Nailed Page 8

  When Jimmy got to the locker room, he started pissing blood. He didn’t give it a second thought. Tonight was when New York got to town. Jimmy knew the hotel where the visiting team stayed, the bar where they drank, and he had plans.

  He went home, put on black leather pants, a gunmetal gray silk shirt, a black leather jacket and his best Tony Lama boots. He did four lines of coke, a hit of crystal meth and chased it all with a double shot of Swedish vodka. He checked himself out in a full-length mirror, smiled and decided he looked bad enough to take on the devil and spot him six points.

  Jimmy walked into the bar at the MetroPlex Medallion Hotel at 8:30 that night and as he’d hoped a dozen or more players from New York were there. He wasn’t sure of the exact number because he couldn’t focus long enough to keep count. But there was a sufficient number for his purposes.

  He announced himself by shouting at the top of his voice. “I just want all y’all to know that New Yorkers are PUSSIES!”

  The declaration got everyone’s attention. The bar manager recognized him — as a renowned troublemaker — and quickly picked up the phone to summon the police. Several members of an optometrists’ convention started edging toward the exits. But the football players from New York, who were as big or bigger than Jimmy Leverette, were completely unimpressed. One of them turned his back on Jimmy, and loudly passed gas in his direction.

  “Motherfucker!” Jimmy yelled. Then he giggled insanely and said, “That’s about the only thing you cocksuckers will ever get past me. That’s why I came down here. To warn you. Stay away from Jimmy Leverette on Sunday — or your ass is mine!”

  A tight end for New York named Bergman snorted and said to the huge lineman next to him at the bar, “Hey, Pete, which side of this idiot’s head did that guy from Chicago step on? Maybe we can do the other side Sunday and even him out a little.”

  The New York players roared.

  Being ridiculed was not how Jimmy Leverette had seen things going. He’d seen them regarding him as someone to be feared. Someone to stay the hell away from. Not as a fool. Not the butt of their jokes. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all.

  Just then Jimmy spotted New York’s hot-shit rookie quarterback, Roger Braddock. Guy was the number one pick in the whole draft last spring. Now, he was just standing at the bar with a tall glass in his hand looking at Jimmy. Not laughing like all the others, just looking at Jimmy. Like he was a bug that flew in through a hole in a window screen or something.

  Jimmy zipped right over to him, taking the New York players by surprise.

  “What the fuck you looking at?” Jimmy demanded. “You drinking ginger ale or something there, you pussy? You best stay away from my side of the field Sunday. You don’t, I’ll —”

  A pair of huge arms encircled Jimmy from behind.

  “That’s enough, asshole. Time for you to hit the road. Face first, if that’s the way you want it.”

  It was obvious that Braddock’s teammates weren’t going to let Jimmy threaten their new star player. Jimmy was lifted off his feet and carried backward, but he kept his eyes on the young quarterback who’d yet to say a word to him.

  “You think these limp dicks gonna save you?” he asked Braddock. “That what you think?”

  For some reason even Jimmy would never be able to understand, all of his fear and rage found a focal point in the young quarterback who merely stood and watched him, probably wanting nothing more than for him to go away. But Jimmy didn’t go away. He pushed up on the two clasped hands that held him and bit down on the man’s thumb as hard as he could. Jimmy’s captor howled and immediately let him go.

  What happened next moved too fast for anyone to stop.

  Jimmy hit the ground running. He yelled, “Blitz!” and hit Roger Braddock in the head with his right forearm as hard as he could. The young man’s glass flew from his hand, and he dropped like he’d been shot. His fall was interrupted only when his head smashed into the bar rail.

  The coroner’s report said, upon its release, that Roger Braddock was dead before his body came to rest on the floor.

  Jimmy nearly died himself that night from the beating he received from Braddock’s teammates. Only the arrival of the police saved him, and the officers involved later admitted that had they known what Jimmy Leverette had done, they wouldn’t have interfered.

  This time the Gunslingers made no effort to help Jimmy, legally or financially. In fact, they cut him from the team, and to help in the suit which the New York team was bringing against them, they started a PR campaign outlining how they’d tried to help “reform” Jimmy Leverette over the years, but he’d proved perversely incorrigible.

  Jimmy was held in jail without bond on a charge of second-degree homicide, and had a public defender for a lawyer. His defense was that he was deranged by steroids and other drugs at the time he struck Roger Braddock, and that the Gunslingers were culpable as Jimmy had received all of his drugs from the team trainer, and that the team physician was aware that players were encouraged to use steroids without warning them that such substances had serious side-effects, including uncontrollable fits of rage.

  In a nutshell, Jimmy copped a temporary insanity plea and placed the blame elsewhere.

  The team trainer and physician vehemently denied Jimmy’s allegations, and since no other player or any of the coaches would corroborate the charges, the district attorney declined to prosecute the two team officials. Lab reports on blood samples taken from Jimmy just after the incident did, however, show levels of drugs that should have killed him, much less impair his judgment.

  For that reason, the judge reduced the charge against Jimmy to manslaughter, and when a guilty verdict was returned, after the jury deliberated for all of eight minutes, sentenced him to twelve years in the state prison at Huntsville.

  He served every last day of his sentence, as the parole board consistently rejected any plea for early release. When he got out, Jimmy was 46 years old, had a hundred and seventeen dollars in his pockets, and no hope of ever again finding a job having anything remotely to do with pro football. As far as the big-time sports establishment was concerned, Jimmy Leverette had been given a life sentence.

  Adding to his misfortune, just as he got out, the Braddock family released to the media a highlight video of their late son’s life, to remind everyone of just what a fine young man had been killed, who was responsible for his death and that the killer was now free.

  Ironically, it was in response to that video that Jimmy Leverette reinvented himself. When a Dallas TV crew caught up with him at a local flophouse and asked if he now had any remorse for what he’d done, he let loose with a rant: His father had abandoned him. His mother had beaten him. He’d been dirt poor. All the schools he’d attended wanted him only for his athletic ability. The Gunslingers had shot him full of steroids. All his life he’d been somebody’s nigger. And that’s what those Braddock people wanted him to stay. Well, he might be stone broke, he might be the most hated man in America, but he was nobody’s nigger now.

  And he never would be again.

  To Jimmy’s amazement, just days after his tirade aired, unsolicited letters found their way to him. Some of it was hate mail, but a far greater part praised him for what he’d said. And enclosed in many of the letters was money. Most came with only a few dollars, but one envelope from a lady in Alabama contained a hundred dollar bill. She wrote that his voice rang with the Lord’s righteous thunder.

  That was the moment of Jimmy’s epiphany, and he never looked back. He legally changed his last name to Thunder. He found a bleeding-heart ghostwriter to tell his life story: Nobody’s Nigger. He printed a hundred copies of the book with the money that continued to trickle in. He took those first copies to black churches around Dallas to sell from the trunk of a twenty year old Cadillac. He used the proceeds to print more copies and started selling them all over the South. Then a Boston publisher picked up the book — nobody in New York would touch it — and it became a best-seller.
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  From there, Jimmy acquired a mail-order divinity degree and backstopped it with his childhood readings of the Bible. He parlayed that with his college education in television arts and sciences and the money from his book to become a televangelist. His message was simple and compelling: Have faith in God, live a good, clean life, and no black person in America would ever have to be anybody’s nigger again.

  The Reverend Jimmy Thunder never asked directly for money. At the end of each show, a simple message came on the screen that the preceding program was furnished by a publicly supported ministry. It would continue to be presented as funds permitted.

  The soft sell worked. Dollars rolled in by the millions.

  After hearing from a woman in his audience one day that he spoke as if he stood on a high mountaintop with Jesus and could see the whole world, Jimmy decided to find some nice place at the right altitude so he could back up that perception with a degree of reality.

  Let the flock see how he had risen to the heights. Tell them they could climb the mountain, too. Jimmy moved to a fenced-in lakeshore estate in Goldstrike, California, and built his new TV studio on the property.

  Now, four years after his release from prison, at age fifty, he stood in front of Ron Ketchum and told the chief he’d come for the body of his son.

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” Ron told Reverend Thunder. “I don’t recall reading about him in your book.”

  Ron kept his tone civil, but like most cops he wasn’t well disposed to ex-cons, especially one who’d killed somebody and then didn’t have the decency to die behind bars. Jimmy Thunder was familiar with the chief’s attitude, though he hadn’t encountered it anytime recently. Still, he kept from lashing out. Didn’t say a word.

  “Maybe you mentioned him in a later edition,” Ron surmised.

  “I’m here for my son’s body,” Thunder said, holding his temper. “Are you going to let me give him a Christian burial or not?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I haven’t received word that his autopsy is complete … and Reverend Cardwell’s widow has first claim on his body. She and Mrs. Mahalia Cardwell are on their way to town as we speak.”

  Now, the Reverend Thunder’s eyes flashed with an anger that would have done credit to a wrathful God. He leaned toward Ron and said portentously, “I know who you are.”

  “We know each other, Reverend,” Ron replied evenly.

  Jimmy Thunder glared at the chief a moment longer, then he got to his feet and left the chief’s office with a seeming sense of purpose in his step.

  “Ten to one the man finds all those reporters swarming around here,” Oliver Gosden offered.

  “No bet.”

  “A hundred to one he pours poison in their ears about our racist chief of police.”

  “Maybe I should write a book,” Ron responded. “Nobody’s Cracker.”

  Annie Stratton saw Jimmy Thunder striding toward the stage, looking like his namesake storm front. Of greater importance, the swelling media mob saw and recognized him, too. The reporters had grown restless with her explanations of why the police couldn’t tell them anything yet, not even the victim’s identity. She’d had to tongue-lash several of them back into their seats when they’d gotten snotty with her, and the mood in the room was foul. Now, though, the newsies grew excited. They could feel a story was about to fall in their laps like manna from heaven.

  They moved to the edges of their seats and gathered their legs under them, ready to leap to their feet and bellow the first question that popped into their heads. It was feeding time at the zoo.

  Annie fleetingly considered the possibility of cutting the power to the microphone on the lectern. But that would do no good. Reverend Thunder came by his adopted name honestly. He could project his voice to the back row of the auditorium without breaking a sweat or dropping a consonant.

  For an instant, she even considered throwing the fire alarm to clear the room. But that would give her only a short respite, and would make things look worse in the end. So, whatever Jimmy Thunder had to say, and she knew she wouldn’t like it, she’d have to yield the stage to him and simply let him say it.

  Annie smiled to literally put the best face on things, stepped back and gestured to Jimmy Thunder to take her place. If she really didn’t like what the sonofabitch had to say, she could always tackle him from behind.

  Jimmy got right to it. “I believe y’all know me, and I think many of you know I live in this town. Undoubtedly, you’re all here because you heard that yesterday a black man was found crucified to a tree.”

  The Reverend Thunder enunciated his next statement with exquisite precision. “That man was my son.”

  The auditorium was hushed. Not even Annie Stratton had expected this.

  Jimmy Thunder continued before his audience could collect their wits or catch their breath. “His name was Isaac Cardwell. He was my only child.”

  Now, the media regained their footing, figuratively and literally. They shouted a babble of questions at Jimmy Thunder. He couldn’t have understood them even if he wanted to, but he was interested only in making his statement, not answering questions. His voice boomed out, overwhelming theirs.

  “This heinous crime happened in Mayor Clay Steadman’s town. It happened in the town where the chief of police is Ronald Ketchum. He’s the man responsible for catching my son’s killer. But when I asked him just now to release my son’s body to me, he refused.”

  Jimmy Thunder’s anger was so intense his voice quivered.

  “He would not give me my son!”

  The reverend hung his head and not even the crassest reporter in the room would intrude on the man’s grief. After a long moment, Jimmy Thunder looked up and addressed the crowd.

  “Do all of you remember who Ron Ketchum is?” he asked.

  With the possible exception of the newly arrived foreign press, they all did.

  But Jimmy Thunder told them anyway.

  “That’s right. He was Lieutenant Ronald Ketchum of the LAPD. The man who’s supposed to catch my son’s killer was once on trial himself for killing a black man.”

  Chapter 11

  The media knew a big story when they heard one. Every paper, TV network and news website in the country would have as the lead for their next news cycle the fact that the man nailed to the tree in Goldstrike, California turned out to be the son of the Reverend Jimmy Thunder, and that the man responsible for catching Isaac Cardwell’s killer had a reputation among African Americans that was questionable at best.

  Then, as was their wont, the ladies and gentlemen of the press would dredge up the story of Ron Ketchum for the edification of their audiences. Just in case anyone had missed it the umpteen times it had been told four years earlier.

  In his twenty years with the LAPD, both as a patrol officer and a homicide detective, Ron Ketchum had never had to fire his weapon in the line of duty. But two times, when he was off duty, he’d had to shoot criminals. In each case, the man he’d shot was black.

  The first time, Ron had been shooting baskets by himself at night in a park in Beverly Hills. He’d been busy concentrating on trying to sink one hundred free throws in a row when a carjacked Porsche came careening off of La Cienega Boulevard and into the park. He had to leap out of the way just to avoid getting splattered. An LAPD patrol unit, lights blazing and siren screaming, barreled into the park not five seconds behind the stolen car.

  Ron ran to his car to get his weapon out of the trunk

  By the time he had his Beretta in hand, the carjacker had stopped the Porsche and was crouched behind it opening up on the patrol unit with an Uzi. Ron saw the officer behind the wheel killed outright. The dead man’s partner managed to dive out through the passenger side door, but he was shot in the leg as the carjacker kept firing.

  Ron ran toward the shooter. The carjacker exhausted his clip just as Ron put his gun on him and announced himself as a police officer. The carjacker responded by reaching for a handgun sticking out of his pants. Ron shot
him in the chest five times.

  He ran to the shooter, pulled the gun out of his pants, flung it aside and made sure the man wouldn’t be able to resume firing. As far as Ron could tell from his cursory examination, the guy was dead. Good, he thought to himself. One fewer asshole on the streets.

  He then went to the aid of the wounded officer. His name tag said Gosden. Ron used the T-shirt off his back as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding from the wounded cop’s femoral artery. Then ignoring the blood and brain matter splashed about the interior of the patrol car, he called in a Code 30 on the unit’s radio: Officer needs help, emergency.

  He hurried back to Gosden. It seemed like blood was still leaking from the wounded man’s leg. He pulled on his T-shirt as hard as he could, making the tourniquet as tight as possible. Gosden moaned, but Ron could see there was already a large pool of blood under the man’s leg. And, worse, his eyes were starting to glaze over.

  Ron knew somehow that if he let this man go into shock, there’d be no bringing him back. He cradled Gosden’s head in his lap and started talking to him, demanding his attention, that he stay with him.

  “My name’s Lieutenant Ronald Ketchum,” he told the wounded officer. “Help is on the way, and the perp is down.”

  The words seemed to penetrate the fog of Gosden’s terrible pain. He blinked several times, trying to bring Ron into focus. Finally, he groaned, “Bauer?”

  Gosden was asking about his partner, Ron knew.

  “He’s gone. But you’re not. You hang on just a minute and the ambulance will be here.” But Ron saw Gosden’s eyes begin to swim again. So he yelled, “Hang on, goddamnit! You gonna let that sonofabitch kill both of you?”