Pipe Dream (20 page)

“You ready?” Black said, picking up the suit jacket he had draped over the chair in the corner of the room.

“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” Pookie said.

Black sighed, genuinely frustrated that someone who spent so much time conning people couldn’t run game when it really counted.

“I told you. Act like you Clarisse sister. Hold her hand and push people out the way. Cuss out the clerk and the cabdriver. Stir up somethin’.”

“Oh,” she said. “The same thing I do all the time.”

Clarisse opened the door and pale light flooded in from the hallway. Without a backward glance, she affected the wobbly walk of the expectant mother she was supposed to be, and started toward the elevator. Black followed Clarisse, then looked over at Leroy, who seemed the most hesitant of them all. Pookie came next, walking quickly toward Clarisse and reaching for her arm like the dutiful sister.

“You talked all that shit,” she said to Leroy, looking back at him as they waited for the elevator. “Let’s go.”

“I’m comin’,” he said, and walked out of the room like a baby taking its first steps toward its mother.

“You was supposed to say, ‘I’m comin’
honey,
’ Black said. “Tryin’ to front like that ain’t your woman.”

“Yeah, all right,” Leroy said, trying to dismiss Black’s words.

Black looked over at Leroy and saw that he’d accomplished what he wanted. Leroy didn’t look as tense as he had a few seconds before. Not that Black could blame him. None of them, not even Black, had as much to lose as Leroy. If the cops rolled up on them, they would concentrate the most energy on Leroy. He might not even make it to jail. Instead, he might become really clumsy all of a sudden and suffer one of those falls in the back of the police van: the kind of fall that results in multiple contusions about the face and head; the kind of fall that Rodney King took, only worse; the kind where the victim never gets up.

As far as Black could tell, the best way to keep Leroy—or any of them—from taking that type of fall was to be relaxed, because people think better when they’re relaxed. And thinking better than the police was the best, if not the only, chance they had. They needed every chance they could get, too, because every rent-a-cop, Robocop, wanna-be-cop, used-to-be-cop, and never-been-cop in the city would be looking for them.

“You okay, Black?” Leroy said, pulling him from his thoughts.

“Yeah, I’m cool. I was just thinkin’ about somethin’.”

“You better think about what we gon’ do when we get outta here.”

The bell rang and the doors opened on the first floor. Leroy and Black just stood there, spellbound. But Pookie and Clarisse went right into their act, as if they had been practicing it for years.

“Get out the way!” Pookie screamed to no one in particular, then spoke to Clarisse in a comforting whisper. “You can make it, baby. You’ll be there soon.”

Clarisse clutched Pookie’s arm and looked at her with an expression of pain mixed with fear. Black walked off the elevator and approached the man behind the desk, who looked as if he were asking himself why something like this had to happen on his shift.

“Where’s the cab?” Black said calmly.

“What cab?”

“What cab!” Pookie repeated the question loudly. “What the hell you mean, what cab? My sister ’bout to have a baby and you talkin’ ’bout what cab! We called down here ten minutes ago for a cab and you mean to tell me it ain’t here yet?”

“Call ’em again,” Black said. “Call ’em and tell ’em it’s an emergency.”

“But, sir—”

“But nothin’,” Leroy said, slamming his hand against the counter. “Just do it.”

Clarisse let go a wail that seemed to echo off the walls of the lobby. The clerk craned his neck to look around Black and see what was the matter with her.

“Don’t be lookin’ at her,” Leroy said. “You just call the cab.”

“He ain’t call the cab yet?” Pookie said, leaving Clarisse’s side and running toward the desk like she was about to jump over it and attack the clerk.

Black grabbed her just as she reached the desk.

“If somethin’ happens to my pregnant wife . . . ,” he said in low, threatening tones.

Clarisse wailed again. Leroy and Pookie both launched a tirade at the clerk, who picked up the phone and dialed feverishly just as the cab pulled up in front of the door. Black went over to Clarisse and got the room key from her, then placed it on the desk and walked quickly toward the door. He signaled to Pookie that the cab had arrived, and she went over to help Clarisse. Leroy yelled at the clerk for a second more, and in a flash they were gone, piled into the cab and yelling at the driver the same way they had yelled at the confused and nervous clerk.

“Where to?” the cabdriver asked, an accent thickening his words.

Clarisse screamed in response. For someone with no children, she had it down pat, right down to the sweat beading up on her forehead.

“What?” the driver said.

“Hahnemann Hospital,” Black said.

“Where is that?”

“Dig this, man,” Leroy said. “All that actin’ like you don’t know where nothin’ at is gon’ cease right now.”

“Take my sister to the hospital!” Pookie shouted, raising her voice to a shrill scream.

Clarisse started to whimper, and Leroy, who was sitting in the front seat, inched closer to the driver.

“Pull off,” he said in a menacing voice. “Now.”

The tires of the cab screeched against the white driveway of the hotel, leaving two sweeping black marks in their wake. They were going back to the very city that they were supposed to be running away from, and Black couldn’t help wondering exactly where they would end up. Everything that Black had done in his life—the good and the bad—had come down to that question.

As the cab rolled down I-95, an announcer on KYW said the name he’d come to despise: Johnny Podres. When he got to the part of the story that included the suspects’ descriptions, the cabbie turned to Leroy and laughed.

“Can you imagine the whole police department not being able to find four people just because they dressed up in trench coats and ladies’ hats?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s ridiculous.”

Leroy turned his head and the cabbie said nothing more. But the radio announcer went on.

“In other news, freelance reporter Henry Moore was shot to death this morning in an apparent robbery in the parking lot of Abbottsford Hospital. Police have no suspects in that shooting.”

When Black heard that, he couldn’t help thinking that the police would find suitable suspects in the Moore shooting, just like they’d found them. It wouldn’t surprise him. In fact, nothing about the police surprised him. He’d seen too much of what they could do to people, and felt too much of what they’d done to him. Maybe someone who’d never seen them beat a man unconscious or plant a gun on an unarmed man would have been shocked.

But not Black. The only thing that shocked him was that he wasn’t dead yet.

Chapter 15

R
amirez and Hillman left the bail commissioner’s office with the arrest warrants. The papers said that Samuel Jackson, Leroy Johnson, and Patricia Oaks would be charged with the murder of city councilman Johnny Podres, criminal conspiracy, violations of the Uniform Firearms Act, aggravated assault, armed robbery, possession of an instrument of crime, theft by unlawful taking, and a variety of other offenses.

If convicted, they could get the death penalty, or they could get life in prison. But with a “high-quality” victim like Podres, and predatory defendants like drug addicts, the odds always skewed toward capital punishment—something that always seemed to stir up the public’s blood lust.

Ramirez and Hillman knew that. And as they left the bail commissioner’s office and walked out into the Roundhouse parking lot, they realized that the media knew it, too.

Ramirez tried to hide behind Hillman so he could slide past the throng of reporters who stood around waiting for the next briefing on the shooting. As soon as the reporters recognized him, though, they descended upon him like locusts.

“Lieutenant Ramirez, has there been any progress in the investigation?”

“Lieutenant Ramirez, do you have any leads on the whereabouts of the suspects?”

“Lieutenant Ramirez, have the suspects been spotted outside Philadelphia?”

It was all he could do to fight his way through the crowd muttering a few halfhearted “No comments.”

As they made their way to the car, Ramirez noticed Jeanette Deveraux sitting in a news truck in the parking lot. That struck him as odd. Normally, she was the most aggressive reporter in the crowd. Yet there she was, allowing him to walk by without asking a single question.

“What’s that all about?” Ramirez said, gesturing toward Deveraux as they got into the car.

“She is awfully quiet, isn’t she?” Hillman said.

“Too quiet.”

As they were leaving, a brown-haired man came out of the Roundhouse, walked up to her truck, and stuck his head in the window. Hillman caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror when Ramirez turned out of the parking lot.

“Do me a favor,” Hillman said. “Come back around and ride past Deveraux’s truck again.”

“Why?”

“I just saw a cop who matches the description of the man who shot Henry Moore at the hospital.”

“Where?”

“He just came out of the Roundhouse to talk to Deveraux.”

Ramirez stopped the car and threw it into reverse. But he couldn’t back up because there was a line of cars behind him. He put it back in drive, flipped on his dome lights, and went around the block.

By the time they got back to the parking lot, Deveraux and Morgan were gone. Hillman jumped out of the car and looked around for the reporter, and Ramirez ran into the building and shouted through the glass at the officer standing guard at the desk.

“Did you see an officer with brown hair and a bushy mustache wearing black pants and a gray blazer?”

“Sure, he just left,” the officer said.

“Who is he?”

“That’s Lieutenant Morgan from Internal Affairs. He should be . . .”

Ramirez was out the door before the officer could finish. He didn’t hear the reporters yelling after him. He didn’t see the officers walking in and out of the building. He didn’t even see Hillman when he jumped back into the car. All he saw was the truth, forming itself from bits and pieces in his mind, like a mosaic.

“Did you see her?” Ramirez asked.

“No. Did you see the cop?”

“No. But I found out who he is. His name is Lieutenant Morgan, Internal Affairs.”

Ramirez gunned the car and skidded out of the parking lot, wheels spinning against asphalt as he drove toward the Command Center.

Before they were two blocks from the Roundhouse, his phone rang.

“Lieutenant Ramirez, please.”

“This is Ramirez.”

“Lieutenant Ramirez, this is Eldridge Scott. A woman just called me and said she was from Homicide.”

“Okay,” Ramirez said.

“Well, I don’t know whether it was okay or not,” Eldridge said. “I’ll leave that up to you, since you supposed to be the professional.”

Ramirez held his tongue and prayed for patience.

“Now, I know y’all got female detectives and everything,” Eldridge said. “And I don’t mean to sound like some kind o’ male chauvinist just because it was a woman callin’, but somethin’ about her just wasn’t right.”

“Something like what?” Ramirez said, his head bouncing toward the roof of the car as they hit a deep pothole.

“First of all, she was askin’ me about things I know I already talked to you about,” Eldridge said.

“Sometimes we ask the same questions over and over again, Mr. Scott, because people forget things sometimes, and the more you ask, the more details you get.”

“All right, well, since you so sure about it . . .”

“No, Mr. Scott, it’s not that at all,” Ramirez said, trying not to get on the old man’s bad side. “I’m trying to understand what you’re trying to tell me, that’s all.”

“I just didn’t think the woman was right,” Scott said. “Now, it’s one thing to ask the same questions over and over again. But she was tellin’ me not to discuss our conversation with anybody, and then she asked me to come down and meet her in the parking lot of the Roundhouse. Now, if the woman was from Homicide, would she be tellin’ me to keep our conversation secret, like she was hidin’ somethin’, and then tell me to meet her outside someplace, instead o’ in her office?”

The old man made sense. Quickly, Ramirez ran through the names of the people who worked day shift, because he knew there weren’t any female detectives in his squad. Of the twenty-six detectives in the other two squads, he could only think of one female.

“Mr. Scott?” Ramirez said. “Did the woman give you a name?”

“She said her name was Deveraux.”

Ramirez held the phone away from his ear as another piece of the mosaic pushed itself down into the mortar of his mind. It all made sense. Jeannete Deveraux had been waiting in the parking lot for Eldridge Scott. She was going to try to trick him into coming to the Roundhouse and then push a camera in his face. But Morgan had somehow convinced her to leave with him.

“Thank you, Mr. Scott.”

“Wait a minute,” Eldridge said before Ramirez could disconnect the call. “Was I right? Was the woman from Homicide?”

“Well, no, she wasn’t.”

Eldridge let loose a self-satisfied laugh. “Learn to listen to your elders, boy. We ain’t lived all this time by bein’ fools.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramirez said, disconnecting the call.

“Deveraux was waiting for the guy who lives next door to Clarisse Williams,” he said to Hillman.

“Morgan must have told her that he had a better story,” Hillman said. “Hopefully, it’s not the same type of story he fed to Henry Moore.”

Ramirez didn’t respond. He knew that Hillman was right. He had been right from the very beginning. Now people were dying because Ramirez had refused to listen to him. It was just like Eldridge Scott had told him: Listen to your elders, because fools don’t usually live that long.

Lieutenant Darren Morgan looked in his rearview mirror as he turned onto I-76 East and headed for the airport. He half expected to see Jeanette Deveraux and her cameraman take the next exit ramp and go back to the Roundhouse, but when they passed the Gray’s Ferry Avenue exit and switched into the left lane to keep pace with him, he knew he had them. The only problem was figuring out a way to get rid of their news van when he was done.

It had been pretty easy to convince the reporter that the information he had was better than anything she was going to get standing around in the Roundhouse parking lot waiting on whomever. All he had to do was mention the words “police conspiracy.” From there, it was a piece of cake. He told her that if she promised not to contact anyone at the television station before she had the evidence in hand, he would provide her with the paperwork and photos to prove that the Podres shooting was the result of a wide-ranging police cover-up involving at least two ranking officers. What he didn’t tell her was that he was one of the officers, and the paperwork was nowhere to be found.

Morgan turned onto the bridge that led to the airport and looked in his rearview mirror again. Then he smiled to himself and wondered what Deveraux and the cameraman were thinking about as they followed him.

“Do you think it’s safe to come out here with this guy?” Jeanette Deveraux’s cameraman said after they followed Morgan into the airport, through A, B, C, D, and E terminals, around the entire international terminal, and through a hole in the gate at Philadelphia International Airport.

Deveraux didn’t answer. She was too busy wondering what the cop was going to tell them about the Podres shooting and hoping that whatever information he had was worth disregarding the interview with the couple who lived next door to Clarisse Williams. After all, the illegal search thing would’ve been pretty strong. But if this guy could give names and dates and link the whole thing to the police department, that would be like someone giving Deveraux her own world someplace, to pillage and plunder to her heart’s content.

The only catch was, there was no way to be sure about the cop. This little excursion could be anything from a delay tactic to some kind of public-relations ploy. Who knew?

Maybe that’s what was bothering her about this thing. She didn’t know. She’d always pretty much stuck with the “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy because it helped her keep things really simple. But when it came to this, probably the biggest story she’d ever covered, she was willing to risk doing something different. She was willing to toss the dice and risk losing the sure story for the bigger story that she wasn’t so sure about. That’s what Morgan was offering her—something infinitely bigger than anything she’d ever covered. And he hadn’t even asked for anything in return.

Deveraux watched as Morgan stopped his car a few feet from the high grass at the edge of the airport. But she wasn’t really seeing him, or his car, or the grim expression he wore as he got out and closed his door. She was only seeing a Barbara Walters–like rise to one-woman shows and hour-long specials.

“Jeanette?” the cameraman said as he got out of the van and pulled his camera from the backseat. “You coming?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, snapping out of her reverie. “Just let me get my microphone.”

Deveraux got out and leaned over the backseat just as Morgan walked back toward the news van. She had to rummage through some stuff to get to the microphone, because the wire had tangled on something.

“Mike,” she said, still looking down at the floor. “Could you come over here and help me get this wire untangled?”

The cameraman didn’t say anything.

“Mike, I need you over here now,” she said.

When he still didn’t answer, Jeanette Deveraux felt something cold run through her. It was like everything she had ever done up until that moment came together and pressed against reality until it burst through the other side. She felt it all over, that something had just happened that would change her whole existence. It was like ice water pouring over her body, but it was something much colder. It was mind-numbing, all-consuming fear.

Without raising her head, she glanced over at the other side of the van and saw Mike’s hand draped loosely over the camera handle. A smear of blood soiled his sleeve. The rest of his body wasn’t visible, she assumed because it was on the ground next to the van. Jeanette Deveraux’s eyes began to dart wildly from side to side, trying to find where the cop had gone. When she didn’t see him, she clasped her hand over her mouth and willed herself not to scream. That’s when everything came into focus for her.

The whole thing had been a ruse by this cop to get her out to the airport and kill her. That could only mean one thing—that he was smack-dab in the middle of whatever conspiracy had caused Podres’s death, and he was willing to do anything to keep that conspiracy under wraps.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, forcing herself to continue rummaging through the backseat until she could think of what she was going to do next.

She couldn’t hear anything, because the sound of the planes flying overhead drowned out everything, including the gunshot that had killed Mike. She couldn’t see anything, either, because she didn’t dare look up and let the cop know that she saw her cameraman crumpled in a bloodstained heap next to the van. There was only one chance for her, and she was going to take it.

“I got it, Mike,” Deveraux said as loudly as she could, the tears squeezing out from between her eyelids. “I got the microphone.”

Before she had even finished saying the words, Jeanette Deveraux turned around and ran away from the van, tumbling toward the hole in the fence that they had driven through a few minutes before. Morgan darted from the other side of the van and ran after her, cursing himself for allowing a woman to get the jump on him.

Deveraux tripped, put out her hands to steady herself, half crawled, half fell through the opening in the fence, and ran toward an expanse of grass that led to the nearest runway. Morgan ran through the hole after her, gaining momentum as he took aim and squeezed off a shot that missed badly. Deveraux started zigzagging, hoping to make herself a more difficult target. Morgan squeezed off another shot, barely missed, then tripped on a rock and fell down in the grass. When he looked up, Deveraux was about twenty yards away, still running toward the runway.

Morgan lay there in prone position, calmly took aim, and shot Jeanette Deveraux in the small of her back. When he saw her fall, he looked at his gun, realized that he had squeezed off the last round, and began fumbling in his pockets for another magazine as he got up and walked over to her. Deveraux was still trying to crawl toward the runway when he got there, though she could no longer move her legs.

“Go to hell,” she said as he came to stand over her.

Morgan grinned as he watched her writhe back and forth in a sickening pain dance that looked almost like some kind of ritual.

“I never heard you say anything like that on the news,” Morgan said, panting as he struggled to catch his breath. “Do they let you say stuff like that on the news?”