”

  He lost his smug smile. “Sounds good to me, buddy boy, just let me know when you’re ready—I’ll be happy to square off. But a small word of warning. You better bring a couple of friends to help because I’m not going to hold back.”

  I let it go. I was familiar with his bold talk and the way he needed it to support a cause, one he had not one chance in hell of accomplishing.

  We caught a few more stoplights, still a long way from downtown.

  “What did Sams offer up in trade?” I’d calmed down enough to ask the question without fighting the need to throttle him. But I already knew the answer.

  “He said we put him on the street he can track down who pulled the trigger on the judge and his wife.”

  “I figured as much. But I know you well enough that you wouldn’t give a little shitweasel like Derek the time of day unless he gave you something to make you believe he could get it done. What’d he give you?”

  He held up his hand, pointing at the windshield. “Look at what you did to my car. And with my own tire iron. Why’d I open my trunk for you? That was a stupid move on my part. I should’ve known what you were going to do.”

  “Tell me.”

  Wicks puffed on his cigarette. The wind through the broken-out windows whisked away the swirling smoke. “Sams said he could get close to Little Genie’s people on the street and they’d tell him who did the deed. He said he used to sling dope for that organization and knows the ins and outs. Says he knows who’ll give it up, just like that.” Wicks snapped his fingers.

  “You’ve been had, my friend. Tell me you have him in hand and that you didn’t just turn him loose on the street?”

  Wicks looked from the road at me then back again.

  “Ah, man,” I said. “He played you.”

  “What the hell do you know? You don’t have anything better, not right now. All you got is this talk with Little Genie who’s in the can and doesn’t know beans about what’s happening on the streets. That’s it, that’s the best you got? I think maybe the great Bruno Johnson has lost his street mojo and I have to hedge my bets. If Sams doesn’t perform, then based on the contract he signed, he gets slammed. And without a trial he’ll get the full boat, twelve years, no good, and work time. He knows that so he’s going to damn well do what I want him to or I’ll pull the carrot and give him the stick.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? He’s a stone-cold sociopath without any empathy and only cares about himself. He’s not going to do one damn thing for you. He’ll run and gun, livin’ life large until you figure out your mistake and come looking for him. But that can’t happen right away because he knows your priority is finding the judge’s killer. You just handed him a free pass to Disneyland until we can run him down again. And it won’t be so easy this time. He’s older and smarter.”

  Wicks looked at me again, puffing faster on his cigarette. “You don’t know that.”

  I leaned over closer to his face. “Who do you think crushed his three fingers?”

  He punched the steering wheel. “Ah, man, you never told me you were the one who did that.”

  “You never asked. That kid just made a buffoon out of you.”

  He thought about it for a minute. “Naw, we’ll just see. That kid’s scared to death of me. You won’t mind if I reserve judgment for a couple of days, to see if he comes through. You’re a little biased by my count.”

  I looked out the window and watched the passing landscape. I wasn’t so angry about Wicks letting Sams out. I was angrier about Sams being on the street where the Doctor Jekyll inside me could get to him. Not really angry, more scared. I didn’t know how long I could put it off. I just knew very soon I’d drop everything and go on the hunt with a blood lust no one could stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE CLOSER WE drove to Men’s Central Jail, the more I worried. Someone might spot me and recognize me as Karl from TW. I put on a pair of sunglasses, and when we parked, I opened the back door and grabbed a Dodger ball cap. Wicks loved that hat, kept it pristine in the back window of the Crown Vic to show team support. I shook off the shattered window glass and donned the cap low over my brow right atop the dark glasses.

  “Hey! That’s my—”

  I took a step closer to him. “You want to do this now, right here in the parking lot?”

  “Go ahead and keep the hat. It’s ruined now with all your Jheri Curl.”

  It was a racial slur. I kept my hair shaved close to the scalp and never used Jheri Curl and he knew it. Back in the day, he’d sometimes joke with similar indirect slurs, but this was the first time it felt like he meant it, and it hurt. I unbuttoned my work shirt with the TransWorld embroidered emblem and tossed it on the seat. I pulled the bottom of my tee shirt out of my pants and let it hang to cover the .357 in my waistband.

  Wicks stood by and watched. “What gives? Why are you dressin’ down to go into the jail to talk to a crook?”

  The entire time I worked with Wicks on the violent crimes team, I wore similar work shirts. Even after he thought I’d left the department, he’d seen me wearing it in the LAPD holding cell after the arrest for the stolen Monte. Maybe I should’ve changed to a different work shirt than the one with the TW emblem before meeting him at Compton Court; he wasn’t a fool, not by a long stretch.

  I turned to face him, lowered the sunglasses, and looked at him over the top while my mind scrambled to come up with a logical explanation, anything other than having to tell him about TransWorld. Black Bart wanted that information kept mum.

  Wicks’ expression shifted. “Naw, man, don’t tell me you have another case pending? Do you have a warrant you’re trying to dodge? That’s it, isn’t it? Another one besides the GTA I already took care of? What the hell’s happened to you? You step away from the badge and go batshit crazy, is that it?”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding and put the sunglasses back, covering my eyes. “So you’re going to judge me now? Come on, let’s get this over with, I got things to do, people to see.” I didn’t wait for an answer and headed through the parking lot up to the main entrance.

  While we walked, my mind wandered to
what happened the night before. After Dad and I left the foster home, after we left Alonzo where we’d found him, we rode back to the house without saying a word. The experience had been exhilarating. I had not been that happy in a very long time. Driving back in the truck with Dad, I experienced a major letdown. I hit a wallow of depression and despair so deep and dark I never wanted to be in a place like that ever again.

  In the morning, Dad was gone when I woke so I didn’t have a chance to talk to him about what happened, and, just as important, about how, after so many years—decades—he’d finally bared his soul about his wife and my mother. Maybe that was why he’d chosen not to be there when I woke. He’d opened up once, and now I was confident I could get him to talk about her some more. I had to know what happened. I was anxious to continue that talk.

  Twenty minutes later, we entered the interview room to wait for the deputy to bring down Sammy Eugene Ray, Little Genie. Wicks sat behind a standard-issue county government table, gray with a scarred linoleum top etched with gang signs that promised hate and mayhem, a symbol far removed from an ancient maple tree in a park with a heart carved in the bark containing two names in the center promising forever love. I stood with my shoulder against the bare concrete wall, arms crossed. Ten silent minutes passed. I longed for the time when we joked and laughed and spent days on end tracking violent offenders. We’d been friends—much closer than the regular definition of friends. How had our relationship degenerated to this? I had talked to Dad about it, how with Wicks I wanted it to be like it used to be.

  Dad said that maybe we weren’t really friends after all. Not in the truest sense of the term. He said, “If you’re truly good friends, that’s forever and nothing can come between that bond.” I trusted Dad more than anyone else in the world, but in this instance I either didn’t understand the concept or he was just plain wrong. Wicks and I were just going through a rough patch. A rough patch made worse by Derek Sams, the young man who ruined everything he touched. He’d cut a swath through the ghetto with my family at the epicenter.

  The door to the small interview room opened. Sammy Ray stood there in waist chains and leg irons. He wore the red jumpsuit of an escape risk, also the reason why he wore the chains and had to be escorted wherever he went in the jail. He’d escaped once; the sheriff wouldn’t let it happen again.

  He took one look at me and smiled, the exact opposite reaction I’d hoped for. I wanted him angry and at the same time scared.

  “Deputy Bruno Johnson, my man, how’s it goin’?” He tried to raise his hand to shake or fist bump, but the waist chain restricted him. “What an honor to be in the presence of such greatness. This must really be something important to bring out someone of your … of your stature.”

  “That’s a big word coming from a puke,” Wicks said.

  The deputy behind him closed the door.

  Wicks nodded to the chair. “Sit your ass down, inmate.”

  Little Genie hobbled the rest of the way in, chains rattling, pulled out the plastic chair, and sat as best he could. With the chain restrictions I couldn’t tell if the bullets I’d put in the backs of his legs had caused any permanent impediment to his mobility. Did his legs ache every night and keep him awake? Did the pain remind him of the people he killed, the reason for his incarceration?

  “Hey, either of you got a smoke? I’d kill me some people for a smoke right now. I’m not kiddin’, a whole bunch of folks. Bam. Bam. Bam.” He laughed as if that were actually funny and made a gun symbol with his hand at his hip, his index finger and thumb pointed at me. “Pow. Pow.”

  I didn’t regret for one second the way I took him down, the bullets to the backs of his legs, nor that he had only one thing left to look forward to and it wasn’t something pleasant, strapped to a table, both arms extended in a tee, with needles in them.

  Sammy Ray was handsome for a criminal of his stature—for his chosen world: dope dealer, cold-blooded killer. If things had gone differently for him, in another life he might’ve been a movie star. He had a five-hundred-watt smile that lit up a room and melted women right down to their high heels. He’d had an unblemished face, smooth and perfect, until the day I’d caught up with him in that family restaurant and beat him with, among other things, a hot six-slice toaster. He now carried a little scar at the side of his right eye.

  The sight of him brought back that memory hot and heavy. The smells, the pain from my burned hands, the pure, teeth-cutting violence I used in attempting to apprehend him. Wicks had been right, the battle I had with Little Genie tore up that family restaurant, overturned tables, knocked customers down, shattered the glass showcase counter that displayed all the pastries, cakes, pies, and huge chocolate chip cookies. We slipped and slid and smeared the whole mess all over the floor. I did my level best to get control of him, and, still, he almost escaped. I’d been exhausted with nothing left in the tank. Toward the end of the battle, right at the last, I had him around the leg as he dragged me along still headed for the restaurant door. He was shaking me off. I couldn’t let him get away. I pulled a gun from my back pocket, a small .380, stuck it to the back of his leg and pulled the trigger. He screamed in agony and went down but got back up again. If he didn’t make it through that door, he’d be on death row with every ounce of hope snatched from his grasp and gone forever. I shot him in the back of his other leg. That stopped him cold. He went down and let out a wail not of this world. Not from the pain, but more like a wolf with his paw caught in a trap with full knowledge that he would never run free again.

  I’d been the one to ensure his permanent residency on the Row.

  “You’re not getting a cigarette,” Wicks said. “And if you don’t help us out, I’ll make sure you get the brick for the next thirty days.”

  The brick was a burnt piece of protein inmates on discipline earned for jail infractions. Thirty days was the longest sentence available and a pitifully ineffective threat made by Wicks.

  Sammy Ray didn’t lose the smile. “Can’t you at least treat me like a human and take these chains off?”

  “No,” Wicks said.

  I reached into my pants pocket for a key to take his cuffs off. To do so, I had to get close. Sammy Ray tried not to flinch, failed, and said, “You’re not taking these off so you can beat me again, are you, Deputy Johnson?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “I ONLY BEAT you the first time because you wouldn’t stop fighting. I’m leaving the leg chains on.” I pulled a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco from my back pocket that I’d brought for this purpose and tossed it on the table in front of him. All tobacco products fell under banned items in the jail, and I’d just committed a felony. I couldn’t give him cigarettes because of the smell and visible smoke. He’d get caught as soon as he stepped from the room and out into the jail hallway.

  “I don’t use this shit.”

  I reached to take it away. He grabbed it. “Okay, if this is the best you can do.”

  Nicotine was an evil monkey to carry on your back, especially while incarcerated. He unrolled the top, took out a gob of brown leaf that smelled strongly of brown sugar, and stuck it in his mouth. He moved it around with his tongue until it bulged his cheek. He rolled up the pouch and stuck it in his red jumpsuit pocket. “Now, how can I help you gentlemens? No, wait, let me guess, you want to know something about what happened to that poor judge and his wife. Am I right? Cryin’ shame, really was.”

  Wicks said, “You’re a real smartass, aren’t you?”

  “I already told those other two morons in suits, the ones who drug me all the way down here from San Quentin for this mess—I told ’em I don’t know a damn thing.”

  I said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe, Depuuteey, no skin off my nose one way or another.”

  “You’ve been locked down for two years, and I know you’re still in contact with your people on the street.”

  “True that, but as you know, my peoples hung a
round me for two reasons: the money, and my ability to menace them if they didn’t do what I asked them to. I can’t do neither of those from in here. Even if I did, I won’t snitch.”

  “Bullshit,” Wicks said. “And what’s with the big words? You getting educated while you wait on the Row? Won’t do you any good where you’re going.”

  Wicks wasn’t helping.

  I moved a resin chair around and sat closer, the way Doctor Abrams did to me in his office. “We’re not here asking about what’s happening out there right now.”

  He didn’t falter with me being up so close even after what I’d done to him in our last encounter. He still carried some bold street nerve he could draw from. He smiled and chewed his tobacco. “That right?” he said. “Then what exactly you looking for, Depuuteey?”

  I didn’t take my eyes off his. Wicks started to speak. I held up the flat of my hand and silenced him. “What we are here for is ancient history. With ancient history you can’t be labeled a snitch.” That wasn’t true, but it gave him an out if he wanted to hide behind it.

  “You’re wrong about that, but I’m listenin’.”

  “Tell me about Jamar Deacon.”

  His smile tarnished some and his eyes turned hard. “He was the homeboy the Honorable Judge Connors gunned down with a gauge on 10th Street in front of that apartment. He was workin’ for me and didn’t deserve what he got.”

  I shook my head. “He was trying to kill me. He had a gun and was shooting at me.”

  “I know, I was there, remember? I also know that’s part of the game, but the judge messed that boy up with all dat buckshot. His mama couldn’t have an open casket and that’s on me. He was workin’ for me at the time—that makes it my fault.”

  “Who ran with Jamar?”

  For the first time, Little Genie broke eye contact and looked away. I let it fester some, then said, “I can’t do anything for you inside. I’d be lying if I said I could, but I can do you a favor out on the street. What do you need? You have to need something.”