Everyone Pays (5 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The ride to Dub’s apartment wasn’t a long one. We were just off Market, down the hill and a few streets over from his apartment when we left Destiny and her burger.

In the car I asked Hendricks what he knew about the man.

“Not much. I mean, I heard of Dub, but he’s no killer, so homicide don’t rightly give a damn. And that’s my stance too.”

I filled him in on what I’d picked up in vice, the background that had him as a satellite scumbag for the mob.

When we cornered Larkin onto Ellis, we came up behind two patrol cars, and my stomach dropped. I had a bad feeling right away, even before I knew they were in front of Dub’s. Two black-and-whites and an ambulance in front of them, all with their lights flashing.

“What the—?” Hendricks pulled up behind the black-and-whites. I was already half out of the car by the time it stopped.

I slid between the parked cars to the curb and saw something else I didn’t like: Lund and Peters’s unmarked sedan parked in front of the ambulance.

I swore. Hendricks came up behind me and saw it too. “The hell are they doing here?”

I asked if he wanted to guess. “Because I don’t.”

“Damn.”

We badged our way past the officers on scene and made our way up the stairs, then to the dirty apartment in back on the third floor. I’d been here once before, when I was with vice, but that was just my partner and me. This was a full-on gathering. When we came in the door, stepped into Dub’s dirty living room, Lund, Peters, and Ibaka were all there, standing around what appeared to be a battered mess of the man that had once been Dub.

“Looks like his luck finally ran out,” I said. When Lund smiled, I added, “And ours keeps getting worse.”

Hendricks swore. Lund and Peters swore, but then they smiled. Any chance of them giving up a case as messy as this one would brighten anybody’s day.

“What are
you two
doing here?” Peters asked.

Lund said, “For real. You get doubled up on this call?”

“No. I—” I looked to Hendricks, but we both knew it was no use. Even if we wanted to walk back out and forget the whole thing, we couldn’t now. We’d be taking this case and adding it to the others we’d already caught, making us three for three and our secondaries, Lund and Peters, still working a solid donut, a zero-for-three performance that was one for the record books.

“Would you two catch a case already?”

Lund furrowed his brow. He still couldn’t believe it. “Are you taking this one too?”

“We’re following a lead. Dub was a possible connection between the other two cases.”

Lund laughed. “Bowen is gonna
love
this.”

“Like I said, catch a case already.”

Peters started ripping pages out of his pad. “We’ll be glad to help you out though. With our notes. And anything else you might need. You know, if there’s
anything
. Just call.”

Lund patted me on the shoulder as he headed toward the door. Ibaka stood and watched, shot me a knowing smile. We were getting the royal screw on this deal, Hendricks and myself, and there was very little we could do.

“You’re gonna owe us for this, hear me?”

They waved over their shoulders.

Hendricks turned my way. “They’ll get us back. That’s how it works, Donner. Calls come in, murders go up and come down. It all washes out in the end.”

“Are you serious right now?”

He sucked his lips in tight against his teeth. “No. No, not really.”

Ibaka smiled. “Well, it’s nice to see you two, also. Anyone want to see the body?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MICHAEL

I knocked at the door, and he opened it, simple as could be—no fear or hesitation. Shirt open, actually a bathrobe on his shoulders, with baggy pajama pants and a gun parked at the waist. When he smiled, gold caps shined among his teeth, stains of neglect on what was left of his originals.

“What you need, my man? My playa?” He strung out the last syllable, eyeing me up and down. Long dreadlocks fell over his shoulders. He wore shaded glasses, but even with these, I could see one eye had gone bad.

He lowered the glasses to stare me in the eyes, squinting his good eye, sizing me up. Some sign of recognition passed over his features.

Then he laughed. He mocked the act of straightening up. “Welcome, papa.” He winked at me and placed his glasses back over his eyes. “What can I get you? We ain’t got no little boys here.”

Mystified, I wanted to know how he knew me. He had never entered the church.

He stepped inside, baiting me. “Well? Help you, padre?”

“I’m here about a girl.”

He laughed. “That we got!” He turned, left me at the door, let it stand open. “Girls what I got. You let me know.”

I followed him, watching as he packed a large bowl of dark hash for his pipe. He was far enough gone already that the hash wouldn’t make a difference.

A blonde girl sat on the couch, wrapped in a robe that hung open to her navel. Below that, a sash tied loosely. The robe barely covered her sex. I saw opaque pink underwear, the soft inside of her thigh. She smiled up at me, revealing teeth treated as badly as his.

“Hi, sugar,” she said. “You want some love?” Whatever she saw in my face, she didn’t like. “Okay then.”

“Get up,” I said, then to him, “Let her go. She should leave. The two of us have to talk.”

“Oh,
do
we?” His face turned sour, ashen, and his hand went to his belt. I saw the gun, its handle.

She asked, “What you say to me?”

I told her, “You’re free. Go. Leave and find salvation in God. He loves you. I give you love.”

The pimp stepped to me, hand at his belt. “What you—”

“No,” I said, “no.” Before he could do anything, I took him by the throat with one hand, held his wrist with the other to keep the gun in his pants. I pushed him back against the wall hard enough to knock down a framed picture of a girl.

He called me a name through gritted teeth, a racial epithet I’d never been called before.

I hit him in the gut with a left, then she was coming at me, arms windmilling, punching, her robe wide open. I covered my face, let her hit my arm, leaning into the pimp so he couldn’t lift his gun. I brought my knee up hard into his stomach and then again to his groin. He doubled. I grabbed the back of his head, his Medusa’s mane of dreads, and thrust his face against my knee. He crumpled, down, out, and I turned my attention to her.

I caught her wrists and held them. “Be still. I am here to save you.”

“I don’t want saving, you perverted—”

“I give you love, child. Take it.”

She spit in my face.

Like the man on the street, she chose her own way. We are nothing if not our habits. She writhed in my hands, tried to kick. I turned away, wanting to ask how much he meant to her, why she would protect him. She tried to bite my neck, berserking, gnashing teeth.

I shoved her back onto the couch, harder than I meant to, and she went limp.

“Are you all right?”

This was for Emily—Emily and what he did to her—and it had little to do with this girl. She had chosen her own path away from God. And this was what it wrought, this result in a place she shouldn’t be.

I stood over them, watching them breathe. Under her head, I saw a metal box, realized this was what she’d hit her head on. I pried it out from under her and opened the lid. It was filled, of course, with drugs and money. The money wasn’t a lot: twenties and crumpled, dirty tens, even change. Bags of white powder, rolled into tubes pushed against a bag of weed, cubes of hash, clear plastic boxes of pills. I closed the box, put it aside.

Something moved inside me at the sight of her bare thighs, something I didn’t like. I reached down to wrap her robe back around her, but it was caught underneath. I had to crouch down, so close, to lift her and pull both sides closed. I smelled her scent: unavoidable, earthy like sweat, sweet like cheap candy. For a moment I wanted to touch her.

“No.” I shoved the word out. Her teeth, dark, stained, unkempt, pushed me away. I could barely see her gums. I tied the robe tight with its sash and pulled her up off the couch by the arms, got her on her feet and then over my shoulder. I carried her back through the apartment to a bedroom, flopped her down on the bed. It sloshed and moved under her.

A water bed. Funny. I almost laughed as she swished around on its waves, thinking how good it was for Emily and so many others that soon he would be gone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the pimp’s living room, I slipped my knife out of my pocket, opened it with care, and slid it up the back of my hand, watching as it trimmed black hairs from my skin. It was ready, and so was he.

I took a pillow off the couch and wiped blood from his mouth. He still didn’t respond. Not until I pulled him up by his hair, held him in front of me, slapped him. Then, when he started blinking, I lifted him higher and smashed him facedown into and through his glass-top coffee table, making one big mess on the floor.

He scrambled onto his hands and knees, the fight rising in him, and I let him stand, seeing I’d made an even worse mess of his mouth. He flipped hair out of his face, an action that took a full movement, a swing of his body. His hair so thick and heavy.

He saw the gun on the floor. I didn’t know how stupid he thought I was, but I wasn’t that green. I dipped into a right uppercut and pivoted from the hips, brought my fist up hard under his chin, sent blood flying. I dropped a left hook into his ribs, an easy move since he was fully unguarded, didn’t even attempt a fighting stance. When he reacted to the hook, left his face open again, I knocked him down with a right cross.

I had questions, wanted a list of names, but I could barely control myself. I dropped on top of him, straddled his chest, and reached for the metal box. I lifted it over my head and brought it down. It gave a little, the box, and I lifted it to smash down again.

Later, I held the box aloft. He blinked slowly, focusing on my hands, then smiled through the blood. I still had him; he had enough left to give me what I wanted.

When the pimp came to, I’d calmed enough to do my work, to get what I needed. I’d cleaned and scrubbed his coffeemaker and used it to make a dark pot, finding old coffee that I forced myself to consume. When I’d had enough, I tied up the girl and gagged her so she couldn’t scream. I woke him with cold water on his face and chest, forced some down his throat.

He spit it up on the floor, coughed himself awake.

“Ready to talk to me?”

His eyes flitted around the room, then focused on his wrists, which I’d tied.

“You can’t do this.”

“I want names.” I brought the knife to his forearm, played it against his skin. “We’re going to play a game you won’t like.”

He swore, and I admired that attitude. It made what I had to do even easier.

I sawed the knife harder, broke skin, then worked its tip into the cut.

He ground his teeth, and something came loose. When he spit it on the ground, I could see it was a piece of thin, cheap gold.

“What you want?”

“Names. Everything about a girl named Emily. You called her Silver.”

He shook his head, grimacing at the pain. “Don’t know her. Too many tricks, man.”

I slapped him with my open hand. “How do you know me?”

He squinted. Thinking. “The church, man. I been to your church. Seen you there. You can’t do this. What would God do?”

I punched his mouth, bouncing his head back.

“Who did that to her?”

“What?” He focused.
“Who?”

“Emily. Her tongue.”

It came to him then, slowly but definitively. He got it, remembered exactly who I meant.

“Did you do that?”

“Me? No. Huh-uh. That made her worthless to me.”

“Who did it?”

“Who? Right.” He was scared. “A trick. A john.”

I pushed the knife in.

“Johns. You got to believe.”

The knife formed a distinct outline under his skin, almost an inch of it now.

“That was a ways back. Silver, she—”

I slapped the word from his mouth. “Emily.”

“Emily. She wasn’t here that long. She young, man.”

“Too young.”

“Damn.” His eyes came into focus. Blood dripped from his lower lip. I pulled my arm back to hit him again when he said, “How you know her? Who she to you?”

Time passed without my answer. His breath wheezed in and out through his nose. In the bedroom, the woman strained against her bonds, screamed into her gag. I removed a small black notebook from my inside pocket and flipped it open, readied my pen.

“Tell me who did it to her. Tell me their names and how I can find them.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DONNER

Ibaka led us back into Dub’s apartment, past a shattered coffee table and a turned-over recliner. There, on the floor, his dreadlocks matted with blood and flecks of bone, was our man Richard Webster—Dub. In truth, he’d been lucky to live as long as he had.

I wondered if we had gotten here sooner, if maybe something would have changed. Maybe we could have helped him, even caught our guy. I didn’t waste long on that line of thought. It wouldn’t get us anywhere.

And this wasn’t a loss I would mourn.

“Here lies one dead pimp,” I said. “Adios, pimp.”

Hendricks said, “Dub got dead. Things shake out. Scum claiming scum. And still we work it.”

Ibaka wore her gloves already. By way of confirming his identity, she lifted a wallet off the top of the TV and worked her way through it. She found and held out a New York driver’s license toward me. “Richard W. Webster,” she said. “Address in Harlem. Can you believe it?”

“He tarnishes the neighborhood’s fine name.”

“This stain’s been here long enough to have a sheet like he does, still never bothered to get a California license.”

It was ironic. I gave her that. Illegal too.

I looked at the address, somehow relieved to be looking at an old New York license, even after all this time. Dub was from a bad block in Spanish Harlem, way over on the West Side—home to some of the city’s worst crack hustle. Even dead in his pajamas on the floor of a dirty apartment in the Tenderloin, Dub had done well to get away from there.

I saw the scars on his face: old scars, long-ago cuts that had healed and only added to his persona. He was like that old tortoise, its shell scraped and gnarled, who still plodded along—until that one fateful day.

Hendricks toed Dub’s leg with his boot. “Real looker, this guy.”

One cut went across his forehead, clear down over one eye and onto the cheek below. The eye was milky white, pupil and iris washed out from the wound.

“Oh yeah. No way anyone would know him but as a pretty boy.”

“Pretty boy with a lot of women.” Ibaka read off her sheets. “This Cyrano held down half the women in the ’Loin.”

I said, “Don’t I know it.”

She glanced around the apartment at the filth and the wreckage. “Though calling the hookers in the ’Loin
women
might be stretching the truth.”

“Still, he had some run regardless.”

Hendricks said, “Chicks with dicks. Guys with fake boobs. Love this city.”

I thanked him for the clarification.

Scanning the wreckage, if Dub was actually a major player, controlling a lot of women and money, he didn’t live like it. Some people like a low profile, but this was gutter profile. Too much of the proceeds into his veins or up his nose.

He had a fake polar-bear-skin rug on the floor, now soaked in blood, and a TV that wasn’t even sixty inches.

“Makes you wonder what went down here.” Hendricks stooped to get a closer look at the body.

Ibaka clued us in: “This took some time. Look at the hand. Every finger broken, sometimes twice. You know how hard that is to do?”

It looked like a handful of sausages. Hendricks tested the fingers, wiggled each one to tell what was intact under the skin.

He said, “Never seen anything like this.”

“Call it a new form of waterboarding. Next thing they’ll be using it up at Homeland.” She pointed to Dub’s arm, pulled up his sleeve to show the skin above the wrist. I counted four cuts, going up toward the elbow, each deeper than the last. The topmost one, closest to his elbow, was more than an inch wide. It made a rectangle about three or four inches long where the skin had been peeled back to reveal muscle. Then the muscle had been cut again, and a cube pulled out of it.

This level of pain had never occurred to me.

Ibaka straightened. “This was just the start, I’m guessing. We roll this boy over to see where he bled out, I think we’ll find a whole new interpretation of dark ages.”