Sleeping Dogs (10 page)

The cab driver’s eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “You from around here?”

“No.”

“Then let me take you a little farther down. This is Harlem. In the Fifties there are a lot of good hotels. You don’t want to get out here.”

“No, thanks.” He handed the driver sixty dollars and climbed out. “Keep the change.” The driver didn’t speak. The buttons on the doors all came down automatically and the cab was already moving to catch the green light. The man had decided not to sit through another red and watch what he was sure would happen.

Ackerman glanced at the four young men beside the building. The watcher was moving his head from side to side rapidly, as he had seen one of the horses do at the post this morning at the racetrack. The life of a petty thief was mostly watching and loitering, and the thought that the waiting was over always seemed to make them twitch and flex and make unnecessary moves just to wake up their limbs.

The guns wouldn’t be in their clothes. If the police surprised them on a sweep, they wouldn’t want the ten-year sentence for carrying a firearm—or worse, to give a cop the excuse to open fire. The weapons would be in a trash can or behind a loose board over a window. He held the thieves in his peripheral vision as he moved up the street. It was a delicate matter to pique their interest enough to get them to reveal their hiding place, and then to induce them to reject him as prey. He knew the critical moment would be the instant when they thought he had stopped looking. Then at least one would make a move, if only to check the place where the weapons were.

He walked past their building and they held their places, but he could feel their eyes moving up and down his body. They would be looking for some sign that he was a cop acting as bait. If he was dangerous, it wasn’t because he could chase down four men half his age and handcuff them; it was because attacking him might bring five or six carloads of cops screeching in from all directions with riot guns and body armor. He sensed that they were making their decision. In a moment one of them would betray the hiding place.

“Hey, man!” came a voice. It disconcerted him. That wasn’t how it was done. The voice came again. “Want some crack? A little blow? Crank?”

He stopped and turned to look at them. What the hell were they doing? Of course it would be drugs these days. The watcher was the salesman. The salesman strutted out to the sidewalk, his head at a slight angle from his shoulder. He was skinny and black, with long legs in fitted jeans that ended in a pair of white high-topped sneakers with big tongues half-laced with red laces. On his left wrist he wore a Piaget watch with a band that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a two-pound gold nugget. He had misread the signs. These weren’t hit-and-run thieves; they were pharmacists.

He stood thinking as the salesman approached. He had been out of the country too long. What else didn’t he know? He glanced over the young man’s shoulder at his three companions. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of their shadowy stand, he could discern that they were all black too. They all wore high-topped sneakers that looked as though they had been designed for players in the NBA, laced haphazardly with red laces. What was that all about—a sign to customers? A uniform? The cops would love that.

The young man smiled. “You be here buying, or looking? Don’t have all night, I got shit to move. Won’t do better anywhere around here.” His smile was vacant, unfeeling and confident. He didn’t speak quietly or look over his shoulder for the patrol car the way street dealers used to.

A line of five cars cruised up to the light, and the other three stood up, walked out into the street and leaned down to speak into the drivers’ windows. Two of them made quick deals, taking money and handing the drivers tiny plastic bags from inside their jackets, then moved on to the next two cars. When one driver didn’t roll down his window, the young man’s expression didn’t change. He just gave the door a lazy, half-hearted pat, already looking ahead at the next potential customer.

Ackerman pushed his amazement to the back of his mind. This was a distraction, and he had to work with the new circumstances, regardless of how they had come about. “I want to buy a gun.”

The salesman cocked his head again and leaned closer. “Say what?” From the exaggeration he could tell that the salesman was already savoring the irony of the situation enough to want to hear it again.

“I don’t want any drugs tonight, but I do want a gun. Can you help me out?”

The grin broadened. “If
I
have a gun, and
you
have money but no gun, what’s to stop me from having both of them?”

“You’re making too much here to fuck it up robbing people.”

“Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.” The young man turned and sidestepped back toward his building’s shadow like a base runner shortening his lead.

He followed the salesman back toward the shadow. “It’s got to be now.”

“Can’t do that. How’m I supposed to hold my corner with no gun?”

So that was it. They weren’t afraid of the police or a tapped-out, desperate customer ready to kill to get the whole hoard. There were so many dealers now that they were fighting over prime locations. “I don’t want all of them. Just a pistol.”

“Pistol? Shit.” The salesman’s professional grin returned. Behind him the light turned green and the traffic moved past again. The three vendors looked up the street, then began to drift toward the shadow of the building, so the salesman felt comfortable enough to turn his back. He removed the board from the window and reached inside with both hands. When he turned, he held a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel. A gun like that weighed at least two pounds empty and was fat and squat, like a little cannon with a thick round handgrip. Ackerman could see that the salesman and his friends weren’t in the concealment business. The only conceivable reason they would pick a gun like this was that it wasn’t as heavy to carry around as a .44. But then, with his other hand, the salesman reached deeper into the cache and produced something bigger, black and square and utilitarian, that didn’t resolve itself into a recognizable shape until he had it at chest level.

“How much for the Uzi?”

“It’s not for sale. I’m not giving you a loaded piece and then standing here with nothing in my hands like a fool.”

Ackerman smiled. “May I?” He took the revolver in his hand and examined it. It hadn’t been fired more than a few times, but it had some kind of filmy substance on the barrel. He opened the cylinder, touched the inside of the barrel with the tip of his little finger and sniffed. It was the familiar smell of gun oil, so the kid had at least cleaned it. Then he sniffed the outside of the barrel, and detected a lemony odor.

“What are you doing? If you’re going to eat the barrel, don’t do it here.”

“What’s this got on it?”

“Pledge. I waxed it to save the finish.”

Ackerman nodded sagely, as though to ratify the wisdom of spraying furniture polish on a revolver. These kids had no more idea of what they were doing than they would if they had arrived this evening from Neptune. “How much do you want for it?”

“A thousand.” It was as though he had no smaller numbers in his head.

“I haven’t got that much.”

But now the salesman’s eagerness to sell was gnawing at him. He had already spent too much time with this man. “What did you think I wanted?”

“They sell for two hundred new.”

“All right. Give me five hundred and go away.” He was miserable. The idea that there was a grown man walking the streets who didn’t have a thousand dollars depressed him. He had spent five minutes haggling with a panhandler. He accepted the five hundred-dollar bills and jammed them into his pocket with impatience.

As Ackerman tried to conceal the big revolver under his coat, the air around him seemed to tear itself apart with a sudden roar. For the first fraction of a second he thought the salesman had let his finger stray to the trigger of the Uzi. But as he jumped to the side, he saw one of the street vendors sit down abruptly. There were muzzle flashes from the windows of a big brown Mercedes at the corner as two passengers fired wildly at the two salesmen still standing up in the street, hitting the curb, the side of the building and parked cars as though they were blind.

Cars began to squeal out of line and roar back up the one-way street. Each time one of the street vendors hid behind a car, it would move, and he would have to run to the next. Ackerman saw one of them run to the driver’s side of a car, fling the door open, push the occupant over and drive off. The Mercedes now backed up to afford a better angle on the one who was left, but then it stopped abruptly as the driver saw Ackerman and the salesman in the shadows. Ackerman saw the face of a young black man, and then the barrel of the shotgun swung toward them.

As the man pumped the slide, the salesman seemed to collect his thoughts. The Uzi came up and the now-empty street became a different place. The little machine gun jerked and a brief, messy shower of sparks and flame sputtered out of the short barrel, some of the burning powder still glowing three feet out of the muzzle. It took less than two seconds to empty the thirty-round magazine into the Mercedes. Then there was a second of silence when Ackerman could hear the brass casings that had been ejected clattering onto the sidewalk. The doors of the Mercedes were punctured in at least a dozen places. The right side of the windshield was gone, and the left was an opaque fabric of powdered glass held together by the remnants of the plastic safety layer. But miraculously, there was activity in the car. The driver popped up, leaned over the wheel and began to sweep the ruined glass out of the windshield. Then the shotgun barrel swung up again, and there was a face behind it looking for a target. As Ackerman sighted the pistol, he noted with detachment that the car must have been modified. Military ammunition should have gone through the doors and done some damage to the people behind them. Probably they had put steel plates in the doors the way the old gangsters did.

Ackerman aimed with both hands and squeezed the trigger. The big pistol jerked, and he could see that the man with the shotgun had been hit. His head lolled forward, and it appeared he had lost some hair and scalp. Now the car’s tires spun and smoked. When they caught and the big Mercedes jumped forward, the shotgun fell from the dead man’s hands and slid a few feet on the pavement.

The street vendor who had been sprinting for a hiding place when the Mercedes had backed up now stopped and dashed for the shotgun. He knelt beside it, brought it to his shoulder, fired, pumped and fired again at the Mercedes as it screeched around the corner.

The salesman disappeared around the building as the street vendor trotted over to his fallen companion. The wounded man was sitting in a growing pool of blood, rocking himself back and forth slowly. In a few seconds the salesman pulled up in a Jaguar that looked a lot like Meg’s. The two men hauled their wounded companion to his feet and dragged him into the back seat of the car.

As Ackerman watched them, he felt something that could have been sympathy. “You know how to apply a tourniquet?”

The salesman turned on him, his eyes wild with anger and fear. “None of your business.”

“He’s going to bleed to death if you don’t.”

“No,” came a frightened moan from the man sprawled on the seat. Ackerman could see that he was stiff and shivering now, going into shock. The word
no
might have referred to anything he had heard, felt, seen or remembered, but it seemed to affect the salesman, who said, “Get in with him.”

Ackerman climbed into the back seat and closed the door, then squatted and leaned his back against it to stay out of the blood. He took off his necktie and tightened it around the young man’s thigh as the car pulled out. He looked at his watch. It was just eleven-thirty now. In ten minutes he would have to loosen the tourniquet to keep the leg alive. “Is there a hospital we can get him to?”

The salesman sounded furious. “Okay, you popped that fucking Jamaican, but you don’t know nothing.”

“He’s your friend. It’s up to you.”

The salesman leaped to adopt his point of view. “That’s damned right, and that’s why we’re taking him to the emergency room.” He was a born leader. “Don’t worry, B-Man, I’ll get you there.”

The salesman was calming down now, driving with reasonable attention to whatever was in front of the car.

Ackerman waited and watched, counting the minutes. The wounded man was now limp and probably comatose from the loss of blood. As the car moved uptown, he wondered if the salesman had changed his mind, but the kid spoke again. “We’ll take him up where they won’t piss their pants if they see a black man with a hole in him. But I got to throw the Jamaicans off. If they know he’s hit, they’ll come right to his room and cut him up.”

Ackerman used the tall buildings that floated by to orient himself. The Honourable Meg and her friends used the term “culture shock” to describe the feeling he was experiencing now. A day ago he hadn’t been thinking about coming back to the United States, and now he felt as though he had been shot out of a cannon and landed here. It all looked the same, but it wasn’t, and he was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t either.

“What do you think?” the salesman asked Ackerman.

He held his watch up until a passing streetlight swept across it, illuminating it like a photographer’s flash. There was still five minutes before he had to loosen the tourniquet. The salesman was nervous and wanted support. “Sounds okay. If you can get him there in five minutes it’ll help.”

The street vendor had said nothing since getting into the car. Now he was leaning back in his seat as though he were asleep. “What’s wrong with your buddy?”

“Oh, shit,” said the salesman. “He’s hit too.”

“Why doesn’t he talk?”

“He doesn’t know any English. The B-Man knows a little Spanish.”

Ackerman looked down at the man sprawled across the seat. He was sweating and shivering and looking gray in the face. He might live, but he wasn’t going to do any translating tonight. Ackerman leaned over the seat and put his head over the other man’s shoulder. He could see that a bullet had hit the man’s arm, and blood had soaked the front of his blue shirt. He looked closer. It was a clean hole punched through the left bicep, about the size of a double-ought buckshot pellet. But he could tell that that wasn’t what had hit him; a stray round had clipped him when the salesman had hosed down the neighborhood with the Uzi. At the time he had noticed that only about half the magazine had hit the car. It was probably just as well that they hadn’t called for an ambulance. The ones nearby could be filling up now with people who had been sitting in their apartments watching the late news. “It looks like only one shotgun pellet,” he said. “He’s not in danger, but he’ll need some help, too.”