Double Tap

by Steve Martini

He opens it and reads. “That’s what I thought.” At this moment Nathan seems filled with regret, his face a portrait of lament. He shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything, as if he can’t speak. “I never wanted it to come to this,” he finally says.

  When I look down, he is holding a small automatic, blued gunmetal, the slide on top slick with oil glistening in the light from the streetlamp overhead. It’s almost lost in his hand, which is tucked under his open suit coat. Anyone looking at him, even up close, might think he has his thumb tucked over the top edge of his belt, talking to me western style.

  A block down, on Broadway, the street is teeming with people, all heading home at rush hour. But on the side street along the courthouse, the sidewalk is empty.

  The gun looks like a .380. Deadly. Gangbangers use them all the time because they are easy to hide.

  “Nathan, you don’t want to do this.”

  “You’re right, I don’t.” He shakes his head.

  I can’t imagine the panic and confusion going on inside his brain at this moment.

  “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?” he says. “You won your case. Your man is free. Why did you have to go poking your nose in? I love you, but you’re a …”

  A woman comes out the door of the library, shoots us a quick glance, and keeps going.

  “You’re a pain in the ass.” He finishes the thought.

  I start to walk past him, like I’m going to follow the woman toward the courthouse across the street. Kwan moves in front of me and blocks the way, his little pistol almost in my stomach.

  “Don’t. I want to talk,” he says. “I want you to understand.”

  “Nathan, listen to yourself. Do you hear what you’re saying?” At the moment I have to wonder if I’m talking to Jekyll or Hyde.

  His eyes dart toward the entrance of the library, where the lights have just flickered. Closing time. He knows we can’t stand here.

  “Let’s go this way.” He follows up the suggestion by nudging me with his free hand, turning me away from the courthouse.

  I turn and start to walk, slowly.

  “Nathan, listen to me.”

  I start to raise my hands, he says, “Put ‘em down.”

  “Nathan.”

  “Don’t … don’t talk right now, just walk.”

  He is right behind me, the pistol in his outside coat pocket. Nathan knows this is a risky area. The jail is just down the street ahead of us, the courthouse behind us.

  When someone has a gun in your back, there is a natural inclination to cooperate. But reason tells me that, given what I now know, if he gets me out of this area, I’m a dead man.

  He comes up next to me like we’re two friends strolling down the sidewalk, with me on the inside. He now has both hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit jacket so that it looks more natural. End-of-the-day working stiff just stretching the pockets of his coat.

  If I try to run he is going to put a bullet in me. Maybe more than one, considering the speed with which a .380 can fire.

  In the distance I see a figure, a lone man wearing jeans and a light tan jacket as he steps from the main entrance of the county jail a block away. He turns and walks up the street toward us on the other side. In the dim light just after dusk I cannot make out any features, though he appears to be looking this way. For an instant I think about calling out. Nathan reads my mind.

  “Let’s take a shortcut.” He takes his left hand out of his pocket, turns to me, and guides me toward an alley that divides the block.

  “Keep going,” he says. He’s looking around, at the sides of the building and the utility poles. My guess is Nathan is looking for cameras. He’s not taking me for a ride. Whatever he’s going to do, he intends to do it here.

  Kwan is pushing me westward along the alley. This is not good. There is nothing ahead except littered service entrances and a few dumpsters. With muni buses a block away, revving their engines as they pull away from the bus stop at rush hour, if Nathan pushes me against the side of a building and gets up close, he could put a bullet in me and it’s possible no one would even hear it.

  We cross the street and we’re halfway down the alley on the next block when he stops just beyond the end of a large green metal dumpster. “This will do,” he says.

  I turn and look at him. “This is where you want to talk?”

  He pushes me into the breach formed by the end of the metal bin and the concrete protrusion that is the rear service entrance to a building.

  My back is against the wall.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “You couldn’t.” There’s a sound like someone clearing his throat in the alley behind him.

  As Nathan turns to look, there is a quick flash, a reflection off an arcing stream that disappears in the shadows of his face, his free hand reaching up toward his eyes. The stringent smell.

  I hear him moan as I reach out and push the hand with the gun to the side and away.

  “Excuse me.” Before I can even process what I am seeing, Emiliano Ruiz closes the distance like an apparition. He is wearing jeans and a tan jacket, the figure I saw exiting the jail. In a fluid motion he takes the gun in one hand and the back of Nathan’s head in the other. When he brings his knee up, Kwan’s head sounds like a hollow melon hitting a boulder. Nathan’s knees buckle, and he hits the asphalt like a sack of cement.

  Stripping the clip from the .380, Emiliano pulls the slide and ejects the round from the chamber while he bares his teeth, holding a small red plastic squirt gun between them.

  I’m leaning against the wall of the building, unable to stand upright with Kwan lying across my feet.

  Ruiz takes the squirt gun from between his teeth, tosses the metal pistol into the dumpster, and crushes the clip under the heel of his shoe. Then he rolls Kwan off my feet so I can stand up.

  Ruiz is wearing street clothes, the T-shirt, jacket, and jeans that I must assume he was wearing the night the cops arrested him. You would never recognize him in a crowd. The everyman, wiry and invisible.

  “They took me back to the jail so I could change, get my stuff. I was heading back to the courthouse to look for you. You disappeared. Then I saw you coming this way, but you went down the alley. I thought I’d check it out. Didn’t think you guys were ever gonna stop walking,” he says. “And I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Every so often my thoughts drift to Jim Kaprosky and the notion that at least someone benefited from his years of toil in legal hell. Emiliano Ruiz is a free man.

  In all, he had spent more than a year behind bars, confined in county jail, awaiting trial. For twenty-three hours each day he had been held in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, isolated from other inmates because of information, vague in its nature, communicated by the military to jail officials that Ruiz was skilled in the martial arts and that he should be considered an extreme risk as an inmate.

  About six months ago I received a letter. It was from Emiliano. He now lives somewhere along the Deschutes River in the state of Oregon, He has gone to court in order to legally change his name in an effort to recover some of the peace and privacy that he had before he became branded in the public psyche as the “Double Tap Killer.” Along with the letter was a picture of Emiliano standing in front of a small mobile home. Next to him was his new wife. She was holding their first child. Both were flaming redheads.

  Nathan Kwan was arrested and prosecuted for the murder of Madelyn Chapman, attempted murder for his acts in the alley with me, as well as a number of felonies involving political corruption. Kwan’s lawyers were able to cut a deal so that the former legislator and congressman is now serving a term of more than thirty years at Pelican Bay.

  They might never have convicted Kwan in Chapman’s murder except for one thing: the Orb at the Edge. The piece itself is now resting unceremoniously somewhere in a landfill. Nathan admitted that, had he known what it was worth, he might have been tempted to fence it. But, knowing K
wan, I doubt it. The risk that the cops might find it and trace it back to him were simply too great. Nathan placed it in a large plastic trash bag and smashed it into small shards before depositing all the sharp little pieces in a dumpster behind a grocery store in Chula Vista the night of the murder. The problem for Nathan was that some of the pieces didn’t stay in the bag. Trace evidence found on a pair of slacks in Nathan’s closet revealed small shards of blue glass along with traces of dust, a unique compound of lead and powdered pigments known to have been specially mixed and used by the artist in crafting the blue Orb. It is the problem with a piece of art that is peerless: the materials used to make it are often one of a kind. Nathan’s strong suit was never evidence.

  As part of his plea bargain, Nathan also gave up information regarding the murder weapon and how he knew where to find it. It turns out this was a gift from Chapman’s Mexican maid, the one who walked off the job one day and never came back.

  Kwan, who had watched Chapman’s house on and off for more than a month, guessed that the maid was illegal. He followed her home, found out where she lived and where she hung out. She went to a local tavern at night. Nathan dressed down, struck up a conversation, and fed her drinks at the bar one evening. After she was mildly swacked, he made sure the word Isotenics came up so that the woman tried to impress him with the fact that she worked for Chapman, who owned the company. He picked up details about the size and the layout of the house, the fact that Chapman never turned on the security system. And then the clincher: the maid volunteered that she had stumbled over a very large pistol in a dresser drawer upstairs when she was putting things away one day. Apparently it frightened her. Nathan couldn’t believe his good luck. As he told his interrogators, “If you have to shoot somebody, it’s always nice if you can get them to supply the gun.” Kwan wanted the cops to be looking in the wrong direction from the get-go. He knew the caliber of the gun from the description the maid gave him. She remembered enough of the letters engraved on the side that it took Nathan less than five minutes searching online before he found the Mark 23, a contract piece made for Special Operations Command that only came in forty-five caliber. As far as Nathan was concerned, he’d found the Grail. He brought his own bullets and then discovered he didn’t need them. He swapped out rounds anyway, just to mix things up in an effort to confuse the cops further.

  When he was finished fishing for information, Nathan drove the maid from Chapman’s house with an anonymous call from a pay phone one afternoon. He identified himself as a security guy from Isotenics and asked about her work references and her legal residence status. The woman left and never came back. This removed the final live-in obstacle to Chapman’s house.

  Kwan will not be eligible for parole until he is nearly seventy years old.

  In the months since he was arrested, pled out, and sentenced, the media frenzy surrounding the name Nathan Kwan has transformed it into a synonym for corruption that makes it difficult for me to recall that there was ever a time, in another life, when Nathan was a friend, part of the social unit that was my world.

  I have often wondered what part of the cancer that ate his soul resides, perhaps in a more benign state, within each of us: the need for approval, the appetite for adulation that comes from some ancient, subterranean part of our being.

  Nathan could tell you about every good cause and social need, from education and protection of the environment to the banishment of poverty, and was willing to tax us to the nth degree to pay for them all. At times he could make you love him, as he did that day when he delivered the photograph to my office.

  In the next breath he could sell his soul to some liquor lobbyist or gambling tycoon, carving a massive tax exemption in the law for their benefit, and he would see nothing wrong in any of this. He would laugh and tell you that consistency was “the hobgoblin of little minds.” The next day he would climb back on the stump and rail against loopholes for the rich, and under Nathan’s definitions of truth and commitment he would mean it.

  I wonder if I knew him at all, or whether it is even possible to discern those forces that transform the human soul to commit an act so calculated and brutal as the murder of Madelyn Chapman.

  As for Isotenics and the government’s IFS program, or Information for Security: congressional committees, the Pentagon, and civil-liberties groups continue to battle in a ceaseless war of probes and investigations. With ever-emerging technologies and the explosion of classified projects within the government, it will probably never be known to what degree private information has been plundered. What is certain is the peril that such technologies present for the future. Given the mandate by governments that all shall participate in the advances of the electronic age, the pace, noise, and fury of the future carries with it immense risks for privacy and the inevitable destruction of those sheltered and quiet places where each of us can reside in peace.

  EPILOGUE

  A few years ago I found myself sitting in my study, tears running down my face. My aunt had called to tell me that my uncle, my father’s little brother, Evo, had died. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer a few months earlier, the chimney that never stopped smoking, and was in the hospital for tests when his heart gave out. The death certificate read myocardial infarction. In a way it was merciful. My father had passed away two years earlier. Now they were both gone.

  In later years Evo’s mental state had improved enough so that he lived at least at the margins of normal life. New medications and therapy helped. While his moods could swing wildly and severe stress could put him in his chair to stare at the wall, he was able to drive again, though he never went far. He ran errands for my grandmother in the years before she died.

  As my father grew older and his health failed, I found myself filling the void.

  I once had to help Evo out of a scrap with the law. Pulled over in a routine traffic stop, you might think his first instinct would be to run, but it wasn’t. Seeing the red light in his mirror, Evo crossed two lanes of traffic and slammed on his brakes so quickly that a man riding a ten-speed along the shoulder plowed into the back of my uncle’s car.

  The fellow ended up on top of Evo’s trunk, upside down but unhurt, and mad as hell. Weeks later my uncle could laugh about it, gapped teeth and all. But at the time it wasn’t funny.

  The initial stop for a bad brake light now produced an angry cyclist and a cop, who I am sure was beginning to wish he had never seen my uncle or his car. It was about to get worse.

  Screaming at my uncle from behind the cop, the cyclist demanded that Evo be arrested. In the meantime my uncle was fumbling with his wallet.

  Told to get his license out, Evo couldn’t get the lumber that were his thumbs and fingers to function enough to slip the license from the plastic window in his wallet. He tried to give the wallet to the cop. The officer wouldn’t touch it, only the license. Evo wasn’t saying anything. He was trying to stay away from the cyclist, whose adrenaline rush was being enhanced by elevated testosterone levels, now that he realized this colossus driving the car wanted no part of him.

  At some point, amid the shouting and chaos and with Evo backpedaling up the sidewalk, my uncle tried to pass the officer a twenty-dollar bill. The officer wasn’t sure whether Evo was trying to pay the fine, bribe him, or simply purchase continuing protection against the cyclist.

  With the cop in the middle, it must have looked like a comic maypole: a spindly, red-faced cyclist in tights, jumping up and down, shouting, trying to reach around to grab some shirt every few seconds, coming away instead with a few hairs the texture of fence wire from my uncle’s arm. People driving by must have thought the guy was on drugs, chasing someone with ten inches of reach and a hundred pounds on him. If Evo had fallen on the guy, the man’s injuries would have been fatal.

  Unable to get his license out, with the cop in the middle and the cyclist pushing them up the street, Evo kept pulling the only thing he could get his fingers on from his wallet: currency from the large open pocket.
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  With a fistful of bills in his face and an agitated biker climbing up his back, demanding an arrest, the cop did the only thing he could. Evo found himself snagged in the gears of the law, sitting in the county jail, charged with a fix-it ticket for a bad brake light and bribery of a peace officer—a possible four-year stint in the joint, depending on the amount of cash in his hand at any given moment.

  It took me an hour to get Evo out of jail with an order signed by a judge. It took me a few more days and a carload of medical records from the VA to convince a supervisor in the DA’s office that he really didn’t want to go to trial, bribery being a crime of specific intent. Evo had full mental disability, certified by the government with shrinks in attendance to testify; he was a man who’d had more voltage passed through his body than most cons strapped to “Old Sparky”; who during periods of his life had difficulty forming the requisite intent to get out of his chair and walk to the kitchen—and when he did, he usually couldn’t remember why he’d started the journey. It was not a case in which to sound the bugle and mount the charge for clean government.

  After viewing the size of the box and feeling the weight of the medical records inside, the prosecutor allowed my uncle to fix his brake light and go. And so we did.

  But even in death it seems my uncle was ill-fated. My aunt, his sister, was to endure one last losing battle, this one with the VA. I learned years later that my uncle’s military records never properly reflected his first name. At induction, some clerk had typed in the name “Elvo,” instead of “Evo,” so that to this day it is the name “Elvo” that marks his grave. Go online and you can find it—the name Elvo Angelo in the records of the Golden Gate National Cemetery. Like the tomb of the unknown, Evo rests for eternity, under another name.

  The experience with my uncle taught me that not all men who die in wars are buried immediately. It also gave me an abiding respect for those who have experienced what most of us have not: the indescribable chaos and horror of battle, and the nightmare memories, images and visions that sear the soul.