He blinked swollen eyes at me. He looked like a fish you’d throw back. “At Lloyd’s headquarters?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell for?”
“Well, that’s what I’m going to check out. Do you have anything I could take that isn’t that .38 of yours? It’s louder than an elephant fart.”
“What’s wrong with your Browning?”
“I’d need to switch out barrels and I don’t want to take the time.”
He nodded and got into a drawer of his nightstand and handed me a six-inch item with an ebony handle and metal trim.
“A switchblade? What are you, Boyd—James fucking Dean?”
“Do you want it or not?”
“I want it.”
“Just be careful with it—cutting edge is razor sharp. Don’t hurt yourself. Try the switch.”
The stiletto blade popped out with a snap. Like a robot erection.
“Okay, thanks. Can I ask you one thing, Boyd?”
“Sure.”
“Are you a Shark or a Jet?”
I quickly climbed into a dark sweatshirt and black jeans and black sneakers and went out the back way, coming around the building. The street was dead. No traffic at all, stoplights in flashing mode; pavement was wet and shiny from street cleaning, reflecting the now lower-hanging Hunter’s Moon.
I crossed to the HQ side of the street, but didn’t bother trying the front door, going around to the alley instead. Parked back there along the building was a late-model Oldsmobile Toronado, army-green with a black vinyl top. Powerful ride, not inexpensive.
Nobody behind the wheel.
Nobody in the alley, either. With the unopened switchblade tight in my fist, I moved down to and around the parked Olds. Near the rear door to Coalition HQ, I paused. The door was closed, but its edges were bleeding light. I could hear muffled male voices. I drew closer and plastered my ear to the wood, but the door was thick and heavy and all I got for my effort was louder muffled talk.
But then the talk got even louder, and closer, and I darted away, slipping into the recess of a doorway behind the adjacent building.
Peeking carefully around the corner of my hiding place, I saw two white men emerge, one big in width and height both, the other slender and not tall but not small either. They wore topcoats and hats like it was 1952 but had a timeless gangster look—the big man had a face plump from pasta and hard from hurting people; and the slender one was mustached with a narrow face that was intelligent in a racetrack tout way. They might have looked corny to me if I couldn’t read how fucking dangerous they were. The slender one was counting money in an envelope, quickly, just giving it a second check, having no doubt already done so inside. The bigger guy was just watching. He liked money. Well, we had that in common.
The big guy opened the driver’s door and climbed behind the wheel, the slender one got in on the rider’s side, and the Toronado started up with a powerful engine throb and rolled by me. I had plastered myself against the door within my recess, enveloping myself in darkness. Or anyway I hoped I had. That big guy could take my switchblade away and hand it to the slender guy, who would pick his teeth with it while the big guy beat me to fucking death with an arm he tore off me.
I wasn’t unhappy to see them go.
Then I heard something that sounded like a key chain rattling, which is exactly what it was. André was locking up Coalition HQ’s rear door after his wee-hours meeting with business associates. He was in a black sharp-collared jumpsuit with red trim and no jacket, but his sleeves were long, so he should be okay in the chill.
Tucked under an arm—right out in the open—was a paper bag, its top folded over, just about the right size for a couple loaves of bread. Of course that wasn’t bread he was carrying away.
He was heading out of the alley when I called out, “André! Wait up.”
He swiveled and I was right there, a few yards from him, the switchblade hidden in my fist, blade still sleeping. If he ran or tried anything, it would wake up.
“Hey, it’s me. Jack. From work. We haven’t had a chance to rap yet.” Sarcastic but lightly so.
“White boy,” he said, voice like sandpaper, eyes diamond hard and rhinestone glittery, “what you wanna do is, walk away now. You wanna jus’ forget what you think you see. Those men? They nasty-ass men. You be very goddamn dead without tryin’.”
“The Reverend himself couldn’t have made a better speech, André. Stay cool. This is no hijacking. I’m not after whatever’s in that paper bag. Coke? Horse? Just don’t care.”
Nostrils flared in the pockmarked, sunken-cheeked puss. “Then why the fuck you standin’ there starin’ at me with that stupid face in the middle of the night?”
“Doesn’t matter what time of day it is, André, you got the same face. Like your face is always there, telling people like me that you’re still using.”
His eyes narrowed, losing none of their hardness. He was sorting through his options. I had no idea whether he had a weapon or not, but chances were he did.
“All I want to know is,” I said, “are you the top of the food chain? Are you cracking the whip or just another mule?”
Why did I want to know? I guessed there must be some part of me that wanted Reverend Lloyd not to be dirty. Some part of me that wanted to walk away from a job that didn’t suit my requirements. I wasn’t soft. Just fussy.
“Why, you think your white ass gettin’ a cut? Ain’t no way.”
“Did I say I wanted a cut of your end? Just tell me. Do you answer to somebody, or is this campus distribution scheme your own brainchild?”
He must not have had a weapon after all, because he flung the paper bag at me and its hard-packed contents hit me in the chest, startling me. That freed his hands, gave him the half-second he needed to rush me, putting a spiky shoulder into my belly and he took me down, hard, on my back.
Now I was looking up at him and damned if he didn’t have a knife, not a switchblade but a fucking combat knife, held in his fist in time-honored stabbing position.
I popped the blade and slashed across his throat, like a stock boy using a box-cutter, and his eyes opened wide, combat knife clattering to the alley floor, and the gash in his throat sprayed my face red, like a horrible spigot had been turned on all the way, and the warm coppery stuff was in my hair and all over my shirt and fucking everywhere, even in my eyes. At least it didn’t burn.
I shoved him off of me and he lay on his side with vacant eyes, the blood oozing from the gash but not really flowing anymore because his heart wasn’t pumping. I was a mess. A bloody mess. How the fuck had Jack the Ripper managed it, anyway?
My shirt and shoes I took off immediately, wrapping the latter in the former, so I wouldn’t leave bloody footprints. Then with all the care I could muster, I left the alley, bare-chested, in stocking feet, making sure as best I could that no cars were coming and nobody was on the sidewalk or in a window. I was shivering and some of it was the chill air. The loaves of dope I dumped down a sewer, the switchblade too, once I’d rubbed any fingerprints off.
Then I moved quickly, though not running, back to the apartment, the alley way. Up the back stairs and getting out of all of my clothes, underwear too, off of me and into the garbage bag with the clothing from the earlier fun and games. Then I took my third or was it fourth shower of the day, and leaned against the shower wall with both hands, my head under the spray and watched the blood go Psycho-ing down the drain.
Afterward, smudgy red was on the towel here and there, and I was bent over bare-ass adding it to the garbage bag of clothing-turned-evidence when Boyd came in. In his undies, finding me stark naked stuffing a bloody towel into the bag. His eyes opened as wide as their puffy pouches would allow.
“I’ll have to reimburse you for the switchblade,” I said.
THIRTEEN
The water in the YMCA pool was exactly the way I liked it, comfortable once you’d been in for a while, and not so immediately warm that you felt you’d fallen into
a great big bath. Just enough snap to the temperature to let you think, and I could stand some of that. Thinking, I mean, although swimming would fill the blank just as well.
As the Broker had suggested, I’d gone to the YMCA on Locust Street in downtown St. Louis, where a room had been booked and paid for, to be seen and to have a look at the cubicle where I’d supposedly been staying. The setup was that you always asked for your key at the desk and handed it in when you left. So between the various clerks, mostly part-timers, kids and the underemployed, it would be assumed I’d already been here.
At the pool, I had an “open swim” time to myself, just me and that echoey lap-lap-lap ambiance that I knew so well and the strangely soothing scent of chlorine in that world of reflecting water that helped me reflect.
Right now I was swimming freestyle with a stroke smooth enough to be envied by a high school champ, like the one I’d once been. At the same time, my mind was finding nothing smooth about how I’d been handling things lately. If you’re somebody who yells at the TV when the hero does something stupid, I can only remind you that this was not TV and I am not a hero.
A hero wouldn’t have impulsively broken ranks at that KKK meeting and caused fiery chaos to erupt. A hero wouldn’t have blundered into the aftermath of a drug deal and slit some bastard’s throat and gotten drenched in warm sticky red. I would have to do better.
Of course, doing better meant leaving St. Looie right now, and if the Broker advised that, I would not argue. What I would learn from this lively debacle was not to let myself be talked into coming out of the shadows where my gun and I belonged to get involved up-close-and-personal in the target’s life and his sphere of influence.
In the pre-dawn hours—after I was showered with blood and then showered blood off me—I’d told Boyd what had happened, more or less, in the alley behind Coalition HQ. The “less” part was that I left out that I’d confronted André, saying instead that he’d caught me eavesdropping.
“Well now,” Boyd said, “we have to scrap the job.”
We were in our underwear at the kitchen table again.
“Probably,” I admitted.
“No probably about it, Quarry.”
He was right, of course, if for no other reason than a staffer with his throat slit in the alley behind Coalition HQ unquestionably meant cops.
I said, “The thought of walking into that office and having to weather a bunch of questions from some St. Louis Columbo does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. I admit it. But what if I don’t show up today? Suddenly I’m a suspect. In a day or two, my background story blows up. They bring in sketch artists. My face is on the news. Think of it this way, Boyd—your partner’s face is on the news.”
The swelling had gone down some, but bruising and scrapes still made him look the monster in a Grade Z horror flick—particularly when he made a face, like he was doing now.
“Quarry, we can’t stick. We just can’t. We got five grand each out of what you did last night. Let’s cut our losses and count ourselves lucky.”
I flipped a hand. “Why don’t we hold off till we see how the morning goes down? And then we can call the Broker and get his take.”
He was shaking his head. “His take on you killing some colored drug dealer behind the target’s place? After he hears that, you think you’ll even still be on the Broker’s team?”
That sent my brain a quick image of Boyd and me and others I’d encountered in Broker’s network of damaged goods, all of us in basketball jerseys. With him as frustrated coach, yelling at the refs. But then I immediately realized the coach’s way of benching me in this game would be to have my ass killed.
“No, Boyd. That’s gotta be our little secret. Here’s what we tell him. We woke up this morning, and learned to our dismay about the murder of one of the Reverend’s staffers. An apparent drug deal gone wrong.”
“Yeah,” Boyd said thoughtfully, “Broker would wonder why you went over there last night, when you saw those lights on. Why did you go over there, Quarry?”
“You didn’t question it last night.”
“We didn’t discuss it, really. You just did it.”
How could I explain to Boyd that something in me wanted to make sure our target was part of the dope distribution ring operating out of his domain? How could I make him understand that I needed Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd to be dirty, to somehow deserve what we’d been hired to do to him?
How could I explain all that to Boyd if I couldn’t explain it to myself?
“I had to make sure,” I said, “that whatever was happening over there wasn’t a result of what went down at that Klan meeting.”
Which sounded lame even to me, but Boyd let it pass.
Boyd and the sun were up before I was. I’d found him at the window in his half-turned position, one pillow under his ass, the other propped against the wall, as he used the binoculars. The portable radio, turned to the easy-listening station, was softly playing “The Good Life” by Bobby Darin.
“Anything yet?” I’d asked, barely awake.
“Not yet,” he said.
That didn’t surprise me. While André’s body had surely been discovered by now, any cop cars would be along the side street in and near the alley, beyond our sight. And nobody got to the Coalition HQ till eight A.M. Plus, everybody who’d made the weekend trip had been told they could wander in as late as they liked. Even if that meant after lunch.
I’d crawled out of bed after a bracing three hours of sleep, took yet another shower, shaved, shat, and got into some of the few clothes of mine that weren’t stuffed in a garbage bag ready to be dumped somewhere. Then I walked down to the Majestic, got us doughnuts and coffee, and walked back.
Around eight, the worker bees began arriving across the way, the usual mix of black and white, and mostly older staffers who had passed on the road trip. By eight-fifteen, a black Plymouth Fury made a parking place out of a yellow-curbed area near the front of Coalition HQ; it might as well have had UNMARKED POLICE CAR stenciled on the side, and the two lumpy-looking plainclothes cops in rumpled suits canceled any lingering doubt.
Boyd and I passed the binoculars around for half an hour, watching these obvious detectives get greeted first by a staffer and then by Harold Jackson, who took them deeper into the building than could be seen from our perch. Presumably back to his office and—assuming the Reverend had made it in by now—that office, as well.
Lowering the binoculars, Boyd said, “Shit.”
“Nothing we didn’t expect. Put those down. We have things to do.”
“We do?”
“In a little while, you’re going to call the Broker. Tell him our adjusted story about the drug-dealer killing across the way. Explain that I’ll go in the office after lunch and deal with the detectives then, when they’re getting tired of hearing what they’re hearing. He’ll know we can’t skip that step before skipping, if that’s what he wants us to do.”
Boyd nodded. “And you?”
“I’m going downtown to the YMCA and make myself known. I’ll take that swim the Broker recommended. Either before or after that, I’ll find a Dumpster to get rid of that garbage bag of bloody clothes. Probably find a department store to buy a few new clothes, since my wardrobe has been seriously depleted. I’ll return here before I go across the street for a grilling, and see what the Broker advises.”
“Okay,” he said.
“It’s barely possible the detectives will call in more troops to canvass the neighborhood. So don’t answer the door, and turn that radio off. Nobody’s home. Got it?”
“Got it.”
And now I was back, and the Broker had advised that we stay, “if possible.”
We were in the living room, on the couch.
I said, “Stay how long, did he say?”
“Till the job’s done.”
“Jesus, Boyd—they’ve seen me across the street. Everything I said about police sketches and my face getting famous still goes.”
H
e shrugged, sitting sideways with one leg tucked under the other. “But it always did. Once you went undercover, you risked that, unless you could find a way to take the mark out without raising general suspicion. Accident or suicide or some shit.”
I shook my head. “You should be doing the hit, not me. What I’ve been doing is the recon. You’re still a new face. Fucking Broker. This is so fucked up.”
Boyd swallowed, licked his lips; he really didn’t like taking the active role. “You want me to do it? You see a way we can set this up? I mean, if that’s what it takes—”
I shook my head again. “No. And we only have the rest of the week to bring it off. Dead white Nazis, dead black drug dealers…this is not like anything we’ve dealt with before.”
His eyes were close enough to normal now to widen, though he still looked like Lon Chaney halfway through having his makeup removed. “Fuck the Broker. He’s not on the fucking firing line. You wanna bail, Quarry, I’ll bail.”
“Not yet. We might as well see how this afternoon plays out.”
I went in to Coalition HQ around eleven. The Reverend was in his office, on his phone, looking as cool as ever but for a vertical crease between his eyebrows indicating the pressure he was under. Jackson was out in the bullpen, hovering around, mother-henning his bummed-out staff and keeping an eye on the two lumpy cops, who were split up and moving from desk to desk doing interviews, pads and pencils in hand like carhops taking orders.
When he saw me, Jackson came right over.
“Jack,” he said, “you just got here?”
I nodded.
“Are you aware of last night’s tragedy?”
“What?”
He took me by the arm, walked me all the way back to the office. I glanced over at Ruth’s desk. Empty. Then I was in the chair across from a shell-shocked Jackson, seated in his swivel chair, stroking his thick mustache nervously; even the shaved skull had lost its luster.
I sat forward. “Mr. Jackson, what’s going on?”
He told me about the terrible discovery out back, in the alley, that had been made early this morning by Sanitation Department workers. That André Freeman, one of the Coalition’s oldest, most respected staffers, had been found with his throat cut.
Quarry in the Black Page 13