Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  ‘That’s bullshit!’ Cross said, though he was secretly overjoyed. Reddick was making this easier for him than he could have ever hoped. He needed an excuse to cut Reddick free and had been planning to pretend his phone had run out of battery power, ask if Reddick had another Internet-ready computer somewhere in the house. Now, no such feeble ploy on his part would be required.

  Still, for Poeto’s sake, he had to put on a show of outrage. ‘You’re stalling!’

  ‘No. I’m not,’ Reddick said forcefully. ‘I can get into the accounts from my own machine, but that’s the only way.’

  Cross just stared at him.

  ‘For Chrissake, it’s the truth!’

  Cross looked over his shoulder at Poeto, as if to say, ‘Can you believe this shit?’ And then, before the giant Mexican could misinterpret the gesture as a request for instructions – assuming he knew enough English to have followed a word of what had just been said – Cross turned back to Reddick and said, ‘OK. Shit. Where is this computer of yours? And you’d better not fucking say “at the office.”’

  ‘No, it’s here. In the bedroom.’

  Cross looked at Poeto again, feigning great annoyance. ‘We’ve gotta move him to the bedroom. He needs to use his own computer. La computadora. ¿Comprende?’

  The big man shrugged his assent and took a step forward, seeking to give Reddick a better look at the gun in his hand in case he’d forgotten it was there.

  ‘You try anything,’ Cross said to Reddick, ‘everybody dies. You, your wife, the boy – everybody. Got it?’

  Reddick nodded.

  Cross crouched down, used Ruben’s knife to cut Reddick’s legs free. Then he went around the chair behind Reddick to do the same for his hands. He leaned in, his face out of Poeto’s view, and whispered something only Reddick could hear:

  ‘Don’t move.’

  He quickly cut the tape from Reddick’s wrists, using as little motion as possible in an effort to make the act imperceptible to the big man with the gun. As he’d hoped, confused though he had to be, Reddick followed his orders and remained still, doing nothing to suggest to the giant watching them that his hands were not still bound together behind the chair.

  Now Cross pretended to hesitate, leaning in and then back out again, as if he’d lost the nerve to use the knife at all. He finally straightened up, backed away from the chair, and looked to Poeto for help. A coward afraid of his own shadow.

  ‘I can’t. I don’t trust him,’ he said, holding the knife out for Ruben’s driver to take.

  Poeto didn’t move.

  ‘You do it!’ Cross screamed, pushing the knife at the big man like it was something he could no longer stand to touch.

  For a moment, Ruben’s man still didn’t move. Then, finally, he mumbled something under his breath, shook his head, and stepped forward to relieve Cross of the knife.

  Reddick didn’t waste any time trying to figure out what Cross was up to. That was something he decided he could worry about later. At the exact moment of exchange, while the big Mexican’s attention was on almost everything else but him, Reddick leapt from the chair. He snatched at Poeto’s gun with his left hand and threw a hard right to the big man’s face, a punch he fully expected his survival to hinge upon. Had the giant known it was coming, the blow might have meant little to him, but the element of surprise lent it the power to stun Reddick was hoping for. As Cross clumsily stepped out of the way, Poeto staggered backward beneath Reddick’s weight, nose gushing blood, and crashed to the floor with an audible grunt, Reddick taking pains to drive a knee into his diaphragm on impact. As the air flew out of him, Reddick threw two more rights at the big man’s face, in rapid succession, and continued to fight for control of the gun with his left. In the struggle, the weapon went off once, twice, the rounds hitting nothing that Reddick could see.

  He caught a blur of movement to one side: Cross, running for the door. Had Poeto given him time, Reddick would have next seen Iris – all but forgotten by the three men in the room – stick her bound legs out to trip Cross up, send him tumbling face first to the floor right beside her. But Reddick’s attention was drawn elsewhere when Poeto tossed him off his chest like a toy he was tired of playing with, fighting back now, Reddick’s moment of holding the upper hand having quickly come and gone.

  Poeto was rearing up on one elbow, bringing his gun around to put a bullet in Reddick’s face, when the front door burst open and two people with weapons of their own stormed into the room, a familiar black woman in a gray suit at the point.

  ‘Police! Freeze!’

  Ruben’s man looked straight down the barrel of Finola Winn’s gun, saw only an old female mayate he didn’t think had the nerve to shoot. Winn let him make a quarter turn toward her before she put two rounds in his chest, not willing to trust that only one would have sufficed.

  Now Lerner, gun held firmly out in front of him, played the same scene out with Cross, who had scrambled back to his feet just before the cops made their entrance. He was still holding Ruben Lizama’s knife in his right hand.

  ‘Drop it!’ Lerner said.

  ‘That’s right, Cross. Drop it,’ Reddick said, slowly rising up from the floor. ‘It’s not his job to kill you, it’s mine.’

  ‘Shut up, Mr Reddick,’ Winn ordered.

  Lerner was still waiting for Cross to comply, his nerves visibly wearing thin. ‘I’m not gonna tell you again,’ he said. ‘Put the knife down!’

  ‘I’m not going to stop, Cross,’ Reddick said. ‘No matter where you go, no matter where you hide. You’ve got to know that by now.’

  ‘I told you to shut up!’ Winn snapped.

  Cross glanced about the room, eyes flitting from one face to the next. He looked down at Iris, smiled, then turned the smile on Reddick. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

  He had the knife blade in his throat before either cop could stop him. His jugular spraying the room red, eyes rolling up in the back of his head, he drifted to the floor like a long length of ribbon, convulsed for several seconds, and grew still.

  ‘Jesus,’ Lerner said, as Iris broke out in muffled hysterics again.

  While her partner checked Cross for a pulse, Winn turned to Reddick, her incredulity only barely contained. ‘What the hell was going on here?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t have time to answer that right now. There’s a man on his way to Irvine to kill my wife and son!’ Reddick put a hand in his trouser pocket for his phone.

  Winn ordered him to halt, her service weapon trained right at his head, but Reddick paid her no heed. He dialed Dana’s number instead and brought the phone up to his ear, mumbling a prayer only God was meant to hear. How long had he been unconscious before Cross brought him to? Could Ruben already be in Irvine?

  Please, Dana, he thought. Answer the phone.

  Please.

  The TV was the only thing that could keep Jake still anymore, so it was on in their room almost constantly. Dana kept having to tell him to turn down the volume, and he had twice, but when she’d gone to the bathroom a moment ago, he’d cranked it up again and she had yet to notice, her mind on so many other things.

  Had her phone been on vibrate, she might have seen it shudder across the room’s only table when Reddick’s call came in. But the ringer was on and the sound of it was buried hopelessly beneath the din of the clamorous cartoons Jake was watching. Sitting on the bed, Jake on the floor at its feet, she flipped through a new magazine she’d bought that morning and tried to pretend the television wasn’t even on.

  The SIG Sauer P220, still unloaded and banished to the closet, was far beyond her easy reach.

  If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, Ruben would have hung around the motel, watching people come and go until Reddick’s wife and son revealed themselves to him. But he couldn’t wait for that. He had to get back to Los Angeles and the mess he’d left in Poeto’s lap before something went wrong, either the big man killed one of the three people in his charge or one of them killed him. Any combination of variou
s catastrophes was possible. So Ruben found the room he was looking for the fastest way he knew how: by asking the motel clerk.

  She was alone in the empty lobby when he came in, just an overweight black woman in a ghastly green uniform who, at the sight of the knife in his hand – Ruben always liked to carry two – let him guide her into a back office without offering much more in the way of argument than a tiny squeal. At his instructions, she used the computer in the office to identify the room in which the ‘Reddick’ party was staying, then created a copy of the door key for him. Finding her unwavering cooperation more generous than pathetic, he thanked her for her time by killing her quickly, in a way far too clinical for him to derive any pleasure from it.

  Reddick’s wife and son were in room 108, at ground level, at the far end of the parking lot. It was the perfect location for Ruben’s purposes: no stairs to climb and adjacent to only one room. He would be able to get in and get out easily, with just a minimal chance of encountering other motel guests. He waited for the only visible witnesses – an elderly couple inching to their parked car like snails in winter – to get in the vehicle and drive off, then hurriedly crossed the lot to room 108.

  He stood at the door and listened for sounds of life on the other side. He heard a television playing, volume cranked up high, the silly voices and sound effects of what could only be a cartoon. He slipped the card key silently into its slot with his left hand, held the knife at the ready with his right. He would kill the woman immediately, because he didn’t need them both alive to get what he wanted out of Reddick, then render the child unconscious before loading him into his rental car and making a hasty escape. It was going to be easy.

  He fully inserted the card, jerked down on the door handle with the lock’s flash of green, and charged into the room.

  It was empty.

  The lights were on, the TV was blaring, but no one was here. Or so it appeared, until a black man larger than Poeto, with a mouth sprinkled with missing teeth and a scowl to rival that of any butcher Ruben had ever employed, stepped around a corner into his view, holding a cell phone up to his ear with one hand and a big-barreled revolver in the other.

  ‘Yeah, he just showed up,’ Orvis Andrews said calmly into the phone. ‘Hold on.’

  He raised the gun, shot Ruben dead-center in the face. Then he closed in, hovered over the dying man’s body, and put one more in his chest, just to be on the safe side.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  It was over.

  Reddick’s relief was like a drug coursing through his veins, dissolving all fears, luring him toward sleep. What happened to him now held no importance. Dana and Jake were safe. Nothing else mattered, past, present, or future.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Iris Mitchell said.

  She was sitting across from him on his couch, uniformed cops and coroner’s techs scurrying around the living room all about them. Reddick was right back where he’d started, in the same chair he’d been in when Cross had cut him loose, but this time his hands were bound behind his back by a pair of handcuffs, courtesy of one of the detectives who’d saved their lives; the male one, Lerner.

  ‘For what?’ Reddick asked. Lerner and his female partner, Winn, had stepped a few feet away to confer in private, but Reddick took care to keep his voice down, anyway.

  ‘For what they did to you. Perry and his friends.’ She paused. ‘It was incredibly cruel, so . . . I’m sorry.’

  Reddick started to say thanks, just nodded his head instead.

  ‘Of course, they didn’t know who you were. What you’d already been through, I mean. Maybe if they had—’

  ‘What? They would have treated me differently?’ Reddick had to snort at the thought. ‘I don’t think so. I think you give them too much credit, Clarke and your fiancé, in particular.’

  ‘Please. Don’t call him that.’ She glanced at Cross’s body, still waiting under a blood-soaked sheet on the floor for the coroner’s man to finally grant its removal from the room.

  ‘Cross wasn’t your fiancé?’

  ‘He was, but that’s not the point. I’d just prefer not to think of him in those terms, anymore. When I do, I feel unbelievably . . . stupid.’

  She hugged herself for warmth, Reddick saying nothing.

  ‘Are they going to be OK? Your wife and little boy?’ Iris asked.

  The cops had let Reddick speak briefly to Dana on the phone, and she’d put Jake on the line for a split second, just so he could hear for himself that his son was really alive and well, and emotionally unscathed from the day’s events at the motel.

  ‘I think so. They’re both pretty tough. They might have a sleepless night or two for a while, but with any luck, that’ll be about it.’

  ‘I’m glad. How—’

  Reddick shook her off, said, ‘I think we’d better keep what happened at the motel between me and the detectives. The less you know about it, the less reason they’re gonna have to think you were an accessory to all this.’

  He was right. If the man who’d killed Ruben at the motel down in Irvine had been placed there by Reddick himself, as she suspected but no one would confirm, it would hardly help her to know all the hows and whys of it, no matter how badly her curiosity called out for such disclosure.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ He didn’t look fine or feel fine, but this was the kind of false optimism he had to put stock in now.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do to you?’

  ‘If I lawyer-up well? I might get off with ten or fifteen years. Maybe see the outside again just in time to attend Jake’s college graduation.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  He smiled. ‘I think you can guess the answer to that. Two counts of murder, throw in a couple for kidnapping and B and E . . . They’d have to send me the graduation video, something I could watch in my cell until I passed on.’

  He chuckled to ease the severity of the joke, but Iris couldn’t manage doing the same.

  ‘Whatever I can do to help you, I will,’ she said.

  Reddick nodded, turned grim again. ‘You’ve already done more than enough. But thanks.’

  ‘You can’t really be serious?’ Winn asked.

  Lerner looked away, toward Reddick and Iris Mitchell on the other side of the room, both of them just sitting there looking like survivors of a coal mine disaster. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age,’ he said.

  ‘You mean soft in the head, don’t you? We can’t just let this guy skate. Even if we could pull it off—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, OK. I was nuts to even consider it, you’re right.’ He tipped his head in Reddick’s direction. ‘But I mean, look at the poor bastard, No. You know what his story is, what those two just told us happened here. You telling me he’s the bad guy in all this? Hell, the bad guys in all this are dead.’

  ‘And exactly whose fault is that? By his own admission—’

  ‘It’s his fault, sure. Technically, anyway, in two out of six cases. Or seven, if you count this guy Lizama down in Irvine.’

  ‘“Technically”? Norm, do you hear what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. Yes!’ Winn was looking at him like he’d just grown a striped horn in the middle of his forehead. ‘Like you said, I asked for a homicide and, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, No, did I ever get my wish. We’ve got seven assholes known dead, including Rainey, and Reddick did at least two of ’em. If it were anybody else, I’d be as ready as you to lock his ass up and throw away the key, but this guy—’

  Lerner was preaching to the choir and didn’t know it. Winn was only slightly less conflicted about Reddick than he, because Lerner was right: Assuming the statements they’d just gotten from Reddick and Iris Mitchell were to be believed, the only real victim in this whole mess was Reddick. Perry Cross and his friends had themselves been murderers of a sort, the apparently accidental nature of Gillis Rainey’s death notwithstanding, and Reddick had had every right to believe they wo
uld kill again, given sufficient excuse.

  Going vigilante on four people to protect his family had been a tragic error on his part, and criminal by any definition of the word, but considering the man’s history – the unthinkable loss he had suffered once already at the hands of an animal not unlike Ben Clarke or Ruben Lizama – it was hard, if not impossible, to condemn his actions. Winn herself could not say with any degree of certainty that she would have done differently, under identical circumstances. That didn’t make Reddick innocent, but it did make it easy to wish that Lady Luck would get off the poor bastard’s back and give him a fucking break for a change. Now and forever.

  ‘What are you suggesting we do?’ Winn asked. ‘Even if we were stupid enough to try, how in the hell do we explain seven dead vics without pinning at least two of them on him?’

  Lerner couldn’t hide his surprise, nor his elation. The intransigent hardliner their fellow officers all liked to call ‘No Winn’ was actually acting as if she could be coerced into straying from the letter of the law for once. It was probably just a mirage, he knew, but Lerner went with it anyway, said, ‘Ruben Lizama and his big buddy over there. If what Reddick and the lady say about them is true, they were a couple of really bad hombres. Really bad. Lizama in particular.’

  Winn didn’t need to hear another word to know where this was going, but all the same, she said, ‘I’m listening.’

  Lerner checked to make sure no one was close enough to overhear, lowered his voice to just above a whisper. ‘Well, Lizama and his boy being responsible for the murders of Cross and his three friends wouldn’t exactly strike anybody as highly improbable, would it? They owed him money and couldn’t pay off. Mitchell said the debt was over two hundred and fifty Gs, for Chrissake. Hell, what happened to those guys is what always happens to people who stiff Mexican drug families out of a quarter million bucks. Am I right?’

  ‘You are. But—’

  ‘I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna say the evidence won’t add up. And for the most part, it probably won’t. But a dirtbag like Lizama, assuming he’s everything they say he is, who the hell’s gonna care? The Feds? The authorities down in Mexico? I don’t think so. They’ve probably both been trying to put this guy out of business for years. We hand them his head on a silver platter – four homicides he’s tailor-made to fit – I kind of doubt they’re gonna spend a whole lot of time worrying it might be a frame-up.’