We waited. I wanted to read some more, needed to, but couldn’t, not with the ugly revenge festering in my belly. I unwrapped the Chick-O-Stick and touched the end to Marie’s lips. The touch startled her. She saw the candy, looked up, and smiled. “Thank you, babe.” She took it, sucked on it, and went right back to reading the last few pages.
I opened the Sno Balls and ate one with some chocolate milk. The sugar rush surged through my body and, for a time, sharpened my mind. I unwrapped the batteries from the bubble packaging one at a time and let them rattle loose in the bottom of the bag, all eight of them.
Marie closed the book. “Amazing. If half of this stuff is real, it’s an amazing story. Bruno, the whole thing is a love story. He did it all for the love of Sasha, got caught, and paid the price. He’s still paying the price.”
He got caught all right. I caught him when he worked as a clerk in the convenience store. And he may have been right, he might’ve walked away clean had I not put it together.
“What happened in the dope deal?” I asked. “Where’s the four hundred and fifty kilos? Does he tell that much in the book? Did he at least put forward some sort of half-assed opinion?”
“He says that the deal was set, that it was supposed to go down at nine o’clock at night on a pier in San Pedro. The Nicaraguans kept the coke loaded in the hull of a ship.”
“But?”
“Noble played it smart. He wanted to get his girl Sasha away from Papa Dee and, at the same time, get his stake for them to go off and live together. He must’ve loved her a lot, Bruno. He ran security for Papa Dee on this deal. He was supposed to, anyway. He checked out the pier ahead of time. He hired some of his cronies he could trust and bought the guns. He was going to take down the dope and the money at the same time.”
“What happened?”
Back in the day, after Noble left our house and started slingin’ his dope, he and I never spoke again. We inhabited different sides of the street. I just hadn’t been aware at the time of Noble’s motivation for his abrupt moral decline, enrolling into the largest criminal enterprise in Los Angeles. No motivation other than greed ever came to mind.
Well, unless Sasha truly did motivate him.
But I’d met Sasha back when I was a street cop, back when Grover Porter brought her to me to do something about the injuries Papa Dee inflicted upon her. At the time I didn’t know she was linked to Noble. She’d become the common denominator who brought all of us together. Noble and I almost came together over it. So close, but without touching or seeing one another’s involvement, linked without our knowledge, almost as if on purpose. Did she know?
Yeah, sure, I knew Sasha. Knew what she was capable of. She knew her weapons, her sexual allure, the reaction all men had toward her.
Marie shrugged. “It’s a helluva thing, Bruno. There was a shootout like something right out of a Bruce Willis movie or, or like that last scene in L.A. Confidential, at the abandoned motel, you remember that one? Papa Dee showed up to the meet with Del Fawlkes and … well, you just have to read it for yourself. Here …” She handed me the copy of A Noble Sacrifice.
I took the book from her. “What’s he say happened with that nine million in cash? Do you know how much room that kind of money needs? How much it weighs? I did a deal once where we seized four million in cash. They’d stored the money in cowboy boot boxes, fifties, twenties, and hundreds. The boxes filled a standard hall closet from floor to ceiling.” I started to ramble as I suppressed my guilt for arresting Noble and not listening to him that night in the Stop and Go, the night he’d shot up armed robbers who weren’t there to rob the store after all. They’d come at Noble for the dope and/or the money.
“It wasn’t in cash,” Marie said.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It’s just like you said. That much cash was too hard to deal with, to transport and to exchange. So according to what Papa Dee told Noble, the CIA wanted payment for the coke in diamonds. That way the CIA could transport that kind of wealth in a diplomatic pouch.”
My head whipped around all on its own. “What?”
“What’s the matter?” Marie asked.
“You said diamonds? You sure it says diamonds?” I grabbed up the book from my lap and thumbed through it. “Show me where? How many diamonds? What would the container for that amount of diamonds look like? Those would be real easy to hide for twenty-five years. You could hide ’em anywhere.”
“I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask your brother. He didn’t describe it in his book, not in the aftermath of that big mess. Read, you’re gonna have to read it. He said he thought Papa Dee probably got spooked with the CIA being involved. Noble postulates that Papa Dee just cut his losses after the shootout and scrammed down to Rio. That he wanted nothing more to do with dope dealing. Maybe even Costa Rica. Noble actually mentioned Costa Rica. Wouldn’t that be something if right now, Papa Dee lived down in Costa Rica?”
Her last few words didn’t fully penetrate into my thought process. I’d opened the book to read a story I’d come to dread. I really didn’t want to know the truth. Not this truth. Had I been so wrong about my brother, my best friend?
I found the chapter titled “Ghettocide” and started reading.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
FROM A NOBLE SACRIFICE BY JOHNNY NOBLE
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ghettocide
I met Sasha for the last time, the last time while I could still breathe free air. I didn’t know that would be the case or I would’ve held her longer. Much longer. Hugged her so tight and never let her go. I would’ve kissed her long and deep and said that final good-bye, that missing good-bye I regret to this day.
We met at Grover Porter’s place, the abandoned red brick library at Century Boulevard and Bullis where Grover lived. He let us in and left us to it.
The library didn’t have any electricity. The drafty air managed to weasel in from someplace in a high-low whistle. On that cool December evening, the ten or twelve guttering candles heated the crisp air and made our shadows jump and waver and dance on the partitioned walls. I held both her hands in mine and let my eyes soak her up.
I know this sounds more like a crazed teen crushing on his first high school sweetheart, but I’m not a poet, not by any stretch, and can’t express myself well enough to describe the emotions that gripped me whenever I came around her. Not what this twenty-four-year-old woman did to a twenty-year-old kid in love for the first time.
She looked as if she couldn’t hold it in any longer and spoke first. “I saw them. I saw the diamonds.”
“What?” This wasn’t what I expected her to say.
“The diamonds, silly, I saw them. Papa keeps them in one of those purple Crown Royal bags. Seven hundred and fifty two-carat diamonds, twelve thousand dollars apiece, nine million dollars’ worth. All of them, the whole bunch are no bigger than this—” She held up both her cupped, delicately boned hands. Can you believe it, nine million dollars’ worth?” Her manicured fingernails were painted with Matrimonial Red. I know because I painted them for her the last time we’d seen each other not two days before. Met her in that very same broken-down, rickety library.
What a wonderful and magical place.
She’d shaken the bottle of polish and held it out for me to see the name, smiled at me with that coy, ‘come hither,’ look that I’d never seen from any other woman. And she looked at me like that all the time. She loved me like I loved her.
I digress. I do that when I think back, remember how she looked, how she smelled, the touch of her skin, the sheen in her brown hair.
“He’s so arrogant,” she said. “Proud of his precious little rocks. He keeps the purple Crown Royal bag in his pocket, right here.” She pointed to the area on her hip where her pocket would be if she’d been wearing any clothes. I’d untied her dress straps as she spoke and let the dress slip down past her curves to lay at her feet. She never wore a bra or panties. Papa wouldn’t let her.
I hated that bastard.
She stood there unabashed, vulnerable yet unafraid.
I led her over to Grover’s cot and kissed her on the lips, kissed her ear, kissed her neck. She groaned.
I won’t go any further here; it wouldn’t be gentlemanly and would be terribly unfair to her memory.
Afterward, we lay on the cot, our naked bodies clinging to each other for heat as the sweat cooled on our skin.
“It’s tonight,” she said.
I jerked up and looked down at her. “Tonight? You sure?”
Like I stated earlier, I’d been asked to run the security for Papa Dee’s deal, but he’d found out about us and beat Sasha yet again, worse this time. Papa Dee needed killing and I intended to take care of that pressing issue at the conclusion of his upcoming and grandiose dope deal.
Grover, as always, had been called in to fix her up. That’d been two months ago. I’d been on the outs with Papa, who had every hype, coke fiend, pimp, and thug out lookin’ to cash in on the contract he’d put on my ass. I’d been on the dodge big-time, watching over my shoulder, never getting a good night’s sleep, just short catnaps. Two months of that shit wears on the body. The only thing kept me going was the thought of taking out the fat man and stealing away with my woman.
I didn’t know the date until right at that moment when she told me.
“What?” she asked, “What’s the matter? You scared, baby? Don’t be scared, you’ve got it all planned out. You’re so much smarter than those people. You can do this.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “Leave right now, run off and live in Madrid. You said you wanted to live in Madrid, right? Let’s go then, right now.”
She eased me back down on the cot and edged over until she could get on top, her soft breasts resting on my chest, her chin resting on mine. When she spoke, I not only heard her words but felt them as well, the vibration from chin to chin. “I would love to do that, go right now,” she said. “Go this very minute. But you know Papa, he won’t stop until he finds us. He’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it. You know that. You know Papa, you worked for him. He’ll hunt us both down, not because he loves me, because he doesn’t. I told you that. You’ve seen firsthand how he treats me.
“He’d run us down because we’d embarrassed him by taking off. It would show him as weak. And that’s the last thing Papa wants, to be shown up in front of his peoples.” She made her voice deep when she said “his peoples.”
“No,” she said. “If it wasn’t for Papa, it wouldn’t matter what kind of job you had. I told you that. You could be the postman, a waiter, you could be the night clerk at an all-night liquor store. It wouldn’t matter because I love you that much. You understand. I really need you to understand how much I love you. Tell me you understand, Johnny, please?”
I nodded. Her words got to me, made a lump rise in my throat. This beautiful woman loved me like no one else in the world ever had.
“So you see,” she said, “we can’t live like that. We can’t have regular jobs. We have to run, and run hard, disappear. And to do that we need money, Johnny. We’ve talked about all of this. But if you’re scared, really, baby, we can find another way. I don’t want you to do it if you think it’s not going to work like we planned. The last thing I want is for you to get hurt.”
DOWNEY, WILDERNESS PARK CURRENT DAY
I LOOKED UP from the text. I didn’t want to be a cynic but couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help thinking Sasha wound up Noble like some kind of toy soldier and sent him off to war. Knowing that any outcome other than what she had in her current situation, that of being sexually indentured to Papa Dee, would be acceptable to her. Best case, Noble could come away with the dope and the diamonds, and they’d run off as planned. Worst case, the dope rip got botched, people died, and if she came out of it real lucky, Papa Dee would’ve been wiped off the big board and sent where he belonged: the morgue. We’d had a saying for that in the Violent Crimes Team: “Case cleared by exceptional means.”
I put the book down to check the environment around me, sitting in the car with Marie. Over by the entrance, Mack arrived at the park.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MACK DROVE INTO the park in his older model navy-blue Ford Ranger. He, too, cruised through once, getting the lay of the land, and then drove over to us. He parked his car like cops tend to do, driver’s window to driver’s window, before he shut it down. Over at that same entrance, still a long way off, my nephew Bruno came into the park on foot, moving along the tree line beside the asphalt drive.
Mack’s window whirred down. “Holy shit, Bruno, what the hell happened to your face? That didn’t happen at the jail. You didn’t look that bad.” He leaned forward in his seat to see Marie. “Ah, man, what happened to you two?”
“We were up at the hotel in the room when these three thugs burst in. They jumped me and attacked Marie.”
Mack tried to look around me to get a better look at Marie. “She okay? You okay, Marie?”
She waved. “I’m fine.”
“Who were they? I told you not ta mess with Don Brodie. Man, he’s bad news. They’re already calling him ‘Don the Don.’”
“Mack, they were deputies. All three of ’em were from a special team.”
His eyes went large, his mouth dropped open. “Are you shittin’ me? How do you know? Did they identify themselves?”
“No. When the leader got up close and personal with my wife, she got a look at his star clipped to his shoulder holster.”
“Sons a bitches. Dirty-assed, corrupt cops. What’d they want?”
“They want Noble.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? He’s in the can for the rest of … Oh, no, no, no, they wanna bust him out, don’t they?”
“Yeah. You seen this?”
Marie handed me a copy of A Noble Sacrifice, and I handed it to Mack through the windows.
The way I handed the book to him, the first thing he saw was the back cover. “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch, is that you, Bruno? You were cute as the dickens, weren’t you? What happened, man, you turned ugly. Sorry, Marie, no offense.” He held the book picture up for comparison.
“None taken,” she said.
“Hey, I’m sittin’ right here.”
He turned the book around, looked it over. “Your brother wrote a book?” He opened it and thumbed through it.
“Yeah, you didn’t know about it?”
“Nope.”
“Mack, it’s on the LA Times bestseller list for nonfiction.”
He held up the book. “No way can this be nonfiction, not if your brother wrote it. And I probably missed it because I don’t read much, and I’ve been on graves until just recently.”
I liked Mack a lot, more so than my brother, but his disparaging remark cut me close to the quick, and I suppressed the urge to say something rude. I said nothing instead.
“Besides,” Mack said, “the name Johnson’s like Jones and Smith. And look, he used Johnny as a first name. I wouldn’t have recognized the name even if I were a big reader.” Mack lost his smile. “You’re not gonna bust Noble out, are you, Bruno?”
My nephew caught up to us and got in the backseat without being asked.
“Johnny Mack,” I said, “this is my nephew, Bruno Johnson.”
“The hell you say.” He started his car and jerked the gearshift in reverse. Then he backed up, got out, and came around to the passenger side. I didn’t know his intent and jumped out of the car.
Mack opened Bruno’s door and stuck out his hand. “I’ll be a son of a bitch, another Bruno Johnson, ain’t that somethin’?”
My nephew shook hands with him. Bruno didn’t smile.
“That’s right,” I said. “And he’s an intern over at Lennox Station.”
Mack took a step back. “Well, I’ll be damned. I got a good friend works Lennox, Pete Sommers.”
Bruno slid out of the backseat displaying a rare smile. “Really? You know Lieutenant Sommers?”
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br /> “Yep, got some shit on him, too, so if he ever gives you a hard time, tell him you know all about that shift-run to Vegas. He’ll shit his pants.”
Marie got out and stood with us, her smile not as bright as usual. She carried what Blue Suit did to her on her shoulders like a smothering weight.
Mack sobered. “Sorry to hear about your kids. We’ll get ’em back. You have the great Bruno the Bad Boy Johnson on your team, you can’t lose.”
I took a step closer. “Mack, you’re not in this. You can’t be.”
“Don’t start up on that tired old tune. It won’t do you any good, and you know that. Let’s get on past it and get this thing goin’, so Bruno junior here can get his kids back.”
“I’m not a junior.”
“I know that, but hey, you could do worse, kid.”
“I don’t think he feels that way,” I said. “Come on, we can talk about all that mess later. We need to get Noble out.”
Mack nodded, “First tell me what you got goin’ with Don Brodie.”
“He’s the one who has the two children.”
Mack’s expression turned grave. “You sure?”
“It’s the LACF and D that has them,” my nephew said.
“Shit.” Mack turned to my nephew. “How do you know? Are you sure?”
“Lieutenant Sommers told me.”
“Who are they?” Marie asked.
Mack said, “Los Angeles Consolidated Freight and Design. It’s a cocaine distribution network, pure and simple, with a bullshit name. They’re just trying to make a Gucci purse out of a pig’s ear. That name’s their cover, their brand. On the street, they call ’em the Coffin Dancers, which is more appropriate with the way they deal with malcontents, competition, and people who get in their way. They’re low profile, ghosts, until they need to take care of business and put someone in the ground. They know how to drop bodies without witnesses or physical evidence. At least so far. One day the midlevel crook tryin’ to move in on the business is there, the next he’s gone and no one knows what happened to him. It’s a missing person case without the body.
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