by Kylie Brant
“We can make a couple stops first.” Nate’s phone call to the officers tasked with bringing in Juicy for questioning again had been fruitless. If the man had been seen around his old neighborhood lately, no one was talking about it. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and trip over Emmons.”
“Lots of rat holes in that area,” he muttered. The light turned green and he turned right. Another of his shortcuts, undoubtedly. “And I’ll bet he knows every one to disappear in.”
“Vice won’t be too happy if he goes underground.”
“Vice can get in line.” They drove for a time in silence, with Nate taking side streets and alleys that had her doubting her direction sense. But when the neighborhoods started their visual decline she assumed he was heading the right way.
She used the time to call the hospital. Talked to Burke about Adam’s condition. It remained unchanged since she’d been there earlier. The only way to contact Hannah was by contacting Jerry Muller’s number, which she’d programmed into her new phone when she’d taken her mom there this afternoon. But his line was busy so she gave up and dropped the cell back into her new purse.
Nate was on his own phone, but was doing more listening than speaking. She reached forward, fiddled with the radio. Was mildly amused to discover it didn’t work. Risa was half looking forward to Nate’s reaction when he made the same discovery. Things hadn’t changed much since the days when she was on the force here.
He hung up, silent for a few minutes. His jaw was tight. “That was Cass,” he said abruptly. “She claims that one of Kristin’s coworkers told her my sister talked about going to Atlantic City.”
She eyed him carefully. It was difficult to tell from his expression what he was thinking. “That’s not far. What? An hour by car?”
“She quit her job.” His mouth was set in a flat straight line. But she thought if she could see his eyes, hurt might flicker in them. “That tells me she doesn’t plan on coming back.”
“Where did she work?”
“A fast-food place.” He took the next corner a bit sharper than usual.
“So it’s not like she couldn’t get another one like it without much trouble. She may have just intended to go for a few days and couldn’t get time off so she quit. People do.”
“Maybe.” Clearly, he wasn’t convinced. “But she could have told me that. Hell, she’d have to explain once she got home anyway.”
“What would your reaction have been if she had told you?”
He was silent for a long moment. “I’d have made her leave Tucker with me.”
Risa didn’t respond. She didn’t figure she needed to. Whatever problems Nate and his sister were having, it seemed clear to her that Kristin didn’t mind letting her brother suffer a little. Risa had never missed having siblings. Now was no different. But she couldn’t help sympathizing with his obvious concern.
He slowed on a familiar street. On the next block, she recalled, would be Juicy’s apartment building. “I’m not convinced that’s really where she headed, but Cass will check with hotels there and see if she can find anything out.” One corner of his mouth pulled up slightly. “She’s showing some real aptitude for pretext calls.”
“How does Recker have time to be doing all this?”
His sideways look was sharp. “I forgot. You missed out this morning.” She listened with growing disbelief as he filled her in, with short succinct sentences about Recker’s removal from the task force. He finished with, “It’s a case of her decisions coming back to bite her in the ass. Something she has in common with my sister, unfortunately. I just don’t want Kristin’s decisions to end up hurting Tucker, too.”
He parked behind a rusted-up small pickup and opened the door. She joined him on the street, but both of them paused before heading toward the apartment building. “Looks a little different from last time,” she murmured.
The street was nearly deserted. Across the way there was someone hurrying up a cracked concrete porch and into a building. But there was no one on the sidewalk up ahead. And as they approached, Risa saw that the porch to Juicy’s apartment building—the one that had been jammed with young men when they’d been here two days ago—was empty.
They walked up the stoop, pushed open the unlocked front door. Retraced their steps to the apartment upstairs. But this time when Nate pounded on the door, no one answered it. They knocked at every single door on that floor and not at one did anyone acknowledge their presence.
Babies still cried. Music still played too loudly. People were inside. They just weren’t interested in talking to Nate and Risa. They headed back downstairs. Nate rapped at the building super’s apartment door. “Philadelphia PD. Open the door now or you’ll have a whole lot of unwanted company on this street. In this building. And then you can come downtown and explain your shyness there.”
A chain rattled. The door was pulled open the length of it. A visual slice of a short, stocky African American man clad in a tank-style undershirt and shorts could be seen through it. “Don’t have nothing to say to you.” The door began to close. Was halted by Nate’s foot.
“Where’s Jasmine? The woman in apartment two eighteen?”
“Moved out. Yesterday. Don’t know where she went and didn’t ask questions. Rent’s paid up and it’s none of my business anyways. It don’t pay to ask too many questions.”
“What about the guys who hang out on your stoop?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me shut the door.” The one brown eye that was visible in the wedge of opening had worry flickering in it.
“Where’s Javon Emmons? Juicy?”
“Don’t know him. Don’t know where he is.”
Nate and Risa exchanged a look, and Nate stepped back. The door was shut firmly.
“I think he found a different place to live,” she observed as they headed back down the empty steps.
“And made damn sure no one around here talked about him after he was gone.”
Spying an ancient stooped man sweeping the porch a couple doors down, she hurried toward him. “Excuse me.” She saw his lips moving. Couldn’t hear what he was saying until she drew much closer.
“Don’t know nuthin’. Don’t see nuthin’.”
“Yeah.” She blew out a disgusted breath as she turned back to rejoin Nate. “There’s a lot of that going around.”
“He’s not far,” Nate said after they’d gotten back into the car. “He can’t be and still be able to run his business.”
“Think Randolph was working the protection profit angle with Emmons?”
“He was his arresting officer,” Nate pointed out, turning the key in the ignition. “On the other hand, as such, he was in a perfect position to make sure evidence disappeared before the appeal. Maybe that’s how he worked out the deal with him.” He pulled away from the curb. “At any rate, even if we get to talk to Juicy again, I’m not going to be able to ask any questions like that. But I’d sure like to ask a few regarding Lamont.”
“He’ll have to come up for air sometime.” It took effort to tamp down her impatience. “A man like him doesn’t trust his business dealings to underlings for long.”
“Earlier you said you had time for a couple stops. Did you have somewhere else in mind?”
She turned toward him in the seat, as much as the belt would allow. “When I found Tory Baltes’s obituary earlier today, it listed a surviving sister, a Carly Williams. I’ve got her address. We could always stop by and see if she’s more forthcoming about her sister than Juicy’s neighbors are about him.”
As it turned out, Carly Williams had plenty to say in answer to their questions. And all of it was delivered in a selfrighteous half sneer that did little to endear her to Risa.
“I don’t like speaking ill of the dead.” The bone-thin woman spoke the words with the relish reserved for people who thrived on doing just that. “Tory and I took different paths all our lives. She followed a path of self-indulgence and it eventually destroyed her. Tragic, but
I used her as an example with my kids and now with my grandkids. Straying from the path of the Lord leaves us stumbling in darkness.” She turned away from the screen door then to check on the welfare of the three children sitting in a row on the couch, eyes all glued in the same direction. The sound of cartoons could be heard.
“Do you remember what she did after her business burned down? How’d she make a living?”
The woman patted her graying bun and gave a slight sniff. “Not sure the bar was ever her business to begin with. I think that man she took up with gave her the cash for it. Had her put it in her name, and I told her at the time, there’s no good reason a man does that, unless he’s trying to hide something. Did she listen?”
Obviously the question was meant to be rhetorical. Carly didn’t wait for an answer. “He was bad news from the start, and I told her that, too. He’d been in prison and he didn’t make his living any way that I could see, so where’d that money come from? She was doomed to come to a bad end from the day she met him. And she should have known better, with a kid to take care of and all.”
“So the boy didn’t belong to Fredericks?”
The woman shook her head hard enough that it should have set her hairdo to unraveling. Not a strand moved. Risa was beginning to believe it was shellacked in place. “Can’t tell you where the kid came from, but he appeared long before she took up with that Fredericks. I will say,” and the words were uttered so grudgingly they appeared painful for her, “he was good enough to the boy. Sammy idolized him. Was real broken up when he died. I always figured it was drugs brought Fredericks and Tory together. She’d had her own problems with that stuff before, but after his death, she just spiraled further and further downward.” For the first time a hint of true emotion flickered over her face. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough with her. Might have been a bit too strong in my opinions back then. But she sort of pulled away. When I heard she’d overdosed, I hadn’t seen her in almost a year.”
“What happened to her son?”
A pious expression crossed the woman’s face. “Well, it was my Christian duty to raise my sister’s boy, so I did my best. No matter that we didn’t get a dime to take him in, either. Tory certainly didn’t leave anything behind when she died. But things didn’t work out. My husband hurt his back and was on disability. He and Sammy never did get on together. And he was just all the time causing problems with my own two kids. Things got tight and we had to give him over to Social Services. They treated him right,” she hastened to say. “They got families who take kids like that, with nowhere else to go.”
It was impossible not to feel a tug of sympathy for a long ago young boy who lost everything in a few short years. The man who’d taken an interest in him. His mother. And the only other living relatives he had.
“Do you have an address for Sammy now? Know where we can find him?”
“He’s in Bethany Alliance Cemetery, buried right next to his mother. We didn’t have the money for a proper stone, but there’s a marker on his grave. We did right by the boy in death, even though he never had much use for us after he was grown.”
Risa’s heart dropped to the vicinity of her stomach. “Sammy Baltes is dead?”
The woman nodded, and if she felt a shred of sorrow over the thought, it didn’t show in her expression. “Car crash three years ago. And I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that boy was headed for a bad end, in any case. There was a slyness about that one. You ask me, he didn’t care a bit about anyone but himself.”
“So you identified the body?” Nate asked.
She lifted one bony shoulder. “I identified the car. It was registered to him. Wasn’t much I could do with the body. The car rolled several times before bursting into flames. What was left of Sammy was burnt to a crisp.”
Johnny waited for Hans to speak. And the longer the silence stretched, the uneasier he got. “You don’t have to worry,” he repeated as the older man stared at the untouched beer sitting in front of him. “I could tell from the questions that the task force is running in circles. They don’t have anything solid to tie me to the others. And, of course, they know nothing about you and Juan.” He thought that was worth mentioning. Johnny wasn’t the type to rat out the other members of the group. Hans should trust him on that.
But when the other man shifted his gaze from the bottle to him, trust wasn’t exactly the emotion Johnny read on his face. “You leavin’ anything out of the story, Johnny?”
“I told you every question they asked. Couple amateurs, which means we’re going to have to nail this cocksucker ourselves. McGuire couldn’t lead a bunch of Girl Scouts in a pissing contest, much less a task force.”
“He led the task force to you.” Deliberately the man picked up his beer. Drank.
Irate now, Johnny growled, “That was Giovanni’s fault. I just read the best way to deal with the situation and did damage control. I’m in front of this thing. I expected a little more support.”
“I’m sure you did.” There wasn’t a hint of friendliness in the other man’s gaze. “I’ll bet Jonas did, too.”
Shock kept him silent. Hans smiled. A chilling stretch of the lips. “I’ve been around long enough to have friends in lots of different districts. I hear things. Blew himself away with his own gun, but maybe you were there, too, huh? Convinced him to do it? What was the bullet in his chest for, insurance? You were afraid they might be able to pack his brains back together again?”
“That’s not the way it happened.” He couldn’t believe this. Hans never looked at him that way. Talked to him that way. He’d brought Johnny into the group. Groomed him for the position. “I just went over there to talk to him. Iron things out between us. He pulled out a gun and what was I supposed to do? I thought the motherfucker was going to kill me, so of course I drew on him. I didn’t figure he was going to blow his own brains out.” He pulled the folded-up sheets that he’d taken from Jonas’s home out of his pocket. Smoothed them out for Hans to read. “Look at this, he was going to fucking rat us all out. Take the easy way out for himself and leave us holding the bag. I didn’t go over there planning any of this, but I damned sure took care of it. The way I’ve always taken care of problems.”
“Yes.” For a moment Johnny thought finally Hans was seeing sense. Until he went on. “Exactly the way you’ve always taken care of problems. Use an elephant gun to kill a mosquito, that’s your fuckin’ motto.”
Johnny snatched up the papers, crumpled them in his fist. “Fuck you. Fuck you.” He was nearly trembling with rage. “Don’t you think the motherfucking Cop Killer would love this? To see us turning on each other? You gonna let that cocksucker win?”
Picking up the bottle, Hans took a long drink. Set it down and looked at it contemplatively. “No,” he finally said. “That’s not what I’m gonna do. But right now we have to be smart. There’s too much attention so we have to stop our outside business practices. As of now.”
Johnny’s jaw dropped. But he wasn’t given a chance to object. “How do you know you weren’t followed here? McGuire could have put a tail on you. That pulls me into things, you get that, right?” Hans shook his head. “It’s over. For all of us. We pull away from our associates. Cut all ties. With each other, too. The three of us.” He looked at Johnny and added, not unkindly, “They’re looking at you so you’re poison for me and Juan. Maybe it’s not fair, but that’s the hand we’re dealt. Don’t contact me again. Don’t contact either of us.”
He slid out of the bench seat of the booth. Turned and shuffled toward the back door. Johnny watched him in disbelief. Hans would come back. He never left a partial beer behind. He’d never leave Johnny behind.
But as the door closed after the man, and five minutes stretched into ten, Johnny was forced to admit Hans had done just that.
And for the first time, he felt totally alone.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record.” Nate pulled into Jerry Muller
’s driveway and tried to avoid looking at the charred structure on the other side of it. “I didn’t mind taking you to the hospital. It was closer to Williams’s place than it would have been for you to return to the station house for your car.”
“And this place is across the city from the hospital, and even farther from my vehicle.”
He aimed a level stare at her. “The last time I watched you drive away, you barely managed to make it out of a burning house alive. Consider me extra security.”
Because he was fairly certain he didn’t want to hear any response she would make to that, he got out of the car and headed for the side door of the house.
But it was impossible for him to wait for her there and not sneak a look at the home that could have been her coffin.
He’d have to walk all around the structure to get a clearer picture of the damage, but what he could see from here was enough to have his chest hollowing out.
The side facing them would have held the bedrooms. And the fire had gutted the area. The outside wall was all but destroyed. Parts of the roof had caved in. And the thought that Risa could have been caught in that . . . unaware of what lay in wait until the smoke had already ensured that she’d never regain consciousness . . . A muscle clenched in his jaw as his mind skirted the thought.
She joined him on the step and followed the direction of his gaze. And he thought he saw a hint of nerves in her expression when she looked at him. “Sometimes you don’t question luck. You just accept it.”
“And sometimes,” he said grimly, as he reached out to rap at the door, “luck runs out. Which is why you’re not by yourself tonight.”
The door was opened then and Nate blinked, his attention diverted by the guy in the doorway.
Stocky, about five-eight, the man’s receding hairline was in no danger of being duplicated anywhere else on his body. His tropical print shirt was open to his navel, and the gold chains he wore were half hidden in the thicket of fur that covered his chest. He bore the slightest resemblance to an ewok of Star Wars fame. Nate slid a sideways glance to Risa. She’d let her mother stay here?