by Jana DeLeon
That was a whole lot of angst for someone who professed to know nothing.
* * *
Hustle dropped his skateboard on the pavement and gave himself a kick. He knew Shaye was doing everything she could do to find Jinx, but he was afraid it wouldn’t be enough. The cop’s story about Joker had freaked him out more than he’d let on. He tried to tell himself that Joker had probably taken the wrong guy at cards, but it didn’t feel right. People got beat up all the time over gambling, but it didn’t usually move to murder. If Joker had died from a beating and been found in an alley, Hustle would have passed it off as a card game gone wrong. But shot and dumped in the water? That didn’t make sense.
A crowd of street kids was already at the dock, but none of them were skating. Instead, they were huddled in a group near the water, and no one looked happy. He skated over to them, kicked his board up, and stepped up to the group.
“What’s up?” Hustle asked.
An older kid called Boots looked at him. “You ain’t heard?”
Hustle’s back tightened as he looked around at the grim expressions on all five faces. “No. I wasn’t around yesterday. What happened?”
“Ain’t nobody seen Scratch since Thursday,” Boots said.
Hustle stared at Boots, trying to process what he’d heard. Scratch was the oldest of their group. He was seventeen and had been on the streets for the last three years. Scratch had helped Hustle when he first showed up—gave him pointers on finding a night hideaway and how to find a niche for food and money. “Maybe he caught some overtime?”
“For two days?” Boots asked. “Besides, I went by the demolition site yesterday. That dude that runs it said Scratch didn’t show up for work Friday or Saturday.”
A kid called Reaper shook his head. “He ain’t the only one. I heard two kids was missing from the Tremé—Joker and Spider.”
“Joker’s dead,” Hustle said.
“What the fuck!”
“How do you know?”
“What happened?”
They all responded at once. Hustle scrambled to come up with a story that didn’t include his involvement with Shaye.
“I was in the square yesterday looking for Jinx. There was this cop asking around about a kid some fisherman pulled up with a cast net. I saw the picture when he showed it to someone. It was Joker.”
“Damn,” Boots said. “Joker drowned?”
Hustle shook his head. “Somebody shot him. Least, that’s what the cop said.”
“Shot him why?” Reaper asked.
“I don’t know,” Hustle said. “I ain’t ask no questions. I just tried to hear what he was saying, and that’s what I got.”
The kids all looked at one another. “What the hell is going on?” Boots asked.
“Street kids is disappearing,” Reaper said. “That’s what’s happening.”
Boots ran his hand over his shaved head. “Maybe we should all lie low for a while.”
“Lie low where?” a kid named Shadow asked. “Ain’t no amateur got the best of Scratch. He’s been doing this longer than anyone. And Jinx might have been new, but she was smart. If someone got the jump on them, what chance do the rest of us have?”
“We gotta change things up,” Hustle said. “Change everything we do.”
“What are you talking about?” Shadow asked.
“He means change our routine,” Boots said. “All of us have one—when we skate, when we work our gig, when we eat, and where we sleep. It’s too easy for someone to know where we’re going and when.”
“We all skate here most days,” Reaper said. “Ain’t nothing gonna happen at the docks, not in the daylight and with all those construction workers around.”
“Maybe not,” Hustle said, “but it makes it easier for someone to find us and track us. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to cut back on our time here, and don’t go directly from here to your nighttime place.”
“But if we change things up,” Shadow said, “how will we know if anyone’s missing?”
“We’ll set a check-in place,” Boots said. “One for now and then another when we check in at the first. A different place every time. If you want to come to the docks, then that’s fine, but Hustle’s right—you shouldn’t leave here and go straight to your hiding place.”
“That sounds good,” Hustle agreed.
“Okay,” Boots said, “so tomorrow, regardless of where else you decide to go, everyone check in at the corner drugstore on Saint Claude. Noon.”
He looked around the group and everyone nodded.
“And it goes without saying that we all keep our ears to the ground,” Boots said.
“And watch our backs,” Reaper said.
Boots looked around. “Well, we’re here. Might as well skate.” He tipped his board up and set off for a series of ramps on the far side of the dock. The other kids slowly followed suit, but Hustle stayed where he was. He watched the skaters for a bit, then sat down on the curb behind him. Shadow sat down next to him.
“You find out anything about Jinx?” Shadow asked.
Hustle shook his head.
Shadow looked down at the ground, making a circle in the dust with his finger. Hustle didn’t know him well. He guessed Shadow was fourteen, maybe younger, but his eyes had that haunted look that said he’d seen and experienced more than someone his age should have.
“What’s happening to us?” Shadow asked.
Hustle’s heart clenched at the fear in Shadow’s tone. Living on the streets was hard enough when things were normal. “I don’t know,” Hustle said.
“I’m scared,” Shadow said, his voice small and hollow.
“Me, too.”
Shadow looked up at him, his expression slightly surprised. Hustle held in a groan. Even though it was the truth, his statement wasn’t going to help alleviate Shadow’s fear. It probably made it worse.
That’s a good thing.
Hustle took in a breath and blew it out. “Look. Fear isn’t bad. Lots of times, it’s the one thing that keeps you alive. You know how sometimes you get a funny feeling about something—sometimes you feel it in your stomach or sometimes the back of your neck?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t ignore it. If anything feels off to you, no matter where you are, get out of there and go somewhere with lots of people.”
Shadow nodded and rose from the curb. “I gotta get to the animal shelter. They’re paying me to help clean the cages. It’s not much but it gets me food, and I like the dogs. They kinda remind me of us.”
Hustle nodded. “Be careful. Be aware.”
“Okay. I’ll say a prayer for Jinx.”
“Thanks,” Hustle said as Shadow skated away.
A prayer for Jinx.
Hustle checked his cell phone, but there weren’t any missed calls or messages. He wondered if Shaye had talked to the priest, and what, if anything, she’d discovered.
* * *
The man watched the skaters from the vacant building across the street. The one sitting on the curb was the kid from the square—the one he’d seen talking to the woman and the man the day before. The man was a cop. The posture, the walk, the way he studied the crowd…he might as well have been wearing a sign. The woman had confused him. She hadn’t acted like a cop, but she didn’t appear to be a typical holiday shopper either.
Maybe the woman was social services. That would explain her familiarity with the cop and her talking to a street kid. Either way, the woman was potential trouble, and the cop was definitely trouble.
He blew out a breath. For that matter, his clients were trouble, too. Most of them weren’t from New Orleans and if they screwed up, the police would investigate in their area of the world, not his. Usually, the product was collected here and the clients arranged for transport. He had no idea where the product went or why it was purchased to begin with, nor did he care. He was in the procurement business, not writing a book. The out-of-town clients had never been trouble, but the local ones were a
whole other ball game—this new one in particular.
They had promised him no bodies would ever surface, and now a cop was circling the square, asking questions. He should have known better than to sell to them. They had plenty of money but low intelligence—some of the many redneck millionaires that had cropped up when oil was found on their land years ago. The money they’d offered had been more than his normal asking price, so he’d given in. He should have known it was too good to be true.
Their agreement had been for five healthy teens, but he was cutting their agreement short. If the one that was still unconscious didn’t make it, then they’d have to make do with three. They wouldn’t be happy, but he didn’t care. They were the ones who’d broken their part of the agreement—drawing the attention of the police.
Things like this were happening far too often. People were getting careless, some reckless even. And that included his own associates. He hadn’t spent decades slowly amassing a fortune only to lose it all over carelessness and stupidity. Kidnapping Peter Carlin had been a huge mistake. He couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing the boy’s face plastered across the screen.
Product acquisition was harder as well. So many had relocated after Katrina and never returned. The Ninth Ward had provided easy pickings for over a decade. Plenty of people were the kind no one missed. Others were the kind that would sell a kid for the price of a hit. After the hurricane, product had been harder to acquire given the depletion due to so much relocation, but missing persons had been so common that he’d made several years of good hauls, waiting on the police databases to catch up.
The small bayou towns had been a stopgap for years, but he’d been unable to fill all the client requests until lately. The street kids had seemed like a great idea to fill the requests for older product, and with no payment to junkie mothers, his profit margin had increased. The kids would have wised up eventually and gotten too hard to capture, but if his clients hadn’t gotten sloppy, he might have continued for another couple months—maybe long enough to fund a nice boat along with his oceanfront home in an extradition-free country. Now it looked like the boat was off the table.
It was time to close up shop. Clean house and nail the doors shut.
Starting with the skater kid.
Chapter Seven
Jackson knocked on the door to the bar. The building was no different from the many other run-down structures in the Tremé—bar on the ground level and probably storage or maybe an apartment on the second floor. Developers were slowly renovating all the neighborhoods around the French Quarter, buying the properties at a big discount and reselling for a huge profit once they’d spruced them up.
The sign in the window said Closed, but the tip Jackson had gotten was that a card game went on Sunday mornings before the bar opened. Thick shades covered the window, so he couldn’t see inside. He knocked on the door again and heard some rustling inside. Finally, the door opened and a young black man with dreadlocks peered out.
“We’re not open yet, man,” the guy said.
Jackson flashed his badge. “I don’t care anything about the card game you’ve got going on. I’m working a homicide and want to see if you can tell me anything about the victim.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Why would we know some dead guy?”
“I heard he played here sometimes.”
The man stared at him a couple seconds longer and must have decided it was more trouble to keep him out than let him in, so he opened the door. Jackson followed him inside to a table with four other men, a deck of cards and poker chips in front of them.
Dreadlocks pointed to Jackson. “He’s five-oh. Says he thinks some dude that got whacked used to play cards here.”
A guy wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt nodded at Jackson. “What you got, five-oh?”
Jackson took out the picture of Joker and showed it to the men. They all looked at the picture, then one another. Finally, the one with dreadlocks nodded.
“He played with us a couple times,” Dreadlocks said. “I think he rotates to different games around here, but we figured he was due to come around this week. Guess we know why he didn’t.”
“What happened to him?” Bob Marley T-shirt asked.
“He was shot and dumped into Lake Pontchartrain,” Jackson said. “A fisherman pulled the body out on Friday.”
Dreadlocks held up his hands. “Look, we don’t play that kind of card games, you know? Dude played with us a couple times and he seemed all right.”
“I heard he was a real shark at cards,” Jackson said.
A couple of guys nodded, and Bob Marley T-shirt scowled. “Dude played me like a piano a couple weeks ago, but that’s no reason to kill somebody. Not for what we’re betting.”
“He’s right,” Dreadlocks said. “No one ever walks away from the table with more than a hundred bucks. We play more for the fun of it—the money just makes it a little more interesting.”
Jackson nodded. “Can you tell me anything about him? Other games he might have been in…ones with the kind of stakes that might motivate people in the wrong way?”
They all shook their head. “There’s not any big money games in the Tremé,” Dreadlocks said. “Only small stuff like this. We’re street musicians, man. Not a lot of money in what we do.”
Bob Marley T-shirt nodded. “You better head to the business district for the high-dollar games. I hear some of them suits play for ten thousand or better a game. Too rich for my blood.”
Another of the men snorted. “Like they’d even let your raggedy ass in the front door.”
“How did Joker get in here?” Jackson asked. On the surface, a scrawny white street kid didn’t appear to have anything in common with the men in front of him. If Jackson knew how Joker had wrangled his way into their game, maybe he could find the other places Joker had played.
“Dude could seriously play the sax,” Dreadlocks said. “He walked up on us on Bourbon Street one night, asked to borrow an instrument, and totally threw down. We got to talking, found out he liked cards, and invited him to drop in sometime.”
Jackson nodded, his frustration building. Playing the saxophone might get Joker a pass in the Tremé, but he doubted seriously it would register favorably with the high-stakes suits. “There’s nothing else you can tell me about him—people he hung around with, where he stayed?”
They all shook their heads.
“If you don’t ask a lot of questions of people,” Dreadlocks said, “then you don’t have answers. Cops aren’t the only people who come around asking about things.”
Jackson knew exactly what he was referring to. Loan sharks, bookies, and any number of other nefarious characters might come looking for someone. The less you knew the safer you and the person they were looking for were. It was the official motto of the streets—Don’t Ask. Don’t Offer.
Jackson pulled out his card and handed it to Dreadlocks. “If you think of anything or hear anything, let me know.”
He stepped outside the bar and blew out a breath of frustration. That conversation had led absolutely nowhere. Unless they were the world’s best actors, those guys didn’t seem the type to shoot a kid and dump the body. He’d checked the money on the table, and it had amounted to about sixty dollars. Unless they’d cleared it off before he walked in, they weren’t lying about the game being low stakes. A hundred bucks was a good payoff for Joker for what probably amounted to a couple hours work, but it wasn’t worth killing over.
So where would a kid pick up a high-stakes poker game in the business district? And how would Jackson find where they were? He couldn’t exactly walk into corporate offices and start asking about cards. The suits would lawyer up before he got the first sentence out of his mouth.
His cell phone rang and he checked it. Shaye.
“What’s up?” he answered.
“I just finished talking to the priest.”
“You get anything?”
“No. He admitted to recognizing Jinx, but said he
didn’t know anything else about her and hasn’t seen her since last Tuesday when he gave her the Bible.”
“That’s what he said. What did you see?”
“I don’t know. I got a mixed read on him. I don’t think he was lying about his interaction with Jinx, but I got the impression he’s worried about something, and I mean specifically worried, not I’m-a-priest-and-care worried. If that makes sense?”
“Definitely. I’ll run a check on him—claim a couple of the kids saw the priest talking to Joker. No one can prove he didn’t, so it shouldn’t raise any red flags down at the department. Vincent won’t be in until Monday anyway.”
“God forbid he skip his weekend off to solve a homicide. How does he sleep at night?”
“I’m betting very well, all while dreaming about retirement and ways to make my life miserable.”
“Probably. Did you find any card games Joker made?”
“One, but I didn’t get anything. Joker played with the guys, but I don’t like them for killing him. Not enough at stake in the game, and they didn’t give me any indication to think they wanted him dead. Seemed surprised when I told them.” Jackson paused for a moment, thinking about Shaye’s connections.
“Hey,” he said, “you wouldn’t happen to know about any high-stakes card games in the business district, would you?”
“Ha. I can’t even win at Go Fish. I’d be the last person who’d know about high-stakes card games. Are you thinking Joker got into something big and beat the wrong guys?”
“It would only take one wrong one, right?”
“True. I don’t run in those circles, and it’s usually a guy thing, but I bet Eleonore knows some of them. I hear she’s hell at seven-card stud.”
Jackson smiled. “That woman is full of surprises. Is there anything else I can check on for you?”
“Not that I can think of. I’m going to meet with Hustle and see if he found anything new.”
“Sounds good. Let me know on the card game. Oh, and Shaye, you looked great last night.”
He hung up before she could respond. And before he said too much.