Another bargaining chip with God was that Ice had given D a crucial tip back when D was mourning the murder of his mentor, the critic and historian Dwayne Robinson.
D had first encountered Robinson at the door of New York nightclubs where his old company, D Security, protected entrances and dance floors. Eventually, D read Robinson’s magnum opus, The Relentless Beat, a huge history of black music in America. Backstage at an LL Cool J concert, D peppered Robinson with questions about the text. Impressed by D’s interest, Robinson took the big man to lunch and a friendship grew out of that conversation. Robinson loved the backstage gossip D had access to, while D found his growing understanding of music history an asset in dealing with clients.
When Robinson was stabbed to death on a SoHo side street by two members of the Bloods, D was devastated. He didn’t believe this was some random act of violence. That suspicion was bolstered by the theft of The Plot Against Hip Hop, the manuscript for Robinson’s next book. This began an investigation which became a crusade, where rogue FBI agents and messianic businessmen conspired to use money, surveillance, and psychology to manipulate hip hop. Eventually, the coconspirators became rivals, creating a subterranean version of the East Coast/West Coast rap battles of the nineties.
Two of Ice’s protégés had been used as hit men in Robinson’s death, which is how D and Ice first met, forming an uneasy alliance that resulted in the termination of Eric Mayer in a Canarsie basement (or so D surmised). A few years later, when Ice was implicated in another murder, it was D who kept him out of harm’s way.
So now they sat across from each other in the brightly lit Georgia diner, far from Brooklyn, each in debt to the other, an awkward truth that the taste of late-night fries didn’t disguise. Back then, Ice had been bald with a diamond in one earlobe and a thin goatee. The man sitting across from D had a thick salt-and-pepper beard, black-rimmed nerd glasses, and teeth as yellow as cheddar cheese. Moreover, his body was seriously filled out. No longer light-pole lean, today’s Ice had bulked-up shoulders and spread across the waist. Whether it was because of age or the additional weight, Ice looked like a former lightweight who’d moved up several weight classes. You could mistake him for a different man if you ignored his eyes which, despite the glasses, were still as cold as winter on an elevated subway platform.
D said, “You didn’t answer when I asked if you’re now living in Atlanta.”
Ice looked at D like this was a very silly line of conversation. “I’m here now, right? You are here too, but I understand you out in Cali now. So we are where we are.”
D tried again for a human connection: “My grandfather died.”
“Got shot I heard.” Ice wasn’t about to get all warm and fuzzy.
“Yes.”
“Damn,” Ice said, “you Hunters got a real thing going on with God.”
“Or the other guy maybe.”
This made the man crack his ice grill a bit. “I dunno. I knew your brothers Matty and Rashid a little bit. As far as shit goes, they weren’t into anything real deep. Bullets do lie. Believe that. I know.”
“I do too,” D said. “So, how bad is our situation?”
“Two weeks ago some people went fishing off Canarsie Pier. Hooked a motherfucking arm. Now, motherfuckers been dropping bodies off Canarsie Pier since the Jews ran Murder Incorporated in the Ville. The Italians took over Canarsie and dropped more bodies there than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. But the arm they found belonged to Eric Mayer. I ain’t no scientist so I don’t know the process, but I know the result.”
D absorbed this mix of history and unwelcome information, then asked if Ice had a plan of action.
“Well,” Ice said, “the easiest thing to do would be for all concerned parties to just shut the fuck up.”
Ice hadn’t said this like a threat. His voice was bone dry. But the words sent a serious chill up D’s spine. When confronting fear, D had always felt it best to address it head-on. He said, “Or eliminate the other concerned parties?”
Ice laughed. “Yo, if this was ’95 and we was back in BK, I guess it could go down. But it ain’t and we aren’t, so take a breath and unclench your butt cheeks.” After that, Ice took a big sip of his milkshake and sat back.
D said, “You know Mayer was an ex-FBI agent?”
Ice’s eyes got wide and then small again, like a cat about to sleep. He looked out the window as if all the cars in the parking lot were suspect. Finally he said, “All I knew for sure was that he was a gunrunner and that he’d pulled some of my crew into some stupid shit and that he was getting in my way.”
“Here’s the thing: he and another ex-agent were running wild all up in hip hop. Thought they were the second and third coming of Suge Knight.” D leaned toward Ice and lowered his voice. “He’ll be just another cold case in the Ville—lots of those, right?” He was looking for reassurance, but that wasn’t how Ice got down.
“Well, someone’s been asking about him,” Ice said. “That’s why I know about the arm. Wasn’t NYPD but maybe some FBI version of internal affairs, now that you tell me this. I’m sure they’ll have questions since it’s one of their own.”
“Have they been asking about you?”
Now Ice was smiling again; he enjoyed being notorious. “Nigga, you know they’re always asking about me. When a body pops up in Kings County, the first thing they do is wonder if Ice did it. I’m the easy answer to every lazy cop’s question.”
“What happened to those two kids?”
Something approaching softness crossed the hit man’s face. “Tracy is dead, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” D said, feeling like a fool.
“He died doing something stupid,” Ice said. “The other one is all right. Doing good.” This moment of sentimentality passed as quickly as it came. “You doing business in ATL now, huh? You fuckin’ with Lil Daye, right?”
“I just made him a big deal. I’m doing management now, not security.”
“Huh. Good for you. You know much about his man, Ant?”
This caught D off guard. “If you’re asking, then probably not enough.”
“ATL is full of opportunity. Ambitious motherfuckers with good old country hustle. But if you’re from out of town, you probably don’t know the story behind the story. Watch Ant.”
“He a problem?” D asked.
“Were you a problem when you were a bodyguard?”
“A bit.”
“Well, he’s a real problem, not a toy one like you.”
“You are full of good news tonight, Ice.”
“Nigga, it’s never a good look when I show up.” Ice finished off his milkshake. “You done all right for yourself. Got better clothes. A tan. A better business that you can use your brain for and not your body. It’s a good look. A long way from the Tilden projects. But know this: at some point you may have to decide what you need to do to keep it. Nothing gives more sleepless nights than keeping the past in the past.”
“Could it really get bad for me?”
Ice leaned across the table. “Yo, you see who’s president, right? Well, a black man these days who ain’t prepared for the worst? He ain’t been paying attention.”
CHAPTER THREE
WICKED GAMES
From the sky, the streetlights below were intersecting strings of pearls. Red pearls moved in staccato unison. The white pearls were static, but given the illusion of movement by the plane’s descent. Every few minutes, a string of green pearls appeared, but that just seemed a tease, like a green-eyed stranger who glanced your way one afternoon and never looked back.
It could have been any city anywhere. Red lights. White lights. Green lights. Long rows of them bunched together like children over tables of free ice cream. Serene Powers had seen a lot of them in the past several years—these twenty-first-century cities that were unique in name only.
Fast-food jobs. Revitalized downtowns. Homeless people. Shattered civility. Incipient fascism. Serene remembered Detroit and its seven blocks of branded vital
ity, while homeless people huddled in the dark by the bus depot. That was an extreme case, but it fit the overall pattern. Every city. Every town. Condo corridors with construction cranes, welcoming more. She remembered Seattle with cranes decorated with green lights hovering above the skyline like metallic trees.
Serene wondered if she were exaggerating. So much travel. So much ugliness. Was she too jaded now to feel a city’s individual swagger, or to smell its aroma? Perhaps she had gone over that edge where her visual perception was totally dulled. She searched her memories of this weird occupation she’d taken on, and all she recalled were strings of red, white, and green pearls.
London, she hoped, would be different. It was her first assignment outside of North America. It was an old modern city, which meant it would have all the old and new vices. Serene wanted London to surprise her, but she was sure it wouldn’t. The doors she had to open in London were the same doors she would find anywhere else: doors to the personal hell of the poor, the desperate, the gullible. Hello, London. Hello, world.
* * *
A few hours later, Serene soaked in a big bathtub at a hotel on Soho’s Dean Street, thinking about the night ahead and her boyfriend back home. She was an ocean and a continent away from Arthur and the lovely house they shared in Sausalito.
Her man was undoubtedly in the kitchen, chopping onions, checking the oven temperature. He was a chef with a growing online following, and was never more joyful than in his culinary lair. Serene enjoyed playing Robin to his Batman, though using a knife skillfully for cooking was not a gift God had given her.
Serene reached over to the heated towel rack, pulled off a fluffy white one, and wrapped it around her long, taut, brown frame. She could easily pass for a WNBA player (and sometimes did), though mixed martial arts were more her speed. She’d been approached for autographs and signed Lisa Leslie’s name once or twice, hoping the basketball legend would never find out.
Serene moved into the bedroom, where Naughty by Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray” came out of a faux transistor radio on the bed’s nightstand. The room had another musical anachronism as well: a mini Marshall amp by the bar.
Using her laptop, she surveyed a map of the area. She’d walked around earlier and gotten the lay of the land, but knowledge was king. London was very eccentrically laid out with crazy side streets, alleyways, and odd names. This wasn’t a city neatly laid out on a grid, but a lovely hodgepodge where James Bond, Harry Potter, and Jack the Ripper easily coexisted in imagination and memory. It had only been a day but she already liked London. Now, to make it work for her.
Serene took the small elevator down, walked through the wood-paneled lounge area, handed her room key to the receptionist, and went out onto buzzing Dean Street. She made a left, walked past restaurants, hotels, and a private club before making another left onto Richmond Mews, a cul-de-sac that ended with a string of white lights and big windows as one entered the Soho Hotel.
As this neighborhood had once been the home of production companies, film distributors, and screening rooms, the Soho Hotel had become Hollywood’s London location for junkets, touring musicians, and actors. Rising real estate prices had driven many media companies out of central London to Shoreditch, but many traveling musicians and actors still called the Soho Hotel their London home. As Serene entered the lounge, the actor Michael Sheen walked past her toward the elevators, while action stud Jason Statham knocked back a pint with two mates at the bar.
Serene glided pass Statham to a spot near the man she knew to be Alister McCord. He sat with a glass of top-shelf Scottish whiskey in a well-tailored blue suit, an eggshell-white shirt, and an exquisite haircut. He smelled like an ocean breeze and his eyes were a piercing blue.
Those blue eyes quickly surveyed Serene, studiously judging her shoulders, legs, and thighs. Serene would have been flattered if she hadn’t known that underneath his stylish veneer was a corrupt exploiter of women. He slid Serene his business card, which said he was an investment adviser. But she knew that sex trafficking was what McCord was really invested in, and that he had deep connections to Russian mobsters that paid for his bespoke suits. Any legit business McCord did was funded on the backs of women imprisoned throughout Europe.
McCord thought Serene a prostitute. She upped the ante by replying that she was a dominatrix. Intrigued, McCord asked what roles she played.
“I can be a nurse or a nanny,” she responded with her best Jamaican accent, “but spandex and paddles are what I do best. Do you enjoy being spanked?”
“What well-educated sire of the British isles doesn’t, my dear?”
“I have a place a few blocks from here,” she told him.
“Of course you do,” he said. “I would expect nothing less. I have some time. Think you can accommodate me for forty minutes?”
“It will be your pleasure.”
They exited out the bar’s doors onto bustling Wardour Street. Drinkers clustered outside bars. Londoners sought out favorite restaurants or headed to the nearby theater district. Cars navigated Soho’s tight streets as if the pedestrians were invisible. Soho had once been a tawdry home base for legendary gangsters and brothels. Despite the ongoing twenty-first-century upgrades, echoes of its sleazy past could still be heard.
One particularly dark sound emanated from Tyler’s Court, an alley a few blocks from the hotel which once housed a brothel. Midway down the alley, the door was still there and Serene had the keys. McCord followed her up a stairway.
On the third landing, they entered a room with just a wooden table, chairs, leather belts, and a bottle of water.
“Bare bones, isn’t it?” McCord observed just before Serene punched him in the stomach. When he bent over she caught his face with a knee. As he wobbled backward, Serene spun around and cracked a rib with a sidekick. McCord moaned and grabbed his right side. Serene tied his hands with leather straps and dragged him over to a chair.
Now fully aware of his predicament, McCord’s veneer of proper English upbringing disappeared. He looked at Serene with the disgust of a man who truly hated women.
“You just want to be a man,” McCord shouted, “but you have the wrong fuckin’ equipment, cunt!”
Serene walked over to him and smiled. “I may have been born with the wrong equipment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t buy it, mate.”
Back on Tyler’s Court, Serene made a left onto Berwick Street and then another left onto narrow Walker’s Court, which had once been filled with sex shops, strip clubs, and dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Like much of contemporary Soho, Walker’s Court was modernized, cleaned up, sanitized. Still, a lively bit of the old grime could be found at a sex shop with pink windows.
When Serene walked up and made her request, the Englishman behind the counter leered from ear to ear. But Serene wasn’t deterred or one bit self-conscious. She perused his offerings and, to the Englishman’s satisfaction, purchased the biggest model. Now a satisfied customer, Serene strolled back down Berwick and onto Tyler’s Court with a small grin.
When Serene entered, McCord stopped struggling with his bonds and stared at her. “What’s in the bag, cunt?”
Serene said politely, “Something you are probably very familiar with.” She pulled a long black dildo and bottle of lube from the bag, placing them on the table.
“I don’t need the dildo,” McCord with a snarl. “But I am certain your cunt needs the lube.”
Serene didn’t respond. She walked behind the handcuffed man with the dildo in one hand and the lube in the other. The suddenly flustered McCord shouted, “Get out from behind me, cunt!” With her foot, Serene tipped his chair forward and the trafficker fell, face-first, to the wooden floor.
Blood oozed from McCord’s forehead and mouth. Serene pulled down his pants and underwear. McCord’s voice, which had a lot of bass in it, reached a higher pitch now, like a soul singer going falsetto, as Serene squirted lube along the crack of his white ass. When she turned the vibrating dildo on, it sounded like the buzz of small
propeller plane.
“Cunt, you wouldn’t!”
“Oh, I would and I am,” she said. “I need some names, though.”
“What names?”
“What names and addresses you do think, pimp? Locations, safe houses, business partners. I’m not the police. There will be no due process. You help me, you maintain your dignity. If not, you become my bitch.”
Alister McCord gave up names and locations in Paris, Morocco, and the UK, but wasn’t very forthcoming about any connections in the US. Serene recorded him on her smartphone and whenever McCord’s enthusiasm tailed off, she would bring that dildo up to his ear and let him feel the buzz.
This was a fruitful twenty minutes for Serene, well worth the flight over.
She told him, “I hope this isn’t just a list of imaginary friends.”
McCord lay awkwardly on the floor, tied up with his butt in the air. He wasn’t a gangster really, so breaking him wasn’t that hard. But he was a hateful pimp, which made Serene consider violating him anyway.
She forwarded the names to her connect Mildred Barnes in the US and waited to hear back. She chuckled looking at McCord, his bare ass paler than a December moon, his haughty demeanor a memory. She contemplated her next move. All she was responsible for was getting him here. His “disposal” was up to someone else, though she had been assured that he would not be murdered since she’d be the last person seen with him and London had more cameras per square foot than almost any city on the planet.
Her phone buzzed. The word Go appeared on her screen and she headed for the door.
“Where are you going, cunt?!”
Serene walked back over, turned on the vibrating dildo, and placed it next to his face. “It has been pleasant meeting you, Alister,” she said. “Someone will be along shortly. I don’t know what will happen to you, but hopefully it will be even more unpleasant than this.”
Amid McCord’s curses, Serene left the room, headed downstairs, and locked the door. In the noise of Soho on a Friday night, no one heard McCord scream.
The Darkest Hearts Page 2
