Pipe Dream (2 page)

Somehow, Podres wasn’t reassured. Holding a match halfway between the straight shooter and his lap, Podres watched as Butter placed the new candle on the mantel. Then he felt something slithering down the cushion of his chair. It was a mouse, but to him it felt like someone’s hand. He thought about the four sixty-dollar bundles everyone knew he’d bought from Pop Squaly, and the five thousand dollars he was hiding in his sock. Then he looked at the way everyone was looking at him, and the slithering mouse felt even more like someone’s hand. He noticed that everyone was closer to him than they’d been only two minutes ago. Then he saw Butter’s mouth moving, saying something he couldn’t quite make out. Johnny Podres was from the Badlands, and he knew a setup when he saw one.

“Yo,” a voice called out from the back door. “It’s Leroy.”

As footsteps approached the living room, Podres decided that he had to get out of there. He reached into his suit jacket, turned around, and pointed a nine-millimeter at the chair cushion, dropping the straight shooter to the floor with a clatter that broke the silence in the room. After that, all hell broke loose.

Pookie screamed and threw herself to the floor. Rock, who had been sitting silently in a chair in the corner, dived at Podres. Butter blew out the candle and kicked Podres in the back, knocking him over the chair and into a small pile of trash in the hallway. The gun fell to the floor, slid across the room, and went off with a flash in the corner opposite Rock’s chair.

“I don’t wanna die,” Pookie whimpered, as she crawled toward the back door.

“Shut up, bitch,” Butter said quickly.

When Podres heard Butter’s voice, he got to his feet and swung in that direction, catching Butter with a left hook. Butter fell into Rock, who had grabbed the gun. The impact caused Rock to pull the trigger. The shot went straight up in the air, hitting the ceiling. Three tricks and their customers came running downstairs screaming. Then Podres lunged at Rock and tried to take the gun.

Podres almost had the gun when Butter, thinking Rock was Podres, punched Rock in the neck, knocking him backward. Rock stood in front of Podres and aimed at what he hoped was the man’s head. There was a gunshot, then another, and what had been an all-out struggle just seconds before became deadly stillness. The bullet hole in Podres’s temple caused him to slide to the floor. Then everything stopped.

Butter thought he saw a hand with a heavy gold link bracelet pull back the curtain and dart toward the shed kitchen. But the hand was white, and Butter knew that the white boys only came through on Fridays. So he shook the image from his mind and whispered through the darkness to Rock.

“You all right?”

“Shut up and get the money,” Rock said. “Hurry up!”

Rock reached into the dead man’s pockets and pulled out the bundles he had bought. Butter, still numb but recovering quickly, reached into another pocket and pulled out a wallet. He had started to open it when he heard sirens approaching from about a mile away.

“Five-o,” Butter said.

Rock finished searching Podres’s pockets and started toward the stairs. “Get his car keys so we can roll. Pookie, which car was he drivin’?”

For half a minute, Pookie didn’t respond.

“Pookie!” Rock said loudly.

“I don’t wanna die,” Pookie managed to mumble through a shock-induced haze of tears from the far corner of the room.

“Bitch, I’ll make sure you die if you don’t hurry up and tell me what car these keys go to. Get up! Now!”

Rock slapped Pookie hard and dragged her from the corner. Then he picked her up and carried her upstairs to a bedroom whose window was opposite the bedroom of the abandoned house next door. Butter was not far behind.

“Dig this here,” Rock said, holding Pookie’s face in his hands. “You can either jump over there or you can wait for five-o. And I know you ain’t tryin’ to go to jail. Them dykes up there would have your little scrawny ass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Pookie jumped across the alley to the other bedroom window. Rock and Butter followed. Downstairs, in the deafening silence that followed the melee, Leroy, who had been coming through the back door when the shooting started, fished out the five thousand dollars Podres had been hiding in his sock. Then he climbed the stairs to the second floor and ran along the rooftops to the end of the block before disappearing into the night.

Officer James D’Ambrosio pulled up at the back of the house about one minute after Pookie, Butter, and Rock had gone out the front of the house next door.

“2512 on location,” he said into the radio that sat perched on his shoulder like some bizarre mechanical parrot.

“Okay, 2512,” the radio squawked back. “Use caution. We’re getting numerous calls from that location reporting gunshots.”

“2512 okay.”

“Tell him to wait for backup,” a crusty old man’s voice yelled over the static-filled radio.

“2512 okay,” D’Ambrosio said, thanking God that his sergeant had sense enough not to send his officers into these places alone.

D’Ambrosio’s philosophy was simple: Criminals don’t care about anything, but pipers care about even less than that. He had survived many a hairy situation by remembering that simple philosophy.

“You’re damned right I’m waiting for backup,” D’Ambrosio mumbled to himself, then chuckled. “This ain’t
COPS
in North Philly.”

The radio started clicking. Everyone in the district had heard what D’Ambrosio said and they were pushing their “talk” buttons.

“You’re hanging up, Jim,” somebody said, informing him that his radio was stuck in the talk mode.

D’Ambrosio pulled out his talk button just as a wagon with two female officers arrived. The sergeant pulled up, and the four of them drew their weapons.

The sergeant went in first, with the two officers from the wagon following closely. D’Ambrosio brought up the rear. They moved slowly, half expecting someone to rush at them from the dining room or living room. The front of the house had been cinder-blocked and cemented as part of a campaign to close down drug houses, which meant that the back way was the only way out. So when they didn’t see anyone in the rooms that had been the shed kitchen, kitchen, and dining room, they approached the curtain that sectioned off the living room from the dining room.

The sergeant indicated that the officers from the wagon should cover the hallway. He pointed toward the curtain and signaled to D’Ambrosio. Then he pointed his gun at the corner that would be exposed when D’Ambrosio pulled back the curtain.

“Now!” the sergeant said in a stage whisper. When the curtain was drawn, the four officers trained their guns on a person who lay in the corner, bathed in the haunting glow of their flashlights. When they saw that he had been shot, they tensed, knowing the shooter could still be in the house.

One of them went over to check for a pulse. As she did so, the radio squawked. Two more cars had arrived at the house.

“25A, have 2520 take the front of this property,” the sergeant said into the radio. “Have 25 Tom 2 take the back. We have a founded job here. One male down, no flash on any suspects. Send rescue to this location and inform 25 Command that—”

“25 Command en route,” the lieutenant said before the sergeant could finish the sentence.

Two officers came in the back door, flashlights blazing. The sergeant signaled for them to turn their radio volume down. Then he signaled for D’Ambrosio to come with him to check upstairs. He pointed to the basement door and signaled for the female officers to check the cellar. He signaled for the guys from 25 Tom 2 to stay at the back door in case anyone decided to run.

The officers fanned out, creeping up and down darkened staircases to conduct a room-by-room search of the upstairs and the basement. But it became apparent fairly quickly that the house was empty. After the space under the basement steps, there was no place left to hide. Someone might have hidden behind the hot-water heater, but that had disappeared over a year ago along with the copper plumbing. The doors had been taken—sold to carpenters and junkyards—so there were no closets to speak of. There was no furniture other than the tattered love seat and couch in the living room. And the tub and toilet were filled to the rim with human waste. Not even someone in Podres’s condition could have stood the stench, so that was out, too.

By the time the search was halfway through, Fire Rescue 1 had arrived. Tom 2 radioed upstairs to the sergeant, who told him to keep rescue out until the house had been thoroughly searched. Two minutes later, after looking out over the rooftops that extended beyond the front and rear windows on the second floor of the row houses on Park Avenue, the sergeant radioed downstairs to allow rescue to enter the house.

The officers who had conducted the search came back to the living room and watched the guys from rescue declare Podres a 5292—the code assigned to dead bodies.

“25A, call Homicide, we’ve got a crime scene here,” the sergeant said over the air. “And hold Tom 2 out on the scene on a detail.”

After the dispatcher answered, the sergeant started mumbling to himself.

“When are these suit-and-tie guys gonna start believin’ what they see on the news about crack?” he said as he took in the image of congealed blood and gray matter sticking to the wall where the bullet had exited Podres’s head.

“Sergeant, I think you’d better come take a look at this guy,” one of the fire rescue workers said. “I think he’s a—”

“Oh shit,” D’Ambrosio said. “That’s Johnny Podres.”

“The guy who runs the what d’ya call it?” the sergeant said.

“Yup. The city councilman who runs the Police Civilian Review Board,” one of the female officers from the wagon said.

“25 Command,” the sergeant said wearily into the radio, “please expedite.”

“25 Command on location,” the lieutenant said into his radio as he stepped up on the landing that led to the shed kitchen.

Everyone drew in their breath as the lieutenant strode into the living room of the house. When he saw the figure everyone’s flashlights were trained on, Lieutenant John Flynn put his head in his hand and said to the sergeant, “Call the captain at home. He’ll probably want to notify the commissioner, maybe even the mayor. They’re going to want to know about this one before the press gets a hold of it.”

What the lieutenant didn’t say was that Podres—the man whose anticorruption record was supposed to take him straight to the mayor’s office—could not have died in a crack house.

Chapter 2

W
hen Black reached the top of the stairs in the abandoned house next to the club, he already knew where to go because he’d been there a few times and had taken some old chandeliers that looked like brass antiques. Needless to say, they were worthless, like most of the stuff in abandoned houses.

Still, the run-down ghost houses were as much a part of the dope game as straight shooters and caps. A piper could go into an abandoned house and strip it, selling the pipes and fixtures to salvage shops and collectors. Or he could pirate some electricity, clean the place up, and turn it into a smokehouse.

But this place was next door to a storefront church on the corner of Germantown Avenue and Broad Street, so the options were fairly limited. At most, a piper could break in at night and maybe smoke two or three caps by himself. But even that was impossible most of the time, because there were workmen in the club next door at all hours of the night working to refurbish it. They weren’t there that night, though. Black had watched them leave and lock up the place an hour earlier.

He walked across the dark room and set to work ripping some of the rotting planks from around the hole in the floor until he could get a better view of the inside of the club. There was some sort of backup generator powering lights that ran along the wall, and that helped him to see what was actually in there—power tools, rolls of insulation, and boxes of ceramic tile. It wasn’t much, but knowing he could get at least a couple hundred dollars for that stuff was incentive enough to risk being electrocuted. He didn’t care.

After listening for a few minutes to make sure no one was inside, Black lowered himself into the hole feet-first and nestled carefully between the wires. He moved slowly, making sure he didn’t jerk any of the wires loose, and it took what seemed like forever just to move about three feet toward the opening in the vent.

As Black lay prone between the wires, trying to avoid jerking a wire out of some unseen power source, his mind wandered to the son he’d left behind after his wife divorced him. If he was electrocuted, would they come to the funeral? Would the baby know him if his ex-wife bothered to bring him? Would death erase the guilt of being a bad father and a worse husband? Would anyone even find him there, stuck in a vent to an unfinished club?

After a few minutes, and after seriously considering going back, Black made his way to the end of the vent, pushed his feet through the opening, then hung by his fingertips and dropped down onto the bar.

“There must be more than this in here,” he said to himself after surveying the array of power tools that were spread out on the floor.

Hopping down off of the bar, he walked to the back of the club and into the deejay booth. He glanced to his left and noticed that there was a microwave oven and a small television on a shelf next to a back door. On his right, there were some cheap imitation-African made-in-Taiwan prints that probably would be hung on the walls when they finished the place. In the corner, next to the prints, was what looked like some new bathroom equipment. Scattered along another wall were boxes of nails and screws.

He left those things and walked toward the basement stairs, where a bright light reflected off the cellar wall. He went down the rickety steps, quickly searched through some boxes, and found that there was nothing there but some rusting deejay equipment.

The heat was stifling; there were two big, rusting oil tanks against the wall, and cobwebs, graffiti, and reddish-brown dust covered everything. It felt like his lungs were getting dirty just breathing it.

He was getting ready to go upstairs and collect the microwave and power tools when he heard a car pull up outside. There was something familiar about the sound of the car, but he couldn’t place it.

Before he figured out where he’d heard it before, Black heard voices outside, then keys jangled in the door. The deadbolt slid back, and the only other sound in the building besides the noise of someone entering the club was the double thud of his pulse. He looked around quickly, searching for a place to hide, then walked around to the back of one of the oil tanks and sat down in a mound of dust.

As the car drove away, the driver yelled that he’d be back in five minutes. Black knew that he could sit perfectly still for five minutes, but sitting still wasn’t his main worry. He was starting to breathe in more of that dust. And the more he breathed, the more he felt like coughing. Black couldn’t risk that.

He started looking around for some kind of weapon—a rock, a pipe, anything that would give him enough time to get out of there if the man spotted him.

Black listened as the man began to whistle a Spanish tune. He heard the man’s rubber-soled construction boots pace back and forth across the floor. When the whistling and the walking stopped, he heard the man grunt, as if he were fat and having trouble bending down.

Behind the oil tank, Black suddenly began to feel very hot. It was as if the dust were closing in on him, daring him to cough. His throat began to itch, then his nose. Streams of sweat began to make their way down the sides of his face, meeting at his chin and dripping down into his lap. His heartbeat, already furious, began to vibrate through his body like the sound of a bass drum. He clasped his hands around his nose and mouth, shut his eyes tight against the swirling dust, pulled his elbows in to his sides, and then sneezed.

For a full minute, there was nothing. The footsteps stopped, the whistling stopped, the grunting stopped. Black’s heart, he could have sworn, stopped. The man was listening. He had to be. He was wondering where the sound had come from, or if he had heard a sound at all. He was looking around him for signs that he was not alone. He was deciding if he should call his workmates, if he should call the police, or if he should be the police. Then, just as suddenly as everything had stopped, he started to whistle again.

Black let out a long breath, then breathed in deeply, a mistake. As the man began to walk toward the basement steps, Black could feel his throat and nose begin to itch again. He was trying to will the itch away, praying for it to disappear, when he heard the man’s foot pound against the first basement step. The step creaked under his weight, and there was a pause between that step and the next one as he stopped to steady himself on the rickety wooden stairs.

Black covered his nose and mouth, feeling like his heart was going to squeeze out from beneath his eardrums. He sneezed twice and breathed short shallow breaths, praying that the heavy footfalls on the squeaky steps had covered the noise. As the man came to the final step, Black tried to breathe normally.

The man took several steps toward the oil tank. Black tightened his hands into fists, then sat on his haunches and watched as the man’s shadow crept under the oil tank and blackened the wall behind him. The man stood there for a moment while Black sat coiled tight as a spring. Then the man turned and began to rummage through the boxes on the floor, swearing to himself as he realized that whatever he was looking for was nowhere to be found.

All at once, the man stopped moving, as if he was trying to think of another place to search. He came and stood in front of the oil tank again, filling the room with a stillness that Black could have reached out and touched. At that moment, the man must have decided to look behind the oil tank.

As he started to walk slowly around to the side of the tank, Black prepared to spring. The rusting, graffiti-scarred hunk of metal that stood between them seemed to shrink beneath the man’s lengthening shadow. Then the familiar rumble of a car engine broke the silence.

The driver banged on the basement window.

“Okay, okay, I’ll be right there,” the man said, his deep voice matching the size of his gargantuan shadow.

He turned to look at the oil tank once more, and disappeared up the basement stairs.

After the man left, Black did not move for the next five minutes. It took that long for his heart to descend from the top of his throat down into his chest.

But it didn’t take nearly that long for Butter, Rock, and Pookie to get away from the house.

When Pookie pointed to Podres’s late-model Mercury Marquis, Butter and Rock both knew something wasn’t right.

“What’s this, a cop car?” Butter said.

“Dude was a cop?” Rock said, backing away. “Y’all must be tryin’ to get popped.”

“He wasn’t no cop,” Pookie said, as they approached the car. “He said he was some kinda—”

“Just get in the car,” Butter said. “We can talk about it later.”

“No, let’s get a hack,” Rock said. “If they see three pipin’-ass niggers rollin’ in a brand-new black Mercury in the middle of the night, they gon’ know somethin’ wrong.”

“Just keep walkin’,” Pookie said, stressing each word. “And don’t look back. The rollers just pulled up by the house.”

Butter and Rock both hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then rounded the corner of Park and Erie, hoping that the police car that had just pulled up in front of the house wouldn’t approach them. When the guys at the hack stand saw them walking toward Broad Street, they started to yell, hoping to get a five- or six- dollar fare so they could take the money and go cop some dope.

“Taxi hack, hack cab!” a piped-out man in a piped-out gray Granada screamed at them across Erie Avenue.

Pookie started toward him. Butter and Rock followed, thinking that a gray Granada was inconspicuous enough for their purposes.

Another man, this one in a late-model Oldsmobile with a twisted grill, yelled out, “Taxi hack, taxi hack, take you there and bring you back, faster than SEPTA, cheaper than a cab, taxi hack.”

“Yo, Rock, c-come here, man,” a familiar voice said to them in a quick stutter.

They all turned, relieved to see someone they knew, and walked back toward the dull-brown Impala with no hubcaps.

When they got in, Butter grinned a ghastly yellow-toothed smile and said, “Where you get a ride from?”

“That’s the last thing you need to be worried about right now,” Leroy said as he pulled away from Germantown Avenue and drove across Broad Street. “The last thing.”

“So what you sayin’, man?” Butter asked, his grin disappearing. “You know somethin’ I don’t know?”

Leroy, sensing that he had slipped up, said quickly, “You need to be worryin’ about where you tryin’ to go.”

“We should go to the Crescent Moon,” Pookie said. “I’m tryin’ to lay back and take a bath before I take my blast.”

“I can’t go to West Philly,” Rock said. “They lookin’ for me out there.”

“For what?” Butter said.

“I snatched a pack off this young boy out 52nd Street.”

“You swear you a gangster, don’t you?”

“I ain’t say all that,” Rock said. “I just gotta get mine.”

“All right, well, get mine and break me off some o’ them caps you got.”

“Don’t worry ’bout that, I got you,” Rock said, while he passed ten caps apiece to Rock and Pookie. “You worry ’bout gettin’ that cash outta that wallet and throwin’ the rest of that shit outta here.”

“Shakedown, breakdown,” Leroy said, smiling.

Rock passed five caps to Leroy.

“That’s a down payment,” Rock said with authority. Then, as if he were trying to confirm that he was in charge, he added, “Now, shut your dumb ass up.”

Leroy glanced in the rearview mirror, wondering if Rock and Butter still had the gun.

“Dig this here, man,” Leroy said as he pulled the car over at 21st and Erie, about two blocks from the 39th Police District. “You think I don’t know where you got all that dope? I was comin’ up in the house when everything jumped off. I know wussup.”

Rock glanced at Butter to see his reaction, but Butter seemed oblivious to the fact that there was now a witness to Podres’s murder. He just sat completely still, wearing a blank stare. Pookie, on the other hand, seemed to hang on Leroy’s every word.

“You can play that hard role on Butter and them, but that don’t move me,” Leroy said matter-of-factly. “Now, you can either get out and tell five-o how that Puerto Rican got slumped, or you can throw that gun and all that I.D. down the sewer before we all get popped.”

With that, everything stopped, until Pookie tore her gaze away from Leroy and looked expectantly at Rock.

Rock glanced at Pookie and then turned his murderous stare on Leroy. Then he pulled the gun from his groin and chambered a round with an ominous double click.

“I’ll splatter your brain against that windshield. Now, shut up and drive.”

Leroy glanced leisurely at Rock, bent down, emptied two caps into his straight shooter, lit two matches, and pulled the smoke into his lungs. He held the smoke in for half a minute, then released it slowly through his nostrils, filling the car with the sickeningly sweet smell of burning crack. He turned around, his eyes the size of half-dollars, and stared at Rock.

“Do it,” Leroy said, reaching for the barrel of the gun and placing it gingerly against his own forehead. “Do it now, while they still lookin’ for you from the last body.”

He paused and pressed the gun more firmly against his forehead.

“I just hope you know how you goin’ somewhere in a car with blood all inside the windows and a gun with at least two bodies on it.”

Rock stared back at Leroy and decided to kill him. But as his finger began to tighten around the trigger, a police car rode slowly down Erie Avenue from Hunting Park. He lowered the gun, allowing the police car to pass, and eased his grip on the trigger. Then he glanced away from Leroy.

“Man, you know I was just bullshittin’,” he said, grinning nervously. “Let’s get outta here.”

Leroy stared at Rock for a second longer. Then he turned around, put the car in drive, and pulled off slowly, his jaw moving from side to side, as it always did when he took a hit. There was silence as everyone took in what had just occurred.

Butter thought that it might be a good time to change the subject. All the gunplay was blowing his high. And in this, his first moment of clarity since the shooting, the thought of the white hand pulling back the curtain came roaring back to him in Technicolor. He could even see the heavy gold bracelet dangling from the wrist.