“What do you think this is?” I said. “An episode of Law and Order?”
Sweat trickled down Stoma’s face, dripped from his nose.
“Your public defender’s in rehab,” Piper said. “Besides, you violated probation.”
“You know who Tremont Washington is?” I said.
He continued to stare at the ground and shook his head.
“How come I don’t believe you?” I stood.
“’Cause I don’t like niggers.”
“Watch the language, cocksucker.” Piper pulled a black plastic object from her pocket. “Or I’ll Taser your ass.”
“Yet you were hanging out by the projects in West Dallas.” I cocked my head. “Not exactly the yacht club.”
Stoma Steve stared at the business end of the electric device, licked his lips.
I arched an eyebrow. “And how do you know Tremont is black?”
Stoma frowned, muttered under his breath. The sharpest tool in the shed, he was not.
“Let’s try again,” I said. “Think back. What’s it been, three wee—”
Bam-bam.
Two gunshots in rapid succession, close by. Hard to tell the direction because the noise echoed off the tombstones, muffled by all the vegetation.
I dropped to my knees, right on top of Dad. Swiveled my head in a 180, scanned the tree line. No one was visible.
Piper shoved Stoma to the dirt and dropped a few feet behind me, checking out the opposite field of view, gun drawn.
Bam.
Another round, a larger-caliber gun or the same one fired closer.
I reached for my hip, grabbed for the pistol I’d started carrying again.
Silence.
Nothing but the screech of the cicadas and the thump of my heart.
- CHAPTER FIFTY -
THE LOAN SHARK—PART II
Donny Ray knows the five-oh when he sees it.
The old Crown Victoria, the way the man in the black tracksuit moves, the tilt of his head.
In the fourteen years he’s been in business, Donny Ray has pissed off a number of people—dozens of cops, several judges, too many lowlifes to count. He’s been beaten up, stabbed twice, shot at a half-dozen times, run off the road, and banned from three different strip clubs.
But he’s never had anybody aim a silenced weapon at him before.
The man in the black tracksuit pulls the Glock out from under his jacket as he walks through the cedar trees, maybe thirty feet from Donny Ray’s office/picnic table.
In the brief amount of time it takes Black Tracksuit to raise the Glock, Donny Ray calculates his best play.
It’s all very simple really. The law of self-preservation.
This is a hit, a professional one. From this range, the shooter is not likely to miss. Ergo, Donny Ray is likely to die.
And the only thing you can do that’s worse than shooting a cop is to die.
Therefore, Donny Ray’s best bet is to pop a cap in the man in the black tracksuit even though he’s a police officer. Because he doesn’t want to die.
To that end, he drops behind the picnic table as Black Tracksuit fires a single shot, which hits Fuck Stain in the leg.
Donny Ray pulls a Ruger .38 Special from his waistband. Aims at the only target available, the shooter’s legs. Jerks the trigger twice.
Mr. Phyllis, himself no stranger to the ways of the street, has evidently reached the same conclusions as Donny Ray.
From one side of the picnic table comes the roar of Mr. Phyllis’s weapon, a four-inch .44 Magnum.
Donny Ray doesn’t wait to see if any of their shots have found their mark. He rolls away from the table, jumps up, and sprints toward the thick line of vegetation that serves as a boundary to the cemetery.
A tingling sensation on his shoulder. He touches the spot. His hand comes away wet with blood. Black Tracksuit is still in the game.
He pushes through the bamboo, turns, fires twice more.
Then he runs as fast as he can.
- CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE -
Two more shots, closer.
Sweat trickled down the small of my back. The cemetery seemed to have gotten hotter. The air held less of a breeze.
“You see anything?” Piper whispered.
“Nuh-uh. You?”
“Nope. I think it came from your direction.”
A bush on the fence line in front of me rustled slightly, maybe twenty yards away. An animal or the returning wind? Or the shooter?
“You gonna call it in?” I stared at the bush, knuckles white around the grip of the pistol.
“Wasn’t planning to,” she said. “Since I’m not really a cop anymore and I used someone else’s badge number to get Stoma out of lockup.”
The bamboo next to the bush twitched.
I stared at the leaves, focused all my attention.
Movement behind me, then swearing.
“Dang you, Stoma Steve.” Piper’s voice was a loud whisper, angry. “Don’t you dare run on me.”
I glanced away from the bushes, lowered the gun.
Stoma Steve, hands cuffed behind him, was galloping away, long legs making good time with each stride.
Piper holstered her weapon, stood, ran after him. And tripped. She fell face-first, disappearing behind a grave marker.
I looked back to the shrub line.
The man had emerged in the few seconds I’d been turned around.
He was in his midforties, Caucasian. He wore a black tracksuit and a matching ball cap, brim low. The jacket of the tracksuit was zipped up all the way, obscuring the lower half of his face. The way he moved and his overall appearance seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place him, my attention being drawn to the silenced pistol in his hand.
I didn’t move, didn’t speak. He glanced at me for a quarter of a second and then melted back into the vegetation, leaving me to wonder if he’d ever really been there.
- CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO -
Fifteen minutes later
No more gunfire. And no sign of Stoma Steve.
Piper called a friend at dispatch to see if there had been any calls about shots fired in the Fair Park area. So far nothing. Given the usual number of weapons discharged in this particular locale, and the innate distrust most of the inhabitants had for the police, the fact that there had not been a report didn’t seem too unusual.
So Piper and I drove around the area surrounding the cemetery in her borrowed unmarked squad car.
It was nearly eleven in the morning, the day heating up.
Malcolm X Boulevard, the main drag through this section of town, was not open for business yet. The only place that appeared to have any activity was a convenience store that advertised discount cigarettes and lottery tickets. The store was next to a fried chicken joint and a bar called TJ’s Adult Playtime Club.
TJ’s looked like the kind of place you would go if you wanted to learn firsthand about knife fighting and syphilis.
Piper stopped in front of the bar and got out. I stayed in the car. She knocked on the door of the club, got no answer, then went inside the convenience store and the chicken joint only to emerge a few seconds later from each, shaking her head.
After that we drove slowly down the side streets, where we saw a lot of old men sitting on front porches smoking cigarettes, several stray dogs, a Vietnamese guy driving an ice cream truck, and a kid pushing a lawn mower down the sidewalk.
What we didn’t see was a redneck child molester with a blowhole in his throat wearing jail whites, hands cuffed behind his back.
Piper, as one might imagine, was a tad nonplussed.
“Stoma’s a freaking pedophile.” She turned a corner. “And I let him go.”
We were cruising down a street a few blocks south of the cemetery, windows open, letting the sounds and smells of th
e city wash through the squad car.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll find—”
A hulking figure knelt in the middle of the next block, crouched over something that looked more than a little like a dead body.
“What the heck?” I squinted.
Piper eased off the gas. “Is that Mr. Phyllis?”
“I thought he and Donny Ray got blown up in a car bomb,” I said.
The loan shark and his number-one enforcer were legendary in North Texas law-enforcement circles.
“Nuh-uh. That was his cousin.” Piper shook her head. “Over in Fort Worth.”
The figure glanced up, saw us, and stood.
It was indeed Mr. Phyllis. He appeared to be injured, blood staining his white guayabera shirt. He also appeared to be angry.
“Crap.” Piper jammed on the brakes. “He’s got a gun.”
We were maybe forty feet away. Mr. Phyllis pointed what looked like a small cannon at our car.
Piper yanked the transmission into reverse, mashed the accelerator to the floor.
Mr. Phyllis turned away from us, his gun aimed at the side of the street. The weapon erupted—a plume of fire the size of a watermelon and a roar like a howitzer.
Then a strange thing happened.
Mr. Phyllis’s head snapped back, and he fell to the ground. Like he’d been shot by a silenced weapon.
Piper stopped.
No movement on the street.
She put the car in park.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What if it’s somebody who’s seen Stoma?” She opened her door, gun drawn.
I swore under my breath. She was right; we had to do whatever it took to find Stoma Steve. I exited as well and took cover behind an old Honda parked a few feet in front of our vehicle.
Piper dashed to the other side of the street and hid behind an oak tree.
Mr. Phyllis was obviously dead. The figure on the ground, apparently Donny Ray, was the same or nearly so.
A few seconds passed.
About fifty feet away, a man emerged from between two parked cars.
The shooter in the black tracksuit. His ball cap was gone, the jacket unzipped, face clearly visible.
He walked hunched over like something was wrong with his side. As he approached Mr. Phyllis, I could see that a portion of his abdomen had been blown away. One hand was clutching a tangled mess of flesh and jacket. The other held the silenced pistol.
The man stared at the two bodies for a moment and then fell to the ground himself.
Piper stepped from behind the tree. She holstered her gun.
Her face was ashen. Arms and legs shaking. I realized I was in the same condition, terrified, and not just from the gunfight we’d witnessed.
“C’mon. Let’s roll.” I headed toward the car.
“Did you see?” She pointed to the man in the black tracksuit. “He was using a silenced Glock.”
“The ballistics on Bobby’s or Raul’s gun,” I said. “It was only a ninety percent match.”
“That’s—” She kept pointing. “He—he—”
“Hurry up. We need to get out of here.”
She shook her head as if to rid herself of the images on the street. Then she jogged to our vehicle.
Once behind the wheel, she cranked the ignition, turned around, and sped away, going in the opposite direction of the three dead bodies.
Two thugs and a guy in a black tracksuit.
The latter was Lieutenant Hopper, the chief’s assistant.
- CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE -
We didn’t speak for a couple of blocks. Shaky from adrenaline. Silent from the shock of learning who the man in the black tracksuit was.
Old houses and overgrown yards blew past the windows.
I turned the AC to high.
We stopped for a light at Hatcher Street.
Piper looked my way and said, “What the hell?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Hopper was doing his own one-man crime-reduction program.”
“Figured him for an asshole. Not crazy.”
“Everybody’s got layers,” I said. “Like a dysfunctional onion.”
I wondered where Deputy Chief Raul Delgado was at the moment. He’d disappeared in the aftermath of the incident by the Trinity River where Bobby McKee had died.
A group of people ran past the front of the car. Maybe six or eight. Men and women, varying ages, all moving fast, pointing to the other side of the street. Everybody had a cell phone in their hand. We’d left the gunplay far enough behind us that the hubbub had to be for some other reason.
“Speaking of assholes,” Piper said, “where do you think Stoma Steve has run off to?”
Hatcher was a main thoroughfare south of Fair Park, three lanes each direction.
Old apartments lined one side of the street. The other side, across from us, was a strip mall. The businesses there were pretty typical for the area—a beauty supply store and a dialysis office, a pawnshop.
And a day-care center.
The group of people crossed the street en masse and headed toward the day-care center where another, larger group was clustered.
Piper took several deep breaths and leaned her head back against the rest. “You don’t think he’s over there, do you?”
Where else would a child molester seek refuge? A place to which he is irresistibly drawn.
She hit the switch for the red and blue lights in the grill and peeled across the street.
A few seconds later, the borrowed car screeched to a stop in front of about twenty people circled around an inset of the strip mall, a corner where the day-care center connected with a tax-refund business.
Badge-less, Piper and I pushed our way through the crowd like we were cops.
Stoma Steve huddled in the corner, kept at bay by an old man wielding a rake like it was a spear. Stoma was still handcuffed but his jumpsuit was filthy.
“Step away, partner.” I grabbed the old man’s arm. “We’ll take over from here.”
Grumbling from the crowd.
“Show’s over, folks.” Piper whistled once, a piercing tone. “Please clear the area. This is police business.”
“He’s a damn pedophile,” the old man said. “My pastor told us about him.”
“Your pastor’s right.” I walked toward Stoma. “And now we’re taking him back to lockup.”
“What’s he doing out here anyway?” The old man pointed a finger at me. “He’s wearing jail clothes.”
“It was a, uh, clerical error,” Piper said.
Stoma stood up, eyes frantic. He addressed the crowd: “These aren’t real police. Somebody call 911.”
“Shut up, Stoma.” I grabbed his arm, leaned close. “You want us to leave you here?”
Stoma squinted at me while the crowd continued to grumble. He tried to pull free from my grip.
I shoved him toward our vehicle while Piper carved a path through the angry people.
Thirty seconds later we were barreling down Hatcher Street, Stoma in the back.
I looked in the rear. “Start talking. Tremont Washington, everything you know.”
“I coulda died back there,” he said. “I wanna go back to jail.”
I punched him in the nose.
He caterwauled. Bounced up and down on the seat.
Piper pulled into the parking lot of a self-serve car wash. She stopped the car. Turned around. “You want me to take you back to those people? Cuffed? In your jumpsuit? They’d love to see you.”
Stoma cowered in the backseat, pressed against the door.
“Begin at the beginning,” I said.
He took several deep breaths.
“That day. I saw three people,” he said. “Two adults an
d Tremont.”
“Keep going,” I said.
“One of ’em was the po-po. A Mexican in a black Suburban.”
I looked at Piper. That had to be Raul Delgado.
Stoma continued. “The Mex was fighting with this woman. She was the third person.”
“What did the woman look like?” I said.
Stoma shrugged. Women weren’t his thing.
“They was like a family or sumpthin’. Bitchin’ at each other.” Stoma shook his head. “My mama used to chase Daddy around the hog holler with a garden hoe. I know from fightin’.”
“Black or white?” Piper said. “The woman. What color was she?”
“She was white. Maybe in her forties.” He licked his lips. “Rich-looking.”
Hannah McKee.
“So the Mexican cop and the rich lady are fighting,” I said. “Then what happened?”
“Tremont. He ran away.”
No one spoke.
“And?” I said.
Stoma frowned at us, a little jailhouse lawyering going on in his ninety-IQ brain.
“This isn’t gonna come back on you,” Piper said. “Everything’s off the record. We’ll even take you to Burger King on the way back to lockup.”
Stoma nodded. “I, uh, followed him.”
I stifled my natural revulsion to the implications of that statement.
“Then what?” Piper asked.
“We were on Hampton.” Stoma’s eyes were animated. “I was getting close, about to start talking to him.” He paused. “Then a squad car stopped.”
“Because there was a warrant out on you,” Piper said. “And you don’t exactly blend in.”
“The last warrant, that was all a misunderstanding,” he said. “See, I was just—”
“No one cares, Stoma,” I said. “What happened to Tremont?”
“The police arrested me.” His voice was whiny. “They put the cuffs on too tight.”
Piper rolled her eyes. “Cry me a river, ass-munch. Now tell us what happened to Tremont. Where did he go?”
Stoma looked out the window of the borrowed squad car. The sun was shining, traffic moving along Hatcher Street.
“He went back to the Iris. On the other side of the property, there’s a side gate.”
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