There was something surreal about this initial exchange; not only did it appear as if she knew them, but it was like she expected them.
Drake snapped several photos of the officers, trying to focus on their faces through the car window.
As Jasmine and the officer who was wearing sunglasses even though it was dark out, started to discuss something, it looked even more to Drake like they knew each other.
“What the hell is going on?” he mumbled under his breath.
He continued to take photographs as the officer reached into the bag slung over his shoulder and pulled something out. Drake immediately sat ramrod straight in his chair, no longer concerned about being seen.
The man passed a yellow envelope to Jasmine, who exchanged it for a larger package that she retrieved from just inside the door.
There was a curt, final exchange before the two officers made their way back to their car.
“What the fuck?”
Breathing heavily, Drake once again lowered himself into his seat as they got into their cruiser and pulled away.
When they were gone, he turned back to Jasmine who remained on the porch. For one, terrifying second, Drake thought their eyes met, but then she turned and went back into the house.
Confused, unwilling to accept what he’d seen, Drake glanced down at his cell phone and scrolled through the images.
I’m just tired… tired and bruised. The cops were just asking about me, about the trial. Or maybe it had to do with something else entirely; Clay’s pension, perhaps.
But when the image of Jasmine and the item that she’d handed over filled the screen, he audibly groaned.
It wasn’t a stack of paper, some forms she’d filled out, or the sacred family casserole recipe.
No, in her hand was a package. A package that Drake was all too familiar with.
A brown paper package, one wrapped in clear tape that had the symbol of a snake eating an eyeball all over it.
Chapter 27
“What the fuck?”
The man who shot Leroy’s brother bolted to his feet. He’d been sitting behind a desk, one that was clearly meant to look like a prop from Scarface, but was most likely an IKEA special, when Leroy entered.
Leroy didn’t flinch.
Even when the thug scooped up a pistol and aimed it at him, Leroy somehow managed to remain calm.
He’d gotten this far, after all. If they wanted to kill him, no amount of pleading or begging would change their minds.
So be it.
“BT, why you bring this nigga here? Why the fuck would—”
As gold incisor made his way around the desk, one of the several junkies who was splayed out on the floor got in the way, and he shoved her aside with his foot.
“Why’d you bring him here?”
“’Cuz he brought dis,” the fat man named BT said, producing the brick of heroin and slamming it on the desk.
The man scratched his cheek with the barrel of the pistol.
“Is that—” he turned back to Leroy, a sneer on his face now. “You bring gifts, son?”
Leroy nodded.
“A truce,” he said, trying his best to keep his voice from cracking.
A strange silence fell over the room—even the passed out junkies seemed to stop snoring for a moment—and then gold incisor pressed the pistol against the center of his forehead.
Leroy closed his eyes.
I’m sorry, ma, he thought. I’m sorry I couldn’t get out. I know—
But the bullet he’d expected never came; instead, the pressure on his forehead subsided, and Leroy heard someone laugh.
It wasn’t a hearty chuckle or a high-pitched giggle, but something in between.
He opened his eyes.
“You bring me a gift,” the thug said, using the gun to indicate his own chest. “Me.”
Leroy swallowed hard and casually moved his right hand closer to his pocket that contained the video camera.
“I don’t want no trouble. That shit there is a brick of heroin. The good shit.”
One of the junkies whose skin had the texture and color of clarified butter stirred.
“Calm down, you’ll get yer fix,” gold incisor muttered. As he moved to the desk to inspect the brick, Leroy glanced around.
The room in which they stood was a perfect square, with the thug’s desk located directly across from the only door. To his left was a book case filled with drug paraphernalia. There was so much clutter on it, that Leroy figured there was no way that someone would notice the button-sized camera. It would also provide a perfect view of the desk.
As Leroy slipped a hand into his pocket, he heard his mother’s voice inside his head and felt another pang of guilt.
You’re the only one who can get out of here, Leroy.
Not only had he not gotten out, but he was becoming more entrenched than his brother had ever been.
“Yo Chris, what should we do wit’ him?” BT asked.
Gold incisor, whose name was evidently Chris, turned around, but this time he didn’t aim the gun at Leroy. Instead, he held it at his waist in crossed hands.
“Where’d you get this from?”
Drake had told him that this question would eventually come up. He’d also warned Leroy that if the thugs thought he’d stolen it from them, from one of the many dealers in Chris’s network, he’d end up dead. Likewise, if he gave up his source: dead. If he wasn’t able to convince them that he was capable of getting more: dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
“I asked you a question,” Chris asked, slowly raising the gun again.
If all answers led to death, there was no fucking way Leroy was going to provide a response.
His only course of action was to ignore the query.
“Open it, tell me I’m lying,” Leroy said. “I didn’t cut it with nothin’.”
Chris squinted at him for a moment, and then hooked a chin at BT. The big man waddled over to the desk, grabbed a knife and slit the package down a seam. Then he used the flat of the blade to scoop out a small amount of the yellow-white powder. After bringing it to his nose and sniffing it, he looked to Chris for further instructions.
Chris cocked his head at the nearest junkie—a woman who was only wearing an over-sized t-shirt that barely covered her bony chest—and BT grabbed her by her greasy hair and dragged her closer.
“Hey!” she said. But she didn’t fight him; she didn’t even open her eyes.
“Shut up, skank,” BT grumbled. “Or I’ll pick someone else. Now boil this shit up.”
Now the junkie’s eyes flipped open and her tongue darted out and moistened her cracked lips. Then she scrambled on all fours and grabbed the spoon and lighter from BT.
“You tell me you didn’t cut it with nothin’?” Chris said. “We’ll see about that.”
Leroy watched the junkie prepare a syringe with morbid fascination. The entire time her fingers were shaking so badly that he feared she would drop it.
But she didn’t.
The longest part of the procedure was actually finding a suitable vein for injection.
Eventually, she settled on one between her toes.
Even before she’d pushed the plunger all the way down, the junkie’s eyes fluttered and her back arched. A low moan escaped her lips and she slumped onto the beanbag chair, not that unlike the way she’d been before BT had grabbed her by the hair.
“Now what?” BT asked, collecting the paraphernalia and placing it in a neat pile on the desk next to the brick.
When Chris answered, his eyes remained locked on Leroy’s.
“Now we wait. If this bitch dies, then this nigger’s gonna escort her to hell.”
Chapter 28
Officer Michael Pontiac gnashed his gum as he stared out the car window.
“Why do you think those assholes killed that kid, anyway?” the driver, Officer Pete Dalton, asked.
“I guess they didn’t want no middleman,” Mike replied, continuing to chew his gum f
uriously.
His jaw was already starting to ache despite it not even being ten yet, but if anything, this only made him to chew even more violently.
Mike always chewed gum when he was stressed, and he couldn’t remember being this stressed in a long time.
“Isn’t that what we are?” Dalton offered. “Middlemen?”
Mike hung his arm out the window.
“Nah, not middlemen, more like distributors. But why the fuck does it matter? If we don’t find the dope… if we don’t find whoever stole our gear, our fucking corporate title ain’t gonna mean shit.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mike saw his partner swallow hard and the man’s second and third chins started to quake.
“Yeah,” the man practically moaned. “We’ll find it.”
On their second tour of the ghetto, Mike saw three young black boys horsing around on the sidewalk up ahead. They looked young enough to be in high school, maybe even middle school, and yet they weren’t.
“Slow down,” he instructed Pete.
“Why? You think that’s them? You think—”
“Just slow the fuck down.”
Pete obliged, taking his foot off the gas and allowing the NYPD cruiser to come to a crawl.
Mike had no doubt that whoever had taken their dope had used the kids who’d launched the bottle at them as a distraction. His first thought had been that Chris and his crew were behind it, but that didn’t make sense. Sure, they’d gunned down the Walker boy, but that was different, that followed the rules: thugs killed thugs, crooked cops killed crooked cops. It would make no sense for Chris or BT to fuck with their only supplier.
And, besides, so long as the product kept coming, they were happy. In the rare case that it dried up, the worst they would do was look elsewhere to satiate their need.
If the thugs ever did come for them, Mike knew that it would only be because someone on his side had sent them.
This meant that whoever had robbed them was working for someone else. And there was only room for one player on these streets.
“It could be them,” Pete said quietly. “Should I-”
One of the kids turned and Mike saw his face and his eyes clearly for the first time.
“Fuck!” he swore. “Stop the car! Dalton, stop the fucking car!”
Mike didn’t wait; the car was still rolling when he hopped out.
It was them; it was the kids who had thrown the bottle at their car.
He was in a full sprint by the time he reached the sidewalk. They were faster than him, of course—they were always faster—but Mike had the element of surprise on his side. Two of them scattered, but the middle one, a kid with an afro and a red sweatshirt, hesitated.
Mike reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder and whipped him around.
The kid, who was no older than fourteen, tried to wrench free, but Mike grabbed his sweatshirt and held fast.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” the kid proclaimed. “I didn’t do nothin’!”
Mike brought his knee up and drove it into the kid’s groin. He groaned and immediately dropped to his knees.
“You didn’t do nothin’, huh,” Mike said, pinching the kid’s collar bone. He was so thin that he could imagine crushing the bone with just his thumb and forefinger. “You threw a bottle at my car the other day.”
The kid looked terrified, which confirmed Mike’s suspicions: these kids weren’t behind the robbery, they’d just been used as pawns.
Behind him, Pete was shouting from the vehicle, yelling that the other two kids were getting away.
“Stay in the car, Dalton. I’ve got this,” Mike said, turning his attention back to the frightened kid.
“Who paid you to throw the bottle at my car?”
The kid shook his head.
“The what? Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout? I didn’t do nothin’.”
Mike squeezed even harder and the kid cried out.
“I swear!”
Mike dropped to his haunches so that he was at eye level with the kid.
“You know what they do to kids like you in prison?” he said with a sneer. “No? Well let me tell you, then. First, one of these big black niggers pins you up against the wall, maybe when you’re in the shower or maybe they just drag you off your filthy mattress when you’re asleep. Another one rips off your tighty whities, while a third spreads—”
As he spoke, Mike spun the kid around and pushed him down on the sidewalk, face first.
“And then the real fun starts.”
The kid turned his face to one side, scraping his cheek and chin across the rough surface.
“I didn’t do nothin’. All I did was watch.”
Michael’s sneer became a smile and he grabbed the back of the kid’s hoodie and pulled his head up.
“Who? Who told you to watch?” Michael hissed.
When the kid didn’t answer right away, he pulled even harder until the front of the hood started to cut into his throat.
“Tell me, or I swear I’ll—”
“Leroy…” the kid hissed. “It was Leroy Walker, the brother of the guy that was killed. He told me to do it.”
Michael was so surprised by the response that his hand slipped off the hoodie, sending the kid’s face crashing back down to the sidewalk.
Chapter 29
Screech paced back and forth inside Triple D. He’d already drunk three glasses of scotch, which was three more than he usually did. He couldn’t help but think that they’d gotten it all wrong.
They were supposed to be the good guys, the ones preventing overdoses of the like that Yasiv and Beckett had described. And yet, Screech had just stood there, complacent, when Drake had told Leroy to reintroduce a package of poison into the system.
And now, a full hour had passed without a word from either of them.
His heart pounding, Screech took his phone out of his pocket and checked for messages.
There was nothing.
Leroy’s dead; the thugs took his drugs and killed him. Drake was arrested and thrown back in prison. He’ll been dead soon, too; the convict who had turned his face into hamburger would come back to finish the job.
And I’ll be here, all by myself, wondering how everything went so wrong.
He swallowed hard.
I’ll call Beckett, he’ll know what to do.
But Beckett only knew how to take care of things one way. Which was even worse than the way they were handling it.
Screech’s phone buzzed in his hand and he yelped. He was so surprised that he fumbled it, barely managing to grab it before it crashed to the floor.
He hoped that it was Drake or Leroy, or maybe even Yasiv calling, telling him that they were okay. But it wasn’t a call, it was a notification from the video app.
With a sweaty thumb, Screech unlocked the phone and then opened the application.
An image of a black man with a gold chain around his neck sitting behind a cheap desk filled the screen. On either side of him lay a skinny white girl who looked as if they’d seen better days.
Or years.
And then there was Leroy. The kid was standing across from the man at the desk, with his back to the camera. But Screech knew it was him. He knew it, not because he recognized Leroy’s shaved head, or even because he was wearing the same dark hoodie as when he’d left Triple D.
No, he recognized him because Leroy was scared shitless.
As Screech watched in horror, one of the junkies twitched and foam started to build at the corners of her mouth.
And then the man behind the desk raised a pistol and aimed it directly at Leroy’s face.
Chapter 30
“I told you what would happen if she died,” Chris said, raising the gun again. His cavalier attitude toward the fact that the girl beside him was ODing, and that he had committed himself to taking Leroy’s life, wasn’t just unnerving; it was downright soul crushing.
Leroy took a deep breath and closed his eyes and said a silent prayer. At least he�
�d managed to set up the camera when both men had been distracted weighing the brick. If he’d done it correctly, Screech would have a record of his murder.
Which was… something.
But, for the second time since coming to the trap house, Leroy avoided death. Someone gasped and he opened his eyes.
The chest of the white girl in the ratty t-shirt who had tested his product suddenly inflated. Her eyes bulged and she coughed. Without even bothering to turn her head to one side, she spat a thick wad of something horrible onto her shirt.
“She’s alive,” Leroy said, trying to temper his relief. “She’s fine—look.”
Chris turned to look at the girl who mumbled something that was borderline incoherent.
“What’d she say?” Leroy asked.
The junkie repeated the same nonsense and then scrambled toward the desk, her objective clear: more heroin. Chris used the palm of his hand to shove her back onto the beanbag chair.
“Sit the fuck down,” he said, before looking at Leroy. “She said it’s good shit.”
Leroy suddenly felt like vomiting. It was all he could do to swallow the bile that rose in his throat.
“I’ll tell you what, you bring me a brick like dis erry week and I’ll cut you the same deal as your brotha.”
The mention of his brother kept the nausea at bay.
“And what deal was that?”
That you wait for him to get the product and then shoot him and steal it? That kind of deal?
“Fifty stacks a key. That’s more than enough to get you into school or whatever. Just don’t be late…” Chris grinned, showing off the gold incisor. “’Cuz you already know what happens if yous late.”
Leroy blinked.
School? Declan was buying heroin from the cops and flipping it to these thugs to pay for school? My school?
“This ain’t no fuckin’ negotiation. Oh, and this key here? That’s a gift. You a smart kid… what they call it over der on the Wall Street?”
“Start-up cost,” Leroy replied quietly.
“Yeah, that’s what dis is. Start-up cost. Now get the fuck out ‘fore I change my mind.”
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 2 Page 45
