Demetrius Mixon and Tyrone Jackson didn’t notice the approaching Mexicans. High on grass and cheap wine, they were too busy enjoying the company of the two mulatto chicks they’d picked up on Mission Street to notice that their space was about to be invaded.
“Hey, maricones, como estan? Where’d you find the hoes?”
Tyrone looked up from the bench. “What’d you say, muthafucka? You talkin’ to me?”
Pablo smiled. He tried to look calm but could feel his lips twitching. “No, I’m talkin’ to yo mama, you ugly black cocksucka.”
Demetrius chimed in as he and Tyrone got up from the bench. “Hey, this be the little greasa we put down a few months back. I guess he wants another ass-whoopin’.”
“Yeah, that him,” Tyrone agreed. “You a little bit outta yo territory, ain’t ya, fool? You must be brain-dead, comin’ here alone, you sawed-off little muthafucka.”
“He’s not alone, spook. He’s with us.” Rigoberto emerged from the shadows behind the bench, followed by Estefan and Ramon.
Demetrius turned around but was struck across the face with a baseball bat before he could react. He fell back and staggered a few feet before falling unconscious to the ground as Estefan and Ramon grabbed Tyrone. The girls began to scream but stopped as soon as Rigoberto put his finger to his lips and shook his head. They were streetwise enough to know that silence would be their salvation.
Rigoberto rolled Demetrius over onto his back and checked his work. “Nose gone, teeth missing, cheeks crushed. Da man has no face.” He laughed as he turned to Tyrone and then glanced over at the girls. “I want you two lovely ladies to be a witness to the first ever sex-change operation to take place in Garfield Square Park. Doctor P here will be the attending physician. It’s his first operation so it might be a little messy. But if you’ll just bear with us, it will all be over with very shortly.”
A crowd began to form and move toward the bench. Ten, maybe fifteen, blacks were edging their way over to see what Tyrone was screaming about. With their focus on him, they failed to notice the twenty-five members of Los Hermanos Bandidos who were enveloping the park from Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Sixth, Treat, and Harrison Streets.
Tyrone screeched in pain as Pablo thrust the knife upward into his groin. “You like it, macho Negro? You like being a woman, big man?” He pushed and twisted the knife before pulling it out of what was left of Tyrone’s scrotum.
Estefan and Ramon released their grip and let their victim fall to the ground. His hands turned red with blood as he rolled around on the grass holding his crotch, screaming in pain, and begging to be killed.
Pablo stomped on his head and laughed as he mockingly yelled, “Kill the little wetback muthafucka, huh? Yeah, nigga, you should have!”
“Kill me,” Tyrone pleaded. “Just finish me.”
Pablo laughed. “No way, bitch. You a woman now. Bye-bye, puta!”
The crowd of blacks was now running full-out toward the bench, followed by the Mexicans who had closed in on them from the street. Before they could reach Pablo and the others, they were set upon from behind and, in a matter of minutes, those who weren’t lying unconscious on the ground were fleeing in panic toward the projects. From that night on, it would be where they would stay, unless they wanted to wind up in the morgue.
Pablo regretted that he wasn’t able to get the other four who had jumped him. It was rumored that they were hiding out on the hill over in Hunters Point, in the vicinity of West Point and Middle Point. There was no way anyone was going to get to them over there. It was a black stronghold and any attempt to penetrate that area would be like trying to commit suicide. Pablo would just have to be satisfied that he’d gotten a couple of them. Making Tyrone a eunuch and turning the already brainless idiot Demetrius into a vegetable was good enough for now. Pablo had acquitted himself well and was now a full-fledged member of the gang.
After the Garfield Park incident, Pablo’s reputation in the gang began to grow. By the time he was eighteen years old, he was one of the leaders and ran his own small crew of enforcers whose job it was to make sure that non-affiliated criminals pay protection for the privilege of operating on the gang’s turf. The protection was known as “the tax,” and no one got an exemption.
Things went along smoothly for Pablo until the spring of 2000, when a car thief named Bob Matulski opened a chop shop on Florida Street and let it be known that he wouldn’t be paying any “greaser tax.”
Pablo sent a couple of his boys over to have a talk with Matulski. Bad Bob, as he was known to his underlings, beat up one of the messengers while his pals held the other. They were sent back to Pablo with a message that he’d best “stay the fuck away from my business.”
“I guess we’re gonna have to teach the dumb Polack a lesson,” Pablo seethed to his crew. It was bad enough that a gringo was poaching on the gang’s turf. Now this bastard was beating up his people. This would never do. He would need something more than just a beating. Yes, he would need much, much more than that.
And so, several nights later, accompanied by two of his most brutal enforcers, Oscar Mejia and Antonio Camacho, Pablo exited his car and walked across the street to the shop. It was two o’clock in the morning.
Six men had left the building during the previous half hour. A week’s worth of surveillance had revealed a pattern. Bad Bob Matulski was always the last to leave—usually about an hour after the rest of his crew had departed.
Finding the door unlocked, they entered and crept silently toward an office in the back of the garage, where they saw Matulski through the door. He was on the phone and the conversation he was having indicated that he was getting ready to take in another stolen car. They stayed back until he hung up, then stepped into the room.
“Hey, gringo, what’s happenin’?”
Matulski jumped up and reached for the drawer to a filing cabinet where he had a gun.
“Wrong,” Pablo said as Oscar fired a shot into Matulski’s shoulder. Matulski screamed as the impact knocked him to the floor.
Oscar went over to the downed man and laughed. “Hey, you no look so tough now, gringo.”
Matulski gritted his teeth and tried hard not to show his pain. Yes, he was a tough guy, but even a hard ass like him wouldn’t be able to stand up to the treatment he was about to be subjected to. “No,” thought Pablo, “Mr. Matulski would soon be crying like a little bitch.”
Oscar and Antonio dragged the injured car thief into the garage as Pablo locked the front door. Spread-eagling him on a workbench, they clamped the man’s hands into the vises on either side and tied his feet to the end with electrical wire. They finished their prep work by duct-taping his mouth shut. Pablo approached Matulski, whose eyes betrayed his terror. The tough guy tried to talk, but the duct tape prevented his protests from being heard.
“You know, gringo, you shouldn’t have fucked up my boy when he came in here to collect your overdue taxes last week. What you did was very disappointing to me. All I wanted was a little cut of your action so we could all benefit from the profits you were making. I allowed you to operate in my territory and how did you repay me? You beat up one of my business associates. That was a very unwise move on your part, Mr. Matulski.”
Oscar and Antonio went to another part of the garage and returned with a large acetylene tank, a torch, and an arc welder. Pablo watched as the two men donned the eye protection and prepared to go to work.
Bad Bob also watched. He squirmed violently as he tried to break loose of the vises and electrical wire holding him to the bench.
Looking into the car thief’s horror-filled eyes, Pablo said, “Take a good look at us, cabrone, because we are the last thing you will ever see.”
Antonio went to work with the arc welder, melting metal into the eyes of Bad Bob Matulski as Oscar set about amputating his ankles with the acetylene torch. The car thief squirmed violently and moaned but soon went limp.
Pablo cursed as he thought back to that night. “Fucking cops. Why the hell did
they have to be on Florida Street on that particular occasion? Christ, we hadn’t seen any fuzz on that block for a week. The one time they drove by had to be when Oscar, Antonio, and I were exiting the garage.”
In the ensuing gun battle, Pablo and one of the cops were wounded. Oscar and Antonio were killed.
Pablo was tried and convicted for the murder of his two fellow gang members, who’d died as a result of the felonies they had been committing together. He was also convicted of the attempted murder of the two police officers and the mutilation of Bob Matulski.
Now he sat in the exercise yard at San Quentin prison, where he would be spending the remainder of his life.
Glancing over to the group of convicts from the White Alliance, he caught the eye of their leader, Grady Milsap, a blonde six-footer with a body covered in tattoos. Like Pablo, he was a lifer. They’d helped each other out in the past and would do so again today.
Pablo ran his hand through his thick black hair and Grady nodded. It was time.
CHAPTER
8
Ryan was at peace. Holding Carol close to him at the edge of a World War II bunker on the southern slope of the Marin Headlands, he marveled at the windswept panorama that lay before him, convinced that he was standing at the center of one of the most spectacularly breathtaking vistas in all the world. Spread out before him in all directions was a natural canvas that combined the creative magnificence of God and man.
To the west were the Farallon Islands, home to great whites and their prey, the sea lion. To the north lay Mount Tamalpais and Point Reyes. To the south, along the northern shore of San Francisco, the exclusive Sea Cliff neighborhood and Presidio were perfect backdrops for sailboats moving in and out of the Golden Gate.
Alcatraz and Angel Islands basked in the shadows of the eastern hills and graced the waters of the bay, standing watch over the Golden Gate Bridge, which in turn stood as a sentinel to the west of Coit Tower, the Trans American, and other architectural icons that silhouette the San Francisco skyline.
This beautiful and peaceful place was where Carol and he always began the last day of every visit. It was where they came to speak tenderly to one another while fantasizing about how their lives might have been had their paths not pushed them in opposite directions.
The sight of fishing boats chugging toward Fisherman’s Wharf with their catches of the day mirrored times long since past when the city was defined by the ethnic communities that made it special. Days when Italians, Irish, Chinese, Latinos, and Russians all occupied their little areas of the city and where if one wanted to experience the culture and food of a certain community of immigrants, one could. Those were the days before social engineers and politicians made this type of community cohesion among ethnic groups a cause for leftists with the mantra that everyone had to mix or the society was somehow corrupt.
Ryan broke the silence. “How’s the Jib sound?” The Jib was one of their favorite restaurants along the bay in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate.
“The Jib’s fine.” Carol sighed. She really didn’t want to leave the serenity of the little perch they’d occupied for the past hour or so. Leaving always meant the beginning of the inevitable farewell—a farewell that became more difficult each time. She wasn’t yet ready to let go of the intimacy and passion of the past two days. Neither was Ryan, but this was how it would be until he finally broke free from the life he’d chosen and came home to her for good—assuming she was still waiting.
Ryan remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on Carol Katzenbacher at a small dinner party thrown by mutual friends in North Beach. He’d just gone through a very messy divorce and the furthest thing from his mind was getting involved with another woman. His ex-wife, Ciara, had been a jealous, lazy, shiftless, and self-centered narcissist who’d put demands on him that were impossible to meet. Her main activities in life were watching soap operas and spending money. She neither worked nor performed the normal tasks of a stay-at-home wife.
The marriage had begun to unravel when Ryan returned home from one of his lengthy deployments and discovered that she’d not only spent all his hostile-fire pay and depleted their bank account but had amassed a debt that put him in jeopardy with his superiors when the creditors came looking for him. The last straw had been when he’d found out that she’d been carrying on an affair with her best friend’s husband.
After the divorce, Ryan was determined to avoid serious and long-lasting relationships. He held firm to that decision—until he met Carol.
Carol had all the qualities that his ex-wife lacked. She was extremely attractive. Her angelic face, brown eyes, and auburn hair were complemented by the most perfectly proportioned body he had ever seen. She dressed immaculately and turned heads everywhere she went.
More importantly, however, she possessed a quality that many modern-day women lack. She was selfless. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to make him happy. She was a perfect lover and confidant, and Ryan hoped she would someday be his wife.
They sat together in silence at the Jib, looking out over the water as they sipped merlot. No finer wines could be found than those from the Napa Valley—that not-so-far-away place where Ryan had spent the most troubled years of his life.
“I’m going to miss you, my love. And when I’m sitting on top of some godforsaken, snow-covered mountain in Afghanistan freezing my ass off, I’ll relive these past few days. Just thinking about your embrace and those luscious, tender lips of yours will be enough to warm my bones.”
“Your what?” Carol mocked, as if mistaking the word bones for something else. Then she added, “Oh, your bones. Right.” They both laughed.
They lingered a while longer, stalling for time. The thought of parting once again was almost more than they could bear. When they finally left the restaurant, they headed to Carol’s apartment on Nob Hill, where they spent one last sweet but sad night together.
The next morning, Ryan took one final look at his sleeping beauty.
The innocent love of his life knew very little of what he did for a living and nothing of how he had been spending his time lately. He hoped he could keep it that way.
He closed the door to the bedroom and slipped quietly out of the apartment.
Having already closed down his home, he headed out across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toward his next destination—Sedona, Arizona, where he had some more unfinished business.
CHAPTER
9
Ryan turned on the radio as he drove past the windmills on Altamont Pass and headed south toward Interstate 5. The sun was just peeking over the eastern horizon and he was thankful that his southern route would preclude the aggravation of having it glare through the windshield. He half listened to the repetitive chatter that emanated from the local all news station, not absorbing much of what was being reported until he heard something about an incident at San Quentin prison.
He listened as the reporter stated, “Prison officials have confirmed that the medium-security facility is still in lockdown after yesterday’s riot, which resulted from a brawl between three prison gangs. Members of Hijos de Zapata, the White Alliance, and the African Guerrilla Brotherhood clashed after the White Alliance challenged the African Guerrillas over rights to a certain section of the exercise yard. In the ensuing melee, the Zapatas went to the assistance of the Whites and the fight quickly escalated into a riot. The prison SWAT team had to be called and, after tear gas failed to quell the disturbance, shots were fired that resulted in the death of Black Guerrilla inmate Clarence Newton.
“After order was restored, it was discovered that two other inmates, Albert Jefferson and Anthony Upton, were also dead. It’s been determined that they died at the hands of the two rival gangs. Jefferson was found on the ground with a crushed skull, apparently the result of a forty-five pound weight disc being dropped on him. Upton lay nearby with a broken neck caused by a blow from a blunt instrument, possibly a weight-lifting bar.
“Jefferson and Upton
were serving life terms for the 1980 bombing death of San Francisco police sergeant Jack Oldham. They and other members of the radical Black Socialist Army, along with a female member of the Marxist group Lenin’s Legion, lured the sergeant and other cops to an abandoned house in San Francisco on the false report of a rape. Oldham was killed and two of his officers were wounded when the front porch blew up. A chase and gunfight ensued in which their female accomplice and the driver of the getaway vehicle were killed. Jefferson and Upton were captured after fleeing the scene.”
Ryan smiled and said aloud to himself, “Thanks, Sal.”
CHAPTER
10
Orlando and Inez Mendora were desperate. Their lives had been on a downward spiral since the day ten years earlier when their son, Pablo, went to prison. What little savings Orlando and Inez once had were gone, depleted by the attorney’s fees they’d spent in a futile attempt to see their son acquitted.
Following the trial, Orlando suffered a series of heart attacks, which forced him to quit his job and take a small pension. The pension, combined with social security, was barely enough to buy food. There was nothing left over for rent or any of the other necessities of modern living. Inez was battling cancer and often had to forego treatment and medicine for her disease in order to avoid dipping into the small amount of money they set aside every month for food. Their unpaid utilities had been turned off and they sat in their flat bundled in extra layers of clothing. They were sick, cold, and miserable.
In a few days they would be evicted, and what lay ahead after that was anyone’s guess. The couple, known for their generosity to others, had received no offers of aid, food, shelter, or any of the other things they had provided to the have-nots in their neighborhood over the years. Their faith in humanity reached an all-time low as they realized that the friends they thought they had were really just fair-weather friends—here only when they were benefiting from Mendora generosity but unwilling to reciprocate in kind when their former benefactors fell on hard times.
The Rampage of Ryan O'Hara Page 6