Chapter 8
Lenny Poon would file no kidnap complaint. Of course, he’d file no complaint because he’d want to deliver the justice to my sorry carcass himself. He’d come for me, but by the time he did, I’d be long gone. I still had the twenty thousand dollars Angela had given me, enough to buy a bus ticket for Memphis. They had a bus that went all the way there on its way to Miami. I wouldn’t have to change anyplace along the line. I’d buy a half dozen tickets and take over the entire rear section, stay stoned on pepper vodka and ride day and night until I was back in a simpler world, a world of mercy and kindness, a world of summer thunderstorms, lightning bugs, toads croaking, and old men telling tall tales to their grandchildren on porches and stoops on soft summer evenings.
I had started out as a simple country boy and they’d turned me into a killer. When I’d done my job, they threw me in prison, a sacrifice to a Congressman’s anger. But I could go back to my former world, the world they tried to take from me in that prison cell so long ago. I was going home. But first, before all of that, we would celebrate, the kid and I, and share a meal. We would commemorate the new life that had been thrust upon us. He would be celebrating his recent escape from death, and I would be celebrating a return to a life I had thought was long lost to me.
Maybe later in the evening, before I shipped myself East, I would even drop by the Rescue Mission and enjoy a round of Amazing Grace with the boys. But for the moment, a meal was required. Such a commemoration would be aptly served by a burger and fries. After all, it’s best to start with the basics.
Upon my return from Mickey D’s I observed my elevator was still broken, but for some reason, it managed to carry me a couple of floors higher than before, leaving me only one staircase to climb. Why the elevator did so, I could only guess. Maybe it was something to do with the cable unwinding, or tangling. Maybe it had completely unwound, thus allowing me the extra two floors as a last gesture of its mercy before it plummeted straight to the bottom on the very next ride.
Problem. Gregor was dead. He must have tried to escape or something when I left him alone. He’d crawled off the couch and dragged himself into the rear bedroom, probably searching for a telephone. Had no way of knowing I didn’t use them and didn’t have one. The exertion stressed his nicked artery and it must have opened back up, judging by the size of his neck. The toughskin we’d put on his neck had held tight, so the blood had forced it’s way out of his eyes and ears, after blowing up his neck like a balloon. Homicide sat in the doorway to the bedroom, an ugly look on his furry visage. He was a cat, and cats don’t like death. They understand what it means better than most of us.
It took me a second to comprehend it, to fully grasp that I had, in spite of my best intentions, managed do dispatch yet one more sorry soul into the void. I walked away and sat down on the couch and stared at the suffocating room around me.
I was damned. There comes a moment when the state of the soul is fully assessed, displayed without sentiment, under the harsh glaring light of reality. This moment, so the saints and prophets tell us, is usually realized by many at the precise moment of their death. I however, was accorded the privilege of understanding this hideous truth while still living. And the truth smelled. At the very innermost core of my being, I became fully conscious that I was nothing more than a dark, sickening stench in the nostrils of God. I knew that out there, somewhere, a very pissed off God had watched that boy die and added the sin to my personal account. And that very selfsame God had, at that moment, turned his face from me. Forever.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. My Granny tried to tell me when she dragged me to hear the hellfire revival preachers who came to the white clapboard church in Somerville on those hot summer nights so long ago. My son, turn not thy feet unto violence. I had not listened.
There was little fanfare to accompany the fact that I had finally succeeded in damning myself to Hell. A ceremony of some sort seemed appropriate. So I tossed the filet of fish sandwich to the cat and unwrapped a Big Mac. Even the damned have to eat.
It was dark enough outside to transport Gregor to the alley. I wrapped him in the blanket which had been covering the couch. I took a couple of cans of Fix-A-Flat for the van’s front tires and headed down. The elevator didn’t kill me as I thought it might.
It’s not a nice neighborhood. The sight of a huge man carrying a human sized bundle was dutifully ignored by all. For the simple reason that anyone poking their nose into anyone else’s business in that part of town usually got killed after one or two pokes. The cops never got out of their cars, nor did the gang bangers in their primer gray Oldsmobiles, the bus drivers, or anyone else who had the sorry misfortune to be in the vicinity after dark. So I carried my bundle containing one dead kid to the alley. Plan was, to chauffeur him back to his point of origin along with the badly injured Nose. I figured Lenny Poon would kill Nose anyway, being as how he’d failed to protect Poon’s only son.
The van was missing from the alley. Somebody’d driven it off, flat tires and all. Whoever stole it apparently did not even bother to discard it’s unconscious passenger, Nose, before driving it off. I wondered what car thief, upon breaking open a typically nondescript white van in a downtown alley, simply accepted the fact that there was an unconscious, bleeding man with a broken leg lying on the floor in the back next to a motorized wheelchair. Accepted it and drove off on two flat front tires. Was this just another day at the office for the average inner city junkie? Had we finally arrived at a level of complacency with cheap violence that a bleeding, unconscious man with a broken leg swollen to three times its original size simply did not register? And was the motorized wheelchair a plus? Something the junkie felt sure he could at least get a few bucks for someplace? Perhaps a couple of hundred bucks from a shady durable medical supplies vendor?
I dumped the body of Gregor in the corner. Nobody’d bother it for awhile, it looking like any other sleeping wino who was broke and homeless, had AIDS, and might have an ice pick under the blanket, ready to jam it into the kneecap of an unwelcome stranger.
Upstairs, I opened the walk-in safe, the big Klein Mark 7, which wouldn’t chip, crack, peel or fade under any circumstance short of a direct hit from a tactical nuclear warhead. I took out a few items I might need for the road, including a few extra grenades, along with an MP-5 submachine gun. The cat walked back there and meowed. He did not allow me to pet him, or talk kitty talk or any of that other cat stuff. Our only bond was food. At least the animal was honest about it. Accordingly, I sliced open a 10 pound bag of dry mix onto the floor of the bathroom. “The place is all yours,” I said. “Have a nice life. Control your territory. Try not to let them cut your balls off.” He ignored me completely in favor of the food. I left the kitchen window open so he could go in and out as he pleased, before adding a clean sweatshirt to the bag and heading downstairs to the Greyhound station to buy my ticket out of La-La Land.
Poon would be looking for me. And what he looked for he found. He had resources, high and low and middle. He’d have the kidnapping on film from the hidden cameras surrounding the gate and the street outside. He’d be able to access the right people and discover my identity faster than the FBI. Perhaps even now, his henchman, Nose, was awake, and paying off the junkie who stole the van in exchange for dropping the dime to Poon as to my most recent whereabouts. Poon would find me with the objective of forcing me to reveal the location of his only son, Gregor. All to no avail. Sooner or later they’d find Gregor in the alley and Lenny Poon would receive his retribution. No, I wasn’t going to kill Lenny Poon with a flying bomb after all. Better he continue to live. It would hurt him more, that way, to be forced to continue life with the knowledge somebody’d trashed his only son. Live with not only the pain of the son’s death, but the dishonor which came with having failed to protect him. His pain would be magnified by the basic goodness of his son. When one loses something, the pain is in proporti
on to the goodness of the thing. The soul of a father’s only son is of infinite value. Poon’s sorrow would therefore be infinite, unyielding, and the source of a rage and hatred perhaps unparalleled among L.A.’s citizenry.
Retribution Page 8