Deadly Assets (20 page)

There now was widespread blight, for example, pockets of it severe. Calling the Hooks property a row house was something of a misnomer, as there were no other houses along its row. Twenty years earlier, when Tyrone had been five, a fire had ravaged all the others on that side of the street. Their blackened masonry shells had been demolished by the city, leaving the Hookses' two-story structure standing alone near the corner, with only raw empty lots where the other row houses had once stood.

Over time the demographics of the neighborhood had dramatically changed, too.

Now the vast majority—eighty percent—of Fairhill's residents were Hispanic. While these were mostly Puerto Ricans, there were also many who had emigrated from Cuba and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Family-owned businesses in what they called their El Centro de Oro—Center of Gold—catered to them, the markets painted in the same bright yellows and greens and blues as those in the islands. Remarkably, on all four corners at Lehigh and Fifth there were even palm trees—leaning ones made of metal installed to further create a tropical feel.

Carmelita—who had been born at Temple University Hospital's Episcopal Campus, on the outer edge of Fairhill—wiggled her hips as Tyrone tugged down her skintight jeans.

Just as she jumped onto the bed, Tyrone's cell phone—which he had tossed on the couch next to his black Ruger 9-millimeter semiauto pistol when he had undressed—began ringing.

Or, perhaps more correctly, it began rapping.

Hooks had recorded songs he had written on the computer, and from those digital files had created ring tones, then transferred the rings to his cell phone, where he had linked them to the telephone numbers of select members of his crew.

“Damn it!” he said, recognizing who was calling without needing to look at the phone screen.

“Anything wrong?” Carmelita said, watching the skinny Tyrone walk quickly to the couch and grab the phone off the seat cushion.

He ignored her, then snapped at the caller: “You better be calling to say it's done.”

Carmelita could hear the male voice of the caller but could not make out what he was saying, only picking up on his tone. He sounded, she thought, excited in a nervous way—maybe even scared.

“Look, man,” Tyrone said angrily, his eyes darting at Carmelita then away, “we've been over this. You gotta just do it. You hearing me? 'Cause if you don't, you know what happens.”

There was no reply for a moment, then Carmelita heard the caller mumble, “All right.”

“Don't say it—do it! Let me know when it's done. No surprises.”

Hooks ended the call, and was about to toss the phone back on the cushion when it made a
Ping-Ping!
sound.

He looked at the screen and read the text message: “Yo, King. Bags in AC safe. All good here. TV news keeps showing smash & grab. That dude really dead???”

Tyrone turned his back to Carmelita, then thumbed a reply: “News says 1 dead 1 shot. Stay there. No casinos!! Lay low til I say.”

He nodded as he glanced at the crushed velvet pouch and thought:
Lucky they got to the Shore quick. Five-Oh really got to be looking hard for them, especially since he killed that guy. Damn good news that loot's locked up.

Right after he hit
SEND
, the phone made another
Ping-Ping!

“Damn,” he said in a hiss, then flipped the switch to silence the phone.

He suddenly felt the warmth of Carmelita's skin against his back, then her arms wrapping around him, her gentle fingers finding his curly black chest hairs. She rested her chin on his shoulder. He could feel her moist breath on his ear.

“You ever shoot anyone, King?” she said.

Hooks jerked his head.

“Why the hell you say that?”

“You rap about it,” she said, her tone playful but serious. “You got the nine. Just wonder sometimes if you've done it.”

She buried her face in his neck as her right hand slipped down to his belly and then to his groin.

Hooks inhaled deeply.

“Well, baby, I rap about some super-hot sex, too, so what do you think?”

He exhaled as he glanced at the phone screen and saw that the text massage read “Call me QUICK!”

“What's that text about?” Carmelita said.

“You oughta not ask so many questions,” Hooks said sharply, turning from the phone toward her.

She stuck out her lower lip in a pout—just as her hand grasped him in a way that left no question she wasn't really pouting.

After a very brief moment he grinned, tossed the phone back beside the pistol on the couch, and said, “But that one's about nothing that ain't gonna wait!”

He then roughly pulled a giggling Carmelita back across the room to the bed.

—

A half hour later, Hooks hit a speed-dial key on his cellular phone as he watched Carmelita, sitting up in bed beside him, take a fat pinch of crushed marijuana from a clear plastic zip-top bag and refill the bowl of the glass pipe that had been on the desk.

“Don't forget I need you to call your brother after that bowl's burned,” Tyrone told her. “I got a job for him.”

“What you want with Ruben?” she said, picking up a matchbook from the bedsheet.

“Baby girl, what'd I tell you about asking so many questions?” Tyrone said, then barked into the phone, “Yo!”

“You call that calling me quick?” DiAndre Pringle answered.

“I had something I had to do first.”

Carmelita giggled.

“Whatever, Ty,” Pringle said.

Hooks guessed that Pringle had overheard Carmelita, and grinned at her.

“Listen,” Pringle went on, “I wanted you to call quick 'cause I'd just got an idea for you.”

“This about me performing at that Turkey Day gig?”

“No.”

“What? I'm still doing the gig, right?”

“Yeah, Ty. But you want to work another gig?”

Hooks looked at Carmelita, grinned, then said, “Depends. I don't know. Might be busy. When?”

“This afternoon.”

“Today? You messing with me?”

“No. You heard that the Rev is putting on a rally, right?”

“Rally? About what?”

“About all the killing that's going on. About stopping Killadelphia.”

Hooks felt the hair on his neck stand up.

He can't mean what happened this morning.

How'd he know about my boys?

Unless somebody else went and talked . . .

“Going to be lots of people at the ministry here, Ty. And I figured you'd be really good at really amping up the crowd.”

Yeah, he does mean my raps.

“How much?” Hooks said.

“How many people?”

“No. How much I get paid?”

“Are you serious? Ain't nobody getting paid. I mean, c'mon, it's for our people!”

Hooks was quiet a moment.

Guess I'm about to get me a good grip for that loot—plenty of benjamins for a while.

And it'd look good if I played that rally
.

Might even be news covering it. Get me on TV.

“TV news coming?” he said.

“Yeah. I left messages with 'em all. That
Philly News Now
and Channel 10 called back and said they were sending reporters. Sure there'll be more.”

Hooks's eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, man,” he said, nodding, “I could seriously amp that crowd up.”

“Don't need you to do a whole set or nothing. Just rap one or two songs. Rev Cross doesn't like folks taking over his stage.”

Carmelita lit a match, then put the flame to the pot in the pipe bowl. She took a deep puff on the glass pipe and held it in, before holding out the pipe to Hooks.

“So,” Pringle said, “whatcha say, King?”

Tyrone Hooks looked at his gold Rolex watch.

“I say what time you want me there?” he said, winked at Carmelita, then took a puff on the pipe.

[ FOUR ]

Lucky Stars Casino & Entertainment

North Beach Street, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:45
P.M.

“The way this ghetto punk strutted out of here, he must've really thought that he'd conned everyone, that we were just gonna swallow this little charade of his,” Security Director Sean Francis O'Sullivan said, as he gestured toward the wall of flat-panel monitors showing live video feeds of activity throughout the casino property. One monitor had a sharp freeze-framed close-up image of a smirking Tyrone Hooks as he sat on a Winner's Lounge barstool.

O'Sullivan looked at Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, and went on: “He expects us to believe that, after being in the jewelry store, he just happened to be having a beer while the robbery was taking place downstairs? Innocently playing a couple hands of five-card stud on the video game at the bar? And then that he just happened to leave the scene after it's all gone down?”

“That really is pretty ballsy bullshit, Sully,” Harris said, looking from the close-up image and meeting O'Sullivan's eyes. “Almost like he's taunting whoever's watching.”

“I'd say more bullshit than ballsy, Tony. I really don't think he's that smart, or that he realizes what deep shit he's in. Because what I do know is that Mr. Antonov is more than a little pissed. He's been in and out of here constantly all day, watching the videos, getting information updates, and saying to make sure that we—meaning me personally—give you everything you need.”

Harris and O'Sullivan were in the large security office on the top floor of the casino complex, which was down the hall from the office of the casino's general manager, Nikoli Antonov.

Harris thought the forty-by-forty-foot space—with a small staff busy at a dozen workstations and watching the wall of flat-panel monitors—looked somewhat like the ECC war room at the Roundhouse. O'Sullivan had told him that, while not nearly as impenetrable as the casino's vault room, which had been built inside a fortress of reinforced concrete walls one floor below ground level, it was highly secure.

O'Sullivan was forty-three years old, tall and fair-skinned, with a smoothly shaven face and scalp and a bushy mustache and goatee and eyebrows that in recent years had faded from carrot-red and added flecks of gray. He wore a nicely cut dark woolen two-piece suit that had been tailored to accommodate the Sig Sauer .40 caliber semiautomatic that Harris knew he carried in a black leather holster on his right hip.

O'Sullivan had put in just over twenty-two years at the Philadelphia Police Department, leaving as a lieutenant in the Citywide Vice Unit, which fell under Specialized Investigations along with Narcotics, Special Victims, Homicide, and other units.

For someone who had served in such an intense unit of the department—while most officers worked within one of the department's twenty-five districts, performing the necessary street-walking grunt work, Vice worked big complicated cases throughout the city—O'Sullivan required a challenge after retirement.

He had found that challenge at the casino, he said, “protecting the facility from a constant string of knuckleheads who misinterpret its ‘More Money! More Winners!' slogan as an open invitation to rip off the place.”

O'Sullivan had replayed for Harris that morning's security camera videos of the flash mob raging through the casino, of the four males in black hoodies and bandannas obscuring their faces while robbing the jewelry store, and finally of Tyrone Hooks. The videos had been made using scores of camera angles to create seamless detailed time lines of each subject's every step at the casino.

The compilation of Hooks began with the cameras first picking him up strutting across the parking lot and entering the revolving doors, then, approximately an hour later, showed him exiting doors to the parking garage at the opposite end of the complex and hailing a taxicab.

“Hooks,” O'Sullivan said, “bragged to the bartender that he was some hot-shit hip-hopper going by the name King Two-One-Five, and tried to make himself sound like he was something of a regular big-time gambler. When he flashed that gold Rolex President, the bartender felt obligated to ask about it, and Hooks was quick to pull the wrinkled bill of sale from his pocket to authenticate it was in fact his and that he had paid for it with his winnings . . . and probably flashing how much he had paid for it.

“Clearly he thought,” O'Sullivan went on, “that everything he'd done would give him a pretty solid alibi. We know that he knows the casino cameras capture everything, because we have record of him taking our beginner's intro tour, and that's one major point we make to all the newbies. We show them the cameras.”

He gestured at the monitors. Tony's eyes went to them.

“We're not actually watching every table in live time,” O'Sullivan went on, “but the cameras certainly are, and when someone starts really winning a shitload of money, we say, ‘Whoa,' and go to check the forensic recordings.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Every damn week. This week we caught this guy—a really bright numbers guy who just graduated from Wharton—counting cards at the blackjack tables. He denied he was doing it. So we showed him the video, then escorted him from the building. We were nice about it. Didn't kick him in the ass on the way out. But a lifetime ban, he got. And we shared his name with other casinos. Now he'll have to figure out some other way to come up with the funds to pay off that massive MBA student loan he probably has.”

“Lifetime ban? That's pretty harsh, isn't it? It's not like he was cheating, he's playing smart.”

“We're not in this business to go broke, Tony. Look, we make the rules, and one of those is that the odds are in the casino's favor. And we tell people exactly that, especially during that beginner's intro tour—right before we then tell them, ‘You don't like it, then start your own damn casino.'”