by Kirk Alex
CHAPTER 113
Biggs found a secluded spot at an all-night gas station. Changed the plates back. He had Marvin and Patience hunker down in the rear of the van, facing away from the windshield, prior to continuing on to the residential neighborhood where he rented the two-car garage.
He guided the Party Wagon north on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. When he got to Strathern, he made a left. There was a new strip mall on his right that he drove past. He reached Vantage Avenue and made a right turn. Stayed north beyond the rear parking to the strip mall until he neared the alley entrance on the right side. He turned into it. Drove a hundred feet. Made a left at the main alley. This alley served his needs perfectly. Nothing but high brick walls and chain-link fences with rising ivy on his left-hand side all the way down to the end of the block. Garages were on his right, the east side. Couldn’t have picked a better area to rent one.
He drove another hundred yards and stopped the van. Looked both ways, always, before unlocking the garage door. Gripped the handle and yanked up on the roll-up. Biggs got back in the van and eased it in next to the Cadillac. Marvin Muck and Patience McDaniel were allowed to disembark from the Party Wagon only after he had pulled the garage door down.
He and Marvin quickly carried the suitcase into the backseat of the Caddy. Biggs had the black woman climb in the trunk. Patience complied without a peep. That’s what he liked about her. Never gave him any grief. “Catatonic” was right. She was an inch away from it. Bishop then told Marvin to join her to keep her company.
“Shit, man. Yo. I’m suppose’ to be Deacon, Cecil. I get the phobia in there.”
“It’s a large trunk. What are you complaining about? It’s a Cadillac trunk. First class all the way when you travel with Trusty.”
“I know it be a Cadillac, Cecil. I get them cold sweat’ in it, man. How ’bout I wear the hoodie an’ stay in the front wiff you and keep my head down? Be the same.”
“Get your chickenshit ass in there, goddammit. It’s only for five fucking minutes.”
Marvin was about to relent and crawl inside the trunk. “All right. Yo. I’ll do it, me. Don’t be the first time.”
“I know you will.” Biggs shook his head. “More trouble than you’re worth.”
It was obvious soon enough to both what a tight squeeze it would be. Biggs grabbed him by the arm and shoved him toward the front instead. Slammed the trunk shut. Marvin looked at him.
“Get in the front seat. What are you waiting for? Pull the hood over your head. Get on the floor.”
“Know the rest. Ain’t got to tell me twiced. Keep my head down ’till you say different.”
Biggs pulled the garage door up and backed the Brougham into the alley. No cars drove through. No one in sight. All was fine. In that regard. He pulled the roll-up down. Made double-certain that it was locked before getting back in the Caddy and driving off.
Few minutes later, near the corner of Saticoy and Vineland, he pulled the Cadillac into the back of a gas station. Pressed the trunk release. He got out. Lifted the trunk open and instructed Patience to squeeze into the backseat next to the suitcase. He closed the trunk and got behind the steering wheel. Marvin was still grumbling about something.
“Now that the ho be in the backseat, take the hoodie off?”
Cecil yanked it off for him. Told the deacon to sit up. Biggs chin-gestured in Patience’s direction. Docile as usual.
“See? Never complains. Didn’t matter to her that she had to spend a few minutes in the trunk.”
“Yo. You try it sometime, Omar. See how you like it.”
Biggs’s right hand snapped out like a cobra going for a lethal strike. He gripped Marvin R. Muck by the Adam’s apple, his fingers digging in like a vice, applying pressure.
“When I ask you to do something, pissant . . .”
Marvin gasped. Unable to get a word out.
“I told you before, don’t ever call me Omar. I don’t like it. I don’t like the memories that go with it.”
Marvin made some more desperate sounds in his throat.
“I let you sit up here because I’m reasonable. I’ll go so far as to say I take pride in it; and also because it appeared a bit crowded with her back there. Only next time I say jump, motherfucker—you don’t say but one thing: How high? I call the shots, run the show. Got it?”
Marvin nodded his head. “Yeah, Hoss.”
“Then say it. Let me hear you say it.”
Marvin tried to speak, but the other’s grip was too tight and made it difficult. Biggs let him go.
“You the boss, Hoss. I ain’t got no problem wiff it.”
Cecil watched him go through a coughing fit of some kind. Probably imagined, more than anything. Exaggerated.
“Knock it off.”
“How we gonna stay partner’, if you be pissed every time I don’t agree wiff you, man? Ain’t right. Yo.”
“You think I’m pissed? Do you really believe I was pissed just then?”
“Maybe not.”
Biggs looked at him. Glanced in the direction of the suitcase.
“Anyway, what’s there to be pissed off about, Free Ride? We got goods in the car, don’t we? We got goods, pussy on the hoof, don’t we?”
“We sure do, Omar—I mean Cecil. Sorry, Hoss. We sure got the good’. Pussy on the hoof.”
“That’s right.”
Biggs started the engine, and rejoined the Vineland traffic. They were headed south, south toward home and a dopamine-generated rush.
CHAPTER 114
Biggs waited for Marvin to unlock the front gate and drove on in and stopped just inside the yard to make certain the gate was locked back up properly and Muck tossed the key back to him. Once that was done, Biggs continued to the rear of the house. Backed the Caddy to the door. Had Patience get out of the car while he waited for Muck to walk back there.
Patience McDaniel did her usual: stood in place, staring off into space. He was tempted to take a look at what she was fixated on, and stopped himself in time. Nothing she ever stared at was worth bothering with. It was the way she went about it, so thoroughly focused, that had you believing that whatever it was she was looking at no one else had ever seen before, or ever would.
Only it was a crock. Because she stared at nothing, ever, that mattered.
Muck was dragging his ass. Made it back. Biggs and his Man Friday each grabbed a nylon cord handle and hauled the heavy suitcase out of the backseat and lugged it inside the hallway. Cecil called the woman in. Patience would have stayed out there the rest of the night, gazing at the stars, if he hadn’t.
The back door was locked.
CHAPTER 115
Petunia Roscoe had heard the Cadillac pull up and soon she was out of bed and dragging a chair across the bedroom carpet to the rear porch door. She climbed the chair and was straining through a crack in the curtains over the glass portion of the door to see what was going on with Pastor Stinky and his aide-de-camp. Only she couldn’t make anything out. It was too dark back there.
She whispered Marty’s name from where she stood on the chair, hoping to wake him and let him know that they were at it again, for what good it did. Marty Roscoe’s typical response was to continue snoring. He just didn’t give a damn. What would she have told him anyway? What were Biggs and the light-skinned negro up to? Nothing that she could tell.
It all seemed fishy somehow, sinister. The Sinister Minister. How fitting. Hardly enough. Had that evil clown makeup on again. She had no real proof that anything out of the ordinary was taking place, and yet deep down something told her that it certainly was. Then you had the odd-looking chest. Always. These things appeared to be made out of wood, or metal, and were in the shape and size of a large Samsonite suitcase, maybe larger. Yes, it was larger, considerably. Had some type of rope handles on the sides. And, on top, where the average suitcase had a single handle, their “suitcase” had two. Rope handles. There was that length of “tubing,” looked like tubing, sticking out between the handles on that
same side of the chest.
Furthermore, why did this activity most always take place under cover of night? She also knew that loud music and noise, boisterous festivities and whatnot, very often followed. That was the routine with the Sinister Minister and his demented deacon.
She looked at her husband. Dead to the world. What would have been the use? He was on his back, scratching his testicles, and snoring like a thousand-pound hog.
That’s what had kept her awake: her husband’s snoring. Seven years of it and she was just about at her wits’ end. Maybe they ought to reconsider sleeping in separate rooms—even if it meant having Marty sleep on the sofa in the front room, which would not have made either of them happy, to tell the truth. Then, too, she was used to sleeping and sharing the same bed with him.
To be fair, the snoring hadn’t always been an issue, had not always been this bad. It sure seemed to get worse lately.
She returned to bed, shook him awake, and told him to knock it off.
“Was I snoring again? I didn’t know I was snoring, babe. Sorry.”
“You never used to snore, Marty. Not like this. I don’t sleep much these days. Those creeps are at it again, Marty. It’s just a matter of time before the music starts up. And it’s three o’clock in the morning.”
Roscoe said nothing. Sound asleep again. So quickly. His favorite activity (or should it be non-activity?), and chasing skirts. If not necessarily snoring this time, he was wheezing. They were wheezing sounds.
Petunia looked at him. Rolled her eyes. “What’s the use? Talking to myself, as usual.”
CHAPTER 116
The African-American couple, Harold Crust and his wife Fay, who lived in the modest wood and stucco house on Biggs’s left, had a bedroom window that faced the bishop’s backyard. Although Biggs’s rear door could not be viewed entirely from it, enough could be seen in order to basically determine the activity going on with Biggs and his sidekick—if and when anything was going on back there.
Short and wiry, fifty-two-year-old Harold Crust had been lying in bed, risen and taken a look through the curtains, and returned to bed intent on getting some shuteye in spite of the televangelist blaring from the color set that his wife had going in the living room, to no avail.
It was no use. And yet, he knew it, couldn’t deny it: it wasn’t the tv so much as the craving for a smoke and a drink, a shot (double, preferably) of something strong.
He’d been lying there, fantasizing about how good it would feel to fire up a cigarette and have a taste of whiskey, when he heard the Cadillac pull up a moment ago and then watched Biggs—in that scary-ass clown shit on his face—and that dumb young nigga Marvin through a thin crack in the curtains unload a suitcase or some kind of chest out of the trunk of the Cadillac and lug it inside the church. Not only was the suitcase large in appearance, but must have been pretty damned heavy the way it took the both of them to lift and carry it on in. He didn’t need a telegram from Western Union to tell him what would happen next: Party Time in Bishop Biggs’s “sacred” Church of Re-Newed Hope would soon follow. That’s what those rude and crude sons of bitches usually did; the shouting and music blasting always happened afterwards.
Call Valley PD again? What for? He’d complained to the rollers too often already about it all, had discussed it with Fay, who didn’t seem to be bothered by it nearly half as much as he was: woman was wrapped up in all that tv evangelist crap, but had in fact talked to Marty and his wife Petunia and Petunia had tried calling the police herself to at least force Biggs to knock off the racket, bring it down to a tolerable level. It hadn’t done any good. In four months the rollers had only showed up one time in a black-and-white, but Biggs had been alerted somehow, or his intuition told him to turn it down, and the noise had stopped before the cops arrived, and that had been the end of it (that time). The noise had died down to nothing, for a few days or so, a week, and then the same bullshit had started right up again. The racket wouldn’t have bothered Harold as much as it did, frankly, if only the strange cats would strictly do it during daytime hours while people was up and about, at work. Why cause all that ruckus at night and in the early hours of the morning when people got to sleep? When working folks got to rest up so they can make it in to their job and earn a living?
I’ll tell you why: Man got bread up the yin-yang. Don’t have to get up early five, six days a week to make a dollar, that’s why.
Trouble was, you couldn’t reason with somebody like that. Dude got plenty money. Loaded. Owns that big house with the big front yard, two-car garage in back, never mind that he don’t spend a whole lotta time on upkeep; owns a Rolls-Royce—even if it’s only a ’72, it’s still a badass Rolls, and that brand new Cadillac.
Don’t work like most folks; he don’t have to. When you got pockets full of dough. Stays up all night raising hell. Plays that disco, plays funk, rock-n-roll. There’s times he even leaves gospel on—that still don’t make the clown look like any preacher he ever knew. Not only that—there was that damned stench comin’ outta his house not long ago.
Smelled awful, like burning flesh. . . . Christ, what a thing to say. The idea made his skin crawl. Woulda never even thought it until Old Lloyd Dicker from across the street suggested it smelled like that: death. Dead bodies. Flesh being burned. What Mr. Dicker said.
All he knew it just smelled bad. Couldn’t tell what it was. Lord, it stank. Stayed that way. Off and on. Just when you thought it was gone—it came back. Keeps comin’ back. And Marty’s wife had agreed with him, too. Petunia been trying to get Fay to go on over there and talk to Mr. Biggs about it, at least try to see the inside of his “church”—and Harold hadn’t felt comfortable with that at all, didn’t care for the looks of that Bishop Biggs. But that big-mouth Petunia Roscoe kept saying that Fay could do it easy because she was religious and watching them Christian programs on tee-vee all the time, and that if she was to go knock on Biggs’s front door that he would let her in with open arms because, as she saw it, “Fay and Biggs got so much in common”—and they could all figure out what the hell was going on in there. Was it a real church like the bishop claims, or was it something else?
For a while there it seemed to be. A few years back. And why come he was so picky about who was allowed inside from the neighborhood? Why couldn’t Petunia go in? Why wouldn’t Biggs and Marvin let her in to say a prayer?
Biggs had told her that only those selective few who truly had the faith were allowed to join his parish. Had to do with security, too. Said they been getting death threats. Had to be a bunch of bull. What else? Who knew what to believe?
“Please turn the television down, Fay. I gotta get my rest.”
Volume was lowered some. It was still too loud far as Harold was concerned.
CHAPTER 117
Biggs and Marvin carried the chest down into the basement. Lowered it next to the pit. They undid the clasps, and lifted the lid open and watched the girl pop out hysterically, gasping for air the way Dione and others before her had, even though she’d clearly had access to the breathing tube. But it was okay. Biggs found it amusing when they carried on.
“What’s your name, girlie?”
“Dixie Osgood.”
He liked that, too. Dixie. He’d never known a “Dixie” before.
The bishop unlocked the door over the pit, opened it, to reveal the victim below. Terri Denise Klopp. Hardly treading water.
“This is what happens to bitches who cause me grief. We call it Pit Therapy around here.”
“Them hole’ there? In the door? Dude be runnin’ hot wire through them hole’ in case them victim don’t be gettin’ the message.”
Biggs closed the door. Locked it. Indicated the steel entrance to the cooler in the distance, by the bookshelves and play area.
“Now, should you end up in there—for whatever infraction—that’s pretty much it. End of the line.”
Biggs yanked the girl up by the handcuffs and dragged her over to the door to the Mattress Room, where
Dione was heard from, sobbing, pleading to be let out. Biggs got the door unlocked and shoved her in, and stiffened like a statue. Grimaced. Didn’t dare budge.
“What do it be, Trusty? Yo.”
“My back. Son of a bitch.” And Biggs could not move one inch without experiencing severe pain. He leaned against the doorjamb this way. Held on for support, gasping. Fuck. Why was this happening to him now? The victim scrambled past him. Made it out of the room and ran up the stairs and started wailing and pounding on the locked door.
Dione was heard from as well, wanting to be let out, released. All Biggs could do at this point was turn his head and look up at the girl from Georgia hammering at the basement door with her fists. He had his Magnum in his hand. Movement of any rapidity was out of the question. Still, something needed to be done. Commotion by the heifer was not good for his psychological well-being.
“What do you want me to do wiff her, Hoss?”
“What do you think? Bring her back down.”
All Biggs could do was sigh and shake his head in frustration. Muck climbed the stairs with his arms open, the idea being that he would wrap them around her waist once he got close enough and carry her down. Only the victim kicked out at him. Tried for his groin. Missing, crying, shouting. She did her best to fight him off, keep him at bay. It worked for a while.
Marvin dove for her legs, and yanked on them this way, pulling her down the flight of stairs to the cement floor of the basement. The victim was in no shape to do much after that. Marvin was groggy enough himself.