“Now comes the real fun part,” I said, drifting the shotgun barrel from one to the other for emphasis, “the part where I ask you who sent you, and you play it tough, so I start blowing off parts of your body. And one of you plays it real tough so I kill him and the other of you looks down at his missing leg and ruined arm and decides it can still get worse so he talks.” If I was getting through to them it wasn’t clear from their black eyes. “Now we can skip all that messy bullshit, or I can go to work. Honestly I don’t give a fuck which way you want to play it.” I heard a rush of wind behind me, and felt the thud of a black jack hitting the base of my skull. The world went sideways. My knees buckled and I fell, I waited for the impact of the floor but I just kept falling into a big black hole.
CHAPTER 12
Tumble and twist, drifting down through oblivion. No guilt for those I’d hurt. No guilt for those I couldn’t save, just rich warm black rushing past… Memory was a foggy distant thought lost in the haze…There was something I was supposed to do but it was all behind me now, lost… out of the black cotton came a growing pain. A pin point at first, then it sped at me, trying to catch me like a cop car in hot pursuit. Bam! My head exploded into sixteen different colors. I could feel pain so I wasn’t dead. Pain equals life, it’s a shitty conclusion to a fucked equation but there it was. My eyes fluttered and rolled open only to find more darkness surrounding me. My arms were pinned behind my back and bound by duct tape, ghetto cuffs also taped my ankles together. My rather large frame had been crumpled and folded nastily into a small dark space. My tiny prison bumped and rumbled with a rhythm I couldn’t place but knew was familiar. I tried to sit up and hit my head on padded sheet metal inches above me. It snapped into focus, I was in a car trunk, and that was a freeway rumbling beneath me. Muffled rap music thumped from the interior, keeping beat with my pounding brain. I was being taken for a ride, as they say in the gangster flicks. Only these were real gangsters and it wasn’t going to end with a pretty fade-out or the cops rolling to the rescue. Dumb bastard, I’d let them take me and now I was going to pay big. Odds were these were the same punks, or ones like them, who had done Kelly. And now it was my turn to go down ugly. One more useless corpse. One more unsolved murder for Lowrie. And like a big death machine they got to keep rolling along, unthinking and unstoppable. Fuck them. I squirmed onto my back. The speed shifted, we were pulling off the freeway. With every bit of strength I had I kicked at the side of the trunk. “What the hell!” came from the cab of the car. I kept kicking, it was an outside shot, but maybe someone on the street would hear me. Suddenly the car ground to a stop. I heard the doors open and kept on kicking like my life depended on it, which it did.
The trunk popped up, flooding me in the yellow light of a street lamp. The beefy guy in a jogging suit jumped in on top of me. I flailed and tried to fight, but with my hands behind my back and legs jammed in I couldn’t have bested a crippled midget. The thug grabbed my hair, covering my face with a sweet smelling rag. I twitched and jerked but couldn’t get free. When I could no longer hold my breath I inhaled… The world blurred, growing soft at its edges. The pain in my head evaporated into a descending fog and I was lost once again to the darkness.
From a great distance I could smell someone barbecuing. A searing pain came with consciousness. A thin cigar tip pressed into my chest. The burning I smelled was me. A scream crawled its way out of my throat.
“I’m sorry, did that hurt you?” The preppy boy in his argyle was kneeling down pressing the ember into my flesh. Lifting the cigar to his lips he sucked in, the tip glowed red. He jabbed the ember back down. I clenched my jaw so tight I almost broke a molar. I squashed the building scream down into my gut and forced a smile. “Tough it all you want, sooner or later you’ll beg to talk.”
“You haven’t asked him any questions.” An older man in an immaculate suit moved into view. “What do you expect him to talk about, the weather perhaps?”
“He knows what we want, trust me he knows.”
“Please, go see if you can find me a chair. I’ll have a little chat with Mr. McGuire.” Following orders, sweater boy stood up. He gave me a quick loafer to the ribs and walked away chuckling at my torn gasp.
“This is building up to be a very long night. Now I’m sure you have no desire to prolong this little dance, so why don’t you tell me where the girl is.”
“What girl?” I wheezed.
“Please, tell me or not, but don’t infer I’m stupid.”
“Perish the thought mother fucker!” I said. His kick landed hard to the side of my head. I rolled away, trying to protect myself from the next blow. Instead I heard him stepping out of the room and down what sounded like wooden stairs. Rolling over, I scanned my surroundings. I was in a small bare room, through grease streaked windows I could make out the tower of the downtown train yard. From the view I could tell we were on the second floor, probably of a warehouse, not that this information did me a damn bit of good.
The two younger grease-balls clattered into the room dragging an office chair and a gym bag. While the man in the running suit lifted me into the chair his young friend opened the bag lifting out a cordless drill.
“Hey, you ever see that show, This Old House?” sweater asked his partner.
“Yeah that Bob Villa is one smart wop. He must’ve saved me a grand around the house, you know, doing fix it myself stuff.”
“You think they’d want to do a show on me and my use of tools?” he said fitting a drill bit into the head and keying it down. “You want to pick which leg I start on?” he asked me with a stupid smile. I locked my jaw and grinned up at him. “Ok, left it is.” He revved the drill up several times like a street racer getting ready to launch. With a slow arc, he moved the spinning steel down into my thigh. As the bit dug into my flesh I jerked my legs up knocking the drill from his hand. I kicked out at his chest with a strength meant to kill. Instead of knocking him over the force sent me speeding backwards on the chair’s castors. They both looked shocked and amazed by what they saw next. I felt my back slam into something solid that gave way with the sound of glass breaking. I tilted violently back and saw the stars above as I fell through the night. Wood snapped against my back shattering the chair as I landed on a pile of discarded pallets, breaking their cross braces like they were matchsticks. A sharp spear of broken board pierced my leg.
Pieces of the broken window rained down around me. Somewhere above me the greaseballs were screaming. The familiar pop of small arms fire echoed just before the wood around me started to splinter from wild rounds. I had darkness on my side. But even idiots get lucky sometimes. Reaching out behind my back I found a long piece of glass and sawed at the tape binding my wrists. The glass cut my fingers but it also sliced off the duct tape. Freeing my ankles, I pulled the wooden spear from my leg and ran limping for the cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse.
A square of light spilled out of the warehouse as the door slid up and three silhouettes charged out. I jumped onto the fence and started to climb. As I hit the top a pistol cracked and a bullet whizzed past my head. I pulled myself up and over, falling hard on the other side. I was on a thin strip of pavement on the bank of the LA River.
The dark forms hit the fence as I rolled down the embankment, bouncing over the moss slick cement I splashed down into the river. Above me the mob boys topped the fence. Pulling myself up I fought the current and ran for cover. I lost my footing on the rocks, went down, got up and kept going. I pulled myself onto a small sand island covered in bamboo and scrub brush. Hunkering down in the brush I lay silently. Past the branches I could see Sweater Boy and Running Suit on the top of the bank looking down. They walked back and forth, searching. After several long painful minutes they turned and disappeared back towards the warehouse.