Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 3

  She called him on her cell phone to alert him to our arrival. Apparently the cop’s name was Johnson. I did not hear her use a first name. We hit the McDonald’s drive-through on Sunset, ordering a goodly quantity of their foodstuffs, before continuing in an easterly direction towards Hollywood, finally taking Canyon Drive north into the Hollywood Hills. The retired cop lived at the top of a short, steep driveway in a clean three story place set into the hill in a neighborhood which at night would seem like a Storybook Land, with its old street lamps, winding streets and peek-a-boo cottages. You could almost feel the ghosts of Gable and Lombard lurking about, wondering where the next party was. I did a three point turn in the narrow street and parked facing down the hill. A dog in the back began to bark. A heavy-throated sound, but controlled, like a Shepherd who knew his business, to wit, eat intruders who by the smell of them carried bags full of guns, knives, Big Macs and grenades.

  “I’ve never seen anybody order six Big Macs at one time,” she said. “And eat five of them in twenty minutes.”

  “Life is short. Carpe diem.”

  “You’re a pig. It’s no wonder you’re so big and fat, the way you eat.” She poked my belly, then brushed the rest of my arm and shoulder with her palm. “God. You’re not fat. You’re some kind of genetic freak, aren’t you? You’re one of those men that has a cave man gene, like the Bible talks about. One of those giants who lived on the earth in the book of Genesis. Like Goliath.”

  “Your cop friend was dirty when he was on the force,” I said. “No cop lives in a two million dollar pad like this without stealing dope money or ripping off pimps.”

  “Wrong. He married a rich girl. They met after she was raped and left for dead. She survived and they fell in love.”

  “What’s your connection to this cop?”

  “His wife and I see the same shrink.”

  I heard the cough of a human command in a foreign language, probably German. The dog stopped barking and a man appeared at the side gate looking down at us. It was not a friendly face, set as it was in a permanent squint. The features were heavy in the brow and the jaw, perhaps Norwegian. He had the little salt and pepper cop’s mustache they all have. The upper body posture was that of a veteran, big-shouldered, loose, world-weary, and with not an ounce of give should it come to a shoving match. From his thinning gray hair, I could see he was about my age, and doubtless had watched the bodies pile up in Nam, as had I. Perhaps he had piled up a great deal of bodies himself over there.

  There is a brotherhood. No matter how much the elite leftist wimps would like to eradicate it. It remains as long as our blood flows through our veins. I looked up at Johnson and saw my brother. In some respects, the awareness gave me the feeling we were still in the jungle. He had the advantage, the high ground, and presented only a partial profile over the gate, with the wall of his house a sufficient shielding buttress should I suddenly bust a few caps in his direction. I was certain if trouble began, Johnson was capable of unleashing a real shit storm from the safety of his three story pad. As if that wasn’t enough, he was joined at the gate by a trusted friend. A Shepherd who stood upright at the gate, took point and gave me a knowing stink eye, his big grinning jaws laughing at me. I knew the look. It was a dog who knew men and had confidently and savagely defeated them in countless chases through the brush infested Santa Monica mountains, or in cramped apartment hallways in South Central. A retired LAPD K-9. The kind which kept his massive head down and went straight for the testicles, of which it can be said mine were retracting fully at the sight of him.

  “C’mon John, turn off the motor and let’s go inside,” she said.

  “No. Tell your cop friend to come down to the car without the dog.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going inside. Johnson’s going to make us a fresh batch of rum sours. I’ve had them before. It’s his wife’s recipe, with real powdered sugar and everything. C’mon, John.”

  It all sounded so civilized. Like we were just a couple of tennis buddies stopping by a friend’s place after a sweaty morning at the club. I realized why. Her voice, a rich contralto, had a natural honey to it. A music that a man could probably listen to forever. Correction. That I could listen to forever. I tried to stuff the thought, but it was out, and expanding inside me faster than a hollow point round in the heart. I had been without a woman for more than two years, and my last encounter had ended in my girlfriend’s death from a well placed government sniper round to her head. I looked at Angela and she caught me looking and crossed her arms over her chest and I knew my face was growing red.

  “See anything you like?” she said. “Because if you do, you can forget it. I’m not the cave woman type.”

  “Why do you call him Johnson?” My voice was a notch higher and in spite of the air conditioning it was getting hot in the car. From somewhere far away, I could hear her voice.

  “His first name is Edward, but he hates it. Everybody calls him Johnson, even his wife. Now let’s go. You can trust him, believe me.”

  “I trust nobody. Tell him to come down here. Without the dog.” The dog, I knew, could jump the gate, but it would give me an extra second in case things weren’t what they seemed. When you live by a code, it can make you paranoid. There were a lot of people who’d like to see me back in prison. I wasn’t sure yet if Johnson was one of them or not.

  Angela yelled. “He wants you to come down!”

  To my surprise, Johnson did, opening the gate and descending the three short flagstone walkways to the driveway and down to the car. He smiled at Angela and then at me. It wasn’t a true smile, but he made the attempt to show some teeth.

  “Johnson, this is the man who is going to kill my son’s murderer,” Angela said, by way of introduction. “He won’t come inside because he doesn’t know if he can trust you.”

  Johnson didn’t even twitch. “C’mon in soldier,” he said. “The war’s over. You’re looking at a fat old retiree with nothing to do all day.” Johnson wore a stained white short-sleeved dress shirt, stretched by his big gut, the rag worn untucked over old baggy black trousers, exactly what I’m sure he wore in the days when he was putting endless varieties of diseased repeat offenders on ice. There was something else he wore.

  “Why the piece?” I asked, referring to the bulge of something small and lethal right about the beltline, just above where his hernia repair scar probably was.

  “I’m not carrying for your benefit,” he said. “The truth is, a lot of people hate me. And some of them know where I live. Look, it’s hot out here, and they just removed a small lesion from the top of my balding head. Why don’t we go inside like civilized people? I just made a fresh batch of sours. If the ice in the shaker melts, they’ll be too watered down to be of much use.”

  Hell is for heroes. I shut down the machine and we got out into the too hot February glare. Johnson eyed my big leather bag but said nothing. He was extending his trust to me in a thousand silent ways. Bending first, not out of weakness, but out of respect for Angela, and whatever it was she meant to Johnson’s wife. We both have the same shrink. Probably as much of a bond as was possible in the New Age we were in, where absolute truth had been consigned to hell and transitional truths were created fresh daily to fit in with whatever current brand of cyber tribal funk you subscribed to. So Johnson bowed to me out of respect for his wife, and out of respect for where we’d come from. So there you have it. I still had some honor left.

  “McDougal,” I said.

  “Johnson,” he said.

  “SEALS?” I said.

  “Nah. Rangers.”

  And that was that. We went inside to a large comfortable living room with a high ceiling, a big picture window overlooking the street, a lot of white furniture and cherry wood, and even a baby grand piano next to a marble fireplace big enough to park a Volkswagen in. A wall niche sported a statue of the Virgin Mary, in fr
ont of which was one of those candles in the glass jars. The couch underneath the window probably cost ten grand, had a lot of gold brocade woven through the white satin covering, but for all its external worth gave out a loud interior cracking sound and sagged heavily when I sat down.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Johnson said, making no issue of my size and weight, or the fact I’d just ruined his furniture. “It always does that.”

  “You Catholic?” I said, pointing to the statue.

  “Mostly by necessity,” he said. “They’re the only ones who have a ritual for actually removing the stink of sin from the soul.”

  “You mean confession?”

  “Yeh. It’s like taking your soul to the dry cleaners. And between you and me, I still have a lot of dry cleaning to do.”

  “The Catholic Church is full of perverts,” I said.

  “Yeh, but the perverts inside the church aren’t Catholics,” he said. “They’re infiltrators. You remember what in infiltrator is, don’t you?” Johnson focused a gimlet eye on me.

  I remembered.

  “What’s an infiltrator?” Angela asked.

  “An infiltrator,” I explained, “is someone who makes it past the wire and sticks his bayonet in your eye while you’re sleeping.”

  “Except in the church,” Johnson added, “the infiltrators in high places used their pricks as bayonets to stick our Catholic children. But we’re cleaning them out as we speak.”

  Our eyes met again and we exchanged silent recognition of who we were and where we’d been. And he was right about having too many sins. We had accumulated an unforgivable number of them in Southeast Asia. It had a new kind of enemy in Vietnam, an enemy who relied on stealth and savagery instead of strength and numbers, and the powers that be in the American military machine had decreed that a new kind of soldier would be needed. So they created men like Johnson and myself. Men who would swim through snake infested rivers at night, find enemy boats and blow everybody in the boats to hell. Men who could take a Ka-bar knife in each hand and wreak a carnage that would gag a butcher. Johnson and I were just such men.

  Our superiors saw to it that we were poked and prodded and subjected to every known form of psychological torture. We were taught to kill without thinking. To destroy people by whatever means was most expedient. Sometimes we vaporized them, sometimes we showered them with white hot flying needles, sometimes we gutted them and left them hanging on a gatepost in their village as a lesson to the others. Many times we killed every man, woman and child in the village. And could still recall each expiring soul with a frightening clarity.