David Putnam - The Disposables

I smiled. Robby still had far too much confidence in me. I was nothing more than a broken-down, wrong-side-of-forty ex-con.

Before I could say anything in response, he said. “I need your help. I’m just going to lay it out. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours and I’m dead on my feet.”

“Help you how?”

“Like the old days. I need the best of the best to shut down this asshole who’s torching everyone, and you’re it. He hit again last night, fried another one. He’s doing it more frequently now.”

“How can I help? I’m on parole.”

“I can call in a favor, fix it with your PO. I’m calling in a lot of favors on this one. All I got.”

“I can’t help you, Lieutenant, it would only get us both in trouble and you know it.”

“Like I told you, I’m so tired I can’t see straight. I don’t have time to stroke your ego or pat you on the head. You owe me, and I’m calling in your marker. You know I never intended to do it, but this situation is getting real shitty. You can’t imagine the pressure they’re putting on me.”

I did owe him. Going back a long time. He was a patrol sergeant, and I was new to the streets pushing a radio car in South Central. It was something I didn’t want to ever think about, the images of that night. Just the thought of it-her name-I’d pushed her name out of my memory and wouldn’t let it back in.

Robby stopped at a red signal at Compton Avenue. “Say something, Bruno. You know that if you and I team up like the old days, we’d have this son of a bitch all grappled up inside a week. That’s all I want from you is one week. One week, pays you up in full.”

On second thought, I really didn’t owe him, not after he shot me, though independent of his argument, I did feel the tug of morality, to do what was right.

The signal turned green. We sat at the light. Cars behind us honked. He waited.

I looked at his haggard face, his bloodshot eyes. He looked a thousand years old. Maybe I did owe him for all the times he did what was right to shut down a violent offender in the ghetto. And beyond that, he had done what was right when he went alone in the back door of the house and saved the kid from Johnny Wayne Bascombe. I hadn’t known he’d been the one. Why wouldn’t it be him? He had always championed the underdog, walked the line, often venturing into the gray area of the law to throw assholes in jail. He’d taught me to do the same. For that and nothing else I knew I was going to help him. Before I could form the words, he said her name before I could stop him. “I’m calling in your marker, pal, for the little girl twenty years ago. You owe me for Jenny.”

That night, I had been assigned code-three to a traffic accident, car vs. pedestrian. I beat the paramedics and other patrol cars. Jenny was down in the street, knocked right out of the crosswalk, knocked right out of her shiny black patent leather shoes.

The night was hot. Groups of people clustered on the sidewalk, quiet, pointing, as if I wouldn’t see Jenny.

At first I thought Jenny was some little girl’s doll tossed haphazardly from a passing car.

No first aid or medical attention was going to help her.

Half her face was mashed, the other half was perfect, angelic in the scant aura of the streetlight.

There was very little blood.

Mercifully, she died on impact.

Her blue gingham dress masked the horror underneath.

Sweaty Marty said later he came up and spoke to me but I was “zoned out,” that “I had the blood spore with my nose to the ground.”

From the debris field, the bits of headlight glass and aluminum trim knocked off the car on impact, I knew the car was old and large. Then I noticed the asshole had hit poor Jenny hard enough that her little body ruptured the radiator. I started following the water trail in the street, a trail that would be gone in minutes, evaporated into the hot summer night. The swath started out large and wide and narrowed as the murderer picked up speed as the coward fled.

I ran.

The water narrowed further and then turned to sporadic blotches.

Then, to droplets.

At an intersection, I lost it entirely. He’d caught the green, only I didn’t know which way he went. I ran in a big arc, cars skidded to a stop to avoid the tall, black uniformed deputy who’d lost his head and ran in a circle in the middle of a busy intersection.

My flashlight dimmed as it started to fail.

I thought I picked up the trail headed north that meant a left turn. I got down on one knee and still wasn’t sure. I got down, in a prone position, and sniffed. I then got up and ran in a full sprint, fighting the heat that now helped the suspect to escape, drying up the evidence.

The foot race worked.

At the next intersection the murderer caught the red and left behind a puddle. He continued on through, went two blocks, and turned on Spring Street. He’d been close to home, a mile and half away when he ran Jenny down.

The water turned rusty and led up a concrete drive to a garage door closed and padlocked. I took a minute to catch my breath and tried to shove back the lion that wanted to get even, to make things right.

In the academy they called it “your professional face.” No matter what happened, you had to put aside your personal feelings and be professional.

I went up to the door, sweat stinging my eyes, my uniform wet under the arms. I wiped my eyes clear on my short sleeve that left a sweat smudge.

I knocked.

The door opened immediately. The room on the inside was dark, the screen door between us. I couldn’t see him and didn’t know if this man, who without conscience, ran down a defenseless little girl in the crosswalk, had a weapon.

His rich and deep timbre voice said, “Can I help you, Officer?”

“Yes, I would like you to come out here and open your garage door.”

Silence for a long moment. “Heh, heh, I don’t think so, Officer. You don’t have a search warrant.”

I carefully, with as little movement as possible, reached up and tried the screen door.

Locked.

He started to close the inside door.

“Wait.”

“Yes, is there something else, Uncle Tom? Something you want to do for your whitie, the people you serve?” He didn’t try to mask the anger and hate in his tone. He was safe and he knew it, swaddled, nice and comfortable, in the shroud of the law.

The next second I sniffed it.

Alcohol.

A drunk driver.

The scent of metabolized alcohol set something off inside me, snapping the last straw. The professional face came off.

I roared.

With both hands I clawed through the screen, reached in and took hold of the enigma, a large, black man wearing a white Stetson hat. I pulled him through the screen door and out onto the ground.

“I caught that last signal,” Robby said. “You remember? By the time I turned on Spring and found the house you had that old man down in his front yard and was putting the boot to him.”

Robby had pulled me off. He had to slug me in the stomach to bring me out of the blind rage. That wasn’t how he’d saved my bacon, though. As a supervisor, he had witnessed a crime I’d perpetrated when I took the cowboy into custody with excessive force. Robby was obligated to stop me. Then turn me in for felony prosecution.

No, the way he’d really saved me came after he got everything calmed down with med aid responding for the suspect. He told me I’d done a hell of a job tracking the car, that he’d never seen anything like it, the tenacity, the perseverance. Then he helped with the story, the way it would be written, the way the courts would accept it, and at the same time save my career. Get at least some token of justice for Jenny. Six months later, Robby was transferred to run the newly formed Violent Crimes Task Force and specifically asked for me to be on his team. So started the genesis of the BMFs.