The assistant placed the tray down on the table and bowed out of the room apologetically.
The man turned back to McNamara. “This needs to stop, and there’s only one man I know who’ll be able to make it stop.”
“Who’s that?” asked McNamara.
“He’s a journalist, one of the best.”
“Fitzgerald?” asked McNamara. “How can…”
“No,” said the man. “Ray Hammer.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” said McNamara.
The man picked up his coffee, drained it. “Well, I’m glad I’ve got your attention,” he said and stood up and left the room. He took the elevator down to the lobby, and McNamara ran after him but just missed the doors. Then, he was gone, out into the street. She watched from the pane windows up above as he disappeared into the crowd, who were braying for police blood.
Chapter Nine
The bodega was cramped. A space small enough to be a large bedroom . . . but six times the size of the room I lived in at the rehab center. There was me, the owner, an assortment of magazines on hunting, shooting and fishing, and a pile of scratch tickets.
The owner spoke into a wireless phone receiver. “You heard what I said! Spudnik for race one, to win. No. To win, dammit.”
He signaled just a moment with an extended finger. “That’s what I said, already, dammit, six-to-one. Yes, Spudnik.” He rolled his eyes. Nodded once and placed the phone on the receiver base.
I kicked my toe on a pile of unopened New Philosopher magazines that seemed out of place.
“Door stop.” The owner said, pointing at the unopened pile.
“They’re a long way from the door.”
“Haven’t finished unpacking.”
They were last month’s issues.
“Anyway,” said the owner, a guy with an olive complexion and a smile that looked as plastered on as the sagging ceiling, “What can I do you for?”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Just scratched in my pocket and pulled out the yellowed paper ticket stub.
He looked at it like it was toilet paper. “What you want me to do with this?”
“I won.”
The guy scratched his nose, “Good for you. But I still don’t see what that’s gotta do with me.”
“You’re a retailer with the Georgia Lottery.”
The guy gave me a look that said, You can’t possibly be that dumb. “Pal, I don’t follow.”
“I won. You pay me out.”
“How much you win?”
“$300 million.”
“Do I look like I have $300 million?”
I snatched the paper back from him before he got any ideas. “So?”
“So what?”
“How’d I go about claiming my winnings?”
He scrambled around behind the counter. His voice came up over the top. “You registered with GA Lottery?”
“No, why?”
He came up with a shotgun. “Then hand it over.”
The bells at the door chimed and a tall black man stepped into the place. He saw the owner, the shotgun, and me, and he stepped back through those bells and out onto the street.
A splitting crack filled the air.
Bits of blood and bone spattered on the shop window and the owner’s instincts dropped him to the floor behind the counter.
I kept low.
Made it to the door and peered out.
The owner’s voice was loud over my shoulder. “Damn riot’s come all the way to my door. Fucking punks.”
He’d forgotten the money. And I didn’t wait around to hear more complaints, but I did wait long enough to check the street for a smoking gun and muzzle flashes. In the distance a shadow moved off down the road. I opened the door a crack. The bells chimed.
I decided to call Georgia Lottery, they’d probably transfer the funds to me.
“Thanks for nothing,” I shouted back, my ears still ringing with the gunshot, and slipped out into the street.
The guy on the ground was dead. His jaw was the only thing left attached to his neck. No point trying to resuscitate him.
Chapter Ten
A tall man stepped out from the bodega and into the street. He was wearing a dark hoodie, and he turned back towards the store for a moment. Irving Mathers raised the scope on the AR-15 to his eye. He looked down the sight. He checked the man’s head lined up with the middle of the crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger. There was a path of pink mist and the man crashed forward over the threshold and into the shop. The bells on the door jingled and a shout rang out inside the store, and people on the street scattered. The man’s legs kicked out involuntarily. His arms thrashed. Mathers slunk back into the shadows.
He waited around to enjoy the aftermath, even though he knew it put him at risk. He watched as a police car, and then another, and another, pulled up at the front of the bodega, and then sidled away down the street, wiping his prints off the rifle with the grungy tail of his T-shirt, breaking it down, and tossing it into an overloaded Dumpster.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw the face of his attacker looking up and down the street; the truck-thief. Their eyes met for a moment.
Fuck, he’d killed the wrong man.
His attacker stepped towards Mathers, but Irving grimaced in a way that said, “I dare ya.” Instead of pursuing him, the man knelt down beside the body, turned it over, pulled the hoodie down off his face, and Irving Mathers saw the guy’s jaw, his victim was a black man, and he was missing the rest of his head.
The police jumped from their vehicles and surrounded the truck-thieving dickhead, their guns drawn, their voices raised, their shoulders up, their faces etched with fear. “Get on the fucking ground!”
Dickhead did just that. He placed the AR-15 down, and lay on the ground as he was swarmed by police and kicked in the face, and then rolled over and kicked again and again in the chest. Mathers sucked in a deep breath, started counting backwards from 300, smelt the smoke and the fire. This was almost better than death for the goddamn horse-rustler who’d taken his 18-wheeler and whipped him on the side of the interstate.
Maybe he did believe in Karma after all.
A half-brick skidded across the road and Chief McNamara let out a deep sigh. Things were finally calming down up here. She’d tag-teamed with Carter to let the other woman get some sleep, although McNamara had not slept for 48 hours herself.
The protesters peeled off one by one and headed home for bed, but still in the distance flares were set off, fireworks fizzled and whirred, and in the next street windows were smashed, cars set alight as baseball bats and bricks and anything that could be thrown was hurled at storefronts and inanimate objects, at police officers and at regular civilians.
McNamara understood this wasn’t only a protest against the killing of an unarmed black man. This was also about hardship and suffering. The people in Savannah existed sometimes above the breadline, sometimes below, but always fearful that what they had could be taken from them at any moment. Right now, the fragility of that attitude hung in the air and mixed with the crashing of broken glass.
She clapped one of her captains on the shoulder. He was a pudgy man, wearing riot gear and carrying a weapon filled with rubber bullets, a can of Mace strapped to his belt.
“Another hour, maybe two,” said McNamara, “and then we’ll call it in.”
The man’s shoulders relaxed and a weary smile creased his features as he passed on the good news to his team. He turned and looked up at his Chief. “God, I hope so. It’s my anniversary tomorrow; almost like Mayweather. I can’t imagine how his wife feels.”
He waved a vague hand at the general assembly that was beginning to drift off, the phalanx of exhausted police officers stepping back, breathing in air that was a little less smoky, and sucking down on small plastic bottles of water.
“I imagine she’s distraught,” said McNamara, “as will your wife be if you don’t make it home.”
“Oh, I’ll make it home alr
ight,” said the captain. “I always do.”
McNamara clapped him on the arm again. “Go home, now. I’ll look after it here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Your wife will be pleased to see you.”
“Gosh, I hope so,” said the man as he trundled off to his car, back home to his wife, to prepare the roses for tomorrow—as Mayweather had, just days ago—to organize a sweet, poetic card to leave on the table. Hopefully it would win him a little fooling-around time with her after the dinner he’d planned. There hadn’t been much of that lately, what with the double shifts he’d been pulling.
McNamara watched him go. Her eyes glinted in the glow of a stray Molotov cocktail. She dabbed her sleeve at the corner of her eye and turned to the nearest officer and relayed that she was now the officer in command, their immediate supervisor. She gave some orders, and then stepped back into a shadowy alcove at the entryway of a party supplies business that was shuttered up and closed, for the week by the looks of it . . . or maybe it had closed months ago in the economic downturn.
McNamara drew her cell phone out of her pocket and signed into the county database. It never worked as well on her phone, as it did on her laptop, but she figured she might as well get a start looking for this Ray Hammer guy. Her search returned no results, so she tried a few variations on the spelling of Ray and Hammer, but none of them came back with much, just a couple of old articles and no contact details either.
There was a faint stirring in the air and she shuddered. It was nights like these she wished she had an office job or was more like some of the other chiefs who just sat back at the station and avoided going out as much as possible. They did functions and galas but avoided the hard truth of police work. But this, this was where she was truly comfortable, out in the field where a police officer belonged, regardless of rank.
Then, something deep inside her whispered, caution. The sixth sense she’d honed over the years on the job. A warning. . . . The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
A cold hand clamped over her mouth and pulled her back into the folds of the darkness.
Chapter Eleven
It didn’t take long for them to throw me into the big house. They made me cool my heels for about three hours in the county jail with all protesters, disturbers of the peace, and random lowlifes who’d been pulled in throughout the night. A kind of cheerful prison camaraderie ensued, and the other reprobates got me caught up on the situation out on the streets, especially after they’d heard that I’d just escaped after voluntarily being locked up in another big house outside of town.
Their chatter was derisive, divided, angry, either because they felt what happened to Chris Mayweather was a travesty of justice—the same way being here in this cell was—or because they felt a deep racism that their parents had instilled in them throughout their years as children, which had only been reinforced as they grew up in a society that encouraged this attitude. All of this led to spirited debate, rife with curse words, threats, and the occasional scuffle on the filthy concrete floor. Good times and bad times coming together to sort it out in the only way open to them: violence.
And then, word trickled through that another black man had been shot, most likely by police but possibly by someone else, and I was hauled out of that communal cell and thrown into an isolated space on the other side of the wire . . . for my protection, they insisted. People jeered at me through the wire, spat in my general direction, and threatened to hang my dog from the rafters the moment they got out . . . a dog I did not own. I pressed up against the farthest wall, trying to avoid the surprisingly accurate wads of phlegm, and thanking God our captors had at least gone through the motions of removing any sharp, hurlable weapons from everyone’s pockets.
Eventually, one of the officers came and collected me, and took me up to a detective, where I was interviewed for what seemed like the rest of the evening and halfway through the next day. They kept asking the same questions over and over, and I kept giving the same inconsequential answers over and over. Neither of us found the encounter very satisfying. Apparently, the fatal wound matched a gun I owned, an old AR-15, I hadn’t used for years. They’d pin this on me, no matter what. I stopped arguing.
And then I was in prisoner transport shackled to a rail with a bunch of my former cellmates, who reiterated their desire to maim me. And then I was in Chatham County Jail, handing over my meager belongings—a cell phone, car and house keys, a wallet stuffed with the remainder of my military pension, a crumpled lottery ticket, and my driver’s license, and that was it. A TV in a backroom crackled out snippets of news: … It’s out of control down here … another black man killed… Tommy Abbas … outside a Bodega … headless …
I was shown my cell, which I was to share with three other men. All were African American. Two of them were bigger than me, and the other one—a little guy—wouldn’t stop talking. His mouth went on and on like a Gatling gun. They all wanted to know why I was in there, and the talker kept asking and asking. I kept my jaw firmly clenched, avoiding his gaze until the talker was asleep.
Once blessed silence reigned, I asked the two big men how they’d managed not to kill him yet. The two big men bristled. I decided to call them Moley and Mini-Me on account of a deep sense of irony and a love for Austin Powers. Moley didn’t have a mole, just a scruff of goatee on his chin, and Mini-Me was almost twice the size of Moley, and that made him about four times as big as me. And I’m not a small guy.
“Hey!” said Moley.
He was immediately backed up by Mini-Me, who said, while clambering off the bed one gigantic leg after the other, “We stick together here, and if you don’t want to be part of that, then you’ll be torn apart.”
Moley nodded emphatically while the talker snored loudly on the bed below.
“Word is you killed a nigger, Abbas or something, point-blank outside a Georgia lottery store,” said Moley.
“You didn’t say anything when he was asking,” I said, nodding my head towards the man snoring on the lower bunk.
“Not our place,” said Mini-Me.
“And now it is?” I said.
“I reckon you’re the cause of all these riots I been seeing on the news,” said Moley.
I considered this for a moment and clambered onto my own bunk. “Forget about it, fellas.”
“My family’s out there,” said Moley.
“Mine, too,” said Mini-Me, “and they’re not safe tonight!”
“No! You put them in danger, man.”
“Seems like that’s all because of you, Ray.” Mini-Me reached up over the top of the bunk, grabbed me by the wrist and hauled me down and back onto the floor. He was so much bigger, and so much stronger, that he looked like a kid dragging around his stuffed teddy bear.
I did not enjoy being a teddy bear. I complied. “So, what do you fellas do around here for fun?”
Mini-Me jerked back his elbow and his fist, ready to pound the literal and metaphorical stuffing out of his teddy . . .
I shaped up, ready for a fight, but Moley stepped behind me, grabbing my hands and pinning them behind my back.
I had to admire their teamwork.
Mini-Me paused, his fists clenched, his elbow up, drawn back, ready to unleash two hundred fifty pounds of muscle into my face—and that was just one arm I was talking about.
“Wait,” I said, and let him linger there, frozen in mid-punch.
His lip curled up. His voice went up an octave and took on a hard edge. “Now, why would I do that?”
“Yeah,” said Mini-Me, his breath hard in my ear, his hands clenching my wrists, jerking my elbow joints upwards toward the blank ceiling. It was like being forced to do yoga. And I’m not fond of yoga; the only eastern arts I enjoy are hentai porn and good curry.
I squirmed, struggled for a moment.
“You killed a brother,” said Mini-Me, “and now our families are in danger thanks to you.”
I decided to set their expectation
s low. The way I figured it, if they took the bait, then I could get away by paying them a lot less than $300 million not to beat me up. Besides, all I wanted was one thing: alcohol.
I’d left one institution with a single hope and a ratty piece of paper and didn’t achieve that hope or claim the winnings on that single piece of paper, and now I was back in another institution. The whole damn thing reminded me of leaving the Marines with the hope I had to do something with my life, something meaningful, something that could sustain my interest. I’d fucked that up, too. I mean seriously, who becomes a journalist for a second-rate newspaper and an editor who forgets to pay you?
I looked at the hulking man in front of me, the huge fist poised, the muscles tense, and the skin bunching up on his forehead. A victim of circumstances or a thug? It didn’t matter. He was like me by now, thoroughly institutionalized.
Also, whatever his childhood trauma or mild mental disturbance, he was about to thoroughly kick my ass.
“How would you like to get out of here,” I said, “and grab a drink?”
High-pitched, careening laughter started up behind my ear. It sounded like a man dying or a cat coughing up a furball. The fingers wrapped around my wrist like a vise let up a little pressure. Once again, blood flowed through my fingers. It looked like I’d be able to play the piano again after all.
I swiveled my body slightly, wrenched my hands out and swung Moley around in front of me, just in time for him to collect the massive fist that Mini-Me smashed in the direction of my face. Moley went limp and I let him drop to the floor, then shimmied left as Mini-Me swung again, his huge fist glancing off the hairs on my chinny chin-chin.
“I’m serious!” I said, dancing left and right to avoid his wild, swinging blows. Realizing suddenly that being sober makes it a lot easier to fight and not get hit. Sobriety was a pain in the ass, but it had its upside.
Eventually, the big man tired—which happens fast when you’re that size. I stepped forward and in, and pushed him into the lower bunk on top of the snorer, who jerked awake with wide eyes, grunting and panicked. “Huh? Wha’?”
The Fight (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 4) Page 3