Chapter 6
I eased our vehicle away from the curb and blocked the van’s escape entirely. A small woman of Philippine or maybe Chinese extraction, wearing a smart uniform, blue with red piping, with the name of some school on it, slowly got out.
“Walk away,” Johnson said, climbing out of the jump seat. “Just walk down the sidewalk and disappear.” And she did, not looking back.
I got out of the Mercedes and walked up to the van, stepping across the fallen, unconscious Nose, and pulled open the rear doors, Johnson at the ready with his backup pistol should perchance there be a small phalanx of ne’er do wells hiding inside, intent on gaining a surprise advantage. It was not to be, instead there was a skinny blond kid inside, in a wheelchair, the heavy, motorized kind, pointing a small pistol at me, a revolver. He’d made a huge mistake, the revolver’s chamber having one bullet missing, which would cause the hammer to fall on an empty chamber at the initial trigger pull.
“Don’t even think about firing that thing,” I said to him.
“School’s out,” Johnson said. “This must be his kid. I heard Lenny Poon’s got a teenage boy who’s a cripple. Goes to some high class private school.”
Behind me I heard a sound. And saw the ugly sight of Angela lying atop the downed murderer, Nose, her index and middle fingers rammed straight into the man’s nostrils. The right nostril tore open, spurting blood, and she began to wretch all over his face.
“Johnson, do something about that, willya?” He went to help her, pulling her off the victim, who’d passed out from the pain. I turned my attentions back to the kid with the pea shooter. Our eyes met and the kid saw something reflected back at him from my watery blue shark’s pupils few men live to recount. In life or death confrontations, it always comes down to the eyes, and in his, I could clearly see he hadn’t the will to do what needed to be done. His gun hand began to shake uncontrollably. This could not be held against him, for he was nothing more than a callow young man, one who’d been denied the use of his legs, and who’d had a lot of coaching from people who’d taught him that, if you were a cripple, that you were a winner anyway, and you could compete in your own Olympics and be admired from afar by the likes of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Never mind that most paraplegics wound up on disability, living in rat holes just like the one I inhabited until they died early from the heartbreak.
“Hey kid,” I said. “You’re not supposed to take a gun to school. You could get expelled.”
“It’s a private school. All the kids have something. You have to have something when you’re rich.”
What he meant was, when you’re crippled.
“What’s your name,” I said.
“Gregor.”
“Figures. Will you come with us, Gregor? It’ll only be for a little while.”
He nodded. “I will, but if you were smart you’d leave me alone. My father won’t give you money. Instead, he will kill you. He already knows who you are. The cameras at the gate have recorded everything. And I’m not afraid of you. I didn’t shoot you because your friend has the shotgun. Otherwise I would have. But my father will find you and then you’ll realize you’ve made a big mistake.”
“I make lots of mistakes, kid. It’s no big deal. Now give me that.” I took the gun from the kid, and his school bag, which had a cell phone that I stomped on the pavement, and loaded the still-unconscious Nose into the van.
“Johnson, I’ll drive the van, and you take Angela back to your place in her car.” From somewhere beyond the trees, deep within the compound, I could hear dogs barking and men shouting. Security had been alerted. We had but seconds more to make a graceful exit. I put the van into gear and headed south for Sunset. Johnson ignored my directions to take Angela home, following behind me instead. So much for him being under my command.
We hit Sunset and five minutes later were traveling within the speed limit on the 101 south to downtown L.A, a ride which gives one the feeling of traveling down a filthy concrete digestive tract into the lower bowels of a putrid city, the place known as East Los Angeles, where all the poor people strive mightily with one another for ill-gotten gains that profit nobody.
I turned off on Alameda, looped around through the stinking gray world of L.A.’s backside, and took the back way to my place, the ten story brick apartment house across the street from the Greyhound station. The station was up to its usual self, that of belching thick clouds of diesel exhaust and dispatching the big shabby buses with the lice infested seats and filthy bathrooms, the better with which to transport the drunks, druggies, farm workers, little old ladies, traveling foreigners, perverts and parolees to their various sordid and sundry destinations.
The apartment block was surrounded by cold storage buildings, mostly secured by high chain link fences, mean dogs and razor wire. The buildings were doubtless filled with apples, or iced broccoli, or crack cocaine, or other products which come from the soil, what with my neighborhood being smack dab in the middle of the Los Angeles Produce Market, perhaps one of the largest in the world, it being the entry point for the fruits and vegetables and drugs necessary to keep sixteen million hungry bodies marching and munching and dreaming their way through the illusive purgatory sometimes referred to as La-La land.
Pulling into the crowded, obscenely graffiti’d alleyway behind my building, I found a convenient parking spot between a couple of dumpsters and a pile of old mattresses. I noticed they’d come and picked up the body of Billy , which I’d dumped out my window earlier, but picking him up was all they’d done, there was no police tape, or other evidence anybody gave much of a damn about how he’d gotten there. I was surprised they’d come and taken him away so fast, the alleyway normally being a place nobody in their right mind would even think of looking. Maybe a junkie had phoned it in, hoping the cops would tip him a few bucks. Johnson pulled up behind me in the Mercedes.
I took out the big Bowie and punched the blade into the sidewall of the two front tires of the van.
“What’re you doing?” Johnson asked.
“To discourage anyone who tries to steal it,” I said.
“So you’re just going to leave that thing sitting in the alley with two flat tires. That’s ridiculous, McDougal. You shouldn’t be parking it here in the first place. I’ve never heard of a thief parking a stolen vehicle next door to his home.”
“I’m not a thief. And what difference does it make if I park it beneath my apartment? There’s thirty units in this building. No way to connect this van to me.” I gestured at the Mercedes, which, in the filthy underbelly of this back alley, looked like an alien spacecraft. “Park that across the street in the Greyhound lot,” I said. “And pay the lot man extra to guard it. And also threaten to kill him if anything happens to it or he’ll call his friends and it’ll get stripped clean while he looks the other way.”
Johnson left me alone and I got down to business. Nose was lying in a puddle of blood, the huge nostrils thick with clotting blood, his leg swollen to three times normal size, laboring to breathe through his mouth. He wasn’t going anywhere but into shock. I was going to have to deal with Nose, to collect from him the retribution demanded by his action of executing Billy Q’s son David. I was going to punish him, but I wanted to transport him to a place I knew of in the tunnels underneath Union Station. A place where I could extract a whole lot of information from him about the coming and going of Lenny Poon. Then I would exact the maximum retribution possible, and he would die slowly underneath the ground, in a place where the screams of a human being in mortal agony were generally ignored by anybody inhabiting the place. That would be later, under cover of darkness.
Meanwhile, I took the hypo kit from my bag and shot Nose up with enough morphine to keep him out for a few hours. Then I grabbed the kid out of his expensive motorized chair and carried him in the back way. The kid, to his credit, had not thrown up. Perhaps his life in a wheelchair had rendered him a lot tougher than
I first thought. A few minutes more after that, I was cursing the elevator in my building for it’s unfaithfulness, which forced me to carry the kid the final three flights to my apartment, where what was in store for him I knew, but he could only guess.
There was a knock on my door and Johnson and Angela walked in.
“Where’s Heinz?”
“I put him in the van to guard our prisoner,” he said. Johnson grabbed them both a Bud Light from the fridge before escorting her to a position on the big red leather couch with the spread over it. Angela was sitting on top of the blood of her son’s father. I declined to point out this fact to her. Johnson tuned in a local channel, the Lakers in early season, somebody missing a second free throw and getting paid about ten thousand dollars a minute to do it on National TV.
“McDougal, I been thinking,” Johnson said. “I think we’re maybe making a big mistake, here. We’ve done good so far. By good old fashioned dumb luck, we’ve caught the murderer. You should let the police handle it now. Turn the killer over to them. And we should let the kid go. That was not a good idea, kidnapping the kid. We should have left him there.”
“Go home, Johnson,” I said, taking the kid into the bathroom and laying him out in the tub before pulling out the Bowie knife, at the sight of which, his eyes widened considerably. They were hazel-gold, the kind only the Russian people sport, and with his long, shag-cut blond hair, he reminded me of one of those famous Olympic figure skaters whose name I cannot remember. It was the one who skated the best in ‘02 but for some reason came in second.
“Angela,” I called.
She left the living room and came and stood next to me, and I handed her the knife.
“What’s this for?”
I nodded at the boy. “Tit for tat,” I said.
The comprehension came slow, filtered as it was through the drugs and the rum sours and the grief. “You want me to execute this boy. You can’t mean it.”
I didn’t mean it. I was offering her the knife as a mercy. She would not be able to cut the boy’s head off and she would understand that in spite of her grief, she was still a decent human being. This knowledge would help her to fare with some dignity in the lousy months and years to come. So I offered her the knife, knowing she would, by it’s presence, rediscover the good within herself.
“I can’t ... kill a child,” she said. “But I think I can kill the man with the large nose. I think I can do that. Take me down to the van and I’ll do it.”
“This is better,” I said. “This is Lenny Poon’s son. Lenny Poon took your son. Now you take his. Case closed.”
“You ... you’re evil. I had no idea how much so, until this very moment. You really did strangle an old woman in Vietnam, didn’t you? I ... I thought we just took the kid to lure Lenny Poon out of his fortress. To interrogate him or something.”
“No. We took the kid to kill him. To get revenge for your son. I’ll go back to the fortress later and take Poon out.”
“You will? But how?”
I did not share my plan with her. But it involved blowing the entire place to hell, flying over it by night and dropping onto the castle roof something that exploded in such a way as to leave no stone standing upon itself and no living thing in its wake for a good two hundred yards in any direction. Something I could make myself from readily available materials purchasable anywhere in America.
No, you’re not safe, no matter what the Director of Homeland Security tells you. Sorry, but the cat’s already out of the bag, and every demented psycho knows it. Don’t bother to curl into a ball when it comes. It’ll just cause the heat to weld your teeth to your knees.
Johnson stuck his head in the bathroom door. “What’re you doing with the kid? You’re not seriously thinking of killing the kid, are you?”
I looked at him. “Not me,” I said. “Angela’s going to do it.”
“The hell she is,” Johnson said.
“Hey look,” I said, turning to the man. “I didn’t ask you to come. You asked me. What? What did you expect to find? What did you expect?”
Johnson stood, jaw clenched, his body trembling with anger. “Aw shit, McDougal, we’re not back in the jungle anymore.”
“Tell that to somebody who gives a damn. Go home, Johnson. I knew you’d wash out halfway through this thing. You’re no Ranger. You’re nothing but regular Army pussy.”
“Not. I got the purple heart to prove it.”
“Which you got when you cut yourself shaving. Or was it a paper cut, you rear echelon pogue.”
Johnson walked very slowly to the door, his every fiber straining to get at me, but his common sense holding him back. “Angela? You coming?”
“No. Go home, Johnson, like the man says.”
“Angela. Let’s go.”
“I’m not leaving,” she said. “Perhaps John is right. Maybe we should get revenge. An eye for an eye.”
“I’m getting out of here,” Johnson said, and left.
“What’s going on?” Gregor said. “Why are you talking crazy?”
“What’s going on is, this woman here, is going to cut your head off sometime in the next couple of minutes. After which, we’re going to dismember you and stuff your component parts into garbage bags and toss your remains into the ocean somewhere off the San Pedro breakwater. You’re crab food, kid. Say your prayers, or whatever it is you do, and say them fast, because you’re checking out.”
“But why?” he said.
“Because your father, Lenny Poon, killed her son. He had the guy with the big nose kill her kid. So we’re going to kill you. It’s called retribution, kid.”
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” Gregor said, before turning his face to the wall and whispering the rest, over and over again.
Okay, maybe I should have been more sensitive. We’re not supposed to speak to our young people this way. Maybe Angela was right. I was evil. I was picking on a cripple, after all. I did feel a twinge somewhere down deep, in the place where my Granny had written upon my childhood heart the laws of her God. But merely a twinge. I’d made a promise to Billy Ahiga. I’d promised him retribution. I’d promised Billy that I’d find the killer of his son and blot out that killer, and his entire family, from among the generations of the earth. In short, that the seed of Lenny Poon would be cut off, forever, from the land of the living. But something was bothering me. Something simply didn’t feel right. Then I heard it. A voice, soft and warm, like the feel of a spring breeze.
My son, the voice said. Granny’s voice. Speaking clearly to me from wherever she was, from across the fathomless, eternal spaces where she no doubt slopped a better sort of hog than the ones she had truck with here on earth.
“Did you hear that?” I said. “Did you hear that voice? It was my Granny. She just spoke to me.”
“McDougal, you’re cracked,” Angela said. “You’re a complete wacko. You make Charlie Manson look like a boy scout. But I’ve come to realize that the rules have changed for me as well. I should be repulsed, but since they killed my son, there’s something going on inside of me. Something hard, and ugly.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I just heard a voice from beyond the grave. I don’t think we should kill this kid.”
“No!” Angela cried. “No, this thing has to be done. Don’t you get it, McDougal? What Billy was trying to say? They killed our only son! This isn’t something you settle in court. This is something you must take care of yourself. The blood of my son is crying to me from the ground! This thing has to be done ...” She took the knife uncertainly in her shaking hands, holding it all wrong, and got on her knees beside the kid in the tub. There was a silence, and she gave the kid a tentative poke on the neck. I reached out to stop her. Unfortunately, the kid jerked at the touch of cold steel and the razor sharp blade sliced cleanly into his jugular, which began to spurt. As though awakening from a dream, Angela took in the full horror of
what she had done.
“God! John! I’ve cut him! Oh! Look at all the blood! Jesus, do something!”
Retribution Page 6