Retribution
by
David LaGraff
Copyright © 2013 David LaGraff. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
Chapter 1
When I got home to the 10th floor roach-infested firetrap I lived in across the street from the downtown Los Angeles Greyhound station, Billy Ahiga was waiting for me. Which was unusual, since he’d been in the VA, the one out on Wilshire, for the past couple of weeks, waiting to die from the same rare blood disease that’d killed his father. He didn’t call first because being as how I have a certain incurable technophobia, I don’t have a phone. So he didn’t call, he simply left the VA and came.
Billy is full-blooded Navajo, and the disease had something to do with that. Billy said it was a virus that entered the Navajo population because of the bats in New Mexico, but there was no scientific proof of that. Myself, I speculated it was something Billy picked up tunnel crawling in the Ashau Valley a lifetime ago. Wherever it came from, the damn thing incubated for years before it blew up. Years ago, when we met in Nam, he’d told me about it, how it had taken his father and how it would take him too, when it was ready. The disease attacks the connective tissues in the final stages before ultimately turning the body into a stinking bag of bloody pus. Since the disease only killed native Americans, and mostly the ones who also drank too much, as Billy had, there wasn’t any big national program. Nobody was working on a cure or anything. After Billy died, there wouldn’t be any men coming over wearing biohazard space suits to see about a cleanup.
He wasn’t a bag of pus yet, but from the smell of him, it wouldn’t be much longer. He’d taken up a reclining position on my big red leather couch. In spite of the smell, Homicide, the stray alley cat who was sometimes fed by me, had come in from the fire escape and was asleep on Billy’s stomach, an affection the tattered, vicious beast had never shown me.
Outside, it was one of those bright, clean February days in L.A. where some hot winds had gusted in from someplace farther south, blowing all the chemical stink out to sea, and the temperature had shot up into the 80’s. Inside, the air was overly heated from the sun beating down on the roof. There was a sense of claustrophobia, amplified by the smell of his disease. I put the window cooler on and in a few seconds the air began to cool the sweat on our bodies, blow the stink out the window and make the place bearable. As bearable as a rat trap like my place ever gets.
“You smell like shit,” I said.
“They killed my son,” he said.
“Who did?”
“Some gang bangers, I think. They shot him when they went in to rob that Trader Joe’s store near the VA. David was in there buying me a Hostess cherry pie and a Coke and they shot him in the head.”
He fished out a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. There was a Beverly Hills address, and a woman’s name. “My son’s mother,” he said. “Her name is Angela Caldwell. She’ll be expecting you to call her. She has some information for you.” Billy had never been married. He hadn’t watched his son grow up, but two years ago, his son had found him and they’d had a reconcilement of sorts. Leastways enough of one for the son’s death to arouse Billy to the maximum level of anger. Which was why I figured he’d come to see me.
“I’ll talk with the boy’s mother,” I said. “And then I’ll find the men who did this and kill them.”
“No. That would only be revenge. And revenge isn’t enough. It’s got to be more than that. I want--” he was interrupted by a convulsion which sent Homicide scurrying under the couch. There was an explosion of blood with the coughing fit, most of which sprayed me right in the face, and when it was over, he lay still. His lips were moving but no sound came out. I put my ear to his mouth. “--retribution,” he said, then died.
I thought about it. Retribution. The word had an uncommon meaning to Billy and me. When we were partnered up in Southeast Asia doing our thing together, retribution meant killing everybody, down to the last man, woman and child, and generally burning everything to the ground before, during, and afterwards, and so forth. Because stuff happened over there. Lots of stuff. Evil things. Me and Billy had been a component of the war machine, and it had left indelible marks on our souls. Our divergent life paths had crossed in the Navy, where we’d been sorted and graded and packaged into an experimental training program now known as the SEALS.
You may disagree with what we did over there. And perhaps you would have done things differently. Perhaps you would have shown mercy when one of your best friends handed a stick of gum to a cute little toddler and the child exploded in his face, shredding what used to be your drinking buddy all over a pig wallow. Maybe you’d have smiled and shown infinite patience to the old woman who tried to slash you with a machete while you were in the latrine. Maybe you’re one of those bastards who thinks violence isn’t mandatory to maintain the peace, that war is merely one of many options and that peaceful negotiations, if given enough time and effort, are the nobler, higher path. If so, you’re a better man than Billy and I. More power to you. Just let me know where it is you’ll be buried so I can come often and piss on your saintly remains.
I looked down at Billy, or what used to be Billy. He no longer looked like a man bent on retribution, just a tired old man whose years had been few and bitter. An old man who frowned in death, a frown he would carry into the afterlife where he would doubtless make the bitter complaint to God that he had suffered the hideous misfortune of outliving his only son.
Billy still had his long braids, and the big sixteen-inch Bowie strapped to his side, which he’d carried since he was thirteen years old, the one passed down to him by his father, who’d been given it by his grandfather, who, it was said, had taken it off a luckless trapper someplace in the Superstition Mountains in the late 1800’s. I gently removed the knife and scabbard, which was leather and of superior workmanship. I went into the bathroom and washed Billy’s blood off my face and lathered up and tested the blade on my three day growth. The blade was sharp enough for a clean, close shave.
You may be offended by what I did next, which was to dump Billy’s corpse from my rear bedroom window into the alleyway below. You might have a point. A normal man would have called somebody, maybe the cops, or maybe an ambulance. But I’m not a normal man. I don’t want city officials poking around in my apartment, taking note of things and reporting those things to the proper authorities. Because I cannot afford to have elevated encounters with law enforcement, or have them taking special notice of me.
I live by a code, a simple one. I will not let anybody arrest me again. The Navy arrested me, once, after a 57 day stay in a military hospital in Japan owing to a sniper bullet in my back. They came to me and led me away when I was in a weakened condition, and I let them. I remember the night they came for me. I was still in my pajamas. I said to myself, It’s a mistake. It’ll all be straightened out in the morning. It wasn’t. They brought me before a tribunal. You’re under arrest for the murder of a full bird colonel, they said. Indeed, I explained, I had killed a colonel, but it wasn’t murder. I did it because he was dirty, channeling drugs out of the Golden Triangle and into the United States by way of Mexico. He was making a lot of money and some of that money was going to Charlie. The colonel was in a sampan full of Charlies and I blew the sampan to hell. It turned out the colonel was a Congressman’s son and they convicted me of murder and s
entenced me to life. They chained me naked to the floor of an iron cage in an unlisted prison nobody’s ever heard of. It took me ten years to escape. They won’t arrest me again.
So I threw Billy out my window. I wasn’t sloppy about throwing him outside. I checked to make sure he wouldn’t land on a sleeping addict or anything, then I let him fall. His smashed body in the alley below would appear a suicide, and it wasn’t likely any cops would come to my door. Billy had only one friend that I knew of, and that was me. Nobody was going to miss him, save myself and possibly Homicide, the cat, who for some strange reason had taken a liking to Billy.
Billy’d ruined my couch, the one decent piece of furniture I owned, stained by a sudden massive release of blood from certain of Billy’s orifices, not least of which were his nose and eye sockets. So I wiped the couch down and threw a bedspread over it to hide the bloodstains, went into the kitchen, popped a can of Mr. Pibb, pulled out my bottle of pepper vodka and poured myself a couple of fingers in his memory. Wondering if Billy could see me, or was he now in a place where the world didn’t matter any more.
“Here’s looking at you, Billy,” I said, knowing damn well he could see me.