The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  The situation was not made any better when Kicky drove on her first hit.

  It hadn’t originally been intended to turn out that way. Early on a black and drizzly November night, Kicky was driving a maroon Subaru SUV on one of her occasional single-vehicle scouting trips, with Jimmy Wingo in the front seat and the company commander, Billy Jackson, in the back. It was the first time he had ever ridden with her, and the first time she had seen him since their brief meeting in the Burger Barn. He had greeted her with a courteous “Good evening, comrade,” when he got in at the downtown rendezvous point, and otherwise had not spoken to her during the whole excursion so far. Wingo had told her where to go, which was across the Williamette River to the Oregon Convention Center, and they circled several times around the odd-looking building with its eerie twin glowing green towers and the bizarre pendulum-like sculpture. Jackson and Wingo had exchanged comments on the traffic conditions and were clearly spotting exits. “You can’t get into the parking lot without getting a ticket and getting the vehicle photographed on CCTV, so just keep on going around one more time,” Jimmy told her. “You thinking Holladay or Martin Lucifer Koon for the tickle, boss?”

  “Oh, let’s come in from Martin Luther King Boulevard,” said Jackson. “I like the irony of it.” Kicky had no idea what they were talking about, nor did they volunteer the information, but she presumed someone was going to be killed or something blown up. After a while Wingo told her to take them back to the original rendezvous point north of the river. “Go through downtown,” he said. “Actually, downtown is one of the most secure areas for us, because if we have to bail it’s a lot easier to escape on foot into the crowds, and there are MAX stations and bus stops all over the place and other ways to E & E the area. Worst thing is to get pulled over on a freeway, because there’s only one way you can go without attracting all kinds of attention, especially from a helicopter. You’re on an interstate and they get a chopper locked onto you, you’re in deep shit.”

  The Christmas lights were already up in the Pearl and the downtown Portland area, even though it was still only a week before Thanksgiving, and the streets were brightly lit and reasonably filled with shoppers. They were cruising down Park Avenue just past the Nordstrom department store, when Jimmy Wingo said in a sudden, sharp voice, “Sir! On the right!”

  “I see them,” said Jackson calmly. Kicky glanced over to her right, but saw nothing except the sidewalk and some pedestrians. “Lot of traffic down here.”

  “Comrade Jodie’s a good driver,” said Wingo. Kicky started to say something, then realized he wasn’t talking to her, he was simply stating a fact to the company commander. She felt suddenly pleased and honored. “Float it or pass, boss?” asked Wingo.

  “Float it,” said Jackson.

  “Turn right on Morrison and swing back around the block,” Wingo ordered her. She did so. “Watch your speed and your signals and keep your eyes peeled to the left for any cops or other nasties. The CO and I are going to take care of some business.” Kicky turned right on Morrison Street. “What the hell is he thinking?” wondered Jimmy out loud.

  “American hubris,” growled Jackson behind them. “He’s some rich yuppie bastard who’s had everything his own way his whole life, and he thinks he’s fucking immortal and invincible. Well, he’s about to learn that no means no.” As Kicky turned right again onto Broadway she saw Wingo calmly pulling his ski mask out of his back pocket. He opened the glove box and tossed another one onto Kicky’s lap. She picked it up.

  “Now?” she asked. She glanced over to her right and saw that Wingo had his .357 out, and behind her she heard a tiny click as Jackson took the safety off his own weapon.

  “Not yet. Wait until you make the turn back onto Park,” he replied. She turned right onto Yamhill Street, cruised down the block and turned right again back onto Park Avenue. Her guts were quietly turning into water inside her. She waited for the vibration of the cell phone to tell her that her handlers back in the operations center at least understood what was going on, but none came. She deftly pulled the mask onto her face with one hand. They went past the Nordstrom entrance again. “Slow down a little,” said Wingo. “There they are.” Kicky looked over and saw a tall white man, forty-something, dressed in a fine tawny overcoat, wearing gloves, walking down the sidewalk with his arm around a slightly shorter woman with coal-black skin, a very short Afro, and gold earrings in her ears. The negress was wearing a fur-trimmed dark coat and carrying a Nordstrom’s bag. The couple was laughing, their breaths frosting in the air, and as Kicky drove by not twelve feet from them, the white man leaned over and kissed her. “Trying to change your luck, are you, traitor?” breathed Wingo viciously. “Okay behind you, Kick? Don’t pull over, just stop. Now.” She stopped the Subaru and Wingo and Jackson both threw their doors open and piled out of the vehicle. “Back in a jiff!” Wingo called to her before they scampered between parked cars to the sidewalk.

  Kicky twisted her head around and looked behind her, but she couldn’t see much except the head and shoulders of the interracial couple. Then came the lightning-like muzzle flashes and thunderous explosions from the Volunteers’ guns that echoed up and down the tall buildings along the street, glowing in the red and green lights of Christmas. The couple seemed to break apart, whirl, and then dropped out of her line of vision, and Kicky heard screams and shouts and the sound of running feet as the crowd fled, many of them running out into the street in panic, in front of her and behind her. Before she could blink an eye, both men were back in the Subaru, slamming their doors shut. “Pull off, as fast as you can but don’t peel it and leave any tire tracks,” ordered Wingo. “Head down Park, turn right on Burnside, and we’ll get back across the river and dump this vehicle.” Kicky did so mechanically. She still couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that she had just witnessed a double homicide; it hadn’t had time to register.

  Behind her Jackson was speaking on his phone. “I need a cleanup on aisle nine,” he said. “Somebody busted a ketchup jar.”

  “Aisle nine?” asked Wingo over his shoulder. “Okay, Kick, I’ll tell you where to go once we get over the river. A comrade will pick us up, then we’ll get you back to your own car.” He leaned over and touched her shoulder. “How you holding up?”

  “You guys were so fast I think I’m having the adrenalin rush right now I should have had back there,” said Kicky, laughing a little shakily.

  “Target of opportunity, comrade,” said Jackson from the back. He might have been speaking of the weather. As they approached the Burnside Bridge through Old Town, they ran headlong into two police cars with sirens screaming, followed by one of the special armored personnel carriers, heading the other way. “RRT, and they’re playing our song,” said Wingo. “Looks like nobody’s described this ride to them, and if we’re lucky and the witnesses have any sense they won’t, but we’ll dump it anyway.”

  Behind them Jackson made another call on his cell. “Running Rats heading for that ketchup spill on aisle nine,” he said. “Advise our co-workers to avoid Park Avenue and downtown generally.” He closed the phone. “I don’t like going into the clear like that, but sometimes you have to,” he remarked.

  Ten minutes later they pulled into a parking place on a darkened side street. “What now?” asked Kicky.

  “It will take a few minutes for our transport to get here,” said Jackson. “In the meantime we sanitize this SUV. My fingerprints and Jim’s don’t matter as much, since they already have us tagged, but yours do, comrade. We’re going to booby-trap it, of course, and with any luck whatever cop or car-stripping nigger opens it will splatter all over the street, but sometimes the bomb squad spots and disarms our traps, plus they can also lift fingerprints from bits and pieces. They find even a partial from you, and you’re toast. Anything you touched, the steering wheel, the door handles, anything on the driver’s side that might hold a print needs to be scoured.”

  Wingo reached under the seat and pulled out a plastic shopping bag. They
got out of the Subaru, and Wingo came around to the driver’s side and took a rag and a bottle of silver polish out of the bag. He soaked a big spot of polish into the rag, and vigorously wiped down the whole steering column, the inside driver’s door, the dashboard and the outside of the door. “Abrasive, destroys prints,” he explained. Then when Wingo was finished, he took a bomb out of the bag, what appeared to be four or five sticks of dynamite or TNT taped together with black electricians’ tape. Kicky realized with a start that she had been driving around with a bomb under the seat next to her. A bolt with an oval eyelet protruded from the top of the bomb, and below it was a small black box with a dial attached that was held onto it by perforated metal strapping. Wingo took out a small length of wire, hooked one end into the eyelet with a small d-ring, and turned the dial. A small red light came on the box. “Armed in sixty seconds,” he said. He carefully inserted the bomb under the front seat and looped the other end of the wire around the inside of the door handle, and closed the door. “One of the Red Baron’s little gadgets,” he told Kicky. “Now we need to un-ass this area in case the Baron screwed up, or else I did, and it detonates prematurely.”

  The three of them walked up the street for several blocks, past closed storefronts and a few bars and fast food joints. Kicky hugged her coat around her against the cold and the icy misting drizzle, with her pistol jammed into her belt beside the cell phone in its holster, which still had not vibrated. They entered a small park and walked along the edge of it, not going all the way in. “Watch out for niggers and crackheads in here,” said Kicky, remembering some of her own escapades the same place, in what seemed like a long lost previous life.

  “I think they need to watch out for us,” said Wingo with a chuckle. A silver Explorer pulled up along one side of the park. Jackson waved and the lights blinked, and they got in. The girl Volunteer Lavonne was driving, minus Kevin. She had a thoroughly illegal police scanner on the seat behind her, hissing and gabbling code numbers and clipped phrases. “They’re really screaming on the police frequencies about that float you guys pulled,” she told them. “The guy was some kind of ambassador, and the Sheba was his wife. Some kind of African.”

  “Yeah, well, he should have been careful what kind of souvenirs he brought back from Booga-Booga Land,” said Wingo. Lavonne took the long way west and then turned back north across the Willamette, and an hour later they were back to where Kicky had parked her Toyota. “This is your stop,” said Wingo. He got out and walked her to her car. “Seriously, Kicky, how are you doing?”

  “It was a pretty freaky night,” she admitted. “But if you’re worried I’m going to go all mushy in the head, do the whole guilty conscience thing, find Jesus and confess my wicked racist sins to the cops or something like that, don’t be. Look, I knew what I was getting into when I first talked to you in Lenny’s roach hole. I know I’ve still got a long way to go before I prove it to you, but you can trust me. Maybe I’ll get there one day.”

  “You’re closer than you think,” said Wingo with a smile, and before he turned and walked back to the Explorer he gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek.

  XI

  Hearing The Screams

  O, God, that I were a man!

  I would eat his heart in the market-place!

  Much Ado About Nothing—Act IV, Scene 2

  Annette Ridgeway had led a life of sufficient privilege, and sufficient just plain good fortune, so that until the age of seventeen she had never attended a funeral before. On this cold and rainy afternoon in January, her luck ran out. She stood with a group of her family and friends on the sodden grass beside a long dark hole of brown earth into which some men in overalls were about to lower her only sister. Janet Ridgeway had turned sixteen only a month before she swallowed an entire bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills, and almost a whole bottle of Jack Daniels from her father’s liquor cabinet. She then passed out on the plush carpeted floor of the rec room in the two million-dollar family home in West Linn, Oregon, and choked to death on her own vomit.

  Annette stared at Jan’s peaceful face, like a golden little angel, visible through the glass window at the top of the coffin. The minister was droning in the background about the saving grace of Jesus Christ, but Annette tuned him out. What he was saying had no relevance to what was happening to her. It was just background noise. Annette watched the face in the glass slowly disappearing into the ground, burning into her mind forever the last sight she would ever see of her sister. They had only been a year apart; Annette’s parents sometimes joked with them, “You were a mistake, Annie, but you were so beautiful we just had to make another one.” This would be the last time that she would ever see this person, this part of her that had been there always, now been ripped away from her for the rest of her life, now sliding down into the earth out of her sight forever. Annette knew that she had to control herself, that she mustn’t go insane. She leaned over the edge of the grave, her long blonde hair falling from her black-draped shoulders, straining for that very last glimpse of all. She could see her sister’s dead face, barely visible in the shadows at the bottom of the grave, before the dirt began to fall on it and she was gone.

  Her boyfriend, a tall and good-looking kid in a somber suit named Eric Sellars, grasped her arm, afraid she would fall in. “Annette, we need to go now,” he said, quietly but firmly, gently easing her away from the grave.

  “It’s not over,” she said.

  “I know,” said Eric softly. He understood perfectly well what she was really saying to him. “But the ceremony is. You need to come away now and be with your parents. They need you.” Annette turned and walked away from the grave without another word. She had not cried during the entire funeral. Since the one explosion of hysteria and grief in Eric’s arms when they had heard the news together, she had not cried at all. Annette went straight to her sobbing wreck of a mother, Lorraine. She quietly took Lorraine’s arm from her father and led her back to the waiting black stretch limo parked along the gravel cemetery pathway. It was as if none of the other hundred or so people attending the funeral even existed. Annette ignored them all, and none intruded.

  Ray Ridgeway stared after his wife and daughter. He was a distinguished-looking man in late middle age, expensively dressed in Armani and professionally coiffed. He prided himself on requiring neither Rogaine nor Viagra at his age, and he had the bright and even teeth of a young man, polished but not even capped. Ray was the CEO of Continental Bank, a senior partner in the most successful brokerage firm on the West Coast, and a power player in the financial world. He had just made the stunning discovery that rich and powerful men down through the millennia always made at some point in their careers—that he was powerless to cheat death. His child was dead, and there was no one to negotiate or bargain with, no one to threaten, no one to bribe, no strings that could be pulled, no way to fix this. Technically Jan hadn’t even been murdered, she had taken her own life. Ray’s common sense and lifetime of experience in the real America told him with perfect clarity that the man responsible was completely untouchable, and that there was nothing to be done. He was shaken to the core of his being by the loss of his youngest child, and he was icy with fear for his oldest.

  He beckoned to young Sellars. He had approved of this boy from the beginning, a steady and intelligent young man planning a career in engineering, and he was grateful for Eric’s relieving him of his fears for Annette’s future, since even at their young age he could sense that they were a solid couple and would probably make it if they decided to give it a go. It was Jan who had been driving him and Lorraine frantic for the past year. “Eric, is Annette . . . all right?” Ray asked the younger man anxiously.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Eric told him frankly. “She won’t talk to me.”

  “Or me. I’ve tried. I’ll try again tonight,” said Ray.

  He did try again that night, asking Annette to join him in his study in the West Linn mansion. She sat down on the couch, still wearing her black mourning dr
ess from the funeral. “Mom won’t take a sleeping pill,” she said. “She says she won’t ever take anything again. I suppose that’s understandable in view of what happened to her last prescription. I think she’ll sleep, though. She’s exhausted. Empty, I suppose would be a better word.”

  Ray poured himself a stiff shot of Jack, aware of the irony of consuming the drug that had killed his daughter as a means of ameliorating his grief at her death, although he said nothing. He knew that Annette would catch that irony as well, but he said, “This is a hell of an occasion for me to ask you this for the first time, but do you want one? Have you started drinking yet?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to start,” said Annette.

  “Smart decision,” said her father with an approving nod. “But then, all of yours are smart. I wish your sister had possessed your level head.”

  “Dad, no need to dance around it. Jan’s decisions were just plain stupid. She was self-destructive, she had no sense of self-esteem and no inner strength. She let the whole adolescent angst thing get on top of her, she just went with the flow, and it killed her. She got involved with drugs, she got involved with a nigger, and she did both at once. If that’s not the classic definition of a self-destructive personality, I don’t know what is.”