Assume Nothing (2 page)

Post started re-correcting the flaw in his document, said, ‘So what happened?’

‘What happened is, he wigged out again. Saw this gorilla jerkin’ his old lady around and decided to offer him a little relationship counseling.’ Glavin finally started to laugh. ‘I guess the guy didn’t appreciate it.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah. Wrong Good Samaritan to fuck with, right?’

‘Where’s Red now?’

Glavin made a pair of wings out of both hands, flapped them overhead. ‘Gone west. We let him go just in time to catch a two o’clock to Los Angeles. He says he’s movin’ out there permanently. What, he never told you?’

‘Me? Why would he tell me?’

‘No reason. I just thought—’

‘Hey, Dick. Me and Red are ancient history, all right? Now, put a sock in it and go think somewhere else, I got work to do here.’

Glavin looked at him, measuring the level of his sincerity. Then he threw his head back and laughed one more time before turning and walking away.

Post watched the white man cross the crowded squad room, his mind wandering. He waited until Glavin had completely disappeared, then opened the top drawer of his desk and shuffled through the small landfill inside, looking for something. After a moment, he found the greeting card, the one he’d received just over a week ago and then quickly put away. It was one of those sexually suggestive numbers designed to titillate horny old men and easily excited college boys. There was a photograph on the front of two immense, perfectly tanned white breasts spilling out of a skimpy red brassiere, and the text inside read:

Someone named ‘Red’ had scribbled a short note about leaving for California, then signed his name at the bottom.

Post propped the card up on his desk for display and shook his head, like a weary mother hen pondering the fate of her most troublesome chick. It was nice to see his old partner still knew how to kick a little ass every now and then, but it was also unsettling to see that he hadn’t yet learned how to
stop
. Some cops, ex or otherwise, never did.

Post used to hold out hope that the man he once thought of as a brother would someday come around, stop suffering these momentary lapses of self-control that always seemed to cost one deserving asshole or another a quart of blood. But no more. He had given up that pipe dream well over a year ago. Red was
entitled
to crash and burn occasionally, perhaps more so than any cop ever born, and Post had eventually grown tired of pretending not to feel that way himself. Because he had seen the bodies too, that cold November night. First Kaye’s in Reddick’s living room, then the two smaller ones upstairs.

It was a sight he would never forget.

Post stared for a moment longer at the greeting card his old friend had sent him in lieu of a proper goodbye, then tossed it into the wire wastebasket beside his desk, shrugging. If Joe Reddick was indeed still a headcase after all this time, it was truly a crying shame. But it wasn’t Charlie Post’s problem anymore.

It was California’s now.

PRESENT TENSE

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

ONE

‘
Y
ou’ve done this sort of thing before,’ the cop said. The nametag pinned to his left breast said his name was Connelly.

Reddick just looked at him.

‘I remember you. You split a guy’s head open with a garbage can out at Castaic Lake, about six, seven months ago. When I was still with the County Sheriff’s.’

Reddick couldn’t believe it. Of all the LAPD uniforms to catch this call . . . ‘That’s got nothing to do with this,’ he said, now vaguely recognizing the guy.

‘He roughed your girlfriend up or something. Or was it your wife?’

‘Look. I need to know. You gonna take me in, or not? My kid’s gotta get home, he’s dead on his feet.’

The cop glared at him, didn’t even bother to glance over at the little five-year-old Reddick was talking about, curled up asleep on a couch nearby. He was trying to be civil, the uniform, treat Reddick like a person instead of an animal, and all Reddick could do by way of thanks was crack wise, act like he wasn’t staring down the wrong end of some serious shit.

‘Please answer my question, Mr Reddick,’ the cop said. Not fucking around anymore.

‘She was my wife,’ Reddick said.

‘The boy’s mother?’

Reddick nodded.

‘And what’d the guy do to her again? Refresh my memory.’

Grudgingly, still pretending he couldn’t see what the earlier incident had to do with this one, Reddick obliged, told him how he had indeed used a metal garbage can to try and crush the skull of a bearded biker with a tattooed beer belly out at Castaic Lake the previous July. Before Dana had finally lost patience with him and asked him to move out.

‘Yeah. I remember now,’ the uniform said.

Reddick remained silent.

‘They got into it out in the parking lot. The biker almost ran her over on his way out and she said something to him, got his ass all bent out of shape.’

Reddick still didn’t say anything.

‘As I recall, though, he never actually touched her. Just threatened to punch her lights out, or something along those lines.’

‘That was enough.’

‘You almost killed the man, Mr Reddick.’

Reddick shrugged. ‘He said he was gonna knock her teeth out. If he was just talking to hear himself speak, he picked the wrong day to do it.’

The cop nodded, studied him in silence for a moment. ‘Like this kid tonight. Guess he picked the wrong night to knock your kid down, too.’

Reddick shrugged again, still offering no apologies. ‘I guess so.’

They had just been horsing around. Three body-pierced skinheads in their late teens, white skin translucent as tissue paper, forearms and biceps stained blue with tattoos, pushing and shoving each other like drunken sailors as they stood in one of two long order lines at a Glendale McDonald’s, just after ten on a Saturday night. Their language was blistering, an endless onslaught of ‘fuck yous’ and ‘motherfuckers’ that could have peeled paint from the walls, but their routine was being tolerated until one of them threw an elbow out, knocked a drink off a woman’s tray as she tried to ease past. Orange soda exploded across the floor like liquid shrapnel and the restaurant’s manager finally appeared, made a brave if ill-fated attempt to usher the trio out.

He was a mousy looking East Indian with a long neck and a bald, luminescent pate, and the skinheads showed him all the respect his mild appearance demanded. Which was to say, they laughed in his face, told him to get his ‘black nigger ass’ back behind the counter before they had to put their collective foot in it. Then, just to clarify their point, the largest of the three put his hands full in the manager’s chest, shoved him backward into the group of people still standing in line behind him.

Reddick’s son Jake hit the floor beneath the Indian’s weight like a blindsided quarterback, the back of his head making an audible
whack
as it smacked off the hard linoleum.

And then the big skinhead laughed.

He never saw Reddick coming, a rocket launched from a nearby table, so he couldn’t anticipate the overhand right Reddick threw at him, caving in the left side of his face like a papier mâché construct. The kid’s friends watched him go down in a heap, blood spewing between his fingers as his hands went instinctively to his nose, and never thought twice about retaliation. They could see in Reddick’s eyes that he was hoping they’d try it, give him any excuse to go after them, too.

Afterward, in the deafening silence that took over the restaurant, every customer in attendance had gazed at Reddick in open horror, as if he were something wild that had wandered in off the street to attack and feed off the innocent.

It was a reaction to which Reddick was no stranger.

‘You don’t think you might have overreacted a little?’ the uniform asked now. ‘I mean, this kid you hit’s no Boy Scout, I grant you, but he didn’t
intend—
’

‘I don’t give a damn what he intended,’ Reddick said. ‘He hurt a five-year-old boy during the commission of an assault. Damn near broke his neck. Far as I’m concerned, he got off easy.’

The cop fell silent again, in an awkward spot. He was professionally obligated to admonish Reddick, to make some concerted effort to condemn his attack on an unarmed man damn near half his age, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. Reddick knew the nature of his confliction, because he’d seen it in others before: Just as he had out at Castaic Lake six months ago, the uniform probably admired him. If he had a wife and kids of his own, how could he not envy the zeal with which Reddick seemed determined to defend his family from all the scumbags of the earth?

‘Tell you what, Mr Reddick,’ the cop said eventually, closing his little notebook up to announce that he was all through asking questions. ‘We’re gonna let you go. Again. The kid wants to sue you in civil court later, that’s his privilege, but I’m not gonna bust you for protecting your boy from someone who, as you just pointed out, was in the act of committing an assault of his own.’

Reddick waited for the ‘but.’

‘But I’d like to offer you a little bit of advice, if I may.’ He fixed his eyes on Reddick’s, made sure he had his full attention before going on. ‘You know that expression “chill out”? I think you’d better learn how to do that. Because if this sort of thing happens to you as often as I think it does . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, the wrong people are gonna get hurt. It’s only a matter of time.’

Thirty minutes later, Dana took her own turn making Reddick feel like an ass.

Dropping their son off at home at the ungodly hour of one a.m. had been an easy tip-off that something had gone wrong. Reddick could be irresponsible, but never where Jake was concerned. That much, at least, she knew about him.

‘What happened, Joe?’ she asked, after he had laid the sleeping boy down in his bed and she had escorted Reddick back to the door, like a prison guard showing an inmate the way back to his cell.

‘Nothing,’ Reddick said. ‘The movie ran late and we ate after instead of before. I should’ve called, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re lying,’ Dana said.

Reddick stared at her, his cheeks burning. Eight years his junior at thirty-three, his estranged second wife was a big-boned, auburn-haired beauty whose luminous green eyes had always disarmed him, but never more so than at times like this, when he was trying to feed her a line. So he cut to the chase, gave her a short version of the evening’s events, doing what he could to make them sound innocuous. She wasn’t fooled one bit.

‘Jesus, Joe,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I know. Same old Red. Thank God he’s soon to be your ex, huh?’

‘Don’t do that. Don’t start talking about
us
when we were talking about
you
.’

‘Let it go, Dana. No damage was done, all right?’

‘You can’t go on this way, Joe. You need to start seeing Dr Elkins again. If you don’t—’

‘Hey, I’ve gotta go. Do me a favor, tell Jake I’ll call him tomorrow or Monday, come by to see him again next week. OK?’

He turned to leave and Dana let him, both of them lacking the energy to resume their favorite pastime of late, arguing endlessly over things that would never change. She had disappeared inside the house before he could even back his car out of the driveway.

The five-mile drive to Reddick’s apartment in Echo Park was a long one. He deliberately took the surface streets to extend it, to give himself time to gear down before any attempt at sleep could prove futile. He even put the radio on, scanned the dial until he found an FM station playing the most sedate pseudo-jazz imaginable.

But his mind raced helter-skelter all the same.

He’d come a long way in nine years. That much was irrefutable. The recurring nightmare that had chased him out of Florida rarely visited him anymore, and when it did, he could deal with it, shake off its effects before he did something stupid to make the pain go away. He had some semblance of self-control now.

But in many ways, he was still damaged goods. Just another crazy waiting for his next dark impulse to come unglued. That he had been moved to violence tonight by more noble motives than usual did little to change this fact.

Still, Reddick was all but unrepentant. A return to normalcy would have been nice, but normalcy had its drawbacks. Complacency, in particular. Belief in the idea that nothing bad ever happened to those who didn’t somehow ask for it, either by omission or commission. Or that the safety and security of the people you loved was something you could purchase with cold, hard cash, rather than forge in blood, time and time again. These were all mere delusions, lies people told themselves to give them comfort at night, and every day they cost some poor bastard dearly.

But not Reddick. Reddick was one of the enlightened. And being enlightened, he felt little fear, because now he knew what was necessary to hold on to what was his, to keep those who peopled his private little universe out of harm’s way: Vigilance. Constant vigilance. That, and a ready and unapologetic willingness to do unto others long before they could do unto those he loved. Reddick’s rule to live by was a simple one: No one hurt his family for free,
ever
– and nothing would ever make him abandon it. Not Dana’s threats of divorce, not being separated from his son – nothing.

He had been burned once. It would never happen to him again.

With home less than five minutes away, Reddick sped south through a yellow light on Fletcher Drive just before the Glendale Freeway exit ramp, saw nothing but clear sailing ahead and then a white van on his right came out of nowhere to leap into his path.

Reddick stood on his brakes and turned his wheel hard left to avoid the collision, sending his Mustang across the double yellow line dissecting the street. Conversely, the driver of the white Chrysler hit the gas, burned rubber in his own quest to keep the two vehicles apart. But both men were attempting the impossible. Inevitably, the Ford and Chrysler slammed together, right headlight to left rear quarter panel, then skidded to a halt, both gouged and dented but otherwise intact.