1 Motor City Shakedown (15 page)

Allen had been the one to push for expansion once it was obvious how easy it was to move their product. Allen had schemed and brooded and found the perfect transportation solution. Allen had driven the entire affair with a flair and confidence that Noel could only admire. The same patience and focus that had made him a death-dealing sniper in the service had been effortlessly broken down, re-assembled and brought to bear in the drug game.

But now that same man was telling him it was all over. Noel felt the pressures plaguing Allen seep into his own bones. Subpoenas and grand juries meant one thing—convictions. They never meant anything else.

“I can’t do prison, Al,” he said.

Allen let out a sharp, bitter gale of laughter.

“Prison?” he barked. “Noel, they’ll get us on the murders, brother. Plus conspiracy to commit. Plus furtherance of an organized scheme. Shit, for all I know they’ll figure out a way to use that burning project being a federal building to charge us with domestic-fucking-terrorism. Either way, don’t worry about prison, buddy. Worry about the needle in your fucking arm and the pitchfork that comes after.”

Noel thought about his wife and his house. He thought about what he had that he didn’t want to let go of.

“Al, there’s a pack of smokes in the glove box.”

“Thought you were quit.”

“Just give me the pack.”

Noel inhaled smoke for the first time in three months. It tasted harsh and wrong, but he dragged a second time and blew it out his nose in twin jets. Synapses fired and he felt a dizzy rush.

“Run for it?”

“I dunno,” Allen said. “But maybe, yeah. Grab all the stashed profit and the surplus H, and just bolt. Sure. You ready to never see Jenny again?”

“I don’t think I am, no.”

“But if it comes to it.”

Noel cracked his window so the smoke could get out, and tapped the ash on the window’s lip.

“Sure,” he said. “If it means getting away from a death sentence? Sure.”

“I don’t know if we’re there yet.”

Noel kept smoking and thinking. Allen stared at him, and Noel realized after a while that his lieutenant was waiting for Noel to reach the conclusions he himself had already reached. He almost smiled. Allen was a great motivator. He knew when you had to push a man down a road. And he knew when you had to wait for the man to just see that there was nowhere else to go.

“Alright,” he said.

“Alright what?”

“I’ll do the work,” Noel answered and tossed the cigarette out into the night. “These two tonight. Then the Indian.”

“That doesn’t stop the subpoenas,” Allen whispered.

“We’ll need a lawyer for that,” Noel answered with a sly grin.

Allen laughed, an ugly and guttural sound.

“I’ll handle that,” he said. “We get a shyster to slow down all the federal shit. I’ll take some surplus product into the lock-up to replace the stuff from the Lucas case. You do what you need to do. If there aren’t any live bodies to testify, and the Lucas case is shut down, then the grand jury can run for fucking months and it won’t go anywhere.”

“That’s a lot of bodies,” Noel said.

“Make the lawyers look like a domestic,” Allen said. “Murder-suicide. And make the Indian vanish. He’s a junkie, anyway. Make it look like he just walked away somewhere.”

They both sat for a while longer, the plan Allen had spelled out hanging heavy in the air. Noel lit another cigarette.

“You sure you can do this, Noel?”

“All the way,” Noel answered, and let his gaze drift up to the distant lights of the penthouse apartment. “Just another Detroit tragedy, right?”

In the darkness, Allen smiled.

THIRTEEN

Darren leaned his elbows on the terrace’s half-wall and stared down at the streets below.

Issabella had all of Vernon Pullin’s case-file spread out across the little wrought iron table between the two chairs. There wasn’t much. She thumbed through the various papers she’d taken with her from the crematorium and kept talking, kept prodding Darren to explain himself and what he thought he was accomplishing.

“Kicking the hornet’s nest,” he said.

“Pissing off a judge,” she corrected.

He looked back over his shoulder at her. She had a pen held in her teeth, and a little wrinkle stitched between her eyebrows. As she thumbed through the papers she’d lain out, one hand would occasionally drift up and brush an errant length of hair back behind one ear. Darren’s face softened as he watched her.

“That civil case will make them look at the missing evidence,” he said. “It’ll get dismissed, sure. I didn’t even bother to make sure the complaint could survive a motion for summary disposition. The point was to get everyone riled up. I figured it might flush out the dirty cop.” He took another sip of his drink and shrugged in resignation. “Of course, that was before I knew it was more than one cop, or that they were a bunch of highly trained TAC team killers. That might have given me pause.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.”

“Me too.”

“So how are you going to explain to Walter Lucas that your big case on his behalf got tossed out of court?”

Issabella plucked a page out of the pile and held it up for closer scrutiny. After a few seconds, she noticed Darren wasn’t answering her. She looked up at him. A grin was spreading over his face.

“You—" she started.

“Hmm?”

“--didn’t…oh my god!” She slapped the paper back onto the table and stood suddenly, then sat, not certain what to do. Darren held his hands out in front of him, defensively.

“It was a hail Mary.”

“You never even talked to Walter Lucas?!”

“Why would I?” Darren shrugged. “There’s no case. He wasn’t framed or anything
for real
. I’m just saying he was to get the missing evidence noticed, so maybe the cops involved will do something to make
me
notice
them
. I can’t, in good conscience, go tell a client I’m filing a suit for them when I know it’s a fake case. What kind of lawyer would I be if I did that?”

Issabella stared, opened her mouth, and then stopped. Darren seemed as earnest as a schoolboy.

“Where, in all of what you just said, did you decide the phrase ‘in good conscience’ applied?” she snapped. “You intentionally filed a bogus law suit on behalf of a man you’ve never talked to!”

“Here we go…”

“You’re getting disbarred.”

“I’m not getting disbarred.”

“How can you—“

“How can I
what
?” he said, suddenly very serious. He didn’t raise his voice, but the nonchalant smile was gone, replaced with a very direct intensity. Issabella remembered him in the crematorium, a simmering outrage building in him as he learned of Vernon’s death.

This was the other side of Darren, she realized. The one he rarely revealed.

“How can I risk disbarment?” he continued. “That’s easy, Issabella. Because being a lawyer doesn’t mean anything to me if Vernon gets murdered and I’m expected to just wait around for another client to walk in the door. If filing a fake suit gets the hounds on the trail of the bastard who killed my client, then the state can cut my ticket into a hundred pieces for all I care.”

He set his drink on the half-wall and took a step closer to her, his eyes never leaving hers.

“And what I don’t understand is why that’s a mystery to you.”

Issabella bolted to her feet. She knew a confrontation was coming, and she knew her future as a lawyer depended on her ability to always stand and face them. She opened her mouth, but he was still talking.

“Maybe I should have asked more questions before I brought you in on this,” he said. “Maybe I should have asked you if you want to be a safe lawyer or a
good
one.”

Issabella didn’t need to form a rebuttal in her head. The words flew out of her of their own accord, and she jabbed a finger at his chest.

“You arrogant son of a bitch,” she spat. “Don’t you dare lecture me. You’re a drunk hiding in a bar! You put on this whole act like it’s all a big joke and then you turn around and call
me
a bad lawyer? Who the hell do you—“

“Why did you take this case?”

“You forced me to!”

She felt blood rushing to her face.

“That’s not why,” he said, and they were face-to-face. His voice was thick, his gaze intense.

“I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

“Why are you still on this case, Izzy?”

“Don’t call me Izz
y—“

Darren stepped in close, tangled his fingers in her hair, and kissed her.

She felt herself go rigid at the shock of his touch. His other hand pressed against the small of her back, pulling her closer to him. Her mouth opened into his and nothing coherent happened in her head. His embrace was firm as he bent over her.

For a timeless moment, she didn’t think. His lips pulled away from hers and she blinked, her eyes opening to the vision of him staring intently into her.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed.

She wanted to tell him not to be. But then he was kissing her again, and she didn’t want to say anything. His movements became urgent—his hands were pulling her down to the floor, pulling her slacks down, getting one leg of them off and past her shoe.

He unbuckled his belt and yanked her panties to the side, his mouth never pulling away from hers. She opened her eyes again and they both were looking into one another. Her fingers dug into his shoulders and she realized she was holding him, too.

“Yes,” she whispered.

With a hungry groan breathed into her mouth, he pushed inside her. She heard herself gasp, felt him pushing, felt him holding onto her with a desperate strength.

The expanse of stars high above her wavered, spun, and then she was spinning with them, shuddering, calling out something she couldn’t hear over the sound of her own pulse in her ears.

*

The cop
in charge of destroying Malcolm’s home was getting out of the car, leaving the other cop alone to smoke cigarettes in the darkness at the side of the road. The first— the leader of the little paper soldiers who had stormed Malcom’s lair –was named Allen Darius Phelps. Allen Phelps had an address to go along with his name, and Malcolm knew them both.

He
learned the name after exiting the northern-most service tunnel of the Brewster-Williams projects, his big hands marked with the sharp stink of gasoline, walking in a wide arc away from the scene, stalking, deliberate, calm, circling back to stand unobtrusively among the crowd of gawking, yammering citizens gathered to watch Malcolm’s world blackly pour itself out into the afternoon sky.

He mimicked the crowd by pretending to snap cell-phone photos of the burning building, but his eyes never touched on the blaze. Even as he knew that the thousands of miserable, haunted faces he had rendered over the years were blackening and curling in on themselves, vanishing in to so much smoke, Malcolm’s attention remained fixed on the uniformed men and women milling about the plain of weeds and broken concrete below the towers.

All of his life, he had been an observer— an alien presence shrouded in a carefully-arranged deceit of humanity, watching and recording the pink and brown things as they went about their lives, making judgments about them no other soul was privy to. The uniformed officials milled about, performing tasks, communicating. He watched their body language, the way they responded to one another. He watched their postures and the expressions shifting like water over their faces.

In no time at all, Malcolm’s attention was fixed on one man. He was dressed in the black body armor and fatigues of the police who’d walked into the gasoline-bomb Malcolm had rigged in his home. The man’s face was a mask of anger, and he stalked about like a restless beast, a predatory glare lighting his narrow eyes.

Malcolm waited until someone yelled “Allen”, watched intently as the predator turned to address whoever it was that had called the beast by its name. Malcolm snapped a photo of the beast. He listened and watched. When the beast stalked away from the scene and climbed into a black van, he continued to watch.

Once the van peeled off to the south, Malcolm walked away from the scene and never looked back. He had a car parked several blocks away. He drove it downtown and waited a block down from the Detroit Police Department complex. The black van was parked inside the razor-wire fence outside the police building.

Malcolm alternated between watching the building’s rear entrance and using his cell phone’s web service. The police department’s own website provided him with the beast’s full name. Two minutes later, he had Allen’s home address and personal phone number.

And hours later, when Allen marched out of the building, leapt into a red Saturn sedan and sped away into the city, Malcolm peeled away from the curb and followed him.

Now, in night’s deep hours, he watched as the brake lights on Allen’s car flared like a pair of angry embers in the night. The red Saturn pulled off and started away from the man in the other car. He considered staying with Allen, pursuing him back to his home and exacting immediate collection on the debt the TAC Lieutenant now owed Malcolm.

This Phelps, after all, was singularly responsible for the loss of Malcolm’s great project. Those thousands of rendered humans now circling the atmosphere over Lake Erie as particulates of ash had been Malcolm’s
voice
. They had been the closest thing to a distillation of his soul; the collective statement he imagined would remain after he was gone.

He almost followed Allen Phelps. But, above all other things, Malcolm was patient. His deep-set eyes slid away from the retreating Saturn and fixed on the silhouette of the smoking man parked on the street ahead of him. Another cop, he assumed-- someone who knew facts Malcolm needed. Someone who could explain the story of Vernon Pullins to him, and point out where he had made his mistake, exactly. He suspected the mistake was Darnell. Darnell had said his name to Allen Phelps, or to someone pulling Allen Phelps’ strings. But that was only a suspicion.

Malcolm had to know.

*

It took an hour and five cigarettes for Noel to work himself into the mental state he needed. He’d stare up at the lights of the penthouse apartment and know that the reason he hesitated was the girl.

To the best of his knowledge, Noel had never killed any women or children. Even in Afghanistan, he’d had the luxury of being fairly select in who he pulled the trigger on. As a sniper, much of his mission time had been spent deep in the mountains, positioned as an unseen killer, plucking individual enemies off the battlefield in an unhurried and deliberate way. Noel would exhale a trail of frost into the thin, clean air. His finger would depress an exact depth, as sure as a mechanical plunger. Far away, one man among a dozen would pitch backward, slump, and never rise. Noel had never hesitated in that role, and he had never felt anything but pride and elation afterwards.

But as he stared at that distant apartment and smoked his cigarettes, he could only think about his wife. She was in bed, he knew, while he was here. She was in bed, and there was nothing in her heart or mind that could ever predict Noel was out on the town planning the murder of a woman no older than Jenny herself. He and Jenny were in two separate worlds now—she remaining in that sane land where they were both comfortable, unremarkable citizens, and he in this dismal new world where he must transform and become something wretched.

Noel finished his fifth cigarette, pitched it out the window, and opened the car door.
‘Just go,’
he told himself.
‘Just go.’

He pushed the button on his key chain that popped the trunk. In the sunken space reserved for a spare tire there was a little metal gun safe with a digital lock. Noel bent into the trunk and tapped the combination into the keypad.

When the safe opened, it revealed its contents—three handguns, two cell phones and several small plastic bags containing an off-white powder. The guns were from crime scenes, never logged into evidence. Noel picked one out and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. He hesitated a moment, staring into the trunk, before also reaching in and palming one of the little baggies of heroin.

‘Give the lawyer a drug angle,’
he thought. He grabbed a second baggie and put that in his pants pocket with the first.
‘Dirty the fucker up; make him like any other perp. Druggie. Illegal firearm. Some kind of fight. Shoots the woman, gets weepy about what he’s done, blows his brains out…’

He put his hands on the trunk lid to shut it when Malcolm closed the distance between them—stalking up from behind with silent, unhurried steps –and smashed his elbow into the back of Noel’s skull.