Lowcountry Punch

by Benjamin Blackmore

  “Suit yourself.” Not exactly the response I was hoping for. I waved my hand in the air. “Good to meet y’all. Keep an eye out for those oysters.”

  I throttled backwards and sped off across the blue. All those things I had told myself about not wanting to meet another woman anytime soon. Perhaps I was wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what I needed. Something about Liz Coles intrigued me.

  Back at my place, I peered out a front window and saw the unmarked police car parked up the street. I opened the closet door, pulled out my shotgun and loaded a couple shells into it. Put a few more in my pocket.

  Try and get me, Tux Clinton.

  4

  Before the sun rose, I decided to play a trick on the two cops sitting outside my front yard. Found some old Black Cat firecrackers in my garage and snuck across the street a couple hundred yards down. I cut through two lawns, moving low behind a row of azaleas.

  One of the men looked like he had nodded off. The other was spitting tobacco into a cup and looking out the windshield. Now, I know this kind of game wasn’t exactly professional and some might even say childish, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, if I could get this close to them, so could Tux Clinton and his thugs. A lesson needed to be learned.

  I lit the end of the brick and tossed it next to the driver’s side door. With a huge grin on my face, I knelt down and waited. A roar of shots ripped through the quiet morning. Those two cops were out of the car quicker than you could say Dunkin’ Donuts. Both of them had their guns drawn. Once the explosions stopped, the first thing they heard was my laugh.

  They didn’t find it as funny as I did. As they holstered their weapons, I said, “I couldn’t resist.”

  One of them mumbled, “Asshole.”

  I raised my hand in the air. “Y’all are doing a great job. I’ll bring cookies and lemonade out later. You take it in a sippie cup?” More mumbling. Then they both climbed back into their car and I went back home for a shower and cup of joe.

  Before tackling the day, I had to get one thing out of my mind. Sitting on the couch in the living room, I Googled Liz Coles. For what it’s worth, it was my first time Googling a woman. Not only did she have a website, but she had her own Wikipedia page. Are you kidding me? She had mentioned being an artist in New York but had certainly played it down. CBS had even done a story on her. As if that wasn’t enough, Liz had also put together a foundation called The Portrait and a Dream Project that provided art lessons and supplies to children in hospitals all over New York.

  I looked at the telephone number on her website. Wanted to call it. Otherwise I’d never run into her again. Charleston is small but not that small. But I couldn’t. I’d already crossed the stalker line by Googling her. Some things you just have to let be.

  I went up to my room, aching to play the banjo. I have three, but my go-to is my father’s: a prewar Gibson with a custom-built mahogany neck. The old wood rim can bring out sounds that very few banjos can; it rings as if spirits are buried in it. Sometimes, I can feel my father’s presence in those tones. I took it from the case and sat in the armless chair by the window. I rested it on my lap and put the picks on—stainless steel National NP2s for my index and middle finger and a plastic Golden Gate pick for my thumb. I started picking out Earl’s version of “Sally Goodin” and focused on the sounds until everything else faded away.

  The call came at four that afternoon. I’d been in the office most of the day. Our CI, Jared Winters, gave me an address. I crammed the last quarter of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into my mouth and walked over to Steve’s office. “We’re a go,” I said and handed him the address.

  Steve took the yellow sticky note from me and eyeballed it. He crumpled up the paper and threw it back at me. “Things are getting busy around here.”

  I smiled, tasting the blood of future combat. He winked, and I knew we shared many of the same reasons for being in this business. We were both warriors until we die.

  With the sun setting, Ches, myself, and two other agents pulled into an abandoned lot in the middle of flat land two miles from the address. Another car full of agents pulled in behind us. Three patrol cars were waiting.

  Cinching my Kevlar vest tight, I joined the circle gathering around Steve. Seven DEA agents, eight cops. “Listen up, listen up,” he was saying, again with his usual toothpick in his mouth. I wondered how often he changed ‘em out.

  He passed around the address. It was the first time the police officers were being told who we were looking for and where we were going. We didn’t want any corrupt cops letting Tux know that one of his crack houses was about to be raided. Holding the details until the last minute is a practice we used in South America when working with hired hands, but many of us had found that using it in the States was a pretty good idea, too. I don’t mean to give cops a hard time. I’ve worked with plenty of dirty agents.

  Steve continued. “My guys are going in first. Reddick and Benton will go in the front door.” He pointed at us. “I’ll take a team to the back. NCPD, you will keep an eye on the windows and come in after the initial move. I want the cruisers to follow the g-cars. I know I don’t need to say it but I’m saying it anyway. No fucking sirens. We’re going in quiet. Any questions, gentlemen?” No one said anything. A few shook their heads.

  “See you down there. Be safe.”

  I climbed back into the shotgun seat. As Ches drove us toward the bust, I checked my Beretta one more time. One round in the chamber. I had four extra clips, two in my belt and two in the back pockets of my jeans, just in case things took a bad turn, which wasn’t rare. The agent sitting directly behind me beat on the seat a few times, charging us up. We were four blocks away.

  North Charleston was a city fighting to get rid of its ugly half. Money had flooded in recently, but much was cursed by poverty and crime. We were in the middle of the worst of it tonight. We passed the last street of single bedroom homes and entered the affordable housing area, all crumbling old apartment buildings. Four stories. Brick. Dirty. Ten years from being gentrified. A/C units fighting to stay alive, dripping condensation into the dirt below. Damp clothes dangling from the lines. People congregating in white plastic chairs on their porches.

  Chester eased to a stop in the middle of the road fifty yards out. A boy riding a blue bicycle on the sidewalk pedaled toward us. No shoes on. He stared for a long time, then saw the units pull up and realized what was going on. It didn’t faze him. He just kept pedaling. Chester and I both pulled on balaclavas to hide our faces, a good habit to have in our profession.

  I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the asphalt. Started to run. The other agents were right behind me, including one carrying an air-powered ram. The neighbors soaked up the situation, watching it go down as if this was normal afternoon entertainment. Who needed reality TV when you had this happening next door?

  We were heading into a ground level unit, number 102. I ran up the four steps and took position on the right, weapon in hand. My heart roared and I embraced the adrenaline, took control of it. Chester took the left side. The bass line of some underground hip-hop music thumped inside.

  The agent with the ram approached the door and waited for my signal. They’d bought two of these air-powered battering rams a month earlier and they hadn’t failed us yet. As anyone who has ever stormed a house knows, surprise is all you have going for you. If you don’t get a door open quickly, a bust can go terribly wrong. Sometimes two men hauling a cement cylinder don’t have the force to break down the door, and it gives the men inside a chance to arm themselves. We don’t like that.

  I nodded to the agent, and he pulled the trigger on his new toy. A sphere popped out, and thousands of pounds of force knocked the door wide open with ease. He stepped back quickly and I barreled in, yelling, “DEA! DEA!” You need to establish who is breaking down the door. Our hope is that the guys inside won’t be as quick to shoot a Fed as they would someone else.

  The front door opened up into the living room. There was a cou
ch and a recliner, both occupied by young black males. One guy’s hair was pulled back in cornrows. The other wore a do-rag. They were still holding game controllers in their hands, caught in shock by the door splitting open.

  I saw a handgun on the coffee table. Cornrows eyed it.

  “Get your hands way up!” I screamed, moving toward him. “Don’t you do it!” I kept him and the other guy in my weapon’s sights but scanned the doorways for additional danger. Ches and the two agents pushed into the hallway toward the kitchen.

  Gunfire erupted.

  Several bullets ripped into the wall next to me and I fell to the floor, keeping my gun aimed at my subjects. Cornrows got nervous and stood to make a run for it. I went after him with a dropkick. He fell, screaming. I pinned him to the ground with my knee and cuffed him.

  More thunderous gunfire. Screams.

  I yelled at the guy with the do-rag to get on the ground. He didn’t move off the couch, just sat there with his hands up. I aimed my gun at his midsection. “I’ll ask one more time. Get on the ground, keep your hands above your head.” He got my meaning and fell knees to chest. I moved carefully toward him and cuffed him, too.

  Someone yelled, “Clear!”

  Ches came around the corner. I went to the stereo. Turned the volume knob to the left.

  “Everyone okay?”

  He nodded. “Two of them got a little trigger-happy in there. Bad shots, though. Found about a key of coke. Some cooking on the stove. Four men in cuffs.”

  “I hope it was worth it.”

  “Me, too. I have a feeling we just lost any case we’ll ever build on Tux. Now he knows we’re onto him.”

  That night, a woman dialed 911 and reported a body swinging from a bridge near Rivers Avenue.

  I met Chester at the scene around midnight. The Police Department had closed the road and marked off the area with yellow tape. The black scrawny body of our CI, Jared Winters, swung by the neck from a rope. A CSI photographer snapped shots and, with each flash, as if I was watching an old moving picture, I saw more and more of the story.

  His eyes had been cut out. They’d removed his clothes. Stabbed him. The knife still protruded from his chest. A pool of blood had collected fifteen feet below him on the pavement. I’m sure some had dripped onto several windshields as the cars passed under him before it had been reported.

  They didn’t need to hang a sign on him to get the point across. This was a message to the men we’d arrested earlier: don’t betray Tux Clinton.

  5

  The orders came down from the Atlanta office the next day. We had to find out where Chad Rourke’s cocaine came from. Steve fed me the case on a silver platter. He told me earlier that morning, “You get whoever, whatever you need. Show me that I was right in bringing you in. Make me proud, Reddick.”

  I promised him I would. I was excited at the opportunity and didn’t want to let him down. He was giving me another chance.

  In drug enforcement, it's all about using the small-timers to get to the more important players. Then you work the more important players to get to even bigger ones, and up you go. In some cases, I’ve followed the supply chain all the way to the coca plants on a hillside in Bolivia. That’s what it’s all about. That’s how you clog a leak and win the drug war. But as I was reminded yearly, the powers that be don’t always let you go to the top. Steve assured me that I could take this as far as I’d like, but I took that with a grain of salt.

  Chester and I rode downtown to the police station on Lockwood to get more information on Chad Rourke’s death. We needed to find out where the celebrity had gotten his drugs. A Detective Rosenberg led us into his office. He probably should have spent a few minutes tidying up the clutter, but by his appearance, I didn’t think he was too worried about it. Investigating death takes a toll on you. He was a heavyset guy. Gray hair. Couldn’t be too far away from his pension. He wore a short-sleeved plaid button-down that looked like it came off the rack of a thrift store. His khakis might have come from the next rack over.

  “Case closed,” I said. “Is that the latest?”

  “That’s it,” he said, handing over a copy of his report. “We think he was sitting on the railing, smoking a cigarette. From there, he either lost his balance or went on his own accord. No foul play. You should see the toxicology report. The guy was tweaked out of his mind. From what we were told, he had a thing for catching a buzz and then playing on penthouse balconies. It was only a matter of time. It’s a shame. Some of these movie stars think they can walk on water. Good life’s too much for them.”

  “Can you share some details? Like I said on the phone, we’re supposed to find out where he got his coke. Orders from upper management. You know how it is.”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  I flipped through the police report. “So where had he been all night? Who was with him? I’m assuming you’ve interviewed everybody and have a pretty good feel for the evening.”

  “Oh, yeah. Treated it like a murder. We talked to everyone. Rourke started out at a house party south of Broad. Thrown by James King, the owner of the Mazyck. Lots of the folks filming that movie with him were there. Tela Davies, too. It was one of those upper-crust shindigs. A bunch of them went back to the hotel, ended up partying at the rooftop bar. Then James King, Tela Davies, and Chad Rourke went to Rourke’s penthouse. King and Davies left around 2 a.m. Got ‘em both in the lobby on the video camera walking out the door. They never came back. Both have alibis. Rourke hit the pavement around two hours later.”

  “You spoke with King and Davies?”

  “Several times.”

  “Did you ask about the drugs?”

  “Not really. I told them to tell me the truth, that I didn’t care if they were tooting some snow. Not my job.”

  “So King and Davies went home together?”

  “No. King went home to his longtime girlfriend. Davies went over to another guy’s house. I forget his name. Something Riley. It’s in the report.”

  I searched for a minute. “Jack Riley.”

  “That’s him. Lucky guy, right? He’s got a condo over in Mt. Pleasant. He verified that Ms. Davies was with him the remainder of the night. We left it at that.”

  “Do you have a list of everyone at the party at King’s home earlier?”

  “No, I didn’t bother with it.”

  After about five more minutes of this, we wrapped it up. On the way out of the parking lot, I called Steve and told him we wanted research and light surveillance on James King, and we agreed it wouldn’t hurt to watch Jack Riley, too. It wasn’t worth trying to put a tail on Tela Davies. Being one of the biggest names in Hollywood, she had enough people following her. Above all else, at this point in the investigation, we had to be stealthy.

  King was now our focus. He’d been with Rourke the night he’d died. He owned the Mazyck Hotel where it had all gone down. And even the party earlier in the evening had been at his house. I would have bet every dime I had that he knew how to find good cocaine.

  First step was searching public and private records. What did he own? Did he work with anyone else on any other investments? School records: how were his grades? What were his extracurriculars? This information was critical in prep work for a potential undercover assignment. If whoever we sent went in bad-mouthing Wake Forest—who King happened to have played basketball for—we’d already be at a disadvantage.

  I wasn’t ready to go under. We wanted to feel King out first, try to understand him. And although Chester’s scar works wonders when he’s going under for gang work, penetrating high-society Charleston wasn’t his thing. So we put up a young female agent, Carly Baker, at the Mazyck for a few nights and let her work her magic. She wasn’t there to ask questions; only to watch, listen, and mingle.

  She ate most of her meals at the hotel, and spent hours at the bar each night. If anyone checked her out, we had put together a bulletproof backstory for her. The cast and crew of the movie, Lonely Morning—including Tela Davies
—were all living there. Many of them had just returned from Chad Rourke’s funeral in his hometown of Boise, Idaho. The bar bubbled with stories about him. Dry eyes were hard to find.

  James King was always at the hotel, and he either ate dinner at the restaurant or sat at one of the two bars every night. I studied a picture of him. King didn’t look like I had imagined him. He was shorter and had less hair, but he carried himself with great confidence. I could see it by the straightness of his back and the hidden grin in his eyes.

  After a few days, it became very clear that he craved power and fed off the spotlight. He wanted, even needed, people to like him. We had seen that in how King treated his guests, especially those involved with the movie. If I was planning on going undercover to befriend him, I needed to be someone he would want to impress. I’d worked people like that before. I couldn’t bust into his hotel selling ball bearings. James King would only help me if I could help him—if he had something to gain.

  I finished up the week with good news: Steve finally called off the cops watching my house. How could Tux find out it was me who crippled his cousin? Even if he did, he wasn’t dumb enough to make a move on a federal agent a week after we’d found a man who ratted on him swinging from a bridge.

  Things were finally getting back to normal.

  6

  Even I roll sevens from time to time.

  The next day, luck found me at the most unlikely of places: Crosby’s Seafood Market. I had vivid memories of visiting Crosby’s as a kid while staying with my grandparents one summer. The store still occupied the same blue shack on Lockwood. The growth of the city had long passed it by, but they were still providing the freshest fish around. Inside, the heady aroma of the ocean brought back grand memories of my youth. Back to those days with my grandparents, and back when my father and I would drive up to the Baltimore marina to watch the fishermen unload the morning’s catch.