Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 7

  The kid was squealing. I took the knife away from Angela. It was time to finish him off, but I hesitated. My head was screaming. I don’t know why I felt so wrong about the killing of the kid. Maybe because I figured retribution didn’t really apply to the kid. Billy hadn’t known that Lenny Poon’s son was a cripple, and in fact wouldn’t be reproducing any more of the father’s line. Or maybe I had a feeling Granny wouldn’t approve. I’d heard her voice, calling me, touching me with it’s softness, it’s love. By it’s very ethereal beauty, I had become aware that I, in comparison to that kind of purity, had reached a new low. Something even lower than the time I burned an entire family to death by throwing them in a pit and dousing them with fuel oil after the father tossed a grenade and killed three friends of mine. This was lower than that because this time, I had nearly lost the last small piece of my soul.

  I’d nearly executed a crippled boy. Perhaps had I been acting alone, perhaps if my own son had been murdered, I could have done it, could have worked up the killing heat within myself to finish the kid off, but after hearing my Granny’s voice, and seeing the shock in Angela’s face at the sight of Gregor’s spurting blood , I knew I’d lost my will. I quickly applied pressure to the wound. The spurting stopped, and I knew the kid would survive. The artery had been merely nicked, but enough blood had passed in the fifteen seconds to knock the kid cold. It took me a few minutes to get enough toughskin applied as a bandage from my medical kit and get the kid squared away. Toughskin is always the answer for ugly wounds when you don’t want to mess with a needle and thread. I carried him out to the couch and laid him out. One thing was sure--there’d be no orange juice and cookies awaiting him after his self-donation of blood. There would only be the interior agony one feels when finding oneself at the farther end of Hell’s hallway.

  The front door opened with a bang. Johnson, Heinz at his side, the ugly beast giving me a super stink eye. The cat bolted through the window and onto the fire escape. “Nice work, you sick ghoul,” Johnson said. “Well at least you didn’t kill the kid. I’m taking Angela out of here. If you try to stop me, I’ll turn the dog loose, and I don’t care how big you are, this dog will rip your liver out. McDougal, you’re doing everything all wrong. In fact, I don’t think you know what you’re doing. You’re demented. And that thing with the Bowie knife was sick. I mean, sure I’ve seen some sick things and I’ve done a few sick things in the line of duty over the years, but this was ... well this was beyond criminal. You had no right to put that thing in Angela’s hands. Not considering the condition she’s in. You need help, man. A lot of help.”

  “You’re right.”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. I just now almost did something I could never be forgiven for. Not in this life and not in the next. Don’t you see, Johnson? That’s why my Granny spoke to me. That’s why she showed me that I was down to the last piece of my soul.”

  “Man, you are sicker than sick. Nobody spoke to you. You’ve gone over the edge. You’ve become schizoid. You’ve crossed the line, and when you did, you made an enemy of one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles. And now they’re going to hunt you and take you down. Lenny Poon has citywide connections. Every junkie in town is going to be looking to finger you for the reward money. Every cop in this city is going to come down on your sorry head.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I won’t let anybody arrest me. They’ll have to take me out the hard way. Which is why I think you should take Angela and disappear. Because you don’t have the edge anymore. When they come for me, I intend to fight to the death. But you can’t make that claim. It’s because you have something to live for. You have a wife and dog. You have position in the community. You can have beers with the guys after a round of unspeakably bad golf. You can go to class reunions and laugh about the glory days. I, on the other hand, have nothing left but a vicious cat who only uses me for food and shelter.”

  “McDougal, let me take the kid out of here. I’ll call my friends at Ramparts and tell them to pick up the thug in the van. I’ll tell them the whole thing was done by some irate dealer. I won’t connect you to any of it.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll clean up my own mess. I’ll return the kid. But don’t plan on seeing Nose again. He’s already had his trial and conviction. I just have to carry out the sentence, which is death by torture.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” Johnson said. “For awhile, when we were back at my place, you got to me. It’s like I came under your spell or something. I began remembering what it was like back in that jungle all those years ago. And then I started thinking about my life with the LAPD, about all the punks I arrested over the past thirty years, punks who lawyered up and plea bargained themselves right back onto the street. I began believing you had found a better way, a cleaner way to see justice served. I ... I thought I still had the stones for a little extralegal justice. But I don’t.” He grabbed Angela by the wrist and took one last long look at me as he opened the door. “McDougal, just between you and me, because at some level we’re brothers ... I never met you. You don’t exist. Now do like Dr. Laura says. Go and do the right thing.”

  When the door closed behind them, I felt utterly alone. Except I wasn’t. Homicide came in through the open kitchen window, neck hairs raised in irritation at the fact I’d let a large dog into his sanctuary. He jumped to the floor and glared up at me from beside the empty food dish. So I wasn’t alone. And also, I had the kid. His eyes opened and he was dully aware that it wasn’t a bad dream from which he’d awakened.

  “I heard voices,” he said. “I thought I was hearing angels. But I’m still here. You didn’t kill me.” He touched his neck, his fingers delicately palpating the lumps of the toughskin.

  “You were saved by my Granny,” I said. “She’s up there in Heaven. She didn’t like what I was doing and she intervened.”

  “Unh,” he replied, having no words to describe the joy he was no doubt feeling from this salvific teleological development as regarded his present continuing form of existence in the physical plane.

  Having also no words, but rather being a creature of purity and action, Homicide came over and jumped on the kid’s chest, sniffing delicately at the blood. The kid reached out weakly and scratched him behind the ears.

  There was a bonding thing happening between them. I could sense it, and I knew why. It had something to do with new life, and starting over. A celebration of sorts was in order. I had a couple of hours before the heat came down on my place like a bad cold. I’d blow an hour with the kid, arrange for his return to the castle in Beverly Hills, and disappear.

  “Hey kid, you feel like a Big Mac?”

  He nodded weakly.

  “Sit tight. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  The best celebrations begin with food. I smiled at myself in my wisdom as I headed for the elevator to make the short trek to the corner McDonald’s. I was through killing. Billy would simply have to wait for his retribution. And what difference did it make? Sooner or later, we all died, the only question was by what manner.

  I felt a lightness inside that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. It was all so simple. From now on, I’d do it Granny’s way. It would be God, the Bible, and church on Sundays. All I had to do was disappear after I’d arranged for the kid’s return to his father. I’d even forget about killing Nose. And why not? Sooner or later somebody would kill Nose. No reason it had to be me. The grand plan of the universe had begun to unfold before me. I was but a grain of sand on an infinite beach. I had to stop fighting my destiny, stop defending myself, stop living up to a code of honor that no longer applied to the century I lived in. A grain of sand didn’t need to defend anything. It just needed to blend in with the other grains of sand and finish out its days unnoticed by anyone or anything. Like Jesus said. Be meek and later on, inherit the earth.