Behold the Child (2 page)

'Fuck that!" Kenzie bellowed. "Cover me."

He took a deep breath, gathered his legs and scrambled up the front steps on his elbows and knees. The front door was still open a few inches. Time expanded and then contracted again, everything slowed to a crawl. Kenzie saw a ratty green sofa and chair, a fat joint burning uselessly in an overflowing ashtray; magazines in piles next to an incongruously new wide-screen television set with surround-sound speakers. He crawled, moving a little closer; the 9 mm Glock clenched in his sweaty hands, then peered through the foot of the door into the hallway.

Motorcycle boots, fat legs in blue jeans. Kenzie fired even as his eyes traveled up the body to take in the long beard, wild "tweaker" eyes and pierced brows. The legs exploded into gore and bare bones. The biker wailed and went down. Another shot blew his jaw away. then he went silent. The shotgun he'd been holding fell uselessly to the wooden floor.
Hey, Gato, nice to meet you.

Bear, from down the hall, probably in one of the back bedrooms: "Gato?
Ese
, are you okay, man?"

Kenzie went into the living room, gun up and searching every corner; heart in his throat and pulse throbbing painfully. He eyed the body, kicked the shotgun away and shifted to the left of the hall just as Oso fired two shots at the front of the house. Part of the door disappeared, and the living room was bathed in an eerie, shifting light as the cop cars arrived from all angles and focused their floods.

"Manuel Ortega? This is Detective Sam Kenzie, LAPD. Let's cool it for a minute and talk things over."

After a long pause, Oso answered, which Kenzie knew to be a good sign. He was panting, breathing heavily; high as a weather balloon on meth. "Talk what over, man? I ain't going back inside,
ese
, I promise you that."

"So let's talk."

"Talk about what, cop? Huh?"

"Hey, who cares," Kenzie said. He forced his voice to stay casual. "First, about how I'm getting too old for this shit. I'm nearly fifty, Oso. Don't make me chase you, okay?"

"Fuck you."

"Okay, how about it's not too late to help yourself, here."

"The fuck you mean? Huh? Help myself how, cop? I can't take it any more, man. I can't stand the pain."

"What pain, Oso?"

"
The
pain. I can't stand it, man. And no more of this I poke death bullshit, either! You know what I mean?"

Kenzie didn't, but played along. "Yeah. Sure. The I poke death thing."

He willed himself to stay calm, sound confident. He edged closer to the doorway. "I know something you can do about it," he said.

"Yeah, right. And what's that,
ese
?"

"You can let the kid go," Kenzie said. "That would sure make you look good. Then you get a bad-ass lawyer and you never know, right?"

"What kid you talking about?" Oso taunted. "You see some kids around here, or something? Huh?" But his response had taken a few seconds too long. Oso was thinking it over.

"Oso?"

"What kids, cop? Huh? Fuck off, man. I can't stand the pain."

He had the girl right there in the room with him. Kenzie just
knew
that somehow. He had always trusted his instincts.

And he also knew that Oso had just decided to kill her.

"Cop?"

Kenzie took a deep breath. He slid around the corner, gun up and at the ready, and started inching down the hall. The deep voice had come from the right and towards the back of the house. The junkie had said there were only two men inside. Kenzie knew he had to take his chances, or the little girl was dead. He approached the first bedroom, risked a peek. No one there.

"Come here," Oso growled softly. Someone whimpered; someone with a very high and fragile voice. They were in the back bedroom. A floorboard squeaked beneath his foot and Kenzie winced.

"Cop? You out there?"

"I'm coming in now," Kenzie said. "Let's not shoot each other, okay?"

He spun around the corner and stepped into the bedroom, the 9 mm cocked and ready. His hands were shaking, but he still managed to draw a bead on Oso's perspiring forehead. The huge man held a girl in a death grip, despite his wounded arm. She was a horrified, small-boned teen with her hair in a pony tail. She seemed astonishingly tall. The 357 was aimed right at the back of her skull. Time swirled into a black hole as the two men stared, unblinkingly, into each other's eyes.
Oh, shit, oh shit . . .

Kenzie finally registered that the girl was standing on a chair. Oso was using her body as a shield. She wore a white blouse with cut-off blue jeans, and her thin legs were trembling. She reminded him of his sister.

Kenzie took a long moment, then said: "Oso, I think we have us a difficult situation, here."

Oso was wild-eyed, amped, soaring on methamphetamines and nearly psychotic. His jailhouse tattoos pulsed with blood and twitched from adrenaline. He cackled and held the girl closer, his snarling face next to hers so that Kenzie couldn't shoot. "Fucking difficult? No shit! Give me your fucking gun."

Sweat burned in Sam Kenzie's left eye. He blinked it away without once closing his right. "You know I can't do that," he said.

"I poke death, man. Now give me your fucking gun, or I do the girl!"

Kenzie didn't move. "And then I shoot you," he said. "What good is that?"

"I don't even fucking care, cop!"

The girl who looked like his sister Jenny whimpered and Kenzie forced a smile. "Take it easy, honey," he said. "I think we can still work something out."

Kenzie felt his vision telescope. He fixated on the smallest of details; the miniscule distance between Oso's head and the girl's face, the tremble in Oso's hairy trigger finger, the cars arriving outside to surround the house. He sniffed and took in the odor of some kind of gas. The crystal meth lab! Suddenly Kenzie realized Oso only wanted to stall until the inevitable spark from gunfire would immolate them all. He was running out of time.

Oso's eyes widened slightly, as if he were reading Kenzie's mind. "Don't even think about it asshole. I'll kill her first." Talking made his head move half an inch further away from his captive's.

Kenzie took the shot. He stole a deep breath, released it part way and squeezed the trigger; unfortunately just a split second after someone outside tried to use the bullhorn. The resulting screech caused Oso to turn slightly towards the window. The 9 mm slug neatly removed his left eye, his wide nose and part of his sinus cavity. A fine mist of crimson and grey sailed high in the air behind him. Then the bullet ricocheted out of Oso's skull and traveled down into the trembling neck of the young girl, who looked startled and mildly upset, as though someone else had rudely passed gas in an elevator. A crimson fount shot out of her carotid artery. She immediately went pale and began to sink to the floor.

Kenzie cried: "No!"

Meanwhile, what was left of Oso's mind finally directed his fat, hairy finger to pull the trigger of the 357 Magnum. Kenzie, horrified by the death of the girl, had already fired once more, hitting Oso in the chest. Then he managed to cover his balls in a useless defensive maneuver before the hollow-point bullet went right through his splayed fingers, tore the thin webbing of skin between two of them and viciously penetrated his lower intestines. There it spun, end over end, creating tremendous internal injury and releasing fecal matter into his bloodstream. What was left of Oso dropped like a sack of bricks.

Sam Kenzie fell to his knees, then sideways onto the floor. He felt thirsty and hot and his groin felt like it was on fire. He heard the cops storming the house, someone screaming for an ambulance, and he wondered if they would be too late to save him. Suddenly he was cold and shivering and the pain was unbearable. He watched the young girl bleed out onto a cheap, coffee-stained throw rug.

That's when he woke up.

The world was a white blur. As his eyes came into focus, Kenzie realized he was in a hospital bed. The pain was incredible, but somehow he had survived. He wiggled his fingers and toes and discovered that he wasn't paralyzed, searched and found the expected IV needle in his arm.

His balls.

He tried to move his hands low enough to explore his genitalia, but one was fastened to a board with the IV and the other buckled to the metal frame of the bed. Kenzie gasped in horror. They didn't want him to touch himself down there. The bullet had struck him low, and torn up his guts. He remembered that much.
Jesus, he had lost his cock and balls.

"Hello?"

No one answered.

He had to know.

Kenzie struggled to free the hand they had fastened to the bed. He tried clenching the muscles in his pelvis, but everything seemed fuzzy and moved in slow motion. He felt a sharp pain in the groin area, but logic told him that this might just be a catheter inserted into his penis. It didn't prove anything.

"Nurse? Hello?"

He found the nurses call button with his trembling fingers and pushed, then pushed again.

Darkness began to overtake him.

Suddenly Kenzie felt terrified of going under. He was panicked that he might die while he was sleeping; never get to explain what had happened in Oso's house, why he'd had to take that shot, to clarify what had gone so horribly wrong. The world seemed to slide into thin, colored slats that moved further away. He was sinking fast; heart thudding, breathing rapid and shallow. Footsteps entered the room, someone spoke, but it was too late. He was unconscious.

Someone said something, and Kenzie woke up. It seemed he'd slept only a matter of a few minutes, but the itch on his face told him he badly needed a shave. At least a few days had gone by.

"How long?"

It sounded like the voice of a man with the harsh, raspy voice of a chronic smoker. For a long moment Kenzie didn't realize that it was his own voice, that he'd spoken his thoughts.

"Honey?"

A woman's voice. Laura was in the room with him. Kenzie tried to speak again, but the effort exhausted him. The room began to spin, and he was abruptly terrified that he would vomit; that then his belly wound would pop open and his stinking guts spill out. The pain increased. He remembered the blood spurting from the girl's neck and the bullet striking his stomach. Kenzie, half delirious, wailed his darkest thoughts. He said: "Damn it, you and the baby made me hesitate."

"What?"

"I hesitated, Laura. I lost my fucking edge."

"Oh, Sam, forgive me . . . "

And then he wanted to tell Laura that he was sorry, that he didn't really mean what he'd just said, but by then it was already too late. The 'pain train' was back. Agony tore through his insides and stole all reason.
I can't stand the pain any more ese, I can't stand the pain . . .
Moments, hours, days flew by. Kenzie moaned and grunted and writhed on the bed, generally drugged out of his mind. The world had no sharp edges, everything was blurred and distorted. He had a surgery, and then got cut another time or two; maybe too many operations to count.

In fact, Kenzie, at first humiliated, almost got used to watching his own shit flow into a plastic bag.

Almost.

One morning something felt different. Perhaps his medications had been changed, or it was merely that enough time had gone by for the healing to begin in earnest, but the world seemed almost back to normal. Kenzie found he was able to crack a joke and to smile. More time passed; sunny and then cloudy days. Several cops he knew came to visit, and quietly congratulate him on having "blown the assholes away." No one mentioned the dead girl, and Kenzie was grateful for that.

And finally the plastic bag of excrement was missing. Kenzie could see the furniture, the flowers, and the trees outside the hospital window even more clearly than before; the thin veil of cellophane, probably created by the pain medication, was finally gone.

"Honey?"

Sam Kenzie turned his head and saw Laura. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she had lost a great deal of weight, but Kenzie figured he didn't look so good himself. He thought his wife was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

"Hi."

Laura began to cry. "You're going to be okay," she gasped. "The surgeon says you're going to be fine."

"I know. He told me."

"How do you feel now, Sam?"

He searched himself. "Weak," he said. "Really weak." And then he looked more closely at Laura, at how thin she was, and something deep inside began to shrivel and die. He struggled to speak again. "What's bothering you, honey?"