Lion Plays Rough (9 page)

“Don't worry,” Teddy said. “Nothing's going to happen.”

“Where we going?” I felt a shrug on one side of me. I thought of Teddy lying in a coma after being shot all those months ago, how I'd believed then that if he'd had any choice he'd want to die rather than live. I still didn't know whether I'd been right or wrong to think that. I hadn't ever gotten around to asking him. Now it seemed that maybe I never would.

We drove a short distance through the old hospital grounds, then came to another gate. Before the car came to a full stop, the man in front was already out and unlocking another chain. With the car stopped again I felt the muscles in my legs tightening to spring, but there was nowhere to run as they walked us through knee-high grass. I kept telling myself, I will stop, I will make them do it here if they are going to do it. At last I fell to my knees. “I'm not going any farther.”

“Boss doesn't want the car down there, so we got to walk the rest of it,” the older man said, in the even, apologetic tone of a someone who intended no harm, handling me as easily and gently as he handled that shotgun.

“Where are we going?”

“Boss wants you in the pool room. I told him he could kill you up in the club as easy as anywhere, and if he's not going to kill you, why, it's a shorter walk back to the car. But he don't care what I think. ‘Bring them down here,' he tells me. So I'm bringing you.”

Beside me Teddy stood with his arms folded. “What about security?” he asked. “Don't they have guards?”

Slightly ahead of us, the younger guy turned and held up a wallet with a badge.

“You're shitting me,” I said.

“Nah, it's legit,” the older man said.

We followed the flashlight beam across the cracked pavement, then cut through more dry grass and came to what must have been the indoor pool. Behind the building, across a ravine, I saw the old hospital, its windows dark and broken.

We ducked through a side door, the top half closed by plywood. Gravel slid under my feet, probably from the roof. Stars and moonlight shone through it. The beam lit up lane lines dangling over a debris-littered basin. Rainwater pooled still and dark on the far side, in what had been the deep end.

On the other side of the pool I saw the red ember of a cigar glowing like a slowly blinking eye. “Y'all bring those two along over here,” the smoker called.

We walked along the side, past exit doors boarded over. The air smelled swampy. Of dead things that had recently been alive. The water couldn't have been more than a few feet deep, but it looked bottomless. Shapes rose above the surface, half-submerged, half-dissolved, like carcasses or ruins: slatted deck chairs, old bottles, rotting buoys, anything that could be thrown, tipped, or rolled.

He had two of the old slatted deck chairs at the edge of a ten-foot drop, above the cluttered basin. They made us sit with our backs to the stinking hole, and they used plastic zip ties to bind our wrists. Just a nudge was all it would take to send us over, headfirst and helpless all the way down.

Then they would have to haul us out of there I told myself. And that meant they'd have to wade into all that gunk themselves, which they certainly weren't going to be eager to do when the time came. But maybe they were used to it.

The younger man used a lighter to start a bonfire on the tiles a few feet away. The paper flared quickly, the flames licking across the lacquered planks of a bench some previous visitor had busted up. In the firelight the room seemed both to shrink and expand, the near parts coming nearer, the opposite end withdrawing to such a great distance that when I glanced over my shoulder the shadows seemed to swallow everything.

The fire lit the face of the man who had been smoking. When the paper was burning on its own he tossed his cigar end into the water. I heard it hiss below. “Looks like you left your camera behind.”

“It's good to finally see you in person.”

He chuckled. But I didn't like the sound. Teddy was quiet. “Quite a coincidence, isn't it, meeting here tonight?” Damon asked.

“Aren't you going to introduce me to your associates?”

Beside me Teddy now laughed, and I felt a spreading chill, wishing that I hadn't heard that sound.

A pause. “You think this is funny, motherfucker?” Damon wanted to know.

The older of the two men who'd been handling us came around to stand loose limbed by Teddy's chair, his palm cupped over my brother's shoulder.

Teddy didn't seem to register the presence of the man at his side, the killer's touch. “You're so incredibly weak. I can smell the weakness on you.”

I spoke quickly. “This is the guy I took the pictures of,” I told him.

I asked myself if Lavinia once again had set us up, if Campbell was anywhere near this place tonight. Plus, I couldn't tell whether Teddy remembered those pictures I'd taken, whether he realized who Damon was. And yet through my fear and dismay I felt a pulse of wonder: for the first time since before the shooting, my brother had for a moment sounded like my brother again.

The older man still had one hand on Teddy's shoulder, the shotgun in his other. He began to push Teddy over experimentally, finding the pivot point where the front chair leg lifted off the ground. Teddy didn't take his eyes from Damon. He was grinning, more alive than I'd seen him for months.

Hoping to draw their attention, I said, “You must be anxious to find out who betrayed you. Who told me about your meetings with Campbell. You must realize that the same person told me to come here tonight. You have a meeting planned? You expecting another visitor?”

A moment lapsed before Damon looked at me. When he did, his face was dreamy, abstracted. This was his true anger I saw, total absorption in the pleasures of his rage, when he became merely an observer to what was about to happen. I saw that he was more dangerous than I'd supposed.

“I know who betrayed me. Jamil Robinson. Jamil, now, he ain't no longer in this world, so I don't have much need for your information.”

“It wasn't Jamil who betrayed you. He wasn't the person who called and told me to crash your little reunion. I can see how you might think that, because it was what Nikki Matson wanted you to think, but you're wrong. I'm the only one who knows who really called me, and I'm not going to tell you.”

“Nah, see, that ain't gonna fly. Teasing, holding the milk bone in my face and yanking it back, that ain't right. That's the way to get your hand bit.” Damon beckoned, and the younger of the two men came over from the fire.

“You had Jamil killed,” I went on, pressing my luck. “He wasn't yet my client when I took those pictures, only later, at the end, and only thanks to Nikki sending that false press release to the KTVU News, blowing smoke up your ass.”

“Nikki Matson would sell out a client for a steak sandwich on rye bread.” This, from Teddy.

Damon's face twisted; then he chuckled. “I hear you're some kind of a retard these days. Don't know how I feel about killing no retard.”

“Put the gun to your own head and pull the trigger,” Teddy said. “That's the only way to find out.”

Damon raised the handgun and pointed it between Teddy's eyes, my brother staring back at him. Damon glanced at me. “So this gonna be the second time you had your brother's brains on your face. Hope the bullet
takes
this time. I hate to see a good job done bad.”

Teddy just stared at him, the heavy gaze of a man you don't want to fight, because no matter how many times you hit him he'll get back up to his feet, prepared to slug away, if too little, too late.

“Damon!” a voice called from the other end of the pool, and without a word Damon raised his aim and fired into the darkness, the sound momentarily deafening me. I'd seen him alter his aim, yet I couldn't help squeezing my eyes shut.

“Police! Throw down your weapons!”

I opened my eyes. Damon was hunkered down, with Teddy and me as shields. His gun barrel passed my face once, then again. His sidekicks lay on the tiles.

“See?” Teddy said. “What did I tell you? He's finished.” I looked and saw he was gloating. Was this part of his pathology, an inability to recognize danger? Had his survival released him from fear? Or was it that now, longing for death, he no longer feared it?

Whatever it was, he seemed as unfathomable to me as he'd always been, an indication that the brother I knew was still in there, fighting through the fog.

“It's Campbell!” the voice called. “I was just fucking with you. I'm coming down to your end now.”

Damon persisted in scanning the darkness through the space between Teddy and me, then stood. Campbell came along the pool edge in his patrol uniform. Even now, wearing his regulation blues, he carried himself like a man in a six-hundred-dollar suit, his shoulders back, a subtle swagger to his athletic stroll.

Damon again halfway raised the gun, suspicious. “This the end? They got the place surrounded? They send you in to negotiate? 'Cause you know, man, they ain't taking me alive.”

“Nah. I'm fucking with you. They got me on patrol duty. I'm patrolling.” He looked around.

Damon raised the gun a little higher. “Then what the fuck you doing here? This ain't Oakland.”

“Relax. I got a call about some trespassers up here at Oak Knoll. I'll bet these two are them.” He nodded at Teddy and me. “Looks like you managed to detain them without a struggle. Makes my job easy.”

“What job might that be?”

“Why, to arrest them, of course. Take them off your hands.”

“They ain't even here,” Damon explained. “You ain't never seen them.”

Campbell considered this, then shook his head. “No. We aren't going to play it like that.”

“What I hear is you telling me no. That's
all
I've been hearing from you lately.”

“Your real friends are the ones who say no when you need to hear it.” I had to admire the way Campbell was staying cool, but I wasn't certain Damon was into life lessons.

Meanwhile, the two guys on the floor had stood up. The younger one brushed off his clothes, then accepted the gun from Damon.

“Don't worry,” Campbell said. “I got plans for these two. They're not getting off the hook. By the time I'm through, we'll know what they know, and you won't have to worry about it coming back on you.”

“You listen to me. Nobody else but you could have stopped me from shooting that retard. Nobody. You hear that? But something always comes back.”

“Send one of them to unlock the gate,” Campbell told him, nodding at the pair of goons. “I'm taking care of it now.”

Campbell gave my car keys to the younger guy and told him to ditch the car in Oakland, neither too close to our apartment nor too far away. “That way when they find it they won't know what to think if these two haven't turned up. Maybe they went to dinner; maybe the car got jacked. So don't leave prints, but don't wipe it down, either.”

Then he told them to put us in the trunk of his unmarked car. Teddy resisted and offered a moment of struggle as the trunk was opened. He managed to jerk away briefly in a frenzied spasm. In an instant I was knocked down with a punch to the jaw while Teddy took the shotgun butt slammed into his chest. He slumped and was levered in. Damon and Campbell went on chatting with apparent unconcern. I was on my feet again almost immediately, head spinning. Now the younger one had his handgun out. Gesturing me in, he lowered the trunk decisively just as I yanked back my hand.

A moment later we were moving, jostling against each other in what felt like a moving coffin. We bumped and rolled over potholed roads inside the hospital grounds. Then the pavement hammered beneath us as we headed onto the freeway.

“Leo,” Teddy said hoarsely. “I think this guy might just kill us.”

“Like Damon was going to let us go?”

“The fucking psychopaths I understand, and always did much better than normal people. But a cop, someone who thinks he's above the law . . .” He didn't finish the thought and didn't have to.

We were quiet then for a while. Listening to the highway noise, trying to figure out where Campbell was taking us. At least that's what I was doing. I don't know what thoughts were running through Teddy's head, or how his mind worked anymore. After what had happened back there at the pool, I understood that I didn't know the first thing about him.

Eventually I realized that I was making sense of the almost imperceptible clues and could visualize our progress northward through the I-80 interchange toward Berkeley. Exiting the freeway, we turned once, again, then a third time. Shit. I was lost. We drove on and on, bumping over potholes, turning, stopping, rolling through intersections. I dropped into a nightmarish sleep, then was jarred awake by the loud exhaust pops of a motorcycle in the next lane.

At last we stopped, and I felt the driver's side door open. When Campbell lifted the trunk I saw the faintest tinge of dawn at the horizon, but the orange glow of the city still lit the clouds. “Get out,” he instructed, and we did. Me first, then Teddy, my brother moving stiffly, haltingly, with a stunned, startled look that made me think he didn't remember what had happened.

My knees were weak. We were in our own neighborhood, at the stub end of a street that had been cut off by the freeway, fenced on three sides, with some kind of electrical shed on the ivy-covered slope beneath us. The Rabbit was parked on the far side of the cul-de-sac.

“Get out of here,” Campbell said. His face was ashen. From his exhaustion I understood how precarious our fate had been. I wondered if I was the one who'd put him so far out on whatever limb he was on. I didn't think so, not entirely, but I was there with him, and it would only take the slightest stumble for us both to fall.