The Innocents

by David Putnam

  I didn’t want to speak, afraid he’d read my anger and resentment toward him.

  The hot summer wind blew in both open windows and did little to cool down the heated world around us. The Nova had a bench seat, and when sitting behind the wheel, Blue didn’t look as intimidating. But that meant about the same as saying the skinny tiger didn’t look that hungry.

  I didn’t like Chelsea with Thibodeaux out of my sight. She’d said she could take care of herself and maybe she could under normal circumstances, but not with the likes of Dirt.

  Blue came out of a side street in South Gate and took Atlantic Avenue north. Alameda probably would’ve been faster. We fell in with all the cars backed up for miles in a long string of changing red and green lights. We caught the red at the first signal.

  “With this traffic,” I said, “we might not get there in time.”

  Blue didn’t look at me. “He’s a heroin hype with nine grams, what do you think he’s gonna do once they cut it up?”

  “Good point.”

  Blue said, “So, what did you think of working with Wicks?”

  I took a hard look at him for the first time since getting into the car. Here it was: the real reason why he wanted me to ride with him. He wanted to goad me a little to find out if I’d break, find out if I worked for Wicks or if the transfer to his team was legitimate.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard he’s really something to work with. Kinda always out there on the edge.”

  Now look who’s calling the kettle black.

  When I didn’t answer right away, Blue said, “I wish I had the opportunity to work with him. I think we would’ve made a good team. We could’ve taken down some real heavies. I put in for that violent crimes team, one of the many hopeful fools, and didn’t get it. I gotta tell ya, I was surprised as hell that you wanted to leave that team and come here to work on this one.”

  Blue never put in for the violent crimes team, he just wanted to bait me, draw me out. Wicks and Blue would never click. They’d be at odds from the moment they met. And the irony that he would comment about how Wicks lived out on the edge, as we headed to kick in some doors in Huntington Park, wasn’t lost on me.

  “You asked for me.”

  He looked at me. “I what?”

  “You personally called the chief and asked for me.”

  He smiled. “Someone’s yankin’ on your dick, my man. Not that I don’t want you, but that didn’t happen.”

  “Oh.”

  My mind spun at the implications. Now who was lying? The most logical answer would be Blue. More misdirection to put me off my game.

  “I didn’t get along with Wicks,” I said, “and I grew up in Willowbrook, so I thought I could make a real impact out here on this team.”

  The lie even sounded good to me.

  Blue nodded. The signal changed to green. We advanced, but not enough to get through the intersection; it’d take another cycle or two.

  “So,” Blue said, “what do you think of the narco team so far?”

  “I like it better than the violent crimes team. That was really something on Peach, the way that whole thing went down. The birdcage, all those arrests.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but we missed Mo Mo.”

  “Sounds like we’re gaining on him now.”

  Blue said nothing. We rode in silence. I looked straight ahead at the traffic, trying to see the lime-green T-Bird, a useless endeavor in the vast river of cars.

  Blue broke the silence. “You know, you always act like you got something on your mind, like you’re distracted. Like maybe you’re dying to ask me something.”

  He knew exactly why I was distracted. He and Thibodeaux had caused that distraction with the senseless and unwarranted abuse of Mrs. Whitaker. He was playing me like a cat plays with a mouse. Anger rose up and I pushed it down. I didn’t look at him.

  Play it cool. Play it cool.

  The signal changed to green for the second time. We again inched forward. I felt Blue’s eyes on me the whole time.

  He leaned over on the bench seat and patted my leg. “Hey, we need to trust each other. We’re a team here; it’s important. Go ahead and ask me anything you want.”

  I turned to look at him. “And you’ll answer it honestly, no bullshit?”

  He gave me a huge patronizing smile. “Of course.”

  “Did you do it?”

  His smile tarnished a little. “Heh. Do what?”

  “You know what.”

  He shrugged, the smile gone now. “Don’t play games with me. You wanna ask me something, go ahead and do it.”

  “Okay, did you really shoot and kill your father?”

  His expression didn’t change, but his eyes did. They hardened. I’d just prodded the skinny tiger with a stick. Now we both wanted the same thing: to tear each other’s heads off and kick them down the road. I stood a head taller and at least thirty pounds heavier and he still scared me. I didn’t think I could take him with an empty hand.

  He looked at me and said nothing. I didn’t think he would.

  I pushed a little harder. “Like you said, if we’re going to be on a team together, I think whether or not you shot your own father to death is something I should know, don’t you?”

  “I thought we’d have other, more important, issues to discuss besides some ancient history that has no bearing on what we’re doing here today.”

  He wanted to talk about the jam Dad was in and maybe offer some alternatives to get him out of that jam. That’s why he’d started the conversation. Only, it wasn’t working out for him.

  I shrugged. “Okay, sorry, I didn’t know that wasn’t on the table to discuss or that it was such a sore subject.”

  “No, no, if you want to . . . no, if you need to know about that horrible event that happened to my family, I’ll tell you all about it. I won’t be happy about it, but I’ll tell you. And fair is fair. After I tell you, you gotta tell me something outta your past.” He let that hang a moment and then said, “You still wanna play this silly little game?”

  I broke eye contact and looked out the windshield. He knew about how I’d pistol-whipped my brother, Noble, and arrested him for a triple murder. How Noble, at that moment, sat in jail waiting trial and that I’d be one of the star witnesses. Everyone in the department knew. That’s the story Blue would ask about. No way did I want to dredge up all that hot emotional soup, something so intimate and painful, especially not with the likes of Blue.

  He who lives in glass houses . . .

  He’d made me see the two incidents side by side, tried to make them comparable. I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to be like Blue. Not the cold-blooded killer part.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s just let it drop.”

  “You sure?”

  I said nothing more. We rode in silence.

  Now I brooded about Noble. Couldn’t help it, and realized I’d been wrong to prod Blue about the killing of his father. How spiteful of me.

  “Hey,” I said, “tell me about Jaime Reynosa.”

  Blue took his sunglasses off the dash and put them on. “He’s the guy who’s going to lead us right to Mo Mo. We take Mo Mo down and we take down the second-largest cocaine operation in LA. Papa Dee has the number-one spot. He’s next.”

  That raised the question: Then why weren’t we going after Papa Dee first?

  Noble had worked for Papa Dee, selling cocaine for him. I wanted to go after Papa Dee to redirect some of the pent-up rage over my brother about to go to prison for life.

  “What does Reynosa look like?”

  “Your standard, skinny Mexican heroin hype. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s got these big letters, ‘FFL,’ tattooed on his neck, right here. They’re real obvious and stand for Fucked For Life. And that’s what he’s going to be once I get my hands on him.”

  “You sure he can lead us to Mo Mo and be able to hang a case on him?”

  Blue lowered his chin and pulled his sunglasses down
his nose, looking over the top of them at me. “That’s what Ollie says, and I’ve never known her to be wrong about anything.”

  He hesitated and said, “You don’t seem convinced. You still act like you got something stuck in your craw. You better get used to what we do here, the way we do things, because this is how it is on our team. This is what we do—we turn people, make them give up other people.” He put his sunglasses back up where they belonged and looked out the windshield. “Sometimes bad people help you do good things.”

  That last statement struck an odd cord and it shouldn’t have. For some reason, I now questioned whether Blue really did walk on the dark side of the law. One thing I knew for sure, though—Blue truly believed he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  BLUE PULLED INTO a Church’s Chicken fifty minutes later and drove right up to Thibodeaux’s T-Bird already waiting there. He stopped, driver’s window to driver’s window, standard cop positioning. The Church’s Chicken rendezvous proved Blue and Thibodeaux had talked about a plan before Ollie even arrived at the narco trailer.

  What else did they have planned?

  The sunlight faded by the minute, with dusk coming in fast to finish off the day.

  In the T-Bird, Thibodeaux smoked a cigarette with his window down. Chelsea looked okay. She fanned the smoke and leaned a little toward her open window for fresher air. I would’ve really liked to have heard the conversation in their car on the ride up.

  Blue said to Thibodeaux, “You know what to do. We roll up hot and go inside. You and Bruno take the stairs. Boot the door and if Jaime’s there, you secure him. You wait there. If he’s not, you haul ass down to us, because that’s where the action will be.” Blue turned to look at me. “You got that?”

  I nodded.

  “Then get out. Get in Dirt’s car.” He turned back and spoke louder. “Chelsea, you’re with me.”

  I got out and left the door open. I moved around, passing Chelsea. We locked eyes. I said, “Keep your head down.” She nodded and went on by. I found it kind of hard to believe she didn’t squawk at yet another one of Blue’s capers that walked just outside the black-and-white line of the law, a place where an error of any kind could ruin a career, her career being the sole motivation for transferring to Lynwood narcotics.

  I hesitated before getting into Thibodeaux’s car. I didn’t like Blue for what he stood for, the laws he broke, the killings, but with those things excluded, in another place and another time, we might’ve been able to be friends. With Thibodeaux, I couldn’t stand him as a person, as a human. I got in and slammed his door.

  Blue took off, chirping his tires. Thibodeaux followed. We pulled back out onto the street.

  The T-Bird smelled of soured nicotine and pine scent. Thibodeaux, his sleek sunglasses covering his eyes, said, “This one really has the potential to make your asshole pucker, so be sure you got your Kotex firmly in place, huh, Nancy?”

  I said nothing and tried to keep the Polaroid photos of Mrs. Whitaker’s bruised breast out of my mind. But that was like trying not to think about pink elephants when someone tells you not to think about them.

  In three long blocks, both cars bounced into the lot of the rundown hotel, The Park View, at the corner of Slauson and Seville in Huntington Park.

  Hypes, hookers, and street urchins scattered.

  We bailed out of the cars and ran for the front door, Blue in the lead with Chelsea right behind him. Blue held Wicks’ Smith and Wesson 9 mm down by his leg. He pulled on the double glass door.

  Locked.

  Blue moved to the large window, tapped, and pointed the automatic at the hotel clerk who controlled the button for the solenoid release.

  The door buzzed.

  Chelsea yanked it open. We flooded in. Blue put his hand on her chest, stopped her, moved her aside.

  “Go, go,” he said to us. “We’ll give you a short count of five.”

  With Thibodeaux close at my heels, we ran up the shabby stairs, the carpet worn through to wood. I ran down the wide hall to room 207, stutter-stepped to get my stride correct, and booted the door on the run.

  The door flew open.

  A woman screamed.

  A hooker sat on the edge of a dirty swayback bed, half-naked, her tattooed breasts sagging down between her legs, the john standing in front of her with his pants at his ankles.

  Dirt shoved me in the back. “Come on, the action’s on the first floor.”

  Now I followed him back the way we came. He ran slower than I wanted to go. I fought the need to shove him out of the way as we descended the steps, taking them two at a time. I couldn’t remember the room number Ollie said for the first floor. No way would I ask Dirt.

  We hit the bottom of the stairs and ran into six Hispanic gang members who’d just come in and clogged the hallway. Dirt didn’t hesitate; he plowed into them yelling, “Sheriff’s Department. Get down, get down.” He clubbed the closest one and shoved into the others. The gang members, in a daze, slowly started to comply, easing to the floor.

  Dirt yelled, “I got these guys. Go, go.” He swung his gun and hit another one across the jaw who didn’t comply fast enough. He’d been right to take control of them, as we didn’t know if they were related to Jaime Reynosa, and they outnumbered us.

  I didn’t want to leave him with six against one, but he seemed to have them in hand, and I pitied those guys if they decided to try and take him on. No doubt Dirt would smoke them all and never lose any sleep over it.

  I needed to get to Chelsea and followed Dirt’s orders. I ran full speed down the hall until I came to the only open door.

  Inside the small 10’x15’ room, five suspects fought with two deputies, Blue and Chelsea, a clusterfuck of the first order. Elbows and fists and legs worked hard to injure and overcome. Yelps and grunts and fists connecting to muscle and bone.

  I almost didn’t slow down in time. I crossed the threshold to jump into the fight.

  A gunshot went off.

  In the small confines, the explosion stunned me. The concussion slapped me in the face. All the combatants in the room hit the floor, the same as if someone flipped off their power switch.

  Blue, like a startled cat, leapt into the air, turning as he did, aiming the automatic for any kind of target. He fell backward onto the bed, his eyes locked on me.

  “No, no,” I shouted. “It’s me—Bruno. Don’t shoot.”

  For one long second, one that didn’t want to click over to the next, Blue’s wild-eyed look said that he’d come far too close to gunning me. His eyes shifted back to normal and he lowered his gun.

  Chelsea stood alone, over by the corner, her gun in her hand. Gun smoke rose all around her in a strange aura. “It’s okay. It was an AD. It was an accidental discharge. It was me. It’s okay.”

  Blue got up off the nasty bed, chuckling. “Good thinking, Miller. Shooting your gun like that took the fight right outta these assholes. Let’s get ’em all cuffed and sorted out.”

  I put my gun in my holster.

  Thibodeaux ran into the room with his gun drawn.

  “Ho,” Blue said. “We’re code four; it was just an AD.”

  I bent over and started cuffing the Hispanic male closest to me. Chelsea and Blue did the same. I went to cuff the second one when Blue turned his next one over. “Hey, this guy’s shot.”

  I stepped over another one, still facedown on the floor, to see where Blue pointed. The guy close to Chelsea’s feet, a Hispanic gang member wearing a white strap t-shirt, had a through-and-through bullet wound to his right shoulder. Blood soaked his shirt and pooled on the floor under him. The gang member didn’t display any symptoms of pain or discomfort. That’s what heroin did for you. He said, “I’m suin’ all your asses. You wait and see. I’ll own all your asses. Fuckin’ Five-O just kickin’ in our door. You assholes are done.”

  Blue looked up at Chelsea. “Looks like you got one, kid. This one your first?”

  Chelsea turned pale and swa
yed on her feet. “I didn’t mean to. We were fighting. I had my gun in my hand. I hit that guy. He was trying to grab for my gun. He . . .” She looked at the gun in her hand as if it were an alien piece of metal. “I hit him with my gun. And it just went off.”

  “Shh,” I said. “Don’t say anything else.”

  Blue said, “That’s right, listen to Bruno. Bruno, get her outta here. Go to the desk and call for medical aid. Dirt, let’s get the rest of these guys secured.”

  I gently took Chelsea by the shoulders and guided her over and around the human obstacles on the floor. Out in the hall, I took her hand that held her gun and stuck her gun back in her holster on her hip and snapped it.

  “Hey, you got socked in the face pretty good. I think you’re gonna have a black eye.”

  “Bruno, he was trying to get my gun from me. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. We need to get some ice for that eye. You’re fine, trust me; it’s a clean shoot. Don’t you worry about it. You going to be okay? I need to go to the desk . . . never mind, you’re coming with me.” I guided her down the now-empty hall. All the gang members had fled with the sound of the gunshot.

  “Bruno, we didn’t have a warrant to go in that room, and I shot someone inside that room where we didn’t have a legal right to be. I’m in deep shit, aren’t I?”

  “I told you, everything’s going to be fine.”

  But I didn’t see how it could be. Wicks had warned me that Blue and Thibodeaux would try and dirty me up. They’d missed me and just dirtied up Chelsea.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHELSEA EASED DOWN and sat cross-legged on the floor by the front desk. The top edge of her body armor pushed up under her chin. I stood close by and called dispatch and asked for paramedics and a black-and-white. I also asked dispatch to make all the other notifications: to the headquarters narcotics desk, to Stubbs, the Lynwood captain, and to Homicide so the OIS—the officer-involved-shooting team—could respond. I got a clean towel from the hotel desk clerk and some ice. I helped Chelsea to her feet, put the ice pack on her eye, and we went back to the room.