by Chris Holm
“Yes, hello. I believe I’ve discovered something of interest.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Nothing you need concern yourself with—I’m working it.”
“Then why’re you calling me?”
“Because you and your constituent organizations have been naughty boys and girls indeed.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ve been passing notes in class.” Engelmann tsked. “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask to see them.”
There was a long pause—so long, Engelmann wondered for a moment if he’d pushed too far, if his contact would simply fail to answer.
Then his contact said: “Our communications are encrypted. Locked down.”
“Not so locked down as you might think,” Engelmann replied, his self-satisfied smile reflected in his tone.
“You’re gonna wanna watch the way you talk to me,” his contact spat. “We’re not a bunch of fucking morons, and we don’t take kindly to people who suggest otherwise.”
Engelmann was chastened, his smile dying on his face. “I wouldn’t dare suggest—”
But his contact cut him off. “Good. Keep not suggesting.” Then he sighed, and when he spoke again, he was once more composed. “If this shitwad’s cracked our communications, he’s even better than we thought. If I get you the access you want, are you good enough to get this guy?”
“Yes. There’s no one better.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say. But I swear to God, if I find out you’re using this information to fuck us over, we’ll hire the number two through five guys to hunt your ass down and make you live just long enough to regret it. You get me?”
Engelmann paused before answering. “I do.”
“Good. Check your phone. I’ve forwarded along some links to sites you’re gonna wanna take a look at. I’m also gonna put out the word to my organization that our communication network should go dark until you find our man.”
“No. That could signal to him that something’s amiss. Your communications should remain undisrupted.”
The line was silent for a moment. “You understand that’s one hell of a big request.”
“I do.”
“You’d better. Because if I don’t plug this leak and any more of our guys die by his hand, it’ll be on your head.”
“Until today, you were unaware your network had been breached. It would be folly to squander the tactical advantage this discovery affords us.”
“All right. I’ll give you a week. Then we’re changing the locks whether you got the guy or not.”
“Understood.”
“All right, then. Good luck.” And with that, his contact hung up.
No, not good luck, Engelmann thought. Good hunting.
11
By day, MacArthur Park seemed safe enough. Sure, it was blanketed in elaborate graffiti and dotted here and there with homeless people, napping in the shade of the park’s eucalyptus trees. But people still walked their dogs across the patchy, sun-scorched lawn, and couples brought their kids to kick soccer balls or climb atop the Day-Glo play structure.
Once the sun was doused by the Pacific to the west, though, the tenor of the park—and the Eastside neighborhood of Long Beach in which it sat—changed. Families packed up and left. The indigents retreated to the sidewalks and stoops outside the park, or vanished from the neighborhood altogether. And then the gangs arrived.
They strolled in with cultivated swagger, calculated to intimidate—but they traveled in packs, because numbers meant safety. They were black, mostly, although there were some Hispanics, too, and even one Cambodian crew. There was no intermingling of races within groups. Long Beach may pride itself on its diversity, but it seemed their street gangs weren’t so enlightened.
Michael Hendricks watched them with feigned disinterest from his perch across the street. No one paid him any mind. He was nothing more than scenery.
Hendricks had arrived in Long Beach late last night. Lester had booked him into a midrange chain hotel a couple blocks off the water under the name Robert McCall, and supplied him with the corresponding ID and credit cards. Shortly after he arrived, he took a walk down to the beach, a military duffel slung over one shoulder. There, he’d unpacked from the bag a pair of jeans and three shirts—a plain white tee, a heather gray tank top, and a red-and-black checked flannel. The tide was low, polluted water lapping Coca-Cola brown beneath the sodium vapor lights. He walked down to the water’s edge, dipped the clothes into the surf, and wrung them out. Then he stuffed them back into the duffel, the dampness bleeding through, and hiked back to his room.
Come morning, the clothes—which he’d hung across the shower rod—had dried. The seawater had discolored them. A saline crust stiffened the fabric. The room smelled like something died in it.
He put them on, layering the shirts—first the tank, then the tee, then the flannel. Then he slipped out a side entrance and hiked inland, stopping at a bike rack to smear grease from the chains into his hair and face and hands. A few blocks later, when he saw a businesswoman’s expression flicker distaste as he walked by, he knew he’d achieved his goal; as far as she was concerned, he was one more homeless person in a city full of them.
Irving Franklin’s only known address was a modest single-story stucco home belonging to his grandmother. Hendricks settled in on the stoop of a shuttered pawnshop across the street and a few doors down, and watched.
The grandmother was up when he arrived. She tottered back and forth past the windows for hours. Cooking. Cleaning. Tending to two young children—Franklin’s brothers, or cousins maybe. But Hendricks didn’t lay eyes on Franklin until noon, when he stumbled into the kitchen— his face pillow-creased, his expression sleepy. Hendricks was shocked by how young he looked. Franklin was small-boned, with delicate—almost feminine—features, no visible tattoos, and he stood somewhere shy of five-five. Hendricks couldn’t fathom why a major criminal organization would want this poor kid dead.
Hendricks remained outside the house all day, changing looks and position to evade notice. Sitting on the pawnshop stoop, his flannel buttoned up. Propped against a neighbor’s fence in his T-shirt. Lying beneath a black acacia tree, tank top showing. He’d hoped for a chance to talk to Franklin alone. But the kid didn’t set foot outside until nightfall, when three members of his crew—each older and harder than Franklin, their inked-up necks and knuckles adorned with chunky, ostentatious gold—came by in a tricked-out Civic to pick him up.
On his way out the door, little Franklin gave his grandmother a peck on the cheek.
Hendricks trailed them to the park a few blocks east. Watched them set up with an efficiency born of practice. In the ecosystem of the park, it seemed the Savage Prophets were top dog: they commanded the Day-Glo play structure in the southwest corner, with access to both Warren Avenue and East Anaheim Street. Their drug deals went down like clockwork. Four gangbangers in black hoodies stood at the corners of the playground fence. They were the biggest and scariest of the lot, and their sweatshirts bulged suspiciously at pocket or waist. Two others, one of them Franklin, manned the playground gates. Both appeared to be unarmed. The seventh member of the crew sat beneath the play structure—impossible to make out amid the shadows, save for the glowing ember of his cigarette.
Buyers entered the playground from the southern gate, greeting Franklin with a handshake—no doubt handing him a roll of bills. Then they disappeared into the shadows of the play structure to pick up their bundle. They exited the playground to the north, the lookout there whistling a signal when they were clear. The money transfer and the exchange of drugs were separate transactions. The product remained out of sight at all times. The flow of customers was closely regulated. Anyone who watched their operation for longer than five minutes could tell that they were dealing, but the police would be hard-pressed to capture evidence on camera, or justify a search via probable cause. If the cops rolled up in force, all the Prophets had to do was scatter—the gu
ys with the guns never touched the drugs or money, and vice versa, so the list of offenses any one of them could be charged with was short. And an undercover agent would have to have a death wish to try to make a buy while that outgunned.
That went double for Hendricks approaching Franklin; at least an undercover cop would have some backup. And to the junkies looking to score, Franklin was an afterthought, a means to an end—they barely broke stride as they handed him their cash, and rarely did any of them speak a word to him. If Hendricks were to make his approach under the pretense of making a buy, the Prophets’ muscle would be on him before he got five words out—and if Franklin reacted poorly, the situation could go south quick.
Which was a shame, because by the look of the kid, he could use someone like Hendricks in his corner. While his buddies joked and laughed all night, Franklin looked furtive, jumpy, nervous. He was the runt of the litter, more mascot than full-fledged gang member, and—either in spite of his attempts to puff out his chest and project confidence, or because of it—they teased him mercilessly.
Hendricks felt for the kid. Saw shades of his own rough upbringing in Franklin, and remembered all too well how much the path it set him on had cost him. But as long as Franklin was manning that gate, the kid was unapproachable.
There was nothing Hendricks could do but watch and wait.
Engelmann watched and waited, too, not far from where Hendricks lay.
Once his Council contact had forwarded along links to the pertinent race sites and directed him toward those results that signified outstanding hits, Engelmann set to work decoding them. Letter by letter, he’d scratched down messages in his leather-bound Moleskine, alternating his attention between the pixelated sans serif of his burner phone’s web browser and the yellowed typeface of Cruz’s copy of The Godfather until his eyes grew dry and itchy from the strain. The result was a rough sketch of two hits— incomplete and riddled with misspellings, but sufficiently decoded for Engelmann to grasp the salient details. His Council contact supplied whatever additional background he could, and a little creative Googling filled in the rest. The Internet was such a boon to the business of hunting human prey.
The target of the first hit was one Richard D’Abruzzo. He was the nephew of Monte D’Abruzzo, a capo in the Chicago Outfit, and he ran a nightclub the Outfit used as a front for dealing cocaine and MDMA, among other things. It seemed Richard had a fondness for the product he helped peddle—and an unfortunate propensity, when he was high, for cutting women.
He claimed the first time was an accident. A razor blade across his girlfriend’s face while they were showering together. The girl told a different story, but her wound was shallow and didn’t require stitches, so a payment in the low five figures was enough to buy her silence.
The second time it happened, his victim—a minor reality TV star of the famous-for-being-famous type—was asleep. She, unlike the first, pressed charges; it took six figures and a binding legal document before she corroborated his story of a late-night snack gone awry.
When a patron of his nightclub turned up with her throat slit in an alley a half-mile from his apartment, the family realized Richard’s predilections would be better handled with a payoff of a different kind—this one to a contract killer.
Engelmann had flown from Miami to Chicago with the intent to follow D’Abruzzo until his quarry made his approach, but by the time he landed, D’Abruzzo was already dead. The papers reported his cause of death as an accidental overdose, which made sense. A capo’s nephew murdered would have appeared an act of war, and suicide would have besmirched the family name—the D’Abruzzos were Catholic, after all.
Engelmann was disappointed Chicago proved a waste of time, but not disheartened. Instinct told him he was close. Perhaps his quarry had simply been too late getting to D’Abruzzo as well, he thought. Perhaps the second hit on his list would bear fruit.
He flew from Chicago to LAX earlier this afternoon, and drove from there to Long Beach, where the target of the second scheduled hit resided. The line at the rental counter was brief, and the traffic on the 405 southbound was light. By four p.m., his rented Chrysler was staked out in a strip mall across the street from the park the target’s gang was known to frequent.
Engelmann surveyed the sun-scorched ghetto before him and waited for the target to arrive. It seemed impossible that, just days ago, he’d felt the cool Lake Geneva breeze on his face—or that these hardscrabble men and women in their vulgar outfits and thumping cars inhabited the same planet as Vian and his guests. The thought brought a smile to his lips. One of the great pleasures of his vocation was that it afforded him a front-row seat to the whole of life’s rich pageant—and reminded him that while our journeys may vary greatly, in the end they all converge.
The Savage Prophets arrived shortly after sunset. At first blush, Irving Franklin—the smallest of them by far—came across as a hapless innocent. The impression was heightened by the fact that while the rest of them took languid sips of malt liquor from paper bags, Franklin pounded Red Bull after Red Bull and vibrated with nervous energy.
But—thanks to his Council contact—Engelmann knew better. Franklin’s coltish demeanor was not a sign of youth or innocence. It was the external manifestation of Franklin’s unbridled ambition. Of his eagerness to prove himself to his compatriots and to the world.
Two weeks ago, Franklin and his cousin—a foot soldier for LA’s Hangman Squad—interrupted a transaction between the Los Angeles family’s courier and the Savage Prophets’ second-in-command, killing both and making off with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin and the cash to match. Franklin kept the cash, and his cousin kept the drugs.
Franklin’s ineffectual appearance proved an asset. His own gang suspected nothing of his involvement in the heist—they assumed one of their rivals was to blame. But when the Los Angeles family caught someone selling their Black Top branded heroin on their turf without permission, they traced the product back to Franklin’s cousin, who— after some persuasion—informed them Franklin was the mastermind behind the plan to steal it. The cousin was now buried at the site of the old Puente Hills Landfill. Franklin’s death was to be far more public—a message to the remaining Prophets that any moves against the family by their members, gang-sanctioned or otherwise, would not be tolerated.
As Engelmann watched, he came to realize that Franklin’s eyes belied his childlike appearance. They were cunning and suspicious—narrowing at every passerby, darting toward the source of every noise that echoed through the city night. Franklin was a man who expected violence— who saw traces of it everywhere, because it lurked inside his heart.
Worry not, young man, thought Engelmann—violence will find you soon enough. But with luck, my quarry will find you first.
And as those words danced through his mind, Franklin abandoned his post—and the homeless man at the park’s edge began to move.
12
Irving Franklin downed the remainder of his fourth Red Bull and chucked the can into the street. His face felt flushed. His back teeth floated. Caffeine hummed in his veins. When he peeled away from his post at the playground gate, the muscle nearest him called out.
“The fuck you think you’re going, Iffy?”
Franklin eyed him up and down. Two hundred pounds of dumb and mean. He wouldn’t last long once Franklin was in charge—which would be sooner than he or any of the other Prophets thought. “Ease up, Ty—I gotta take a leak. Ain’t nobody coming anyway.”
Ty looked up and down the empty street. Shrugged his meaty shoulders beneath his black sweatshirt. “Be quick about it.”
Franklin tapped a Newport from his pack and struck a light. Hot smoke and cool menthol filled his lungs, and his racing heart slowed some. This time of night, every business in this stretch of Eastside was closed, and the park’s restrooms were in Tiny Rascal territory. Ain’t no way he’d risk a bullet to piss indoors when an alley would do just fine. So Franklin exhaled a plume of smoke and set out across East
Anaheim, headed toward the narrow service road between the furniture store and the shuttered corner market.
As he did, Hendricks—who’d been slouched beneath a covered entryway with decent sight lines on the park— rose to his feet and followed. Hendricks felt the eyes of the Prophets’ enforcers on him as he staggered across the street, so he angled slightly away from Franklin, and fought the urge to glance in the kid’s direction. As soon as he could manage, Hendricks ducked down the nearest cross street and out of their line of sight.
Though Hendricks’s footfalls had echoed loudly as he’d crossed East Anaheim, feigning drunkenness, his boots were now silent against the stained concrete. He’d been trained to remain undetected in far more challenging environs than these. He sprinted down the sidewalk, buildings blurring to his right as he looked for a way through.
Beyond the second building he passed was a low iron fence—its gate padlocked—barring entrance to a small parking lot. He vaulted the fence in one smooth motion and cut diagonally across the lot toward Franklin.
Maybe I’ll save this kid yet, he thought.
Engelmann watched with interest as Franklin crossed the street—and interest blossomed into excitement as he saw the homeless man on the far side of the block stir as well.
The latter had been still so long, Engelmann had forgotten he was there; he felt more like set dressing than person. Rough-sleeping homeless were as much a signifier of Southern California as palm trees and garish murals. One’s eyes slid right off them, which made them an inspired disguise for someone trying to blend in.
Unfortunately, the lot in which Engelmann sat faced the park from across the street, which meant both Franklin and the homeless man disappeared from view as soon as they ventured south of Anaheim. He started the car—grateful for the first time since he’d rented it that America’s idea of luxury was not performance but serenity; its engine was so quiet, none of the young men in the park noticed. Engelmann slid out of the lot toward the park and took the first left he came to. Then he rolled down the darkened road at five miles per hour, scanning the night for any sign of Franklin—or of his quarry.