Something big had happened in the house. That much was apparent. And Black wasn’t trying to be around anything big. Cops tend to grab anybody and everybody when something big happens. He’d seen it too many times—guys who had never done anything remotely illegal doing life for someone else’s crime. Black wasn’t trying to go out like that. Which meant he’d have to catch Tone on the next go-round. Taking a left, he headed up to Pop Squaly’s, mumbling, cursing, and trying unsuccessfully to convince himself that Pop Squaly’s dope was just as good as Tone’s.
“I need a blast,” he said in a barely audible grumble.
A lady coming out of the bar looked at him and said, “Who you talkin’ to?”
“Do it look like I’m talkin’ to you?” he said, and readjusted the trash can, switching the weight of it from his left to his right side.
The lady, barely fazed, looked at him and resumed her drunken stumble from the bar next to the barbecue place to the bar up the street.
Black picked up the pace, walking quickly toward Pop Squaly’s, and watched police cars, one after another, turning left on Hunting Park Avenue. Since they hadn’t stopped, Black knew that he was safe for a while. As long as they were going to help one of their own, he could smoke fifty caps in the middle of Broad Street and the cops wouldn’t care.
But in spite of his newfound feeling of security, something kept nagging at him, pulling at him like a pinched nerve run amok. The faster he walked, the more intense it became, until it was almost an actual pain pounding against his head. Then, as he dragged the trash can up Pop Squaly’s steps, it hit him. Leroy. Could he have had something to do with what happened in the house?
It wasn’t like they were friends or anything. People don’t become friends out there. At most, they might become partners. And Leroy—stuttering-ass, crazy-ass Leroy—was one of the best partners Black had ever had.
You had to be one of the best to bring rescue to a crack house. That’s why Black knew that Leroy had something to do with it. Trouble was, the same instinct that told Black that Leroy had gotten away with doing something in the house was telling him that Leroy wouldn’t be getting away for long.
Leroy looked in the rearview mirror at the police car burning against the median that separated Roberts Avenue from the expressway off-ramp and tried to think of a way out. When he thought he’d figured something out, he spoke quickly.
“Pookie, when we get up to Wayne Avenue, get out the car and lay down in the street,” he said.
“Nigger, you must be on ALPO,” Pookie said, rolling her eyes and snapping her neck at the very thought.
“I said lay down in the street!” Leroy screamed.
“Ain’t nobody givin’ no orders up in here but me,” Rock said, once again aiming the gun at Leroy’s head. “Matter fact, just pull over.”
“All right, I’ll pull over,” Leroy said, then made a hard left and slammed the accelerator to the floor as he came around the curve leading to Wayne Avenue.
The sudden turn caused Butter to slide across the backseat and bump into Rock, who sat stuck against the door, struggling against Butter’s 130-pound frame. In the front seat, Leroy opened his door and crouched, waiting for a second before he jumped. Pookie followed suit, fighting desperately against the door handle before she finally got it open.
Rock, his eyes wide open, was yelling something no one could hear as Butter, his terror-stricken face flush against Rock’s chest, pulled at the door handle. When Leroy and Pookie rolled from the vehicle, barely avoiding the stone curb that buttressed the asphalt street, the car barreled into the steps of a row house. The last thing Pookie saw before the car burst into flames was Rock’s horrified expression as he pounded against the rear window. Neither Pookie nor Leroy saw Butter crawl from the other side and collapse a few feet away. And neither of them cared.
Leroy got up quickly, ignoring the flame-riddled car. He started toward Wayne Avenue, trying to walk normally in spite of the rapidly increasing swelling in his right knee. Pookie, her face scraped badly along the left side, tore her gaze away from the burning vehicle, got up from the oil-slicked asphalt, and jogged half a block to catch up with him.
“Pookie, go lay in the street,” Leroy said. “That’s the only way we gon’ get outta here.”
There was a gentleness in his voice that hadn’t been there before. She looked at him to see where it had come from and their eyes met. They connected. But as quickly as the connection had appeared, it hid behind the reality of the moment. Yet somehow, Pookie knew in her heart that it was there.
Leroy walked to the curb and knelt behind a parked car. Pookie lay facedown in the street. She knew they only had about ten seconds before the police arrived. And she knew that Leroy was her best and only chance of getting out of this thing alive. So no matter how crazy he sounded, she was going to listen to him. And if they ever got out of this thing alive and got their lives together, she would follow him to something better. Because anything was better than this.
As soon as Pookie lay down, an elderly couple in a late-model Cadillac—church folk from the look of them—stopped. When the man started to get out of the car, Leroy walked up behind him, jammed a stick in his back, then directed him back to the car. Pookie, knowing full well that Leroy would just as soon leave her lying in the street as take her with him, got up and slid into the backseat behind him.
“Just d-d-drive, man, nice and slow, that same thing you do every Sunday—holdin’ up traffic—just d-d-drive!” Leroy said.
“Okay, son. Calm down,” the old man said, glancing at his wife. “Which way you—”
“Nigger, j-just drive!” Leroy said. “I’ll tell you which way.”
“All right, son,” the man said, taking in Leroy’s quick stutter and believing that he was just nervous and afraid enough to kill him and his wife. “The Lord—”
“This nigger don’t understand English, do he, Pookie?” Leroy said, glancing at Pookie, then fixing his gaze on the old man. “Drive, man, the Lord ain’t got nothin’ to do with this here.”
The man fell silent, just as two fire engines and a police car approached from the opposite direction, going toward the two car fires that burned within the next three blocks.
“And don’t try to make no signals and signs to nobody,” Leroy said, indicating the police car and fire trucks. “ ’Cause I’ll blow so many feathers off your woman’s Sunday hat, you’ll think it was a chicken coop up in here.”
The man drove on as if he hadn’t seen the police and fire engines. But when they had passed, he said, “Boy, why don’t you just take the car? You can have it. Just let my wife go. I don’t care what you do after that. Just please, let Mother Jones go.”
“Mother Jones?” Leroy said. “You call your woman ‘mother’? What y’all into, somethin’ kinky, Pops? Probably be tearin’ it up, don’t you?”
Pookie grinned. Mother Jones patted her hair, turned toward the window, and tried hard to stifle a grin of her own. Pops, who didn’t find Leroy the least bit amusing, pursed his lips and gripped the steering wheel tightly.
“Make a right on Germantown and make a right on Clarissa,” Leroy said. “We gotta find Black.”
“Black?” Pookie said, trying unsuccessfully to hide her exasperation.
“Yeah, Black,” Leroy said. “He ’bout the only one I know smart enough to get us outta this.”
Pops started to accelerate, causing everyone in the car to grab for something.
“Slow down, Pops,” Leroy said. “We ain’t tryin’ to get no tickets.”
The old man looked at Leroy in his rearview mirror, then eased his foot off the gas pedal.
“Now make this left on Hunting Park,” Leroy said, taking in the dozens of police cars that were darting along Hunting Park Avenue, turning up and down the maze of one-way streets that ran along either side of one of North Philadelphia’s major thoroughfares.
“Look at these nuts,” Leroy said, talking more to himself than to anyone else.
He looked to his left and saw five or six officers with flashlights walking through the Simon Gratz High School football field. On his right, a K-9 cop in front of the Amoco station was getting out of a Jeep with a remarkably docile-looking German shepherd.
“Make a right on Broad Street,” Leroy said, as the old woman turned her head slightly toward him.
“Turn around, Mother Jones,” Leroy said quickly. “I can’t let you live if you see my face.”
Pops looked in the rearview mirror again.
“That’s why Pops gon’ get his ass out that mirror,” Leroy said. “Ain’t that right, Pops?”
The old man fixed his eyes on the road and nodded.
As the car turned onto Broad Street, Leroy began to scan both sides of the street. Except for two police cars and a bus going south on Broad from Rockland Street, there were maybe five or six cars going in either direction.
“Go in this Roy Rogers like you goin’ through the drive-through, Pops,” Leroy said, watching the approaching night-owl bus that he knew only stopped at subway stops after midnight.
The old man pulled into the parking lot.
When they entered the drive-through, Leroy said, “What time is it, Pops?”
“It’s twelve-twenty.”
“Black probably around Pop Squaly’s by now,” Leroy said to himself.
“Huh?” Pops said.
“Nothin’. Just pop the hood and give me the keys.”
The old man handed over the keys. Leroy broke the lock handles on all four doors and got out of the car, beckoning for Pookie to do the same. When she did, Leroy opened the old man’s door and employed the power locks. Then he looked under the hood and disconnected the battery. With no electricity, the car was all but useless, and there was no way to disengage the locks.
“Catch that bus,” Leroy said to Pookie as he bent down and pretended to tie his shoe.
She walked hesitantly toward the bus, thinking that Leroy was going to leave her.
“Go ’head, girl, ain’t nobody gon’ leave you,” he said, sensing her hesitation.
Pookie looked back over her shoulder at him, wavering between the bus and the car, then fell in line with the other three people waiting at the corner of Broad and Hunting Park for the bus. One woman looked at her strangely, staring at the long red abrasion down the side of her face, but as quickly as Pookie had gained the woman’s attention, she lost it. A skinny, dirty girl with a fresh scrape along the side of her face was nothing compared to the other sights and sounds of North Philly after dark.
“Fare, please,” the bus driver said when Pookie climbed up the bus steps.
Pookie just looked at him.
“I’m only going to ask you for your fare one more time, miss,” the driver said as he reached for the button that would change the flashing ORANGE LINE sign on the front of his bus to the HELP, CALL POLICE sign.
“Here’s the fare,” Leroy said, boarding the bus and handing the driver a fifty.
The driver looked at it, pocketed the money as if that sort of thing happened every day, and spoke into the microphone. “Erie next.”
“I might want you to stop before we get to Erie,” Leroy said. “I know it’s against the rules and everything, but I’m lookin’ for somebody, and he probably on one of these corners you pass on your way to Erie.”
“Whatever you say, brother,” the driver said, suddenly affable.
Leroy looked over at the corner of Broad and Jerome streets, hoping he would recognize one of the shadowy figures beneath the trees that lined the opposite side of the street. It was only the drug dealers, though, and a trick who waved at Leroy as he glanced out the window over the driver’s shoulder.
At Lycoming Street, Leroy started to think of what he would do when he got to Erie Avenue. The police, he thought, would probably board the bus there, if not before, and he could only hope that no one would know that he had been in the house when the Puerto Rican was murdered. He was about to tell the driver to stop at Pike Street, when he glanced over the driver’s shoulder and saw a figure turn the corner of Broad and Dell near the auto-parts place.
“Stop,” Leroy said calmly.
“Right here?” the driver said as he slowed the bus and reached for the button to open the doors.
“Yeah, nigger, right here!” Leroy said, losing all pretense of politeness.
The driver opened his mouth as if to say something, but thought better of it and opened the doors without so much as a whisper.
When he and Pookie got off the bus, Leroy began to call out before the bus had even passed him, and the loud rumble of the engine muffled his voice.
“Black!” a voice called out as the bus on the other side of Broad Street pulled away, and Black knew before he even looked that it was Leroy.
Leroy called again, and Black stopped and turned.
When the bus passed and he saw the look on Leroy’s and Pookie’s faces, Black was reasonably certain of two things. Whatever had happened in the house wasn’t over. And he was about to become a part of it.
Inside the house, detectives took measurements, fingerprints, and photographs. Lab technicians took blood samples from the floor and semen samples from the mattresses in the upstairs bedrooms. Uniformed officers stood guard at the front and back doors, keeping nonexistent onlookers outside the perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape on what had turned out to be an easy detail—so far.
Homicide lieutenant Jorge Ramirez, who had been busy organizing and overseeing the frenzy of activity, came back into the house for what seemed like the hundredth time and asked to speak with the 25th District four-to-midnight supervisor.
“That’d be me,” Lieutenant John Flynn said as he strode from the living room to meet Ramirez.
“Okay, so what’s up?” Ramirez asked.
“Well, the victim is a city councilman,” Flynn said. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s the head of the Police Civilian Review Board.”
“I know,” Ramirez said. “What I meant was—”
“And get this,” Flynn added, rolling his eyes in the air. “He’s a spick, to boot. The papers will have a field day with this one.”
Flynn expected Ramirez to agree. After all, he looked Caucasian. With his dirty-blond hair and light brown eyes, it was a natural assumption. But a closer look revealed a dark, almost ruddy complexion and full, voluptuous lips. He could have been of Mediterranean descent, or he could have been Latino. As Ramirez looked at Flynn, unshaken by the overt racism that he’d always found to be present within the department, he realized that Flynn was trying to figure out which one he was.
“I forgot to introduce myself,” Ramirez said. “I’m Lieutenant Jorge Ramirez, Homicide. And when I said, ‘What’s up?’ I was referring to stuff like: Did your officers question any witnesses? Has any weapon been recovered? Have any suspects been identified? You know, police stuff.
“The political and racial overtones do not concern me,” Ramirez added, looking Flynn straight in the eye. “I’d just like to know if anybody under your command has done anything other than roll out the yellow tape.”
Flynn was flustered for a moment, but recovered quickly.
“No offense, Ramirez. But you know how you people get when something happens to a Latino. I was just saying that—”
“Well, well, well. If it ain’t the Red Man himself!” Ramirez said, interrupting Flynn when he saw another detective from his squad. “Come to show us rookies how it’s done?”
Detective Reds Hillman bristled at the reference to his age. Although Ramirez outranked him, no one could touch Hillman’s experience. He had worked Homicide for almost twenty years and had seen a little bit of everything. In less than a year, he would retire. He’d promised himself that he would take it easy for the next few months, and no one was going to deny him that. Not even Ramirez.
“Give a kid a lieutenant’s bar and he thinks he can start giving lip to his elders,” Hillman said.
“You know I’m just messing with y
ou, Reds,” Ramirez said. “You don’t write, you don’t call. I was beginning to think you had something against your coworkers.”
“Work, Ramirez. I’m a prisoner of my work,” Hillman said, shaking his head in mock exhaustion. “You know how it is.”
Ramirez didn’t respond. He knew that Hillman was a prisoner. But he knew that he wasn’t imprisoned by work. The walls to Hillman’s prison were thicker than work. They were so impregnable that no one had gotten in for years. Mostly, people had stopped trying.
Sensing Ramirez’s discomfort, Hillman changed the subject. “Speaking of work, how’d that Faison case ever turn out?”
“Conviction, felony murder, life without parole,” Ramirez said. “The jury wouldn’t go for the death penalty.”
“Can’t win ’em all.”
“No kidding,” Ramirez said wistfully. “So what’ve we got on this one?”
“Well, I’ve only been here for about fifteen minutes. From what I can gather, we haven’t got any eyewitnesses, naturally, but we’ve got a list from Radio of the addresses where the calls came from. I wanted to save them for you, but I figured I’d be nice and call ’em back for you, since us little guys end up doing all the legwork anyway.”
“Aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” Ramirez said, batting his eyes and blowing a kiss at Hillman.
Hillman ventured a sidelong glance at Ramirez, then looked at an investigator from the medical examiner’s office and a crime-lab technician to make sure they hadn’t seen Ramirez’s little display.
“You’re just a barrel of laughs tonight,” Hillman said. “Marriage must be doing wonders for you.”
Ramirez just smiled. He had been married for a year, and his wife had just had a baby boy a month before. His family and his career were everything to him, and it showed.
“Anyway,” Hillman said, “the lady that lives two doors down—a Mrs. Green—says she heard a guy say, ‘Yo, it’s Leroy,’ about five seconds before the gunshots.”
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