The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  “Hey,” said Jackie. “Open up. Maybe I can help you with somethin. You lookin for a woman?”

  There was only silence.

  Then Jackie O did something dumb. He tried to open the door.

  Looking back, Jackie O couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. At best, he was going to make whoever was inside the van seriously pissed, and at worst, he could end up with a gun in his face. At least, Jackie O thought that a gun in the face was the worst that could happen.

  He grasped the handle and pulled. The door opened. A stench assailed Jackie O, as if someone had taken the bloated carcass of a dead animal buried in shallow ground and suddenly pierced its hide, releasing all the pent-up gas from within. The smell must have made Jackie nauseous, because there was no other way of explaining what he thought he saw inside the cab of the van before the door was yanked closed and the van pulled away. Even now, in the comfort of his own apartment, and with the benefit of hindsight, Jackie could only recall fragmented images.

  “It was like it was filled with meat,” he told Louis. “Not hanging meat, but like the inside of a body, all purple and red. It was on the panels and on the floor, and I could see blood dripping from it and pooling in places. There was a bench seat in the front, and two figures sitting on it, but they were all black, except for their faces. One was huge and fat. He was closest to me, and the smell came mostly from him. They must have been wearing masks, because their faces looked ruined.”

  “Ruined?” asked Louis.

  “I didn’t get a good look at the passenger. Hell, I didn’t get much of a look at anything, but the fat one, his face was like a skull. The skin was all wrinkled and black, and the nose looked like it had been broken off, with only a piece left near his forehead. His eyes were kind of green and black, with no whites to them. I saw his teeth too, because he said something when the door opened. His teeth were long, and yellow. It must have been a mask, right? I mean, what else could it be?”

  He was almost talking to himself, carrying on an argument in his head that had been going on since the night he had opened the door of the van.

  “What else could it be?”

  Walter and I separated after our lunch with Mackey and Dunne. They offered to meet up with us again if we needed any more help.

  “No witnesses,” said Mackey, and there was a sly look in his eye that I didn’t like. I didn’t care about what they might have heard, but I wasn’t going to let someone like Mackey throw my past back in my face.

  “If you have something you want to say, then say it now,” I said.

  Dunne stepped between us.

  “Just so we’re clear,” he said, quietly. “You handle G-Mack how you want to, but he better be breathing and walking when you’re done, and if he expires, then you be sure to have a good alibi. Are we clear on that? Otherwise we’ll have to come after you.”

  He didn’t look at Walter when he spoke. His eyes remained fixed on me. Only as he turned away did he speak directly to Walter. He said: “You better be careful too, Walter.”

  Walter didn’t reply, and I did not react. After all, Dunne had a point.

  “You don’t have to come along tonight,” I said, once the two cops were out of sight.

  “Bullshit. I’m there. But you heard what Dunne said: they’ll fall on you if something happens to this G-Mack.”

  “I’m not going to touch the pimp. If he had anything to do with Alice’s disappearance, then we’ll get it out of him, and later I’ll try to bring him in so he can tell the cops what he knows. But I can only speak for myself. I can’t speak for anyone else.”

  I saw a cab on the horizon. I flagged it and watched with satisfaction as it weaved through two lanes of traffic to get to me.

  “Those guys are going to bring you down with them someday,” said Walter. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Maybe I’m dragging them down with me,” I replied. “Thanks for this, Walter. I’ll be in touch.”

  I climbed in the cab and left him.

  Far away, the Black Angel stirred.

  “You made a mistake,” it said. “You were supposed to check her background. You assured me that no one would come after her.”

  “She was just a common whore,” said Brightwell. He had returned from Arizona with the weight of Blue’s loss heavy upon him. He would be found again, but time was pressing and they needed all of the bodies they could muster. Now, with the death of the girls still fresh in his memory, he was being criticized for his carelessness and he did not like it. He had been alone for so long, without having to answer to anyone, and the exercise of authority chafed upon him in a way that it had not previously done. He also found the atmosphere in the sparsely furnished office oppressive. There was the great desk, ornately carved and topped with green leather, and the expensive antique lamps that shed a dim light on the walls, the wooden floor, and the worn rug upon which he now stood, but there were too many empty spaces waiting to be filled. In a way, it was a metaphor for the existence of the one before whom he now stood.

  “No,” said the Black Angel. “She was a most uncommon whore. There are questions being asked about her. A report has been filed.”

  Two great blue veins pulsed at each of Brightwell’s temples, extending their reach across either side of his skull, their ambit clearly visible beneath the man’s corona of dark hair. He resented the reprimand, and felt his impatience growing.

  “If those you had sent to kill Winston had done their job properly and discreetly, then we would not be having this conversation,” he said. “You should have consulted me.”

  “You were not to be found. I have no idea where you go when you disappear into the shadows.”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  The Black Angel stood, leaning its hands upon the burnished desk.

  “You forget yourself, Mr. Brightwell,” it said.

  Brightwell’s eyes glittered with new anger.

  “No,” he said. “I have never forgotten myself. I remained true. I searched, and I found. I discovered you, and I reminded you of all that you once were. It was you who forgot. I remembered. I remembered it all.”

  Brightwell was right. The Black Angel recalled their first encounter, the revulsion it had felt, and then, slowly, the dawning understanding and the final acceptance. The Black Angel retreated from the confrontation, and turned instead to the window. Beneath its gaze, people enjoyed the sunshine, and traffic moved slowly along the congested streets.

  “Kill the pimp,” said the Black Angel. “Discover all that you can about those who are asking questions.”

  “And then?”

  The Black Angel cast Brightwell a bone.

  “Use your judgment,” it said. There was no point in reminding him of the necessity of attracting no further attention to themselves. They were growing closer to their goal, and furthermore, it realized that Brightwell was moving increasingly beyond its control.

  If he had ever truly been under its control.

  Brightwell left, but the Black Angel remained lost in remembrance. Strange the forms that we take, it thought. It walked to the gilt mirror upon the wall. Gently it touched its right hand to its face, tracing the lineaments of the skull beneath the skin. Then, slowly, it removed the contact lens from its right eye. It had been forced to wear the lens for hours today as there were people to be met and papers to be signed, and now its eye felt as though it were burning. The mark did not react well to concealment.

  The Black Angel leaned closer, tugging at the skin beneath its eye. A white sheen lay across the blue of the iris, like the ruined sail of a ship at sea, or a face briefly glimpsed through parting clouds.

  That night, G-Mack took to the streets with a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. It was a Hi-Point nine-millimeter, alloy framed and loaded up with CorBon +P ammunition for maximum stopping power. The gun had cost G-Mack very little — hell, even new, the Hi-Point retailed for about ten percent of what a similar Walther P5 would go for — and he figured that
if the cops came around and he had to let it go, then he wouldn’t be out of pocket by too much. He had fired the gun only a couple of times, out in the New Jersey woods, and he knew that the Hi-Point didn’t respond well to the CorBon ammo. It affected the accuracy, and the recoil was just plain nasty, but G-Mack knew that if it came down to it he’d be using the Hi-Point right up close, and anyone who took one from the gun at that range was going to stay down.

  He left the Cutlass Supreme in the lockup, and instead drove over to the Point in the Dodge that he used for backup. G-Mack didn’t care if one of the other brothers saw him driving the old-lady car. The ones that mattered knew he had the Cutlass, could take it out anytime he damn well pleased if they needed some reminding, but the Dodge was less likely to attract attention, and it had enough under the hood to get him out of trouble quickly if the need arose. He parked up in an alleyway — the same alleyway in which Jackie O had seen fit to try to confront the occupants of the black van, although G-Mack didn’t know that — then slipped out onto the streets of the Point. He kept his head down, doing the rounds of his whores from the shadows, then retreated back to the Dodge. He had instructed the young bitch, Ellen, to act as an intermediary, bringing the money from the others to him instead of forcing him to return to the streets again.

  He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He reached beneath the driver’s seat and removed a Glock 23 from its slot. The Hi-Point under his arm would do if he ran into trouble on the street, but the 23 was his baby. He’d been put onto it by a guy who got drummed out of the South Carolina State Police for corruption and now did a thriving business in firearms for the more discerning customer. The Staties down in SC had adopted the 23 sight unseen, and had never had cause to complain. Loaded up with .40-caliber S&W cartridges, it was one mean killing machine. G-Mack removed the Hi-Point from his holster and balanced both weapons in his hands. Next to the Glock, it was clear what a piece of shit the Hi-Point really was, but G-Mack wasn’t too concerned. This wasn’t a fashion show. This was life or death, and anyway, two guns were always better than one.

  We descended on Hunts Point shortly before midnight.

  In the nineteenth century, Hunts Point was home to wealthy landowning families, their numbers gradually swelled by city dwellers envious of the luxurious lifestyles available to the Point’s residents. After World War I, a train line was built along Southern Boulevard, and the mansions gave way to apartments. City businesses began to relocate, attracted by the space available for development and ease of access to the tri-state region. The poor and working-class families (nearly sixty thousand residents, or two-thirds of the population, in the 1970s alone) were forced out as Hunts Point’s reputation grew in business circles, leading to the opening of the produce market in 1967 and the meat market in 1974. There were recycling stores, warehouses, commercial waste depots, auto glass sellers, scrap dealers — and, of course, the big markets, to and from which the trucks trundled, sometimes providing the hookers with a little business along the way. Nearly ten thousand people still lived in the district, and to their credit they had campaigned for traffic signals, modified truck routes, new trees, and a waterfront park, slowly improving this sliver of the South Bronx to create a better home for themselves and for future generations; but they were living in an area that was a crossroads for all the garbage the city of New York could provide. There were two dozen waste transfer stations on this little peninsula alone, and half of all its putrescible garbage and most of its sewage sludge ended up there. The whole area stank in summer, and asthma was rife. Garbage clung to fences and filled the gutters, and the noise of 2 million truck trips a year provided a sound track of squealing brakes, tooting horns, and beeping reverse signals. Hunts Point was a miniature city of industry, and among the most visible of those industries was prostitution.

  The streets were already crammed with cars as I arrived, and women tottered between them on absurdly high heels, most of them wearing little more than lingerie. There were all shapes, all ages, all colors. In its way, the Point was the most egalitarian of places. Some of the women shuffled like they were in the final stages of Parkinson’s, jerking and shifting from one foot to the other while trying to keep their spines straight in what was known locally as the “crack dance,” their pipes tucked into their bras or the waistbands of their skirts. Two girls on Lafayette were eating sandwiches provided by the Nightworks outreach initiative, which tried to provide the working girls with health care, condoms, clean needles, even food when necessary. The women’s heads moved constantly, watching for pimps, johns, cops. The cops liked to swoop occasionally, backing up the paddy wagons to street corners and simply sweeping any hookers within reach into the back, or pink-slipping them for disorderly conduct or obstructing traffic, even loitering, anything to break up their business. A $250 fine was a lot for these women to pay if they didn’t have a pimp to back them up, and many routinely spent thirty to sixty days in the can for nonpayment rather than hand over to the courts money that they could ill afford to lose, if the poorer ones had $250 to begin with.

  I went into the Green Mill to wait for the others. The Green Mill was a legendary Hunts Point diner. It had been around for decades, and was now the main resting place for cold pimps and tired whores. It was relatively quiet when I got there, since business was good on the streets. A couple of pimps wearing Philadelphia Phillies shirts sat at one of the windows, flicking through a copy of Rides magazine and arguing the relative merits of assorted hookups. I took a seat near the door and waited. There was a young girl seated at one of the booths. Her hair was dark and she was dressed in a short black dress that was little more than a slip. Three times I saw older women enter the diner, give her money, then leave again. After the third had departed, the girl closed the little purse containing the money and left the diner. She was back again maybe five minutes later, and the cycle resumed.

  Angel joined me shortly after the girl had returned. He had dressed down for the occasion, if such a thing were actually possible. His jeans were even more worn than usual, and his denim jacket looked like it had been stolen from the corpse of a particularly unhygienic biker.

  “We have him,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “An alley, two blocks away. He’s sitting in a Dodge, listening to the radio.”

  “He alone?”

  “Looks like it. The girl over at the window seems to be bringing him his money a couple of times an hour, but she’s the only one who’s been near him since ten.”

  “You figure he’s armed?”

  “I would be if I was him.”

  “He doesn’t know we’re coming.”

  “He knows somebody’s coming. Louis talked to Jackie O.”

  “The old-timer?”

  “Right. He just gave us the lead. He figures G-Mack made a big mistake, and he’s known it since the night Martha confronted him. He’s edgy.”

  “I’m surprised he’s stayed around this long.”

  “Jackie O thinks he’d run if he could. He’s low on funds, seeing as how he spent all his money on a fancy ride, and he has no friends.”

  “That’s heartbreaking.”

  “I thought you might see it that way. Pay at the register. You leave it on the table and someone will steal it.”

  I paid for my coffee and followed Angel from the diner.

  We intercepted the girl just as she entered the alley. The pimp’s Dodge was parked around a corner in a lot behind a big brownstone, with an exit behind him onto the street and one before him that connected perpendicularly with an alley. For the moment, we were out of his sight.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’m not interested tonight,” she replied.

  She tried to walk around me. I gripped her arm. My hand entirely enclosed it, with so much room to spare that I had to tighten my fist considerably just to hold on to her. She opened her mouth to scream and Louis’s hand closed around it as we moved her into the shadows.

  “Take it ea
sy,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  I showed her my licence, but didn’t give her enough time to take in the details.

  “I’m an investigator,” I said. “Understand? I just need a few words.”

  I nodded to Louis, and he carefully removed his hand from her mouth. She didn’t try to scream again, but he kept his hand close just in case.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ellen.”

  “You’re one of G-Mack’s girls.”

  “So?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Aberdeen.”

  “You and a million other Kurt Cobain fans. Seriously, where are you from?”

  “Detroit,” she said, her shoulders sagging. She was probably still lying.

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

  “I know you don’t. I’m just asking. You don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Bullshit,” said Louis. “That’s how old you’ll be in 2007.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Okay, listen to me, Ellen. G-Mack is in a lot of trouble. After tonight, he’s not going to be in business anymore. I want you to take whatever money is in that purse and walk away. Go back to the Green Mill first. Our friend will stay with you to make sure you don’t talk to anyone.”

  Ellen looked torn. I saw her tense, but Louis immediately brought his hand closer to her mouth.

  “Ellen, just do it.”

  Walter Cole appeared beside us.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk back with you, buy you a cup of coffee, whatever you want.”

  Ellen had no choice. Walter wrapped an arm around her shoulder. It looked almost protective, but he kept a tight grip on her in case she tried to run. She looked back at us.

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said. “I got nobody else.”

  Walter walked her across the road. She took her old seat, and he sat beside her, so that he could hear all that she said to the other women, and could stop her if she made a break for the door.