Bonn considered how difficult it must have been to cut, set, angle, and polish the thousands of tiny bits of glass the way they had done. The woman grasped Bonn’s hand again, to hold him in place. She nodded to her sister, who adjusted the lights. The mosaic changed. The sun came from behind clouds. Musashi, Kojiro, even the boat cast shadows now—all three women watched him. The room was thick with anticipation. This was the moment that would make or break the mosaic.
There—he saw it.
Musashi’s shadow lay coiled in the water.
It was his true nature—
The woman closest to the mosaic, the one who’d set the pieces, spoke reverently. “Watatsumi.” Bonn felt a shiver of excitement. He sucked in his breath and sighed in genuine appreciation. He knew the legend.
Watatsumi—the dragon-deity of the sea.
~Forty
Henna shook as she entered the ICU. The physician on the phone said it was a subarachnoid bleed from blunt force trauma.
He looks better today, but he’s not out of the woods yet. I apologize that you have not been contacted sooner. We didn’t know who he was for a while. You are Stephen’s power of attorney. Are you related in some way?
A lapse of time had occurred. She couldn’t recall anything between that phone call and this moment. Peering in the small window to his room, she wasn’t even certain how she got to the hospital.
It couldn’t be him.
His whole head seemed purple and swollen. A tracheostomy tube embedded rudely in his neck.
Oh, my poor Stephan.
A nurse came in to check vital signs. She asked him some questions. He nodded and coughed a bubbling wet cough. The nurse suctioned out the hole in his neck and plugged it with a small valve so he could talk then went to retrieve pain medicine. Henna was horrified.
At least she knew where he was now.
It had taken the police three days to sort out what actually happened at the cabaret—two of Stephan’s friends were killed in the senseless attack. Stephan reached for her hand. Orthopedic pins stuck out of both hands and he winced with the effort. He tried to smile. Henna couldn’t smile back. She touched the tips of the broken man’s fingers and he seemed to relax, but then his breathing seemed too fast, as if he were preparing to dive underwater. Henna stood to get the nurse, but Stephan shook his head stiffly. He tried to say something. She bent down. Stephan’s eyes moved as though he watched a moving train beneath his swollen lids.
“Can you see me?”
Stephan strained to answer. “Um …” Stephan coughed more.
Everything about his airway looked uncomfortable.
He tapped her hand with his fingers, but it seemed involuntary. The nurse was back. She gave Stephan some pain medicine through a huge intravenous line that ran underneath a clavicle then helped him roll onto his side. He relaxed a little. His eye movements persisted, but the train slowed. “Forty of them, at least.”
“Forty? Stephan, it’s me, Henna. Forty what?”
Stephan coughed again. The nurse assured him his cough was stronger then stooped to check on some drainage devices strapped to each side of the bed. “Call me if you need anything, OK? I’ll check on you in a few minutes. Here’s your call bell—” The pain medicine made Stephan drowsy.
“Forty what?” Henna repeated.
Stephan strained to open his eyes. He seemed angry. The train was back and was up to full speed. Stephan’s eyes jittered back and forth.
“Didn’t I already tell you this?”
Henna recoiled. “No—I just got here.” She could see how easy it would be to become disoriented in this environment. “Do you know who I am, Stephan?” Her friend closed his eyes, but the train sped along. His face drew tight and he looked like he might cry. Then he did. He cried. And tapped his fingers frantically. When he opened his mouth, Henna could smell blood. Most of his teeth were broken or missing.
“Forty of them, Mama.” Henna stooped awkwardly, trying to hold him. She hovered, looking for a place to touch him that might not hurt. There weren’t any.
“It’s going to be OK, honey.” Henna didn’t believe her promise, but she had to say something. She wiped her own tears with a sleeve and found some tissues nearby for Stephan.
“Forty,” Stephan said again, then drifted off. “Too many to fight.”
A man stood at the door. He appeared surprised to see Henna. He didn’t appear to be a medical person, and for a moment it appeared that he would walk past. Henna felt her jaw clench and squared herself to the door.
“You know him?” the intruder offered. Henna stepped toward the man and in front of Stephan to block the interloper’s view.
She answered rabidly. “Who are you and why are you here?” The man quickly found his manners.
“Chief Superintendent Forsythe. I want to help.”
He wants to help. Too late for that.
“I’m Henna Maxwell. Stephan’s power of attorney.” Forsythe nodded. He stuck his hands in his pockets.
“How is he today?” Henna looked at Stephan—he either slept or ignored them.
“How is he? Not good. I’m his close friend and colleague, but he thinks I’m his mother.” Forsythe nodded.
“The doctor has kept us from talking with him much. He said we had to ‘minimize stimuli.’” Henna crossed her arms and paced at the foot of Stephan’s bed.
“His brain was bleeding. They couldn’t allow anyone in, I guess. I only found out he was here this morning.” Forsythe nodded again. The man obviously had questions to ask, but pursed his lips and was silent.
Chief Superintendent—impressive title.
Henna broke the silence. “Who did this?”
“A hate group. White supremacists.” Forsythe stepped closer to Stephen and tilted his head. “Your friend here took a few of them out. He fought like hell. We have video footage from the bar.” Henna shook. Forsythe kindly pretended not to notice.
“Do you know Stephan through the Synagogue?”
“No. Through the university.” Henna did a double take. “Synagogue?” She forced a laugh to make her point. “Stephan isn’t Jewish. You’re thinking of someone else.” Forsythe raised his eyebrows. He rummaged through his pocket for something, then handed Henna a copy of Stephan’s passport. Stephan looked so young in the photograph: on his head, he wore a Kippah.
It was unmistakable for anything else.
“He may have worn that for the photo as a joke. He’s got an odd sense of humor.” Forsythe shook his head confidently.
“He’s young for a rabbi, but he’s a bona fide rabbi. He was ordained eighteen months ago. That’s a big deal. He must’ve grown up orthodox, because the knowledge it requires to become a rabbi is intensive. He likely studied hard from the time he was a young boy.” Forsythe watched the information sink in. Henna felt dumbfounded.
How didn’t she know? She knew he was a drag queen. Hell, she knew his shirt size. How could she not know Stephan was a rabbi?
Forsythe held his hand out for the copy. “Let’s get some coffee.”
Forsythe filled her in. Forty-four aggressors, most with shaved heads and neo-Nazi tattoos, descended on the cabaret en masse. Security cameras caught the event. Each carried a framing hammer. None wore masks. The attack was long and deliberate. Forsythe watched Henna wince at the mention of the hammers.
He had to read her correctly to know if this would succeed.
Henna set her jaw. Steam rolled off her untouched coffee. “How many have you arrested?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Ms. Maxwell. We’re in the information gathering phase of the—” She didn’t let the detective finish.
“Forty-four criminals entered a building with weapons, battered eight, but killed two men in a premeditated act and it’s on videotape?” Henna knew she was shouting, but she didn’t care. “On video, Mr. Forsythe—and not one arrest has been made? All of those men—have they vanished into thin air?” Forsythe looked into his cup. Although he’d already sweetened hi
s coffee, he tore open a sugar packet and slowly stirred it into the cup. Henna leaned in to assure Forsythe saw her glare.
At sixty-one, his career was nearly over. Forsythe had worked hard to keep peace in the city. He’d been young once. Unjaded.
He got promoted because he was a good officer.
A good man.
He looked at Henna apologetically. “I’ll be honest, Ms. Maxwell—by that, I mean if you repeat what I tell you, I’ll be fired. That’d be OK—I’d go learn to fish. I’d seek peaceful spots. I’d sit and take time to listen to the birds. I wouldn’t hold it against you, but I think I still have some good to offer the community, so I hope you don’t repeat this.” He felt sad and defeated. “Some of the skinheads are connected.”
The girl waited. Forsythe felt embarrassed to have said what he did.
Connected—the mobster cliché.
“Connected to what?”
He stirred his coffee some more.
He had already said too much. The stunt would get him canned.
“Connected to someone important?”
Forsythe sipped at his coffee. The woman across from him was so young—so full of energy. Ready to change the world. He envied her. He remembered those feelings. Unyielding certainty and vigor are only friends of the young, but he was thankful the traits still existed. The decades of disappointment had changed him. Even good people lost their certainty in jobs like his.
He couldn’t feel it anymore. No sure things existed. Disappointment and injustice taught him that.
He’d lost himself—his hunger for change and justice. At the end of the day, cops that last are the cops who know when to stop asking questions. He shook his head, disgusted with himself. With the injustice of the system.
She even looked a little like his wife—before she passed.
She was gone even before he lost faith in the system. Before he realized he was powerless to make grand changes. He was only one cog in a machine. No matter how well he did his job, no matter how precisely he matched the teeth of his gears with the rest of the machine, the machine often failed. It failed by design. It was bigger than any individual. It was more powerful. The machine that men built to ensure justice didn’t run justly. It didn’t thrive on goodness and light. It was simply a massive delivery vehicle. Someone operated the machine for a while and it delivered money from one account to another until the balance of power shifted. Then it delivered money to the next god. The cogs of the machine, like himself, never even felt the transitions. It was easy to convict a homeless miscreant who does wrong, but it was routine for criminals who had friends in power, friends with money, or friends with influence, to go free. It was a hard lesson to learn, yet for some reason he still clung to the machine like a tidewater limpet. The naive part of him still hoped it might someday work, though he’d run out of motivation to fix it.
“I’m not ready to learn to fish, young lady.” Henna glowered at him, so he focused on stirring the sweetener into his coffee.
“Not just yet.”
~Great White Hope
Brownsville was Bonn’s new proving ground. Bonn walked the streets just after dark. He wore a black hooded sweatshirt, loose jeans, and sneakers. He kept his hood up and his head down. It was much harder to blend in—in Brownsville—the population of whites hovered between two and three percent, so if anyone saw his face, they’d consider him an oddity. He’d spent time getting to know the streets. The first few times he’d ventured into Brownsville were uneventful. Tonight he planned to walk down Pitkin Avenue. There were more businesses and fewer apartments on Pitkin, so he was sure to encounter more people.
Just another guy looking for drugs.
Bonn kept his hands in the long front pocket of the sweatshirt. He’d cut holes in the pocket to allow quick access to the baton, oleoresin capsicum spray, and karambit strapped to his belt. He’d painted upas, tincture of arrow poison wood, on the blade of the hook-shaped knife. Bonn was certain the tincture hadn’t been easy to come by. He didn’t entirely understand the poison and treated the blade with great respect.
To most people the gruesome gifts he and Henna exchanged would seem macabre. They were certainly not romantic gifts.
The odds of being shot in Brownsville were good, even if you didn’t go looking for trouble. Accordingly, Bonn wore a ballistic vest under the sweatshirt. He also carried an unregistered .357 in case things went truly sideways. He took the gun from a guy on the subway one day. As the thug watched his heavy-hitter friends beat someone over a perceived infraction, he’d noticed the outline of the revolver in the man’s back pocket. Bonn sunk an ice pick just left of the man’s spine, hoping to hit his descending aorta. He made a quick circling motion and pulled the pick out. His estimation worked. The man bled out in a couple of minutes—well before his thug buddies finished with the beating. Bonn wore skin-toned rubber gloves in public. Since he had never handled the revolver without gloves, it was an ideal backup weapon. He set it up for a weak side draw, in the event his dominant arm became injured.
As Bonn walked, he noticed differences in the clothing worn by gang members. Even from block to block the colors were different. Basically an enormous public housing project, gang activity was common. Gang members advertised their turf with their clothing. Prostitution was rampant. Drugs could be found every hour of the day—sadness of every flavor. For sale, cheap. A young man approached on a BMX bicycle, a Yankees cap sat high on his forehead. He wore a flannel shirt tied low around baggy chinos but was bare-chested. He looked lanky and awkward on the small bike.
“Smack downs, boy?” he asked.
Was he even sixteen? Certainly no older. He would call the kid BMX.
BMX seemed shocked when he saw Bonn’s face. “Aw no—You want girly girl instead.”
Bonn had worked to develop an understanding of local street language. It was a challenging task. “Boy” definitely referred to heroin. Cocaine was more a white man’s drug and was commonly referred to as “girl.” Since Bonn didn’t look like a heroin junky, BMX likely offered to sell him either cocaine or a session with a prostitute. “I’m good. Thanks anyway.”
“You a narc?” Bonn held his left eye mostly closed, like he’d been punched or possibly had a palsy. He’d brought props along, so he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.
“Sure, kid. I’m a narc.” They faced each other for a moment. BMX smiled and shook his head in disbelief.
“Why you walk Pitkin this late?”
Bonn worked hard to smoke the cigarette naturally. “I should ask you that. What are you, about fourteen? You should be at home where it’s safe. You’ll only get yourself in trouble out here. Why did you ask if I was a cop—you have drugs on you?”
“At home where it’s safe?” The kid gave Bonn a look of incredulity. “You don’t know where I live.” They neared a row of three-story apartments. The boy gave a shrill whistle and pedaled away quickly.
Housing projects in various stages of decay surrounded him. Cooking noises rattled from open windows. Cigarette butts lay in thick piles. A man in a blue windbreaker sat and smoked on a stoop. He stood as Bonn came near. He tilted his head and squinted past the brim of his cap to get a better look at Bonn.
“Playa, why you in the pro-jects?”
Another man stood quietly inside a nearby doorway, listening. Bonn knew both were armed.
The guy on the porch must sell what the guy in the doorway hands him. If the cops came by, the hood on the street would hand his pistol inside so he didn’t have anything incriminating and the man in the doorway would disappear. If rivals came to shake them down, the man inside would have a long gun—it was a good strategy. The police wouldn’t do anything without a warrant.
“You can’t help me.”
“This my hood, bumpkin—I be yo’ ONLY help.”
BMX watched from the corner. He held a cellphone to his ear.
Time for improvisation.
“I need ten keys of raw.” It was an unreasonabl
e amount. Men who sat on porches couldn’t access that volume.
Bring out the boss.
The man laughed. “You travel pretty light. What, you gonna write a check?”
He had a point.
Bonn took a drag from the cigarette. “You think I’m alone? You have your boss, I have mine.” The man on the porch shared a look with his backup then stepped onto the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street to exaggerate his disbelief.
“OK, great white hope—conjure up the man. Let’s see who shows up.” Both BMX and Backup spoke into their phones. Bonn may have sold them short. They were patient and organized.
Did they have a call tree? How many guns would point his direction in a couple of minutes?
Bonn panned the myriad windows that faced the street.
They could be anywhere.
Bonn shook his head dismissively and started down the sidewalk. “You have had enough playtime. You must not have the resources. I’ll go find the varsity crew.” The screen door creaked open. Backup stepped off of the porch with a pump shotgun. He held it along his side as he approached and surveyed the block. BMX was on the move too. He pedaled toward him on the bike.
Bad odds. Take the fight on the move.
Bonn pulled his hands from his sweatshirt pockets and held them to his sides, but he didn't stop. He kept walking.
“Hey,” Backup yelled from the porch, “We ain’t done!” The slide of a pistol racked home a round. He stepped sideways. Glancing back, he saw that BMX had a semi-automatic leveled at his chest. An old car approached. “Hold a minute,” Backup ordered. “This your boss rollin’ up on us?”
INHUMANUM: A THRILLER (Law of Retaliation Book 1) Page 24