Desperate Souls

by Gregory Lamberson

  Ever on the case, Jake stood and made his way over to the corpse on the floor. Crouching, so as not to get blood on his knees, he searched AK’s pockets. His right hand came out clutching plastic packs of black powder. He estimated he held ten little bags.

  Maybe two hundred bucks on the street, he thought. That’s all my life is worth to them.

  He shoved the bags back into AK’s pocket, then removed his hand. A single bag lay centered in his palm. He focused on the fine black powder.

  What if I snorted one line, just to kill the pain in my eye? That might even give me some insight into what this shit is doing to people …

  He closed his fingers over the bag, feeling its texture.

  No! Not a chance. Don’t even think about it.

  He shoved the bag into AK’s pocket with the rest, then picked up the knife and carried it into the bathroom, where he rinsed little pieces of himself off the blade. Returning to the office, he stored the knife in his safe. No telling when that might come in handy. Then he settled into the chair behind his desk, stared at the security monitors, and waited.

  Ten minutes later, Jake buzzed Edgar into the building and waited for him in the suite’s doorway.

  Edgar stepped off the elevator and strode in his direction. “What the hell happened?” he said, nodding at the underwear Jake clutched against his eye.

  In response, Jake gestured to his office.

  “This better be good.” Edgar crossed the reception area to the open office doorway and came to a sudden stop.

  Jake joined him, and they stared down at AK’s corpse together.

  Edgar said nothing until he located the bloodied weapon Jake had used to crush AK’s skull like an eggshell. “Don’t expect me to get you a replacement.”

  “The zombies couldn’t get in here because of the salt, so they sent someone who was still alive. A scarecrow. I bet AK couldn’t wait to spill his guts when he went out to score.”

  Edgar cocked an eyebrow at him. “Salt?”

  “Yeah, they can’t cross any doorway that’s protected by salt. It’s some ancient voodoo superstition. I guess I forgot to tell you that.”

  “So if you had taken salt with us to the Point, we could have poured it on each doorway, and they couldn’t have chased us?”

  “Good point. Of course, I would have had to explain everything to you then, and I needed you to see things with your own eyes.” Jake lowered the wadded underwear, revealing his wound to Edgar, who recoiled. “Seeing is believing.”

  “Jesus!”

  “AK managed to get in one good lick before I bird brained him.”

  Leaning closer, Edgar inspected the injury, his lips peeled back in a grimace.

  “That look on your face isn’t making me feel any better.”

  “You have to go to an emergency room.”

  “Yeah, that’s near the top of my to-do list. But I don’t want to leave a corpse in here. I do have office help.”

  “You don’t seem very concerned about”—he gestured with his hand—“this …”

  “There’s no saving this eye, and since I’m not bleeding to death, I can afford to prioritize my crises.”

  “You still carrying that hand on you?” Shaking his head, Jake pointed at the safe.

  “Then let’s get out of here. Give me an extra key and your alarm codes. I’ll take you to Saint Vincent’s, then come back here and deal with this stiff.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Edgar pulled over in front of Saint Vincent’s emergency room on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue, an unhappy look on his face. “You took a gypsy cab here after some punk tried to rob you and stabbed you in the eye. You only called me to tell me what happened.”

  “Understood. Are you going straight back to my office?”

  “No. I’m going to need some tools.”

  Jake let that statement stand by itself. “Thanks,” he said, opening the car door.

  “Stay alive.”

  “You, too.”

  Edgar drove off, and Jake sauntered into the emergency room, where he saw scarecrows, homeless people, and generally miserable-looking individuals sitting with impatient scowls on their faces. He gathered that many of them had already been here for a long time. Passing the security guard, his underwear still pressed against his eye, he scrawled his name on a sign-in sheet on a clipboard and stood before a heavyset woman seated behind a glass partition.

  Looking up at him with disinterested eyes, the woman said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’ve been stabbed in my eye, and I need immediate attention.”

  “Please have a seat, and we’ll call you in a few minutes.”

  “There are no seats.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Fuck this. “I said, I’ve been stabbed in the eye, and I need immediate attention.” Removing his balled-up underwear, he revealed his wound to the woman and leaned against the glass despite the pain.

  The woman turned white at the sight of the nasty stain he left on her partition.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The voice came from behind Jake. The security guard.

  Rather than deal with another tool of the medical system, he closed his good eye and collapsed onto the floor.

  “Oh, shit!” someone said in the waiting area.

  “Call some orderlies!” the guard said to the woman behind the glass.

  That’s more like it.

  The orderlies rushed Jake into an examining room.

  “He got stabbed in the eye,” one of them said, “and he just passed out in the waiting area.”

  The physician, an Indian man, examined Jake’s lacerated eyelid. “Can you open your eye?”

  “No,” Jake said, the smelling salts that he hadn’t really needed still burning his nostrils. “There’s nothing left in there to repair anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I saw pieces of white on the sidewalk and on the knife of the scarecrow who attacked me.”

  Reaching forward and leaning close, the physician used his thumb and forefinger to force Jake’s eyelid open. “This is going to hurt…”

  No shit. Jake screamed, but the physician took his time inspecting Jake’s ruptured organ.

  “Did you take anything for the pain?”

  Just four Tylenols. “No,” he said, gasping. Load me up, boys.

  “I’m afraid you’re right. That eye is going to have to come out. The procedure is called enucleation surgery and involves disconnecting muscles from your damaged eye.”

  “Great. Can I have some drugs now?”

  “You’ll be under anesthesia soon enough.”

  Damn. Jake grabbed the doctor’s nearest wrist. “Do whatever you have to do. Just make sure that whoever does the job takes the right one out, and by the ‘right one,’ I mean the left one. I don’t want any screwups; do you understand? I can’t afford to lose both eyes.”

  The physician offered him a sympathetic smile. “I understand your concern. It’s normal in this situation. The nurses and surgeons will take numerous precautions so that no mistakes occur. Frankly, looking at this particular injury, there is very little possibility of error.” He turned to the orderlies. “Take him to prep.”

  They wheeled Jake out of the examining room.

  Jake had never undergone surgery before. Lying on his back in the operating room, he watched in fascination as the nurses made preparations on behalf of the surgeons. Their blue surgical scrubs and gleaming silver equipment made him feel as if he had been taken aboard an alien spaceship. More personnel filed into the operating chamber. A male nurse hooked his arm up to an IV.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your anesthesia.”

  Thank Christ.

  A short man with glasses stepped forward. “Mr. Helman, I’m Dr. Fisher. You’re in excellent hands, if I say so myself.”

  “Just don’t fuck up my good eye by mistake, or I’ll hire someone to fu
ck up yours.”

  The doctor blinked. “I promise. You’ll be out in another minute. While you’re unconscious, the anesthesiologist will snake a breathing tube down your throat. When you wake up in a couple of hours, you’ll feel sore there as well.”

  Jake’s vision turned blurry, and Dr. Fisher’s voice grew distant. He wondered how Edgar was faring with his cleanup operation, then forgot all about him. “More drugs …”

  NINETEEN

  For the first time he could remember, Papa Joe tasted fear. Not fear of dying—that came with the business he had chosen or that had chosen him. No, he feared losing those things that meant the most to him: his position in the world, his family, and the respect of those who knew the streets. At forty-four, he’d enjoyed a good, long run, six of them at the top of the heap. He knew it was inevitable that someone would dethrone him; he just hated that it was going to be his nephew, Daryl, who he refused to call Malachai, let alone Prince Malachai.

  In the last three months, his six chief competitors had all been slain or had vanished, which amounted to the same thing. In the short term, his own business increased several times over, which meant good times.

  But a month ago, someone had targeted his crews for assassination. Corner after corner fell, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He had to give Daryl props: when the boy moved, he moved large. Joe had lost so many men to drive-by shootings and Machete Massacres that many of his surviving people had retired from the business. They hadn’t defected to other operations, because no other gangs existed besides Daryl’s, and Daryl wasn’t recruiting, at least not from the ranks of the living.

  Joe didn’t know what Daryl’s soldiers were—brainwashed, enslaved by drugs, hypnotized—he just knew that they were unfalteringly obedient and endlessly replaceable. Some people on the street called them zombies, and Joe didn’t disbelieve them. Daryl’s woman was known to be a Mamba, a voodoo priestess. Joe had never even contemplated selling Black Magic because he believed it was more than a deadly drug; he believed it was truly evil.

  He never thought he’d see the day when the hard drugs of his era—cocaine, heroin, and crack—were replaced by something even more addictive and dangerous, but that day had come. The streets he knew would never be the same. The city he loved was bound to die a horrible death only to be reborn as something incomprehensible and wicked.

  With his ranks thinned and Daryl impossible to find, Joe had ordered the white drug cops Gary Brown and Frank Beck to trace his nephew and assassinate him. He found it ironic that he had been forced to turn to cops to save his operation, but Brown and Beck were the most corrupt cops he had ever met. They were worse criminals than his ilk because they pretended to be something they weren’t: law enforcers. Joe and his fellows were straight up about what they were all about: power and money. The only protection they provided came in the form of extortion. The real parasites on society were Brown and Beck, not the drug lords and dealers who believed in the simple philosophy of supply and demand. And now, less than twenty-four hours after receiving their marching orders, they were dead. Goddamn, those white boys had proven to be a disappointment.

  Chess knocked on the open door of Joe’s office. “Wagon’s all loaded, boss.”

  Looking around the office, Joe sighed. This had been one of his favorite fronts. “Do me a favor. Close that safe door.”

  Chess glanced inside the safe. “But it’s empty.”

  Joe had just cleared it out. “I know that and you know it. But Daryl doesn’t know it, and the cops don’t know it. Let whoever comes snooping around waste some time, manpower, and money for nothing. Can’t you just see their faces?”

  Laughing, Chess closed the door and threw the lever.

  Joe stood up. “All right, brah. Let’s close this joint down. We had some good times in this club, didn’t we?”

  “True that, true that.”

  Chuckling, Joe led the way out of the office and down the stairs.

  They left through the front door. Joe didn’t believe in skulking through alleyways or sneaking out fire exits. A caravan of three SUVs idled at the curb, waiting for them, and the sky had begun to lighten with dawn’s approach. Joe looked up and down 112th Street. Deliverymen unloaded magazines and produce from their trucks, and whores checked their watches. A few scarecrows lingered here and there but no zombies.

  Good. Joe hated zombies.

  Chess opened the back door of the middle SUV, and Joe climbed in and sat down beside WMD, who sat with an AK-47 stashed between his legs, pointed at the floor. Chess closed the door and got into the front next to K-Man.

  “Okay, fellas,” Joe said, “there’s no time for sentimentality. Let’s clear the fuck out of here.”

  “Ready, chief.”

  The voice had come from a cell phone, set on speaker, clipped to the sun visor above K-Man’s head. The driver reached up and clicked the phone off. The lead SUV pulled into the street, followed by the main vehicle and then a team bringing up the rear. They stayed in tight formation, obeying the speed limit, and took Seventh Avenue to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then merged onto the Triborough Bridge toward Queens. Manhattan vanished behind them. Joe would miss the old girl.

  “Play some Miles,” Joe said as the sun rose into the sky and cast golden light on the water below.

  Chess located Miles Davis on the SUV’s MP3 player, and jazz-funk came over the speakers, bringing a smile to Joe’s lips. They took the Grand Central Parkway east toward LaGuardia Airport and then the Van Wyck Expressway toward Kennedy Airport.

  “Take your time,” Joe said to K-Man. “We don’t want no police pulling us over.” Gentle laughter filled the vehicle. “That would get pretty messy.”

  The caravan got off the Belt Parkway east onto the Nassau Expressway.

  Chess looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Joe, what’s the difference between a corner boy and a ho?”

  “The ho washes her crack and sells it again, son.”

  They all laughed, having heard and repeated the joke many times.

  WMD turned to his boss. “There were eight cooties on a ho’s ass. Four of them were smoking reefer. What were the other four doing?”

  “Sniffing crack,” Joe said, provoking another round of cackling.

  The Nassau Expressway became Rockaway Boulevard.

  Almost home, Joe thought. Then they boarded the Rockaway Expressway. Just forty minutes to leave a lifetime behind. Far Rockaway was one of the four neighborhoods occupying the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. It had been a Jewish neighborhood before becoming largely African American. Driving along Central Avenue, Joe gazed at foreclosed homes covered in graffiti. He had lived here as a boy and had enjoyed the beach. Now scarecrows stalked the sidewalks, but he saw no zombies. They haven’t come this far out yet.

  K-Man drove parallel to the beach, and Joe looked at the boats on the North Atlantic. He regretted that he had never learned to swim.

  Plenty of time for that now, he thought.

  They passed a housing project on the beach, and he studied an empty playground.

  Is that where Shana plays?

  After a few more minutes, the caravan pulled alongside the curb of a weather-beaten Dutch Colonial home that had been a converted two-family house when Joe bought it. He turned it back into a single-family house for Toni and Shana, his common-law wife and daughter.

  They both lived under Toni’s maiden name, Robbins, but he paid their bills and sent Toni money every week. He visited them at least once a month but preferred the excitement of the city. He kept them out here for their own protection, so Shana could live as normal a life as possible.

  All eight occupants of the three vehicles got out. Joe’s most trusted men. Chess and K-Man fetched Joe’s bags.

  Toni appeared in the doorway as the men approached the peeling porch. She wore a white dress and a brave smile. At thirty, she looked more fit than women five years her junior.

  Cupping her face in his hands, Joe said, “You look
good, girl.”

  She smiled despite the tears in her eyes. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Aw, you’ll be sick of looking at my fat ass soon enough.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think so. Come inside.”

  They walked inside arm in arm, followed by Joe’s army. Toni had packed two suitcases, which stood waiting at the bottom of the staircase.

  “That’s all you packed?” Joe said.

  “That’s all I need. I’m looking forward to leaving all this behind. I only want you.”

  Joe believed her. “Go on upstairs and wake my daughter. I’ll be up to see her in a minute.”

  She walked up the stairs, and Joe faced his men. “Hand me that bag, Chess.”

  Chess passed a leather bag to Joe.

  He set it on the glass coffee table and popped its tabs. “I want to thank all of you for sticking with me these last few months. I know it’s been rough. I know some of you wanted to run and didn’t. I know others of you want to stay and fight still. But it’s time for me to step down and for us to go our separate ways. Chess has my blessing to keep the organization going if that’s what he wants. And if he’s smart enough not to want that, then the offer is open to each one of you. Work it out among yourselves. What happens to this city’s trade in the future isn’t my concern. I’m done with it.

  “But I’ve got something for y’all, a parting gift. Call it severance pay.” Reaching into the bag, he removed several bulging manila envelopes with names scrawled on them. “A working Joe could live on what’s in these envelopes for four years. I know you ain’t working stiffs, but if you pace yourselves, you could make it for two.”

  The men laughed, and Joe handed out the envelopes.

  “I’ll be leaving out of here tonight,” Joe said. “Chess and K-Man and WMD are going to see me off. The rest of you are free to leave now. We’re not employer and employees anymore. We’re not even business associates. We’re just old friends with common memories.”

  One of the men, a runner named Jackson, gave a loud snort. “Fuck that, Joe. We all stayin’. What’s a few more hours of servitude?”