Guardian Angel

by Peter A. Bodi

George Kim didn't know what to call whatever it was that allowed him to escape the two killers he was riding with in the white Chevy van while wrapped up in duct tape like King Ramses. Terms like luck, fate, or an act of God would probably have come to mind, but his brain was concussed and struggling to compute. Still, George Kim was certain that the math revealed he was lucky to be alive. Cranked on adrenalin, bleeding from a fresh gash on his head, he went forward despite doing a drunken hula, trying to cover distance with the urgency of a man who knows his life depends on it. The shadows seemed to spin around him, and he thought of the cartoons he had watched as a boy and had used to learn English, the ones where the stars are circling around Wiley Coyote's head after he falls off a cliff.

He imagined that he must really look like something else right now. Just your everyday, average sight of a lone, fortyish, Asian guy, in a linen suit adorned with tattered tape, forehead swelling and bloody, shuffling like a wino fired up on Mad Dog 20/20, in the abject blackness of the Dog Patch at 3:20 am. He had nearly knocked himself unconscious with a running, head first, collision with the post of a darkened street light. He had to grope the post like a priest on an altar boy to remain tenuously upright. If the street light had been on, he wouldn't have collided with it and smashed his skull, but he was grateful for the darkness. The brutally humid summer night caused all of Philly's A/C to be beyond maxed. This had created a blackout. The darkness arrived at nearly the exact moment he slipped his restraints and escaped the moving vehicle. Damned if he knew how he did it. His luck started when he felt a nail clipper that one of the thugs missed, and slyly used it to work his bonds. Fear drove him to make his move. After bouncing on the pavement, he realized was really outside the rolling coffin and was in one piece. The unlit night allowed him to melt into the back alleys of the Dog Patch. The duo of his tormentors drove on for several blocks, simply unable to believe their eyes. By the time they pulled a U-turn and went back to the spot where he'd bailed, he was gone.

He made his way down the deserted street, the quarter moon and stars above him the only light. He knew he couldn't worry about any other unseen obstacles in his way. He lurched into the darkness, full speed ahead, because it felt like providence. The Dog Patch was a decrepit industrial zone and there were few souls around on the graveyard shift, so as he made his way to an access road that led out, he kept looking for headlights. His fluke escape was not going to discourage his would be killers, Vincent and his nephew, a young, viscous goon named Lenny, from hunting him. They were out there right now, searching. Nothing was going to make Vincent “the Vampire” Valente forget about the seventy seven thousand dollars Kim owed him, no doubt about that. Valente's nephew, that Lenny kid, was like another old cartoon, Baby Huey, a big baby with incredible strength who was good at hurting people. Kim cursed in both English and Korean as he paused briefly and removed some more duct tape, taking off plenty of hair and skin with it.

People had told him that Vinnie the Vampire was no joke, a guy you had to pay, the nickname coming from his reputation for ghoulish violence. Kim was a bookie, as well as a degenerate gambler, and he had used the Vampire to cover his action and fell behind paying him. He never figured it would come to this. He felt he could finesse the guy, and he'd never get whacked because dead men couldn't pay their debts and Valente was a business man. Vincent and Lenny Valente lured him to the back of an after hours club to, you know, just talk about things. They pulled guns and trussed him while he begged them to reconsider, eyes brimming with tears. Vincent had laughed at him for crying like a little bitch. Then Kim had pulled the old atheist-in-a-foxhole routine, silently bargaining with a God he had always claimed not to believe in. He couldn't explain what went down, but here he was, making his way to freedom.

Against very long odds, the Korean bookie now believed in the Almighty. But the God he would believe in wouldn't be some sob-story sucker who would turn the other cheek. His God was a numbers man, a book keeper like him, constantly tabulating credits and debits, always keeping score and separating the believers into sheep and goats and red and black. He would register the changes that Kim would make in his life from now on, and unlike Vinnie Valente, he would see that the good would outweigh the bad if he lived. God had to work this way, otherwise heaven would be filled with gamblers and low rent hustlers who exploited that cheap loophole called forgiveness. The universe couldn't have been made and run by a punk. That would make no sense whatsoever. As his thoughts wandered, his pace slackened, but he thought of his twin seven year old daughters at home in their beds and picked it up again. He fought back tears.

He came on a one story concrete building, and pulled on the padlocked doors and shuttered windows in vain. More and more of these businesses in the Patch were closing each year, since it seemed that things could be made cheaper down south, overseas, or apparently anywhere except here in Philly. He heard some dogs barking and figured they were a way off. The place was called the Dog Patch because the city had a problem with packs of feral dogs in the area. It seemed all of Animal Control's attempts to eradicate them just made the survivors nastier and more resilient. He still didn't see any headlights or other traffic, and figured his luck was holding. He went on, determined to make it to the access road that lead to the residential neighborhood of Greenbrook, which bordered the Patch. Though there was no sign of the Valentes' van, he knew they were still out there somewhere. Maybe a marked police cruiser would drive by on routine patrol tonight. Yeah, and maybe the Eagles will win the Super Bowl, he thought.

He had made three painful blocks of progress when he heard the sudden sound of rapid footsteps approaching him from behind. Before he could react, a flash of motion appeared on the periphery of his vision and he felt an electric sensation, a new, different pain, shooting from his left ankle to his brain. He looked down and saw that a big mutt, some kind of mean looking German Sheppard mix, had planted its jaws in his left calf. The canine was all fury and motion, mangy and snarling, its blood brewing distemper. An ex-boxer, Kim first threw a few jabs down at it, but when it declined to dislodge its teeth, he let his fists fly at its head as hard and fast as his body would let him. As he flailed away, a random memory came, of when he had been an eight year old, newly arrived from a UN refugee camp, and his American classmates made fun of him because he thought cans of dog food in the supermarket contained dog meat for human consumption. Dog flesh could be quite the delicacy in Korea . Images flashed of his boyhood in rural Korea , where his uncle would take him to a shed and make him beat a dog savagely with a switch. Country people thought that inflicting suffering on a dog made its meat taste sweeter. He'd cried while beating the shit out of the poor animal, and he couldn't help but to think of one of his favorite American expressions, paybacks are a bitch. His right hand throbbed, and he had the pooch in a head lock, driving his elbow into it, finally causing it to give up the fight. The dog slunk away into the shadows and, a moment later, he heard it yelp and howl. He was nursing his tender hand and moving forward again when he saw the head lights coming right down the street toward him.

Anthony Watkins tried to stay awake as he drove his delivery truck through the Dog Patch on the night shift run, letting a cigarette burn down close to his fingers, hoping that would help keep him awake. Watkins was one hell of a guy, always willing to take unpopular shifts and assignments, which was now why he was in one of the loneliest corners of the city at a godforsaken hour, driving a delivery truck for Philadelphia Consolidated Freight. He was a fit African-American man in his thirties and he turned up the gospel music on his radio to fight the boredom. It wasn't all espirit-de-corps that explained his well-known hunger for overtime. He had a four year old boy who had a blood disease that was common enough that the doctors at Children's Hospital could diagnose it, but rare enough that the accepted treatments were considered experimental and the insurance company wouldn't pay for them. He paid the costs out of his own pocket. His co-workers would have beef and beers and his church would have bake sales for him. He saw a white van pulled over on the side of the road and people outside. It looked like there had been an accident. Being one hell of a guy, he stopped to see if he could help. Before he got out, he finished the last swallow of the pint of Crown Royal, a habit he had developed because being one hell of a guy was starting to take a heavy toll on him.

Watkins got out of his truck and immediately he felt uneasy, as if there was something bad in the air outside the cab. His impression while stopping was that there had been a crash and a guy lying outside the van was hurt, but after stepping closer and shining his flashlight, he knew now that he had come upon a murder scene. The flashlight revealed that the guy on the ground had a good sized hole in his forehead and his clothes were bloodied. The corpse looked like some kind of Chinese or something. There were two mean, dark looking guys standing around the corpse, clearly surprised by his appearance. The two men looked kind of similar, but one was older and slighter and one was younger and had a hulking physical presence, a real big dude. With next to no light, he couldn't tell for sure, but the two killers didn't seem to be dark enough to be Puerto Ricans or Mexicans. They looked like Italians or Jews, damned if he could ever tell the difference between them. As he was performing his split second analysis of their ethnicity, the big young guy was suddenly in front of him and snapped a ham-sized fist into his face with a speed that belied his bulk. Watkins dropped his flashlight as his head snapped back, and he felt burning pain at the bridge of his nose, and then realized he was kneeling on the ground, unable to defend himself. The older Guido/Jew picked up his flashlight and reached into Watkins's pants, taking out his wallet. The big guy was over him, his knee in Watkins's back and his gun on the back of his head. Watkins said a quick, silent prayer. Come on, show me something, he prayed.

Lenny Valente was nervous. They had been lucky to find Kim again. He thanked God for that, because had the deadbeat Korean gotten away, it was probably Lenny that was going to get killed, blood relative or not. He had run over some German Sheppard-looking stray that ran across the road. It had been a lucky break, because when he stopped the van and flicked the high beams on, they noticed George Kim skulking down the street, an annoying look on his face like he thought he was going to make it. Now, this black truck driver stumbled into them by a piss-poor, cruel turn of luck. His Uncle Vincent was up to something, though. He would do what he always did, follow his lead. Lenny's mother once told him that thinking wasn't his forte, and he knew the old broad was right.

Vincent went through the contents of Watkins' wallet. Now Lenny understood where he was going with this. It was the typical outfit move, standard operating procedure. He put a nearly one thousand dollars in the wallet and put Watkins's driver's license in his pocket. He made sure the terrified truck driver saw him keep the license.

“Anthony Watkins,” Vincent began, reading the driver's license, “who lives at 55th and Vine, and who works for Philadelphia Consolidated Freight. We know who you are now. You get a grand, plus you get to live, for forgetting you saw anything tonight. Do you think that any of this is your business, Anthony?”

“No sir. None of my business,” Watkins told him, while looking at his shoes to avoid eye contact. He didn't want the man to think he was trying to get a look at his face so he could identify him. He thought of what chance his son would have without a father. His face was already swelling where Lenny had clocked him and his head ached.

“Ain't none of my business, sir. No way, no how. I didn't see shit,” Watkins added, hoping that his voice was registering the proper fear and respect for these men.

“Good, Anthony. Very Good.”

It was dark, but Lenny could see that Vincent was smiling. Being like God, with power over regular peoples' lives was what got him off. Lenny knew that his uncle was only into money because it gave him power. Vincent walked the length of the delivery truck, shining his flashlight on it. It belonged to one on the most trusted and successful local trucking firms. Philly Consolidated delivered a lot of high end stuff, all over the area. Lenny could see that his uncle was checking the angles out, thinking of the future. He loved probing people to see how he could use them to make a buck, and more importantly, to get that power over them. It was who he was and what he did; the only thing this otherwise average man had ever been above average in. He was a savant in exploitation.

Lenny helped his uncle wrap Kim in a tarp and load him into the van. The corpse seemed to be unnaturally heavy. He watched the tail lights of the delivery truck receding. The black dude had been shaking pretty bad when he got into his truck to leave.

“You think he'll call the cops?” Lenny asked, after they had rolled well away from the crime scene.

“I know he won't," Vincent pronounced with confidence.

“You seem awful sure about that, Vincent.”

“Yeah, well. I know people, Lenny. I understand them. My girlfriend, the one in college, she says I'm a people person.” Vincent paused for a moment and then repeated the words, “a people person,” out loud and burst into laughter. Vincent was a guy who was often amused by his own wit. He took Watkins' license out and stared at it.

Three months later, Anthony Watkins would receive a letter in the mail without a return address.

ANTHONY,

WE ASKED AROUND AND NOW WE KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU. WE KNOW ABOUT THE PROBLEMS WITH YOUR LITTLE BOY . WE CAN HELP YOU BUT ONLY IF YOU HELP US. NO ONE CAN KNOW BUT YOU. IF YOU TALK THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES AND YOUR BOY GETS NO HELP. THIS IS NO JOKE. WE MET ONE NIGHT IN THE DOG PATCH. TELL NO ONE ABOUT THIS. WE WILL BE IN TOUCH. IF YOU HELP US, THINGS WILL BE BETTER FOR YOUR FAMILY. DO NOT TRY TO CONTACT US, WE WILL CONTACT YOU. YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL

Anthony Watkins smiled. He had been shown something after all. He had heard about people getting notes like this. Of course, he always expected that such a note would be unsigned.