Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“Let her take the child and go.”

“Sure.”

“Robin?”

She looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

“Get your baby,” I tell her.

She looks at the child, then back at me.

“Get up and get your baby.”

The Mexican is smiling. He knows if he can take me down, he can catch the woman and her child before they can get to the front door.

She stands up. Takes a few tentative steps into the room.

“Come behind me,” I tell her.

The Mexican smiles at me. He could grab her in a second, force me to drop the iron, then cut her throat and kill me.

She moves behind me, grabs the child, huddles him in her arms.

“Go,” I tell her.

She moves to the door, then turns and looks at me.

“Go!” I turn my head and take my eyes off of him for a fraction of a second.

In that instant he comes at me. The blade comes underneath. He reaches up with the hand of his wounded side and grabs the action end of the iron before I can swing.

I trap his arm with the razor under one elbow against my side.

“Go!” Between clenched teeth. It’s all I can do to keep from biting my tongue as Saldado’s body crashes into me, his shoulder coming up under my chin, forcing my head farther to the right.

With terror etched in her eyes, clutching her child, she disappears down the hall.

Saldado, with the razor hand trapped under my arm, tries to maneuver his wrist to cut into my back. I feel the blade scraping against the cotton fabric of my shirt, and I pull him, twisting, whirling to keep him off balance.

I leverage the weight of my body and let physics do the rest. Centrifugal force sends us hurtling across the room until our feet hit an immovable object, Espinoza’s body, and gravity takes over.

I cuff my hand around the back of his neck and, on the way down, give him a hard shove, accelerating his fall and driving him onto his chest.

I hit the floor on one shoulder. The crushing contact knocks the wind out of me.

Saldado takes it on the chest, landing directly in front of my eyes. He expels a mist of vaporized blood from his nose and mouth, propelled by breath from a punctured lung. The hand with the blade slaps the floor and the razor clatters across the old hardwood planks.

For several seconds neither of us moves. Crumpled on my side against the end of the couch, unable to breathe, I listen to his wheezing punctuated by occasional groans.

My brain is beginning to go blank, vision blurred like someone has poured water over a sheet of glass in front of my eyes.

I see him lift his head, the frothy bubbles of blood dripping from his mouth and nose.

My own breath comes slowly, shallow, my head as light as helium.

He struggles onto to his hands and knees, his eyes glazed with pain and pitted with anger as he looks at me and weaves on all fours.

I focus on the shining blade across the floor.

He turns his head and sees it.

I try to move, but my body won’t obey. My feet are cold, vision dimming; audible illusions begin to fill my ears, sounds of buzzing.

When my eyes return to him, Saldado’s attention is no longer on the razor across the floor. Instead he is struggling to his feet, holding his side, his dark eyes directed toward the front of the building. As my vision fades, I recognize the sound, somewhere beyond the walls of the room, the electronic harmonics of a siren.

I reenter the world of the living from a haze, a foggy view of the plastered ceiling in the Mexican’s apartment.

Flat on my back for some reason, I’m feeling no pain. The hard floor is gone, replaced by something softer. I try to sit up, but I can’t. I am strapped to a gurney. I start to raise one hand toward my head, and somebody reaches out and grabs my arm. “Stay still. You’re gonna pull the needle out.”

Guy in a blue uniform taping a needle down on the back of my hand. He has one knee on the floor, working over me, adjusting a little plastic wheel on a tube from a bag of clear fluid that is running down through the needle, and into me.

“How you feelin’?”

I try to talk. “Like I got a chip of wood in my throat.”

“Don’t talk. Lieutenant. He’s startin’ to come around.”

The bag for the I.V. drip is being held by another EMT, standing over him. The needle is in my good hand, the left. My right arm is bandaged, gauze and tape all the way from the wrist to the elbow. My arms are laid across my chest, like they were getting ready to put me in a box.

“You lost a lot of blood.”

Through the frog in my throat, I talk. “I can’t feel anything.”

“That’s the pain meds.” The words come from another voice. “Don’t worry, in the morning you’ll feel like shit.” The face finally comes into view, familiar, but I can’t place it. He’s in shirtsleeves and tie, wearing dark glasses and carrying a notepad in one hand and a can of Diet Coke in the other.

“Let me sit up.” The straps hold me in place.

“No. No. Stay there.” The EMT is not going let me move.

“Right. So you can fall on your ass and sue the city.” The Diet Coke still has the icy sweat of chill on the can.

“I’d offer you one, but then you’d puke all over the crime scene. Some fucking lawyer’d find a way to use it against us in court. The vomit defense. Then we’d never be able to solve that.” He motions off to the side with the can in his hand.

I roll my head in that direction and see Espinoza. The top of his body, anyway. Most of it still wrapped in plastic except for his head and upper torso where the sheet has been sliced and peeled back like the husk off a cob of corn. His complexion is white. A narrow crease of dried blood, the thickness of dental tape, runs across his throat.

I roll my head back to look at the guy in the dark glasses. “Do I know you?”

“Oh, yeah.” He takes the glasses off. “Lieutenant Ortiz.” He gives me the pearly whites, skin so tight over the bone structure of his face that the dental feature could be part of a naked skull. “Remember? Had that nice conversation in your office. I did the monologue. You claimed privilege. Talked about your buddy Nick Rush, Gerald Metz. You do remember?”

I nod.

“I couldn’t be sure. All the drugs they’re putting in you from that bag. Probably almost as good as the shit Metz was selling. What do you think?”

I don’t answer him.

“What, no opinion? OK, fine. We’ll let that go. What do you think about this?” He wags his head toward Espinoza’s body. “You think it was an accident? I understand Rush was an accident. Read it in the paper,” he says. “Oh, yeah. Wandered into the path of a cruising bullet. It’s like they say, speed kills.” He looks at me, leaning over again.

I don’t respond.

“What, nothing to contribute? Jeez, for a fuckin’ mouthpiece, you don’t have much to say. And I was led to believe you were the mastermind behind that insurance coup. Well, that’s fine. You save your voice. We can talk tomorrow. Besides, one dead body at a time. Which leads us back to this one. You didn’t happen to see it when it happened, did you?”

I shake my head.

“I shoulda figured that. What can you tell me? Let’s see. We know he’s dead. What did he use, a scalpel?”

I turn my head the other way, toward the floor across the room. It’s gone. I look back at Ortiz. “A straight razor.”

“Aw. That what he cut you with?”

I nod.

“A name?”

I have to clear the frog living in my throat before I can get the word out. “Saldado.”

“Ah. I take it somebody you didn’t represent this time. Good for you. He’s the one lived here, right?”

I nod.

“Man has a funny way of treating visitors,” he says.