by James Ellroy
"That mean you're siding with them?" I said.
Bob looked at his cards again, then shrugged. "Haven't decided yet, I guess."
I didn't think the antigun people were going to lose this round. But I worried about the round after it, a few months down the line, when the subject of carrying guns came up again. All the TV coverage violence gets in this city, people are more and more developing a siege mentality.
"Play cards," Mike said, "and leave the debate-society crap till later."
Good idea.
We played cards.
In forty-five minutes, I lost $63.82. Mike and Neil always played as if their lives were at stake. All you had to do was watch their faces. Gun-fighters couldn't have looked more serious or determined.
The first pit stop came just after ten o'clock, and Neil took it. There was a john on the second floor between the bedrooms, and another john on the first floor.
Neil said, "The good Dr. Gottesfeld had to give me a finger-wave this afternoon, gents, so this may take a while."
"You should trade that prostate of yours in for a new one," Mike said.
"Believe me, I'd like to."
While Neil was gone, the three of us started talking about the patrol again, and whether we should go armed.
We made the same old arguments. The passion was gone. We were just marking time waiting for Neil, and we knew it.
Finally, Mike said, "Let me see some of those magazines again."
"You got some identification?" I said.
"I'll show you some identification," Mike said.
"Spare me," I said. "I'll just give you the magazines."
"You mind if I use the john on the first floor?" Bob said.
"Yeah, it would really piss me off"," I said.
"Really?"
That was one thing about Bob. He always fell for deadpan humor.
"No, not really," I said. "Why would I care if you used the john on the first floor?"
He grinned. "Thought maybe they were segregated facilities or something."
He left.
Mike said, "We're lucky, you know that?"
"You mean me and you?"
"Yeah."
"Lucky how?"
"Those two guys. They're great guys. I wish I had them at work." He shook his head. "Treacherous bastards. That's all I'm around all day long."
"No offense, but I'll bet you can be pretty treacherous yourself."
He smiled. "Look who's talking."
The first time I heard it, I thought it was some kind of animal noise from outside, a dog or a cat in some kind of discomfort maybe. Mike, who was dealing himself a hand of solitaire, didn't even look up from his cards.
But the second time I heard the sound, Mike and I both looked up. And then we heard the exploding sound of breaking glass.
"What the hell is that?" Mike said.
"Let's go find out."
Just about the time we reached the bottom of the attic steps, we saw Neil coming out of the second-floor john. "You hear that?"
"Sure as hell did," I said.
We reached the staircase leading to the first floor. Everything was dark. Mike reached for the light switch, but I brushed his hand away.
I put a ssshing finger to my lips and then showed him the Louisville Slugger I'd grabbed from Tim's room. He's my nine-year-old, and his most devout wish is to be a good baseball player. His mother has convinced him that just because I went to college on a baseball scholarship, I was a good player. I wasn't. I was a lucky player.
I led the way downstairs, keeping the bat ready at all times.
"You son of a bitch!"
The voice belonged to Bob.
More smashing glass.
I listened to the passage of the sound. Kitchen. Had to be the kitchen.
In the shadowy light from the street, I saw their faces, Mike's and Neil's. They looked scared.
I hefted the bat some more and then started moving fast to the kitchen.
Just as we passed through the dining room, I heard something heavy hit the kitchen floor. Something human and heavy.
I got the kitchen light on.
He was at the back door. White. Tall. Blond shoulder-length hair. Filthy tan T-shirt. Greasy jeans. He had grabbed one of Jan's carving knives from the huge iron rack that sits atop the butcher-block island. The one curious thing about him was the eyes: there was a malevolent iridescence to the blue pupils, an angry but somehow alien intelligence, a silver glow.
Bob was sprawled faced own on the tile floor. His arms were spread wide on either side of him. He didn't seem to be moving. Chunks and fragments of glass were strewn everywhere across the floor. My uninvited guest had smashed two or three of the colorful pitchers we'd bought the winter before in Mexico.
"Run!" the burglar cried to somebody on the back porch.
He turned, waving the butcher knife back and forth to keep us at bay.
Footsteps out the back door.
The burglar held us off a few more moments, but then I gave him a little bit of tempered Louisville Slugger wood right across the wrist. The knife went clattering.
By this time, Mike and Neil were pretty crazed. They jumped him, hurled him back against the door, and then started putting in punches wherever they'd fit.
"Hey!" I said, and tossed Neil the bat. "Just hold this. If he makes a move, open up his head. Otherwise leave him alone."
They really were crazed, like pit bulls who'd been pulled back just as a fight was starting to get good.
"Mike, call the cops and tell them to send a car."
I got Bob up and walking. I took him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet lid. I found a lump the size of an egg on the back of his head. I soaked a clean washcloth with cold water and pressed it against the lump. Bob took it from there.
"You want an ambulance?" I said.
"An ambulance? Are you kidding? You must think I'm a ballet dancer or something."
I shook my head. "No. I know better than that. I've got a male cousin who's a ballet dancer, and he's one tough son of a bitch, believe me. You—" I smiled. "You aren't that tough, Bob."
"I don't need an ambulance. I'm fine."
He winced and tamped the washcloth tighter against his head. "Just a little headache is all." He looked young suddenly, the aftershock of fear in his brown eyes. "Scared the hell out of me. Heard something when I was leaving the john. Went out to the kitchen to check it out. He jumped me."
"What'd he hit you with?"
"No idea."
"I'll go get you some whiskey. Just sit tight."
"I love sitting in bathrooms, man."
I laughed. "I don't blame you."
When I got back to the kitchen, they were gone. All three of them. Then I saw the basement door. It stood open a few inches. I could see dusty light in the space between door and frame. The basement was our wilderness. We hadn't had the time or money to really fix it up yet. We were counting on this year's Christmas bonus from the Windsor Financial Group to help us set it right.
I went down the stairs. The basement is one big, mostly unused room except for the washer and dryer in the corner. All the boxes and odds and ends that should have gone to the attic instead went down here. It smells damp most of the time. The idea is to turn it into a family room for when the boys are older. These days it's mostly inhabited by stray waterbugs.
When I reached the bottom step, I saw them. There are four metal support poles in the basement, near each corner. They had him lashed to a pole in the east quadrant, lashed his wrists behind him with rope found in the tool room. They also had him gagged with what looked like a pillowcase. His eyes were big and wide. He looked scared, and I didn't blame him. I was scared, too.
"What the hell are you guys doing?"
"Just calm down, Papa Bear," Mike said. That's his name for me whenever he wants to convey to people that I'm kind of this old fuddy-duddy. It so happens that Mike is two years older than I am, and it also happens that I'm not a fuddy-du
ddy. Jan has assured me of that, and she's completely impartial.
"Knock off the Papa Bear bullshit. Did you call the cops?"
"Not yet," Neil said. "Just calm down a little, all right?"
"You haven't called the cops. You've got some guy tied up and gagged in my basement. You haven't even asked how Bob is. And you want me to calm down."
Mike came up to me then. He still had that air of pit-bull craziness about him, frantic, uncontrollable, alien.
"We're going to do what the cops can't do, man," he said. "We're going to sweat this son of a bitch. We're going to make him tell us who he was with tonight, and then we're going to make him give us every single name of every single bad guy who works this neighborhood. And then we'll turn all the names over to the cops."
"It's just an extension of the patrol," Neil said. "Just keeping our neighborhood safe is all."
"You guys are nuts," I said, and turned back toward the steps. "I'm going up and call the cops."
That's when I realized just how crazed Mike was. "You aren't going anywhere, man. You're going to stay here and help us break this bastard down. You're going to do your goddamned neighborhood duty."
He'd grabbed my sleeve so hard that he'd torn it at the shoulder. We both discovered this at the same time.
I expected him to look sorry. He didn't. In fact, he was smirking at me. "Don't be such a wimp, Aaron," he said.
2
Mike led the charge getting the kitchen cleaned up. I think he was feeling guilty about calling me a wimp with such angry exuberance. Now I understood how lynch mobs got formed. One guy like Mike stirring people up by alternately insulting them and urging them on.
After the kitchen was put back in order, and after I'd taken inventory to find that nothing had been stolen, I went to the refrigerator and got beers for everybody. Bob had drifted back to the kitchen, too.
"All right," I said. "Now that we've all calmed down, I want to walk over to that yellow kitchen wall phone there and call the police. Any objections?"
"I think blue would look better in here than yellow," Neil said.
"Funny," I said.
They looked like themselves now, no feral madness on the faces of Mike and Neil, no winces on Bob's.
I started across the floor to the phone.
Neil grabbed my arm. Not with the same insulting force Mike had used on me. But enough to get the job done.
"I think Mike's right," Neil said. "I think we should grill that bastard a little bit."
I shook my head, politely removed his hand from my forearm, and proceeded to the phone.
"This isn't just your decision alone," Mike said.
He'd finally had his way. He'd succeeded in making me angry. I turned around and looked at him. "This is my house, Mike. If you don't like my decisions, then I'd suggest you leave."
We both took steps toward each other. Mike would no doubt win any battle we had, but I'd at least be able to inflict a little damage, and right now that's all I was thinking about.
Neil got between us.
"Hey," he said. "For God's sake, you two, c'mon. We're friends, remember?"
"This is my house," I said, my words childish in my ears.
"Yeah, but we live in the same neighborhood, Aaron," Mike said, "which makes this 'our' problem."
"He's right, Aaron," Bob said from the breakfast nook. There's a window there where I sometimes sit to watch all the animals on sunny days. I saw a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons one day, marching single-file across the grass. My grandparents were the last generation to live on the farm. My father came to town here and ultimately became a vice president of a ball-bearing company. Raccoons are a lot more pleasant to gaze upon than people.
"He's not right," I said to Bob. "He's wrong. We're not cops, we're not bounty hunters, we're not trackers. We're a bunch of goddamned guys who peddle stocks and bonds. Mike and Neil shouldn't have tied him up downstairs—that happens to be illegal, at least the way they went about it—and now I'm going to call the cops."
"Yes, that poor thing," Mike said. "Aren't we just picking on him, though? Tell you what, why don't we make him something to eat?"
"Just make sure we have the right wine to go with it," Neil said. "Properly chilled, of course."
"Maybe we could get him a chick," Bob said.
"With bombers out to here," Mike said, indicating with his hands where "here" was.
I couldn't help it. I smiled. They were all being ridiculous. A kind of fever had caught them.
"You really want to go down there and question him?" I said to Neil.
"Yes. We can ask him things the cops can't."
"Scare the bastard a little," Mike said. "So he'll tell us who was with him tonight, and who else works this neighborhood." He came over and put his hand out. "God, man, you're one of my best friends. I don't want you mad at me."
Then he hugged me, which is something I've never been comfortable with men doing, but to the extent I could, I hugged him back.
"Friends?" he said.
"Friends," I said. "But I still want to call the cops."
"And spoil our fun?" Neil said.
"And spoil your fun."
"I say we take it to a vote," Bob said.
"This isn't a democracy," I said. "It's my house and I'm the king. I don't want to have a vote."
"Can we ask him one question?" Bob said.
I sighed. They weren't going to let go. "One question?"
"The names of the guys he was with tonight."
"And that's it?"
"That's it. That way we get him and his pals off the street."
"And then I call the cops?"
"Then," Mike said, "you call the cops."
"One question," Neil said.
While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.
"One question," I said. "Then I call the cops."
I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.
There's always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.
The guy was his same sullen self, glaring at us as we descended the stairs and then walked over to him. He smelled of heat and sweat and city grime. The long bare arms sticking out of his filthy T-shirt told tattoo tales of writhing snakes and leaping panthers. The arms were joined in the back with rope. His jaw still flexed, trying to accommodate the intrusion of the gag.
"Maybe we should castrate him"' Mike said, walking up close to the guy. "You like that, scumbag? If we castrated you?"
If the guy felt any fear, it wasn't evident in his eyes. All you could see there was the usual contempt.
"I'll bet this is the jerk who broke into the Donaldsons' house a couple weeks ago," Neil said.
Now he walked up to the guy. But he was more ambitious than Mike had been. Neil spat in the guy's face.
"Hey," I said, "cool it."
Neil glared at me. "Yeah, I wouldn't hurt his feelings, would I?"
Then he suddenly turned back on the guy, raised his fist, and started to swing. All I could do was shove him. That sent his punch angling off to the right, missing our burglar by about half a foot.
"You asshole," Neil said, turning back on me now.
But Mike was there, between us.
"You know what we're doing? We're making this jerk happy. He's gonna have some nice stories to tell all his criminal friends."
He was right. The burglar was the one who got to look all cool and composed. We looked like squabbling brats. As if to confirm this, a hint of amusement played in the burglar's blue eyes.
"Oh, hell, Aaron, I'm sorry," Neil said, putting his hand out. This was like a political convention, all the handshaking going on.
"So am I, Neil," I said. "That's why I want to call the cops and get this over with."
And that's whe
n he chose to make his move, the burglar. As soon as I mentioned the cops, he probably realized that this was going to be his last opportunity.
He waited until we were just finishing up with the handshake, when we were all focused on one another. Then he took off running. We could see that he'd slipped the rope. He went straight for the stairs, angling out around us like a running back seeing daylight. He even stuck his long, tattooed arm out as if he were trying to repel a tackle.
"Hey!" Bob shouted. "He's getting away."
He was at the stairs by the time we could gather ourselves enough to go after him. But when we moved, we moved fast, and in virtual unison.
By the time I got my hand on the cuff of his left jeans leg, he was close enough to the basement door to open it.
I yanked hard and ducked out of the way of his kicking foot. By now I was as crazy as Mike and Neil had been earlier. There was adrenaline, and great anger. He wasn't just a burglar, he was all burglars, intent not merely on stealing things from me but on hurting my family, too. He hadn't had time to take the gag from his mouth.
This time, I grabbed booted foot and leg and started hauling him back down the stairs. At first he was able to hold on to the door, but when I wrenched his foot rightward, he tried to scream behind the gag. He let go of the doorknob.
The next half minute is still unclear in my mind. I started running down the stairs, dragging him with me. All I wanted to do was get him on the basement floor again, turn him over to the others to watch, and then go call the cops.
But somewhere in those few seconds when I was hauling him back down the steps, I heard edge of stair meeting back of skull. The others heard it, too, because their shouts and curses died in their throats.
When I turned around, I saw the blood running fast and red from his nose. The blue eyes no longer held contempt. They were starting to roll up white in the back of his head.
"God," I said. "He's hurt."
"I think he's a lot more than hurt," Mike said.
"Help me carry him upstairs."
We got him on the kitchen floor. Mike and Neil rushed around soaking paper towels. We tried to revive him. Bob, who kept wincing from his headache, tried the guy's wrist, ankle, and throat for a pulse. None. His nose and mouth were bloody. Very bloody.