The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  I look at Saldado, and the thought reaches both of us at the same instant. He makes a move toward the child. I lash out with the iron, missing him by a few inches, but it’s enough to make him step back and to his left. As he does I move into the breach, circling to my right, putting myself between him and the boy. He continues this circular dance of combat and forces me farther to the right. He’s looking at the open door and Robin Watkins kneeling on the floor. I’m where I want to be, and I don’t budge. He has the blade, but I have greater reach with the iron. If he slashes at me and misses, I’ll break his arm. If I get lucky, I might nail him in the head.

  Saldado studies the situation, dark pupils darting back and forth between Watkins kneeling in the doorway and her child on the sofa. Either one of them will do. He feints toward the mother and catches me leaning. I lash out. Nothing but the swish of air. He goes the other way toward the child. The tire iron cuts a figure eight through empty space.

  He backs off, smiling at me. “Not so easy, uh?” He wipes perspiration off his upper lip with one arm.

  I’m watching his eyes. He’s gauging the distance of my reach, my willingness to risk the blade.

  He looks at the child, then back at the mother. Obvious moves now, leaving me to wonder which one he will go for, his focus never far from the tire iron. He looks quickly at the child, takes a half step in that direction.

  This time, I don’t go for it. Instead I move my head in that direction, my feet planted firmly. When he reverses field toward the door, I’m ready for him.

  Saldado is committed. Momentum carries him. Just enough time for a quick hitch with the iron for a back swing. I lay into him like a left-handed batter with a Louisville slugger. The lug end of the tire iron catches him full force, low along the left side of his chest—a deadening thud and the cracking of bone.

  “Unnnnnhhhh.” It knocks the wind out of him. Saldado staggers backward. Surprise and pain, followed an instant later by anger—all the emotions of adrenaline flashing across his face in less than a second. Before I can follow up with another blow, he lashes at me, a halfhearted effort, but enough to keep me away, fight or flight.

  He comes at me again. The blade slashes under the iron. I bend at the midsection, leaning back, and the straight edge of the razor misses my stomach by an inch.

  Looping the iron, I catch the back of his hand on the follow-through, but without enough force to do any damage.

  Saldado is holding his side with one hand now—glancing under his arm, feeling the pain, and assessing the damage. There’s blood on his shirt. He looks at it, then realizes, as I do, that its not where I hit him.

  There is an arc of tiny red splotches up high on his shoulder as if someone swung a loaded paint brush in his direction.

  Breathing heavily, in pain, he connects the dots before I do. He smiles. “You’re bleeding, señor.”

  I glance quickly down. There is blood dripping off the end of the tire iron and onto the floor.

  While I’m distracted for an instant, Saldado tries for an opening. I check him with my eyes, catching him leaning and freeze him in place. Having felt the bite of the steel in my hand, he has no desire to offer up a second course.

  My right shirt sleeve is red from the elbow to the buttoned cuff where he slashed it with the razor through the door. Adrenaline has killed the pain. Either that or he’s severed a nerve.

  His movement is slower now. So is mine. He positions his injured side away from me, protecting it, still holding the bottom of his rib cage with one hand, as he waves the blade slowly back and forth, stirring the air in front of my face with the other.

  He tries to get me to swing at the blade, moving it closer. I refuse to take the bait. He would move in behind my swing and catch my arm coming back. In the meantime, the razor would be free to do its work.

  “Man, you keep this up,” he says, “you going to end up like your friend on the floor there.”

  “Yeah, you do a real good job beating on women,” I tell him.

  “No. No. Not that one. Your other friend. Over there.” He gestures with his head in the other direction. “I let you keep the money. Take it and go. I give you your life,” he says.

  I glance over quickly and realize he’s talking about the package wrapped in plastic and lying on the floor.

  “Espinoza?”

  He nods slowly, smiling at me.

  “What about the child and the woman?”

  He shrugs, offers a disarming smile. “What are they to me?”

  Watkins must have seen him kill her husband. I can’t believe he would let her go.

  “I’ve already called the police,” I tell him.

  “You lie.”

  “Stick around and find out.”

  He waves the blade at me. “How long you think you can bleed like that, man, and still stand up? Huh? Why don’t you go?”

  His eyes tell me that the second I move toward the door he’ll come with the blade.

  “Let her take the child and go.”

  “Sure.”

  “Robin?”

  She looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

  “Get your baby,” I tell her.

  She looks at the child, then back at me.

  “Get up and get your baby.”

  The Mexican is smiling. He knows if he can take me down, he can catch the woman and her child before they can get to the front door.

  She stands up. Takes a few tentative steps into the room.

  “Come behind me,” I tell her.

  The Mexican smiles at me. He could grab her in a second, force me to drop the iron, then cut her throat and kill me.

  She moves behind me, grabs the child, huddles him in her arms.

  “Go,” I tell her.

  She moves to the door, then turns and looks at me.

  “Go!” I turn my head and take my eyes off of him for a fraction of a second.

  In that instant he comes at me. The blade comes underneath. He reaches up with the hand of his wounded side and grabs the action end of the iron before I can swing.

  I trap his arm with the razor under one elbow against my side.

  “Go!” Between clenched teeth. It’s all I can do to keep from biting my tongue as Saldado’s body crashes into me, his shoulder coming up under my chin, forcing my head farther to the right.

  With terror etched in her eyes, clutching her child, she disappears down the hall.

  Saldado, with the razor hand trapped under my arm, tries to maneuver his wrist to cut into my back. I feel the blade scraping against the cotton fabric of my shirt, and I pull him, twisting, whirling to keep him off balance.

  I leverage the weight of my body and let physics do the rest. Centrifugal force sends us hurtling across the room until our feet hit an immovable object, Espinoza’s body, and gravity takes over.

  I cuff my hand around the back of his neck and, on the way down, give him a hard shove, accelerating his fall and driving him onto his chest.

  I hit the floor on one shoulder. The crushing contact knocks the wind out of me.

  Saldado takes it on the chest, landing directly in front of my eyes. He expels a mist of vaporized blood from his nose and mouth, propelled by breath from a punctured lung. The hand with the blade slaps the floor and the razor clatters across the old hardwood planks.

  For several seconds neither of us moves. Crumpled on my side against the end of the couch, unable to breathe, I listen to his wheezing punctuated by occasional groans.

  My brain is beginning to go blank, vision blurred like someone has poured water over a sheet of glass in front of my eyes.

  I see him lift his head, the frothy bubbles of blood dripping from his mouth and nose.

  My own breath comes slowly, shallow, my head as light as helium.

  He struggles onto to his hands and knees, his eyes glazed with pain and pitted with anger as he looks at me and weaves on all fours.

  I focus on the shining blade across the floor.

  He turns his head
and sees it.

  I try to move, but my body won’t obey. My feet are cold, vision dimming; audible illusions begin to fill my ears, sounds of buzzing.

  When my eyes return to him, Saldado’s attention is no longer on the razor across the floor. Instead he is struggling to his feet, holding his side, his dark eyes directed toward the front of the building. As my vision fades, I recognize the sound, somewhere beyond the walls of the room, the electronic harmonics of a siren.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I reenter the world of the living from a haze, a foggy view of the plastered ceiling in the Mexican’s apartment.

  Flat on my back for some reason, I’m feeling no pain. The hard floor is gone, replaced by something softer. I try to sit up, but I can’t. I am strapped to a gurney. I start to raise one hand toward my head, and somebody reaches out and grabs my arm. “Stay still. You’re gonna pull the needle out.”

  Guy in a blue uniform taping a needle down on the back of my hand. He has one knee on the floor, working over me, adjusting a little plastic wheel on a tube from a bag of clear fluid that is running down through the needle, and into me.

  “How you feelin’?”

  I try to talk. “Like I got a chip of wood in my throat.”

  “Don’t talk. Lieutenant. He’s startin’ to come around.”

  The bag for the I.V. drip is being held by another EMT, standing over him. The needle is in my good hand, the left. My right arm is bandaged, gauze and tape all the way from the wrist to the elbow. My arms are laid across my chest, like they were getting ready to put me in a box.

  “You lost a lot of blood.”

  Through the frog in my throat, I talk. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “That’s the pain meds.” The words come from another voice. “Don’t worry, in the morning you’ll feel like shit.” The face finally comes into view, familiar, but I can’t place it. He’s in shirtsleeves and tie, wearing dark glasses and carrying a notepad in one hand and a can of Diet Coke in the other.

  “Let me sit up.” The straps hold me in place.

  “No. No. Stay there.” The EMT is not going let me move.

  “Right. So you can fall on your ass and sue the city.” The Diet Coke still has the icy sweat of chill on the can.

  “I’d offer you one, but then you’d puke all over the crime scene. Some fucking lawyer’d find a way to use it against us in court. The vomit defense. Then we’d never be able to solve that.” He motions off to the side with the can in his hand.

  I roll my head in that direction and see Espinoza. The top of his body, anyway. Most of it still wrapped in plastic except for his head and upper torso where the sheet has been sliced and peeled back like the husk off a cob of corn. His complexion is white. A narrow crease of dried blood, the thickness of dental tape, runs across his throat.

  I roll my head back to look at the guy in the dark glasses. “Do I know you?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He takes the glasses off. “Lieutenant Ortiz.” He gives me the pearly whites, skin so tight over the bone structure of his face that the dental feature could be part of a naked skull. “Remember? Had that nice conversation in your office. I did the monologue. You claimed privilege. Talked about your buddy Nick Rush, Gerald Metz. You do remember?”

  I nod.

  “I couldn’t be sure. All the drugs they’re putting in you from that bag. Probably almost as good as the shit Metz was selling. What do you think?”

  I don’t answer him.

  “What, no opinion? OK, fine. We’ll let that go. What do you think about this?” He wags his head toward Espinoza’s body. “You think it was an accident? I understand Rush was an accident. Read it in the paper,” he says. “Oh, yeah. Wandered into the path of a cruising bullet. It’s like they say, speed kills.” He looks at me, leaning over again.

  I don’t respond.

  “What, nothing to contribute? Jeez, for a fuckin’ mouthpiece, you don’t have much to say. And I was led to believe you were the mastermind behind that insurance coup. Well, that’s fine. You save your voice. We can talk tomorrow. Besides, one dead body at a time. Which leads us back to this one. You didn’t happen to see it when it happened, did you?”

  I shake my head.

  “I shoulda figured that. What can you tell me? Let’s see. We know he’s dead. What did he use, a scalpel?”

  I turn my head the other way, toward the floor across the room. It’s gone. I look back at Ortiz. “A straight razor.”

  “Aw. That what he cut you with?”

  I nod.

  “A name?”

  I have to clear the frog living in my throat before I can get the word out. “Saldado.”

  “Ah. I take it somebody you didn’t represent this time. Good for you. He’s the one lived here, right?”

  I nod.

  “Man has a funny way of treating visitors,” he says.

  One of the EMTs checks the bandage on my arm, and I wince.

  “You can roll him out in a minute,” says Ortiz. “I want to talk to him just for a sec.”

  The guy checks the I.V. quickly, then moves away to gather his equipment.

  “For a lawyer, you don’t seem to get it,” says Ortiz. “You’re supposed to hand out your business cards to the injured, not the dead.” He’s holding my card in his hand. The one with the note on the back to Espinoza.

  “You wanna tell me what this was all about?”

  “I used the card to get in. He had them.”

  “Who?”

  “The mother. The child.”

  “The nine-eleven call. Domestic violence.”

  I nod.

  “I see. And who gave you the cape and tights? Why didn’t you wait for us?”

  “No time. Where are they?”

  “They’re all right. She’s gonna have a shiner in the morning. But she’s alive. More than we can say about her uglier half over here.” He motions toward the dead body on the floor next to me.

  “Must say she’s taking it pretty well, considering. Then again, it probably wasn’t a picture-perfect romance. Who beat her up? Saldado?”

  I nod. “You get him?”

  “No. We got here, he was already gone. But we got people out looking, checkin’ every house, looking in the sewer. Everyplace we can. He’ll turn up.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “What, you know something?”

  I shake my head.

  “Trust me. We’ll get him.”

  If they didn’t snag him coming out of the apartment, they won’t find him now. People who do what Saldado does for a living move without suitcases and call signals without a huddle. They would have a dozen contingencies worked out before the cops came knocking, holes they could dive into or pop out of, places to hide, be picked up from, or dropped off at. In a few hours, after dark, if I hadn’t shown up, Espinoza, his wife, and baby would have each been gift wrapped, dumped in the back of the dark Blazer, and probably headed for a shallow grave somewhere in the desert east of the city. Unless I miss my bet, Saldado or whatever his real name is, is long gone, probably on his way to Cancún.

  Ortiz breaks from note-taking to inspect my arm and head, then adds a few entries for his report. “He sure as hell did a number on you.”

  “Like they say. You shoulda seen the other guy.”

  “What did you do, serve him with process?”

  “Broke his ribs.”

  He looks down at me smiling, incredulous. “With what, your finger?”

  “Tire iron.” I point under the front edge of the sofa.

  Otriz pushes the couch a little until it slides a few inches, exposing one end of the tire iron.

  “Jack. Something over here you missed.”

  One of the evidence techs comes over, hands in surgical gloves.

  “Did Saldado touch it?” says Ortiz.

  I nod.

  “Dust it for prints, then tag it,” he tells the tech. “You’ll need to get his prints too, to eliminate ’em. And blood,” he says. “See if y
ou get any traces. We might get lucky. DNA for an I.D. Our man here says he broke a few ribs with the thing there.”

  I cough, clear my throat to get his attention again.

  “What is it now?”

  I tap the front of my shirt, on my chest on the other side, away from my cut arm.

  “What are you saying?”

  “His blood.”

  Ortiz comes down for a closer look. Where the Mexican coughed it up when we hit the floor. There is a fine mist of tiny specks, little dots of dried blood like bits of rust across the chest of my white shirt, some on the side of my face.

  “Jack. Get a pair of scissors.”

  A second later the evidence tech comes back. A few snips and he cuts a four-inch-square swatch out of my shirt.

  “You become more cooperative somebody sticks you with a knife. I’ll have to remember that next time I come to your office for an interview. Anything else you have?”

  I shake my head. “That’s good for now. You’re lookin’ a little peaked,” he says. “You guys want to get him outta here?” To the EMTs now, “That arm’s gonna take some stitches. If I call ahead to the E.R. and tell ’em they got a lawyer on the way, I’m sure they can find their biggest needle.” He smiles at me.

  “Fine idea,” says the evidence tech. “Tell them to get that fuckin’ harpoon they use to close on autopsies. That’ll give him something to talk about when he rolls up his sleeves at bar meetings.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Ortiz, now wearing his dark glasses again, is smiling. “You want me to call your partner?”

  I nod. I try to form the words, but nothing comes out. I try again. “My daughter.”

  “You want me to have him call her?”

  Quick nods.

  “They’re gonna hold you at least overnight. For observation,” he says. “And we’re gonna talk some more tomorrow, hmm? So that you know, don’t try and tell me there’s no connection between your friend here and the other client, Mr. Metz. Cuz I know there was.”

  I shake my head.

  “Don’t bother,” he says. “I’m also going to assume you’re gonna tell me about it, when you’re feeling better, like tomorrow?”

  Before I can respond, Ortiz has turned around to talk to one of the uniforms. “I want a hold put on him. Material witness,” he says. “He doesn’t get a release from the hospital until I sign him out. Personally. You understand?” Then he looks down at me and winks. “See you in the morning.”