by Hart Hanson
“I worked corners for Mr. Keet when I was ten,” said Tums. “In high school, he sent me to do collections after class. Then he put me through law school.”
Christ, Keet was running some kind of criminal School for Ambitious Wayward Juvenile Psychopaths.
“Not a good law school, I bet.”
Tums laughed and said, “Good enough.”
Lucky handed me back the can of Coke. I palmed the pull tab, apparently not as smoothly as I’d hoped.
“Whaddaya gonna do with that?” Keet asked. “Cut my throat?”
I shrugged and held it out to him.
“Keep it,” Keet said. “Best of luck to you. Where are my barrels?”
I explained where the barrels were and how to get to them. My hands were no longer numb. They felt like I’d reached into a fire. I was good with that because it meant they weren’t dead. Also, it distracted me from my aching head where Keet had kicked me.
Keet decided that I would lead the way, followed by Lucky, which was not good for Lucky because every time I stumbled or hesitated, Slim took the shotgun from where it was hidden under his poncho and struck Lucky in the back. Keet came next, followed by Nick hefting Lucky’s Smith & Wesson, aiming it at birds and airplanes, aching to fire it. Tums brought up the rear, smoking his pot, whistling “Killing Me Softly.”
Both Lucky and I bled steadily from our wrists and ankles, like walking suicides, as we climbed up one floor in the parking garage and then took the ramp with the cut flap of fencing over to the abandoned mall.
I led our little sociopath parade to the alcove with the demon’s head and the slogan: WE ARE ALL MADE OF DIRT.
“No way you fit through that demon’s mouth,” Nick told Slim.
Keet sent Nick through first, then me and Lucky, with Keet pointing his machine pistol at me the whole time, and then we all watched as skinny-bones Tums tried to push Slim through the hole from the other side.
“You’re too fat,” Nick said.
Slim asked if there was a beam or piece of lumber inside that he could use to bash on the hole to widen it. Keet covered me and Lucky with his machine pistol as Nick and Tums hefted a piece of concrete about five feet long and eight inches wide, lined with rebar, out to Slim. Slim ran at the demon like a battering ram four or five times, making the hole big enough for him to come through. It was an impressive display of strength, but the big man didn’t have a lot of stamina, because he was gray-faced after and it was easy to see that Nick was itching to comment on that fact.
Keet ordered Slim to hold my right hand on the beam Slim had used to bash his way through the wall. Nick pointed my own gun at my face from a foot away. Keet picked up a broken cinder block in both hands.
“In case you’re feeling rebellious,” Keet said.
“No, no!” Lucky said, just before Keet hammered my hand three times, the bones busting like a basket.
“Suddenly the Paki can talk?” Keet said.
I reeled and vomited, my right hand pulped and useless when Slim let it go, flapping at the wrist, ruined. Then—“Lucky isn’t an Arab and he’s not Pakistani. He’s Afghan.” I vomited again.
Keet ordered everybody to move on, shoving Lucky in front to lead the way. I pushed my pulverized right hand into my shirt as a makeshift sling and placed my left hand on Lucky’s shoulder for support. Lightning bolts of agony shot from my hand straight up my arm into my head. Slim prodded me with the shotgun, and behind my nausea and anger I realized there was absolutely no chance of my taking the shotgun off him now.
Keet continued to justify his actions against Avila.
“Bought those kids a couple of cheap cameras, stocked the house with food and beer, parceled out just enough dope to keep ’em happy, and told ’em to make little films, sell ’em on the Internet.”
“What, like pornos with the local board betties?” Nick asked. “I’d get in on that action.”
“Skate films,” Tums corrected Nick. “The Internet was the thing, man. All that fragmentation of entertainment, shit going viral. I saw an opportunity.”
I was starting to be able to breathe again, shuffling with my head down, clinging to Lucky, waiting for my chance, any chance, because I would not let another go by, no matter how desperate. I felt sudden empathy for Ripple, being whittled away piece by piece. I wondered where he was and hoped that his kinky little girlfriend was rocking his world to the good.
Lucky led us along the dim first floor of the mall, moving slow through the rubble, dodging holes in the floor left for conduits and escalators and elevators and air shafts. I hoped Lucky would find a chance to escape, leave me behind, but I knew he wouldn’t.
I was convinced that the task force was out there watching us, but I was equally convinced that they wouldn’t move on Keet until he left the building with the barrels—by which time Lucky and I would be dead, our bodies dumped in the basement of this abandoned building, a buffet for feral cats.
“What Biz did was forget that he’s just another little mud boy with fast feet from Lennox.”
“Not so fast he could steal a couple of barrels of money without us noticing,” Tums said.
“Avila’s cousin Rocky stole those barrels,” I said, “not Avila.”
“Rocky was okay with me,” Nick said. “He set me up with some fine bitches.”
“If Rocky stole those barrels, it’s because Biz told him to,” Tums said.
This didn’t exactly match what Avila had told me.
“Why’d you kill Rocky if it wasn’t really his fault?”
“We had nothing to do with Rocky getting killed,” Keet said.
Was he lying? Or was Tums lying to Keet? Neither, I thought, but I had to wonder if I was losing it—loss of blood, pain, microfissures in my brain from getting blown up . . .
We arrived at the vertical ramp looming out of the perpetual twilight in the decrepit mall. No skateboard kids, but I could still smell a fire smoldering nearby. For a moment I hoped that security guard would show up but realized Keet would just kill the poor bastard.
“The barrels are anchoring the ramp,” I said.
“Look for the ones that are welded shut,” Lucky said.
Keet nodded at Tums and Nick to go down one floor to check out the barrels.
They used the double escalators, frozen, leading from this floor down to the first floor where the ramp bottomed out, Tums walking, Nick sliding down the handrails. Slim kept his eyes and shotgun trained on me and Lucky while Keet watched Nick and Tums, Nick taking the northern end of the vertical ramp and Tums the southern end.
A gust of wind blew through a hole in the roof and over the dying fire, and Willeniec whispered, Youaredirtyouaredirtwearealldirt, and I knew for certain that Keet was minutes away from giving Slim permission to kick us over the edge. If the fall didn’t kill us, he’d come down and step on our throats until we were dead.
I caught Lucky’s eye and knew he was thinking the same thing.
“Got one.” Tums’s voice echoed off the pitted concrete walls.
“Me too,” Nick said.
“Check ’em for cash and find the other one,” Keet said. I finished his sentence in my mind—so I can kill these guys.
The other one?
My brain ticked and tumbled and started to work again. There absolutely was not a third barrel. Maybe there was a God, because I’d been handed just enough leverage that it might save us to fight another day. One more barrel missing meant that Keet was out at least a million dollars, probably more.
Tums and Nick struggled to roll their respective barrels to where Keet could look down and see them. Tums repeated Lucky’s trick with the flashlight, opening the plug to look inside.
“Full of cash,” Tums said. “Right up to the top.”
“But only two barrels,” Keet said.
“All the other barrels down ther
e are full of garbage,” Nick said.
Keet beckoned Nick and Tums to rejoin us one floor up. Keet stared at me until they arrived, then gave Nick the Heckler and walked over to stand in front of me, hands on his hips.
“Where’s my money?” he asked.
“I tell you, I’m dead,” I said.
Keet looked at Tums. Tums shrugged and lit one of his blunts.
Keet said, “I’m sick of this whole clusterfuck.”
“You think you’re tired of it . . . ,” I said. “I’m just a driver.”
“Here’s the deal—tell me where the barrel is or Nick shoots the Paki.”
“Can’t even one of you dumb fuckers understand that he’s not Pakistani or Arab? He’s Afghan. He’s from Afghanistan. It’s a proud, fierce culture that has kicked everyone’s ass for thousands of years.”
I had the very brief satisfaction of seeing Keet and his motley crew of lowlifes momentarily taken aback by my sergeant’s tone while Lucky straightened his entire five-foot-five frame because he knew we were about to fight back.
In my ruined hand I still held the pop-top, which I’d straightened out into a tiny dull blade that would barely manage to leave a mark on even the most delicate and exposed skin.
But skin wasn’t my target.
I slice across both of Slim’s eyeballs before Keet can react, but I fail to follow up by taking the shotgun from him because my right hand is nothing more than seeping hamburger. Knowing Slim will pull the trigger, reflexively I yank the barrel under my armpit in an effort to aim it at Keet but I’m too slow. The buckshot grazes my ribs but blows away most of poor Nick’s head. The dying boy pulls convulsively on the trigger of the Heckler but instead of cutting Keet in half, which is my ardent desire, it fires straight up into the ceiling.
Lucky goes after Tums. They grapple, each trying to get their hands on Tums’s murderous little assassin’s gun.
Slim is still on the other end of the shotgun, screaming in fury and agony, his eyes leaking blood and tears and eyeball insides all over me as Keet moves to jam the Ruger into my stomach—so I tip me and Slim over the edge, hoping I’ll be the one on top when we hit the floor below.
We fall . . .
. . . we hit the floor . . .
. . . did I lose consciousness?
I gain my feet.
How much time has passed? What’s happened?
Slim lies on his side, nearby, groaning, his hip dislocated, but still reaching for me with both massive arms. He wants to pull me close enough to bury his thumbs in my throat.
I stomp on the base of Slim’s skull. He keeps coming. I do it again, aiming more carefully. This time there is a pop and Slim stops moving.
I look up to see Lucky, still wrestling with Tums. Keet, framed by a hole in the roof, silhouetted against the blue, blue Los Angeles sky, is raising a gun (my gun!) to blow Lucky’s life away.
I shout a useless warning and register a blur of orange plummeting from the blue sky toward Keet. It knocks Keet to the ground.
Lucky flips Tums over the edge. Tums screams as he plummets and strikes the nearer of the two money barrels, landing in a terrible way so that he is literally lying on his own legs, left ankle jutting out from behind left armpit. I see his little assassin’s gun and I pick it up and hear authoritative voices yelling at everyone to stop and drop our weapons, but Keet is rising again, swinging his gun up to shoot Lucky, who is moving toward Keet, but Lucky doesn’t have a hope of reaching Keet before Keet shoots him. I’m too late! I’m too late! I don’t have the time I need to bring up the assassin’s gun in my wrong hand and fire, but Keet screams and recoils and looks down at his feet again in surprise, like he’s been bitten by a poisonous snake, and he fires the gun at the snake just as I snap off a first shot and, as trained, a second, as quickly as I’m capable, and one of those two hollow-point bullets strikes Keet in the head and down he goes, and I think—We’re okay! We’re okay!—and the police scream at me to drop my weapon and I can and I do because it’s Delilah and the task force and I raise the one hand I can raise, and something tells me—maybe it’s Lucky’s face (heartbroken)—I could not be more wrong.
We are not okay.
We are not okay at all.
HOW TO FALL AND HOW TO LAND
There is trauma in life. There are difficulties and obstacles. Our memories are not dependable even at the best of times, when our brains haven’t been scrambled, when we haven’t lost pints of blood, when we aren’t grief-stricken and furious. That’s why we check in with the people we trust (sometimes dozens of times a day) to confirm that our perceptions of reality match at least a predominance of their perceptions of reality, so that we can agree that we live together in the same world.
Here are some facts I discovered later that I wasn’t able to absorb for a while:
The orange streak I saw falling from heaven that knocked Keet to the ground wasn’t God tossing down a meteor. It was Ripple (you knew that right away). He’d spent the night up there on the roof, in a sleeping bag with his kinky girl, and saw his chance to save Lucky and threw himself down through a hole in the roof at Keet.
When Keet turned his attention from Lucky and fired down, it was Ripple’s chest he was firing into because Ripple bit his Achilles tendon so hard it was severed.
The task force handcuffed me and would not let me go to Ripple and I couldn’t fight them off because I was done. I was out.
Later, in the hospital, Lucky told me that the last thing Ripple heard was me shouting his name. Shouting thanks.
(Did these things happen? I don’t remember. Is Lucky telling me the truth or just trying to make me feel better?)
Lucky said that Ripple gripped his hand hard and did his best to live—but our best is nothing more than the most we can offer in the moment at that time and place and isn’t always good enough, especially with a severed aorta.
So Ripple bled out on the filthy floor of an abandoned mall next to the dead son of a bitch who’d killed him because I wasn’t fast enough.
And then . . .
. . . life went on . . .
. . . in the chaotic, messy, contentious manner it does when several people have been killed and mysteries deepen and lies are told and careers are made and broken, and the vast machinery of law enforcement and justice must react and respond to a degree that allows it to maintain a semblance of validity.
I was in the hospital for a long time. Three separate operations on my mashed hand with more to come. Ruptured spleen, bruised liver, torn diaphragm, buckshot in my ribs and lung, near my heart. A piece of shrapnel lodged deep in my back from the explosion of the Caddie. Extensive blood loss from the wire cuts in my wrists and ankles.
Painkillers.
Anesthetic.
I admit I embraced every opportunity they gave me to retreat from the real. I pushed the button on my morphine pump as often as it would let me; I took every pill they put in front of me; I forced myself to sleep.
Mom and Dad showed up through the mist, the two of them giving me hell in tandem, though I’m unclear on the specifics, until Mom told Dad to leave so that she could be alone with me and God, so she could pray.
I apologized to Mom because when it got out into the general news cycle that the maniac limo driver who’d killed three was her oldest son, it would damage her standing.
Mom said, “Bullshit!” and laid her head on my chest.
One afternoon, the sun low in the sky, magic hour they call it, I opened my eyes to find Dr. Quan holding my hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I’m okay.”
“I mean about Ripple,” she said.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. She went on to tell me that, according to Lucky, Ripple died knowing he was brave, that his fellow soldiers could count on him. “That would have meant the world to him,” she said.
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br /> Media types and commentators had a field day trying to piece together what had happened. I was described, variously, as a crook who double-crossed his criminal accomplices; an innocent bystander who did what he had to, to save himself and his friends; an undercover agent; and a vigilante.
One story that was popular for a day or two surmised that drug-addicted Darren (Ripple) had run away to live on the streets and Lucky and I had set off to bring him home and blundered into a gang turf war.
After they found out that I was out on bail after assaulting members of a warrant execution team, I became the poster boy for post-traumatic stress. On cable news, I saw myself psychoanalyzed by a psychiatrist I’d never met. The outcome didn’t exactly match the me that I knew and loved and sounded disconcertingly like my personal theory of Assholes Find Each Other and I was most definitely a prime asshole.
Delilah persuaded Connie that Lucky deserved the best legal representation he could get—which meant Connie—and it turned out that, tactically speaking, it would be best for Lucky if Lucky and I shared representation, which meant I got Connie as my lawyer too.
But that’s all I got. Connie the Lawyer, not Connie of My Heart. That turned out to hurt more than any of my various wounds, even the actual shard of lead near my heart.
During the early days of the investigation, the police didn’t allow me and Lucky to communicate. They didn’t want us to come up with a common narrative to explain the sequence of events leading to all those deaths.
What they couldn’t understand was that Lucky and I didn’t need to speak because I knew that Lucky knew that I would follow a time-honored stratagem that had worked for us more than once in the past.
Lucky would blame me.
I would blame the dead guy.
Following those simple rules, here’s how the basic Q and A played out:
Mr. Skellig, how did you know where to find those barrels of money?
When Dad and I caught X-Ray (blame the dead guy) and Mr. Tums up in Big Sur and I threatened to hang X-Ray from a tree, the frightened kid, out of earshot of Mr. Tums, offered to buy his life by saying he and Nick (blame another dead guy) stole two barrels of cash from their criminal boss, Asher Keet. X-Ray told me where to find those barrels and in return I promised not to hang him from a tree.