“No identification?”
“I don’t carry any,” Elijah said.
“Who are you?” Andre asked.
“I am a ghost. I am a dead man.”
“I thought your client was cooperating,” Andre said to Lefkowitz.
The lawyer’s shoes were brown and his belt was black. I never trust a man whose belt doesn’t match his shoes. “My client will make a statement when you can offer him immunity and protection,” he said again.
“You’re not being very cooperative, either,” Andre said. He picked up the phone and poked at the screen with his finger. Nothing happened.
“It’s not turned on,” Elijah said.
Andre found a button on the side of the device and pressed it. The screen lit up with the words ENTER PASSCODE and a numeric keypad.
“What is the code to unlock this?” Andre asked.
“If I go around telling people my security code, it won’t be secure, will it?” Elijah said.
“I can’t believe this shit,” Andre said. “I’ve got to spend my whole damn afternoon fucking around with Statler and Waldorf.” He stuck the wallet and the phone back into Elijah’s pants pocket, put his hand on the back of the thief’s head, and pushed him down into the backseat of the unmarked Crown Vic.
“You will take my client to one of the smaller precincts for booking. I don’t want you walking him past all the people at 201 Poplar,” Lefkowitz said.
“Fine,” Andre agreed.
“This is an important request. My client believes he is in very real danger.”
“I said I’d do it.”
“I will follow you, and I will meet with my client as soon as he’s booked. You will not question him except in my presence.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Andre said, and he shut the door behind Elijah.
I stubbed out the cigarette I’d been smoking and folded up my walker. I’d left it in the backseat on the way over here, so it was easy to grab. But Elijah was sitting there now, so the walker had to go in the trunk, which meant I had to walk around the side of the Crown Vic without it, to the front passenger door, trying not to lean against it to steady my weak legs.
As I did this, Andre made no move to help.
14
2009
For a man in a perp cage with his hands shackled behind his back, taking a ride to the East Precinct house to get booked for serious crimes, Elijah was looking awfully pleased with himself, and I didn’t like it. Andre didn’t seem to like it, either.
“Dude, they call it witness protection for a reason. If you ain’t a witness, you don’t get protected. So if you want me to do you any favors, you better be ready to admit to some bad behavior, and you better be ready to rat out all your friends.”
“I will do what I must to get what I need. A man like me doesn’t have much use for friends,” Elijah said. “The world, in my experience, contains two kinds of people: the kind I can use, and the kind who are useless.”
“I see two kinds of people in this car,” Andre said. “We got the motherfucker in the front seat with the badge, and the motherfucker in the backseat wearing handcuffs.”
I wondered what sort of motherfucker I was.
“Funny you should mention the handcuffs,” Elijah said. He arched his back so he could shift the weight of his body onto his wrists, and then he slid out of the bracelets. He waggled the cuffs triumphantly at Andre.
“Did you leave him with a lockpick?” I asked.
“Hell no,” said Andre. “I frisked him. I don’t know how the hell he just did that.”
“There are two kinds of people,” Elijah said. “The kind who are content to be shackled, and the kind who will yank their own thumbs from their sockets to escape from bondage.”
“That’s a neat trick. Looked like it hurt,” Andre said. “And now you can put the cuffs right back on, because I ain’t letting you out of that cage until you are properly restrained. Unless you want me to hit you with the Taser.”
“Can I Tase him?” I asked.
“Maybe. If you behave yourself,” Andre said. Then he leaned on his horn. “Hurry it up! Sunday-driving motherfucker.”
A panel van in front of us was going very slowly. Andre changed lanes to get around the slowpoke, but the van sped back up, cut in front of us, and slowed down again.
“What is up with this guy?”
I started to get nervous, but I was always nervous. Paranoia is the first symptom of dementia in the elderly. It was almost like white noise to me.
“Maybe you should pull him over and give him a ticket,” I said.
“I am a detective. I ain’t a traffic cop.”
“I always used to keep a pad of tickets in my glove box, in case I wanted to hassle somebody,” I said.
“There are a hundred things wrong with doing that,” Andre said. “I bet you used to pull over black folks for driving in the wrong neighborhoods. Also, we issue traffic tickets with computers these days.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
In the backseat, Elijah wove his fingers together and then violently twisted his hands in a way that jammed his thumbs back into place with an audible popping noise.
I looked in the side-view mirror at the lawyer, who was following us to the police station. Lefkowitz’s ride was as tacky as his suit. He was driving a big Cadillac Escalade truck, which my grandson once accurately described as the preferred vehicle of people who are trying too hard.
It used to be, when a man wanted to put some money into a car, he got himself something with a twelve-cylinder engine, a performance transmission, a heavy-duty suspension, and racing tires. Now an expensive car was wrapped in chrome, upholstered with leather, and inlaid with hardwood: a precious, ornamental thing unable to get you to the corner grocery store without burning through half a tank of gas at four dollars per gallon.
Andre’s cheap, government-issue Crown Vic could run rings around Lefkowitz in his sixty-thousand-dollar Escalade. That truck was a rolling monument to softness, inefficiency, and overconsumption; the perfect symbol for the age of epidemic obesity.
Bill O’Reilly was just talking about this recently: People used to want to be Steve McQueen, but now the kids were all trying to be like a rapper called Pee Diddler. This used to be a nation of men, and now it’s a country full of strip malls and ugly cars and cell phones with no buttons. It was easy for me to think sometimes that there was no place in the world anymore for men like me. But that wasn’t true. Valhalla was a place, and there was also a place for me out on South Parkway, next to my son.
I wondered how Lefkowitz could afford all the stuff he had. Crime paid, to be sure, but defending Memphis thugs and settling traffic accidents wouldn’t generate enough cash to keep a man in Cadillacs and diamonds. I figured he was leveraged up to his eyeballs. I bet his gold watch had somebody else’s name engraved inside the band, and he’d bought the Escalade at a steep discount, coming off the end of someone else’s two-year lease.
Behind us, a beat-up-looking Ford F-150 truck cut Lefkowitz off and pulled right up to our back bumper. Traffic was pretty light for people to be so aggressive, but Memphis has always been known for its discourteous drivers. Andre didn’t seem to have noticed the truck; he was still bitching about the guy in the panel van, and about having to play straight man to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.
In front of us, the Sunday-driving van crossed an intersection and then stopped short for no reason. Andre had to slam his brakes to keep from rear-ending it.
“The fuck is with this guy?” Andre said. “I wish I did have the damn ticket pad.” He shifted into reverse, but there was no room to back up, because the truck was sitting right up against our back bumper. We were stuck in the middle of the intersection, and these guys had boxed us in.
“Oh shit,” I said, and I hurriedly pulled on my seat belt.
Andre didn’t quite seem to realize what was happening, until he heard the sound of a revving engine. He barely had time to brace before a big-ass Chevy Suburban
slammed into the driver’s side of the police car, and an air bag exploded in my face.
15
2009
The crash and the air bag jangled my head for a good twenty seconds, and when I reoriented myself, three men had already jumped out of the back of the panel van in front of us and were dragging Elijah from the backseat of the police car.
They were all wearing panty hose on their heads to obscure their features, but I could see they were black guys; and several of them were pretty big.
I looked in the side-view mirror. Behind us, two more panty-hose men were getting out of the Ford truck that had boxed us in. Behind the truck, Lefkowitz threw his Escalade into reverse, backed up a few feet, then U-turned into traffic and peeled out in the opposite direction. A few seconds later, I heard his tires squeal as he lost control of the Caddy, and then the sound of shattering glass and crunching metal. What an asshole.
“You fucked up now,” one of the thugs was saying to Elijah. He was the smallest of the five men, but he had a commanding sort of posture, and gold on his fingers and around his neck. “You have no idea the kind of trouble you’re in.”
“Ought to do him right here,” said a second. “Send a message to anyone else who thinks they can steal from us.”
“You won’t, though, will you?” Elijah said. “You need what I took. You’re desperate.”
“We can make you tell us where it is. When we start hurting you, you’ll tell us everything.
“I’ve been hurt before, by better men than you.”
“We’ll see about that.” One of the captors was binding Elijah’s wrists and ankles with plastic handcuffs, and another was pulling a hood over his head.
I jostled Andre. He turned his head and looked at me. The pupils of his eyes were different sizes. The Crown Victoria police cruiser is a sturdy vehicle, but not many cars can fully protect you when you get T-boned at an intersection by a big truck. He had probably suffered a head injury, and there was a lot of blood on his clothes.
There was a lot of blood on my clothes, too. My cheeks stung where the air bag had hit me, and my nose was throbbing. I put a hand to my face, and it came away wet and slick. This was not a good thing, so I tried not to think about it.
“Pull it together, kid,” I said to Andre. “It’s time for you to be a hero.”
“Think you all smart with your Members Only jacket. You look like Bob Dole,” he said, and his head lolled to one side.
Outside, the panty hose men had Elijah trussed up like a pig. They threw him into the back of the van, and he landed with a heavy thud. For elderly patients, a fall-incident strongly correlates with death inside of twelve months, even where the injury appears superficial. Especially when a bunch of angry black guys with panty hose on their faces are kidnapping you.
“What about those other two?” one of the guys from the Ford truck asked the leader.
“I don’t need them. Y’all deal with them.”
The Suburban was backing up from the wreck, to make a U-turn. I could see its front fender was hanging loose, and the headlights and front grille were all smashed up, but the engine sounded okay. I hoped that meant he hadn’t hit us too hard, and Andre might not be too badly injured. The three kidnappers climbed into the panel van behind Elijah, and when the door shut, they peeled out. Only the two from the Ford truck were left, and they were arguing about which one of them was going to kill us.
“He told you to do it, so you got to do it,” said the larger of the two. He was easily a couple of inches past six feet and he must have weighed 250. I could see his hair was braided into cornrows underneath his panty hose mask.
“I ain’t even got a gun,” said the second. “I didn’t sign on for this shit.” He was smaller; maybe five-seven, and skinny.
“I’ve got a gun. You can use my gun.”
“It’s your gun. You want it used, you can use it.”
“But he told you to deal with it.”
Andre was still semiconscious and babbling. I reached across his waist and unfastened his seat belt. Then I gingerly tried to roll him to one side. Just my luck he’d made me put away my .357 before we left Valhalla. Just my luck he was left-handed, and I had to try to reach over him to find his holster.
At least the thugs weren’t paying attention to me. They probably thought we were pretty messed up from the wreck. We must have looked pretty messed up. The little one was saying: “Look at that car. That is a cop car.”
“Ain’t a cop car. Cop cars have the word ‘Police’ written on them in big letters. That car has got no lights. Got no sirens.”
“Is so a cop car. Did you see the cage in the backseat? Did you see the radio antenna on the back of it? That is a cop car, and so those dudes are cops. Do you want to be killing cops?”
“I want to be doing what I’m told to do.” The big one pulled a plastic-looking handgun out of the low-slung waistband of his baggy jeans and tried to push it into the smaller one’s hands.
The little one didn’t want to take it. “I say we just leave. We got the guy we came here for. Didn’t agree to killing cops.”
“He said you have to do it.”
“And if I do it, the next time you get picked up for possession with intent or some dumb shit, you’ll rat me out to get yourself a plea deal, and then I’ll get a lethal injection for killing cops. I ain’t never killed nobody. You want it done, you can do it. If Carlo wants it done, he can do it. I was promised two hundred dollars to back y’all up today. I ain’t killing no cops for two hundred dollars.”
“Fuck you,” said the big one. “I ain’t no snitch.”
“I ain’t saying you’re a snitch. I just don’t want to find out if you’re a snitch.”
I found the snap on Andre’s belt holster, and got his police-issue .38 loose. It was cool metal, painted matte black. Lightweight, with functional squared-off edges. It was a gun with very little personality, but it would do the job. I flicked the safety catch and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. I lifted the door latch, but the door was a little sticky, probably because the car’s frame had warped in the crash. I pushed my shoulder against it.
“I can’t believe I got to do this,” the big panty-head was saying. “He told you to do it. You a pussy-ass motherfucker, you know that?” He tried again to force his friend to take the gun.
With my weight behind it, the door sprung open, but when it did, I pitched sideways and off balance. Even though I didn’t have much of an aim, I managed to shoot the little guy. Firing the .357 felt like wielding Zeus’s thunderbolt. By comparison, shooting the little .38 felt like changing the channel on the television, but it made a big noise, and the bullet blew the kid’s kneecap apart. He fell down and started screaming. The cheap plastic gun clattered to the ground, and while the big guy chased after it, I managed to slide out of the car and climb to my feet, supporting my weight by clinging to the open door.
By the time the big kid came up with his weapon, I had steadied myself, and I had the .38 trained on him.
“Why don’t you drop that?” I said.
He did not immediately comply. He wasn’t quite pointing the gun at me, but he had his finger inside the trigger guard.
“Just be cool, old man,” he said. His hands were shaking a little bit.
“I am cool,” I said, and I shot him three times.
The first bullet hit him right above his left eyebrow, and pulped the part of him that dreamed and the part of him that knew how to speak. The second bullet went in just below his bottom lip, shattered all the teeth in his jaw, shredded his tongue, and lodged itself in his brain stem. The third one hit him in the shoulder while he was falling to the ground. I think he was probably already dead by then.
“You killed Clarence!” the little guy screamed. “Oh, God!”
“I warned him,” I said. “I don’t warn anyone twice.”
The plastic handgun was on the ground, a couple of feet from where the little guy was writhing on the pavement
and clutching at his leg. I needed to get hold of it, before he started thinking straight and tried to grab it, but my walker was still in the trunk, where I couldn’t get it. I took a few wobbly steps forward, but that turned out to be as far as I could get. I let my legs give out in the most controlled way I could. It was a little more like kneeling than falling, but not much. At least I didn’t hurt myself much worse than I was already hurt. I crawled the rest of the way to the loose gun on my hands and knees, like a baby. Once I had it, I felt safer, and I managed to pull myself into a sitting position on the pavement before the paramedics arrived.
16
2009
The woman in the EMT uniform took a tentative step toward me. She looked afraid.
“I’ll need you to put those down so I can help you,” she said. She was a young, light-skinned black girl with her hair pulled back from her face. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, but she didn’t seem to need it.
I looked up at her. “What? I’m okay. Somebody needs to help Andre.” I started to point, and was surprised to find that my hands were full of guns. I tried to remember how I’d lit the cigarette I was smoking with my hands full of guns, and could not. I handed the guns to the girl.
“These aren’t mine,” I said.
“Okay.” She didn’t quite know how to respond to that, but the police had arrived, and one of them came over and took the guns away from her.
“I’m going to need to examine you,” she said. “You’re covered in blood.”
“I am?” I looked down at my shirt. It was soaked in dark red down the front. “Shit. Is all of that from me?”
“Looks that way.”
“Well, you should see the other guy.”
Two paramedics were trying to immobilize the kid I’d shot in the leg, but he was flailing around and clawing at himself and screaming. The medical examiner was zipping the dead one into a rubber bag. A grim-looking emergency team was strapping Andre to a gurney.
“Are you shot?” the girl asked me.
Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 9