by Brian Drake
Bacon sizzled. The scent hit him when he entered. In the kitchen he found a pan with four popping strips; some scrambled eggs sat in another pan. Freddie found Sheila in front of the mirror, brushing on eye make-up. She’d tied back her dark hair. Her blue eyes had their usual sparkle and a smile replaced Freddie’s frown.
“Hi, sweetie,” Sheila said, and leaned a cheek toward him. He kissed her. She saw the bandage, gasped, grabbed his arm for a closer look. “What happened?”
“Accident, don’t worry about it.”
Her eyes stayed on him a moment. He looked away. “Go eat,” she said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Freddie looked at her in the blue and white IHOP uniform, the bulge of her abdomen beginning to show. While being a father held some excitement, the grim financial woes facing him and his bride, made it hard to be as carefree and upbeat as he wanted.
Sheila Webster watched her husband go, returned to her face painting. She didn’t see her face in the mirror. She saw Freddie’s frustration, the taut line his mouth formed when he pressed his lips together. He wouldn’t talk. The pile of bills said everything for him.
If Freddie had been chiseled from rock, Sheila had been built with greater care. Soft features, clear skin, scattered freckles, small nose. Nothing in her demeanor suggested that she’d been abandoned at age two and raised in foster homes and had seen plenty of tough times. Their current situation was just another mountain to climb.
Sheila went out to the kitchen. Freddie sat at the table picking at his eggs. She poured coffee and sat near him. Her back arched a little. The chair’s padding had gone to seed ages ago and the wire-mesh backrest did her no good and made her bottom and lower back sore. She scooted closer to Freddie.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about what Art said the other night, about me driving a cab.”
Art Ahern operated a cab company employing ex-cons like Freddie. He’d wanted to drive for Art three years ago after the prison doors closed behind him, but no slots had been available, so Freddie went to work at the bakery. Now Art had a part-time opening.
“Only time you’d be home would be to sleep,” Sheila said.
“Uh-huh,” Freddie said. He chewed some bacon. “But maybe something full-time will come up. With tips I could do okay. While you’re on maternity leave.”
Sheila sipped her coffee. “These graveyard shifts kill you as it is,” she said, “you want to work another five, six hours a day?”
“I’m open to other ideas. You didn’t have any the last time we talked.”
“We’ve always survived.”
“It’s different now.”
“No. It isn’t. You’ve never given up before, why start now?”
He let out a breath but didn’t say anything. She rubbed his shoulder.
“Give us a chance, hon,” she said. “Don’t decide right away.”
He kept staring at the plate, moving the eggs around with his fork.
Sheila ran red nails across his back and emptied the last of the coffee in the sink. “Eat up,” she said, bending to kiss his cheek. She grabbed her purse, and pulled the door shut behind her.
Freddie shoveled the left-over bacon and eggs into a plastic container and stored the container in the refrigerator. The phone on the wall rang. He picked up. “Hello?”
“Back in the old days,” the voice said, “you’d still be out chasing tail.”
Jimmy O’Shea.
“The old lady pop yet?”
“How’d you find me?” Freddie said.
“I called around. Want some work?”
Freddie said nothing.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me.”
“I heard.”
“I figured with the baby and all you might want some money, like, oh, a split of a job I have. Means seventy-five hundred to you.”
“I’m doing just fine. We are doing just fine.”
“You don’t believe a word of that.”
“I’m not going back to prison.”
“Who says you’ll get caught? One night’s work, in and out.”
“No.”
“Seventy-five hundred bucks, Freddie.”
Freddie’s eyes landed on the stack of bills atop the small desk in one corner of the room. His right hand began to sweat so he switched the phone to his left hand.
“At least come and talk about it.”
“My shift at the bakery starts at ten o’clock tonight. I’ll”--and Freddie paused, his mouth dry. “I’ll meet you at the Starbucks on the corner. Nine-thirty.”
“What kind of crap is that? Let’s meet right now.”
“Tonight or forget it.” Freddie hooked the phone.
He sat down at the desk and looked over the bills. His hands shook as he sorted the envelopes. The usual expenses. One medical bill after another. Insurance didn’t cover everything. The baby was costing a ton and hadn’t even been born yet.
The seventy-five hundred sounded good, but he had made a promise to Sheila.
He told her “the life” was over and he wanted to keep that promise.
But would one job really hurt?
Freddie went to bed and spent an hour tossing and turning.
Ben Billsby’s eyes darted left and right as he and six-year-old daughter Yolanda strolled hand-in-hand along the sidewalk. Street, clear. Sidewalk, clear. Park coming up. People there. Ben tightened his grip on Yolanda’s little hand.
She said, “How long have you knowd Baya?”
“Long time.”
“When did she start her candy house?”
“Few weeks ago. Now we don’t have to go downtown anymore. We can buy candy and stay close to home.”
He didn’t want to say that “close to home” meant less danger than downtown, where gangs and drugs were as plentiful as sand at the beach, but still dangerous enough that he had to keep one hand on Yolanda and never stopped moving his eyes. Birds chirped and the gentle breeze gave the assurance of calm.
“Did you knowd Baya before Mommy?”
“We used to live next to each other.”
“Will she have the same candy they have at the other place?”
“She’ll prob’ly have more.”
Baya. Two blocks down. They reached the park. Two men by a tree, talking. They turned to face Ben and Ben smiled. Kenny and Greg. Baseball buddies.
“Yo, Ben!”
“S’up, guys.”
Ben and Yolanda stopped, and Ben exchanged words with his friends. Yolanda looked toward the playground and tugged on her father’s arm.
“Can I go on the swings, Daddy?”
Ben saw four teens loitering on the concrete near the swing set. He said, “No, baby,” gripped her hand tighter. He turned back to his buddies.
“Y’all catch the Cowboys last night?”
An engine raced behind them. Tires screeched. The teens near the swing set clawed under T-shirts and drew pistols, aimed at the street. Ben’s friends cursed; Ben turned and saw two young men shoving machine guns out the side of a big car. As weapons cracked, Ben dived for Yolanda and fell on top of her.
2
“He tried to cover her with his body, but they were both killed in the crossfire,” said Homicide Inspector John Callaway. “Them and the others.”
The crime scene team scoured the park. The bodies had long been carried away, but police still had the street blocked. Squad car cherry lights winked in the evening twilight. The peace of the afternoon breeze and chirping birds had been replaced by the sharp edge of clipped and authoritative voices over radios.
The man beside Callaway, whom he knew only as Wolf, stood still, a long black London Fog overcoat draped over his clothes. The coat matched the rest of his black attire.
Wolf had arrived in Las Palmas four years ago, taking a leave of absence from military service to find out why his sister Shelly had stopped writing letters, only to find that she’d been murdered. He tore the city apart to find the man responsible. Callaway provided a helping hand, and
the two formed an unlikely bond between lawman, and outlaw. With his sister’s killer vanquished, Wolf made his exit from the military permanent and stayed in the city, operating on the fringes between the cops and the crooks. Callaway didn’t think he was a bad guy but wasn’t entirely sure he was a good guy. What he did know was that sometimes Wolf came in handy, because justice, ever the underdog, often needed a little help, and Wolf didn’t mind lending that help, picking up where the law left off. Callaway, as the city’s chief of the homicide bureau, was in the perfect position to feed Wolf information to do things regular cops couldn’t.
“We’re watching this like it’s a movie,” Wolf said.
“I wanted you to see it personally,” the inspector said, looking at Wolf with squint-wrinkled eyes. “The rumors are true, somebody’s selling stolen fully-automatic military weapons to these gangs, and this man, his daughter, and the other two fellows are the first innocent victims.”
Wolf said, “Which gangs run in this neighborhood?”
“The Up the Hill and Down the Hill gangs,” Callaway said.
“Who used the M-16s?”
“The Downhill crew. Now you can bet the Uphill gang will scramble to even the score, military guns or not, and this situation will get worse.”
“Uh-huh.” Wolf’s eyes didn’t leave the crime scene.
“The A.T.F. and Army C.I.D. are on the way,” Callaway said. “My office and the police have been asked to step aside. Which is why, my friend, I’m glad we have our arrangement.”
Wolf remained quiet as his steel-grey eyes watched the crime scene.
“Do you have anything that might lead to the source of the guns and end this before more people get killed?”
Wolf did not reply.
“Did you hear me?”
“Anything I say makes you an accessory.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“An informant gave me a tip about a warehouse in the Tenderloin,” Wolf said. “Next shipment of guns will be delivered there within a day or two.”
“That was fast.”
“I’m not a cop, remember?” Wolf said. “The gun runners have been in the city for weeks setting up deals.”
“Take somebody alive.”
“No promises.”
Wolf moved toward a black Camaro parked at the curb. Callaway watched him drive away.
The Camaro’s engine grumbled as Wolf cruised through the Tenderloin District, following the rough streets strewn with garbage and potholes. The windows were down, and the block’s soundtrack played loud and clear, shouts from the sidewalk, horns, wheels clicking over trolley tracks, music from bars, mariachis on somebody’s radio. By the mouth of an alley, two hookers in tight outfits smoked. Nearby, several blacks kneeled on the sidewalk shooting dice; on the front steps of a dirty gray building, a white woman smoked and read a magazine by a flickering porch light. At another corner a group of teens spoke with a pair of beat cops.
A big gray building with an empty theater marquee loomed ahead.
There was a lot Inspector Callaway didn’t know about Wolf’s background, and the man in black wasn’t inclined to give the information away if Callaway didn’t need to know. Wolf had grown up in Las Palmas, which is how he knew the streets so well, and the players who operated in the shadows.
Back when Wolf had been a teenager, dodging the cops and skipping school, the gray building, the Paradise Theater, had been his sanctuary. A man named Max Klein owned and operated the place and lived in the top floor loft. He’d played old movies because he couldn’t afford new stuff, and the Paradise became a specialty house for those who loved classic films. It was the one part of the Tenderloin anybody could visit because the bums and derelicts and even the hoods and hookers stayed away. Nobody wanted to upset the Old Man, as Klein became known. He gave back to the community and tried to help people, one of whom was a certain angry sixteen-year-old kid who sometimes needed a refuge.
The Old Man passed away while Wolf had been overseas in the military, but the building remained, unoccupied since forever. A fence stretched around the perimeter. Boards over the windows.
Wolf drove by the building. A monument to his past. He kept his eyes forward and stopped for a red light. To his left, a cluster of people hung around the front of a liquor store. A thin girl with stringy hair wearing a dirty shirt and torn jeans approached the Camaro. “Hey, guy. Got a couple bucks?”
Wolf handed her ten dollars. She showed a smile of missing teeth and ran around the corner of the store. Probably to buy drugs. Wolf preferred she did so with money he gave her than money she picked up turning tricks.
The light changed. Wolf drove on. His destination lay a block away.
Wolf hustled up the inside stairwell of the abandoned building from which he planned to set up his stakeout. His heavy steps echoed. The top landing opened into an area cluttered with trash, smelling of urine. A corner with a thin mattress and faded rock band posters suggested somebody had once occupied the space, but now the mattress was stained and torn. Wolf’s boots scraped across the floor as he carried a large tote bag to a window caked with dirt and dust. His London Fog hid the black combat outfit he wore, pants, turtleneck, laced combat boots. In its usual leather rig under his left arm hung his .45-caliber Colt Series 70 auto pistol. Simple firepower that worked.
The tote bag held other tools of the death trade.
He kneeled to unzip the tote bag. He removed a Benelli M4 Tactical twelve-gauge auto-loading shotgun and placed it next to the window. A bandoleer of fragmentation grenades, listening devices, and the proper receiving equipment joined the Benelli. Wolf turned his attention to the radio equipment.
“I didn’t think you’d show,” Jimmy O’Shea said. He made circles with the tall latte cup in front of him.
Freddie Webster pulled out an empty chair to sit across from the big-eyed man. O’Shea’s back faced a wall. Freddie sat with his mouth a straight line, jaw fixed, waiting. He heard the sounds behind him, mixed conversations, the sucking and whirring noises from the counter. His eyes stayed on O’Shea.
Presently O’Shea broke the silence. “You can’t be so flush you don’t need your cut of that money.”
“I don’t have a lot of time.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“Forget my arm.”
“Want a latte?”
“No.”
O’Shea sipped his hot drink. “Mmmmm. Nothing beats a latte. So, this is the scoop. I have a client that wants a safe cracked, and I thought of you.”
“There’s plenty of guys--”
“Can’t use them, the heat’s on.” O’Shea smiled. “You pull the job, nobody suspects. It’s a quick in-and-out, no problems.”
O’Shea reached inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope, from which he extracted pictures. Freddie examined the two-story home in a suburban neighborhood he didn’t recognize. One photo showed a wall safe.
Freddie took a long look at the safe. “You’re kidding me.”
“What?”
“Penny-ante safe like that’s a big deal?”
O’Shea shrugged.
“Who took these pictures?”
“The client.”
“I can pop this in less than ten minutes. Not even break a sweat.” He smiled. Sheila would never have to know about this. He’d get the money and the two of them would have their better tomorrow.
“So, you’re down?” O’Shea said.
“When?”
“Tomorrow night.”
By the time Freddie returned home from work, Sheila had already left. A note on the stove said breakfast leftovers were wrapped in the refrigerator. He went straight to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of his dresser where Sheila had placed several folded sweaters. Underneath a frayed pink sweater, she’d hidden a Taurus .38 revolver, and Freddie knew there were bullets in the cylinder. He ditched the idea of using the gun. The revolver belonged to his wife. He didn’t want cops finding any trail that might le
ad back home. Worst case, if the cops caught him with the gun--and he stopped. He didn’t want to think about that.
From under another sweater he pulled out a tattered shoe box and sorted through the junk inside. He removed a pocketknife, flipped out the blade, and grabbed a sharpening stone from the box. Sitting on the carpet, he ran stone over edge from hilt to tip until the point pricked his finger with a light tap and the edge sliced through a sheet of paper.
He looked at the shiny blade. He’d used a similar weapon only once before, in prison, when another inmate had accused him of cheating at a card game. The inmate threatened to kill Webster, but guards broke up the fight. Freddie acquired a wooden-handled shiv which he kept taped to his stomach, because the fight wasn’t over.
When word reached him that the other inmate and some buddies were planning an ambush, Freddie took the initiative.
Two cell mates covered his flank as he strode through the crowded yard. Hot sun blazed above. Rocks crunched below his feet. A heavy pulse beat rocked his head. Target and buddies straight ahead. They stood near a sewer grate.
Freddie and his mates charged over, their opponents reacting too late. Freddie dived into his enemy and his mates crowded on top. Punching, kicking, a scream as the shiv found its mark. Freddie broke off the wooden handle and dropped it down the sewer and when the guards broke up the fight there was nothing in his hand. The guards couldn’t prove who had the shiv. No comebacks for Freddie.
His target, with a punctured lung, died a few hours later.
Freddie put the knife and stone away, took off his clothes and climbed into bed. He stared at the ceiling a lot longer than normal.
A rumbling truck engine woke Wolf from a cat nap. Voices over the headset assured him the listening devices he’d planted hours earlier were working. He grabbed the headset and scooted to the window. Below the window sat the receiver to which the headphones were connected. He turned up the volume.
At the front of the warehouse, where a large sliding door had been rolled open, sat a medium-sized cargo truck. The engine continued to churn with smoke pumping from dual exhausts. A man wearing dark clothes opened the rear of the truck and stood back while a second man piloting a forklift rolled forward. A hydraulic hiss preceded the rising of long lifting spikes and the driver slid the spikes underneath the first of several pine crates. He lifted the crate out of the truck, steered into the warehouse.