by Osborne, Jon
The kid’s eyes hardened as he slunk away, and Angel could almost see the law of the jungle at work. Wouldn’t be too much longer now before the kid felt strong enough to take Razor on. A year or two, maybe. Three at the most.
“Yeah, OK,” the boy muttered, tugging at the oversized jeans as he walked away. “Whatever you say, Razor. You’re the boss.”
“Goddamn right, I am. And don’t you ever fuckin’ forget it, faggot.”
Angel looked up at Razor when the kid had left the room. “Better watch out for that one, big guy,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to embarrass someone who has nothing to lose, you know. Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s got his eyes on your job. Won’t be much longer now before he comes after you. What is he, anyway? Sixteen, seventeen?”
Razor narrowed his eyes into hard emerald points. He never took them off Angel as he called over his shoulder. “Hey Chauncey? Get the fuck back in here, dude!”
The kid slunk back into the room, the curved bill of his Cleveland Cavaliers baseball cap casting a menacing shadow across his already menacing brown eyes. Razor turned to the boy and smiled his perfect white teeth. “Yo, little Blood. You willing to do whatever it takes to get down?”
The boy widened his eyes briefly in surprise before he suddenly remembered himself and went back to being cool. “Hell yeah, Razor. You know that. I’m always willin’ to put in work.”
“Good. Kill this bitch.”
Chauncey didn’t hesitate, sliding a .38 from his waistband and pointing it directly at Angel’s head. A split-second later, the ear-shattering report of multiple gunshots filled the apartment.
Angel squeezed shut her eyes and recoiled against the back of the recliner, bracing for the impending impact of hot lead sizzling through her flesh.
But it never came.
When she finally opened her eyes again – shocked as hell to find she was still alive – she saw that Chauncey had been cut nearly in half by bullets. Circles of bright red blood soaked into his T-shirt in half a dozen different places as he flopped around wildly on the floor and bled out in a sickening wet rush. After several moments of frantic movement, he finally stopped flopping; his eyes fluttering crazily in their sockets before rolling up completely into the back his skull, making it look as though he were trying desperately to gaze at his own hairline.
Razor Diggs turned back to Angel and smiled again, the huge machine gun still smoking in his hands. “Think he’s gonna take my job now, bitch? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”
And with that clever statement, the hardcore gang-banger took one quick step forward and smashed the heavy butt of the machine gun hard into Angel’s right temple, sending her off to La-La land once again.
As Angel slipped away into unconsciousness for the second time already that day, she had just one thought on her woozy mind:
One of these days I’m really gonna have to start paying that light bill.
Granny Bernice had been absolutely right when she’d said those things didn’t magically pay themselves.
Who knew?
CHAPTER 19
Gerald Trebblehorn smiled as he watched the big nigger dump the private investigator’s body into the alleyway alongside the east end of the tenement apartment building.
Talk about a stroke of luck! If Trebblehorn had tried, he couldn’t have written the script any better himself.
When the big nigger had finally gone back inside the decrepit apartment building, Trebblehorn eased his utility van over to the side of the road and hopped out. Adjusting the “Mike’s Plumbing” ball cap on his head, he pulled down the visor low over his eyes to hide his face and looked up and down the street to make sure no one was watching him. The neighborhood was a dump – nothing but niggers and spics running around – but where was the big surprise in that? After all, you didn’t come to the ghetto and expect to not see a bunch of hood rats scurrying around doing their thang, now did you?
Trebblehorn chuckled, remembering the poster he’d had in his bedroom as a kid. Labeled “The Only Sign of Life in Cleveland”, the poster pictured a green highway sign informing people that Cincinnati was located three hundred miles away.
Templeton chuckled again. Nasty as Cleveland might be, however, the five-hour trip up Interstate 71 from The Queen City had been well worth the time and effort involved. Because since he’d be doing double-duty here today, it meant that his paycheck would be doubled, as well. Not a bad gig if you could find the work.
Grunting, Trebblehorn threw the unconscious nigger woman over his powerful shoulder and placed her into the back of the utility van before slamming shut the doors and walking quickly around to the driver’s-side of the vehicle. Sliding behind the wheel, he cranked the engine into life, anxious as hell to get the fuck out of this godforsaken shit hole already. Jaded as he might be, the neighborhood gave even him the creeps, and he’d never been the kind of man to experience that particular sensation easily. Again, though, no big surprise there. After all, killing people for a living tended to numb one to such pedestrian emotions.
Looking up into the rearview mirror, Trebblehorn caught sight of his perfect Aryan features and smiled perfect white teeth at himself as he pulled away from the curb, admiring his short blonde hair and crystal-clear blue eyes as the van picked up speed and whisked him away from the scene of his nifty little crime.
Time to earn his money.
And killing niggers wasn’t a bad gig if you could find the work, now was it?
Nope, wasn’t a bad gig, at all.
CHAPTER 20
An hour later after leaving the chief of security’s office, Dana and Blankenship made their way up the poorly lit stairwell of Lee Maxwell Jarvis’s decrepit apartment building in northwest Yonkers, passing by a young Jamaican man sporting long dreadlocks to go along with a tie-dyed Bob Marley T-shirt and colorful, knitted Rastafarian cap.
Reggae music blasted from the iPod earbuds tucked beneath the young man’s hat, and the teen locked his coal-black stare onto Dana’s as he passed, freezing her like an ice sculpture in his transfixing gaze.
A sudden, inexplicable jolt of panic bolted through Dana’s heart. Her breath caught in her throat. She resisted the urge to reach out and grab Blankenship by his arm. She just couldn’t help herself. Unfair stereotype or not, she could practically smell the voodoo wafting off the boy’s dark brown skin.
Dana shivered as she and Blankenship came to a stop outside apartment 219 forty-five seconds later, still trying her best to shake off the odd encounter with the boy in the stairwell. Wasn’t easy. Thankfully, though, Blankenship distracted her attention by pulling a set of keys from his pocket and flipping open a lock-picking device attached to the small metal ring. He smiled sheepishly at her. “Better than American Express,” he said, referencing the famous credit-card commercial that implored users to always pack their plastic currency. “I never leave home without it.”
Dana rolled her eyes at Blankenship’s lame attempt at humour, still fighting back the odd sense of unease flooding through her veins. Blissfully, though, she didn’t have time to further process these strange feelings before Blankenship had manipulated the lock with a few quick flicks of his wrist and pushed open the door.
Dana rounded her eyes in shock at the unexpected tableau before them. A huge red Nazi flag dominated the north wall of Jarvis’s living room, staring back at them like the N-word uttered at NAACP rally. She and Blankenship simply stood there dumbstruck for a moment or two out in the sun-dappled hallway while they each tried to process the ugly sight in their lines of vision.
A neatly pressed SS uniform complete with a bejeweled, ceremonial sword and tucked inside a shiny leather scabbard lay across a rectangular coffee table ten feet in front of a flat-screen television set. A white-power propaganda poster housed in an expensive-looking frame watched over the place from above the television set, screaming out the chilling message, The Only Good Nigger is a Dead Nigger! A crude drawing just to the left of the revolting words featured a
black man hanging by the neck from a thick tree branch in an otherwise open field as a group of smiling white faces gathered around and cheered on the disgusting spectacle.
“Jesus Christ,” Blankenship breathed as he and Dana stepped inside the apartment. He kicked shut the door behind them. “It’s a regular Third Reich museum in here. I’d say we’ve definitely got the right address, wouldn’t you? This asshole doesn’t exactly keep his political views a secret.”
Dana’s stomach churned as she scanned the interior of the apartment, gritting her teeth at the hateful display of vulgarity. If you didn’t count the garbage hanging on the wall and the trash lying across the coffee table, though, the place was as neat as a pin.
Dana motioned to an open MacBook Pro that was sitting on a cheap particleboard desk shoved up against the main window of the living room. “Think you can work your magic on that thing while I check out the rest of the place?” she asked.
Blankenship cracked his knuckles loudly. “Your wish is my command, partner.”
Dana went into the small kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards for several moments. Scratched-up Tupperware and a few chipped porcelain plates peeked back at her from the recently dusted shelves. Shutting the cupboards, she opened the refrigerator next and peered inside. Nothing but the normal stuff inside: half a rotisserie chicken. A white-and-red cardboard container of leftover Chinese food. The usual condiments: ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, a full bottle of ranch dressing.
Dana shook her head at the overwhelming normality of the refrigerator’s contents. Seemed that even murdering white-supremacist assholes got hungry every once in a while, and from the looks of things Jarvis had all the makings for a delicious midnight snack. Good for him. Too bad the racist hate-monger was no longer alive to enjoy it. Served the sadistic piece of shit right, though. Dana only hoped that Jarvis had died hungry. Not much of a punishment, she knew, but it wouldn’t have been a bad place to start.
Dana exited the kitchen and made her way into the lone bathroom of the apartment next. Like the rest of Jarvis’s living quarters, the bathroom was completely spotless. No prescription medication bottles in the cabinet hanging above the sink.
In the bedroom down a short hallway, another Nazi flag hung lengthwise from the closet door. No big surprise there, however. These white-power jerks had always loved their Nazi flags, hadn’t they? Damn right, they had. The intimidating standards connected them to an ugly time in history for which they yearned with all their cold and blackened hearts. The bed itself had been neatly made up, pillows on top fluffed up and waiting invitingly for their owner’s expected return, which in this case hadn’t ended up taking place. Thank God for small favors. The nightstands flanking Jarvis’s sleeping space held nothing more interesting than a small digital alarm clock and the latest few issues of Field & Stream inside.
Dana went over to the closet and opened up the door, her skin crawling as the Nazi flag brushed her left forearm. Jarvis’s clothing looked well cared-for but not especially flashy. Nowhere near as nice as the pricy Pierre Cardin ensemble he’d been wearing in the video that showed him gleefully extracting the unborn fetus from Laura Settle’s pregnant stomach with an eight-inch-long carving knife.
Dana bit down hard into her lower lip, trying to puzzle things out. Partial payment for a contracted hit? She didn’t know, but she and Blankenship would need to look into that possibility before they ruled it out. Still, it seemed odd to her that haute couture would pass for currency in the seedy world of organized crime. Dirty green paper had always been more to the liking of the foul men who engaged in such horrendously stomach-turning acts.
Blankenship’s voice sounded from the living room, giving Dana’s heart another jolt. “Hey, Dana? Could you come in here real quick and take a look at this?”
Dana shut the closet door before making her way back into the living room. She hovered over Blankenship’s right shoulder while he sat in front of the computer screen. “What’d you find?” she asked.
Blankenship moved his index finger over the trackpad on the computer and slid the digital pointer down a long directory of white-power hate-group websites. “Look at this shit,” he said. “There are a hundred and eighty-two different white-power groups listed in this directory. So if Laura Settle’s murder was ordered by one of them, it’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than just the two of us to figure out which one it was. This calls for a fucking task force.”
Dana ran her gaze down the list. The White Resistance Fighter Group. Council of Conservative Citizens. European Americans United. The National Alliance. Phineas Priesthood. Volksfront. White Aryan Resistance. Dozens of others. “Jesus Christ,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “It’s worse than looking for a needle in a goddamn haystack. Not gonna get a task force on this one, though. Too many resources diverted to the war on terror, as it is. You know we’re second-class citizens now, don’t you? If it ain’t taking place in Iraq or Afghanistan, it just ain’t taking place these days. Anyway, what else did you find?”
Blankenship shook his own head in disgust. “Got confirmation that the shithead was a youth pastor. Didn’t work for any particular church, though – more of a freelancer. His pay records are kept like the rest of his apartment: organized in a neat little folder right here on the desktop. Made twenty-seven thousand dollars last year.”
Dana stretched her neck. “Not exactly enough to go around buying four-thousand-dollar suits, is it?”
Blankenship looked up at her over his shoulder. “You thinking his get-up in the security video points to a paid hit?”
Dana shrugged. “I don’t know. But if it does then we’re gonna have a hell of a time tracking down the source of the money. Can you get into his bank account from here?”
Blankenship shook his head. “Nope. Already tried. It’s Wells Fargo. Locked down tighter than Fort Knox. We’re gonna need a search warrant for that.”
Dana gritted her teeth. “Great. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon. A couple years ago I actually had to wait two weeks to get a search warrant for a triple murder. Anyway, technically, the money belongs to Jarvis’s next of kin now. Can you get us a name?”
Blankenship opened a new browser window on the computer screen and tapped into an FBI database with his Bureau identification number before entering Jarvis’s name into the search bar. Jarvis’s rap sheet and biography popped up, and Blankenship read quickly through the available information. “Well now, whaddya know?” he said after a long moment, rolling his muscular neck on his shoulders while he continued to study the screen. “Seems Jarvis was an orphan, raised by a church group. Explains his chosen profession, I suppose, but doesn’t give us much else to go on. If I’m not mistaken, though, I believe that means the money in his bank account reverts to the government now. In a way, I suppose that means he’s paying our salaries.”
Dana rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I’ll make sure I thank the murdering asshole the next time I’m paying for my groceries. Hell, maybe I’ll even throw a box of baby wipes into my cart as a way of paying homage.”
Blankenship flipped closed the laptop and rose to his feet, unplugging the computer and tucking it underneath his left arm. “So, what’s next on the agenda?” he asked. “Where do we go from here?”
Dana glanced down at the laptop. “Don’t we need a search warrant for that thing, too?”
Blankenship shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Dana closed her eyes. The illegal search of Jarvis’s apartment they’d just conducted and the illegal seizure of the asshole’s computer couldn’t be used in court against whoever might have paid the jerk for offing Laura Settle, but right now they didn’t have anything else to go on. Besides, sometimes you had to bend the rules a little bit in order to break the bad guys’ backs – something she’d learned the hard way for herself during the Cleveland Slasher case. Prior to that blood-soaked nightmare, however, Dana had been so anal-retentive about doing things by the book that a truckload of Ex
-Lax couldn’t have helped her out. All things considered, though, she considered bending the rules to break the bad guy’s back a fair exchange in this instance. As far as she was concerned, Jarvis didn’t deserve any rights – Constitutional or otherwise. After all, you needed to be human before you could expect any basic human rights, now didn’t you? And Jarvis had clearly been an animal. Nothing more and nothing less. His horrific murder of Laura Settle had proved that much.
“Let’s go talk to Jarvis’s landlord and see if he had any regular visitors around here,” Dana said. “Maybe the landlord will give us another lead we can follow up on.”
Blankenship nodded. “Sounds good to me. A mixture of new-fangled technology and good old-fashioned police work. Sort of makes me feel like a twenty first-century version of Sherlock Holmes.”
Dana rolled her eyes again. “Yeah, me too. Anyway, let’s get the hell out of here already. We’ve got our work cut out for us and this place is giving me the creeps.”
Blankenship smiled. “As it is I, my dear Watson.”
Dana blew out a quick upward breath that fluttered her short blonde bangs. “Uh-uh, buddy. I’m Sherlock Holmes here, not you. And don’t you ever forget it.”
Blankenship widened the smile on his face, showing off his endearingly chipped front tooth. He bowed slightly and swept his right arm theatrically in front of his body. “Like I said before: as it is I, my dear Holmes. Please lead the way, Inspector.”
CHAPTER 21
Angel woke up gagging on blood. A huge weight was pressing down hard on her chest and making it impossible for her to breathe. She shoved the weight off herself frantically and gasped for a cool lungful of air as she rolled to one side, shocked as hell to see that she was inside her own living room.