Stress (22 page)

In 1967, before the riots and shortly after beating the rap for the ambush slaying of four men in the elevator of the Penobscot Building the previous summer, Wilson McCoy had been busy composing a letter to the local media in a second-floor bedroom of a condemned house—ironically, it was the same one in front of which the Wayne State sophomore was shot two years later—when the floor shook and a pane popped out of his window overlooking Cass. McCoy had been smart enough to quit the premises immediately, and dumb enough to leave the letter behind. Its threatening tone made it Exhibit A at his Grand Jury hearing, resulting in his being bound over for trial for conspiracy to endanger the public and commit property damage in excess of ten thousand dollars and two counts of manslaughter. The two counts belonged to a Panther named Cameroon and a fat nineteen-year-old slut of a Symbionese Liberation Army recruit who had been packing C-4 into a galvanized pipe in the basement of the house when it went off, blowing out the ground-level windows and plastering a surprised blue eyeball against the foundation of the restaurant next door.

The white attorney who had won McCoy’s acquittal in the homicide case, a Panther retainer, argued his bail down from a million to a hundred thousand, whereupon McCoy’s aged deaf mother put up her house as collateral to a bail bondsman named Ance. McCoy was out about two hours when he hot-wired a new frost-green Impala on a Chevrolet lot on Gratiot and took off for San Francisco. Transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines brought in the FBI, and he’d been on the run ever since; if you could call festering in attics and basements and shitholes like the condemned building on Twelfth
on the run.
He’d only come back to Detroit because he was sick of flower children and earnest revolutionaries, and curious about what would happen when he named up in the old neighborhood.

He had never for one moment thought the feds would do nothing.

His first glimpse of Twelfth Street after the riots shocked him to the soles of his feet. He’d bitterly regretted missing the excitement, had applauded the flames and destruction on the portable black-and-white TV set where he’d followed it in his little room at the top of a row house in Haight-Ashbury, but hadn’t been prepared to find that nothing had been done three years later beyond clearing the rubble from the streets and boarding up the shattered windows with plywood. Quincy Springfield’s blind pig was gone, burned to the ground. The juke boxes that had belted out Aretha and the Temptations—“Ball of Confusion,” man—were silent. The street that had glowed pink and green of neon noon the whole night through, Saturday night after Saturday night, was dark, deserted by even the ghosts of big boatlike Cadillacs, super-bored Dusters, and junked-up Harleys whose rumbling carburetors and mashing gears had made the whole neighborhood tingle like an electric charge. Now the unobstructed wind slapped at the shreds of old election bills. Terns swooped at flutters in the patches of untended grass and shat from the disintegrating gingerbread on the empty buildings.

At twenty-two, he’d felt like the old man who had outlived all the friends who could serve as his pallbearers.

He remembered where he was when he found out he’d been named among the Ten Most Wanted. It was in the rib joint on Hazelwood, and he was wiping his hands on a steamed towel after polishing off a rack as big as his head when Tino, the restaurant’s bull-necked owner and one of Joe Louis’s early victories in the string that had led him to the championship, came over and informed him that as a celebrity McCoy was now entitled to have a meatball sandwich named after him. That night on Channel 4, Ted Russell confirmed that he had made the list.

That was how he learned the FBI knew where he was. He’d heard they didn’t swing that spot on someone until they were ready to bring him in, thus maintaining the legend.

For a week after the announcement he didn’t stir from his building. He salvaged a dozen Campbell’s soup cans from the dumpster out back and stood them in front of the door and on the windowsill in the room upstairs where he slept and scattered crumpled newspapers around his bed, just in case they got past the cans without making a racket. He tucked a .22 magnum inside the top of his right boot to backup the big .44 in the web canvas holster under his left arm. He quit marijuana cold, wanting to keep his reflexes sharp for when Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. kicked out his lock. When the week was up and cabin fever forced him outside at last, he almost shot a kid on a skateboard when he whizzed around the corner from Atkinson, narrowly missing him. The kid, who was no more than thirteen, fell on his butt on the sidewalk and goggled at the big nickel-plated muzzle staring him in the face. Mortified, McCoy snarled at him to split and threaded the long barrel back into its scabbard.

Nobody came up and arrested him that day. Or the next week. When after six months he was still at large, McCoy had realized there was no incentive for the feds to take him into custody as long as he stayed put. If their information system was half as good as they made out, they knew the esteem in which he was held by the rebellious black community where he’d spent most of his life. He was
their
fugitive from justice. Hoover’s Heroes weren’t about to risk a civil disturbance on the scale of 1967 by going in after him. He was a free man—provided he remained within the ten blocks contiguous to the safe house he had selected. One step outside would be his first on the short straight path to the federal correctional facility at Milan, Michigan, or more likely the hardcase specialty center at Marion, Illinois, where he’d have the opportunity of being butt-fucked by a much more exclusive class of convict. Given that choice, he’d go on swimming between and around the rib cage of the skeleton of what had been Twelfth Street. He couldn’t even bring himself to take a suppository.

By the time he got to Tino’s on Hazelwood he was hungry enough to devour the aroma of sweet barbecue sauce that permeated the establishment. His favorite table was unoccupied—no surprise, as it was always reserved for him, and in any case the place hadn’t been full since Johnson was in office—and he sat with his back in the corner just like Wild Bill as Tino boated in from the kitchen mopping his big broken-knuckled hands on an apron stained the color of blood.

“What’s it tonight, the McCoy?”

“No, bring me the Redd Foxx. Extra sauce.”

“I got the Thurgood Marshall on special. Cajun chicken stuffed with crab.”

“The Foxx.”

Tino ducked his head, a tic left over from his former profession. “Oh, the Indian called. Said he’d try again.”

The call came while McCoy was eating his slaw. He walked down the short hall that led to the restrooms and lifted the receiver dangling from the pay telephone.

“I picked up that delivery,” Wolf said.

“Delivery? What the fuck you—”

“At the hospital, remember? We talked about it.” The Indian sounded resignedly patient.

“Oh, yeah. No busted parts?”

“It’s intact, kind of. How soon you want me to collect?”

“Give it a couple days.”

“These goods are a little more perishable than I thought. If we don’t make delivery soon it may lose all value.”

“Couple days, I said. You got to make them want it bad enough to pay what we ask.”

“I may have to bring someone in,” said Wolf after a pause.

McCoy belched. Paranoia brought out his chronic indigestion. “What kind of someone, Dick fucking Tracy? You screwing me over, Cochise?”

“Wilson, I put this together. I’m the one taking the risks. I’m not asking your permission, I’m telling you I’m bringing someone in. Otherwise in a couple of days there won’t be anything left worth paying for.”

“How come I didn’t hear anything about it on the radio?”

“They’re sitting on it. If anyone knows how they do things it’s you.”

“Just don’t screw me over. I don’t think Michigan ever lifted the bounty on redskin scalps.”

“Call you tomorrow.”

“Wolf?” Dial tone. McCoy slammed the handset into its cradle. “Goddamn Squanto.”

He chased down his meal with Bromo as usual, left according to his custom without paying, turned the corner, and started up Twelfth for home, hooking it now. The cold burned his face and frosted the hairs in his nose. Minus readings tonight. On the stoop in front of his door he pretended to hunt for his key while he checked out the two vans parked down the street. One was a rust-bitten VW bus crusted over with peace signs and old McGovern/Eagleton bumper stickers; the other was spotless silver and bore the Highland Electronics logo on its side panels. Guess which vehicle was wired to D.C.

Shivering in the danker air of the unheated ground floor, he checked his watch, an unconscious military habit from his Panther training. Forty-minute walk, not counting supper. He figured he’d been photographed—what, fifty or sixty times? Price of fame, Wilson. Hope Kmart soaks them good for extra prints.

W
OLF WONDERED HOW IT HAD COME TO THIS.

What had started with an awakened sense of pride in his blood had turned into something else.

He knew now that there was no special reason to be proud of something one had been born to, that he couldn’t change; and God knew that what he’d seen of his people up North and at Alcatraz scarcely lived up to the old legends. If he still clung to a cause, that cause was Wilson McCoy; and if Wilson McCoy in the flesh seemed hardly worth the grief of self-denial, then that great abstract, Loyalty, served. A man had to commit to something to justify his birth.

But how justify an existence that placed an innocent in jeopardy for the sake of an abstract?

Had he for one moment stopped to consider the state of the little girl’s health, he’d have waited until she was out of danger before taking her. He’d been so pumped by the phenomenal good fortune of a development that had removed the object of his quest from the security of the mansion in Grosse Pointe to the relative chaos of a hospital environment—where, for chrissake, rapes took place, babies got switched by accident, and patients had the wrong organs removed—that certain incidentals had escaped his attention, such as the importance of keeping Opal Caryn Cooper Crownover Ogden alive long enough to collect fifty thousand dollars from her parents for her return.

True, her condition had not been thought serious enough to place her in intensive care. That would have made the snatch much more difficult, with only one door leading to the ward from the public part of the hospital and two nurses seated at the monitors inside at all times. Her placement in an ordinary private room for observation only meant that he had merely to duck into a vacant room nearby when visiting hours ended and wait for things to quiet down. Mother Caryn’s decision to remain by her daughter’s side complicated things somewhat, but he’d felt confident—and he’d been right—that sooner or later she would step outside the room, if for no other reason than to clear her head of nighttime horrors. A lifelong insomniac, Wolf was intimately acquainted with those horrors. Should worse come to worse he was armed, but that was a scenario he chose not to entertain. If nothing presented itself that night, it would on the next. Hospitals didn’t dump the children of the wealthy out of their beds after just twenty-four hours.

But Caryn came through for him early the first morning.

The girl was groggy and offered no struggle when he disconnected her from the tubes and monitor wire and carried her out, bundled in the thin hospital blanket. He moved fast, before the nurse at the station could react to the flat line, taking the fire stairs at the opposite end of the corridor to the first-floor exit. But the exposure to the below-zero air of the parking lot during the brief walk to his car must have aggravated Opal’s condition, because she coughed and cried all the way to the motor home park in rural Oakland County where he’d put down a month’s cash deposit on a seventeen foot trailer. By the time he’d tucked her beneath the cheap polyester Kmart quilt he’d bought in Troy along with the other incidentals required for a short stay, the shallow hacking had deepened and she was spitting up fluid. And for the first time in his life he knew true terror. It was one thing if he traded a healthy child for money, quite another if she died in his charge. He knew what happened in prison to the murderers of little girls. He was pretty sure the conviction of his own loyalty wouldn’t be enough to see him through that.

After he’d called Wilson from the open-air booth at the Shell station across the road, he pumped the cradle and asked Information for the number of Mary Margaret Whitehorn in Rochester Hills.

She came, prosaically enough, by taxi, carrying an old scuffed beige-and-blue suitcase with tarnished brass latches; but if Wolf found these details disappointing, he was heartened by the sheer physical presence of the woman. Standing well over six feet in two-inch cowboy heels, she could have been fifty or seventy-five. Her hair, tied casually at the nape and fanning out below that to her waist, was iron gray, but her face, lightly rouged and painted, bore no lines. She wore an ankle-length cloth coat open over a brown corduroy dress whose hem reached the tops of her worn tan boots. The ancient-looking polished black bear’s-claw necklace that hung around her neck had to have cost a fortune; beyond that there was nothing on her person that couldn’t be redeemed out of Wolf’s pocket. He had to wonder what she did with the legendary fees she charged for her special services.

Respect was crucial. He stepped onto the flight of wooden steps that led to the trailer’s door, holding it open for her. “Mrs. Whitehorn, I’m very grateful—”

“Give the driver fifteen dollars.” She went inside.

He saw to the chore. The cabman, a lean black crowding sixty with a CORE button pinned to his Tigers cap, said, “She like a gypsy?”

“Shaman,” the Indian corrected. “A Creek medicine woman. She practices all over Michigan and Wisconsin. Why, what’d she say?”

“She don’t like the moon. She say it all bloody.”

Wolf searched the overcast sky.

“I can’t see it neither, but I didn’t argue with her. You see her eyes?”

“I didn’t get a look. Something wrong with them?”