by Robert Greer
From his bay window overlooking the park he could see people jogging and a woman pushing a stroller. Just to the right of a towering maple tree he loved to watch, especially during the change of seasons, were several young men, college boys, he suspected, playing Frisbee.
He watched the activity in the park for several more minutes before walking back to his bedroom. Stepping inside and kneeling beside his bed, he thought about the advice he’d given young, war-damaged CJ Floyd earlier that day and wondered whether that advice would be enough to sustain the young man through the bumpy readjustment period that was facing him. Hoping it would be, he stretched an arm beneath the bed to grab hold of the duffel bag. Grunting as he pulled it toward him, he let out a truncated sneeze triggered by the thick layer of dust that covered the long-undisturbed bag. He sneezed again as he unzipped the army-surplus bag, fumbled around inside, and extracted two boxes of shotgun shells and a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. Laying the shotgun aside on the floor, he reached back inside the bag and pulled out a .38 long-barrel, the kind big-city police departments had been so fond of in the 1940s and early 1950s. He set the .38 aside and zipped the duffel bag back up. It had been a long time since he’d held a weapon. Longer still since he’d killed someone. But if forced to kill, he knew he still could.
Shoving the duffel bag back beneath the bed, he rose with both weapons cradled securely under his amputation stump, then released them onto his bed. He thought about returning to his bay window to catch a final glimpse of the sunset, but when he craned to look beyond his bedroom doorway, he could see that it was already too late. Congress Park was on the downside of darkness. He’d have to enjoy the sunset view another day.
CJ hadn’t had as restful a night’s sleep as the one he’d just awakened from in weeks. Uncertain exactly what had precipitated the full night of slumber, free of the flashbacks and energy-expending tossing and turning, he simply thanked his lucky stars. He thought the luxury might be in part due to the fact that he’d gone to bed earlier than usual after passing on a trip to Trundle’s Pool Hall for some eight ball with his best friend, Roosevelt Weeks. He suspected that the uninterrupted night of rest was also linked to the fact that his Uncle Ike had informed him as they’d polished off a dinner of ham hocks, French-fried sweet potatoes, cornbread, and collard greens the previous evening that he wanted CJ to join him in the bail bonding business.
It wasn’t a job CJ had lobbied for. In fact, he’d been toying with the idea of starting college, but by throwing in with his uncle, a man whom CJ idolized in spite of his imperfections, he’d at least have an immediate paycheck and some job stability.
The one thing he was certain had sparked his night of unbroken rest, however, was his encounter with the positive-thinking Wiley Ames. As Ames had said succinctly during their discussions the previous day, whether he became a bail bondsman, a teacher, a lawyer, or a mechanic, he’d never again have to start each day knowing that his mission would be to seek out and kill his fellow man.
Wiley Ames watched a street sweeper swish its way south down Larimer Street before turning west on Twenty-first Street and heading toward the mountains. It was just past 5:30 a.m., and only quietness was left in the sweeper’s wake. Letting himself in the front door of GI Joe’s, Ames tugged at one of the straps on the backpack he was wearing, then walked in the semidarkness toward the rear of the pawnshop. Glancing briefly toward his Wall of the West, he jiggled the backpack off, catching it one-handed before it hit the floor.
Frustrated and sleepy-eyed, he was responding to a 4 a.m. page. He’d been carrying the doctor’s-style pager for nearly a year, and although he often cursed the device, he’d come to realize that it helped with his business dealings. He’d been the one who’d initially set up the pager-first communication system with his business partner, Quan Lee Chin, telling Chin that he was never to contact Ames by phone without paging him first.
Ames had known the gangly, six-foot-six-inch, sunken-cheeked Chin, a refugee from the homeland that he doggedly insisted Ames call Taiwan, not Formosa, since Chin had first appeared at GI Joe’s one winter afternoon two years earlier, looking for old movie posters. Three visits later and after considerable probing from Ames, Chin had admitted that from his very first visit to the pawnshop, he’d been looking not for movie posters but for rare Chinese artifacts. What could only loosely be described as a friendship grew between the two men, and when Ames somehow learned that Chin was a concert cellist who, during his first visit to GI Joe’s, had been in Denver unsuccessfully auditioning for a seat with the Denver Symphony, he had Chin bring in his cello and play for him.
Once, after Chin had rummaged around the pawnshop for over an hour before finally leaving without making a purchase, Harry Steed pointedly said to Ames, “Your Chinaman friend sure looks around a lot to never spend a dime. What’s he after, anyway?”
“A big score,” Ames responded.
In the sixteen months since then Ames and Steed had sold the man who they now knew to have been a musical prodigy everything from Chinese sewing baskets to badly carved imitation-ivory elephant tusks. Only once during those visits had Chin shown up with anyone else. It had been a snowy early-spring visit when he’d purchased an 1899-vintage Oliver “standard visible” typewriter while the woman who had accompanied Chin never moved from just inside the pawnshop’s front door.
Grunting and kneeling, Ames unzipped his backpack and nervously fumbled through it. His hand shook as, clutching his .38, he called out in a surprisingly loud voice, “That you, Chin?” in response to three knocks at the back door.
“Yes,” came the barely audible reply.
“Step back from the door and I’ll let you in,” said Ames, walking to the back door, his .38 firmly in hand.
He swung the door open to a sudden burst of sunshine and the startled-looking Chin, who stood a few feet from the door clutching a toaster-oven-sized cardboard box under one arm. “What’s with the pistol?”
Ames ignored the question. “Move back a few steps and let me check out the alley.”
Chin took three steps backward into the alley as Ames stepped through the doorway. Scanning the alley and eyeing the box Chin was carrying, Ames said, “First time, last time, Chin. I don’t know how I ever let you talk me into this deal in the first place. Now, let’s get the hell back in the store. You can never be too careful. Besides—”
A single shot from a semiautomatic handgun cut Ames’s response short. Collapsing to his knees, he fell face forward into a pothole near the alley’s edge. The jagged asphalt edge cut a three-inch-long gash in his forehead as blood oozed from the pencil-eraser-sized entry wound in his neck and his lower jaw twitched. Eight seconds later both of his eyes rolled back in his head, and Wiley Ames gasped a final truncated breath.
Clutching the cardboard box like a football under his right arm, Chin had sprinted twenty-five yards up the alley when the shooter squeezed off a second round. The bullet found a home a little higher and more to the right than the shooter had expected, severing Quan Lee Chin’s right pulmonary artery. Chin took three final steps before he fell onto his side, grabbed his belly where the tumbling bullet had lodged in his duodenum, and expired in under a minute.
All in all, the killings had taken less than forty seconds. In less than another minute, the killer had Chin’s cardboard box securely in hand and had vanished from the alley, swallowed by an archway that framed the narrow passageway between two buildings that fronted Larimer Street’s neighbor to the west, Market Street. The day had become a little brighter, and the morning was silent once again.
“You lookin’ as spry as a cat on midsummer highway asphalt,” Ike Floyd said, looking up at CJ after stabbing his spoon into the wedge of cornbread he’d just plunked into a buttermilk-filled mason jar.
“I feel pretty good, for a change.” CJ stared at the piece of dry toast he’d just shoved aside on the kitchen table, then eyed the thick, grainy mixture in the mason jar. Stirring his spoon around in the unappealing concoctio
n, Ike, a wiry-haired tree stump of a black man with salt-and-pepper hair and dark brown sunken eyes that matched the color of his skin, said, “You slept better ’cause you knew you had a job to look forward to?”
CJ simply nodded.
“Even so, it’s still awful early for you to be up.” Ike glanced across the room at the hand-carved school clock he’d brought back from Korea. The clock was the only souvenir he’d returned to the States with after serving fourteen months as a sergeant in the all-black 159th Field Artillery Battalion during the Korean War. “Ain’t but eight o’clock. You generally been sleepin’ in ’til ten.”
“Not today, and hopefully not tomorrow or the day after that,” said CJ.
“Good. ’Cause you’re gonna need all the rest you can muster when I put you out there on the street. I’ll start you out slow, hitchin’ up nickel-and-dime bonds and handlin’ baby skips—nothin’ too serious at first.”
“Fine by me,” said CJ. He was well schooled in the jargon, if not the nuts and bolts, of the bail bonding business, and he was aware that nickel-and-dime bonds were everyday postings that involved first-time petty offenses such as DUIs, minor property-damage cases, and thievery a notch or two above petty larceny. CJ figured he could handle those.
Bond-skip cases, whether the baby variety or not, were another matter, and contrary to his uncle’s assessment, as far as CJ was concerned, “baby” skips didn’t exist. He knew enough about the bail bonding business to know that bond-skip cases of any sort could turn deadly. Ike had even developed a ranking system for bond-skip cases. Baby skips involved arrogant first-time offenders, well-heeled drunks, or doped-out college kids without the street smarts to know they’d be hunted down by a pro if they skipped out on their bond. Smartmouths, no matter how minor the offense, always moved up a notch on Ike’s list.
“Yearling” skippers, a term Ike had borrowed from the cattle industry, were Ike’s equivalent of troublesome, rambunctious year-old cattle. Included in that category were people who had either the gall or the stupidity to skip out on bonds for more serious transgressions, including everything from minor assault to aggravated robbery.
Ike reserved his “senior” skipper status for career criminals, repeat bond skippers, murderers, arsonists, and any of the tangle of thugs, regardless of their transgression, whom he considered a menace to the cherished, mostly black Five Points Denver community he’d grown up in since moving to Denver from Cincinnati at the age of ten. There was a fourth category Ike had no name for, and one he rarely mentioned. It was well known around the Mile High City that Ike Floyd never posted bond for pimps or skip traced suspected rapists. The rationale behind that choice, according to those who knew him, was that the love of his life had once been a prostitute, and he was afraid he might kill anyone capable of crushing a woman’s soul.
Spooning up a generous helping of gooey cornbread and buttermilk, Ike asked, “Where you headed this early, anyway?”
“Downtown to that pawnshop I told you about last night.”
“To have another shot at findin’ that mysterious missin’ license plate?”
“If it’s there.”
“Hope that one-armed guy don’t peg you for a thief.”
“I don’t think he will,” said CJ, dusting off his hands.
“Why not?”
“Because, just like you, for one reason or another, he’s in my corner.” CJ flashed his uncle a quick wink, grabbed an apple from a nearby bowl, offered Ike a clenched-fist salute, and rushed out the kitchen door into the sun-drenched autumn day.
Ike smiled and spooned up a large dollop of cornbread and buttermilk. He’d been in CJ’s corner since the day CJ’s California-bound mother, Ike’s drug-addicted baby sister, had dropped the boy on the drafty old Victorian’s doorstep with only a five-word note: “Take care of him, Ike.”
Neither CJ, who’d been just a few days past two at the time, nor Ike had had any idea that they would never see Ida Floyd alive again. There was a generous piece of his beloved sister in CJ, and for Ike, who’d been fighting a losing battle with alcoholism and arthritis for more than a decade, his nephew and a former prostitute named Marguerite Larkin were pretty much the only things in the world that mattered to him.
Chapter 4
The first things that caught CJ’s eye and let him know something was wrong at GI Joe’s were the two black unmarked but unmistakable police sedans blocking access to the 2100 block of Larimer Street. He’d driven over, feeling relaxed behind the wheel of his two-tone, cream-on-red, drop-top 1957 Chevy Bel Air, a car that he and Rosie Weeks had lovingly spent a year restoring and finished just weeks before CJ had left for his initial tour of Vietnam.
That relaxed feeling suddenly disappeared. A uniformed cop stood in front of the two black sedans, waving traffic east onto Twenty-second Street toward Lawrence Street. Neither of the two drivers ahead of CJ asked the burly, thick-mustached cop why they were being diverted. They simply moved on as directed, but, ever inquisitive, CJ pulled the Bel Air to a stop a few feet from the cop, rolled down his window, and asked, “What’s going on up ahead?”
“Police business. Move it along, cowboy,” the cop said, eyeing CJ’s Stetson.
CJ ignored the directive and pointed down the street. “Have a robbery or something further up Larimer?”
“Move it along, son,” the increasingly irritated cop said.
CJ craned to see past him and glimpsed a third police vehicle parked just beyond a couple of barricades that blocked access to the building next door to GI Joe’s. “Something happen at GI Joe’s?”
Frowning and with his right hand inching toward the butt of his holstered service revolver, the cop bellowed, “Get the hell moving, buster, now!”
CJ smiled and called out, “Have a nice day, officer,” shaving the Bel Air as close to the fuming policeman as he dared while he turned onto Twenty-second Street.
Unlike Ike, CJ had no deep-seated hatred of policemen. But, also unlike Ike, he’d never had a rogue bond-skipping, drug-dealing cop on the run try to kill him; in fact, he hadn’t had to deal with much along those lines except the occasional racial slur tossed his way by some insecure redneck authority figure in blue. He was pretty much neutral when it came to the police, but lockstep-obedient he wasn’t. There’d been trouble at GI Joe’s or Pasternack’s next door, he was certain—trouble enough to warrant cordoning off an entire city block, and he intended to have a close-up look at the problem.
Removing his signature Stetson, which he’d been wearing since the tenth grade, as much to set himself apart from the sheep-like long-haired white kids and their Afro-coiffed black counterparts as anything else, CJ set the hat on the passenger seat. He’d taken to wearing cowboy boots and a gambler’s vest by the time he was a high school senior, and the boots, vest, and hat had become his youthful trademark by graduation. He’d carried that tradition to Vietnam, and as far as most of his shipmates knew, the boots, vest, Stetson, jeans, and a couple of Western shirts were the only civilian clothes he owned. Only Henry Bales, a kindred-spirit white shipmate who’d been raised on a Durango, Colorado, cattle ranch and who was now a premed student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, knew that CJ had a stateside closet filled with silk pajamas, custom-made shirts and robes, and a half-dozen tailor-made suits that he’d purchased on R&R in Thailand during his first tour of duty.
In CJ’s mind, there was no need for most people to truly know him. And one unfortunate taunting gang-banger from high school had learned when CJ had fractured his jaw with a powerful right jab—a punch that Ike, a onetime amateur boxing champion, had taught him—that it was possible to end up in the hospital with his jaws wired shut for making fun of the wrong person’s clothes.
CJ was comfortable in his own skin. So comfortable, in fact, that Henry Bales always claimed that, given the urban cowboy that he was, CJ had been born one hundred years too late.
Glancing into his rearview mirror, CJ caught a final glimpse of the traffic-directing cop be
fore turning into a vacant lot at the corner of Twenty-second and Curtis Streets. As he slipped out of the Bel Air, he thought about something that he and Henry Bales, who’d been a corpsman, had had drilled into their heads by an old navy gunnery chief: Knowing the lay of the land’s always an advantage. Use it. That was exactly what he planned to do. As a teenager, he’d scoured Denver’s Lower Downtown pawnshops and thrift shops, most of which sat in the heart of what had been skid row before urban renewal came along. He’d visited them so often, in fact, that he knew every nook, cranny, archway, and crevice within a ten-square-block area. Even in the face of Denver’s current massive Lower Downtown redevelopment project, he had an advantage. He knew how to weave his way between buildings, down alleys, and around rubble to get to GI Joe’s with only the remotest possibility of detection.
Although he suspected that the cops were investigating a robbery at GI Joe’s or Pasternack’s, he knew he could be wrong. The one good thing, he told himself as he started his trek back toward Larimer Street, was that since he hadn’t seen an ambulance, likely no one had been injured.
He quickly headed west, threading his way between empty old buildings that hadn’t yet been bulldozed by DURA, past archways and sagging facades, from one protective building corner to another on his way back to Larimer Street. It took him the better part of five minutes to work his way down side streets and west beyond cordoned-off Larimer and Market Streets. When he finally reached a passageway that he knew led into an alley between the two streets, he let out a sigh of relief.