Terminal (4 page)

I
was watching from behind the second-story kitchen window of a Chinatown apartment, invisible through glass a trompe-l’oeil master had turned into translucent orchids on a white frost background.

A man entered the small park. Difficult to guess his height from my angle of observation; impossible to guess his weight inside the thigh-length denim coat. White man, red knit watch cap on his head, some kind of work gloves on his hands.

All of the battered benches were occupied except for one. Every time a local wino had tried to stretch himself out on it, a couple of young Chinese with glossy pompadours and high-sheen silk shirts under fingertip black-leather jackets would detach themselves from a clot at the entrance, stroll over, and explain that the bench was reserved.

Most just moved along, but one guy, who had approached the bench while having an animated, angry conversation with himself, swung a clenched fist at the first Chinese kid who approached. They took him down like wolves cutting a cripple from the herd.

Those kids were all shooters, but I never saw a gun, much less heard a shot. I guess they were learning more from Max than humility and respect.

The white man walked over to the empty bench. Sat down. Lit a cigarette. Stared straight ahead, as if the smoke held secrets he needed to know.

Five of the Chinese kids approached. Two behind him, one at each side, the other squared up, hands empty but ready to draw.

I’m not a lip-reader, and I didn’t have binoculars anyway. But I didn’t need any of that to know what the Chinese kid said as he carefully removed a small, bronze-colored glass bottle out of his jacket and handed it to the man.

“You drink this now.”

The man never hesitated. He opened the bottle, tilted it to his lips, swallowed. He held the bottle upside down, shook it a few times, showing them he had emptied it.

The Chinese kids took the bottle and walked away from the bench, back to their posts.

Nobody bothered the white man when he stretched out on his back and closed his eyes.

F
our hours later, the man opened his eyes.

“Don’t sit up too fast,” I told him. “Just ease into it, or it’s gonna hit you like an ice pick in the spine.”

If waking up in an abandoned warehouse with holes in the roof and rats running the rafters bothered him, he didn’t show it.

“You”—he glanced at his wristwatch, taking care to move slowly—“had plenty of time to make sure. Right?”

“Right,” I agreed. Whoever he was, he’d been searched as deeply as you could search a human. By the best in the business, men and machines both. He hadn’t been carrying a weapon, or anything that could be used as one. He hadn’t been wired. He wasn’t GPS’ed.

And nobody could have followed the pony-express handoffs we’d used to finally get him here.

He gingerly patted his pockets. We’d put everything back where we’d found it. He’d been carrying a current California driver’s license. Claude Davis Dremdell. Brown/blue. Six feet one, 212. DOB: 1/9/44. His photo matched all the info except that this guy was bald. Not skinhead-shaved, hairless as a teardrop. And not just his head, his whole body. He didn’t even have eyebrows.

When his clothes had been removed, I could see his upper body had been covered in White Power ink, prison-issue. Some of it pretty artistic, some just blue blobs of hate messages, down to the thick swastika on the back of his left hand.

“Anything else you want me to do?” he said, slowly pulling himself into a sitting position, patting his pockets again until he found his cigarettes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Talk.”

“Y
ou know how the niggers call each other ‘dog,’ like they invented the concept? Well, they didn’t. Niggers never invented—”

I raised my hand like a traffic cop.

“Yeah, that’s right. Silver said you run with—”

“What he would have told you is there’s only one color I care about. You went to a lot of trouble to get this meet. Took a lot of risk, too. Silver vouched for you with me, same way he did me with you. There’s nothing about you that smells cop. Fair enough. But you’ve been around enough to understand we’re not alone here. You wanted it this way: nothing on the phone, nothing in writing. When this is over, you’re going to have another drink. We’ll leave you somewhere safe, make sure nobody bothers you until you wake up.

“So there’s only one question left,” I said to him. “When do you want to take that drink?”

“Can I tell my story?”

“Not if it’s going to be the one you started with. I heard that one already.”

“But that’s the only way to set the—”

“You’re an intelligent man. I can see that. Feel it. And you must be a righteous one, too, if Silver has your trust. But me, I’m a money man, period. You want to tell me a story with a big-money ending, I got all the time you need. You want to tell me some mud-people/ice-people story, you might as well drink up now, pal.”

He got his smoke going, closed his eyes for a second, then nodded, like he was agreeing with himself.

“You got other references, you know,” he said, giving me a skull’s smile. “Guy named Bobby says you did a deep solid for us, way back.”

I picked up the sound of a slowly approaching car. Nothing necessarily bad—there wasn’t ever much traffic out where we had him stashed, and the unlit roads were busted concrete, so nobody went
too
fast, but…I raised my left finger to my lips in a “ssssh” gesture, giving me the half-second I needed to slide my short-barreled .357 Mag out and center it on his chest.

He didn’t move. Neither did I. Not my body, anyway. My mind searched for what he’d meant by the “us” I’d done a major favor for. Then I remembered. Went back.
Long
time ago.

Bobby took a seat on the hood of my car. “You calling in the marker?”

“There is no marker, Bobby. I’m asking an old friend for a favor, that’s all.”

“The guys you want to meet—you know who they are?”

“Yeah,” I told him. My eyes were on his hand. The hand with the crossed lightning bolts that looked like a swastika.

“Say the name,” Bobby shot at me, cold-eyed.

I put it on the table. “The Real Brotherhood,” I said, my voice quiet in the empty garage.

“You didn’t say it right, Burke. It’s the
Real
Brotherhood.”

“That’s how you say it, Bobby.”

“That
is
how I say it. And that’s how it is.”

“I told you on the phone. I got no beef with them. I just want to talk.”

I let it hang there—it was his play. He reached into my pocket and helped himself to a smoke. I saw the pack of Marlboros in the side pocket of his coveralls—he was showing me we were still friends.

Bobby took the blazing wooden match I handed him, lit up. He slid off the fender until he was sitting on the garage floor, his back against the steel of my car door. The way you sit on the yard.

He blew smoke at the ceiling, waiting. I hunkered down next to him, lit a smoke of my own.

When Bobby started to talk his voice was hushed, like in church. He bent one leg, resting his elbow on his knee, his chin in his hands. He looked straight ahead.

“I got out of the joint way before you did. Remember I left all my stuff for you and Virgil when they cut me loose? I got a job in a machine shop, did my parole, just waiting, you know? A couple of guys I know were going to the Coast. See the sights, nail some of those beach blondes out there, check out the motors, right?

“I get out there and everybody’s doing weed—like it’s legal or something. I fall in with these hippies. Nice folks—easygoing, sweet music. Better than this shit here. You see it, Burke?”

“I see it.” It was true—convicts see all kinds of things, always going over the Wall in their minds.

“I get busted with a vanful of weed. Two hundred keys. Hawaiian. And a pistol. I was making a run down to L.A., and the cops stopped me. Some bullshit about a busted taillight.”

He took a drag of the smoke, let it out with a sigh. “I never made a statement, never copped a plea. The hippies got me a good lawyer, but he lost the motion to suppress the weed, and they found me guilty. Possession with intent. Ex-con with a handgun. Worse, I wouldn’t give anybody up.

“They dropped me for one-to-fucking-ever. Knew I’d have to do a pound before I even see the Board.”

Bobby locked his hands behind his head, resting from the pain. “When I hit the yard I knew what to do—not like the first time, when you and Virgil had to pull me up. I remembered what you told me. When the niggers rolled up on me, I acted like I didn’t know what they were talking about. They told me to draw my commissary the next day and turn it over.”

Bobby smiled, thinking about it. The smile would have scared a homicide cop. “I turn over my commissary, I might as well turn myself over at the same time—so they could fuck me in the ass. I get myself a shank for two cartons—just a file with some tape on the end for a grip. I work on the thing all night long, getting it sharp.

“In the morning, I draw my commissary. I put the shank in the paper bag with the tape sticking up. I walk out to the yard with the bag against my chest, like a broad with the groceries. The same niggers move on me, tell me to hand it over. I pull the shank and plant it in the first guy’s chest, trying for his heart.

“The spike comes out of him when he goes down. I back up to get room to finish him. Turn around and…I’m alone—the niggers took off. I hear a shot, and the dirt flies up right near me. I drop the shank, and the goon squad comes for me.”

“You should’ve dropped the shank and run,” I said.

“I know that now. I wasn’t expecting them to shoot so quick. Things are different there.”

Bobby ground out his cigarette on the garage floor, took one of his own, and lit it. “They put me in the hole. Expected that. Fucking solitary out there, it’s as big as a regular prison; guys spend fucking
years
in there. Only they call it the ‘Adjustment Center.’ Nice name, huh? There’s three tiers on each side. Little tiny dark cells.

“The noise was unbelievable—screaming all the time. Not from the guards’ beating on anyone—crazy assholes screaming just to be screaming. Half of them were stone fucking nuts…maybe from being locked up there for so long.

“I was sitting in my cell, thinking about how much more time I’d get behind this, even if the guy I stuck didn’t rat me out. I mean, they’d caught me with the shank and all. Then it started.

“The niggers. ‘You a dead white motherfucker!’ ‘You gonna suck every black dick in the joint, pussy-boy!’ All that shit. I yelled back at the first one, but they kept it up, like they were working in shifts or something. And then one of them yelled out that the guy I stabbed was his main man, so he was personally gonna cut off my balls and make me eat them.

“They were fucking animals, Burke. They never stopped. Day and night, calling my name, telling me they were gonna throw gasoline in my cell and fire me up, put glass in my food, gang-fuck me until I was dead.”

Bobby was quiet for a minute. His voice was solid, but his hands were shaking. He looked, curled them into fists. “After a couple of days, I didn’t have the strength to yell back at them. It sounded like there were hundreds of them. Even the trusty—the nigger scumbag who brought the food cart around—he spit in my coffee, dared me to kite the warden.

“Finally, they pulled me out to see the Disciplinary Committee. They knew the score—even asked me if the niggers had hit on me. I didn’t say a word.

“The lieutenant told me the shank itself was no big deal—the other guy was going to make it, claimed he’d never seen who stuck him. But I’d have to take a lockup—go into PC for the rest of my bit. You know what that means?”

“Yeah,” I said. PC is supposed to stand for “protective custody.” For guys who can’t be on the mainline: informers, obvious femmes, guys who didn’t pay a gambling debt…targets. To cons, PC means Punk City. You go in, you never get to walk the yard. And you carry that jacket the rest of your bit.

“They kept me locked down two weeks—no cigarettes, nothing to read, no radio, nothing. Just those niggers working on me every day. They never got tired, Burke, like they fucking
loved
that evil shit. Screaming about cutting pregnant white women open and pulling out the babies, stuff like that.

“Then, one day, it got real quiet. I couldn’t figure it out. That fucking trusty came around. He didn’t have coffee that time; he had a note for me—a folded piece of paper. I opened it up. There was a big thick glob of white stuff inside. Nigger cum.

“I got sick, but I was afraid to throw up—afraid they’d hear me.

“That’s when one of them whispered to me—it was so quiet it sounded like it was coming from the next cell—‘Lick it up, white boy! Lick it all up, pussy! We got yard tomorrow, punk. The Man letting us all out, you know what that means. You lick it all up, tell me how good it was!’ He’s saying all this to me, and all I could think of was, there was no way to kill myself in that lousy little cell. All I wanted was to die. I pissed on myself—I was sure they could all smell it.”

Bobby was shaking hard now. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he was lost in the fear. “I got on my knees. I prayed with everything I had. I prayed for Jesus—stuff I hadn’t thought of since I was a kid.

“If I didn’t say anything, I was dead. Worse than dead. I looked at that paper with that nigger’s cum on it. I went into myself—and then I saw how it had to be. I found a way to get the only thing I still wanted…to die like a man.

“I got to my feet. My voice was all messed up from not saying anything for so long, but it came out good and steady. It was still quiet; everybody heard me. ‘Tell me your name, cocksucker!’ I yelled at him. ‘I don’t want to kill the wrong nigger when we go on the yard, and you monkeys all look alike to me.’

“As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt different—like God came into me—just like I’d been praying for.

“Then they went fucking crazy! Like a pack of raving maniacs. But it was like they were screaming on some upper register…and underneath it was this heavy bass line, like in music. A chant, something. It was from the white guys in the other cells—some of them right near me. They hadn’t made a sound through all this shit—just waiting to see how I’d handle myself, I found out later. I couldn’t hear them too good at first, just this heavy, low rumbling. But then it came through all the other stuff. ‘R
B!
R
B!
R
B!’”

Bobby was chanting the way he’d heard it back in his cell, hitting the second letter for emphasis, pumping strength back into himself, squeezing the pus out of the wound again.

“They kept it up. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. There for me. They didn’t say anything else. I started to say it, too. First to myself. Then out loud. Real loud. Like prayer words.

“When they racked the bars for us to hit the exercise yard—one at a time—I walked out. After so long, the second the sunlight hit me in the face, I almost couldn’t see.

“I heard a voice. ‘Stand with us, brother,’ it said.”

Bobby looked at me. His eyes were wet, but his hands were steady, and his voice was cold. “I’ve been standing with them ever since, Burke,” he said in the quiet garage. “If you got a beef with them, you got one with me.”

I stood up. Bobby stayed where he was. “I already told you—I got no beef with your brothers. I want to ask some questions, that’s all. I’ll pay my own way.”

Bobby pushed himself off the floor. “You think you could find the Brotherhood without me?”

“Yeah,” I told him, “I could. And you know I could. If I was looking for them like you think, I wouldn’t have come here, would I?”

He was thinking it over, leaning against the car, making up his mind.

Bobby made a circuit around my Plymouth—the one I’d had back then—peering into the engine compartment, bouncing the rear end like he was checking the shocks.

“When’s the last time this beast got a real tune-up, Burke?”

“A year ago, maybe a year and a half, I don’t know,” I said.

“Tell you what,” he said, his voice soft and friendly, “you leave the car here, okay? I’ll put in some new plugs, time the engine for you. Change the fluids and filters, align the front end. Take about a week or so, okay? No charge.”

“I need a car for my work,” I said, my voice as soft and even as his.

“So I’ll lend you one, all right? You come back in a few days—a week at the most—your car will be like new.”

I didn’t say anything, watching him. “And while I’m working on your car, I’ll make some phone calls. Check some things out, see what’s happening with my brothers…”

I got the picture. My old Plymouth could be a lot of things—a gypsy cab, an anonymous fish in the city’s slimy streets—whatever I needed. This was the first time it would be a hostage.

“You won’t know your own car when you come back, Burke,” Bobby said, his hand on my shoulder, leading me out to the front garage.

“I always know what’s mine,” I reminded him.