Don't Leave Me (7 page)

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.