He flicked an ash onto the scarred floor. “My dead friend? His name was Eric Russ. Was a good cop. A cop that cared. He somehow took to the needle and lost it all. Then got clean. Then got dead. You hear anything about it?”
Dreamo leaned back then. Leaned back against the porcelain tank. Studied him, deeper than any look of Dreamo’s he could ever imagine. Nodded, in an almost approving manner. “I’d heard about this guy,” Dreamo said. “It’s not for me to say shit, right? If you’re an ex-badge, and he is? Well, my customer’s business is their own, right? I respect their privacy.”
“That’s what makes you … you,” Mallen replied.
Dreamo straightened his Mohawk again. With dignity. “I’ll see what I can see, okay, Mallen?”
He flicked the cigarette to the floor. Squashed it out. Nodded. “Thank you, Dreamo. I appreciate it.” Went back out to the bar. Bill had been pacing nearby, like a worried expectant father.
Mallen smiled. “It’s all good, B. Really.”
Bill looked like he believed him. “Don’t make me cavity search you,” he kidded.
“What? And miss out on the high point of my day? You’re a bastard,” Mallen said in reply as he went to the bar and sat on the stool at the near end. Pulled out his phone as Bill gave him a shot of JWB. He figured Bill must be giving him the prize for not succumbing.
He dialed Gato again. Still no answer. No way he could run all over the city looking for him, either. He’d just have to wait it out, and he just fucking hated that fact. It was the control freak in him. That’s what Chris had always called it, anyway. He found himself hoping that his newfound friend was alright. Wondered what it could be that could keep Gato from replying to his phone message. Had he decided it was just too dicey, after the gunplay from Jas and Griffin? He answered that with a shrug; hell, who could blame him, right?
Mallen’s mind left Gato for now and focused on Eric, and what had happened to him. There had to be a reason Eric had looked him up, right? It wouldn’t be to send him flowers, for fuck’s sake. Pulled out his cell. Got Jenna’s number from information. Dialed it. She answered after six rings. Her voice was thready, uncertain. “Hello?”
“Is this Jenna?” Had to work hard to sound chipper. That was made harder with his somewhat broken face and body.
“Who is this?”
“I don’t know if you’ll know my name, Jenna, but my name is Mallen. Mark Mallen.”
There was a long pause. Long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Eric … he mentioned you. A lot.”
It was always nice to be remembered. “Yeah? He talk a lot about those days?”
“All the time.”
“I was …” he said, unsure how to state it. “I hoped I could come by. I know you’ve been through the wringer. I was the guy that … that found you.”
“I know that, too. The police told me. Told me your name.”
“I just want to talk to you for a few minutes. You know he had my name and number in his pocket?”
“I know.”
“I wanted to talk with you about that. Face to face, not over the phone. But only if you’re okay with it.”
Another long pause. “I’m okay with it.”
“I could be there within thirty.”
“Pick up the directory phone when you get here. Dial four-zero.” She hung up. He shoved the phone back into his pocket. Looked at his reflection in the mirrored wall that had been placed behind the bar back when the Bee Gees were on top of the world. He tried to make himself presentable, but it was hard with the fake gold “marbleizing” the mirror had been treated to. Tried to comb his hair with his fingers but gave that up. Finished by downing his drink and sliding off the stool. With a goodbye and thank you to Bill, he went outside, back into the world.
Seventeen
Mallen walked up Leavenworth, realizing he was more out of shape than he’d fuckin’ thought. Felt at his sore jaw, at a loose molar way in back on the right. A coldness crept into his body as he thought back to the beating he’d taken from Griffin. It was the cold of wanting revenge.
But junkies don’t seek revenge, a voice inside his head told him. Revenge would bring attention, and that would bring an interruption to the shooting.
But he wasn’t a junkie anymore.
He was something else now. Something he used to be. Something complete. He was a man again. Now he could think of, and enjoy, thoughts of revenge. Because now he could act on them with the chance of actually succeeding. Junkies never won. He spent the rest of the time on the way to Jenna’s picturing how much dental work Griffin would need when they crossed paths again. And he had to admit, that image warmed his heart.
A few minutes later he was in front of Jenna’s building. He went to the intercom. Pushed the button next to Jenna’s name.
“Yes?” came the tinny voice through the speaker.
“It’s Mallen.”
For an answer there was the soft click as the front door lock, which was now repaired, released. He pushed through the heavy, dark oak portal. Made his way up to apartment twelve and knocked softly on the door. It opened immediately, like she’d been waiting.
Jenna Russ stood there. Worked up a smile. A large bandage tightly hugged her right temple. She was pretty, in a midwestern way. Emoted personality like a firecracker. She looked him up and down. A faint smile played across her lips. “I wonder which of us looks worse,” she said. Yeah, he’d figured right. Sounded like she was probably from Iowa.
“Me, I’m sure.” He smiled back. “But only because I was uglier to begin with.”
She stood aside so he could enter. The apartment had been completely scrubbed of any signs of the attack. He hadn’t noticed his last time here, but the place overlooked the backyard garden of the building next door. That would’ve been an attraction for taking the apartment, no doubt. He went and sat on the couch as she lowered herself into a nearby overstuffed chair.
“You going to live?” he asked.
A nod.
“You didn’t see the guy who did it?”
“No. He came from behind me. I’d just come in through the door. The police say I must’ve interrupted him while he was trying to find something to fence. I guess that’s why he attacked me the way he did. Out of fear.”
“Maybe so.”
After a moment of silence, she said, “You look like you met my attacker’s older, way bigger brother.”
“Lost a bet, is all.”
She paused. “He told me about you. Eric did.”
“Yeah?”
“Told me you were a great cop but lived too hard.”
“Sure feels that way now.”
Another silence. She got up suddenly. Went to the kitchen. He could hear her fixing coffee. Maybe tea. He hoped coffee. She came back into the room then. “So, what did you want to talk about?”
“I hadn’t spoken to Eric in a long time. Not since before I left the force. If I were still a cop, I’d be crawling the streets trying to find his killer. As it is, I’m just trying to figure out why he would have my name and address in his pocket. I feel like it was a message or something. Do you have any idea why he’d have my address? He would’ve had to ask around to get it. Dig a little.”
If he’d been hoping for answer, he was disappointed, because Jenna just shook her head. “I have no idea. He’d been clean. Just got a job. Wanted to earn money to go back to school. Told me he really wanted to study psychology.”
“Psychology?” That seemed light years away from the guy who loved jumping over walls as he chased a felon. Or the guy who lived and breathed sports like football and soccer.
“He told me he wanted to study what made people do the things they did. It was one of the things he most liked back when he was in school, studying for the police force. He just wanted to understand people, I think,” she said as she twisted the weddi
ng ring on her finger, a simple gold band. The kind someone gives to someone else when it’s the message that matters, not the weight of the rock.
“He chose well,” he said, nodding at the ring.
She removed it. Held it in her palm. “He did,” she said in a hoarse voice. Didn’t put it back on her finger. Put in her pocket instead. Tears formed in her eyes then and she broke down, sobs racking her body. Mallen figured he was like every other guy he’d ever met: never really knew what to do when a woman cried. He noticed a box of tissues on the table, so he snagged it up, held it out for her.
“Thanks,” she said as she tugged a couple free. After a moment she was able to continue.
“How did you two meet?” It was weak, he knew, but he wanted to try to get her focused on the beginning, rather than the end.
She smiled as the memory came back to her. “We met at a concert at the Warfield. He was wasted, but we had a fun talk. I gave him my number. I didn’t know he was using, not right away, but by the time I realized how bad it was, I was in love with him. He was so sweet. Then Folsom happened.”
“Folsom?” He hadn’t heard that. That was a hard place to go, especially for an ex-cop. Damn, he thought as he sat there. That was a hard ticket to buy.
She nodded. “Got caught with some heroin. Not a lot, but just enough to catch attention. Did about a year. I would write to him, and he’d write back. It was hard for him in there. Really hard. I sometimes wonder how he made it through.”
No doubt about that, he thought. Jesus … it had been the fear of jail that kept him flying under the radar as much as possible the last few years.
“He would tell me stories about prison, but only rarely,” she said. “Usually when he was feeling bad. He always had to watch his back in there. Was beat up a few times. Once really bad. Prison did to him what it does to a lot of men, I guess: changed him. He got quiet a lot, pulled away. I know he was thankful to get out alive, but he was really changed.”
“Yeah? How exactly?”
Well,” she continued, “he told me once that he wanted to write a book about his experiences, both on the force and in prison. Even had a title, From Cop to Con. I saw him jotting down a few notes once. The old Eric wouldn’t have cared about something like that, you know? I tried to get him to open up, but after awhile of it not working, I let it be. Sometimes a guy has to work through it on his own, right?” she added with a half-smile. “I helped him any way I could. I loved him. He loved me, too, I think.”
Mallen let the quiet fill the room for a moment, his mind filled with images of Eric fighting every prisoner around him, and finally losing. Made his gut turn over, his heart break.
“When I heard,” she said, “about your address and name in his pocket, I figured you’d have an answer for me, not the other way around.”
“Trust me, I wish I had. I’d rather give answers than go looking for them.”
She smiled. “Yeah, he said that about you, too. That you liked having all the answers.”
Got to his feet. Put his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Well, if there’s anything you remember, call me, okay? If there was anything … weirder than usual, yeah? Even the smallest thing could lead something much bigger.” Paused then, adding, “Or, even if you just want to talk about him.” She smiled at that. Thankful-like.
He was at the front door, her following, when she laid a hand on his sleeve. “There was something.”
“What?”
She didn’t seem to want to continue, like she’d spoken impulsively. He let it ride, waiting a moment or two before gently pressing her to go on. “It was about three days before … it happened,” she said. “He was staying over—I mean, we weren’t really back together, but maybe if we’d had more time … Anyway, he had gone out for cigarettes. I was in the kitchen making dinner when he got back. I heard him go right into the bathroom and shut the door. Slammed it, actually. I had this really bad moment where I thought maybe he was about to shoot, you know? That he’d fallen back into it. I went to the bathroom door. Because it was so weird how he just came in like that without saying a word. I knocked. Twice. It was really freaking me out, but I also knew that people have struggles of their own. You know? We fight it all the time.” She paused.
“Yeah, we do. Did he answer? Say anything?”
A brief nod. “I knocked a third time, but he still didn’t answer. I called out to him. Nothing. Then I heard it.”
“It?”
“Crying. I heard him crying.”
Crying? Eric? Mallen had a hard time picturing that. “And he wouldn’t tell you what it was about?”
A smile crossed her mouth as she looked at him. “You’re a guy, right? Would you have told why you were crying?”
“Point to the lady,” he replied.
“That’s why I don’t believe any of that shit about him dealing again. I don’t care if he was found with bags of heroin on him. He was crying, Mallen. Sobbing. Like he was scared.”
“And not scared of going back into the world that put him in prison? Maybe he felt he had no other way?”
For an answer, she only shook her head. Emphatically. “So. If you learn anything, you’ll tell me, right?” she said.
“You’ll be the first one to know.” He went to her door. “Thanks for the talk,” he said as he left.
Eighteen
It was the first time that Mallen had seen this much H outside of the stuff they’d showed him during his training, so he’d be able to recognize it. Six wrapped bags that strangely reminded him of six wrapped hoagie sandwiches. He’d been moving up in the ranks, slowly but steadily. He had been a wheel man for a little bit but had shown smarts during what had turned out to be an ambush, not a “meeting of the minds.” He’d also had to stand guard, but only outside whatever building the meet was going down in. He’d done that with his usual attention to detail. No mouthing off or attitude. It was shit like that, just doing his job and paying attention to the details, that got him noticed for his current duty. It’d been a long haul, that was a fact, but here he was: inside with the buyers and sellers. This was his first eyewitness account to any sort of buy this large, but this was why he’d opted for the detail. Why he’d chased down the chance to do undercover work. This was Serpico. This was the French fucking Connection, man. This was the job. Right here, right now. He was inside. It’d taken a long time, but he’d made it. And now he was looking at a boat-load of death, sitting there on a folding table inside an abandoned store front in Potrero.
Jonesy, another soldier, stood to his right, shifting nervously from his bad leg to his good. Mallen knew it hurt Jonesy to stand for too long, victim of a stray bullet during some fucked-up assassination attempt on the boss man Franco that had ended with a lot of guys dead on both sides—and an unscathed Franco. Jonesy had taken one for the team, trying to defend his boss. Franco had granted him inner court after that, almost taking him to his breast. Mallen thought it was almost cute, in its way, how it really felt like some old world court, with kings, bishops, advisors, and, of course, pawns.
But he was no longer a pawn. He felt like a rook now. Maybe he could parlay that into becoming a knight. He stood there and looked down at the table containing enough horse to set him and Chris up for the rest of their lives in some South American country. He’d proven his worth, although not like Jonesy. No, he’d been diligent, smart, and had only spoken enough to give good advice when he knew for a fact that the department had told him when and where the raids were going to go down. He’d played it like he was just a whiz kid, moving with his gut instinct. He’d appeared to those around him as a guy who could see the playing field and adjust accordingly, even as the shit was hitting the fan. That had impressed.
And it had led him here.
Franco’s buyer in this scenario, a guy named Two-Bit, checked the merchandise. Ran the test to see how good the horse could run. It ra
n quite well. Two-Bit nodded to his assistant, a huge black dude who ran by the name of Wall. Wall then held out a plastic Safeway bag stuffed with neatly counted out bills, rubber banded together in one-thousand-dollar amounts. The other side of the buy, the suppliers, were a bunch of little Mexican dudes. They sent one of theirs to collect the dough.
And that was when it all fell apart. Just as Wall let go of the bag and the other side took possession, there was the sudden concussive sound of a tear gas gun going off. Mallen knew it immediately, as he also knew immediately that shit had just blown up in his world. The cops were not supposed to be here. This wasn’t one of the staged buys, set up so they could help him get higher up the chain.
This was now, as the colloquial phrase runs, fucked all to high heaven and back.
Suddenly it was every man for himself. No one wanted to be anywhere near the dope. Well, Mallen did see Jonesy stuff a kilo under his coat as he bolted for the door. Bravery and stupidity oft look the same, as another old saying goes.
Mallen ran for the nearest door, crashing through it full throttle. The damn thing almost came off its hinges as he charged ahead. The air was filled with yells and cops shouting their usual cop crap when they bust into a joint. “Down! Down! Down!” “Hands where I can see them!” “Eat the floor, motherfucker!”
He found himself running down a short hall, an old office door dead ahead. There would be some fucking anger over this, and that was a fact. He’d told his superiors to keep it cool, that he had it under control. Someone, somewhere, had fucked up royally.
The door broke apart like he was some superhero dude as he threw all his weight into it. A small office lay beyond. Maybe some manager’s, at one time, now empty except for graffiti and garbage. There was the door that would lead to freedom, right there. He registered daylight sneaking in under the bottom. Grabbed at the knob, twisted, yanked, and the door flew open and then he was outside …
… and there was Eric.
Glock in hand, regulation pose down to the feet being one yard apart. Uniform was immaculate, as it always was. Badge like a mirror shining in the sun. Poster boy for what a cop should look like, be like.
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