Cut Throat Chapter 3 - Beneath the City
Cut Throat Chapter 3 - Beneath the City
“You know who I am?”
The patient’s eyes stared up at Detective Bledsoe. Tonto
Ramirez’s erected a wall of stubbornness behind his drug-widened pupils. The
harsh lights of the hospital room brought the bandages wrapped around the
stumps of his leg and throat into a clear, antiseptic focus. The eyes went left,
then right, then back to Bledsoe. Tonto nodded.
“That’s right,” Bledsoe said. “I’m the one they call the
Hell Hound, because I always get what I want. You may not know it, but right
now you’re lucky. Not because you survived when none of your homies did, if you
call what this is surviving.” The detective’s eyes went down to where Tonto’s leg
should have been and came up again. “No. You’re lucky because you have something
I need. Information. That’s the only reason I’m even here. You’re the only one
who saw the man I’m after and lived to tell about it. I want him, and you’re
going to give him to me.”
Tonto Ramirez grunted and turned away. His hand reached for
the button to the morphine drip and fell limply against the bed rail.
“Uh-uh,” said Bledsoe. He held his hand and unclenched his
fist, revealing Tonto’s sought-after relief. “You get what you want when I get
what I want.”
Tonto’s mouth peeled back to reveal a slash of white teeth.
He grunted again and pointed at his bandaged throat.
Bledsoe shook his head. “You don’t get to play that game,
Tonto. You’re not a victim. Far as I’m concerned you got what you deserved, only
it wasn’t dealt out by a judge and jury the way it should have been. The way
the law says it should be. You deserved it anyway and we both know you got off
easy. The doc says you can talk and you’re going to talk or I’ll put it in the
papers we got a witness up in the ICU who can identify our suspect. We’ll see
how long you last then.”
Tonto’s eyes went wide, and a thin line stretched Bledsoe’s face
into a smile.
“Talk,” he said.”
“I don’t know anything.” Tonto’s voice was a whisper, like gravel
tossed against gravel.
“Bull.”
“We were shooting dice on the corner. Green Street. He come
out of nowhere. Never even saw him until he come at me. Chuy and Ramone were dead.
Paco, too. I heard a scream, just a quick scream, and turned around and Bobby
was laying there…” Tonto’s eyes squeezed tight, tear beads forming at the
edges, “…his head…his eyes were staring up at me…”
“Tell me who did it, Tonto,” Bledsoe said, “and I’ll let you
make the pain go away.”
Tonto’s eyes flared open like coals bursting with heat.
“I don’t know who did it! I never seen him before. He was
all in black. Like the night. He wore a mask over his head—”
“What kind of mask?”
“Like a half mask. Covered the top of his head and his eyes.
Like Zorro. He had these swords…two of them…and moved so fast they blurred
under the streetlights. He came at me and I ran. I ran as hard as I could, but
he caught me. I fell…I fell because he cut off my leg. He cut off my leg!!!”
Bledsoe shook his head as Tonto Ramirez, boy of sixteen,
gangbanger, killer and dealer of drugs, erupted into a spasm of quivering sobs.
Bledsoe tapped the button on the morphine drip with his thumb and let it fall
into the bed as Tonto quieted and slowly succumbed to sweat oblivion.
Outside, he told the uniform manning the door to keep an eye
out. Not to let anyone in except hospital staff. Other then him, they had been
the only ones in to see Tonto Ramirez. The boy had no family, unless you counted
gang affiliates as family, and they were cooling off down in the morgue.
Bledsoe stood on the steps of the hospital and lit a cigarette.
He stared past the cars running up and down Sunset Boulevard at the smog hazed building
tops of Downtown L.A. He could almost make out the high-rise where the
vigilante and laid waste to Fool Killer and his gang the night before.
“Damn you,” he said, fingernails digging into the palm of
his hand. “I’ll find you, you bastard.”
People coming in and out of the hospital gave Bledsoe ugly
looks. He wasn’t sure if it was for his language or his bad habit. He didn’t
care. He had a killer to stop before more bodies piled up on his city’s
doorstep.
*
The sewers have a life to them all their own. Even in the
smallest town, an unknown ecosystem runs beneath the streets carrying diseased
vermin, filth, garbage, all on a current meant to make those things disappear,
to carry them away from the people and empty into the ocean or deserted
landfill, all to give the people an illusion of cleanliness.
When screams fill the tunnels, no one hears them. If by chance
some business man or woman walking briskly down the asphalt sidewalk, stepping
over the heavy manhole cover out of a subconscious fear of falling through, and
they hear the softest whisper of a terrified scream, they continue on their
way, put it out of their minds, or chalk it up to the wind blowing between the
office buildings that make up civilization.
But deep down inside the maze of tunnels beneath the streets,
one man can not ignore the stagnant darkness which conceals the city’s waste.
“Tell me,” the voice seeps out of the darkness behind him.
He tries to turn around, but the ropes holding his feet to the concrete ceiling
and chorded around his arms and neck have made have paralyzed his body. “Where
do the girls come from?”
Frank Gonzalez strains against his binds to find the voice
behind him. To catch a glimpse of his abductor. Tears and sweat trail up his brow
and his head feels swollen from the blood pooling inside him. How long has he
been hanging like this?
Hours?
Days?
Because of the oily darkness, it was impossible to know.
“I don’t know!” he screams, pleading. “I’m just a street
man, I don’t get the girls!”
“Tell me.” The voice is closer and as dark as the tunnel in
front of him.
Frank strains again but the ropes only tighten. He gives up and
sobs.
The bright sound of metal unsheathed. He feels more than
sees the long thin blade placed in front of him.
“You buy and sell women like cattle,” the voice says. “I’ve
watched you on the street coming in and out of the building on Spring where the
women were kept. Tell me where they come from and I will make it painless.”
The edge of the blade touches Frank’s forehead, just below the
hairline, like a whispered kiss, and blood flows like a river, dripping into
the shallow current of filth beneath him. Frank screams.
“Tell me where you get the girls,” the voice says. “I will
not ask again.”
“Manning!” Frank forces the name out of his mouth, as if it refused
to be uttered. “Jack Manning. He gets the girls. I take them to Spring Street.”
He shakes his head, crying. “I’m just the delivery man,” Frank says. “I don’t
know where they come from. Everywhere. I just take them where he tells me. I’m
just the delivery man. I just drive the truck.”
Hidden beneath Frank’s sobs are the subtle movements of the
voice. A figure appears in front of him, black as the tunnels, as if the form
fitting clothes and mask shrouding the voice soak up any light that somehow found
its way into the sewers.
“Where do I find Manning?”
Frank shakes his head, his eyes closed, beaded into wrinkles
of flesh. “I don’t know.”
He screams again as ice cold steal opens the flesh of his
belly. Warm blood flows down his chest, his neck, his face.
“Where do I find Manning?”
The voice is as cold as the steel it wields. There is no evading
it. No escaping. Frank knows this now, even as his mind races in panic. He
knows he will never see the light of day again. He gives the voice the answer
and pleads, even with the knowledge his death is immanent.
The screams stop. Frank Gonzalez hangs limp from the rope,
his blood washing away with the rest of the filth. The voice cleans his blade and
snaps it back into the sheath on his back. No one hears the soft splashing of
his feet as he makes his way through the maze of tunnels and up into the over-crowded
city of Los Angeles, where more filth is waiting to be washed into the gutters.
No one sees him climb out of the sewer and disappear down a
shadowed alley. But they will. He knows this, as if it had been foretold to him
by one of the ancient Oracles. They will see him as the city burns, cleansed of
the filth polluting the air decent people breath.
They will see him, those
mongers, those deviants who build their lives on the ruins of others, and they
will scream, Cut Throat!!!
To Be Continued...Chapter 4 - Media Blitz
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