by David Kazzie
"Some men tried to steal the ticket from him," she said.
"What men?"
"One of them was my boss."
"The fuck kinda lawyer are you?"
"Not a very good one, I guess."
"What happened to your boss?"
Samantha laughed loudly, and then tears started streaming down her face. "He's dead, too."
"So this ticket ain't been very lucky yet," Jamal said.
"No," she said. "Not yet."
"But y'all are still alive," he said.
"For now," she said. "Look, we need to get you out of here, hide you until you can cash the ticket."
"I ain't going anywhere."
"Jamal," she said, "it might not be safe for you."
"I ain't gonna tell anyone about it," he said. "Are you?"
"No. But my boss wasn't the only one trying to get his hands on the ticket," Samantha said.
"Explain."
* * *
"What are they talking about?" asked Piggy. He was the teenage boy that had been leaning against the doorjamb in the kitchen. Eighteen years old, he was a newcomer to Jamal's crew. He was not particularly bright, but he was unquestionably loyal to Jamal.
Scotty Mitchell shook his head. "Can't hear shit with you asking me every two seconds. Shut the fuck up."
Scotty was older, twenty-five, and Jamal's top lieutenant. He oversaw the gambling operations in Ravenwood and surrounding neighborhoods. He had been in prison for most of his adult life, but this was a lull in his time behind bars, like planet Earth between ice ages. The world had been and would again be covered in ice, and sure as day followed night, Scotty would be in prison again.
The day's events had been odd, to be sure. Scotty wondered what his boss was up to, what these two strangers wanted from him. Clearly, something about them had intrigued Jamal, which surprised Scotty. Time was, Jamal would have popped them because he didn't like to take any chances. Maybe Jamal was getting soft. Or maybe he was getting wise. Who knew? Maybe he just had a little Christmas spirit bubbling underneath.
A sound to his left snapped him out of his thoughts. A man he had never seen before was trudging through the snow like Bigfoot. Even though he was wearing his heaviest parka, gooseflesh popped up all over Scotty's arms, and instinctively, his hands slipped into his waistband for his nine-millimeter pistol. Although his instincts had served him well, he was far too late in executing his response. Behind him, Piggy was just now picking up on the threat. Useless, Scotty thought.
Flagg was on them like a puma.
"Motherfucker!" hissed Scotty.
Flagg fired two shots into Piggy, who collapsed into the snow and died. A third shot caught Scotty in the shin, staggering but not dropping him. Flagg came up behind him and pressed the barrel into his back.
"The next one's in your head unless you do what I say."
* * *
Jamal Wheeler was the first and only child of Alicia Ray, born via a cesarean section that became medically necessary when it was discovered that she'd taken two hits off a crack pipe while she was in labor. As fate would have it, on that very day, the on-call obstetrician, Dr. Mark Bernard, reached the end of his moral rope when it came to young, unwed, and drug-addled mothers. When confronted with Alicia Ray, he went a bit haywire and performed an unnecessary hysterectomy on her. Dr. Bernard advised Alicia's mother that he had discovered a cancerous tumor on Alicia's uterus, warranting the drastic procedure. This was, of course, a complete and total fabrication, but Dr. Bernard had no desire to deliver six more of Alicia's children. Two months later, Bernard shot himself in the bathroom of a Las Vegas McDonald's.
When Jamal was two, he and Alicia moved to Ravenwood, where mother and son shared an apartment with Alicia's thirty-five-year-old mother, Shawna Jackson. Shawna, who worked the day shift deboning chicken at a Tyson plant, became a de facto mommy to Jamal, as Alicia was a big fan of the nightlife and romantic rendezvous with men whom she did not know. Shawna fed him, changed him, toilet-trained him, and got him to bed. Some nights, Alicia came home. Often, she did not. Sometimes Jamal asked where his Mommy was. Most nights, he did not.
Several years later, Alicia made the acquaintance of a man she knew as Smiley, a man whom she would only know as Smiley. They met in the courtyard, and two nights later, the platonic phase of their relationship came to an end. Within a week, he had moved in with Alicia, Shawna and Jamal. Shortly thereafter, the happy couple concocted a scheme to rob a Bank of America, a plan that they believed would solve their myriad financial issues.
The robbery happened on a rainy Monday morning. Smiley led the way with a shotgun, directing the few customers and bank employees toward the floor. Alicia trailed behind with a .22-caliber pistol, which Smiley had taught her to use on the way to the bank. One of the customers that morning was an off-duty police officer who had stopped in to cash a check. Shortly after taking over the bank, Smiley and Alicia forgot about the hostages and turned their attention toward the teller filling a bank bag with cash. Now in their defense, they were as high as kites, having shared a doobie on the way to the bank. With one exception, the hostages lay quietly on the floor behind the bank robbers, each hoping that, like a bad sexual encounter, this would be over soon.
The officer, Thomas Coventry, leapt to his feet and loudly demanded that the robbers drop their weapons and get on the floor. Much to Coventry's delight, both robbers turned to face him, without first complying with his request to disarm themselves. Coventry was a long-suffering patrol officer, desperate to make detective, and he thought that this chance occurrence would kick open the door to his shield.
As both Smiley and Alicia raised their weapons, Coventry began firing, emptying his clip into the would-be robbers. Smiley took two in the chest, which killed him instantly. While two bullets plowed into Alicia's stomach, she sprayed her pistol wildly, an act that ended Officer Coventry's quest to make detective. A single bullet caught him in the throat, mortally wounding him. Although he died before earning his shield, he did earn a hero's funeral.
Alicia died in surgery two hours later. The day after the funeral, Shawna Jackson filed a petition for relief of custody of Jamal in the Richmond Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, which was granted with little fanfare. Nine-year-old Jamal went to live with foster parents Butch and Nancy Cox, who were far more interested in collecting the monthly stipend check from the Department of Social Services than parenting Jamal and his two foster brothers.
With no moral compass to guide him, Jamal quickly found himself in situations frowned upon by his foster care worker, and shortly thereafter, his probation officer. For the next nine years, Jamal bounced between Richmond's juvenile detention center, therapeutic foster care, and the Department of Juvenile Justice, which was basically juvenile detention for really naughty kids.
At the age of eighteen, Jamal was six feet, two inches tall, weighed 230 pounds, and had become the bane of the Richmond Department of Social Services. Every placement had failed, every attempt to set the boy on the right path had gone down in flames. He dealt drugs, he assaulted teachers, he spread STDs. On the day he turned eighteen, a juvenile court judge signed an order dismissing Jamal from foster care. That night, Jamal's exhausted social worker, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Department, gleefully drank three Bombay Sapphire martinis and passed out in a heap. The next day, she retired and moved to Maui.
Once he was out of foster care, Jamal really came into his own. First things first. He moved home to Ravenwood. He fell in with a gang called the Black Diamonds and quickly rose through the ranks. The Diamonds had cornered Ravenwood's open-air drug market and had spread their tentacles into prostitution and gambling. Like an eager intern with a Fortune 500 company, Jamal enthusiastically performed the Diamonds' dirty work. He carried drugs as a mule, he slapped around girls who got out of line, and he made sure people paid their unpaid balances.
Within a year of Jamal's joining, however, the Diamonds found themselves with a problem. Multiple
problems, actually. Another gang, the Little Rascals, had started horning in on some of the business at Ravenwood and in the surrounding neighborhoods, long considered Diamond territory. Second, the Diamonds' titular heads were not exactly suited for executive positions. They had a poor understanding of price points and never quite grasped the neighborhood's geopolitical dynamic. They ordered hits on low-level Rascals, thugs whose passing would barely be noticed. They flooded the market with low-quality drugs, overcapitalizing as they did so.
In short, they were all broke and dying like flies.
On his twenty-first birthday, Jamal decided that he had seen enough. He recruited his two brothers from his first foster home, and on a chilly Halloween night, he solved all of the Diamonds' problems in one fell swoop. He shot and killed four top-level Rascals himself, ordered hits on two more that were carried out before the sun rose the next day. For good measure, he executed two Black Diamond bigwigs that had been particularly cruel to the younger Diamonds. By nightfall, he had commandeered all of the Diamonds' books, accounts, passwords and lists of suppliers and customers. The other Diamonds, thrilled to have someone step forward and take over, fell in line almost immediately, as did a number of the surviving Rascals. As a final wagon-circling maneuver, Jamal implemented a no-snitching policy in Ravenwood, to which both Diamonds and civilians adhered, lest they be found on the bank of the James River with two in the back of the head.
After taking power, he realized that he needed dependable cash streams, and so he had turned his focus on the wealthy western and northern suburbs. He built inroads into the community, which was quite the market for high-end cocaine and marijuana. He did not know it, but the late Ashley Pierce herself had been a loyal customer of the Black Diamonds. Rich high school kids and bored housewives had provided a never-ending gravy train down here. Things were good.
Then the mortgage crisis hit, and the banks got into trouble, and the automakers got into trouble, and jobs started disappearing, and then retail took a hit, and before you knew it, the rich suburbanites stopped coming down here, and business started to fall apart. Jamal followed the market, so he knew what was going on. The mid-level guys were getting nervous, asking him questions to which he did not have the answers. He was up nights, eating little, losing weight.
So when he had heard about two strangers poking around the Wood that morning, he thought it might be a sign.
* * *
Jamal heard Scotty Mitchell's expletive just as Samantha reached into her inside pocket for the ticket. It was still pinched between her fingers when he drew his nine-millimeter pistol from his waistband. Something wasn't right; he could feel it in his bones. He pressed a single index finger to his lips, signaling the others to keep quiet, and dropped into a crouch. With the barrel of the gun, he waved Samantha and Pasquale into the kitchen, where a back door to the alley provided a means of escape. His guests skittered quietly into the dingy kitchen like frightened mice.
White people, he thought, watching them slip away. They always struck him as weak. Never had to face the shit he did. Soft. Pampered. All thanks to the color of their skin. It never ceased to amaze him. These two, though… The girl, she had risked life and limb to deliver the ticket to him. That had to be worth something. Least he could do was get her out of here with her head intact.
Plus, no one was getting this ticket from him. The news was still settling in, and the deeper it settled, the better it felt. All his prayers had been answered. Things in Ravenwood were going bad, and they were going bad fast. The Diamonds were going to run out of money soon; as it was, he had barely made payroll this week. And now this shining angel had strolled into his life and shown him the way out.
He slid backward against the wall, which the door would swing inward against. It would give him a clear shot at anyone trying to break into the apartment. His Glock pistol was upright, the barrel tapping at his lips. Fear rippled through him, as it always did when he felt violence was at the doorstep. He never understood people who claimed to not be afraid in moments like this. Shit, there might be someone out there with a gun! With real bullets! His breath came in ragged gasps.
The door opened.
Jamal opened fire.
* * *
Pasquale hurried Samantha through the narrow kitchen, out the back door and into the alley behind Jamal's building. The snowpack was deep out here, as high as three feet in some places where the wind had caught hold of it.
"We need to help him," Samantha said when they were on the back stoop. The alley was deserted. She turned back toward the door.
"Forget it," Pasquale said. "I am not letting anything happen to you."
"You're sweet," she said. "Get out of my way."
She drove her shoulder into his side, trying to squeeze in by the door, but he held firm like a statue.
"Sam," he said, "I'm a lot heavier than you. It's not happening."
"Come on! We can't just leave him there."
"The hell we can't!" he snapped at her. "I don't know what circle of hell we've walked into, or what we did to deserve it, but if we do not get out of here right now, we are going to end up dead."
"This is his ticket."
"Then leave it under his goddamn welcome mat," he said. "I'm not going to let you die here. I was all into this idea yesterday. But things have changed."
"Please," she begged. Tears streamed down her ice-crusted cheeks, creating the very odd image of steam misting off her face.
He looked back over his shoulder toward the door.
"We go around the front," he said. "Double back behind whoever was coming in. You stay behind me."
Pasquale jumped off the stoop and into a foot of snow, with Samantha trailing close behind him. They stayed close to the wall of the building, where the snow wasn't as deep and which gave them a bit of cover. At the corner of the building, he peered around toward the building's façade, where he saw the body of the late Piggy lying in the snow. The snow was tinged bright red, a biohazardous snow cone.
"Body at the front door," he whispered back to Samantha. "Can't see who it is."
Samantha sighed softly. She had seen more death today than she thought she would see in her lifetime. She couldn't even remember how many people had died today as a result of this stupid ticket, maybe not burning a hole through her pocket anymore, but most definitely burning one through her world. She tapped Pasquale on the shoulder.
"OK," she said. "You win. Let's get out of here."
"Good idea," Pasquale replied.
"That is a good idea!" a voice said behind her.
The pair turned to find Charles Flagg looking at them. He looked cold and pissed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Monday, December 24
10:45 a.m.
"My goodness," Flagg said, pointing his gun at Samantha. "You two have been running me ragged. I am just exhausted. Hand it over. I've got places to be."
"Hand what over?" Samantha asked. She was desperate to extend things a bit, knowing that Carter's fate surely awaited them.
Flagg sighed. "Trying to drag things out a bit? Look, you can just give me the ticket now, and I kill you quick. But you're already burning what little goodwill you may have accumulated. Continue to give me a hard time, and I'll shoot you both in the stomach. I can assure you, it's a painful way to die."
"What if I don't have it on me?" she asked. "If you kill me, then you'll never find it."
"Oh, you've got it," he said. "If you're as smart as I think you are."
"Look, we give it to you, and we go our separate ways," Samantha said, terror coursing through her veins. "Why can't we do that? Why does it have to be like this?"
"I'm going to count to three," he said.
So this was it, she thought. Giving up the ticket now would be pointless. He could just shoot her and search her pockets for it. Death was at hand here. She was going to die in the alley of a housing project at thirty-four, her life a complete and total failure.
"One.
"Two.
As Flagg's tongue tightened up between his teeth to enunciate "three," the back door to Jamal's apartment blew open like a bomb had gone off. Flagg's head turned just a notch, one click of the dial. It gave Samantha and Pasquale the opening they needed.
Samantha rushed at his legs, while Pasquale launched himself at Flagg's midsection, swiping at the man's gun for the second time in their brief relationship. The still-warm gun dropped silently into the snow and sank into the drift like an anchor. Flagg stumbled backward against the sudden onslaught, but he kept his balance. Back on the stoop, two gunshots shattered the Christmas Eve silence. Sam's survival instinct kicked into overdrive; she grabbed Pasquale's right hand and staggered forward, away from the gunfire and toward the building.
Had he not been focused on the stinging, searing pain shooting up his thigh, Flagg would have been impressed by this display of self-preservation. A second bullet sliced through his shoulder. He grunted, wondering how he could have been so stupid. As he ducked for cover, he reflected back on the scene in Jamal's apartment.
* * *
Using Mitchell as a human shield, he had breached Jamal's apartment like a battering ram. Jamal opened fire immediately, inadvertently shredding his bodyguard into ground beef. Flagg dropped Mitchell's body, its mission accomplished, and spun around the door. He found Jamal crouched in the corner and emptied three bullets into his torso before he could fire back. While Flagg paused to reload, Jamal kicked his legs out, toppling Flagg to the ground, and scampered down the dark hallway, trailing blood behind him. The corridor was pitch black, more so than Flagg was comfortable with. He willed himself to follow Jamal down the hallway, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. After emptying his clip into the blackness, he turned and followed Sam and Pasquale into the kitchen, thinking he really needed to do something about his fear of the dark.
Well, the mistake had been made, and there was nothing he could do about it now. He quickly forgot about the ticket, leaving Sam and Pasquale to scamper for cover. You had to have priorities. Bullets could kill. Quickly, he scanned the snow and found the gaping hole where his gun had punched through and dropped to the asphalt below.