“On occasion,” I said. “Why are you asking?”
“You ever see the special on sex tourism in Thailand?”
“No. But I’m familiar with the concept.”
“Certain men come to West Dallas to exercise their urges on the people here, much like they do in Thailand.”
Poor people made good targets. It had been that way since the first caveman amassed a herd of woolly mammoths and decided to diddle his less-wealthy neighbor’s kid.
“A white man was arrested exactly one week ago, near the Iris Apartments,” Lysol said. “You should probably talk to this individual.”
“Does this person have a name?”
“Lysol is not at liberty to disclose this information.” He wagged his finger. “Lysol is being exceptionally generous already.”
True dat. He didn’t owe me anything, since I wasn’t in the game anymore. Maybe he liked me, too. A fellow could dream, couldn’t he?
“Thanks.” I smiled. “Jon will look into this information right after he visits with Tremont’s grandmother.”
“At the Iris?” Lysol raised an eyebrow.
I nodded. “Stopped here first. A matter of courtesy.”
“Lysol appreciates your show of respect. But you should be very careful at the Iris since Lysol does not control that particular piece of ground.”
I stood. “Thanks for the warning and the information.”
“You do still carry a gun, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “Live by my wits these days.”
Lysol nodded slowly. “That was always Jon’s strong suit.”
- CHAPTER TWELVE -
I left Lysol Alvarez’s compound, headed back to Singleton Boulevard.
At the corner of Singleton and Borger sat an old wooden building, boarded up, abandoned. The structure had a small canopy on the front. Weeds poked through the crumbling concrete. Beer bottles littered the ground.
The building used to be the Barrow family’s service station, an early staging ground for young Clyde’s foray into lawlessness.
It was forgotten now, not even a plaque commemorating the location’s brush with infamy. The place could have been a metaphor for all of West Dallas: nobody much cared about the present. Why should they care about the past?
I turned west on Singleton and then north on Hampton.
The Iris Apartments appeared on my right. Eight buildings total. Constructed in the 1960s, garden-style. Two stories. Each unit opened onto a breezeway that ran the length of each building.
The breezeways were like canyons of crime, sheltered from outside view, protected from the elements, serving as a walkway to the homes of people who had for the most part lost hope.
Tremont’s apartment was in Building Six, toward the back, unit 6225, the second floor.
I parked between a metallic purple Lincoln and a late-model C-class Mercedes, the nicest vehicles in sight. I got out.
Across the parking lot, a group of young men clustered around an unlit charcoal grill. They were smoking and drinking from quart bottles of beer hidden in paper sacks.
The leader appeared to be a guy in his thirties with dreadlocks and a diamond grill on his front teeth.
I’d heard of him before but couldn’t remember his name. Supposedly he only spoke in a badly feigned British accent.
They stared at me, especially the guy with the dreadlocks.
I didn’t stare back. Lots of bad things start with eyeball beefs, the implied disrespect that comes from looking too closely at someone.
I walked purposefully to the outside stairs leading to the second floor. Took the steps two at a time. Knocked on unit 6225 and then committed a felony. Not my first, probably not my last.
In front of the peephole, I held up a DEA badge and ID card with my picture. The credentials were legit, but I was not—no longer a federal agent. I figured a badge would go farther here than my business card from Goldberg, Finkelman, and Clark.
Movement from inside. The door opened a fraction, held in place by a chain, and a woman’s face appeared in the gap.
She was in her seventies. Wrinkled, coffee-colored skin. Gray hair, eyes cloudy with cataracts. She squinted at my face.
“Yes?” Her voice was frail. “May I help you?”
“Are you Alice Simpson?”
She didn’t reply, clearly trying to figure out why a man with a badge was coming to her door.
“What is it you want?” she said.
“I’m here about your grandson.”
“Tremont?” A faint smile on her face. “You know where he is?”
“No. But I’d like to help you find him.”
From behind me came the sound of footsteps and men talking. Loud, like they owned the place.
Alice heard them, too. She frowned for a moment and then closed the door a few inches. She removed the chain, motioned me inside.
I did as requested. She shut the door behind me, locked the dead bolt.
Her apartment was small but spotless. Avocado-green carpet, a beige sofa and matching easy chairs. Two framed photographs hung over the sofa: Dr. Martin Luther King and President Obama. The other walls were decorated with drawings and artwork that all depicted the ocean or a beach.
“May I see your badge again?”
I handed it to her and she grabbed a magnifying glass from an end table. After a couple of moments of scrutiny, she returned my credentials.
“Tremont is not into drugs,” she said.
“Me neither.” I stuck the badge in my pocket. “When was the last time you saw your grandson?”
“I called the police.” She was trying to contain her anger. “Tremont’s friend, that Delgado fellow, he said he’d help, but so far nothing.”
I didn’t reply. I’d figured that Tremont and Delgado knew each other. Would have been nice if he’d told me, however.
“There was a reporter. I told him, too.” She snorted. “He said he’d write a story about it on the computer.”
“A blog or something?” I asked.
“I dunno. The computer, what he said.”
Neither of us spoke for a few moments.
“Tell me about the last time you saw your grandson.”
She nodded, wiped a tear from her eye.
“A week ago this morning. He left for work. And I haven’t seen him since.”
Tremont had a job? There’s a little tidbit that Raul Delgado’s piece of paper failed to mention.
“Where did he work?”
Alice Simpson limped across the room to a buffet by the dining room table. She picked up a framed eight-by-ten photograph. The photo sat next to an American flag folded into a triangle and an open jewelry box that displayed a Purple Heart.
“His mother, my baby, she died in Iraq.” She wiped her nose with a tissue. “Tremont’s all I got.”
I walked to where she stood and took the picture, an image of a gap-toothed grade-schooler next to a woman in Army fatigues standing in front of the Calatrava Bridge, which linked West Dallas with the rest of the city. Both mother and child were smiling.
I put the picture back on the buffet by a stack of mail.
“He’s such a happy boy,” she said. “Even when he heard about his mama, he tried not to be sad.”
“What happened to his father?” I kept my voice neutral.
Damon Washington, Tremont’s father and my friend, had been a Marine Recon officer, the jarhead’s version of Special Forces. Smart as a rocket scientist, built like a linebacker, reflexes of a cat. Could have done anything after he got out—law school, a corporate gig, whatever. Instead, he became a cop, which is how we met.
“Worked for the state. The po-lice.” She shrugged. “Died on the job.”
“Narcotics officer, right?” I frowned like I was trying to recall. “I remembe
r hearing something about that. Damon Washington, that was his name, wasn’t it?”
In the end, all the brains and training in the world couldn’t help with the disease that afflicted Tremont’s dad.
She nodded, lips pursed, a topic she didn’t care to discuss.
Damon Washington was an adrenaline junkie. Police barracks and war zones are full of them. Still, we were friends, something that neither of us took lightly.
I looked at the artwork.
“You like the beach?”
“We were going to go to the coast one day, me and Tremont.” She smiled. “He’s never seen the ocean.”
I nodded.
“The doctors say that a change of scenery might be good for someone with his condition,” she added.
“What is Tremont’s, uh, condition?”
“Autism,” she said. “A mild form.”
I nodded, unsure of what to say.
“Last week,” she said, “I walked him to the bus stop. At 8:00 a.m.”
“Where was he going?”
“He catches the crosstown express.” She crossed her arms like that answered everything.
I let the silence drag on.
“He was going to work. He liked to be busy.”
“His job. Tell me about it.”
“It was a program. They take people like Tremont and find them things to do.”
She scurried back to the buffet and opened a drawer. She pulled out a small leather folio, removed a card.
“Here.” She handed it to me.
The Helping Place, a 501(3)c corporation, address in a ritzy part of Dallas just north of downtown.
The back of the card contained their mission statement: to help disabled members of the community find employment and meaningful value in their lives.
“And you saw him get on the bus?”
Outside came the sound of a siren. It grew louder, then softer.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure I saw him get on the bus.” She sounded anything but sure.
“A hundred percent certain?”
She nodded once and stopped. Her eyes welled with tears.
“My mind, it’s not what it used to be,” she said softly. “I’m not sure of much of anything anymore.”
“That’s okay.” I put the card in my wallet. “I’m gonna talk to the neighbors, see if they remember anything.”
“I miss him so much. I can’t tell you.” She walked to the other side of the room.
I pulled a business card out. Dropped it on the dining room table.
Alice Simpson picked up a feather duster and looked around like she was trying to recall something that had slipped her mind.
I started to say good-bye but realized she probably didn’t know I was still there. So I left.
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN -
THE GUNRUNNER
Irish Joe counts his money, the weekly take.
His favorite activity.
Stacks of twenties and fifties and hundreds. The bills are wrinkled and dirty, occasionally tinged with blood. He doesn’t care.
Joe Callahan, Irish Joe on the street, is in a wood-paneled room at the back of his office on Harry Hines Boulevard, in the northwest section of Dallas. The room is filled with cartons of ammunition and boxes of firearms, stacked to the ceiling.
Chinese AK-47 knockoffs, both the street-legal semiautomatic versions and the illegal fully auto models. Cheap nine-millimeter pistols from South America. Military-surplus rifles from various third-world countries.
Every item has a market and a price. Irish Joe takes a cut as each passes through his hands.
He used to be a legitimate gun dealer. He had an FFL, the federal firearms license required to buy and sell guns, and a storefront down the street where he sold rednecks Benelli shotguns for duck season, bolt-action Remingtons for deer, and Ruger pistols for self-defense situations that would never transpire.
But the feds took away his license after the incident with his sister’s daughter, so he turned to more lucrative endeavors.
His space is the middle unit of a three-store strip center. On one side is a pawnshop he has an interest in; the other is a discount cigarette retailer.
Irish Joe owns the strip center, too, a cinderblock building located in the no-man’s land between those blood-sucking Korean hoods to the north and the Mexican gangbangers to the south.
Both groups leave him alone, except when they need his services.
Irish Joe Callahan, a fifty-eight-year-old native of Dallas and former deacon in the Carrollton Church of Christ, is the largest illegal gun dealer in the state, maybe in the Southwest. He doesn’t think about these things or the people stupid or unlucky enough to get in the way of a bullet from one of his weapons. He only thinks about the money.
The illegal buying and selling of firearms, though extremely lucrative, is not his favorite activity. That distinction belongs to his side business, gun rentals.
For a small fee, Irish Joe will rent a firearm, untraceable of course, for whatever activity the customer requires. Plus a cut of the take. He will also provide advice on the proposed job. Which liquor store has what kind of security. Banks that save money by going without an on-site guard. Individuals who might be carrying a large amount of cash. That sort of thing.
This is a good life Irish Joe has forged for himself, free of all the government regulations he used to have to deal with.
It’s midafternoon.
He’s got an appointment in Richardson, a suburb north of town favored by Russian immigrants. He’s to inspect a crate of Chechen sniper rifles, maybe make an offer.
He puts the cash into one of the safes along the far wall, next to the Kruggerands and diamonds from that deal in Fort Worth last week. He slides the nickel-plated Colt .38 Super into the holster on his hip. Covers the gun with his Windbreaker.
He turns on the alarm and leaves by the back door.
His Bentley is by the Dumpster. Across the lot sits a navy-blue Ford, a Crown Victoria. Otherwise the parking area is empty. Customers use the striped spaces in the front. Everyone else knows to stay out of the back.
Irish Joe is not stupid. He understands that his activities generate enemies. So he does what any prudent person in his situation would do. He draws the .38 Super from its holster, flicks the safety off, and aims at the Crown Victoria.
Slowly he advances.
The windows are tinted.
When he’s about ten feet away, the driver’s door opens.
Joe says, “Hands where I can see them.”
A man in a black tracksuit exits, palms out, held high. His ball cap is worn low, shielding his eyes.
“Easy, Joe.” The man smiles. “That any way to say hello?”
“Do we know each other?” Joe keeps the .38 aimed at the middle of the tracksuit.
The man looks vaguely familiar but Joe can’t place him.
“My front pocket,” the man says. “I’ve got ID. Okay if I get it?”
Joe hesitates and then nods. He keeps his finger on the trigger.
The man slowly reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wallet. He flips it open, displaying a badge.
Joe lowers his gun but doesn’t relax.
The only thing he hates worse than Mexican gangbangers and Korean hoods are cops, especially bent ones, which this guy appears to be.
“A jewelry store got hit downtown,” the man says. “I need to ask you about it, okay?”
Part of what Irish Joes sells along with the temporary use of one of his guns is confidentiality. Irish Joe does not talk to the police. Ever.
His best move is to give this cop the brush-off and set up a meeting for later, one with his lawyer present.
“I’ve got to be somewhere.” Joe holsters his gun. “Maybe we can schedule something tomorrow.”
“Sure, Joe.” The man draws a silenced Glock. “Whatever you say.”
Irish Joe Callahan claws at his hip for the .38 but it is too late.
All the money and guns and Kruggerands in the world will not stop what comes next.
A puff of smoke and he is facedown on the asphalt, a few steps from his Bentley.
As the blood pools beneath his body and his life slips away, Irish Joe tries to think of who will mourn his passing, but no one comes to mind.
This makes him sad. Then it’s over.
Dallas, Texas
1987
Raul Delgado was seventeen years old.
Five years had passed since his brother died in the back of the police car.
A half a decade, as Bobby liked to say.
So much had changed, but so much remained the same.
Twice a week, Raul attended Mass at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in downtown Dallas. He went to confession and lit candles in memory of his brother as well as his mother, who passed the previous spring, may God rest her soul.
The neighborhood around the cathedral had changed. The wood-frame houses that Raul remembered from his childhood were disappearing one by one, replaced by office buildings and fancy stores.
Just across the freeway from the church, a few blocks from his old neighborhood in Little Mexico, a huge complex of buildings was under construction—a hotel, shopping mall, and office tower.
The Crescent, that was what they were calling it. The buildings looked like something from a movie set in Europe. Bobby told him all the new construction would add to the tax base, which was a good thing. Raul supposed that was right—Bobby was smart about stuff like that—but he was still sad to see the homes and other buildings that were part of his childhood being demolished.
He walked down the center aisle of the cathedral. The sun spilled through the stained-glass windows, casting colored shadows on the pews.
It was the middle of the day, so there were not very many worshippers. A few old women he recognized from the neighborhood, his mother’s acquaintances.
They watched him pass, eyes like slits, faces disapproving.
Shadow Boys Page 8