The Jook

by Gary Phillips

  "Zelmont."

  I looked over where Nap was lying still. "Zelmont," the voice said again. It wasn't Nap. It was Wilma.

  "In here." I could barely talk.

  "We're coming."

  Pretty soon a light came through the grate of the water pipe. I could hear Wilma's feet crunching on the earth as she came closer to the entrance.

  "Zelmont. We've been driving around for a while. The cops removed the trucks, and in the dark we couldn't tell exactly where the drain pipe was."

  "Where's Burroughs?" I finally said.

  "He came with Danny. I thought it would be better to bring two cars just in case Nap had to be stretched out. Danny drove Burroughs' station wagon."

  "That's good," I said.

  I half-crawled over to the entrance. Together we removed the grate. "I guess that old bag of bones ain't gonna come down the mountain."

  She was shining her light past me, like she thought me and Nap had buried the bundles somewhere. "Is he okay?"

  "He's dead."

  "Shit." She was thinking what I was, that Danny was gonna go straight off.

  "What happened?" She came into the pipe.

  "He went nuts, kept talkin' about how he had to get right with Jesus. He told me he killed Davida."

  She put the light on me, studying my face. "I assumed"

  "You and everybody else, Wilma. Me and Nap struggled some. He'd grabbed me, damn near busting my back. I don't know if me fighting with him caused him to die sooner. But we need Burroughs to come down here and say Nap died of his bullet wounds.''

  She looked at me, then nodded her head. "I'll go up and tell them he's barely hanging on."

  "If you can, on the QT tell Burroughs there's more money in it for him to do as we say."

  "He was Nap's friend."

  "Nap can't pay him, we can." At that moment I couldn't afford to feel anything about my friend.

  It took some doing, but with Danny's help they got Burroughs down the hill. The old scarecrow was at the entrance of the pipe, the moon lighting him from behind. He looked like death himself come to call.

  "You better hurry, he don't look good." I stood back as Danny rushed in.

  "Nap, I got the doc here, Nap, is you awake?" Danny was all over him, slobbering and crying. Wilma had her flashlight on us.

  He looked up at me like a little lost kid. I had on the face I wore when I didn't want a defender to know anything I might be up to.

  The ancient pill roller got on his knees and bent over Nap, going over his body with his stethoscope. Burroughs' long, hinged fingers were like insect legs dancing over the big man's form. Under his breath I could hear him talking to himself. Danny stood to one side, a flashlight in his left hand. He kept his right free for the gat I knew he had hidden under his sweat top.

  "One of the high-velocity shells shattered his clavicle, and another drove part of his ribs into his stomach, puncturing the lining. He bled into his stomach over time, eventually choking to death on his own blood and bile." Burroughs' voice was the same as it always was, flat with no emotion. What would Danny think?

  The youngster put the light dead on Burroughs, then on me. I didn't look away, I didn't want to seem guilty.

  Wilma stood between me and Danny. "We have to move the body because if the cops find him they will know we did the robbery. Dr. Burroughs can make sure he's cremated properly."

  "We ain't gonna bury him?" Danny said softly.

  "Danny, we gotta think clearly now. We have to get rid of the body."

  I helped Burroughs get up. He looked at me sideways behind his glasses but didn't let on anything. If Danny went buck wild, he'd talk to save his skin. But otherwise he could be depended on to go along with the flow 'cause there was the promise of bigger ducats in it for him.

  Danny was massaging his face with one of his hands, pacing back and forth at the entrance of the big pipe. I guess his shock was wearing off, 'cause he was pointing and shaking his finger at us. "See, see what happened when I went along with you motherfuckahs? My brother is dead… dead, goddammit." He pulled out the piece but I didn't make a move, even though I felt I could have. This was one time when talk, not head ringing, was called for.

  "What are you gonna do, Danny? Dust all of us and run off with the money by yourself?"

  He stopped moving around, bringing the piece up on me. "What if I do, Zelmont? Nap ain't around to protect your ass now, is he? You the one that let him down, wasn't you? How I know you didn't fuck up and he died 'fore he was supposed to?"

  If Burroughs was staring at me, I didn't let on. "Nap died from his gunshot wounds, Danny. I know you've been around enough to know how that can go, how at any minute the bullets sitting there in the wounds can cause all kinds of shit to happen. You must have had a homeboy go out like that before."

  Danny wasn't about to let logic get in the way of his mad-on. But in some part of his eight-ballin' head he had to be wondering how a small-timer like him would move all that cash. He needed Wilma, at least. Now she had to buy my life.

  "Whatever you decide, Danny," Wilma started, "you're going to need Zelmont to help you move the body back up to Dr. Burroughs' car. I assume you know you can't let one of your boys in on this."

  "You let this dope fiend skeleton in on it." He jerked the pistol at Burroughs.

  "He's used to this, Danny," Wilma said. "What happened to Napoleon was unfortunate, but it has happened. It's nobody's fault. And if you decide you don't need any of us, then get the killing over now, stop screwing around."

  I wasn't sure that reverse psychology bullshit was the right angle with a hothead like Danny, but there was nothing I could do. She either convinced him or weat least me and the doc would be sucking on his gun in a few ticks.

  Danny didn't speak. He stood there, staring at his brother. Then, slowly, he cranked his head to look at the stacks of bills. He moved more into the pipe, giving me the stare-down. "Let's get him out of here," he finally said.

  It took a lot of effort from the four of us to get Nap up the hill. Even Burroughs pitched in, more out of fear of Danny than greed for what he was gonna charge us afterwards.

  With a lot of stops and starts we got Danny up to the station wagon. Burroughs had brought along some kind of liquid he used for cleaning his tools. I used that stuff to swab out the pipe as best I could so there wasn't much trace of his blood or our fingerprints. You never knew, the cops might come back and find the hiding spot. No point in giving them a head start on finding out who died in there.

  We got the bundles up and headed back to the Seven Souls Clinic in North Hollywood, me and Danny in Wilma's car, the doc and her in the station wagon with Nap's body. I was sweating all the way there, what with all those cops and sheriffs running around. But damn if that old pharmaceutical junkie Burroughs didn't bring us luck. We made it back to his clinic without being stopped.

  Burroughs had me get a gurney and we wheeled Nap in through a side entrance, a sheet draped over him. We left him in a room with nothing in it except a white metal trash can and a scale. He locked it up and we went into his office. The bundles were in there too.

  Wilma cut a bundle open with a pair of snips he had on a shelf. She counted out seventy grand in fifties and hundreds. "This do it?" She handed the money over to him. He sat behind his desk, rocking back and forth in his chair.

  "Well," he said, picking up the cash. "There has to be some compensation for all my exertion." He licked his lips like a lizard flicking his tongue for a fly.

  "Fuck you." Danny stepped up and tapped Burroughs' large forehead with his gat. "Exert this, motherfuckah."

  I had to hand it to him, that old spook Burroughs kept his head. He took off his glasses and closed his eyes like he was waiting to be sent to that big pharmacy in the sky.

  "Danny," Wilma said, putting a hand on the boy's arm.

  "Give him another $30,000," I said. "Stop playing Wesley Snipes every time something don't go your way, Danny. This is business."

  He m
umbled at me and Wilma and quietly put the gun away. Burroughs opened his eyes, and I swear for a second he looked disappointed. I counted out his bills and handed them over.

  "I shall take care of everything on my end." He sat back, examining us like I'm sure he did when he was getting ready to cut a body open.

  We split in Wilma's car, the bundles in the trunk. We were goddamn millionaires. We'd taken money from a dude that couldn't report it and who'd soon have even bigger worries to occupy his time. 'Course there was still his wild-ass cousin Rudy to deal with, but I wasn't sweatin' him right then. My cut was gonna be two, three million. I could get my thing going again, get myself set up sweet. Maybe I'd take over the Locker Room and franchise that bad rascal, then let the pussy and money roll in.

  But something didn't feel right, and it wasn't just 'cause my best friend was lying on the slab.

  Chapter 15

  When I got back to my pad in Lennox, I grubbed on three cheeseburgers and two orders of fries I'd bought at the Jack-in-the-Box on Imperial. I had some Scotch left in the cupboard, and would have zonked out on coke if I had any I couldn't believe it but I was glad Wilma had hinted she was too tired for sex. The only thing I wanted was food and sleep.

  As the sun came up, I went to bed and tried not to think about Nap. Or the fact that Wilma was sitting on the cash. She was the only one of us who had a safe place to keep it hidden.

  For the next few days everything seemed to be happening in a world I was only a visitor to. I was too paranoid to stay at my shitty apartment but too broke to go anywhere else. Wilma had leaked information to the contact she had in the Justice Department before we did the robbery. The day after the job there was a piece in the L.A. Times Sports section about the charges coming down on Ellison Stadanko. And there was a story in the Metro section about the investigation aimed at Rudy Chekka, reputed mob boss.

  That night I was sitting in the Proud Bird on Aviation watching the TV that hung over one comer of the bar. On the news was coverage of Stadanko at a press conference. He was with his lawyers and was denying everything. His old lady wasn't next to him.

  A hand came down on my shoulder. ''Shame, isn't it?"

  "Assholes always get what's due them, Fahrar." I drank my drink, not bothering to look at the chump.

  "How you been keeping, partner?" He sat down on the stool next to me.

  "I've been just fine, pardner." Now there was a piece about an ice-skating bear on the news. A chick at the other end of the bar cracked up at this. "I know you don't expect me to buy you a drink."

  "That might be construed as a bribe." He took off his hat and placed it on the bar.

  "Ain't there someplace else your half-breed ass can get a drink at?"

  "And miss your witticisms?" He leaned over the bar and ordered. "Give me a rum and coke with a lime in it, okay?"

  The bartender, a big-tittied woman with a weave that needed repair, nodded and made his drink. Fahrar sat there, watching TV and getting under my skin as she made his drink. She put it on the bar for him and he paid her. Cheap civil servant motherfuckah tipped her a quarter.

  "Two men are sitting over in the jail ward of County Hospital." He slurped his drink.

  Finally we were getting to it.

  "As you must know, these Serbian gentlemen were pretty fucked up. One of them in particular has got a smashed pelvic bone, busted spleen, nuts hanging all low." He shook his head from side to side. "The poor bastard may never walk right again."

  I finished my Maker's Mark but didn't want to order another one. No sense getting too loose and end up slipping with this nosy fuck. "Ain't that something. Man, you oughta write that up and sell it to Cops and Donuts Monthly."

  Fahrar's yellow eye zeroed in on me over the top of his glass as he drank. "Naturally these tough boys aren't saying diddly. And their employer, Ellison Stadanko, claims no knowledge of what these ruffians could have been up to carrying firearms on the garbage truck. He's as perplexed as the rest of us why it is that five men, three of whom were in biohazard suits, were on one garbage truck."

  "The Times had a piece today saying Stadanko may get jammed up by a grand jury." What the fuck, I ordered another Maker's.

  "Since when you start reading the newspaper?"

  I was gonna say, "Since your mama started bringing it to my crib in her teeth." Instead I came back with, "I always been into self-improvement."

  "Like nine million worth? 'Cause that was the take you strokes pulled down, Zelmont. Stadanko is boxed in and is going to be sweating under the federal lights soon. That's smart, so smart I know your ducking and dodging self couldn't have thought it all out on your lonesome. No, it would take someone who had a knowledge of how to drop the right clue in the right back channel in the legal labyrinth of D.C."

  "Really?" The bartender had turned the TV to a channel featuring a marble shooting championship. Damn.

  "Did you know that Wilma Wells clerked in the law firm that Brooks Weems has in D.C.?"

  He got a reaction that time. The surprise was all over my face.

  "Yeah," the snake fuck smiled. "Brooks is the older brother of the football commissioner. Isn't that quite the coincidence?"

  "Life is full of them, my mother always said." Come on, Zelmont, don't let this chump rattle you. But damn if he hadn't blindsided me. I sipped my drink and tried to look like I still had game.

  "You seen Napoleon around lately?" He thumped his hat with his finger.

  "Naw, you ask his brother?"

  "He said he hadn't seen him for a few days. He said that maybe he might be back East on some kind of business, but he wasn't sure."

  "There you go." The bartender had switched the channel again. Now there was a cop program playing with somebody I recognized. It was the Asian dude I'd done the shows on the WB with. The sound wasn't on but it seemed like he was the star. Good for him. We were all getting over.

  "There was a fair amount of blood on the roadway, Zelmont. And quite a few spent shell casings too. And flash grenades. But you knew that."

  "I did, huh?"

  Fahrar had more of his booze. "Some of that blood matches Napoleon Graham's blood type."

  He must have gotten Nap's medical record from the league. But so what? He didn't have a body. "I'm sure a lot of people match his blood type."

  "How about his DNA?"

  "You can cut it out, cop. I read in the paper the samples swabbed from the roadway were hard to break down. There's oil, gas, and what have you mixed in, plus the blood got absorbed into the asphalt. They quoted a biologist from UCLA who said all that debris or whatever messes up an exact match."

  "Sounds like you studied that part of the article back and forth."

  "Don't it?"

  Fahrar got off the stool, holding the drink in one hand, his hat in the other. "When you see Napoleon, let him know I'd like to talk with him."

  "Oh sure."

  He looked at the glass in his hand like he'd lost the taste. He put the drink down, not finishing it. "Every step you take." He snugged his hat on his head and drifted out of the joint.

  I pushed both my hands against the edge of the bar, gripping it hard. I suddenly felt like I was gonna slip away into a hole and this was all I could do not to disappear. I got up and moved through the noise of the Proud Bird to the pay phone near the bathrooms.

  I dialed Wilma's number at work, her inside line. Her machine answered and I hung up. I dialed her at home, then on her cell phone and got no answer. Maybe Fahrar had told me about Wilma working for Weems' brother to see if we'd fink out each other. Maybe it was a lie and he was waiting outside to tail me like he'd shown he could do and catch me confronting Wilma.

  I put the phone back and tried to catch my breath, get my bearings. We hadn't really talked about what we were going to do to explain Nap's absence. None of us had a solution anyway I walked back to the bar and had my whisky without tasting it. Wilma had said we should just go about our business as usual for the next few weeks. For Danny that meant run
ning the Locker Room, for her the lawyer thing. And me? Hell, I was only the cat who saved the day, and here I was drinking away what little folding money I had at the moment. She said we'd square up our shares soon as her trap closed in on Stadanko. Well, shit was sprung on the motherfuckah now and we hadn't heard nothin'. Correct that, I hadn't heard nothin'.

  By the time I had my fourth Maker's I was imagining that Wilma and Danny had skipped out on me with all the haul. I gave a crooked smile at my reflection, the sucker looking back at me in the bar's mirror.

  "Say, baby, ain't you Zelmont Raines?" She was older than me by at least ten years. But she had nice legs sticking out of the skirt that was too short for her plump butt. Plus I liked the blonde dye job she'd given her hair, not to mention her overlapping front teeth.

  "I'm he. What you having, dark and lovely?"

  About an hour later we were grinding on the outside stairway leading up to my apartment. She had one leg wrapped around my hip and I had her dress hiked up, my hand rubbing between her legs.

  I breathed some words, drunk and hot and wanting to get my money and get the hell out of town. Fuck Wilma and her scheming self.

  ''Let's get inside," she whispered in my ear, licking and nibbling on it with her tongue and teeth.

  I mumbled something and was untangling myself from her when I got that feeling. The one that told me a cat was about to jack me from behind while I had my eye on the ball. I stopped getting my nut on and tuned my radar outwards.

  "What's wrong, baby? Your wife coming home?"

  "Shhh." I put a hand on her lips. She bit my fingers, still thinking I was fooling around. Somebody was coming up the stairs, and they were on a creep. We had stopped in the middle of the second flight of stairs.

  Below me the stairs turned the corner and went down to the first floor and the sidewalk. The stud had to be at that corner. Good thing the cheap sonofabitch landlord hadn't bothered to replace the lights that were supposed to be in the stairwell.

  "What, baby?" she said again.

  I heard the step and threw the chick down where I figured he was standing.