Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  “Travis,” Gonzo cautioned.

  “No, mom. I know about bullet wounds. Seen all kinds of pictures and stuff online.”

  Lucky had unconsciously reached behind his head and scratched near the scalloped edges of his scar. Of course, Gonzo had noticed it the day prior, had catalogued it, but hadn’t thought to ever ask him considering she had spent most of the day looking for her way off the Lucky Dey crazy train.

  “This your school right here?” Lucky had asked Travis.

  “And that’s my friend Albert!” Travis had pointed out, unbuckling before the car was even stopped, snagging his backpack, joyfully ready to start his school day.

  Not another word about that curious scar three inches behind his right ear had been uttered during the ride out to the West Valley. While Lucky played talk radio roulette, never quite finding a show to hold his interest, Gonzo wrestled with that complaint she had begun to mentally compose.

  “My guess is he’s still home,” said Gonzo, pointing a finger out the rear window of Lucky’s Charger. “If that gray Taurus isn’t what a fed drives, then I’m a Fox blonde with fake boobs.”

  Lucky released a brief chuckle. Gonzo could see the corner of his mouth curl. But her eyes couldn’t help but stay affixed on the obvious scar.

  “Sorry about what my kid said.” Gonzo returned her gaze to Dulaney Little’s Reseda house.

  “Nothin’ to be sorry about,” said Lucky. “He’s a cool kid.”

  “I meant the remark about the…” Gonzo found her words stuck in her mouth. So she just spit it all out. “About the obvious bullet wound behind your ear.”

  “So what about it?”

  “Exactly,” said Gonzo. “What about it?”

  “Took one in the melon,” said Lucky. “What else is there to say?”

  “You survived? That you’re some kind of miracle?”

  “Ten percent of headshots are non-fatal.”

  “And ninety percent of them end up permanently disabled.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” said Lucky, leaving it right there. “Ten minutes and we’re lookin’ for this guy downtown.”

  “Where’d the bullet go?”

  “What? After it entered my skull?” Lucky thought about his answer, glimpsing Gonzo in the rearview mirror.

  “Still have screws in my jaw from a bunch of reconstructive surgeries,” said Gonzo. “Bet you had a great plastics guy.”

  “No guy. No girl,” said Lucky. “No surgery. Bullet’s still in there.”

  Lucky gently rapped a knuckle above his right ear.

  “No shit?”

  “Swims in this little pocket of fluid between my frontal and temporal lobe.”

  “Was there trauma?”

  “Whaddayou think? Fuckin’ twenty-five cal in my head? Induced coma. Buncha holes drilled in the cranium to release the pressure of the swelling.”

  “But everything else?”

  “’Cept for the headaches? Like it never happened.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just before…” Lucky swallowed his words. Cleared his throat and readjusted the rearview mirror so he could see Gonzo’s face. She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were out the back window, still glued on the FBI man’s house next to the freeway. The morning light, softened through the tinted rear window, cast a blue halo around Gonzo’s frizzy hair.

  “Around the same time,” continued Lucky. “That I was foaming the runway for my brother. You know, up in Kern… Anyway. Me and Big Flip had just hooked up this honcho we were after. Walkin’ him from his apartment and out to the car. Some dude. And, you know, like I didn’t see him. He just opens the manager’s door, sticks out his pea shooter and pop pop pop. Two in the honcho and one behind my ear. We go down. Bleds drops and turns the door into balsa wood. Dude in the apartment gets himself dead. Honcho’s dead. I wake up in intensive care with a frickin’ microwave antenna screwed to my skull. End of story.”

  “Good story,” said Gonzo, realizing she was unconsciously looking for rationale to like the man. She had cut him slack the day before because he was grieving for his brother. But by 9:00 P.M. he had spent his cache of Gonzo’s goodwill. He had already started at a deficit today, sinking even lower when he stirred her awake with the gun in his fist. Yet Gonzo was searching for something to care about beyond Lucky’s obvious loss. Otherwise, she would grind over his behavior until it eventually morphed into words contained in a PPL complaint.

  “Everybody said I’d set off the metal detectors,” said Lucky. “Turned out to be a tub of bullshit.”

  “Too small, right?” said Gonzo on rhetorical remote. “Same with the screws in my face.”

  “Car accident?”

  “Forgot my seatbelt. Got tossed clear. Lucky to be alive.”

  “On the job?”

  “Bone of contention when it came to disability,” said Gonzo. “Union was on my side. But I still lost.”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Sure you stole the right address?”

  Lucky remained silent on that one. Once again, fatigue was overwhelming him. His eyes, which he kept leveled on his right side-view mirror, kept creeping shut. Sleep was like a wave that would roll in, envelop him, then snap him awake seconds after he succumbed. It didn’t help that prior to being awoken by his Kern County captain, he hadn’t slept more than four hours a night for a week. The headaches had begun to border on migraines, leaving him too dizzy to catch more than an hour of slumber at a stretch. He’d been depleted before the madness had even begun. And now he was just fighting the inevitable. If he wasn’t a cop he’d have gone trolling the nearest barrio for a few capsules of Dexedrine. Black Beauties. Military-grade stay-awakes.

  Then came that damned jolt as his body forced him back to consciousness. He checked his watch to find he’d been sleeping for thirteen minutes.

  “Time to go,” croaked Lucky.

  “Wait’ll he gets in the car.”

  “Wait’ll who…”

  Lucky blinked and returned his focus back on to his left side-view mirror. There, circling around to the driver’s side of the new Taurus was a black man in gray suit pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, cell phone glued to his ear. For all appearances, the man was in a hurry.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” spat Lucky.

  “Tell you what?” asked Gonzo. She knew he was depleted and needed sleep. Still, she couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice. “That you were snoring so loud you couldn’t hear me shout, “THERE’S YOUR GUY!”

  21

  My name is Dulaney Little. My name is Dulaney Little. My name is Dulaney Little.

  Amongst close friends, it was no secret that Dulaney hated his birth name. For a child born with a speech impediment, spitting out two words as simple as his own name could sometimes be embarrassingly difficult. Just one L in a word could cause his tongue to inexplicably stick at the top of his soft pallet. But the prospect of following the first L with another within two syllables could be crippling, leaving an eight-year-old boy stricken, panicked, and secretly cursing his parents for naming him after a Dutch uncle he’d never even met.

  Dulaney’s middle-class mom and dad finally scraped up enough money to pay for a speech therapist. The daily exercises showed dividends in young Dulaney’s grades and general deportment. The wallflower who had spent his waking hours avoiding most social interaction bloomed and, eventually, even led his high school debate squad to the L.A. City finals. The cripple was cured but for the occasional stressful moment when he needed to blurt something out, usually his own name.

  That morning Dulaney had set it all in motion. The late night tip had gone from improbable to promising. Dulaney followed by casting a net for an FBI Tactical Group to assist in the likely arrest of the Kern County murder suspect who had last been seen driving a black-on-black refrigerated semi. He’d also ordered up a helicopter team to secure the airspace over the takedown site.

  The takedown site had yet to be confirmed. With every click
of the minute hand, Dulaney started to worry. He had already swallowed three pressured phone calls from Lilly Zoller, aka the Mistress of the Bark. With each ring she was looking for the latest details on the coming event. Details that Dulaney would be short on until hearing from his source, Rey Palomino. Dulaney kicked himself that he hadn’t set his alarm and driven up to Granada Hills to babysit the tipster. He had set far too much in motion based on a single informant. FBI practice was to stay glued to the informant throughout the setup. But family life sometimes had a way of throwing up roadblocks. Especially in the mornings when there were kids fighting, midday meals to be folded into insulated lunchboxes, and no damned skim milk in the house.

  Finally, Rey Palomino called in with a breathless recitation of his minutes-old conversation with a former Iraq veteran with the so-called name of Greg Beem. The DOJ and Homeland databases had spit out over a hundred possible matches, two of whom were listed and accounted for as presently serving in the Middle East.

  Dulaney jotted down every other word on to one of the neon yellow sticky notes his wife was accustomed to leaving around as honey-do reminders, grabbed his jacket and car keys, and hurried out the front door to his car. His first call was to the FBI tactical coordinator, who wouldn’t necessarily recognize the caller ID. Stressed, but still trying to keep his emotions under the anxiety radar, Dulaney lapsed back into his third-grade body.

  “It’s Dullllllllll-aney LLLLLLLLL—Little.”

  Motherfucker!

  Dulaney’s brain screamed at his tongue. He practically pressed the END button just from embarrassment. He caught his own breath, inhaled, released, and spoke again as if he were reading it from his own government-issued business card.

  “Special Agent Dulaney Little.”

  With his tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth, he passed on the pertinent details, tossed the phone on the passenger seat, started the Taurus and backed out of the driveway. In an unusual display, he roared up his own street. He rationalized that the neighborhood kids were all in school, so speeding wasn’t that big of a deal. Though upon reflection, he fully expected to get beaucoup phone messages from the nosy octogenarian three doors over. She missed no occurrence on their shared street. More times than he’d like to count, while Dulaney oh-so-patiently listened to her dispense neighborhood complaints, he’d been tempted to tell the old busybody that she would have been more comfortable working in the former East Berlin as a Stasi informant.

  As for his speeding, Dulaney was only half-correct.

  Sure. The Stasi wannabe had noted Dulaney’s accelerating Taurus. But she was more worked up over the strange Dodge Charger parked dead in front of her overgrown home. She had spent the better part of the last hour eyeing the occupants. A man in the front seat. Bald or with a shaved head. White, but maybe Hispanic. Possibly a gang member. And the rather tallish woman with a mop of black hair who kept twisting in the backseat, peeking her nose out the rear window. The nosy neighbor was fully prepared to dial 911 on the duo. But she was also convinced that LAPD dispatchers had been covertly developing a file on her copious calls to the emergency operators.

  Then, just as her colored neighbor had sped his government car up the quiet street, the duo parked outside her property were quickly re-buckling their seatbelts and gone before she could accurately recall the paint tint of the Dodge Charger.

  * * * *

  Trent “Shorty” Reese was an out-of-work trucker with a blistering addiction to crystal meth. The former long hauler who had supported his Corona, California family on a Teamster-protected income, had turned to the pipe as a cheap, but effective stimulant when he needed the extra boost to get over the hump to his far-off destinations. Over his most successful years, he had ingested old-fashioned speed, legal amphetamines, and even snorted super expensive cocaine. But Shorty didn’t know the chemistry of crystal meth. Nor did most other users. Crystal meth is quite possibly the most addictive drug of all when considering the rewiring effects on the part of the brain that produces the chemical dopamine. In Shorty’s case it all led to a quick skid downhill, arrests, divorce, and the loss of both his union card and trucker’s license.

  When Shorty wasn’t abusing the last of his familial relationships to get the coin to feed his out-of-control habit, he was trolling Internet bulletin boards for unlicensed short haul gigs that paid under-the-table cash.

  It was one such job that had led Shorty to Burbank. It was 9:36 A.M.

  “YO!” shouted Shorty. “ANYBODY ’ROUND HERE LOOKIN’ FOR A TRUCK DRIVER?”

  He had followed the instructions the voice at the other end of the pay phone had slowly and carefully recited. And though Shorty wasn’t more than ten minutes late, he was beginning to wonder if he had blown his chance at a clean two hundred dollars cash. He turned a slow circle on the weedy patch of concrete that fronted the old warehouse, shielded his eyes against the sun, and just as he was daring himself to bang on the corrugated steel of the warehouse doors, he heard the heavy clank of a lock being thrown. The big doors squeaked like a million injured mice, then slid sideways.

  “You the guy on the phone?” asked Shorty.

  “You my truck driver?” said the squinting Beemer.

  Shorty launched forward, right hand outstretched. But Beemer held up his hands as if in surrender.

  “Don’t wanna shake my hand, dude,” said Beemer. Sure enough, his hands were sticky and brownish. “A little last minute mechanicals.”

  “No problemo. I’m Shorty.”

  “Greg,” said Beemer. “Wanna give me a hand? Kinda sticky.”

  With what strength he had left after the two years of meth abuse, Shorty assisted Beemer in sliding the rusty doors until both were wide open. Daylight filtered into the room through a blanket of micro-dust that seemed to stay forever suspended in the air.

  “Well, ain’t she pretty,” said Shorty, catching his first glimpse of the black-on-black Peterbilt rig. Right next to it, stood a generic white Freightliner semi tractor and trailer, also refrigerated. “Ice cream trucks, huh?”

  “Without the ice cream,” said Beemer. “Frozen meat products. Yum.”

  “You name it, I hauled it. So I don’t care as long as the money’s green.”

  “That’s why you’re my man,” grinned Beemer. “Headin’ down to a shipping yard at the Long Beach harbor. Hour-fifteen drive tops.”

  “Happened to your other guy?”

  “Food poisoning. Comin’ out both ends,” said Beemer, toweling the goo from his hands. “But you didn’t hear that because my deal with the vendor is that just me and my partner were to get all this frozen shit to where it needs to be.”

  “Not USDA inspected, huh?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t wanna know. My job and now your job is get it to Long Beach no later than noon. So whaddayou say? Wanna saddle up?”

  “No time like the here and now,” said Shorty, who started walking toward the Freightliner.

  “Huh uh,” said Beemer. “I got the Freighty. You’re in the Peter.”

  “The honey’s for me?”

  “Freighty’s got a clutch I gotta baby some. Used to it, so you’re gonna drive Black Beauty there. Okay by you?”

  “You gonna pay me for drivin’ her or am I gonna have to pay you?” laughed Shorty, who was already beginning his walk-around.

  “Hey,” said Beemer, cutting toward the Freightliner. “Cab’s up at the other end.”

  “Just doin’ my standard trailer check.”

  “Not payin’ you to impress me,” chirped Beemer. “Payin’ you to drive. Directions are already on the Garmin. I’ll take up the rear. Now let’s get a move on.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Shorty, sober and, for the moment, knowing which side of his bread was buttered. Then as he spun back toward the Peterbilt’s cab, he sniffed at the air. “You smell that?”

  “Been smellin’ it all night.”

  “Fuel oil?”

  “Think I’m the only underground hauler who uses this as a crash pad?”
said Beemer. “Building reeked when we rolled open the doors. Poor dude musta sprung a leak.”

  “Must have,” said Shorty, climbing up onto the black cab and trying on the big rig for size. He expertly adjusted the seat, ratcheting it closer to the pedals to accommodate his five-foot-five inches. He used to have lifts in his collection of fine urban cowboy boots. But Shorty had long since sold all eleven pairs to a vintage clothing store for less than a single c-note.

  “Right behind you,” said Beemer.

  “I’ll pull her out, then help you shut the doors, okay?”

  “Naw. Let’s leave ’em open. Let the joint air out.”

  Shorty nodded his approval of the plan, saluted his new boss, then pulled his door shut. Clutch, shift, first gear. The Peterbilt eased out of the warehouse like a giant Cadillac. Wow, thought Shorty. What a honey of a truck.

  Greg Beem hadn’t had much of a chance to clean up. He was splattered with globules of that sticky, smelly black and brown goo that, once congealed, stuck to his skin and clothing like tar. So as he eased the stolen Freightliner rig out of the warehouse, he was already skipping ahead four hours to the long, steamy shower with a big bar of soap and a one gallon can of solvent. The night had been long without a lick of sleep. Thank goodness for that bottle of Ritalin he’d packed before leaving for Reno. Forty milligrams consumed every six hours provided plenty of pep for an adult male without ADHD. Though sleep still beckoned, it was going to have to wait just a little while longer.

  At first, Beemer kept close to Shorty and the Peterbilt, following turn-for-turn as the for-hire driver wheeled the big rig onto the northbound Highway 5 for the short jaunt to the west lanes of the 118. It wasn’t the shortest route to Long Beach, but the simplest and cleanest in Beemer’s view. Once they transitioned from the 118 to the southbound 405, it would be a straight forty-four mile ride to Long Beach. The less complicated, the better. Especially after Beemer had caught his first glance at his hired gun, Shorty Reese. Beemer recognized the telltale signs of meth abuse the instant he laid eyes on the poor man. The gaunt scabby face and rotted teeth. Hollow empty eyes.