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Authors: James Scott Bell

BOOK: Don't Leave Me
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Chapter 18
In his cell, Chuck realized this was his first forced absence from Stan since his brother had come to live with him.
As kids, Stan stuck to Chuck like cherry powder to a Lik-a-Stix. School had separated them––Stan needed special classes––but they both knew it was temporary. Even when Chuck went to Afghanistan, it wasn’t like being ripped away from his brother. Stan, who was still living with their mom at that time, talked to him every day on the phone in the two weeks before Chuck left. He was proud of his joke––
You can’t forget me, Chuck. It’s AfghaniSTAN!
Yes, it was. His brother was like a landscape for Chuck, a grounding. In the weeks after Julia’s death, there was Stan. His presence was an odd comfort, but comfort it was. They knew without speaking how much they needed each other then. They cried and laughed. Stan peppered him with memorized trivia, things he’d find on the back of cereal boxes or in
The National Inquirer
.
More memories buzz-sawed in, but the one that stuck out in full color and sound was the 7-Eleven incident. Chuck was twelve and Stan eight. It was raining that day and Chuck was walking Stan home from his special class at school. Chuck had his bike and the back tire was low, so he went to the Shell station to give it some air, while Stan went into the 7-Eleven.
When Chuck came in he saw Stan in tears, a store employee holding him by the shirt. Stan was struggling in the grip. He hated to be held like that.
“What’s this?” Chuck said.
Another guy stepped around the counter wearing a 7-Eleven shirt. “He tried to steal some candy.”
“Did not!” Stan cried. “I forgot I had it!”
“Look,” Chuck said, “I know he didn’t mean––”
“Forget it. The cops are coming.”
“Come on, I’ll pay for it. We won’t come back.”
The counter guy, who looked about forty, poked his finger in Chuck’s chest. “You can leave. He can’t.”
Before Chuck could answer, Stan screamed and broke free of the other guy’s grasp. He charged the counter guy and head-butted his stomach. It was a beautiful move, Chuck would reflect later, like a fierce lineman putting everything he had into a tackling dummy.
The guy let out an
oomph
, but caught the back of Stan’s shirt. He sent Stan flying into the chips rack. Stan cried out and hit the floor, bags of Lays and Fritos tumbling on top of him.
Filled with instant rage, not thinking at all—except that they’d hurt Stan and he was going to hurt them—Chuck grabbed a pot of coffee off the burner next to him and threw it across the store. It shattered on the floor, hot coffee bursting out in a satisfying explosion.
The only other customer, an old Hispanic man, watched motionless from in front of the hot dog rollers.
There were three other pots on the coffee service. Chuck pushed them to the floor with a single motion.
The store employees came after him.
“Run, Stan! Run home and tell Mom!”
Chuck darted down the aisle, toward the drinks case, leading the counter jockeys away from Stan. He snatched bags of corn nuts and cashews along the way, then turned and faced the enemy.
Chuck had one of the best fastballs in the Tustin Little League. He showed his stuff.
By his later reckoning he threw four strikes and only two balls at the 7-Eleven All Stars. Two of the strikes got face. But it only delayed the inevitable by a few seconds.
When the two guys got to Chuck they tried to lay hands on him. Chuck got in a couple of good shin kicks and a back hand across one chest. But soon enough he was on the ground with the older of the two sitting on him.
But at least Stan was gone. He’d made it out. But when he came back to the store it wasn’t with Mom. It was with Dad, and that was not good.
His dad had to sort it out with the cops, and apparently did, after he agreed to pay all the damages.
At home he took it out on Chuck’s bare butt and legs with a nozzled hose. He laid on the stripes as if to transfer all the pain he held inside for being a failure as a father, for being out of work all the time, for having the burden of a son with special needs.
And Chuck knew then if he tried to whip Stan, Chuck would find his own rod and lay his father out. Then run away with Stan, hop a train, see the country.
Instead, a couple of days later, his father was gone for good. Last word was he was with a woman he met at a Reno casino and was riding off toward the east in her Mary Kay pink Caddy. They never heard from him again.
From then on it was only Mom and the two of them, in the little house in Tustin, where the end of the street looked like the beginning of all bad things.
And it was Chuck looking out for Stan, getting into more fights than he cared to think about, after every insult hurled at his little brother.
But now, in the 4 x 6 box, on the hard mattress, staring at the pea green ceiling, Chuck hoped Stan could make it through this night without him.
He hoped Stan wouldn’t dream about the wolf man.
Then the shadow dance began again, and Chuck knew he would not sleep. Not for a long time, at least. The figures from the past, traceable only to that war, mocked his remembering, because he could not remember fully, could not see the faces.
One of them said something. It sounded like
Rushton Line.
What was the Rushton Line? Where was it? Were these figures even real? Had he experienced this scene somehow? Was the VA doc right, that his very memories were traumatized and diffuse? Answers were always just beyond his grasp, and he knew that must be what insanity felt like. Maybe insanity, after all, would be the place he’d end up.
He fought back. He wouldn’t go nuts, not with Stan to take care of. And not until he got some other answers––about why he was here, and who was after him.
The shadows danced, the distant booms sounded, and Chuck pounded the wall with his fist. Rhythmically, punching at phantoms, music for the dance.
Chapter 19
Jimmy Stone realized his throat was as dry as microwaved cotton. He did not want to give into the fear, or even acknowledge it.
But the guy in front of him gave off the deadliest vibe he’d ever been around. Jimmy didn’t want to be here. But it was business. No choice.
Jimmy was about to break to the top of the gangland mountain. A few years ago he was playing Pony League baseball and dealing a little weed on the side. Now here he was, at 22, on the verge of controlling the distribution of H in the Valley, and running the most powerful crew in Los Angeles. Because with the Serbs behind him and his boys, he had the fire power to back up any attempted incursions.
No white gang had been able to keep Bloods and Crips from biting off territory. That was going to change on Jimmy’s watch.
But it meant taking orders from the Serbs, and they put this one called Vaso right up in his grill. Jimmy hated him, hated his voice, hated always having to meet him at night in places like this.
At least the darkness covered his own twitching muscles.
He was here with Ryan Malik, his right-hand guy, in this spot in the unincorporated hills between LA and Ventura counties. Officially it was the Ahmanson Ranch, but at this hour it felt like a graveyard. The smell of tumble brush in the night wind was strong. Jimmy never liked it. It smelled like camping, and he hated camping. Better to be where there was cement and asphalt and concrete and his boys and girls.
Vaso flashed a penlight at Jimmy’s face, making it impossible to see his expression.
“Come on, man,” Jimmy said.
“Speak only when you are spoken to,” Vaso said. His voice was low and scratchy and all out creepy. Jimmy knew he had to respect him, but he wasn’t going to be walked on. If anybody else had talked to him that way, they’d be buried right now. But this was Vaso, and you did what he said.
“Sure,” Jimmy said, but with a little edge, just to let him know.
“You ordered the hit on the girl?”
He was talking about Esperanza Gomez. “Yeah, she was gonna testify against me.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“That don’t got nothin’ to do with distribution—”
“You didn’t
ask
.”
“I gotta ask every time?”
“Do you know what happens to those who do not ask?”
Ryan spoke. “We took care of it, clean.” Jimmy heard a little waver in Ryan’s normally hardcore voice.
“You don’t talk at all,” Vaso said.
“Come on, man, enough of this,” Ryan said.
Jimmy saw a movement behind the pen light and then a
whump
sound. Ryan screamed and went down.
For a moment Jimmy froze between rage and fear.
“My leg!” Ryan cried.
Jimmy dropped to his knees, put his arm around Ryan.
“Did you have to do that?” Jimmy said.
“No,” Vaso said. “I could have done this.”
Whump.
Jimmy felt Ryan’s head snap back. Ryan made no more noise. Blood gushed out onto Jimmy’s shirt. He opened his mouth, it was dry, no sound came out of it.
“Next time, you ask,” Vaso said.
Chapter 20
Early Thursday morning they shackled Chuck, herded him onto a bus with the other criminal masterminds, and took him to the Van Nuys courthouse. They stuffed everyone into a holding cell where Chuck got to hear about cops planting evidence or kicking in doors, and a hundred other complaints.
Chuck said nothing. He was still trying to sort out what was real and what was dream in the last twenty-four hours of his life. Like a drowsiness that will not fade, his sense of being captive in a nightmare—one that was only just beginning—refused to drop from his head.
He didn’t know what time it was when the voice called his name. He went to the bars of the holding cell and saw a young woman with auburn hair and a serious look and an arm full of file folders. “My name is Carrie Stratton from the Public Defender’s office,” she said. “I’ll be representing you today. You know that you’re being charged with the attempted manufacture of a controlled substance, right?”
“That’s what they told me,” Chuck said. “But––”
“Health and Safety Code section 11379.6, sub a, and Penal Code section––”
“I don’t need––”
“––section 664. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “How can they possibly be doing this to me?”
“I’m here to help with your initial appearance. I haven’t seen the police report yet.”
“Will they let me out on bail?”
“Do you have a prior record?”
“No,” Chuck said.
Carrie opened a folder and glanced at some papers inside. “You apparently have a friend in the courtroom who said he’d post if you needed it.”
“That would be Royce.”
“He spoke to me. You know him how?”
“We met at the VA.”
“You’re a veteran?”
“I was a chaplain.”
“And you were at the VA hospital?”
“For awhile.”
Carrie looked at his neck. “You were wounded?”
“Not exactly,” Chuck said.
“How’d you get that scar?”
“Is that relevant?”
Carrie shrugged. “If it’s war related, might hold sway with the judge.”
“Then leave it at that.”
“War related?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Carrie said, and pulled a pen from her coat pocket and scribbled something on one of the papers. “That’s very good. I’ll argue you have no record, you served your country, and maybe we can get the judge to give you a get out of jail free card.”
“What else do I have to do?” Chuck said.
“Plead not guilty and we’ll ask for a continuance and you can figure out whether you’re going to be represented by private counsel or qualify for the public defender’s services.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Carrie said. “Keep your mouth shut.”
.
Rodney “The Terror” Terrell loved this time of the morning, especially when the beach was closed in by fog. It gave him the wonderful sense of being alone in the world, which is what he was anyway, and preferred it that way. He did not like people much. He liked fish.
For a few weeks in 1967 The Terror had been the number three middleweight in the world. But that was many dollars and many blows to the head ago. Now he lived alone in a motor home and caught his dinner in the early morning before the beaches got crowded. The crowds reminded him too much of the fight game, and he never liked fighting in front of people. It was all about the boxing for Terrell, the art of it. Not satisfying the blood lust of the frenzied masses.
But the returns for his boxing career were not so great. He was on welfare now and his head didn’t work so good. He couldn’t get his thoughts to pull together very often.
And when he got around people and got too excited, he was liable to punch somebody just to stop the confusion.
Which is why he liked being alone, and today looked like a good day for it. He carried his bucket of bait and his pole, his jeans rolled up, the cool sand between his toes. He got to his favorite spot. But somebody else was there. A somebody who was sleeping where he liked to set up shop.
Which was fine. He didn’t own the beach. But it was a little strange for a guy to be sleeping there at this hour without a blanket. It was cold-fog wet.
Then Terrell saw the blood. It was soaked in the sand around the guy’s head. Terrell bent over for a closer look—and saw it was just a kid, and somebody had jammed a mean-looking stick of red wood under the boy’s chin. In the red-black hole of the skin, milling around in the dead flesh, were a couple of wasps.
Rodney “The Terror” Terrell dropped his bucket and his pole and tossed his breakfast onto the beach. Then he ran up to the road to try to flag somebody down. He didn’t have a phone, and his thoughts were really jumbled, but he knew one thing for sure—the police ought to know about this.

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