The Informant (5 page)

“I cannot see her, but there is a woman. I see trouble. The woman stands in darkness behind you. In darkness. …”

The
babalawo
’s voice faded. He sighed, exhausted from the strain of looking into the future. Mas Betancourt called what the priest did cheating God. He was glad it could be done, never having forgiven God for taking away his legs.

“The woman,
mi padre
…”

“You must come again. I cannot see her now.” The
babalawo
placed his seashells back into a polished dark wooden box. The consultation was over.

Worried about a woman that even the
babalawo
could not see, Mas returned to Manhattan, sitting alone in the back of a chauffeured blue Ford. His mood demanded silence. A driver and a bodyguard sat up front, saying nothing to Mas or each other. They left the car radio turned off, knowing enough about Mas’s moods not to challenge him with sound or even the slightest unsolicited gesture.

Mas Betancourt, when angry, was frightening. Hadn’t he taken seven years to find the woman who had informed on him, crippling him for life?

Hadn’t he taken three days to kill her?

In Manhattan, Mas sat alone in an apartment he used in Washington Heights, a place where he could be by himself, do business if he liked, bring other women if he liked. There was another apartment ten blocks away, where he lived with Pilar. Now he sat alone and thought about the woman standing behind him in darkness.

The telephone rang.

It was someone calling to tell him that both of the Rucker brothers were dead. They’d been shot to death less than an hour ago.

The trouble will pass. Soon. The
babalawo
’s words had come true.

Mas shivered.

K
ELLY LORENZO HAD ORDERED
the Ruckers’ death. And he had used someone close to the Ruckers to betray them.

King Raymond said, “This here’s T. Lawrence from Dee-troit. They got a famine out there, too, and he’s lookin’ to get straight. Nothin’ but brown around, but T. Lawrence say his people want white. I tol’ him you’d talk wif him.”

The four men stood in the men’s room of a Harlem bar on 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue. Both of the Ruckers had guns tucked in their waistbands. Connie Rucker wore a knee-length red leather coat, purple knickers, black sealskin knee boots. His white silk shirt was open to the waist, and around his neck on a gold chain he wore a silver coke spoon with three tiny red rubies in the handle. He was in charge, a thin, brown-skinned man with a bony, bearded face. He never smiled, never relaxed, and was sadistic to women, enjoying their screams when he burned them with lighted cigarettes.

Carl Rucker, at twenty-four, was two years younger, muscular, with the right corner of his mouth pulled up permanently where a knife had sliced the nerves on that side of his face. He wore a silver lamé jumpsuit open to the waist, the butt of a .38 Smith and Wesson visible just to the left of his navel. His hair was marcelled, shiny, dark brown waves high on his head and thick on the sides. Carl loved money and used the fear his brother inspired to claim a respect he himself couldn’t earn.

King Raymond worked for the Ruckers and had agreed to betray them. In return for this service to Kelly Lorenzo, King Raymond would get the Ruckers’ spot, their distributorship, with Kelly seeing that King Raymond had enough narcotics to sell to dealers under him.

King Raymond was twenty-seven, and always wore three-piece suits with a watch chain across the vest. He was light-skinned, the color of cornflakes, and quick to see who had the power and therefore must be obeyed. His nose had been broken in a fight he had forgotten long ago, and he had trouble breathing.

The fourth man in the men’s room of Whipple’s was T. Lawrence, the man Kelly Lorenzo had hired to kill the Ruckers.

T. Lawrence was twenty-six, slim, and shaved his head every three days with an ivory-handled straight razor given him at fifteen by his father. He was black, the color of a Chinese, with a Fu Manchu mustache and goatee. Occasionally someone called him Chink, a nickname he despised. T. Lawrence wasn’t his real name, which the other three men in the john suspected but refused to comment on. In narcotics, you talked about money or dope. You didn’t talk about anything else.

T. Lawrence was imported talent, a hit man from Detroit, someone the Ruckers had never seen. Before being allowed to get this close to the Ruckers, he had been searched by their bodyguard, who found nothing, no gun, no knife. T. Lawrence had smiled, shrugged his shoulders, wondering what these dumb niggers would say when he pulled out the gun still hidden on him, the gun the bodyguard had missed.

Now the bodyguard was standing outside, keeping people away while the Ruckers talked business in the men’s room with T. Lawrence. King Raymond, who had a .32, was to handle the bodyguard if it came down to that. King Raymond, for his own reasons, was willing to betray the Ruckers, but he didn’t want to kill them. Let somebody else do that.

T. Lawrence didn’t care. He wouldn’t need King Raymond’s help to burn these niggers.

Connie Rucker fingered his coke spoon. He always spoke rapidly. “How you hear ’bout us?”

“Baltimore.” T. Lawrence rubbed the back of his neck. Hot as hell in this pisshouse. Smells like a pisshouse too. “Y’all took shit down there, and it was good. Word got ’round.”

Carl Rucker turned his permanent sneer toward T. Lawrence. “She-it yeah, Jim, it was good. Ain’t nothin’
but
good from the Ruckers. What you talkin’ ’bout? We talkin’ weight or what?”

“Weight.” T. Lawrence sighed. Carl Rucker was a punk with his nose up his brother’s asshole. “Keys. King, here, he know me from Vietnam. We did some dealin’ over there.”

Connie Rucker tapped his teeth with his coke spoon. “Yeah, we know all ’bout that. Okay, how much you want? We startin’ our own thing, so we interested in all the customers we can get.”

T. Lawrence frowned, thinking. “Start out with seven, eight keys. What kinda pure we talkin’, and what kinda price?”

Carl Rucker patted his firm thigh under his silver jumpsuit. “Talkin’ maybe fifty percent pure, least eighty a key.” Might as well squeeze this farmer from Dee-troit. Eighty thousand a kilo for fifty percent was damn high, but what did the farmer from Dee-troit know?

T. Lawrence squeezed his eyes closed in thought, opening them slowly. “Eighty a key, seven keys, that’s five hundred and sixty thousand. Yeah, well, that sounds all right to me. I be checkin’ with my people first, make sure the price is cool with them. But it sound okay.”

Connie Rucker still wouldn’t smile. He never would. He’d die that way. Not smiling, and talking fast. “You be needin’ any cut? We can get you mannite, quinine, any kinda cuttin’ shit you want.”

T. Lawrence fingered his crotch. “You dudes talkin’ some good noise. First I’m gonna take me a piss, then I be gettin’ on the phone, see what my people say.”

He turned toward a urinal, unzipping his fly.

Carl Rucker’s thumb gently touched his sneer. “We always glad to oblige a visitor. We—”

He never finished.

T. Lawrence turned, the .38 he’d hidden down the front of his pants, against his dick, in his hand. He shot Carl quickly, twice in the head, then Connie, once in the throat, once in the forehead. Carl spun, falling into one of the stalls, smearing the door with a bloody hand. Connie lay on his back, coke spoon covered in blood, eyes open and shiny.

When the bodyguard burst into the room, gun in his hand, King Raymond stepped from behind the door, his .32 pressed against the man’s spine.

“Cool it, my man. Be some changes comin’ down. They dead ’cause they went against the man, and he didn’t like it. Kelly done took care of business, is all.”

Now T. Lawrence faced the bodyguard.

The bodyguard said, “I’m cool.” He coughed to clear his throat. No sense dying when you don’t have to.

King Raymond said, “You got a job if you want one.”

The bodyguard nodded yes.

King Raymond said, “He’p me get them outside.”

T. Lawrence, his piece back down in his crotch, warm against his dick, left the bar and took the first cab he saw. He was heading to Kennedy Airport for a plane back to Detroit, but before arriving at the airport he dismantled the gun and threw the separate pieces into four different sewers. He also changed taxis three different times.

Goddamn New York was a nowhere city. T. Lawrence couldn’t wait to get back to the Motor City, where you had glide in your stride, cut in your strut, and some dip in your hips. Goddamn, he sure did love Detroit.

O
NE WEEK AFTER BUYING
dope from Zarzuela, Neil Shire sat in the office of Walker Wallace, his group supervisor at the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement located at Fifty-fifth Street and Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. Wallace didn’t have a window in his small office, but he did have twelve agents working under him. He was a chubby man with receding red hair and a mangled left thumb he’d gotten years ago when he’d stuck his hand in a suspect’s mouth to keep him from swallowing heroin Wallace needed as evidence.

Walker Wallace, forty-two, had nine children; behind his back he was called Sure Shot.

This morning he stood behind his messy desk, typewritten sheets of papers in both hands, eyes scanning the desk for something he couldn’t find. “She’s coming in?”

Neil looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty.” Lydia Constanza was due here to tell him about the next buy she’d arranged. The dope Neil had bought from Zarzuela was twenty-five percent pure, half of what the Cuban had claimed it was, but still good enough. Lydia had passed her first test.

Walker Wallace sat down, dropped his two handfuls of papers in disgust, and reached for a container of coffee. “Fucking moose piss, this stuff. We got three new coffee machines in the canteen, and all of ’em taste like moose piss. Lydia, she still ready to do the right thing?”

Ready to do the right thing. To turn, to flip, to work.
It all meant the same thing. Was she still ready to inform, to betray, to risk her life?

Neil crossed his legs, nodded his head. “Yeah, I’ve talked with her every day since the buy. Seen her twice. She’s ready. Matter of fact, she seemed pleased the buy went down okay.”

Walker Wallace dropped his container of coffee into a wastebasket. “Ain’t that the way? They start out hating the idea of giving up their people; then, before you know it, they’ve become fucking agents and cops themselves, getting off on it, loving the power, the excitement, the fucking money.”

He leaned back in his black leather chair, hands behind his neck. “Up front they asked about you. I told ’em it was cool, no problems.”

“Couldn’t they just read the report on Lydia and my own daily activity report?” Neil frowned in annoyance. Checking up on him already. Waiting for him to fuck up.

Walker Wallace sighed at the ceiling. “You know better, my man.”

He didn’t have to say any more. Neil knew the rules. Once you did something wrong or the bureau even thought you did, you were a marked man unless you got awfully lucky. Neil hadn’t exactly done anything wrong, but he had been associated with agents who had, and he’d suffered for it.

In law enforcement, people took their careers seriously. Cops, judges, district attorneys, it didn’t matter. You constantly ran up against egos and power plays, so the one rule to remember was: Cover your ass at all times. Working for the government had its good points, but one of the bad points was that in federal law enforcement, if you made so much as one mistake and got caught at it, you were gone.

Neil hadn’t made mistakes. He’d just been on the scene when mistakes were made, and the feeling among certain narcotics-enforcement brass was that Neil Shire should be watched. Don’t mark him down as a fuck-up just yet, but watch his ass carefully to the utmost.

Neil had been in narcotics for almost ten years. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he’d planned to be a lawyer because his father had been one. When he was certain he couldn’t stand the boredom and hypocrisy of law, he left the University of Maryland and transferred to Georgetown without the slightest idea of what to do with the rest of his life.

Neil Shire was medium height, slim, with dirty blond hair and a round face that had won him the nickname Pie as a kid. He’d grown a dark brown mustache to hide the torn upper lip he’d suffered when he was nine and for some dumb reason had been licking a barbed-wire fence, the kind of things kids do and grown-ups go crazy trying to understand why. He’d put a hole in his tongue and split his lip, and it had bothered him, being disfigured like that.

But when he’d been able to grow a mustache, it had hidden the torn lip, and no sweat.

The Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement had recruited him at Georgetown, when the Justice Department had decided that young agents were necessary for undercover work against the spreading dope traffic of the 1960’s. At Georgetown, he’d met Elaine and moved in with her that same week. Elaine was taking liberal arts, marching, protesting, shoving a clenched fist in the air. Neil thought she was just killing time and symbolically kicking her parents in the ass. One day he told her so. She agreed. They were married four months later.

From the beginning, Neil loved narcotics-law enforcement as much as Elaine hated it.
Now
he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to be an agent. He wanted to work drugs. He wanted excitement.

Neil trained in Virginia and Washington, D.C. His first assignment was the Cleveland regional office. He and Elaine lived there two years, with Neil working the streets, buying hand-to-hand (money from Neil in exchange for dope directly from the dealer) near college campuses. Neil’s busts weren’t big ones. But they were good ones.

He moved up in grade, with salary increases. Life was exciting, and he never stopped learning about drugs, dealers, the language and customs of that very special world.

He was transferred to Chicago, where Elaine continued to complain about his long hours and what she felt were the dumb, brutal people he met in law enforcement. She wept and tried to understand Neil’s world, his eighty-hour weeks, the telephone calls at three
A.M.
from informants. She told him how bored she was around the unsophisticated wives of policemen and agents. She missed Washington. She feared for his life.