by David Putnam
“Oh, no. No. No. No. Don’t do this. I didn’t do it, I swear.”
I got behind him, put my arm around his neck, and squeezed just a little to let him feel his helplessness and his vulnerability. I gave him a little taste of what Albert had to have experienced. I grabbed his hand, and before he could retract his index finger, I stuck it in between the jam and the hinged edge of the door. I applied pressure with the door, moving it a millimeter toward closing it. He yelped. I let go of his hand and let the door do the work holding him. His legs did a jig. “No. No, no no. Don’t do this. Pleeease don’t do this.”
“Now, you can save yourself ten broken fingers by telling me the truth. The truth is the only thing that will set you free.”
He looked up at me, his eyes pleading just like he did three years before when I had him in a similar situation and I chickened out. I hated myself for that one mistake. I wouldn’t make it again.
“One chance on this finger. Tell me. Where’s Albert?”
“I swear to—”
I moved the door another millimeter.
“Aiy! Aiy! Aiy!”
“You going to tell me?”
“I swear—”
I shoved the door closed. His finger crunched. He screamed. I opened the door. He slid to the floor cradling his crushed finger. Before he could react, I quickly reloaded the next finger in the slot and held the door.
“Nine more. What’s it going to be?”
He’d turned ashen, his face wet with tears.
CHAPTER NINE
WHAT SEEMED LIKE two minutes later, Dad had a hold of my leg and shook. “Bruno, you wanted me to wake you.”
I struggled up and opened my gummy eyes. Darkness more than light filled my room. I’d slept four hours and could’ve gone another twelve or so.
I got up, swung my legs over, and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my face with both hands.
Dad moved back to the bedroom doorway. “Where is it you have to go?”
A question I dreaded because I didn’t want to lie to him.
I stood and stretched. “Let’s go into the living room and talk.”
We sat on the couch. We left the lights off and let the living room continue to dim as the orangish dregs of dusk faded in the windows.
I put my hand on Dad’s leg. “Okay, here it is.” He looked far older than his age. He looked like an old man who’d had the life stomped out of him. I had not told him everything and for good reason. Mostly shame over what I had done, but I also wanted to shield him as best I could from truth’s unkind reality.
He waited for me to continue while I tried to muster my strength and lost my resolve.
Too late. I couldn’t do it.
“You see,” I said, “I don’t think Olivia died of an overdose.”
He sat back a little. “Not this again. Son, we’ve been over this and over this. The South Gate Police said it was an accidental overdose. The coroner said the same. What do you know that they don’t?”
He knew that wasn’t true; the coroner ruled it “undetermined.”
“Olivia didn’t use drugs, Dad.”
His head shook almost imperceptively. “She was upset, despondent about her son being taken, about Albert being gone. He was never coming back. She knew it. I don’t blame her for what she did, using drugs to escape from this mess, and you shouldn’t either. You need to accept it or it’s going to eat away at you until you have nothing left inside. It’s going to ruin your life. Think about little Alonzo. We need to think about Alonzo now. We’re all he’s got.”
And he was all we had left.
In the fading light, Dad looked worse. He hardly looked like the same man. Flesh had melted away and skin hung from bone where muscle once thrived. All of this had taken a huge toll on him, and I wasn’t helping matters by not letting a sleeping dog lie.
“You’re not a cop anymore,” he said. “If you look into this, it’s only going to cause this family more heartache. Please, please, Bruno, let the court take care of Derek. If the system doesn’t get him this time, he’ll screw up again. That’s how it works. That’s his life, not ours. We have to be better than that.”
“I just have to find that witness I talked with. That’s all. Then I’m through, I promise. Then I can get Derek charged the way he should be charged.” Someone on the street would eventually tell me who Derek had used to overdose Olivia.
“And here I thought you had something else to tell me. Something new.”
I was tired of fighting it. I opened my mouth to finally tell him the whole ugly truth, the story I’d squeezed out of Derek. The one I’d never told Olivia.
After crushing Derek’s fingers, I couldn’t very well accompany him inside South Gate PD, so I had shoved him in through the front door, telling him, “For once in your life, do the right thing.” He cradled his damaged left hand and promised to go in and cop to what he’d done, said he’d tell them everything he’d told me he’d done to Albert. I believed him.
But instead, Derek had gone into South Gate and copped to a murder all right—only not the one with my grandson Albert as the victim. A different one to keep Derek in custody, to keep him safe from me as I waited outside the PD just in case he lost his nerve.
The court was now trying Derek for the death of a fellow dope dealer, Percy Williams, who they called Bumpy Spanks out on the street. Bumpy fronted Sams some dope, and Sams never paid him back. This had been a common ploy for Sams, and it finally caught up to him. Bumpy came after him and Sams shot Bumpy dead. After all, Bumpy’s murder was self-defense, and worst-case scenario, the most Derek would get was seven to twelve. He’d do three and a half years and get out. A much better deal than if I again caught up to him on the street. I wouldn’t hesitate this time.
Olivia had visited Derek in jail where he awaited trial. I never knew what he told her, but shortly thereafter, Dad found her unresponsive with a syringe in her arm. I knew my darling daughter—she would never do something so extreme. Since he was in jail, I knew Derek didn’t have a direct hand in it, but he had plenty enough motive to have it done. Maybe Olivia knew something about what really happened to her son, Albert—what only Derek and I knew as the truth. That Derek had killed their son, put him in a satchel, and tossed him off the San Pedro bridge into the ocean. Maybe she got Derek to tell her the ugly truth of what he’d done, or maybe Derek just wanted to get even with me for three crushed fingers. What I did know for sure was that he had something to do with my daughter’s death. I didn’t believe she would use drugs. He’d made a phone call or had a visitor in jail. He’d had one of his cronies do the deed.
Now I couldn’t get at him again until his court case was adjudicated. For once I hated myself for hoping the jury would cut him loose for killing Percy Williams. Derek Sams needed my help to be shuffled off this mortal coil. I was more than happy to assist. I would not miss a third chance.
When I wasn’t working at TW, I was hunting and taking down people associated with Derek. I’d ferret out the truth. I’d find the one who did it.
Now Dad was waiting to hear whether I had something else to tell him. Something new.
No, I couldn’t tell Dad what happened to little Albert. South Gate PD still considered the case a simple missing person.
I hadn’t had the fortitude to tell Olivia, either, and now she was dead. I had wanted to protect her. If I had told her, would my daughter still be alive?
And now, sitting on the couch next to Dad, I again lost my resolve to tell him the words he needed to hear. I couldn’t pass on that kind of heartache, the kind of emotional pain that wouldn’t let me sleep at night, the kind of pain that left permanent emotional scars. For Dad, the way he understood what had happened was far better than the truth. As far as Dad knew, Albert had never been found. Dad still held out that faint glimmer of hope that somehow his grandson was still alive. What Dad knew allowed him to believe a blind justice system would take care of the likes of Derek Sams. If I told Dad the truth, all those misp
erceptions would dissolve and he would float down to join me at the bottom of an emotional quagmire. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to continue on with my monumental charade choosing to leave him in the dark. Even if it meant telling him a good-intentioned lie.
I shook my head and looked away from him.
“Then are you going to tell me where you’re going tonight? You’re not going back to that dive bar over on Central, are you, Son?”
He tried real hard to keep tabs on me when that wasn’t possible, not with what I had going on. “I think I’m going to just drive around a bit to clear my head.”
“Stay away from there, Bruno, please?”
A couple of weeks ago he’d gotten lucky and just happened to be driving by as I walked into the Crazy Eight to get a beer and talk with some people. He’d parked around back and came in to confront me. He thought I’d turned into a closet drinker keeping from him a burgeoning need to smother my sorrow at the bottom of a brown bottle. That day it hurt to see his expression of disappointment. He’d caught me there two more times since, sitting in that dark bar among others of the street drinking cheap beer and whiskey, frittering away our lives in our own prison without bars.
I’d seen his reflection in the mirror behind the bar when he came in, the way he froze when he saw me with a drink in my hand. And all I could think about had been the misdirection I needed to feed him to get him to walk away and leave me be.
At what point does an illusion cross the line into a lie and that lie becomes a reality?
Now I looked back at him and said nothing. I couldn’t tell him I wouldn’t go there, not when I had to run down Nigel. I was forced to play two games. In order to keep my badge and my connection to law enforcement resources, I had to keep Black Bart happy. All the while, I continued to work on Olivia’s death. Even harder now since I no longer had help from my old boss Robby Wicks.
Tears welled in Dad’s eyes. “I miss Alonzo. Have you talked to Social Services about our supervised visits? You said you were going to try and talk to them again.”
I’d screwed that up, too. That was another part of what I couldn’t tell him. South Gate PD took into consideration Olivia’s death and the disappearance of Albert, and the lack of evidence to support Derek’s claims that I had crushed his fingers, and decided not to prosecute me for torturing him. South Gate settled for my badge, which had only been an elaborate ruse to pacify them.
I was lying low, working undercover at TW for a while until the heat died down. Black Bart had struck a fortuitous deal with a favorable deputy chief that knew my background on the violent crimes team, all of our many successes.
South Gate informed Social Services of my violent nature, and Social Services would not, under any circumstances, allow visits with Alonzo. The violent nature that helped keep the neighborhoods safe from class-one predators now worked against me. I had spent all of Olivia’s college fund and my savings on attorney fees trying to secure our custody of Alonzo. The way it looked, Alonzo might ultimately end up with Derek’s relatives. And that wasn’t going to happen, not while I still stood upright.
If I told Dad any part of it, I’d have to tell him all of it. The shame of what I had done would come out.
The telephone rang.
Salvation.
I didn’t jump right up; I let it ring a couple more times. I got up and walked to the kitchen. I picked up the phone. “Johnson residence, this is Bruno.”
Breathing came over the phone line.
“Who is this?”
The voice came across hoarse and almost unrecognizable, strained and angry. “You are … you are one vindictive, arrogant asshole, and I will make you sorry you ever heard my name.”
“Wicks? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you dare play coy with me. You know exactly what you did.”
I swallowed hard. He’d found out about my undercover assignment with TransWorld. Now he knew the real reason why I took the arrest for the stolen Monte Carlo. And even though he had not acted like a friend when he had pulled back from Olivia’s investigation, friends did not keep those sorts of secrets from other friends like I had done with him.
“I … I …”
“What? Don’t you want to gloat? You don’t want to laugh and throw it in my face? It’s not funny, Bruno. Not one damn bit. You really jammed me up here. I get it that you’re mad at me for not helping out with that G-ride beef, but this … you pulled Barbara into it, and now she’s jammed up right alongside of me. Did you even think about Barbara?”
“Barbara? What are you talking about? How did I jam you up?” Barbara was his wife. She worked for Montclair, a police department located just across the county line in San Bernardino County.
“Don’t play dumb. I got the cops out in front of my house right now ready to run us both in. What the hell’s the matter with you? You’ve really lost it, pal.”
“Robby, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He went silent except for more mouth breathing. “You didn’t park a stolen car in my driveway, a bright yellow Corvette with Arizona plates?”
Stool Sample. Rodney Davis.
I put my hand over the receiver and tried not to laugh too loud.
CHAPTER TEN
I LEFT JUNIOR Mint with Dad and walked away from the house without looking back. I headed over to Wilmington and the parking lot of Martin Luther King hospital where I kept a cold car TW supplied for roping, a real beater with 200k miles on it, a faded orange Opel Kadett.
I circled the Crazy Eight checking for anything out of the ordinary, a police stakeout, or scandalous folks who could mean trouble. There wasn’t any way to know if Nigel was in there; he never drove the same stolen car twice. I parked down the street on Central Avenue in front of a defunct secondhand clothing store with a For Lease sign in the soaped-over windows, and walked back.
I still wore my TransWorld khaki shirt and denim pants. In my waistband, I carried my second Smith and Wesson .357. My first one I had stuck under the front seat of the Monte just as LAPD pulled us over, three days ago. I wouldn’t get that one back until the sting concluded. I felt half naked without two of them.
The most dangerous time of day happens when dusk hands off to night. Your eyes play tricks on you with fleeting images that aren’t always there. The ones that are there are the ones to worry about.
I entered the back door of the Crazy Eight and stepped into a short hall with male and female bathroom doors on either side and waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark.
Ralph Ledezma, the owner-operator, kept the place dark. His clientele didn’t want to see life pass them by while they hid in a bottle of watered-down liquor. Ledezma stood behind the bar wiping down elbow prints and bits of peanut shells with a dirty rag. He kept his red curly hair cut close to the scalp. One of his blue eyes worked, the other never followed along and must’ve been glass. So many freckles covered his hands, they looked suntanned. He always wore a blue bowling shirt with “The Crazy Eight” embroidered over the pocket and scrolled large across the back in faded yellows and oranges. He nodded when he saw me.
Nigel wasn’t among the fifteen or twenty patrons. I bellied up to the bar, nudging the stool aside. Sitting takes away a huge advantage if someone comes at you. Not having your feet on the floor leaves you without balance and support.
Ledezma put a draft beer down in front of me with white foam overflowing the rim. I took up the mug and drank down half of it. It tasted wonderful and went down too easy. Before the TW sting had started, I wasn’t a big drinker and usually only imbibed at the conclusion of a takedown with Wicks. My cover now required that I blend in with the criminal element. I didn’t fight the alcohol as much as I should have, not with all that had happened, a weak-kneed excuse to avoid dealing with the curveballs life tosses you.
I set the mug back on the bar and wiped the foam from my mouth with the back of my hand. “You seen Nigel?”
“Not since you two left out
of here the other day. Heard you got jacked right down the street. Heard that car you were in was stolen?”
I took another drink without taking my eyes off of him. The other patrons stopped drinking and talking to listen in. I finished the beer and set the mug on the bar. “Wasn’t the first time and it’s not gonna be the last.”
Ledezma set another beer on the bar in front of me and nodded down the bar to his left. “Johnny Sin has been looking for you.”
“Who’s Johnny Sin and what does he want?”
“That’s between you and him. I’m staying out of it. I told you before, as far as you’re concerned, I’m Switzerland. I stay neutral on all matters that don’t concern this here bar.”
“Tell him I’ll buy him a drink.”
Ledezma looked down the bar. “Hey, Johnny, this here is Karl, the guy you were looking for.”
I turned perpendicular to the bar and let my right hand casually drift under my shirt to the stock of my .357 in my waistband. From down the bar came a white guy who didn’t fit in with the mostly black drinkers. He had a hop in his step and a light swing in his shoulders mimicking cool black men from a bygone age. He wore clothes from the seventies in a retro look, a long-sleeve red dress shirt with four buttons undone, exposing his chest and a thick gold chain around his neck. He was lean and raw-boned with dirty brown moussed hair spiked in every direction. His pants were flared at the bottom and his shoes had three-inch heels, making him five foot ten. I couldn’t see anywhere he could hide a gun except in an ankle carry. He came toward me with a fake movie star smile. A tooth on the front left side was black and dead. The guy really stood out. Not a good profile for a high-end criminal. Or maybe it was smart. If he ever had to run, he could easily change clothes, cut his hair, change his walk, and most people wouldn’t recognize him. Except for that tooth. He’d have to knock out that tooth, and with a smug grin like that, he wouldn’t have a difficult time finding someone to oblige him.