WHITEY CAME PARALLEL with the restaurant and jaywalked, stopping traffic. Horns lit up the morning as he dodged in and out of irate commuter cars’ paths. Through the binoculars, I could see the gang members close to the windows in Fat Boy’s Pork Palace stop talking and eating to watch the spectacle: a pale toreador dodging one-ton metal beasts without horns.
Whitey made it to the front door and paused to straighten his shirt and tuck it into his pants. He looked nothing like the Whitey from yesterday who got tossed out of IRC and then again out of the apartment. He could almost pass as an encyclopedia salesman, only that breed of hawker had gone extinct. The bold, brash way Whitey was acting, he wouldn’t be far behind, a new entry on the endangered species list.
Whitey’s lips moved as he spoke to the cute, scantily clad hostess. He waited at the podium while she left to pass on whatever cockeyed message he’d pulled out of his hat in a feeble attempt to con his way in. The promise of two hundred thousand dollars and the instinctive need to impress a beautiful woman shut down all logical thought.
I shouldn’t have let him go in. I put my hand on the door latch ready to go after him, still debating the pros and the cons of his health and welfare in the balance.
Helen, also looking through her binoculars, said, “You know, I heard tell that the American Indians didn’t mess with the mentally impaired. They thought it was bad medicine and if they did, it would bring disaster to their tribe.”
She made me smile. She pulled down her binoculars to look at me.
I said, “Geronimo and Police Killa Bitch aren’t even in the same universe. But you’re right, they may scalp him anyway.”
She smiled. “What happened here?”
“What?”
“With you, I mean? You said—”
“Oh I ah … tracked a murder suspect to an apartment over off of 10th, right down the street there. I ended up chasing him on foot to this restaurant and—”
“Oh, my God, that was about five years ago, right? That, was you? I remember seeing it on the news. It looked like a tornado went through the place. You really tore it up. I mean really trashed it.”
I shrugged and went back to looking at Whitey in Fat Boy’s, who still waited by the podium.
“And you shot the guy. That’s right, he was … getting away and you shot him in both of his legs. Point blank. Put the gun right to his legs and shot him. Everyone on the job was talking about that one. The way that place was messed up I thought it had to be ten or fifteen guys fighting in there—the way it looked. It was just you?”
“A uniform was having lunch in the restaurant; he jumped in to help. The crook didn’t want to go to jail. He was death-penalty eligible, and knew if I got the cuffs on him it was all over. He’d never take another free breath. He had to get through me to get away, and he tried his damnedest to make that happen.”
She said nothing. I pulled my binoculars down and found her staring at me. “You catch any heat over it?” she asked.
“No, I was doing my job.”
“Hmm.” She went back to watching Whitey.
The hostess returned to the podium with two knuckle-draggers, Crips with hard-core prison builds and tattoos on gleaming shaved heads. Whitey spoke fast, using his hands, trying his best to talk his way out of another beating. One of the thugs pointed to the door. They wanted him to leave. He held his ground. The two moved closer. He held up his hand to stop them. He pulled out a wad of cash, the money I’d given him the day before when he returned to the truck all beat up. The E-ticket to get on any ride in the park. But Whitey made a big mistake. He wasn’t in It’s a Small World, he was in his own Fantasyland. This gave the thugs pause, but only for a moment. One of them snatched the money from his hand. The other punched him in the face. He staggered back.
The two thugs were heavyweights, ex-cons, enforcers whose job it was to squish mild annoyances like Whitey. Break his bones and toss him to the curb.
I got out and ran into traffic dodging cars.
The horns again.
I didn’t take my eyes off Whitey. One thug kicked him again and again while he was down.
A car skidded to a stop and barely nudged me. It still hurt. I used a fist on his hood and kept going. From behind, Helen yelled at me. “Go. Go. Move.”
The restaurant door opened. Whitey flew out. He got up cradling his ribs and bleeding from his face. He looked around for something, anything he could use as a weapon. With some difficulty, he picked up a media stand, the kind that held free flyers on gentlemen’s clubs and midnight escorts. He struggled to get it over his head and ran toward the window.
I yelled, “Whitey? No!”
He chucked it.
The window crashed down in a million tiny cubes of ice. The two thugs inside spun and came out the front door just as I made it across the wide street and sidewalk. In an instant, they were all over me. In my weakened state, I didn’t have a chance with the two rhinos. I yanked the 415 Gonzales and laid the first one out, chucked him upside his head, switched off his lights. The second one was fast. He swung. I ducked, but not far enough. His fist caught the back of my head and set off some minor fireworks. I caught him on the jaw with the backswing of the 415. Small bones and teeth cracked. He went down, flopped on top of his friend, out cold. Pile-o-thug.
That was it for me. I was all done. I’d used up my entire daily allotment of energy. I bent over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
Angry gangbangers emptied out of the restaurant. Helen, in her black cowboy boots, spread her feet in a combat stance and pointed her Glock at them. “Go ahead, I’ll kill all of you. Get back. Get back, now.”
The threatened burst of violence from such a beautiful woman even caught me looking. The procession slowed at the door as too many tried to shove their way out.
We backed up to the first row of cars in the parking lot. Cornered.
A short black woman wearing all red satin pushed her way to the front of the crowd, one that was quickly turning into a lynch mob. “Hold it. Hold it. Shut up all ya all.” She held her hands high in the air.
They listened to her with an eerie reverence. The noise reduced to a murmur.
Helen eased on back to me, still holding her gun pointed at them. She whispered, “That’s Ruby Two.” Said it like I was supposed to know that name. And somehow, I did. The name ricocheted around inside my head. I couldn’t make the connection and knew it was important that I did.