“I figured it was something like that, or you wouldn’t have picked this location so fast when you talked to her on the phone.”
The further away from the highway we got, the more I relaxed. When we got to the Promenade, Marie gripped my hand and said, “Oh, goodie, we get to shop for a little while until things cool down.”
“Oh, lord.”
She jerked on my hand. “What is it with you men that you don’t like to shop?”
“We don’t shop because we know exactly what we want, go right to it, buy it, and get away from the crowd of women milling about and cackling like a bunch of—”
She jerked on my hand again. “Careful. Don’t let that mouth of yours get you in trouble.”
I stopped short and froze.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
I slowly walked up to the large window of the bookstore, too stunned to respond.
“What?” Marie asked. “Bruno, you’re scaring me.”
Unable to form the simplest of words, I held up my arm and pointed.
“What?” she asked. “I don’t—Oh, my God!”
Fifty books in the display window rose up waist high. They stood meticulously stacked, some facing outward for the whole world to see. Their mere presence kept me from talking.
My brother Noble’s face appeared on the cover of all of the books, his expression grim, almost menacing. The close-up showed his age and reminded me of all the years I’d missed with him.
The cover said, A Noble Sacrifice: A Black Man’s Journey to a White Man’s White Gold. By Johnny Noble.
Aghast, I moved up to the window and put both hands flat on the glass.
Johnny. He’d used his old name. His name before Dad adopted him.
Marie moved up beside me. “Bruno, oh, my God.”
The gift of speech returned. “How did we not know about this?”
“We live in a different country,” she said, “whose primary language is Spanish. We also don’t have any contact with anyone here in this country. And we don’t read any nonfiction. We read Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker.”
To the right, taped to the inside of the window, a paper displayed a list of The Los Angeles Times bestsellers. A Noble Sacrifice came in at number nine out of ten in nonfiction. The next column over said the book had been on the list for fifteen weeks.
My brother had made the LA Times bestseller list.
I took Marie’s hand and guided her toward the store’s front door, just as two bike cops rode down the Promenade, in and out of and around the hundreds of people shopping.
Inside, the air conditioning dried the sweat on my face and went a long way to cool off the shock that tried too hard to anesthetize my body. We moved to the front rack, which held another forty or fifty copies. Marie and I each picked one up.
I opened my copy.
“Dedicated to my Big Bro, Bruno Johnson, who tirelessly fought on the streets of LA to make it a better place to live.”
Right there, I eased down to the floor and sat.
“Bruno, are you okay?”
I held the page up for her to see.
“Oh, my God, Bruno.” She sat down right next to me. Some patrons stopped to look.
“He’s insane. My brother’s insane. He put his whole life on display. That’s what happened. No wonder. No damn wonder all this went down the way it did. Bad. It went down bad. How could it not? How could he not know what would happen if he did this?”
“I thought you said he dropped out of high school early, as a sophomore or something, right? He couldn’t write a pamphlet, let alone an autobiography that hits the lists.”
“His senior year. He dropped out the beginning of his senior year. He was eighteen. He worked for Papa Dee for two years. He’s been in prison for twenty-five years. You can get a full college education in prison, that’s what he said he did, remember? He said he got his degree, remember?”
“So what you’re tellin’ me is that you can get married, have kids, get a college education, get full and complete medical coverage, which includes dental, all while being in prison? That’s bullshit, Bruno. I’m sorry, I gotta say I think that’s total and absolute bullshit.”
I’d heard her, but couldn’t focus on what she was saying. I’d opened to the first page, to the first chapter titled “The Day My House Died.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
NOBLE STARTED THE book with the Christmas morning fire as the inciting incident for his life story. I read quickly, couldn’t read it fast enough. Amazing how the prose followed almost exactly how I remembered it. I turned the page and continued to read. Marie didn’t press for an answer and started to read as well.
A woman came by. Her low black heels barely registered in my subconscious, I was so intent on the book in my hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “you’re going to have to move. You can’t sit here.”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry, we’ll move,” Marie said. “We’ll move, sure we will. We’ll do it right now.” Her words came out distracted, mumbled and without emphasis. Low-Heels moved on.
In the passage describing the fire, I came to something I didn’t know, and I’d been there in the front yard, right alongside Noble for that entire incident.
The two firemen came out of the burning house, walked out of the billowing black smoke, right out the front door, a couple of ghastly apparitions in this horrible nightmare that wouldn’t end. They wore large yellow air tanks on their backs, their faces covered by oxygen face masks, their eyes an evil red.
I knew they weren’t red, but to this day that’s how I remembered them. The minute details forever seared into my memory. The names of the firemen, stenciled in black in two places on their turn-out coats, read, “J. Mellor” and “C. Kraig.” Their boots dripped with water. They smelled of smoke and sorrow and of death. I didn’t know what death smelled like until that day.
They gently set my little brother and sister down at the base of the tree, their bodies wrapped entirely in Flintstone bed sheets. I couldn’t see them, but knew. I knew.
I stood off to the side, out of everyone’s way, and couldn’t take my eyes off of them. My dad and his white whore had moved and now stood over by the same tree, with blankets around their naked bodies, unaware of what lay at their feet. His woman kept saying, “I have to get out of here. I have to go.” The deputy said, “Not yet, I need to get your statement first. I’ll have a patrol car give you a ride after I get a statement.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she half-screeched, then caught herself and lowered her tone. “A black-and-white patrol car taking me home to my neighborhood, with me dressed in only a blanket? Just move those fire trucks, and I’ll take my own car.”
The irony of her use, her description of the black-and-white patrol car, was not lost to me even at that young age.
“That’s not gonna happen,” the deputy said. “Not for a couple hours at least.”
Down the street, a news van pulled to the curb, the side door slid open, and out jumped an immaculately dressed female field reporter and a cameraman.
My father’s whore pulled the blanket over her head like someone from the Middle East. She turned her back to the street and moved to the other side of my father as cover. In so doing, she stumbled over the bundles wrapped in the Flintstone bed sheets.
She had unknowingly stepped on my brother and sister.
The deputy quickly grabbed hold of her and moved her to the side, moved my dad too.
I went to my knees at the sight, the way the woman so casually desecrated the dead. The way she disrespected my little brother and sister was like a kick to the stomach.
I hadn’t seen what Noble described in that passage, the children placed at the base of the tree, the woman stepping on them, and I’d been standing right there next to Noble that Christmas morning, my arm around his shoulders. The whole time, sick to death over the pain and sorrow he was going through. I must’ve seen it. I must’ve an
d blocked it out.
Noble didn’t block it out.
I skipped on down.
That horrible day, the way those two deputies acted, especially the black deputy as he valiantly attempted to enter the house under great threat and with disregard for his own safety, I believe that event was what inspired my brother Bruno to go into law enforcement. To become a deputy sheriff and work in the same neighborhood where we grew up. To fight tyranny in its most base form, a fight that he did so well taking it to the criminals, fighting them on their own turf. And, as a good friend of Bruno’s used to say, “Make the streets safe for women and children.”
The clerk in the bookstore returned; at least her shoes did. “If you people don’t move right now, I’m going outside to flag down one of the many police officers assigned to this shopping area and have them escort you out.”
I waved her off without thought to the consequences. How could I concentrate on anything else? She couldn’t possibly mean it anyway, not for sitting on the floor, of all things.
An iron fist had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart, and now it wouldn’t let go.
I don’t remember ever talking with Noble about why I wanted to be a deputy sheriff. I don’t remember telling him the old saying, the one Robby Wicks used to say far too often. But Noble had it wrong. Robby used to say, “Make the streets safe for white women and children.” I probably had told Noble and amended it to protect the innocent. Only Robby wasn’t innocent, and I had protected him far too long and never opened my eyes long enough to see him for what he was until it was too late.
I, too, like my brother, remembered names during that incident, but not the names of the firemen. I remembered the patrol deputies. The tall black deputy wore D.C. Smith on his nameplate; the other, J. Humphrey.
I let the book drop to my lap as I thought about what Noble had written, about my motivation as to why I entered law enforcement. Had that day truly been the catalyst for my motivation? Was it because of D.C. Smith’s heroic actions?
Sitting beside me, Marie said, “Uh oh.”
I looked up from the book. Two uniformed Santa Monica bike policemen came in the door, taking off their helmets, escorted by Low-Heels. She pointed at us.
I got up, helping Marie. I turned to the police officers who came up to us. “Sorry, officers, we’ll move on, we didn’t mean to cause a problem.”
One officer flanked us; the other stood in a bladed interrogation stance. Both were professionals with excellent tactics.
“Why don’t we take this outside?” the policeman in front of us said.
I took Marie’s hand. “Sure, sure.”
Low-Heels waved her hand. “Wait, wait, they haven’t paid for those books.”
Marie pulled her thin wallet out and handed the pesky woman a fifty and a twenty.
“I’ll get you change.”
“Keep it,” Marie said. She held the book upside down as she put her wallet back in her pocket. We hadn’t yet looked at the back cover of the book. Noble had somehow obtained a photo, probably from Dad. It was an enlarged photo that filled the entire back of the book, one that depicted me and Dad and Noble sitting on the steps leading up to the front door of our house on Nord. A photo Noble’s dad had shot not long before the day Noble’s house died.
I took the book from Marie and stacked it on top of mine as we followed the cop out, the second one behind us as a rearguard. If the cops saw the picture, even though I couldn’t have been more than ten at the time, and they happened to put it together that I was in the book, the forged passport ID I had in my pocket wouldn’t match the name in the book.
I subconsciously reached down to feel the passport to make sure it was there and felt something far worse.
The gun barrel to the chrome 9mm that I’d taken from my nephew Bruno.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
WHY HADN’T I tossed the gun barrel over the side at the pier like I had intended to do? What a perfect place to dispose of it. What a dumbass. I’d been distracted with my newly discovered nephew and then with the extortionist. No excuse, not under the circumstances. Now the cops would find it if they searched me. What were the odds that they wouldn’t search?
Zero.
A DrugFire test would determine if the gun had been used in any crimes where a slug had been recovered. The DrugFire database, though not near as large as fingerprints or DNA, still contained hundreds of thousands of guns, logged by their shell casings, slugs, and their extraction bars and firing pins.
My nephew had bought the gun off the streets of LA, which greatly increased the likelihood of the gun’s involvement in a drive-by or an individual killing.
We exited the bookstore out onto the promenade. Marie pasted on a fake smile and tried to step aside, to draw their attention away from me. She couldn’t possibly think I’d make a break for it. Could she? I wouldn’t leave her. No way.
Didn’t matter. The cops corralled her right away and put us both in close to the window, the book display behind us.
Before he asked, I took out my passport and handed it to the shorter cop with the sweat-pasted sandy-brown hair, the one who took the lead.
“Don’t you have a driver’s license?”
“I lost it,” I said.
He nodded. “Why didn’t you leave when you were asked?”
Marie handed him her passport and forged driver’s license. “Sorry, Officer, we just didn’t think it was a big deal, that’s all. We were only sitting on the floor reading these books. We weren’t causing any kind of problem, really we weren’t.”
Without warning, the shorter cop handed the license and passport back and put on his helmet. They both ran to their bikes and took off.
Marie walked over to the closest bench and sat down. “That was a close one. Why’d they leave like that without any reason?”
“They were wearing ear jacks so we couldn’t hear their radio. They got a hot call. And you’re right, that was a close one.” I pulled the pistol barrel from my pocket and showed her.
“Ah, Bruno, I’m sorry, but you’re a dumbass.”
“I know, I know.”
I went to the closest trash can and tossed it in. I came back. I wanted to sit there and read the whole book all the way though, cover to cover, without stopping. Not only to find out how the book sparked all the controversy and put this whole mess into play, but also to get a better handle on my brother Noble. This new brother I’d never met before. Sure, some of the prose would be fabricated lies to serve his greater purpose, whatever that purpose might be, but I’d already been given a glimpse of a part of him I didn’t know and craved more of. I craved all of it, a desire difficult to resist.
Marie must’ve had the same urgent need. She opened the book, started reading, and immediately forgot her surroundings.
“Come on, kid,” I said, “We gotta roll.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” She closed the book and stood, taking my hand as we jumped into the stream of shoppers. “You know,” she said, “we really need to read this whole thing before we make any kind of move.”
“I know, but they only gave us forty-eight hours.”
She tried to stop midstream. “Really? Two days to bust your brother out?”
I tugged her hand, got her going again. “That’s right.”
It hurt to think she didn’t balk at all over the idea of breaking the law, committing multiple felonies by busting Noble out of the jail ward in the hospital. Our lives had veered out of control three years ago and never returned to a familiar reality, one that was comfortable and safe. I loved her for it.
The stream of people slowed and turned into a clot. I held onto Marie’s hand and moved around the lookie-loos. I stood tall enough to see over the crowd. Marie went up on tiptoes to try and see but couldn’t. “What’s going on?”
“Those two bike cops, they came down here for a window smash. The one cop is holding up a medium-sized ball bearing. The window’s made of that safety glass that shattered into
a million pieces, that’s why we didn’t hear anything.” I leaned over, lowered my tone. “Lucky for us, huh?”
“Yeah, we should go buy a lotto ticket.”
“You know,” I said, “sometimes I can’t get a good read on your sarcasm.”
“Good, keep you on your toes.”
We got another ten yards away from the throng before she said, “This—” she held up the book “—is only about a four- or five-hour read.”
“For you, maybe. You forget you’re married to a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.”
“If you’re lookin’ for an argument there, pal, you’re gonna be waitin’ a long time.”
“Thanks for that. Have you ever stopped to think that if I’m a caveman, what’s that make you?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell ya? I’m really a psychology major working on my thesis and you’ve been my subject, my special project for the last three years. All of this here”—she waved her hand around—“has really just been a ruse.” She held up her same hand, pretending to hold a digital recorder close to her mouth, and assumed a professional tone. “After a simple pagan ceremony, a mock wedding, subject has displayed an abnormal and insatiable sex drive that, in my opinion, and based on previous observations, has been triggered by some sort of misplaced proprietary interest in my female sex parts.”
I laughed as I pulled us out of the dwindling stream of people and headed for the public parking. “If that’s the case,” I said, “then when this caveman gets his cavewoman back to the cave, he’s gonna spank some of those proprietary female sex parts.”
She giggled and did a little hop. “Ooh la la.”
We rounded the corner to a row of cars. Bruno, my nephew, waited for us at the rental. He leaned against the car, his arms crossed, sporting a scowl visible from a hundred feet away. His somber demeanor reminded us of the dire situation, shut us both up, and wiped away our smiles.
When we got close, I hit the key fob and unlocked the doors. He didn’t turn and get in. He continued to watch us as we closed on him. “I don’t see anything funny in this situation. Not in the least,” he said.
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