Dark Men

by Derek Haas

  The older brother Ben starts to groan.

  “Time to go . . .”

  “But?”

  “He doesn’t have Archie.”

  “You believe him?”

  I nod and that’s all she needs from me. We’re out the door, down the stairs, through the opening and over the wall before the bodyguards tamp out their cigarettes. We’ll get a few more minutes as they mistake the moans of pain upstairs for something else. It’ll be all we need.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Accidents don’t exist in this business. A hit man dies, a fence goes missing, a mark wanders off the side of a building on his way to plummeting ten stories: none of this is surreptitious. This trade places a premium on precise planning, on exacting detail, and if a player has his ticket punched, more likely than not, a malevolent hand, not an act of God, is behind it.

  The wind has grown belligerent throughout the day, racing around corners and smacking pedestrians in the face like a schoolyard bully. The sun is nothing more than a condemned man held in chains by a wall of dark gray clouds. The sky might rain, or it might just threaten the act, as though it gets some sort of twisted pleasure out of withholding the information. Every now and then, Chicago, as a city, likes to rise up and remind its citizens she won’t be pushed to the background, she won’t blend in behind them, she’s a leading character in their life story and they’d be wise not to forget it.

  The three of us, Smoke, Risina, and I, hurry under the scaffolding of some Gold Coast remodeling project and head toward a simple eatery named the Third Coast Cafe. “Pardon our progress” signs have spread across the city like kudzu. Everywhere I look, another building constructed in the late-19th century aftermath of the Great Fire is in the middle of a facelift. After the housing crash, all those construction workers had to find something to do with their time, so the city funneled stimulus dollars into the hands of no-bid general contractors. Of course, it wouldn’t be Chicago if evidence of kickbacks and greased palms hadn’t already been hinted at by the Times.

  The workers swarm the scaffolding like wasps, the wind only a nuisance. They raise equipment, bang away at walls, scrape, sand, and plaster, ignoring the weather. I guess anything becomes routine if you do it long enough.

  The restaurant is half-full this time of day and customers hunch over coffee and pieces of pie, reluctant to give up their table and head back out into the wind. We slide into a booth in the back corner and order some food. Smoke’s nervousness has reached a new apex; his leg shakes up and down like a piston.

  “We’re in a jam now,” he says. “We’re up against it.”

  “Yeah, we’re at square zero. We haven’t even reached square one. The skull collector was an anomaly in Archie’s files, but not the one who nabbed him or wanted me.”

  “We chased the wrong dog up the wrong tree.”

  “I suppose we could take a look at the file again, see if we can figure out who the client was, see if he’s upset the mark is still alive.”

  “Seems like it wouldn’t have nothing to do with you, though?” He’s asking more than he’s telling. He has a point, but his fidgeting grows even more exaggerated.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Smoke?”

  When Smoke looks up, I can’t tell if he’s surprised by my question or if I caught him by being direct. He swallows and wipes his mouth with his napkin. He looks to Risina for help, but she gives him a hard stare I didn’t know she had in her. I’ll admit it’s disconcerting, coming from her. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that look.

  “What’d’you mean?”

  “You’ve grown more fidgety than a prisoner walking toward the hangman.”

  “I told you, I’m nervous ’bout this whole thing.”

  “Yeah, you told me.”

  “You know . . .” he tosses his napkin down on the table, then points his finger at me, “this is exactly what I was worried about. Exactly.”

  “What’re you worried about, Smoke?”

  His finger hasn’t left the air. “This! You turning on me, everyone looking at me like I had something to do with Archie disappearing. You think the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw that ransom note wasn’t ‘uh-oh, you stepped in it now, Smoke?’ I’ve been scared shitless since he was taken, and I could’ve run a thousand times. Hell, I didn’t even have to come find you; I could’ve just caught the first bus to Frisco and forgot the whole damn thing. But I did because Archie said if he were ever in a pinch that’s what I was supposed to do.”

  His eyes focus, like he just now realizes his finger is jabbing the air toward me, that his voice is growing louder. He lowers his finger but doesn’t lower his eyes.

  “Let me tell you something about Archie and me. You won’t understand this and I don’t care if you do, but this is the truth and if that’s a sound you’ve heard before then you’ll recognize it now.

  “I was twenty-eight years old before anyone believed in me. My whole life was spent with people telling me I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t solid enough, you know what I’m saying? My mom thought I looked like my father and never forgave me for that, even when I apologized. Can you imagine? Apologizing to your mom for the way you look? And all you get for it is your mother trying to beat your father’s face off your neck.

  “School stopped for me when I was fifteen. Just walked away and didn’t go back. You think there were officers out there checking to see where I was? You think the school board or the principal or the teachers came around asking, ‘why isn’t Leonard in school?’ Let me let you in on a little secret: they don’t care. No one gives a shit. Just one more drop-out, one more black boy out of our hallways, out of our detention hall, and good riddance.

  “My first arrest was for boosting a car. I’d love to tell you a story about how some buddy of mine talked me into it, or how I wasn’t going to do nothing but drive that car around and forget my life for a few hours, but that’d be a lie and you’re here for the truth. The truth was I knew that Cam’s Motorshop out by the airport would pay a couple thousand to strip down Hondas with no questions asked and that’s where I was heading when I got stung. I wanted the money, plain and simple. I turned eighteen exactly three days before my arrest so I did a hundred days at Cook County instead of juvey. That was about as much fun as a punch in the dick. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of hellholes but you have no idea. You have no fucking idea, I assure you.

  “The second time I got picked up was across state lines. I had grown pretty skillful at jacking cars by then and I had a regular thing going with six or seven chop shops all over Chicago. This one cat named Holmes I worked with a few times asked if I could drive a hot Nissan over to Boston where his brother Todd had a shop and drive back some other wheels to Indy. Said he’d pay five gees for the trouble and that cash sounded pretty damn good to me. I don’t know what I was aiming to buy at the time, but I remember that the money would set me straight for a while. Needless to say, I saw the bubble lights go up behind me just crossing into Massachusetts, and I panicked, ended up with a helicopter spotlight over my head, six cruisers, and a set of those spikes stretched across the road to take me down to the rims. It was like a Hollywood movie except missing the ending where the good guy gets away. Or maybe I wasn’t the good guy, come to think of it.

  “Anyway, state lines is state lines and I ended up in Federal without a friend in the world. I tried to call Holmes and I’ll be damned if the number done changed. I was staring three years in the face and the Fed House meant organized crime and drug traffickers and El Salvadoran gangs and Aryan brotherhoods and a whole mess of hard cases who wouldn’t think twice about putting your insides on the outside of you if you know what I’m saying.

  “The second day I’m locked up . . . the second damn day . . . I get sucker-punched in the walkway between the chapel and the restrooms. I’m walking along and WHAM! on my back, laid out flat. Didn’t see the fist fly, didn’t see the face, just a blast of
pain, blinking white lights, and I’m looking up at the ceiling. I don’t know who hit me or why they hit me or what I had to do to make it right . . . no one tells you that shit. Look at me, I’m all of five-ten and skin and bones and I was even thinner back then if you can dig that. No one helped me up and no one told me what the fuck I was supposed to do to keep from getting jawboned again.

  “When I went to get my meal that afternoon, I saw some of the prisoners snickering at me and my fat lip and my purple cheek but I just ignored them best I could and sat down at one of the tables they had scattered in the cafeteria.

  “That’s where Archibald Grant found me, busted lip and busted flat, eating a dry hamburger in the cafeteria at Lewisburg. He asked me my name and he asked me my story and I don’t know why I let everything out, but like I’m doing here, I did for him there. The words just poured out of me like water out of a busted bucket. I told him where I came from, where I’d been and why I was stuck up inside there.

  “He looked at me, smiling that half smile of his, the way he does, you know, and didn’t say nothing for a while. Then, he nodded like he’d known my story before I told it and he said I’d been stealing the wrong things. Cars, electronics, wallets, knicks and knacks, this place was full of people who boosted the wrong shit. Boosted it because they didn’t know better. All that crap could only get you a little cash and what was the point in that? Risk versus reward was all upside down. Five thousand dollars worth five years in lockdown? In Federal? With these animals? Hell no. No fucking way.”

  Smoke shakes his head vigorously, then swallows hard. He doesn’t look at us, lost in his story, as he continues.

  “Archie folded his hands and lowered his voice. He said what he stole, the only thing worth stealing, was information. He said there was no greater commodity in the world. He said people laid down their lives for it since the dawn of man and they did it for good reason. Told me he stole information on the outside and he’d been stealing it on the inside, riding out his two-year term in comfort and security until he could resume business on the other side of the wall. Said he got thrown in here on purpose anyway, and though that claim had just the slightest ring of bullshit to it, I bought it like a fifty-cent bottle of beer. Looking back now, I’ll just bet he did get himself thrown in there for whatever reason made sense at the time.”

  I remember that time. My old fence Pooley went to visit Archie in that prison, and commented how he couldn’t get to him to put a scare in him, get the information I needed at the time. Maybe Archie was in there to avoid my reach back then. It doesn’t matter . . . I keep my mouth shut and listen to Smoke unfold his story.

  “Anyway, I naturally said something along the lines of ‘why you telling me this?’ And he said, ‘nobody ever believed in you, but I see a spark inside you maybe no one else saw before. Maybe it’s buried deep down in there but I can see it.’ Of course I thought he was completely shining me but fuck if those words didn’t sound like honey. Say what you want about Archibald Grant, but he’s got a mouth on him that could sell scissors to a bald man. He told me he knew who waylayed me in the hall outside the chapel and he knew how to take care of that situation so I wouldn’t be bothered again, not even looked at askew the whole time I was behind bars, but I needed to do something for him. ‘Could I do that?’ he asked.

  “I didn’t know but I said I’d try. He said ‘good, good.’ Then he nodded to indicate a beefy prison guard standing behind the glass near the exit. ‘See that hack over there what looks like he ate too many dollar specials at the Taco Bell?’”

  Smoke stops and laughs to himself. “You know how Archie do.”

  I can’t help but smile too, but signal with my hands tumbling over each other for him to get on with it. It doesn’t do either of us any good to think of Archie in the past tense.

  “He tells me the guard goes by the name of Nash. Archie says he’s been able to crack the code on most of the hacks but this Nash has been a problem. Says he’s tightlipped and none of the other guards’ll spill on him.

  “Now, as you can imagine, most bulls take a handout here or there for favors, but not this Nash. He’s straight as an arrow and there was no chinks in the armor neither. He’s one of those true blue badges you hear about but never expect to see. And those are the dangerous ones. Because nothing can fuck up a connected con’s plans like a hack who won’t play ball. Suddenly, you find yourself transferred to the wrong cellblock, or your pleasantries are confiscated, or you’re eating at the wrong table in the cafeteria or worse. Balance of power is always a precarious thing in life, but in lock-down, it’s hanging by tooth floss, I’ll tell you that.

  “Archie looks me over, and says, ‘get me something.’ ‘What’d’you mean, ‘something’? I ask back, and Archie gets that look in his eye he gets time to time that says ‘I’m smarter than you think I am.’ He looks down his nose at me and says, ‘What have we been talking about? Information, Smoke.’ He’s the first one to call me that by the way cause I had this pack of Parliaments I pulled out and lit up in mid-conversation. That’s the one good thing I’ll say about L-burg . . . you can smoke inside that damn place. What happened to the world where we kicked all the smokers outdoors? Anyway, Archie keeps on, ‘Anything I can use on Nash to get what needs getting. One week. You find me some A-plus information and all your problems inside this box disappear like bad dreams in the morning light. Consider yourself off-limits for a week . . . nobody but nobody gonna be in your business, I guarantee that. And don’t forget something, Smoke. I believe in you.’”

  Smoke fiddles with his unopened pack, turning the box over and over, occupying his hands. I have a feeling he’d like to pause the tale to step outside and light one up, but telling stories has a way of gaining a foothold on anything else you might want to do, planting its flag until it’s over. He looks up at me.

  “So what the fuck was I gonna do? I’m like three days into this shitbox and I’m going to find out information on a hack no one else has been able to procure? A bull with a clean certificate? How the fuck was I gonna do that? But those words were there, Columbus. He said ’em and I’ll be damned if he didn’t mean ’em. ‘I believe in you.’ Those words were like, I don’t know, they had weight, man. You believe that?”

  I nod and half of Smoke’s mouth turns upward. His eyes start to shine, but he doesn’t wipe at them.

  “First thing I did was spend two days doing nothing but watching Nash. Marking his shift changes, seeing how he conducted himself, who he talked to, who he watched, hell, I even counted how many times he scratched his nuts. But there was nothing there. He just stood behind the glass and watched us with dark eyes.

  “Now, he wasn’t always behind the glass and that gave me a bit of hope. The bulls took various shifts, sometimes behind the glass, sometimes in the corridor outside the rec room, sometimes walking the block, and sometimes out in the yard.

  “I watched him, I watched him, I watched him, and this cat Nash did not give me a goddamn inch. Believe that. I started thinking maybe he’s a robot, like some android out of a space movie. C-3PO or some shit. Cons would try to talk to him and he’d just ignore their shit and give ’em a stare that stopped ’em cold.

  “I was five days into my seven and I hadn’t come up with jack squat. Not a plan, nothing. My mind was racing. Maybe I just make up a story and tell it to Archie, but what would that give me? Seemed like I might as well grab a shovel and start digging my own grave out in the yard. But damn if your mind don’t play tricks on you in the box when you start running out of options. And those words were hanging over me the whole time . . . ‘I believe in you.’ I know it sounds corny as a holiday card, but I wanted that belief to be rewarded, made whole . . . that’s the only way I can describe it. I wanted to justify his belief. This man I barely knew. Had only spoken to once.

  “Then I saw an opening. The slimmest opening possible. An opening that would add some years on my sentence and would put the ‘hard’ into ‘hard time’ if I got caught.
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br />   “See, one thing I’ve come to learn about this job is you gotta look at things from a different angle. I was trying to shadow Nash and pick up on a mistake or a flaw or some way to get inside with him, but instead, I should’ve been watching where he wasn’t. I didn’t say that right. Let me explain.

  “I noticed that the guards went into a locker room just off of A block when they checked in. Various guards would be in and out of there all day, Nash included. When he came in, he’d be wearing a pair of khakis and an oxford shirt, but when he walked out, he’d be wearing a different pair of pants and the blue dress shirt that all hacks wore, you know? It came to me then and there. I had to get inside that locker room and see if there was any clue, any anything he left behind in his locker when he went out on shift.

  “So there it was. All my eggs in that basket. I only had a day left, and how the hell was I gonna get into that locker room? Prisoners weren’t supposed to be out of A block at all, much less in the bullring.”

  Smoke holds up one finger and flashes me a smile. “Except one inmate. One guy, that’s it. Little sawed off son-of-a-bitch named George Yackey. The Yack Attack, my ticket in. This con got the sweet gig of shining the bathrooms, sweeping the floors, picking up the dead bugs off the windowsills in the area called ‘A Extension’ but what the cons called ‘the bullring’ cause that’s where the guards went for break and change. Yack was the only orange jumpsuit allowed back there, twice a day, to clean up the ring and make it look nice.

  “Now understand, the bullring wasn’t near the perimeter or even on the outskirts of the building, so it wasn’t like you had shotguns trained on you or the hacks would think you were trying to escape if they caught you in there. In a lot of ways, it’d be worse for you, ’cause if you were in the ring unauthorized, the guards would assume you were trying to fuck ’em in some way. Steal from ’em or what-not. And here’s a little fact about serving time no one talks about: if you make a legitimate attempt at escape . . . if you get caught climbing the side of a wall, or in a tunnel or gripping the undercarriage of a laundry truck as it drives off the site, the hacks don’t beat the shit out of you. Hell, they’re not even sore. They actually show you a little bit of respect. That’s the truth! Don’t ask me why it’s so . . . best I can figure, they put themselves in the con’s shoes and say, ‘why the hell wouldn’t I want out of this dungeon any way I can? How’m I gonna blame this poor fool for trying?’ Sure, they’ll throw you in solitary for a month and take away privileges for a year, but when you walk down the block, they’ll give you a nod like ‘not bad, you crazy son-of-a-bitch. Not bad.’