The Disposables (16 page)

His hand jerked up to his ear as his eyes went wide with shock. He'd forgotten about it.

I walked away.

I walked down Wilmington, wondering just how much they knew about the operation, “the life of Bruno,” post Soledad Prison. I thought about hot-prowling their office. They'd have a situation board up with photos, maps, and bullets of information in order to see at a glance, “who was who in the zoo.” Intelligence was power, and at the moment, I was powerless. I shifted my thoughts to the problem at hand. First things first. I had to lose them and be sure they stayed lost. Then I had to think about Chocolate, get to her before they did. I had the edge there. They'd believe her a coked-out street whore with nowhere to go. They didn't know about all the money I'd given her. She'd be laying her head in a nice warm motel in South Gate with an eight ball of rock and a bottle of sweet wine.

I sat on a bus bench and waited for the bus that now roared down the street not thirty seconds away. I didn't look for the net thrown up all around. The bus pulled over and stopped. I got up when the door hissed opened, stepped inside, the door closed. The part of the team on foot would be scrambling for their cars while the mobile units jockeyed their cars in a position to tail. The bus picked up speed. The black woman at the wheel of the bus with a pie-pan face, overflowing her seat on all sides, said, “Sit down.”

I changed my mind. Can you open the door, please?”

“Sit down. You can get off at the next stop.”

“Open the damn door. Do it now.”

Her eyes didn't leave mine for several long beats. For a second, I wondered who was driving the bus. Then she braked hard, pulled the door handle to expel the large, angry black man who'd just scared the hell out of her.

I ran back full-tilt to the bus bench where I'd started and cut down a long dirt easement overgrown with bushes, trees, and vines. The second house in, I rolled over a fence covered with vines into a yard with an elm large enough to shield everything under its overgrown umbrella, an umbrella that kept secret three bull mastiffs. Their thick chains rattled, dragged in the dirt toward the intruder in their yard. I clapped my hands, “Manny, Moe, Jack.” It paid to know the neighborhood and to make friends with its inhabitants. The closest dog bowled me over, the others jumped on, their mouths soft on my wrists and ankles as I struggled through them to their doghouse, a toolshed-size building with a low roof covered in asphalt shingles. I crawled in and curled up on top of their smelly, dirty rugs and went right into a fetal position. I tried to imitate the shape of a bull mastiff. At the same time, I worried about the spiders, the large waxy black widows with their bright-red hourglasses on their bellies, disturbed by the new presence, me. Phantoms began to crawl on my skin. The dogs bounced around, excited with the presence of a friend who wanted to play. After a while, they calmed down as the novelty wore off.

Jack, the one with a mauled ear, stayed with me, curled up close almost in a lover's spoon, his body heat a comfort.

The helicopter came in low, its spotlight searching. Its onboard Flir device displaying heat-signatures of all beasts, four legged, and otherwise. The equipment showed crooks hiding under cars, up in trees, even in houses.

Outside the large doghouse, Manny and Moe's chain rattled.
Jack's head came up. He bolted out, dragging his thick chain. When I didn't come out of the other end of the alley or pop out on to the side street, the Violent Crimes Team decided to send a man down the dirt easement to see if he could pick up my trail. Robby was right, “it was on.” This was a maneuver they would never have tried had they wanted to remain strictly sub rosa in their investigation.

I didn't know the time, didn't carry a watch, one with a luminous dial or the kind with little techno-specialties that Robby called a deadman's watch. You carried one on an operation, the alarm could go off, or the luminous dial could give you away at a critical time. He was right, I had learned a lot from him. I tried to track the time in my head. I had to meet Marie at two o'clock.

How long would Robby keep his team in the area thinking I went to ground? How long to wait them out? This is where I had the upper hand. I knew him. Without someone to calm him, explain the options, he always went for the mobile search, too uptight and antsy to sit in one place. I'd always been the one to choose the more logical option for him. Without me, he would send one man to each of the locations they had me down for on his corkboard back in the office, places I'd been confirmed to frequent. Then he'd drive from each of those locations, checking up, always on the move, while his men sat static.

After an hour, all the time I could spare, I crawled out and listened. The fresh air tasted amazing, much better than confinement with Jack's hot Purina Chow breath. The wide open reminded me that under no circumstances would I ever go back to a concrete cell.

Twenty minutes later the cab dropped me three blocks from the Landmark in Huntington Park, code red rumba south side. The Landmark was in Little Cuba, the Rumba.
North of Willowbrook, which is opposite of south side, the code Marie thought I was being paranoid about making her memorize. Along with five others that would now never be used. This was it, our last day in the States. We were on our way. Not necessarily the land of milk and honey but freedom just the same, a different sort, for all of us.

The Landmark, as with most all motels in Huntington Park, was a hot-pillow fleabag, populated by the bottom rung of society. It's a mildewed structure with rotting doors and peeled dull, institutional lime-green paint that no longer wanted to stick to its corrupt walls.

If Robby and his crew had outsmarted me, it no longer mattered. I walked right up to the large, majestic queen palm with the dried out yellow uncut drooping fronds, a graceful lady too embarrassed to show her base trunk, and pulled out the green Gatorade bottle. Inside was a balled up paper that meant absolutely nothing to anyone else. Written on it was 212.

I walked up the stairs, wiping my sweaty hands on my pants. When I saw her regularly, I didn't question her love for me. The Gatorade bottle reaffirmed her desire to hang with an old, overly obsessed, broken-down black man on the run from a society he once coveted. Three weeks apart renewed the anxiety, let the insipid fear of rejection weasel-wedge into my common sense. Why would a woman of Marie's caliber even give me a second look, let alone fall in love?

At the top of the stairs a big man, a white supremacist in a white wifebeater t-shirt and broad, youthful shoulders, entered the stairwell. We both paused, enemies confronting each other, his face tattooed with AB for Aryan Brotherhood, and three teardrops at the corner of his eyes, his large arms sleeved with black ink, jailhouse tattoos touting his hate for his fellow man, the mud people. His blue eyes reminded me of Deputy Mack.

The two were one and the same, each working the opposite sides of the street yet on the same side. The man hesitated, the hate oozing from him as he decided, made a choice, the business that brought him to the Landmark was more important than the oath he'd sworn allegiance to. We passed, me going down the hall, I stepped backward, watching as he continued on down the stairs, his awful glare on me as it disappeared lower and lower with each step until he was gone. I waited by the door marked 212 until I was sure he wasn't coming back, then rapped softly, two, one then two.

“Bruno?” Her voice barely a whisper, made my heart soar.

“Babe, it's me.”

The door jerked open. She froze, her soft brown eyes large and teary. The code red, the signal to drop everything and run for it, had scared the hell out of her. To talk about it was one thing; to live it was all together something else. She had not known if I was going to make it or not. A lump rose in my throat. The woman genuinely cared for me. She reached out, took my hand, and pulled me into the room. At least her brain was working on the right level, at the moment enough for the both of us. She closed the door and gently put her head against my chest. I hugged her. She felt so damn good.

She didn't complain about the tattered clothes, the bruises, scabs, dirty, bandaged hands, Jack's Purina Dog Chow breath that permeated every pore. She took hold of my sleeve, guided me into the bathroom, and shut the door, the light off. For a moment, the heat from her body moved away. I yearned for her. In the perfect dark, the water in the shower went on. Steam roiled up. I smelled it, felt it on my face and lungs, my hands reaching out for her. She was back tugging at my belt. I let her as I stroked her hair and felt her long neck, stroked her breasts, her nipples instantly hard under my fingers.

She pulled down my pants and underwear quick, took hold,
softly took hold, pulled me along to tub's edge. Both of us over and into the water jets.

“Marie.” Her name came out in a rush.

I pulled her sopping top over her head and unhooked her bra. Her breasts released and moved against my arms. I buried my face in her neck and kissed her deeply. She groaned, renewed her grip, squeezing harder, tugging. With her new handle, she pulled me closer and pulled some more. She stood topless, water sluicing between her breasts, fabulous breasts; I was pantless, our clothes going hot and wet under the spray. I found her mouth with my tongue. At the same time she let go with one hand and worked the buttons of my shirt. My hands ineffectually tried to release the wet button to her pants. Her breasts pressed hard up against my stomach, her legs pushing me up against the Formica, pinning me against the wall. I was too caught up in her, her feel, her smell, her touch. I wasn't going to last, the hot water worked as a catalyst to heighten all sensation. I put my head back. “Marie.” Warm water spattered my mouth.

My body convulsed.

She froze. “Bruno?”

“I love you, baby.”

She giggled.

We sat on the bed naked, Indian-style while she rebandaged my hands after she'd given them a thorough cleaning. She could only shake her head and wonder why infection hadn't set in. Said as much. I wasn't entirely sure myself.

The whole time I read hesitation in her eyes. She had something to say.

When she finished, I laid her back on the bed, and put my mouth on hers when she tried to talk. The next session went longer and slower with sweat, little nips with cautious teeth, kisses, and long, damp licks.

The entire time the executioner's ax hung poised over us. We both felt it. At any moment it could swing down on us in a slow arc, end it all. We'd never see each other again. Thrown down hard into the slammer. The possibility remained very distinct, thus the lovemaking all the sweeter, but a little desperate. We reveled in every stolen minute. We finished up with her on top. She dropped down, rested her cheek on my chest, her head turned away, and though I couldn't see her, I knew she gnawed on her knuckle—a nervous tic. She said, “Are we really going to do it tomorrow? Are we really finally going to go through with it? Leave here and never come back?”

“Don't be scared.”

She nodded, “I'd be lying if I said I wasn't.” Her voice quiet, childlike.

She hesitated. I waited for it.

“What's it like inside?”

There it was, a big ugly beast. It had sat on my subconscious feasting on my guilt, the possibility that we could fail in this mission, and she would suffer immensely for my folly.

I closed my eyes. My voice lowered, in a cracked whisper said, “I won't make it better than it is. We're talking about a small, ever-so-tiny concrete room with walls that collapse on you every night, snatch your breath away, bury you under tons and tons of invisible weight until you scream. That's the best part. Then you have the food, bland starch, pale, washed-out pastel colors that salt can't flavor. And there's an odor about the place that reeks wherever you go and penetrates your clothes and skin, sour sweat, mixed with fear and hate. But still that's not the worst. The worst is the people. These people are put there for a reason—”

Marie's fingers involuntarily dug into my chest as she braced for it.

“These people are the worst society has to offer: the malcontents, the predators, the sociopaths, and psychopaths, all churning together in one ungodly collage of putrefying corruption. But there are those few who are not absolutely corrupt when they first get there. Folks with four drunk driving arrests in five years, paperhangers with a yen for gambling, all family men, victims thrown into a sewer of humanity that will eventually eat them. You try every day to stay the same, not change and turn into one of them. It's impossible. You change or you don't make it out.”

What I didn't tell her was about the nightmares that come every night to those who crossed the line of their own convictions, took the law into their own hands, and executed a fellow member of society; a man you executed who was tried and
released by a biased judicial system that thrived on technicalities; a system that in the end let a man who killed twice, once with an overdose of heroin, a daughter and again a small child, a grandbaby shaken and thrown down on a hard concrete floor, while his twin brother watched, a killer the judicial system failed and let go.

Derek Sams.

He came to me every night and sat on the end of my bunk across my legs, cowboy-style. Stared at me with those glowing red eyes, the kind of eyes you sometimes see in photos. This might not be as bad if he'd just say something, anything. He'd sit there and stare. Oh, those stares. His weight on my legs, made my flesh and blood go numb from the pressure. When I did sleep, I saw it all play out again and again. Deputy Mack had been right in his description to Chantal, the way I used my experience to hunt him down, caught him in a friend's apartment, a hideout up in the high desert, Lancaster. He wept and pissed his pants. He was on the floor in front of me on hands and knees, his friends watching, not calling 911, predators themselves who understood the rules of the jungle, anxious for me to do it. Their eyes alive with the excitement of it, their breath that came in short little gasps.