The Disposables (2 page)

The thug pulled away from Robby, anger in his eyes.

Robby stepped over to me and pulled my sleeve up. My skin was black and made it difficult to see, but it was there, “BMF,” only more crudely etched.

“This guy you called asshole is none other then Bruno the Bad Boy Johnson. The man who started the BMFs.”

BMF, that's right. Robby had to rub my face in it. People do stupid things when they're young, things they regret for all
time, things they wish with their very soul to take back. Only it was too late, like the kid on the ground, it was too late.

The thug deputy's mouth dropped open. “You're
the
Bruno Johnson?”

My left fist snapped out and connected with his right cheek—the diversion—as I came out with a right roundhouse—the heat—and laid it right on his nose. Cartilage crunched. Blood burst out as his knees gave way and his eyes rolled up. He melted to the sidewalk. His sergeant caught him. Uniform deputies moved in fast, batons out, ready to beat me until I was dead.

Robby held up his hand to stop them. “Hold it. Hold it, it's all over.” He looked at the sergeant who was easing his unconscious man down to the same dirty sidewalk as the dead kid. “We done here, Sergeant? We going to call it even or do I call in IA and take this incident apart piece by piece?”

His eyes angry, “No, we're done here, Lieutenant.”

“Good.”

Robby put his arm over my shoulder, turned us around, and guided us back into the shitty little market. I felt sick at his touch and would have shrugged him off had I not needed the insulation, the cover to protect what I had in my pocket, a small piece of what I needed to fight the underground war.

“Christ, Bruno, your hands are bleeding. You want me to call med aid?” He reached for the handie-talkie on his belt.

“No, I think you've done quite enough. That big white boy out there's not going to forget what happened. Especially, the way it went down right in front of all his homeboys. There's no way he can leave it alone.”

“He can't lay a hand on you. Everyone would know about the bad blood. Besides, I'll whisper in his ear, make sure he knows exactly who he'd be pissing off.”

The lieutenant of the elite violent crimes unit carried more clout than a deputy chief.

Robby looked around the store. “This the best you can do, Bruno?”

I got a broom from the back and started to sweep up. The handle instantly turned slick.

Robby took it away. “Man, you of all people know the routine. The forensics gotta have a go at this mess first. Come on, I'll give you a ride to the hospital. You need stitches on those hands and maybe even an X-ray of that rock-hard head of yours.”

Doom-and-gloom depression descended and gave the night's darkness a hard edge. I should've done more to stop the kid's assassination. He was someone's child, someone's grandchild. A mother, an auntie would be waiting up for him tonight and, instead, they'd get a coroner's house call.

Outside, everyone had been moved away from the front of Mr. Cho's store and stood behind yellow crime-scene tape. An instant crowd had gathered. Both ends of Long Beach Boulevard—a major drag through town—remained blocked off. Robby had me by the arm, escorting, letting all concerned know I now came under his protective veil.

“I'm working a serial killing, down south of here on Cookacre,” he said, “heard the call and stopped by. Good thing or your black ass'd be on its way to county about now.”

The lump in my pocket grew warmer, even though it was physically impossible. When I didn't answer, he kept up the rhetoric to cover the uncomfortable silence.

“This case is a bad one. You've seen it in the news. I know you have. All the good citizens are staying indoors because of this guy. After dark, they're afraid to come out from under their beds.”

Robby didn't wait for me to answer. He knew I had heard of this suspect. Like he said, everyone had.

“The dude tosses a coffee can of gas on the victim, holds up a lit lighter, and says, ‘gimme all your money.' The victim complies, and the suspect lights his ass up anyway. Then he stands by and watches. Just stands there, cheering like it's Saturday night at the fights.

“There have been three so far, and we don't have a clue.
The victims are too random. Wish you were still on it with me. We'd tear this town apart until someone told us. Right now they're all too scared to give up the dude. Who could blame them? What a way to go, huh?”

In the twenty years working for the Sheriff's Department I'd seen my share of burnt people, charred people, an image sewn into all your senses, the reek, the stark fear forever frozen in the victim's eyes.

We made it over to the police line. The short, dumpy Mr. Cho elbowed his way through the crowd and pointed a stubby little finger at me. “You fired. You hear me, you fired.”

Robby gripped my arm tighter, spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth, “Sorry about that, man.”

“Don't be. I was looking for a job when I found this one.” I had to make it look like I didn't care, even though I did. I had a parole agent who insisted the members on his caseload remained gainfully employed. Worse, I didn't know how Marie was going to take it. I needed the job for the kids.

We rode in silence in the undercover cop car. Neither of us wanted to talk about the stolen couple years that had slipped by. Largely unnoticed by him, I was sure. My hands and knees and eye throbbed with enough pain to keep the past embarrassment at bay. He took Roscrans west then Willowbrook up to 120th and over to Wilmington and up to Martin Luther King Hospital. The people in the area serviced by the hospital called it “Killer King.”

I basked in some relief. I'd been wrong about the surveillance. They had been staked out looking for this torch. I hoped with all my heart that's what it was and that they weren't there for me, watching me in order to find the kids I had stashed. Now I could see Marie without the worry of pulling her into what I had going on.

Robby stopped. Blood had pooled in the lap of my apron.
I got out, flopped it out on the ground in a wet little splash, and closed the door. He rolled down the window. “Don't be a stranger, huh?”

I turned and waved over my shoulder, more interested in seeing my Marie than to dredge up hot, angry memories with the likes of him.

Inside the packed emergency room sat a sorry lot of humanity, the sort in every ghetto across the US. Folks on the lower socioeconomic scale, who drank on Saturday nights to forget their hunger, folks in a dead-end life with nothing to look forward to and who picked up a knife, a club, or brick and took it out on their neighbor.

I checked in with the overworked receptionist then wedged myself into the only seat available, an unwanted half-seat next to a big mama who had one child clinging to her breast and a second on her lap, cute well-fed children who looked like they might have a touch of the flu.

An hour later when a seat with a view of the ER room door vacated, I jumped over to it. Thirty minutes after that I got a glimpse inside of a harried Marie who did a double take when she saw me. The ER door closed on automatic hydraulics as she approached, blocking her from view. It opened again. She cautiously ventured out, looked around, afraid the cops were about to jump her.

All because of me.

I had come into her life and fed her an idea, sold her some fantastical plan. I used her love for me to seal the deal. She'd agreed for only one reason, to help save the children. Guilt in the pit of my stomach overrode pain in my lacerated hands. She asked with her eyes if it was all right to contact me. I nodded and stood. We hadn't seen each other in going on two weeks.
A long, lonely two weeks that now made my heart ache just to see her.

A hot-blooded Puerto Rican fifteen years my junior, put her right about thirty-three. Five four and a little too lithe, she was feisty and not afraid to speak her mind, in rapid-fire English, heavily accented with Spanish.

She rushed out with a big smile. Until she saw the blood, the chewed-up hands, the eye all but welded shut with purple. Her face melted into sympathy that enlarged a lump, made it rise in my throat, and choke me. I didn't deserve a woman like her, not after all I'd done in my previous life, not with what I had in the works and was now too afraid to tell her. She knew some of it, but not all. And she had already warned me if I held anything back, we would be “kaput.”

She hugged me and kissed the uninjured side of my face. “Come on.” She tugged me toward the ER door, hesitated, looked around, said in a low tone. “You sure it's … it's okay?”

“Yeah, I was all wrong about who was watching. It wasn't me they wanted. The kids are safe. It was just the Boulevard, Long Beach Boulevard. A two-eleven team was staked out for a hood pullin' robberies. They gunned him tonight, right out in front of my store. Shot him dead. There was nothing I could do, Marie. Just a kid.”

I tried hard but couldn't stop the tears as they welled in my eyes and burned in trails down my cheeks. I had degenerated to nothing more than a tired, shot-out, overemotional old man.

“Aw, babe, come on in here and let me get you cleaned up.”

She guided me past the long queue in the hallway behind the ER doors, folks in chairs and on gurneys, who had waited hours in the waiting room and now waited their turn to see the overworked doctors in another line on the inside, their
angry eyes blazing a path right through me for the unfair favoritism. We went on past all the curtained-off beds and into an empty trauma room with a hard door, that when closed gave us privacy. My Marie was a physician's assistant and went right to preparing the tray to suture my hands.

She looked behind us one more time, even though the door was closed. I'd done that, made her paranoid to the point of distraction. I wasn't any good for her. If I kept it up, before too long she'd need tranquilizers and a good shrink.

“You sure it's okay now?” Her eyes big and brown yearned for a positive answer.

“Relax, okay.” Her paranoia turned contagious. And maybe I wasn't so sure. Maybe they had been set up outside the store watching me, and the kid they gunned was nothing more than collateral damage, words from the BMF—a bonus.

She sighed. All the tension left her shoulders, and the muscles in her face, tense for the last two weeks, finally relaxed. In the next instant, her Puerto Rican blood flared. She pulled back and socked me in the stomach.

Not too hard.

“Then what the hell you doin' gettin' hurt like this?”

I didn't have the nerve to tell her and make things worse. Tell her that I was going to court day after tomorrow, on Monday. In reality, it was already early Sunday morning. I'd be in court in a few short hours. I used to face down armed and dangerous suspects who would not hesitate to drop the hammer on me, and yet I didn't have the guts to tell her.

To top it off, if she knew what I had in my pocket, well, she'd be done with me for sure. No questions asked. I wouldn't blame her one bit. Not one damn bit.

The cuts were jagged around the edges and time consuming to stitch up. I watched her closely, her every move, her hair, the way her hands moved, her delicate fingers inside the latex gloves, the gold ring on her finger. We'd been together six months, and she'd still not taken it off.

She didn't look me in the eye the entire time. I knew what she wanted to ask. But it was still too soon to see each other. Too dangerous. Too much at stake, other lives besides our own to consider. I had to be absolutely sure it had been a robbery surveillance for the kid, that the cops I'd seen for the last two weeks out in front of the liquor store weren't really out following me. Hunting me. I needed to make sure the kid robbing the store wasn't collateral damage who'd just wandered into the wrong place while the team was watching me.

“Cho fired me.”

She stopped, looked up, “Ah, Bruno, now what are we going to do? You didn't make a lot of money but you needed the job to keep—” Again, she looked around at the closed door. “—to keep that punk Ben Drury off our backs. And the money. We need every penny.”

“Ben's not that bad a guy.”

I leaned forward and gently bumped her forehead with mine, “I told you I got the money thing handled.”

The corner of her lip came up in a snarl. She pointed a latex-gloved finger brown with Betadine antiseptic. “You promised. No more stealing. We're hurting enough people with what we got going on.”

“I can't come over tonight.” We'd planned to meet, the first time in two weeks because of the surveillance.

She stepped back, mouth open.

I hated to hurt her even a little bit. She was everything that was right in my life. I wished every day I had met her years before. But back then she'd have taken one good look at what I was at the time and run away screaming.

“You said it was all right. You said not five minutes ago that they were looking for a robber. You said—”

I held my hand up. “There's too much at stake to be careless. One, maybe two more days, and I'll be absolutely sure.”

“You think that's fair to me? You think that's fair to the children?”

“One more day's not going to matter.”

“To them it will. You don't remember what it's like being their age.”

She went back to work on my hand, shaking her head in disgust. After a couple of minutes of thinking about it she said, “I know it's not right but—” Her brown eyes were vulnerable and the most beautiful I had ever seen. With my other hand I gently pulled her into me and kissed her long and hard, a kiss I wanted to go on forever. She kissed back, the heat rising between us. I'd missed her so. In a way, I wished I had not set in motion the events that now threatened to overrun us both. Only, I realized a long time ago this had been what I was put here for, what I was made for. Fait accompli.