It belonged to Crazy Ned Bressler, Jumbo’s main man, his enforcer. He waited at the spot to reclaim Jumbo’s seventy-five thousand dollars. Not his primary goal. He would also silence the star crook who could put Jumbo away forever.

I waved as the train flashed by him.

Chapter Twelve

I grabbed a few minutes’ sleep behind a dumpster at an AM/PM market on Denker Avenue off of Santa Barbara and made it to court the next day, banged up and so fatigued I had to fight the urge to lay down on the wooden bench and nap. Court got underway, the cases called. To watch as a bystander and not as a cop gave me a new perspective on the judicial process. The court setting gave off an air of pretentious arrogance. When I’d been on the other side of the banister, in the “good guy chair,” I was a part of their little performance—the DA, Public Defender, the judge—as they bandied back-and-forth. All the while the poor slob whose life hung in the balance, stood by, hands crossed at the waist, watching his future wander around the room in the form of words he didn’t understand. Today, I again realized how intimidating it could be as a bystander in the audience—until the bailiff brought out Johnny Wayne Bascombe. Then I just didn’t care about anything else.

Johnny Wayne Bascombe wore all orange, with “LA COUNTY” in large, white block letters across his back. His hands were shackled to his waist, and the leg irons forced him to shuffle. His arm was in a cast up to his shoulder, and his face was under reconstruction in various shades of swollen purple and reds in between railroad tracks of sutures. He stood there as a sawed-off version of Doctor Frankenstein’s monster.

They kept him in the partitioned-off section of the court, behind bulletproof glass. Not because he was so damn dangerous and a threat to public safety, but for his own protection from that same public, who if given the opportunity, would tear him apart. I forgot about my fatigue, sat up straight, and thought about the overwhelming satisfaction I would derive from five minutes alone with him. I’d do more than rearrange his face like the last lucky guy. I began to glare, trying to get him to look my way, to give him the stink-eye treatment, scare him, make him realize he had nowhere to hide, inside or out of his barred walls.

The judge called the case, the DA announced she was ready.

A hand on my shoulder startled me. I jumped and turned. Robby Wicks stood in the aisle, suit coat rumpled, tired, a smile on his haggard face. “Hey, Bruno. What the hell you doing here?”

He must have followed me. He knew all about the caper in the desert, probably saw the whole thing from the air with infrared and was laughing at the irony of taking me down in a courtroom.

“I … I … wanted to talk to you about something,” I said, quickly, with nothing else ready to feed him.

His smile faded, making him look older. He didn’t buy my weak excuse, again patted my shoulder. “Ah—sure, sure. I was going to look you up anyway. Wait around, this won’t take long. Let me test-a-lie and we’ll grab a bite to eat.” Test-a-lie, one of the words used by the BMFs.

He’d caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected to see him in Compton court, especially on this sort of case. “You’re on this?” I said. “Really? Ah, yeah, I mean, lunch sounds good.” So he wasn’t on the prowl, ready to make an arrest after all.

He smiled, figuring this was a scam and I was in court for an entirely different reason, like a pending case under an aka—also known as. That’s what I would have thought.

He walked up, raised his right hand, and was sworn in.

The Deputy DA, a Ms. Hosseni, a Middle Eastern gal, dark complexion, with black hair pulled back from her face, held by two abalone barrettes, stood at the podium. “Lieutenant Wicks, by whom are you employed?”

“Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.”

“How long have you been a peace officer?”

“Twenty-eight and a half years.”

“What is your current assignment?”

“I’m temporarily assigned to a task force attached to Homicide.”

“Were you working as a peace officer on September fifteenth of this year, in the county of Los Angeles, state of California?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us what happened?”

This was a prelim with no jury, a prelim that had been put over again and again for one reason or another mostly because there was really no reason to rush it. And from the looks of him, until recently, the defendant hadn’t been up to it physically. The judge was going to determine if there was probable cause to bind the defendant, Johnny Wayne Bascombe, over for trial.

Wicks looked to the judge. “At the time I was working in my regular assignment out of narcotics assisting in a search warrant service on Nord Avenue in the county area of Los Angeles. As a supervisor, I was only there to observe. My guys deployed on a house while I watched from my unit in the street. That’s when a Rocky Mountain Spring water guy came up to me and said that he had just delivered some bottled water to a house five doors down and across the street. He said he went in the back door because there was a pit bull chained up out front. On a daybed at the back of the house he saw a child hog-tied. That’s the way he put it, ‘hog-tied’.”

Chapter Thirteen

The blood started to pound behind my eyes. I looked over at Johnny Wayne. His chin was up as if proud of all the attention he now received, as if he were some sort of Al Capone who derived respect from his criminality.

“His hands and feet were bound together behind his back. He was facedown on a dirty sheet that was bloody. The Rocky Mountain Water guy said it was real hot inside, and he didn’t know if the kid was even breathing.

“Because there was a dire threat to a human life, I immediately advised dispatch, asked for a patrol unit to assist code-three, and went to the house.”

“Lieutenant, did you go by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you alert some of your men?”

I knew why. Robby also carried the BMF tattoo and he knew it was going to get ugly. He knew he wasn’t going to want witnesses.

“There wasn’t time to alert my men. From the description the bottle water guy gave me, the child was in imminent danger. Besides, my men were still securing the house for the high-risk dope search warrant. To pull even one of them away would have jeopardized the operation and their safety.”

“What did you do next?”

“I went to the location. And because there was a threat to the safety of a child, I didn’t knock. I drew my service weapon and went in the back door.”

“And what did you find?”

“A six-year-old boy hog-tied facedown in a stifling room. It was at least a hundred and twenty inside the house. He was bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose. It looked like his arm was broken, and he was in shock.”

“What happened next?”

“The defendant,” Robby pointed to Johnny Wayne, “without provocation charged me. I was forced to defend myself.”

“He’s a liar!” Two pews back a sketchy speed-freak woman in a dingy-white tank top and greasy jeans, stood up. I knew her as Dora Bascombe. “He’s a liar. He attacked my Johnny and beat the livin’ shit out of him. Pistol-whipped his ass until he was a bloody pulp. Look at his face, Judge. Christ, look at his face.”

The judge banged his gavel. The bailiff moved into the audience, took the screaming woman by the arm, and tugged and pulled her out of the courtroom.

I looked back at Johnny Wayne. He smiled, happy that his woman had stood up for him. Her misplaced loyalty meant a lot in his world. Johnny didn’t have any front teeth, courtesy of Robby Wicks, which gave his smile a sunken look, as if the vacant space where his brain should have been sucked and puckered his lips and skin into an empty vortex.