He was surveying the project again.
“He told me he was going to even up for his girlfriend,” I said. “He was drunk.”
“Probably drunk when he tried,” Hawk said, his eyes moving carefully over the silent buildings.
“Figure they’re watching from somewhere?” I said.
“They kids,” Hawk said. “They got to be watching, see what we do.”
I was still looking at Tallboy. I didn’t bother looking for the gang. If they were there, Hawk would see them. Tallboy appeared to be maybe sixteen in death’s frozen repose. Soft faced, not mean. Kind of kid would probably really rather have stayed home and talked with his mother and his aunts, if he’d had any, and they were sober, and their boyfriends wouldn’t slap him around. Might have not gotten killed if I hadn’t gone and talked with him and gotten him stirred up about who killed his girlfriend and her baby, that might have been his baby. He probably liked the baby, not like a father; not to change diapers, and earn money, and take care of—that would have been beyond him. But she’d have been fun to hug, and she’d have been cute, and he would probably have liked it when the three of them were alone and they could play together. It had started to rain again, not much, a light drizzle that beaded sparsely on his upturned defenseless face.
Hawk said, “Third building from the right, second floor, three middle windows.”
I glanced up slowly, and not toward the windows. I glanced obliquely past them and looked out of the corner of my eye. There was a shade half drawn and some movement behind it.
“What makes you think it’s them?” I said.
“Been here every day,” Hawk said. “While you and the schoolteacher dashing around the ghetto. Nobody live on that floor.”
“Well, maybe some evasive action and come up behind them?” I said.
“Sure,” Hawk said. “Little acting, too.” He gestured suddenly at the vacant lot across the street. I whirled to look where he pointed.
“Now we hustle into the car,” Hawk said.
And we did, and pulled out of the quadrangle with Hawk’s tires screaming as they spun on the wet pavement. We went around the corner onto McCrory Street and slammed into the alley back of the third building. Hawk popped the trunk and we each grabbed a shotgun. As we moved toward the back door of the building each of us pumped a shell into the chamber at the same moment.
“We could set this to music,” I said.
The back entryway had been padlocked, but the hasp had been jimmied loose and it hung, with its still intact padlock attached, limply beside the partly open door. We went in, I to the right, Hawk to the left. We were in a dim cellar. It was full of cardboard boxes that had gotten wet and collapsed, spilling whatever had once been in them onto the floor, where whatever soaked the boxes had, over time, reduced it to an indeterminate mass of mildewing stuff. In the middle of the cellar was a defunct boiler with rust staining the sides of it and adding to the indiscernible detritus on the floor.
We moved past the boiler to the stairs. Hawk, in hightop Reebok pump-ups, moved through the trash beneath the building like a dark ghost, holding the eight-pound shotgun in his right hand as if it were a wand. It was as if he were floating. We went up the two flights of stairs without a sound. In the dim, claustrophobic corridor we paused, Hawk counting the doors until he found what we wanted. He stepped to it and put his ear against it and listened. There was litter nearly ankle deep in places all up and down the corridor—broken glass, fast-food paper and plastic, beer cans, and food scraps that were no longer identifiable. In the silence while Hawk listened I could hear vermin rustle in the trash. I waited. Hawk listened. Then he smiled at me and nodded.
With the shotgun in my right hand I reached over with my left and took hold of the knob and turned it slowly. It gave and the door opened inward and Hawk went in and left. I came in behind him and moved right. There were eight kids in there grouped near the windows, wondering where we were. Beside the window was a large cable spool, standing on end. On top of it lay a Tec-9 automatic, which would fire thirty-two rounds if we let it.
One kid spun toward the gun. It was the same small, quick one I’d taken the Browning from in the van. I fired at the cable spool and hit it, chips of plastic flew off the handle of the Tec-9, and a ragged chunk of the wooden top flew up as well. The handgun ricocheted off the wall and bounced on the floor, the clip separated and skittered across the room, some of the shotgun pellets pocked the wall beyond.
Everyone froze.
In the reverberating silence after the gunshot, Hawk’s voice was almost piercing.
“Where’s Major?” Hawk said quietly.
No one said anything.
“Guess he won’t be going down for it,” Hawk said.
No one said a word. All eight stood in perfect stillness. Under the gun like that they didn’t seem frightful. They seemed like scared kids whose prank had gotten out of hand. They were that, but they were the other thing too, they were kids who would shoot a fourteen-year-old girl and her three-month-old baby. They were kids who would gun down her boyfriend and leave him as a statement. That was the hard part, remembering that they weren’t inhuman predators, and that they were. One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
“Any of you guys read Wallace Stevens?” I said.
No one spoke. The shotgun felt solid and weighty as I held it. The faint smell of the exploded shell lingered.
“We’ll check the slug that killed Tallboy,” Hawk said. “And we’ll check the Tec-9, and we’ll see whose prints are on it.”
Hawk let his gaze rest quietly on the kid who’d first made a move for the gun.
“You the shooter, Shoe?”
Hawk was making it up as he went along. It wasn’t clear to me that the Tec-9 would fire even a test round anymore, and it probably had more prints on it than a subway door, but Shoe seemed impressed.
“I didn’t trace nobody,” he said.
“You think you won’t go down for it?” Hawk said. “You think maybe you gotta lot of influence downtown, and they won’t drop you in a jar as soon as we bring you in? If we feel like bringing you in?”
“I didn’t trace Tallboy,” Shoe said.
“Don’t matter if you did or didn’t,” Hawk said. “We prove you did and it’s one less problem for Double Deuce. Fact we prove you all accessories and we got Double Deuce’s problems solved.”
“We didn’t do nothing.” It was a fat kid they called Goodyear. His voice had an asthmatic whisper around the edges of it. “We just looking out the window, see what’s happening.”
“We got you at the scene of a crime, with the murder weapon,” I said. “There’s three unsolved murders cleaned up if we can tag you with them. You think we can’t?”
“Shoe didn’t do it,” Goodyear said.
“Yeah, he did,” Hawk said.
“No,” Shoe said. His voice had outrage in it. The other kids muttered that he really hadn’t.
“He didn’t,” Goodyear said.
“Move out,” Hawk said. “We’ll call downtown from my car.”
Nobody moved. Still holding the shotgun in one hand, Hawk put the muzzle against Shoe’s upper lip, right under his nose.
“Going down anyway, Shoe, may as well die here as Walpole.”
“They don’t burn nobody in this state,” Shoe said.
“For killing a three-month-old baby?” Hawk smiled.
“I never done that,” Shoe said.
“And her momma.”
“No,” Shoe said, his head tipped back a little by the pressure of the shotgun muzzle.
“And Tallboy. You be lucky to make it to Walpole.”
“No,” Shoe said.
“Course it coulda been Major,” he said.
&nbs
p; “No. Major didn’t,” Shoe said.
Hawk was silent for a long time while we all stood there and waited. Finally he lowered the shotgun.
“Beat it,” he said. They all stood motionless for a moment, then Shoe walked past him and out the open door. One by one they followed. No one spoke. In a moment it was just Hawk and me alone in the dingy room with the damaged remnants of a Tec-9.
CHAPTER
35
“Isn’t that fascinating,” Susan said. “They wouldn’t budge.”
We were sitting at the counter in the kitchen. I was drinking some Catamount beer, and Susan, to be sociable, was occasionally wetting her bottom lip in a glass of Cabernet Blanc. Pearl sprawled on the floor, her four feet out straight, her eyes nearly closed, occasionally glancing over to make sure no food had made a surreptitious appearance.
“They were scared,” I said. “Hawk could scare Mount Rushmore. But they wouldn’t give in.”
“It’s interesting, isn’t it. These kids have many of the same virtues and vices that other kids have, misapplied.”
“They’re applied to what’s there,” I said.
Susan nodded. “And the consequences may be fatal,” she said.
Across the counter, in the small kitchen, there was evidence that Susan had prepared a meal . . . or that the kitchen had been ransacked. Since there was a pot of something simmering on the stove, I assumed the former.
“The thing is,” I said, “we all knew Major did the killing. They knew it; we knew it; they knew we knew it; we knew they knew—”
“You admire their loyalty,” Susan said.
She was wearing black spandex tights and a leotard top. The outfit revealed nearly everything about her body. I looked at her eyes, and felt as I always did, that I could breathe more deeply when I looked at her, that the air was oxygen rich, and that we would live forever.
“Windows of the soul,” I said.
She grinned at me.
“Augmented with just a touch of eyeliner,” she said.
“What’s in the pot?” I said.
She glanced back at the stove.
“Jesus,” she said and jumped up and dashed around the counter. She picked up a big spoon and jostled the pot lid off with it. She looked in and smiled.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Maybe Christmas,” I said, “I’ll buy you a potholder.”
“I’ve got some, but I couldn’t find it right away and I was afraid it would burn.”
She was trying to balance the pot lid on her big spoon and put it back on the pot. It teetered, she touched it with her left hand to balance it, and burned her hand, and flinched and the lid fell to the floor.
“Fuck,” she said.
Pearl had leapt to attention when the lid hit the floor and now was sitting behind the legs of my stool and looking out at Susan with something that might have been disapproval. Susan saw her.
“Everyone’s a goddamned critic,” she said.
“What is it?” I said neutrally.
“Brunswick stew,” Susan said. “There was a recipe in the paper.”
She found one potholder under an overturned colander and used it to pick up the pot lid and put it back on the pot.
“One of my favorites,” I said.
“I know,” Susan said. “It’s why I made it.”
“I’ll like it,” I said.
“And if you don’t,” she said, “lie.”
“It is my every intention,” I said.
She set the counter in front of us, got me another beer, and ladled two servings of Brunswick stew into our plates. I took a bite. It was pretty good. I had some more.
“Do I detect a dumpling in here?” I said.
“No,” Susan said. “I tried to thicken the gravy. What you detect is some flour in a congealed glump.”
“What you do,” I said, “is mix the flour in a little cold water first, then when the slurry is smooth you stir it into the stew.”
“Gee, isn’t that smart,” Susan said.
I knew she didn’t mean it. I decided not to make other helpful suggestions. We ate quietly for a while. The congealed flour lumps had tasted better when I thought they were dumplings. When I finished I got up and walked around Pearl to the stove and got a second helping.
“Oh, for Christ sake don’t patronize me,” Susan said.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “The stew’s good. Are we saving it for breakfast?”
“The stew’s not good. You’re just eating it to make me feel good.”
“Not true, but if it were, why would that be so bad?”
“Oh, shit,” Susan said, and her eyes began to fill.
I said, “Suze, you never cry.”
“It’s not working,” she said. Her voice was very tight and very shaky. She got up and left the kitchen and went in the bedroom and closed the door.
I stood for a while holding the stew and looking after her. Then I looked at Pearl. She was focused on the plate of stew.
“The thing is,” I said to Pearl, “she’s right.”
And I put the plate down for Pearl to finish.
CHAPTER
36
Tony Marcus agreed to meet us at a muffin shop on the arcade in South Station.
“Tony like muffins?” I said.
“Tony likes open public places,” Hawk said.
“Makes sense,” I said. “Get trapped in a place like Locke-Ober, you could get umbrella’d to death.”
South Station was new, almost. They’d jacked up the old façade and slid a new station in behind it. Where once pigeons had flown about in the semidarkness, and winos had slept fragrantly on the benches, there were now muffin shops and lots of light and a model train set. What had once been the dank remnant of the old railroad days was now as slick and cheery as the food circus in a shopping mall.
The muffin shop was there, to the right, past the frozen low-fat yogurt stand. Tony Marcus was there at a cute little iron filigree table, alone. At the next table was his bodyguard, a stolid black man about the size of Nairobi. The bodyguard’s name was Billy. Tony was a middle-sized black guy, a little soft, with a careful moustache. I always thought he looked like Billy Eckstine, but Hawk never saw it. We stopped at the counter. I bought two coffees, gave one to Hawk, and went to Tony’s table.
Tony nodded very slightly when we arrived. Billy looked at us as if we were dust motes. Billy’s eyes were very small. He looked like a Cape buffalo. I shot at him with a forefinger and thumb.
“Hey, Billy,” I said. “Every time I see you you get more winsome.”
Billy gazed at me without expression.
Tony said, “You want a muffin?”
Hawk and I both shook our heads.
“Good muffins,” Tony said. “Praline chocolate chip are excellent.”
Hawk said, “Jesus Christ.”
Tony had two on a paper plate in front of him. He picked one up and took a bite out of it, the way you’d eat an apple.
“So what you need?” he said around the mouthful of muffin.
“Gang of kids running drugs out of a housing project at Twenty-two Hobart Street,” I said.
Tony nodded and chewed on his muffin.
“Couple people been killed,” I said.
Tony shook his head. “Fucking younger generation,” he said.
“Going to hell in a handbasket,” I said. “Tenants at Double Deuce hired Hawk and me to bring order out of chaos there.”
Marcus looked at his bodyguard. “You hear how he talks, Billy? ‘Order out of chaos.’ Ain’t that something?”
“And the most successful local television show in the country is doing a five-part investigative series on the whole deal.”
It got Tony’s attention.
“What television show?”
“Marge Eagen, Live,” I said.
“The blonde broad with the big tits?”
I smiled. Hawk smiled.
“What do you mean, an investigation?” Tony said.
“What’s wrong in the ghetto,” Hawk said. “Who’s selling drugs, how to save kids from the gangs, how to make black folks just like white folks.”
Marcus was silent for the time it took him to eat the rest of his second muffin.
When he finished he said, “You in on that?”
“Sorta parallel,” I said.
Tony pursed his lips slightly and nodded, and kept nodding, as if he’d forgotten he was doing it. He picked up his coffee cup and discovered it was empty. Billy got him another one. Tony stirred three spoonfuls of sugar carefully into the coffee and laid his spoon down and took a sip. Then he looked at me.
“So?” he said.
“The investigation is centered on the project,” I said. “And”—I looked at Billy—“while I don’t wish to seem immodest here, Bill, the investigation, so called, will go where we direct it.”
Billy continued to conceal his amusement.
“So?” Marcus said.
“Any drugs moving in the ghetto are yours,” I said.
Marcus rolled back in his chair and widened his eyes. He spread his hands.
“Me?” he said.
“And if there is a thorough investigation of the drugs trade in and around Double Deuce, then you are going to be more famous than Oliver North.”
“Unless?” Tony said.
“Voilà,” I said.
Tony said, “Don’t fuck around, Spenser. You want something, say what.”
“Move the operation,” I said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere but Double Deuce.”
“Hawk?” Marcus said.
Hawk nodded.
“Say I could do that? Say I could persuade them to go someplace else?”
“Then you would be as famous as John Marsh.”
“Who the fuck is John Marsh?” Tony said.
Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6 Page 64