by David Putnam
I slowed, stunned and in awe of the scene. “Ah, shit.”
“Exactly.” Kohl guided us to the yellow tape at Imperial Highway and lifted it. I stepped under to the other side.
“What happened?”
Kohl lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Ricky Blue jumped his position and confronted the two suspects and the victim on this side of the truck. I caught it all with the high-speed 35mm camera. The one suspect grabbed the victim and put a gun under his chin. That’s when Blue came around with the shotgun.”
“So, that’s when it turned into a hostage situation.”
Kohl shook his head. “The suspect took one look at Blue and didn’t blink. He swung the victim around putting him in between, using the victim as a shield.”
“Oh, man.”
“Yeah. The suspect came over the victim’s shoulder with his pistol to shoot Blue. Blue didn’t have a choice. He fired and blew the victim right out of the suspect’s hands. Bam! The victim goes down dead. The two suspects then open up on Blue.”
“That’s awful.”
“You’re telling me. I was up on that roof”—he pointed across the street—“and couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“I see what you mean. That’s close quarters for a gunfight.”
“They were maybe fifteen feet apart. And you’re right, Blue’s got balls the size of trash-can lids. He stands his ground and works the gauge. He takes out that one there”—Kohl pointed to the crook on the ground—“and then chases the second suspect through the hole in the fence and down the alley.”
“That’s where he shoots the other one right in front of me.”
Kohl nods. “You’re lucky you had the sense and state of mind to get the hell outta the way.”
I tried to absorb and comprehend the hopeless tragedy of it all, though I really needed to put it aside for now, ponder it later. Someplace quiet and alone. That, or I’d end up standing on the street corner with a blank stare like some kind of zombie. I asked, “Is my lieutenant coming out?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t heard.”
“How much shit is Blue in?”
“Right now, I couldn’t tell ya. I don’t know which way the cards are going to fall. He’s easily justified in what he did once he confronted the robbers, but that’s the rub. He shouldn’t have moved from his position. I guess it’s going to come down to how the report’s written.”
“What about the third suspect, did they get him?”
“Yeah, caught him hiding in a cockfighting ring in LAPD’s area, just up that way a few blocks. Someone winged him with buckshot, but nothing serious.”
So much for Blue’s hat trick.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE SQUAD CAR came south on Mona and turned east on Imperial. Kohl saw it and flagged it down. The patrol deputy drove across the double yellow line on the wrong side of the street. Westbound traffic yielded for him. He came alongside us and stopped partially in the driveway of the gas station.
Kohl said to the deputy, “Hey, Mike, can you give Bruno here a ride back to the station?”
“Sure, Sarge. Hop in, Bruno.”
I knew the driver, Michael Milts. We came out of the jail together and went through training at the same time in Lynwood. A good guy who did what needed to be done, and not much more. He went along to get along. He liked wearing the star on his chest, the idea of it. He didn’t go out of his way to serve the public, and always jumped at the chance to claim “ghetto gunfighter” status when he’d yet to be involved in a shooting.
I opened the door and got in the front seat. Kohl bent down and said, “You know the routine, Bruno. Don’t talk to anyone about what happened until homicide can interview you.” He slapped the roof of the cop car, turned, and headed back.
I waved an acknowledgment too late. His words penetrated, but were again overcome by images of the dead that wouldn’t leave me alone. The victim under the flatbed truck, the dead suspect in the alley, and, of course, Pedro Armendez. The worst part, though? I couldn’t shake the phantom taste of Pedro’s blood in my mouth. The way it kept coming back, warm and salty. I didn’t know if I ever would.
I closed the door, and Milts took off driving across traffic to get back on the right side of the road.
In two and a half years on the street, I’d experienced plenty of death: car crashes; natural deaths; brutal, senseless murders. But I’d never experienced the cold, hard truth of death, not up close and personal like that. Nothing even came close in comparison. These last two sudden deaths hit me as a confused ambiguity that I couldn’t rectify in my conscience, the moral right and wrong of them. All of this seemed needless, a terrible waste of human life, and played out as nothing more than a stupid game of cops and robbers.
Milts said nothing as he drove, which wasn’t like him at all. I said, “Hey, what’s been goin’ on? You working late swing or the cover shift tonight? You here on OT?” With most of the shift working the shooting, the watch commander would have called in the next shift early.
He nodded toward the backseat. I turned and peered through the black mesh screen. Milts had another passenger who’d also needed a lift back to the station.
Ricky Blue.
Blue sat with his head back on the seat, his eyes closed. The passing streetlights flickered, revealing his face in flashes—the large nose, the black mustache, his shadowed eyes.
What he’d done came back in a rush and caused my anger to flare. The way he gunned down that kid without the smallest consideration for Thibodeaux or me, almost as if the killing of that kid meant more to him than the lives of his fellow deputies.
His lips moved. “Bruno. That’s your name, right? Bruno Johnson?”
“That’s right.” I shouldn’t have continued to stare at him, but with his eyes closed, he couldn’t see me. And I somehow wanted to understand the man who could do what he did.
“I should’ve apologized out there in the alley,” he said. “I shouldn’t have fired like that with you on the other end of my gauge, not when you were so close to that asshole. I guess I just got all wrapped up in the moment. You know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t. You could’ve hit me or your own partner, Thibodeaux.”
He opened one eye, cocked his head to the side, and looked at me. “Or maybe I feared for your safety, and I didn’t know if you’d have the nuts to drop the hammer on that little puke.”
“Oh, is that right?” I said. “You’re the one who jumped your position. You’re the one who jeopardized the whole operation with that cowboy shit.” I turned and faced front.
Milts, in a harsh whisper, said, “Holy shit, Bruno. Take it down a notch.” He drove on, passing more streetlights and businesses closed for the night.
In truth, Blue had been right. I didn’t know if I could’ve pulled the trigger, and that’s where some of the anger came from: my inaction in the face of danger. I thought that I actually had been about to pull the trigger when Blue fired and I ducked to keep from getting hit.
I took several deep breaths and calmed, tried to think about something else and couldn’t.
Even with the anger and acting like an ass, I still wanted to ask Blue some burning questions. I wanted to know how it felt to kill two human beings, what it did to his soul. It had to tear off a big chunk, a piece never to return, and that brought his soul closer to the edge of extinction. Which only served to bring up more questions: How much soul did one person have to risk? And how much did Blue have left?
I worked on a violent crimes team and Wicks had warned me specifically about what would happen. He’d been absolutely right. Only Blue handled it so casually, the same as if, sitting down to a big Sunday supper with lots of family, he had simply said, “Please pass the mashed potatoes.” Maybe he’d already used up his allotment and didn’t have any soul left.
I would never get that desensitized. If I did see it start to happen, I’d get out. If nothing else, I’d take a job delivering the mail.
Blue su
cked his teeth, a sign of disrespect. “Johnson, just remember when they ask you, you be sure to tell ’em you saw the gun in his hand and he was running right at you. You tell ’em you were scared to death. That’s all you gotta say. Just tell them the truth. You can do that much, can’t you, kid? Tell the truth?”
“I’ve been ordered not to talk about it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SUNDAY AFTERNOON I caught the 91 Freeway and drove east, the window down, the warm wind on my face.
My muscles still moved with the slowness that comes with the fatigue of a marathon workday that had spanned almost seventy-two hours. My mind wallowed in a funk, still trying to catch up with all that had happened—with events that started from the moment Sonja knocked on my door.
I didn’t get home from the shooting on Mona until five that morning, grabbed five hours’ sleep—not near enough—had breakfast with Dad and my new daughter, and headed out to Lieutenant Wicks’ barbecue.
I didn’t want to go, not on my only day off. I needed more sleep and time to think. With this new job, I felt left far behind everyone else and had to continually run hard to catch up. I didn’t know if it’d get any better or if it would always be like this. That’s the part I had to think about. Did I want to run full speed without letup for the duration of my time on the violent crimes team? What kind of life would that be? And now I had a daughter to raise, another large responsibility to factor in. The largest.
Earlier that morning I’d awakened to Wicks’ page. The beeper screech sliced into my raw nerves. I leaped out of bed, looking for my gun, looking for a suspect lurking in the shadowy recesses of my old room.
My old room?
What the hell was I doing there?
And then I remembered.
I shook off the sleep as best I could and, half-awake, shuffle-stepped into the kitchen to the phone mounted on the wall and called Wicks.
He answered. “Hey, Bruno? You still comin’ over this afternoon?”
“What?”
“You still in bed? Come on, man, wake up. You can’t be sleepin’ your life away. Get up and smell the coffee and get your ass over here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The barbecue, remember? You said you’d come over and help celebrate the team’s first takedown. I’m grillin’ up some shark steaks. Get your ass in gear. The other guys are on their way.”
At least this time he didn’t refer to it as the team’s first kill.
“Yeah, sure, I’ll be there.”
No way would I be the only guy on the team who didn’t show up; otherwise I’d have gracefully declined.
He gave me the address.
When I hung up, guilt crept in. I needed to spend time with my daughter. How would I prioritize work with family? The logic of it seemed simple: without work, I couldn’t support my family, but if I worked all the time there wouldn’t be any family. I’d have to ask Dad. He’d know; he’d raised Noble and me. And that worked out, for the most part anyway. Not so much with Noble. There had to be some sort of easy formula to follow. Too many other people did it without any problem. How hard could it be?
After two freeway transitions, I got off in Whittier and made the turns I’d memorized from looking at the Thomas Guide.
He’d said one o’clock, and yet at one fifteen no other cars sat out front of the address. Had I gotten the numbers wrong? The house was in a predominantly white neighborhood and looked no different than the others on the block—a single-story wood-framed rambler, painted beige with brown trim and red brick that went from the ground to halfway up the wall. The front lawn needed mowing, and the composition shingle roof looked new. I didn’t know what I expected from the great Robby Wicks’ house, but this wasn’t it. The place looked so ordinary.
Wicks’ head appeared over the top of a cedar plank gate at the side, his hair perfectly combed. From the backyard, how had he known I’d pulled up out front? Had to be that predatory instinct of self-preservation that he couldn’t turn off.
He waved, opened the gate, and stepped out. He smiled and again waved me in like an old friend just coming in from six months at sea. Neither of his arms moved like they’d taken a bullet just two nights prior in that alley off 123rd and Central.
I turned the truck off, grabbed the bottle of red wine from the seat, and walked over.
He wore starched and ironed denim pants with a sharp crease, a white long-sleeve shirt, and a blue apron that went down to just above his knees. He held a barbecue fork in one hand and a beer in the other. “Hey, good to see ya, Bruno. Thanks for comin’.”
I looked around and held up my hands. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Ah, screw ’em, if they can’t take a joke. We don’t need anyone else to have a kick-ass party.” He spoke with a hint of a slur. His eyes stood out, bloodshot and watery. The odor of metabolized alcohol emitted from his breath and person. He’d been at it for a while. He turned to lead the way. On his right hip he wore an inside-the-belt holster with a Colt .45 Combat Commander sticking up. This one sported deer-stag grips. He even carried heavy while in his own backyard. Part of that predatory instinct again.
“Hey,” I said to his back.
He stopped and turned.
I pointed to the Colt. “You expecting trouble while you’re barbecuing? Is there something I should know about?”
He came back, moved in close to me, smiling, his alcohol breath stronger and hoppy from the beer. He took another pull off his can, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Something he would never have done sober. “Let me tell you something about me, my friend. You’ll figure it out eventually, but here it is. I strongly subscribe to the theory that you never need a handgun until you really need a handgun. Words to live by, my friend. Words to live by.”
Not me. I couldn’t go through life with that level of paranoia.
He let that sink in, then said, “Hey, you wanna beer? Let me get you a beer, old buddy.” He turned to yell, “Bar—”
A pretty woman in black slacks and a sleeveless yellow chiffon blouse appeared with two sweating beers. Her arms were muscular and lean, her smile the kind that lit up the world.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WICKS SLUGGED DOWN the remainder of his beer, crumpled the can with one hand, and tossed the empty over by the barbecue amongst a pile of at least six others. He took the fresh one from her. “Thanks, babe. Oh, this is my favorite deputy, Bruno Johnson. Bruno, my lovely wife, Barbara. She’s a patrol copper in Montclair.”
She handed me the second beer and shook my hand. Her eyes stayed with mine as she continued to smile warmly. “Favorite? That’s some title. You must really be something special.”
My face flushed hot. “Your husband’s just being nice. He hardly knows me.”
Again, I didn’t know what I expected for a wife, but she definitely seemed too nice for the likes of Wicks. Which wasn’t really fair because I hardly knew him.
Wicks shoved his beer can in my direction. “Not true. Babe, you remember me telling you about this guy. He’s the one that tracked that wounded car, chased it on foot for two-and-a-half, three miles, took down a murderer, a guy who ran down that child, that little girl in the crosswalk. Put the boot to him, too. Had to pull him off.”
The shame from that incident returned. I’d lost control on that suspect and vowed that it would never happen again.
At the same time, his description also brought back the image of Jenny lying in the street and reminded me that I, too, now had a daughter at home who needed protection from a violent and dangerous world. The weight of that responsibility seemed insurmountable.
Barbara still held my hand and squeezed it again. “You should be honored. I’m serious, he doesn’t often talk this way.”
I tried to look away from her eyes and couldn’t. “Ah, he’s just drunk, ma’am.”
Wicks put his hand with his beer on our two hands. “That’s enough of that, Bruno. Unhand my wife.” He laughed. “Come on. Come sit.”
I followed them both to the picnic table and sat down. I opened the beer and drank. The taste reminded me of the last beer I had, the one on Holt Boulevard in Pomona, at the Pedro Armendez crime scene.
The beer tasted great on a hot summer afternoon. I could get used to it. I never drank a lot. Dad didn’t go much for liquor. In fact, I’d only seen him drink one time, and after that I never wanted to see him drink again.
With the second beer, I quickly put aside all those other thoughts and started to decompress. I sat at the picnic table and dipped corn chips in salsa and talked with the lovely Barbara Wicks. She talked easily about working a patrol car for the Montclair police department, the mundane exploits of small-town law enforcement. But she spoke of them with excitement and verve. She told of how she met Robby two years ago at a domestic violence seminar, a POST—Peace Officers Standards and Training—update on mandated reporting, in San Diego. I just couldn’t picture Robby going to a DV seminar.
Robby Wicks stood at his grill, and with the slight breeze, the smoke rose and swirled about him, giving the appearance of an apparition. His eyes watered enough to streak his face with tears. He laughed at his own jokes and continued to match me beer for beer. We crumpled the cans and tossed them onto the growing pile on the ground by the barbecue. He flipped the raw vegetables on the grill and forked the small sausages to us one at a time to munch before he put on the main course, thresher shark steaks. Big slabs of fish, stacked on a platter and covered in wax paper, sat on the wooden picnic table next to us.
After the third beer, the afternoon smoothed out. I didn’t know how I’d drive home and no longer cared. With the warm sun and the camaraderie, all the ugliness from the last three days continued to just melt away. Maybe a barbecue after a takedown wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
I helped Barbara bring out the plates and flatware. We set them on the picnic table already covered with a red-checked tablecloth. I tried not to act too much like an enamored puppy. I filled an ice chest with some Dr. Pepper, along with the rest of the beer, and brought it outside so we wouldn’t have to walk so far to get resupplied. Barbara added a fifth of vodka, a bottle of vermouth, and a jar of olives.