Romeo's Way

  Romeo’s Way

  A Mike Romeo Thriller

  James Scott Bell

  Contents

  ROMEO’S WAY

  Author’s Note

  ROMEO’S WAY

  Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles …

  – Homer, The Iliad

  Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

  – Mike Tyson

  IT WAS THE first Tuesday in March, the sun taking its sweet time fighting off the cloud cover and recent rains, when I saw the kid who wanted to die.

  I like to run the high ground in the mornings, even with the narrow roads and the anxious commuters popping from driveways and curbsides in a malignant hurry, trying to beat the mass of their own ilk to the freeway onramps. It’s sort of a game with me. The Benz backing out into the street becomes a challenge—do I bank right or left to avoid the tail? It forces a quick think, and I’m all about the quick think.

  The smell of laurel and sage is best right after a rain. Especially in L.A., where so many scents duke it out. Street smells and sky smells, perfumed maidens on Rodeo Drive and cologned lawyers in Superior Court. East Los Angeles hot dogs cooked on grills with onions and bacon, and smoke in your nose when the hills are on fire. That would happen in a couple of months, these same hills that now smelled so sweet. The vegetation would dry to a crispy brown and the firebugs would come out. It’s people that set the hills on fire. That’s what they never tell you.

  I’d just come down to the flatlands of Los Feliz, a nice sweat working through my T-shirt, when I noticed a boy of about ten with his hand on a telephone pole. He was rocking back and forth. He wore jeans that were fraying at the cuffs. Little white strands from the jeans tickled his black high-top Converse shoes. His right foot was set behind and his knees were slightly bent. It was the look of a wide receiver at the line of scrimmage.

  If he was going to run across the street, he should have been gone. But he wasn’t moving. He was looking around the pole, down the street—his back was to me—as if hiding from something. Or waiting for something to come along.

  Something like a car going a little too fast for this residential area. I heard it before I saw it. A red BMW powering down from the intersection. It was maybe a hundred yards away from where the kid was.

  I was half a block from him. I knew then what he wanted to do. I didn’t yell because it might have scared him into the street. I had to get to him in time to snag him.

  Geometry and physics were never my favorite subjects. I liked hanging out with Descartes and Spinoza. I was never going to be an engineer or systems designer. But you get the principles stuffed into your head and they can come in handy in the strangest of places.

  Like calculating how to get to a kid before a car does.

  I sprinted.

  The boy was tensing, like a lion taking a bead on a gazelle. He didn’t have anything in his hands. It wasn’t a prank he was about to pull. There could be only one reason he was getting ready to make a dash. I didn’t have time to analyze it, to wonder what was making a ten-year-old want to leave life. That was usually the province of angst-ridden teenagers and end-of-the-line adults. He was too young for this.

  The BMW, as they often do, decided it was a good time to speed up. There is a pecking order of cars in Los Angeles and the BMW considers itself the prize peacock. When it can get away with flouting the speed limit, it usually does.

  Especially the red ones. What is it about red that brings out the gas-happy foot?

  I was late getting to the kid.

  I HAD TO veer into the street and make one last leap for the finish line.

  The kid was two steps off the curb when I grabbed a handful of his T-shirt.

  The car didn’t even slow. I caught a quick look at the driver, a woman with tight hair, looking down at her lap.

  I held the kid up, his arms and legs wiggling wildly in the air.

  “Lemme go!” he shrieked.

  I felt like a Maine lobsterman holding up a five pounder. I walked him back to the telephone pole and sat him on the ground.

  “What are you doing that for?” I said.

  He had tears in his eyes. His hair was black and his skin brown. His eyes were a deeper brown and should have had innocence in them, not the wetness of despair. And not the something else I saw—the kind of fear that no kid should have to experience. It wasn’t the being-scared-of-the-dark kind of fear, because that goes away with the light. It was the fear that there was no light at all.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “You don’t want to do that.” I sat cross-legged in front of him.

  He tried to get up then but I was ready for him. He was skinny and I grabbed his jeans pocket and snatched him back to the ground.

  “Hey!” he said.

  “Hey what?”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I just don’t think you should splatter your guts on a car.”

  He looked surprised, like I’d peered into his brain.

  “Yeah,” I said, “what were you thinking?”

  “Let me go,” he said, quietly this time.

  “I want to know what you were thinking. Do you think?”

  “Huh?”

  “Think.” I tapped the side of my head. “Up here.”

  “Come on, lemme go.”

  “We’re going to think first. Then I might let you go.”

  For the first time he looked deeply at me, up and down. “Who are you?”

  “I’m from around here,” I said. “And I don’t want my streets painted with blood. It’s not a good look.”

  The kid looked at his shoes.

  “You a basketball player?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Who do you like?”

  He shrugged again.

  “All right, let’s do it this way,” I said. “You tell me why you think it’s a good idea to get smashed by a car, and I’ll tell you what I think of that idea.”

  More tears came from the kid’s eyes. He made a half-hearted attempt to get up again, but I pulled him right back down. That made him cry harder.

  “All right,” I said. “Let it out for ten more seconds. I’ll wait.”

  That made him stop almost immediately. He wiped the tears away with his hands and then his nose with his forearm.

  “I’ll let you in on something,” I said. “Most of the great men of the world thought about offing themselves at one time or another.”

  A look of interest crept into his eyes. That was a good sign. A little bit to hook him. Don’t reel him in too soon. I could almost hear my dad’s voice telling me that very thing out on Chesapeake Bay. Play the fish a little, don’t be ham-fisted.

  “There was a guy named Søren Kierkeaard who thought about it,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Crazy name, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Henry.”

  “I’m Mike.” I put my hand out. He took it. Good.

  “So this guy, Søren, he became one of the great thinkers. You know, there are people whose only job it is to go around thinking. They’re called philosophers.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “So here’s the thing, why he didn’t do it. He thought to himself, you know, why not try to look at what I’m doing, think about it, figure out what it means, then write that down. Why waste my despair?”

  “Des what?”

  “Sadness. Everybody gets sad.”

  “You ever want to?” Henry asked.

  I nodded. “I wasn’t that much older than you. I’m glad didn’t.”

  “But you’re strong,” he said.

  “Strong?”

  “You can fight.”


  I homed in on that answer and put some things together. “Is that what this is about? Are you getting beat up?”

  He said nothing.

  “At school?” I said.

  He was staring at his shoes again, picking at the bottom of one with his hand.

  “You can be strong,” I said.

  He looked up.

  “Let me tell you about strong. It’s not just outside but inside. You have to have both. And you can. Anybody can.”

  “I’m too small,” he said.

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “When I was your age, I was the fat kid. I didn’t have any strength in my arms.”

  “What happened?”

  “Later on I figured it out. I worked the body and the mind. You ever heard of the Greeks?”

  He shook his head.

  “They had the idea you should work out your mind and work out your body. And learn to wrestle.”

  “Wrestle?”

  “Not like the stuff you see on TV. That’s bogus.”

  “It is?”

  “Totally. It’s an act. I’m talking about real wrestling, taking someone down. You can learn to do that. You ever heard of MMA?”

  He nodded.

  “You can learn that stuff,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Around.”

  “You know it?”

  “Some.”

  “Could you show me?”

  The spark of an old idea flicked in my brain. I’d thought about it before, starting a studio for kids, combining body and mind. It would be MMA and chess. Codes of conduct as well as methods of takedown. A dream, but not one I really thought would happen. There was too much baggage around me, and I was not the kind meant for settling in one place. Even though I was here with Ira, and he was the only one I could truly call friend, I didn’t know if I was going to be staying in Los Angeles.

  “I could show you a couple of moves,” I said. “But you’d have to practice. And you’d have to learn how to use what I show you. You can’t abuse it. You’d have to promise me that. You promise?”

  He nodded.

  “Let me hear you say it.”

  “I promise.”

  I shook his hand again. “A handshake seals a deal.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now stand up and let’s have a look—”

  “Henry!” A woman was charging down the sidewalk toward us. She was a thirtyish Latina with long, black hair and a face set in angry stone.

  “Uh-oh,” Henry said.

  She was on top of us like a lioness. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  Henry looked at the ground.

  “Who are you?” the woman said to me.

  “Name’s Mike, I live—”

  “What are you doing talking to my son, putting your hands on him?”

  “It’s okay, Mom—”

  “Answer me, or I’ll call the police.”

  “I’m a neighbor,” I said. “I just met Henry and—”

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing Henry’s hand. He yanked out of her grip. She made another move for him but he took off running.

  “Henry!”

  “Could I have a word?” I said.

  “Don’t you talk to him,” she said.

  “You’re upset.”

  She turned and started walking away.

  “He’s being bullied,” I said.

  That turned her around. “You don’t know anything! What gives you the right to talk to my son?”

  “It’s called neighborliness,” I said. “People used to be like that.”

  “I don’t want to see you anywhere near—”

  “He needs to learn to defend himself.”

  “Don’t you tell me what he needs! If I see you around him again, I will get the police. I will get a restraining order.”

  “You don’t have to get anything,” I said. “I’m done here.”

  And I was.

  It was time. Time to go. Head out. Hit the road. Find a place where there were no people. The desert. Yes, find a place in the desert and become a hermit and grow a beard and occasionally scare campers. That’s what I’d be good at. Live with the jackrabbits and rattlesnakes. Maybe call up some Native American spirit and learn to dance for rain. Become a shaman, dress in skins.

  Nothing for you here, Romeo.

  Time to leave.

  “NOTHING,” I SAID to Ira when I slammed the door and he asked me what was wrong. I walked past the front room, where two other men were sitting with him.

  “Mike,” Ira said, “come and meet—”

  “Not now,” I said and went to my room. I closed the door and went in to take a shower before Ira could knock and ask me to come out.

  The water was warm and good but offered no relief. I kept seeing that kid Henry. I kept imagining the bullies in his life, and seeing the ones who’d been in mine, almost drowning me once in a toilet bowl and ripping my underwear with a nuclear wedgie. I couldn’t do anything about it then. I can now.

  Henry needed to know how.

  My left little finger started to throb in the hot water. It was still getting used to being reattached after a guy cut it off with a knife. I had to talk a doctor into sewing it back on. He said the odds were against it working again.

  But my little finger is as stubborn as I am and was making a play to rejoin the other nine as a full member of the choir. I flexed it a few times. It didn’t go all the way yet. It wasn’t making a true fist. But close enough for me.

  When I was dry and dressed I pulled out my duffel bag and started packing. I didn’t know where I was going, just knew it wasn’t going to be anywhere with a lot of people. I thought about heading to Union Station and taking a train somewhere. Trains are classic. Who knows how much longer they’re going to be around? But you get on one and ride where the rails lead. I could pretend I was Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

  My bag was almost fully loaded when Ira pushed open my door. He was sitting in his wheelchair like the Cheshire Cat. I hate that look. It means he knows what I’m thinking.

  “Rude,” he said.

  “Abrupt,” I said.

  “I want you to meet a couple of gentlemen.”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “Now that’s not very neighborly of you.”

  I snapped him a look. Why did he choose that word? Maybe he really could read my thoughts. Was it because he’d once been Mossad, a man who looked in eyes before he killed, and then a man who studied Torah so deep he became a rabbi and made his penance with the things of God? He’d seen more things than any ten men put together, and maybe that was why he could see into me. Another good reason to get out of town.

  “I’ll say hello,” I said, “just to be neighborly, but then I’m heading out.”

  “Maybe you won’t. Come on.”

  HE WHEELED HIMSELF back. I followed his yarmulked head to the living room. It was, like all the other rooms in Ira’s house, filled with bookshelves. He’d lost count of his collection of books at seven thousand, with a few thousand of those in storage.

  The two men got up from chairs. One was white and one was black. Same height and build, but there the similarities ended.

  The white guy had sandy hair beating a major retreat from his forehead, an oval face, and close-set eyes. His smile was a little goofy, but those eyes made it appear more sinister. He was a man who knew where the bodies were buried. He wore a dark-red tie and a navy-blue sport coat, khaki slacks, and brown slip-on shoes. He was maybe fifty years old.

  The black gentleman had a square face and thick glasses in black frames. He was older than the other guy, maybe by ten years. He wore a gray suit that was in the last stage of rumple and a tie slightly askew. I knew this look from long years of seeing it in my parents’ house. He was total academia.

  But his smile was warm and sincere.

  “I’m Teodor Steadman,” the white guy said, extending his hand to me. We shook. “And this is Samuel John
son.”

  I shook Johnson’s hand. “Is he your Boswell?” I said.

  “Very good,” Johnson said. “Not many people know that Samuel Johnson anymore.”

  “Is that how you got the name?”

  “No, my mother just liked the sound of Samuel.”

  “So you’re the Quixote tilting at the windmills of California,” I said.

  “That’s the nicest thing I’ve been called in quite some time,” Johnson said.

  “Sit, sit,” Ira said. He had a coffee service on a table, leaned over and poured me a cup.

  “I’m not staying,” I said.

  “For one cup,” Ira said. “You can spare me that. We’d like your input on something.”

  “We?”

  “Ira speaks very highly of you,” Steadman said.

  “I’ve got him fooled,” I said.

  Steadman laughed and it seemed forced. But Johnson’s smile made him feel like an old friend. I could see why he did so well with people. And what had fueled his incredible rise.

  What I knew about his current standing was what I’d seen in passing on news sites. An economics professor at UCLA, the one true conservative in the department, according to some. He’d taken up writing about politics and culture about ten years ago, and his book, The Things That Matter Most, had become a big bestseller last year. Which was about the time his name was getting tossed around as a possible challenger to California Senator Genevieve Griffin. Griffin, who had been mayor of Oakland at one time, had never lost an election.

  “Do you know much about our candidacy?” Steadman asked.

  “Good luck to you,” I said.

  That got a frown from Steadman but a good laugh from Johnson, who said, “Luck and the hand of God are what we’ll need.”

  “What we need is a good hammer,” Steadman said. “Like Thor. And we need to find the head to bang it on.”

  “Sounds very Nordic,” I said. “Viking politics.”

  “Very much so,” Steadman said. “This is the reality. The other side wants to chop Sam up, and they’ll do it with lies.”

  “Politics and lying?” I said. “The very idea.”

  “It’s so easy to do,” Steadman said. “You can pipe it all over the world instantly.”