The Fraud

by Brad Parks

  CHAPTER 41

  Blue Mask had his gun turned sideways, because he thought it looked cooler that way. And he was holding it at head shot level, because that’s what he was about to deliver.

  He walked around from his side of the car, feeling the smoothness of the trigger with his finger. The driver had opened the door but was struggling to get out of the car, for some reason. As soon as he was clear of it, Blue Mask was going to drop him so they could get the hell out of here.

  Then Blue Mask saw the driver wasn’t a him.

  No matter. The sooner he got this over with, the better.

  “All right, all right,” the woman was saying. “The keys are in the car. Just take it.”

  She was finally on her feet now. Black Mask had backed away to give her room to get out of the car. Blue Mask was even with the front tire and had stopped walking. He had his feet wide and braced for kickback. A shooter’s stance.

  “Yo, this ain’t right,” Black Mask said.

  “What you mean?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be no shorty. Especially not no pregnant shorty.”

  “Don’t matter,” Blue Mask said.

  “No, no,” Black Mask said. “You don’t understand. The message I got said it was supposed to be a dude named Carter Ross. This ain’t—”

  “Carter Ross,” the woman said.

  “Shut up,” Black Mask said. “I ain’t talking to you. You got nothing to say.”

  Blue Mask still had the woman’s head lined up nicely with the barrel of the gun. One squeeze would be all it took.

  “Don’t shoot her, dawg,” Black Mask said.

  “Why not?”

  “Dawg, she’s pregnant.”

  “Yeah, so?” Blue Mask asked. He was actually kind of excited by the idea. If killing a white banker had gotten that much attention, imagine what killing a white pregnant lady would do.

  “It’s just … this ain’t who we’re supposed to be doin’, that’s all,” Black Mask said. “Let’s just take the car and—”

  Then Blue Mask watched as a large, dark stain crept down the woman’s pants, sopping her legs.

  “Aw, man, now look what you done,” Blue Mask groused. “She pissed herself.”

  “You dumbass,” Black Mask shot back. “She ain’t peeing. Her water broke. She’s gonna have a baby.”

  “Like, right now?”

  “Yeah. You ignorant or something? Don’t you know nothing about babies?”

  Blue Mask paused for a moment. A cruel smile appeared out of the oval slot of his mouth hole. “Yeah, I know one thing about babies.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you can sell them.”

  The woman began screaming, “Help,” but no more than the “H” and the “E” had gotten out when Blue Mask leapt at her and jammed the barrel of the gun against her lips.

  “You shut your mouth, shorty, or I’ll drop your ass right here and we’ll cut that baby out of you,” he growled.

  “You trippin’?” Black Mask demanded.

  Blue Mask didn’t take his eyes off the woman as he spoke. “I met this dude in prison. He told me that for a healthy white baby, you could get, like, fifty thousand, easy. And that’s for, like, a white trash baby. For a baby like this, from a fancy lady in a Volvo? I bet we could get a hundred.”

  “You definitely trippin’. Don’t you know nothing about women having babies? They do all this screamin’ and stuff. And it lasts for, like, an hour. Where we gonna go that she can do that?”

  “That’s why I was asking if you knew who lived here,” Blue Mask said. “She can have the baby right here. This is my sister’s house.”

  “Your sister!?”

  Blue Mask could hear the surprise in his partner’s voice. “Yeah, dawg. But she’ll be cool.”

  Black Mask let out a short, huffing chuckle. “Yeah, I know she’ll be cool. She’s the one who’s been giving us all these jobs.”

  Now it was Blue Mask’s turn to be surprised. He said nothing. Just smiled even wider as he kept the gun pressed to the woman’s mouth.

  So much for his sister going legit. All that fancy education and all those fancy people she hung around, and all it did was give her a fancier hustle.

  “That dude, the one who told you about selling babies. He still in prison?” Black Mask asked.

  “Yeah. But I can get to him. He’ll make some calls, hook us up.”

  Blue Mask wasn’t lying. There were nearly as many cell phones inside a prison as outside of it.

  “Come on,” Blue Mask said. “Let’s take her inside. We gonna sell us a baby.”

  CHAPTER 42

  I ran down the steps of Tujuka Okeke’s house, with Sweet Thang right behind me.

  My phone was already at my ear. I had hit the speed dial for Tina’s number. After a brief moment of silence, the ringing began.

  One ring. Two.

  “Come on, Tina,” I said.

  Three rings. Four. Then voice mail.

  We were already at my car, which I unlocked using the remote access button. Hakeem Kuti, Obatala Insurance’s faithful private investigator, was ambling toward us with no particular speed.

  “I need you to drive,” I said to Sweet Thang. “And drive fast.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Mr. Kuti, I don’t have time for questions,” I said in his direction. “But if you follow us right now, we’ll lead you to the people who have been at the middle of the fraud you’re investigating.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kuti said, and immediately began jogging back to his car.

  I ran around to the passenger side and climbed in. I jammed the key in the ignition and cranked it hard clockwise just as Sweet Thang sat down.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Start driving north,” I said, having faith in Sweet Thang’s knowledge of Newark’s street grid that she would know which way that was. “I’ll get you an exact address in a second.”

  I hit the speed dial for Tina again. As Sweet Thang began the process of extracting the Malibu from its too-tight parking spot, my phone repeated itself: four rings, then voice mail.

  “Hurry,” I said to Sweet Thang, who still wasn’t out of the spot yet. “You’re not driving Walter anymore. I don’t care about my damn bumpers.”

  She started getting more aggressive with her maneuvering, tapping the cars in front of us and behind us. I texted Tina a “Call me ASAP 911,” then switched over to my phone’s e-mail to get Zabrina’s address.

  There was a new message from Tina.

  Walking out the door now. I’ll get those documents on the way. Also—and don’t freak out—I’ve been having contractions all afternoon. I just didn’t want to tell you because it’s not a big deal. They’re still eight minutes apart. We don’t have to go to the hospital until my water breaks and I’d rather labor at home for a while. Again, don’t freak. But it’s probably going to happen tonight! See you at your place. XOXO.

  The message was time-stamped at 7:43 P.M. If she actually walked out the door at that moment, she would have been at Zabrina’s house by eight, easily. God knows what happened to her after that.

  “Oh, Jesus, she’s in labor,” I said.

  “What?” Sweet Thang said. She had finally gotten the car out and had swung into traffic.

  “She’s been in labor all afternoon. I knew it. I knew it. Well, okay, I didn’t know it. My mother knew it. But that’s another story. I just thought Tina was a little distracted so I asked her if she was having contractions. But of course she said no, no, no, and—”

  I halted my own rant. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I turned my attention back to my phone instead and gave Sweet Thang the address to Zabrina’s house.

  As Sweet Thang plugged it into her phone’s GPS and began following the soothing voice’s directions to our destination, I turned to the Newark Rotary Club Web site. Given how I had misfired in my suspicion of Fanwood Country Club, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t making the same mis
take with Rotary. I’d just have to prevail on Buster Hays to help me.

  Going tab by tab through the Web site, I pulled names off as fast as I could, pasting them into an e-mail that had Buster’s address at the top. Then I went to the Rotary Club Facebook page and stole more names. After a few minutes, I had maybe a hundred of them. That had to be a nearly complete roster of the Newark Rotary Club, or at least a decent enough sample size for what I needed Buster to do with it.

  Immediately after I hit the send button on the e-mail, I dialed Buster’s number.

  “Yeah, Ivy, whaddyuwant?” Buster said in a typically languorous tone.

  “Buster, I don’t have time to explain anything, but trust me when I tell you this is life or death,” I said quickly. “I just sent you an e-mail with names of Newark Rotary Club members. I need you to call your task force guy and ask him if he recognizes any of them names as belonging to carjack victims and I need it, like, yesterday. Can you please help me?”

  My performance must have been convincing, because for once Buster didn’t use a request for a favor as an excuse to bust my balls.

  “Got it,” he said. “I’ll get right back to you.”

  Then he hung up. I turned my attention to Sweet Thang’s driving, which was too slow and too legal.

  “This is not a time to pay attention to traffic laws,” I said.

  “I don’t … I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Zabrina Coleman-Webster wasn’t going to give me documents when I showed up at her house tonight,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she was going to kill me. And I sent Tina to pick up those documents in my place.”

  Sweet Thang pressed the Malibu’s gas pedal down and within a few seconds we were traveling at twice our previous speed. I assumed Kuti was still close on our tailpipe and could keep up. Following people is part of what private investigators do.

  I didn’t know what we were going to face when we reached Zabrina’s house, just that those carjackings had been carried out by two armed men. I needed to do something to even up our odds.

  “Do you have Dave Gilbert’s number programmed in your phone?” I asked as she began slaloming through traffic.

  “Yeah,” she said, and handed me her phone, which had been on her lap. I briefly interrupted the turn-by-turn directions, dipped into her contacts, and found Gilbert. I then returned her to GPS mode.

  On my own phone, I called Gilbert and began talking him through my current situation. There were two things about the man that made him appealing to me in this moment of need.

  One, that he owed me a favor.

  Two, that he owned a shotgun.

  CHAPTER 43

  Blue Mask rapped on the front door to his sister’s house in a series of sharp, insistent bursts. When it opened, he smiled.

  “Hey, Zee. Surprise!” he said.

  Zabrina Coleman-Webster took a step back. “What are you idiots doing? You’re not supposed to—”

  “Come on, dawg,” Black Mask said. “Just get inside.”

  Black Mask had his gun to the pregnant woman’s back and was using it to push her into the house. He wasn’t waiting for anyone’s invitation.

  “Who the hell is this?” Zabrina demanded as the woman entered the foyer.

  “We were hoping you could tell us that,” Black Mask said. “Because it sure as hell ain’t no Carter Ross.”

  Blue Mask marched up to his sister, backing her up against a wall. She was a head shorter. He used his height advantage to loom over her. “How come you didn’t tell me about your little side business, Zee? You think I couldn’t handle it? You think I was gonna dime you out or something?”

  She shoved his chest hard, moving him back a few feet. “Look, I cut you in, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but why didn’t you—”

  The woman moaned, staggered a few steps, clutched the railing of the staircase, and sunk to one knee. She brought her hand to her stomach and made a noise that came from somewhere deep in her throat.

  “Oh, Lord. She’s in labor,” Zabrina said, rushing over to the woman.

  “Yeah, you quick,” Blue Mask said.

  “We need to get her to a hospital,” Zabrina said.

  “Yes, please,” the woman grunted. “The baby is a breach. Hospital, please.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s a great idea,” Black Mask said. “We’ll drop her off at the hospital so she can have her baby, and then we’ll drop ourselves off at prison, because that’s where we’ll be spending the rest of our damn lives when she tells the cops about this.”

  The woman began, “I … I promise I won’t—”

  “Shut up,” Black Mask said. “I told you, you ain’t got nothing to say.”

  Blue Mask shifted his glance between his sister, his partner, and the woman, who had her eyes closed as she breathed through the rest of her contraction.

  “So what’s your plan?” Zabrina asked him.

  “She’s having the baby here,” Blue Mask said. “And then we’re going to sell it.”

  The woman made a terrible noise, but it wasn’t one that could be confused with a word.

  “What?” Zabrina said. “Are you … no way, not a chance.”

  “You sell stolen cars, I sell stolen babies,” Blue Mask said. “You got any other brilliant ideas? You’re the one who got us into this.”

  Blue Mask watched her nostrils flare, the way they did when she was a teenager and he was a little boy who had pissed her off somehow.

  “What I got you into was hustling insurance companies that have more money than they know what to do with anyway,” Zabrina said. “What I got you into was making a little flow on the side so we could get Mama out of the projects. What I got you into was something where no one would get hurt. You’re the one who got us into this mess when you started killing people.”

  “So when you was telling us to shoot that Carter Ross dude, that’s your idea of no one getting hurt?”

  “He’s a newspaper reporter who wouldn’t have gotten interested in any of this if you hadn’t killed that Nigerian guy and that banker.”

  Black Mask intervened: “Can y’all stop the family squabble and focus here for a second?”

  Zabrina exhaled noisily and paced around toward the woman, who had crumpled onto the floor and was lying on her side in a fetal position.

  “Come on. Let’s get her in bed or something,” Zabrina said, bending down toward the woman. “Girlfriend, you think you can get up? We’ll help you upstairs and get you in a bed or something.”

  The woman’s eyes were closed. Slowly, she opened them. She was making an effort to take deep, steady breaths, not always having success.

  “No stairs,” she huffed out between gasps. “I’m about to have another contraction.”

  “Damn,” Zabrina said. She looked up at the two men. “This baby is coming soon. Why don’t y’all boil some water and lay down some garbage bags and some sheets on the couch in the living room?”

  “Boil water?” Blue Mask said. “What is this, Little House on the Freakin’ Prairie?”

  “Just shut up and do it,” Zabrina shot back.

  “You know how to deliver a baby?” Black Mask asked, his tone more curious than challenging.

  “No. But at least I had one once. So just help me out here, bitches.”

  The woman huffed out, “Breach. The baby is breach.” No one paid much attention.

  Blue Mask turned to his colleague. “Sheets are in the closet at the top of the stairs. I’ll get the water going, then get the plastic bags.”

  Black Mask went for the stairs. Blue Mask walked into the kitchen. His ski mask was making his face hot and itchy, so he took it off and stuffed it in his pocket. It’s not like he had to worry about the woman in the other room identifying him.

  He was never going to let her live that long.

  CHAPTER 44

  Sweet Thang turned onto the street where Zabrina’s house was located and slowed when she was about halfway down the block.

/>   “This is it,” she said as we passed a rambling Victorian house perched on a small ridge. The steps leading up to the front porch were maybe five feet above street level. The porch itself was another five feet above that. It gave the house a fortresslike feel.

  Tina’s Volvo was still in the driveway. It was empty, but seeing it gave me some hope. If her car was here, chances were good she was here, too.

  I was operating under the assumption that the two men who had killed Joseph Okeke and Kevin Tiemeyer had been waiting to ambush me the moment I pulled into the driveway. There would have been some confusion when the person in the driver’s seat was not some white guy, as they had been told it would be, but a pregnant lady.

  What would they do at that point? I didn’t know, of course. That was just the start of where this whole operation got tricky.

  “Okay. Drive down to the corner,” I instructed. “I don’t know if Zabrina is here, or if she has a crew here or what. But if they are, I don’t want them to be alerted we’re coming.”

  “Shouldn’t we just call the cops?” Sweet Thang asked.

  “And tell them what, exactly? That my girlfriend isn’t answering her cell phone? We don’t know anything for sure.”

  “All right. So what’s your plan?”

  It was a good question. Here I was, riding up like the cavalry, with no idea where to tell my horses to charge. It was hard to base a plan on speculation.

  Sweet Thang had reached the stop sign at the end of the block. “Just stop here and let me out,” I said.

  As I spilled out of the Malibu, I was semiblinded by the headlights of Hakeem Kuti’s Ford Fusion. I trotted around to his window, which rolled down as I approached.

  “The place where I think our carjacking crew might be is about twelve houses up,” I said, pointing in that direction. “It’s the one with the Volvo in the driveway. Want to come have a look with me?”

  Kuti’s face was impassive; or, alternatively, the lack of light and his scars made it harder for me to read any emotion. But he nodded his head and pulled his car over to the side of the road, next to a fire hydrant.

  We walked up the block together and I gave him a quiet briefing on what I knew and what I suspected. When we reached Zabrina’s place, I veered out into the street and crouched behind a parked car. If anyone was inside the house, I didn’t want them to be able to see us.