1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

  Court was about as exciting as church, and Noel passed his time in both of them the same way: he read the paper and waited his turn. In church, his turn meant getting in line and letting a likely pederast put a flavorless wafer in his mouth. In court, his turn meant getting up on the witness stand and saying the right things to relocate the defendant to the Institute for Better Living Through Forced Sodomy.

  At this stage of the game, he was equally unenthused about both rituals. Communion was just a show for his wife. He was pretty certain that if there really was a resurrected Christ, He was likely to be one of the devout brown people Noel had gunned down in Iraq. It was His zip code, after all.

  And getting on the stand? That was just part of the fake job he did when he wasn’t out on the street doing the real earning with Allen Phelps.

  When he heard the briefcase thump, Noel glanced up reflexively. Some lawyer in a suit that looked like it must have had an allergy to dry cleaning was stooped over, shoveling papers up off the floor. Noel’s eyes started to stray back down to the paper in his lap, but stopped when the lawyer turned sideways to get at the rest of the papers at his feet. Noel stared at the man’s profile and a lightning bolt of recognition ran through him.

  *

  Darren paused for the briefest of moments after hearing Judge Sharpe command that he approach the bench. To his left, the inept defense attorney and his despondent client both stared at him with a mixture of annoyance and confusion. Straight ahead, Judge Sharpe wore a withering grimace. To his right, the assistant prosecutor stood, buttoned his suit coat, and stepped toward the bench without glancing in Darren’s direction.

  Darren stepped up to the bench and unobtrusively set his briefcase up on the ledge, off to the side.

  “I am so sorry for that,” he loud-whispered. “That was embarrassing, wasn’t it?”

  Judge Sharpe, he noted, looked miserable. His eyes were red-rimmed and his skin had a washed-out pallor. He coughed raggedly into his hand and arched one brow at Darren.

  “That’s been going around, hasn’t it?” Darren whispered with a sympathetic grimace. “Did Chelsea give it to you? I bet she did.”

  Judge Sharpe frowned.

  “First, don’t refer to a fellow judge by her first name in my courtroom. She may have some inexplicable sympathy for you, but I don’t. Second, you aren’t even on the docket. What is this?”

  “Hmm? Oh, right. That’s true, Your Honor.”

  The prosecutor on his right was a tall, somber fellow, his face a careful arrangement of severe authority. He leaned in and said “Your Honor, this is improper. I don’t have any notice what this man is arguing.”

  Judge Sharpe raised a finger and the man fell obediently silent. This was, in Darren’s experience with court, perfectly representative of the status quo. The trinity of “judge, prosecutor and defense counsel” could just as accurately be described as “master, minion and unwanted intruder”.

  “Do you have any business here?” he asked Darren.

  “I do,” Darren said, and snapped open his briefcase. “Hold on…it’s in here, I know. Everything’s all mixed up in here now, but just a second…”

  “Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Wait, I think I have it here.”

  “Counselor.”

  Darren looked up, his hands full of stapled piles of paper.

  “If you have paperwork to file, this is not the place,” Judge Sharpe hissed. “Honestly, what are you thinking coming in here like this? That man over there is facing real prison time, and you think you can just interrupt and stumble in here and file some motion with no notice?”

  “Motion?”

  Judge Hodgens blinked, looked at the papers in Darren’s hands, then back at the man’s placid, smiling expression.

  “Alright,” he sniffed. “I’ll bite. What are you holding there?”

  ‘Bingo,’ Darren thought, and let his smile broaden with a hint of satisfaction. ‘Mission accomplished.’

  “I have two copies,” he said. “One for you, Your Honor…”

  He handed Judge Sharpe a pile of papers.

  “And one for you.”

  He handed the second pile to the prosecutor, who stared suspiciously for a moment, then took the papers from Darren.

  Both the judge and the prosecutor glanced down in unison to inspect the cover page of what they had been handed. Darren continued to beam his innocent smile, but inside a little knot of anxiety bloomed in his abdomen.

  Judge Sharpe inhaled a sharp breath of air. He pinched the bridge of her nose and fixed Darren with a look of trembling outrage.

  “Are you—“

  “This is outrageous!” the prosecutor screeched.

  “--out of your mind?”

  “Did I fill it out wrong?” Darren said.

  Judge Sharpe fell silent and leaned back in his chair bonelessly. He regarded Darren with outright bewilderment. The prosecutor, seeing the judge temporarily speechless, took his queue and filled the silence. With one stiff finger he stabbed the pile of papers he’d been given.

  “What the hell is this?” he snarled.

  Darren blinked in feigned bewilderment.

  “Seriously? I thought it was obvious.”

  He leaned in and ran his finger over the caption of text headlining the cover page of the papers.

  “See? It says right there. I’m suing you. Well, not you specifically. Your boss. I figured you could give it to him when you get back to the office.”

  Judge Sharpe looked like he was coming back to life. Darren offered him a sheepish grimace.

  “I am suing Your Honor, though.”

  Judge Sharpe adopted an eerily calm demeanor. Darren knew, looking into that blank, fluish face of authority, that he wasn’t leaving court the same way he came in.

  He opened his mouth without the faintest clue as to what he was going to say, but the judge started shouting at him before he could think of anything.

  Later, once the story had spread through the gossipy channels of the county’s legal community, a handful of local lawyers paid the fee to get a printed transcript of Judge Sharpe’s court session for that day, in the hope that some of what transpired had wound up on the record.

  It had, but only after the judge’s fit of expletives and threats had already passed. The official transcript did not reflect any of the colorful ways in which Darren Fletcher, Attorney at Law, was going to suffer under the wrath of a flu-stricken, wild-eyed, and shaking twenty-year veteran of the bench. It only reflected one official order of the court: “Darren Fletcher is hereby held in contempt of this court, and ordered remanded to the custody of the county sheriff’s department until further notice. Court adjourned.”

  TEN

  “Not the best time, Noel.”

  “Al, it’s that fucking lawyer.”

  “Whatever it is, we’re already suited up and on the road. I’ll call you back after we get this done.”

  “Al, listen—“

  Allen Phelps moved the cell away from his ear, and pointed out the windshield.

  “Take Coolidge,” he said to the driver. “We’ll come up from the south and stage it from the south-eastern corner.”

  Allen, the driver and the four other TAC Team members in the back of the big black van were all in full-assault mode—suited out with clay-insert, neck-to-groin Kevlar, MP5’s, flash-bang canisters and whatever personal choice of sidearm they chose to carry. The van carrying them bore no markings, nor did the antennae-laden scout car following close behind.

  Allen scowled as he put the cell back to his ear. He had been relishing the state of energized, nervous focus that always preceded a job. He’d have been the first to admit that he was an adrenaline junkie, or a danger-seeker or whatever the hell it was people with psychology degrees wanted to call it. The other guys on his team had all got themselves hooked the same way as him: running high-hazard missions in the desert.

  “Alright,” he said into the phone. “But fucking make it fast.”

/>   “Al, it’s Pullins’ lawyer.”

  “Noel, that don’t mean shit to me—“

  “He just got himself thrown in jail. Walked into court and served a lawsuit on the fucking judge. I’ve never seen anything like it. Seriously, this guy just became a defense lawyer legend“

  Allen was quiet. He remembered the lawyer from Pullins’ hospital room. A smart ass with a big mouth. Allen remembered trying to intimidate the two of them, and it not going anywhere with the smart ass.

  “Okay…”

  “So Judge Sharpe explodes. I mean, just ape-shit loses it. Doesn’t turn the white-noise machine on, or kill the mics or anything. Full-on nuclear meltdown. Throws this lawyer in jail for contempt. I just got out of there.”

  “I still don’t understand, Noel,” Allen said, a disquieting chill creeping in at the edges of his mind. This was something. This was a complication. He just didn’t know how.

  “Al, when it was over I chased down the bailiff. Sully. Used to be the job in Dearborn? Anyway, he says it’s a law suit against the judge and the prosecutor’s office and the city. Says it’s on behalf of Walter Lucas. Ring any bells?”

  Allen hit the button for his window and it came sliding down. He closed his eyes to the rush of wind and let his mind scream ‘fuck!’ over and over again. ‘Walter fucking Lucas.’

  “Al?”

  ‘Adapt. Adapt. Adjust.’

  “What do you want me to do here, chief?”

  Al forced himself to calm and started thinking.

  “Here’s what we do,” he said. “Call in and take some comp time. If the desk gives you shit, make it sick time and tell him to call me if he has a problem with it. Stay on the lawyer. When he gets released, you be his ghost.”

  “Will do.”

  “This was a good pick-up, Noel. You stay sharp and I’ll check in once we’ve tied this other thing up.”

  “Good hunting, Lieutenant.”

  “Whoop whoop,” Allen said, and clicked the phone shut.

  The big black box of a van and its trailing communications-car raced further into the blighted stretches of Detroit, aimed like a bullet at the Brewster Williams Housing Project and the last man still holding fast within its walls.

  *

  An undifferentiated sense of unease had plagued Malcolm Mohommad the entire morning. It had no name and it had no face, but as the big man set about arranging the tools and supplies of his art station, he was faintly aware of it.

  The southern tower of the Brewster-Williams Housing Project was wholly his. Every last room and stairwell, every furnace closet and access panel and cinderblock was as familiar to him as if he had built the massive, derelict monolith himself. He squatted in the heart of it, a lone spider at the center of an intricate and empty web. This was the vague unease nestled in the base of his skull—the slight suspicion that one of the outermost strands of his web was vibrating. It was too far off and too faint to trigger any conscious alarm, but it was there.

  Malcolm sat at his art station in the center of his living area and stared at the sketch pinned to his drafting table. Weeks earlier, he’d run across the street-woman known around town as Toofy. She was a haggard, crack-addicted skeleton who spent her afternoons alternating between begging for money and performing sexual acts for it.

  He’d given her fifteen dollars. In return, she’d spent a half-hour sitting on a park bench while Malcolm studiously sketched her likeness—paying careful and loving attention to the hollow depths of her eyes and the thick, root-like veins running along the backs of her hands.

  Those hands never stopped moving. They picked at each other like quarreling birds, and fussed at her layers of filthy clothing. They fidgeted and pawed at her chin. Her deep-set, jaundice-yellow eyes darted everywhere, but never into Malcolm’s own eyes.

  “I know you,” she said eventually, a hoarse whisper.

  “No.”

  “Sho’ do. You the wolf out here. Seen you on the edges.”

  “Sit still, please.”

  “Nobody drawn me ‘fore.”

  Malcolm didn’t bother correcting her. He’d drawn her on many occasions over the years, but always from a surreptitious distance. Like a handful of other Detroit transients, she was what he considered a long-term project. When he had first drawn her there was still evidence of muscle tone in her limbs and youth in her face. Now, several years and many sketches later, Malcolm had a visual record of her horrific decline.

  This would be the last sketch, he knew. She was so wasted and shriveled; death was hovering like an invisible cloud around her. That was the reason he’d broken his anonymity and lured her into their fifteen-dollar deal. He needed this final sketch to complete his project, the capstone image of a human soul dying horribly over a period of pain-filled years-- all in full view of the citizenry.

  Malcolm turned to the little wooden trolley next to him where he stored his paints and inks and brushes. He set about mixing a mustard-yellow hue of oil paint. Once it was the right shade, he began to sprinkle cigarette ash from a zip-lock baggie into the bowl. He, himself, smoked very infrequently. Even then it was only ever as part of his working-man disguise, as much an affectation as his Carhartt jacket and paint-splattered construction boots. In private, he was circumspect about his personal habits.

  The ash had been collected from public ashtrays around town—from restaurants, from bars and from outside doctor’s offices. It was the detritus of the citizens who had passed by Toofy and others like her, every day. They were bits of evidence the citizens left behind, proof that they had been there all these years while Toofy died in plain sight.

  Malcolm mixed the ash into the paint. The mustardy hue darkened and thickened into something closer to vomit. He smiled and set about carefully applying the concoction to the white space surrounding Toofy’s image. There would be more alterations afterwards, of course, but this layer of condemning color was satisfying enough to Malcolm that he began to hum softly to himself as the brush worked itself across the page.

  He was deep in the pleasure-zone of creation when a shrill alarm rose up in the air of the apartment, announcing the presence of invaders in Malcolm’s lair. He swiveled in his seat and stared across the clutter of the room.

  There, sitting nearly-forgotten among the stacks of sketchbooks and the larger, framed pieces, was a single black and white monitor. As Malcolm squinted across the room, the monitor’s screen blinked to life and revealed the contents of the building’s south-eastern stairwell.

  A cadre of little black-and-white police was advancing into the building. They moved cautiously, communicating with short, sharp hand gestures. As Malcolm watched, they mounted the stairs one at a time, drifting up and out of the camera’s view.

  *

  When three of the windows in the upper-most floor of the southern tower exploded outward and began belching black smoke into the cloudless Detroit sky, Allen Phelps was one of the few people on the ground that did not stop what he was doing.

  A second before the fireball roared out from the apartment, one of the TAC team yelped “That’s gas!” into his mic. This wasn’t an entirely new or novel experience for Allen. He had heard similar excited utterances in the desert. He’d seen IEDs turn men into shattered things moments after their discovery.

  So while the firemen on stand-by and the rest of the gathered command crew gaped like fish rudely plucked from a lake, Allen made immediate adjustments. He marched toward that gathering of the dumbstruck and started barking into his shoulder-mic.

  “Clear channel. Clear channel,” he growled. “Ewald, report.”

  “We’re secure, Lieutenant. No sign of the subject. He…this…this is a booby-trap, sir. The whole apartment is going up in flames. Davis was in the threshold, but he’s signaling the thumbs-up. We’re good to go.”

  Allen brushed past the milling bodies and gathered up the pile of city blueprints from the communications table. He unrolled the bundle and started leafing through them with the decisive eye o
f someone who knew how to read them.

  “Copy that,” he said. “All the same, Davis comes out. Ewald, you escort him down. Fire and medical will be meeting you a safe distance from the south-eastern door. The rest head down through the northern stairwell and watch for the subject.”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant.”

  The gathering of people crowded around Allen, his calm presence acting as a magnet. Questions came in a flurry. Allen rankled and scowled through his answers.

  “I understand, Lou. But you can see that fucking fire just as clear as me. And my guys don’t have hoses. You want the fucking press asking you why you let an urban project burn to the ground, be my guest.”

  The fire engine on stand-by rumbled off in the direction of the tower.

  “That’s a fine question, Sam. Ask me again when we don’t have an armed lunatic running around an active four-alarm fire. Until then, sit tight and enjoy the view.”

  The lead paramedic slunk away and kept his three EMTs huddled a safe distance from the burning tower.

  Others were either answered or silenced, until Allen was satisfied that he could continue to focus on the blueprints he had laid flat over the hood of a marked patrol unit.

  “Are those tunnels?” one of the people around him asked, and a hand entered his field of vision, pointing at the sheet Allen had just flipped to.

  “Looks like it,” he agreed. “Looks like they link the two towers. Service tunnels. Son of a bitch.”

  “You think your suspect knows about them?”

  “Who knows? Psycho probably knows every inch of the place if he’s been squatting here long…”

  But Allen knew there was no ‘probably’ about it. He’d miscalculated. Once he’d gotten the hired killer’s name and location from Darnell, his nose had been wide open with the smell of the hunt.

  He glanced back over his shoulder at the thick column of smoke pouring out of the tower, chugging up into the sky like a signal flare announcing the impending demise of his career with the police department. This was a clusterfuck. There were channels and protocols for the kind of no-knock breach Allen had ordered his team to perform. He hadn’t followed a single one of them, because when you came back successful and triumphant, protocols were forgotten.