by Jan Fedarcyk
“Those last two were Deyron and Ai’don Thomas, two brothers with the audacity to try and visit the corner store when some of Mr. Williams’s underlings were firing handguns at some men who used to be Mr. Williams’s underlings.”
The room got a little less friendly. It was hard to get worked up about murderers murdering each other; it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just overlook. They were the FBI, after all, but neither did Kay find herself weeping into her pillow late at night at the thought of there being one less gun hand scuttling through the city’s byways. Civilians were a different matter, and not just civilians but children, two little plots of land out in Mount Auburn Cemetery, grandmothers weeping over coffins. Kay realized that she was gritting her teeth, then stopped before she gave herself a headache.
“Yes, it’s been a bloody run for Mr. Williams, one which we’ll bring to an abrupt end tomorrow at five a.m. We’ll be serving indictments against Williams and seven other individuals, lieutenants and top-ranking enforcers. We’ll have the assigned Assistant United States Attorney standing by in case we need to write paper for additional warrants. If my little photo presentation did not convince you, then let me remind everyone outright that these are very dangerous men, and it would not at all be out of character for them to decide they’d prefer to see a pine box than a jail cell, and would be even happier if they had a few members of law enforcement as company. It’s mandatory for everyone to wear body armor and raid jackets, and make sure your radio is coded before you head out today. We go in fast, we go in hard and we make sure everyone comes out safe.” Dickson then began to go through each specific target, which Agents would be assigned to which location. Kay held her breath as he went through each suspect, lieutenants and minor members of Williams’s crew, waiting to hear her name called. It was foolish to get emotionally invested in a case, Kay knew, and this personal antagonism she had been cultivating against Williams had no place in an investigation.
All the same, it stung to discover she wouldn’t get to slap the cuffs on him. “Malloy,” Dickson said, “you’ll be assisting Torres, Marcus and Chapman when they make the bust on Williams.”
Kay worked carefully to keep the frown off her face, listened as Dickson finished reading the assignments, then dismissed the room. She already had a reputation amongst some of the criminal squads as something of a prima donna, owing more to the fact that she was good at her job and came from a privileged background than to anything else, she thought privately. But still there was no good to come from displaying disappointment; the mission came first, after all. The mission always comes first.
Torres, of course, wasn’t fooled. “Don’t look so cross, Ivy,” he said as they walked out of the meeting. “You think James Rashid Williams is going to be the last person ever who tries to get rich in Baltimore selling crack cocaine? Or just the last one the FBI is ever going to arrest? Believe me, the final shot in the War on Drugs will not be fired tomorrow morning. You’ll get to take out James Rashid Williams 2.0 in another six months, or in six months after that. One upside to the whole thing: there’s always more bad guys.”
Torres made it sound simpler than it was. Williams was clever and Williams was careful, and it had taken the better part of a year for the FBI, with all the technology and resources at their disposal, to finally land themselves this shot at him. But Torres wasn’t altogether wrong, either. In the street they talked a lot about “the game,” epitaphs stolen from hip-hop songs, the usual distorted warrior-creed horseshit. They never seemed to realize that the game was stacked, that the best any corner kingpin could hope for was to slide under their radar awhile and avoid drawing down the wrath of law enforcement, which was belated, erratic and inevitable. Or one of their own people would put them in the ground, or—and this happened with astonishing frequency—they would find some way to ruin it themselves by getting drunk and wrapping their car around a telephone pole or finding themselves stabbed in a bar fight with a random stranger. There were upsides to being a drug dealer, Kay supposed: the money, the neighborhood fame or infamy, perhaps the excitement. But longevity was not generally one of its virtues.
A fact that they would be reminding James Rashid Williams of early the next morning.
3
KAY SLEPT three hours that night, woke with the moon still heavy against her curtains, jumped out of bed sharp as a stropped razor. She dressed in less time than it took her coffee machine to brew up a pot, dumped that in a thermos and moved swiftly to her car. As she drove out to meet the rest of the squad, she ran through in her mind the morning to come, savoring the anticipation. She would not get to go in through the door—fine, fine, that was disappointing but ultimately irrelevant. Tonight, this morning, they would take James Rashid Williams off the streets, put him in a cage where he would spend the rest of his life, or the vast majority of it. There was such a thing as right and wrong—there was such a thing as justice—and Williams would learn that soon. Learn that there were consequences to evil, that the righteous did not sit idly by and allow themselves to be poisoned, abused and dominated.
“You all right there, Ivy?” Torres asked, sipping from a mug of coffee the size of half her torso. “You know we’re just here to arrest the man; you don’t get to eat him.”
“I just wish I got to haul him in,” Kay said.
Torres put a hand on her shoulder. It was a rare moment of affection, and Kay did not miss it. “Forget about who gets to kick in the door,” he said. “This is as much your collar as anybody’s, and more than most. Dickson knows that, and so do I.”
Kay tried not to blush. The only other time Torres had offered a compliment, it was regarding Kay’s ability to down cans of Natty Boh without stumbling, and whatever his feelings on the matter, she felt that was not altogether a thing of which to be proud.
Torres winked and guzzled the rest of his coffee, then set the cup aside and forced himself into his armored vest. A standard precaution, although in this instance almost certainly unnecessary. This was a priority location, and so Torres and the rest of the squad would be following SWAT—special weapons and tactics—into the building. Being an FBI Agent very little resembled the popular perception of the job, but SWAT was part of that very little. There were many people in the world who thought of themselves as hard, who liked to walk with a swagger and brag about their gun collections. Some of them even were tough, so far as it goes, even frightening or dangerous. And all of them, every one, were rank amateurs when compared to SWAT. These were professionals in the field of human violence, and watching them take down a door was like watching an NFL team play pickup football against a group of schoolchildren.
No, this was it for James Rashid Williams. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind . . .
“Ivy—look alive, for Christ’s sake,” Torres said. “Dickson is here.”
Kay snapped to it. Kay didn’t particularly like Dickson, but she had to admit he was an asset in this sort of situation. He seemed cool and collected as ever, unruffled by the moment ahead of them. A last-minute check to make sure everything was in place, and then Kay slid quietly through the side alleyway, stopping finally at the eastern exit to the alley that ran behind Williams’s stash house. “Malloy in position,” she said quietly into her walkie-talkie.
She stood next to a broken-down fence: Was it really a fence if it was broken down? Wasn’t the point of a fence that it marked a boundary between two spaces? What was a thing that did not deliver on its essential purpose? Idle questions to be asked as the morning began to creep out over the night as the first rays of sunlight broke slowly onto the city.
A flash of movement brought her back to her senses, reminding her of how foolish it was to be distracted, even for a moment. She might not be on the entry team, but nor was she browsing through a bookstore. “FBI,” Kay said, firmly but not too loudly. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
The man coming down the back stoop fro
m one of the houses a few blocks down from Williams’s turned his coat up over his throat, looking tired and cold, like anyone would look very early on a freezing morning in February. There were a few naked inches of skin between the heavy ski cap he wore and his upturned collar. “I gotta get to work,” he said dully, unimpressed with her announcement or with the FBI raid jacket she was wearing over her body armor. Kay supposed this was the kind of neighborhood where the occasional intervention of law enforcement was not a subject to get particularly thrilled over—one of the many scarred battlegrounds over which the cops and the crooks fought their nightly battles, like half the city.
“This is police business, sir,” Kay said. “I’m going to have to ask you to return to your home.”
The man sucked his teeth, pulled his cap farther down over his head, looked back warily at the way he’d come. “Boss gonna fire me if I don’t get in on time,” he said unhappily, like he already knew what Kay’s answer would be. “Boss ain’t gonna be interested in any police business.”
“As I said, sir, we’re in the middle of an operation. For your own safety, I’m going to have to ask you again to return to your home.”
“You gonna sign me a note?” he joked bitterly. “I don’t go to work, I can’t pay my bills; I can’t pay my bills, they gonna take the house. Come on, lady, I been late twice this month ’cause the bus never comes in on time. Third strike and—”
There was a sharp sudden noise from the stash house, Torres and the rest going in fast and hard, as they’d been trained, overwhelming anyone inside with speed, with numbers, with the sheer intimidating force of authority. Another twinge of regret that she wasn’t amongst them.
“All right,” Kay said, shrugging, “but hurry up and keep your head down.”
He thanked her and brushed past, heavy eyes still on the day’s labor. Kay’s own were keenly trained on the back door of the stash house, the sound of the action from inside bringing her senses back in hyperawareness. If Williams or one of his peons tried to make a sprint for it, she promised herself, they’d better be going west down the alleyway. Kay felt like a set trap, a grinning wolf, a cat ready to pounce.
But when the back door finally opened, it was only Torres, looking puzzled and annoyed and waving for her to enter. Inside was a beat-to-heck couch facing a gigantic flat-screen television that had not been properly affixed to the wall, a rough hundred thousand dollars in heroin on the scarred wooden coffee table, three young black males cuffed and kneeling next to it, looking furious and a little bit scared. None of them, it did not take Kay long to note, was James Rashid Williams.
“Where is he?” Torres asked one of them.
Staring up at Torres and twenty years in prison, he shrugged and smiled nastily. “Who you talking about?”
“Dickson,” an Agent shouted from the kitchen, “you need to come take a look at this!”
Which he did then, and rapidly, with Torres and Kay following in his train. The kitchen had not been used to cook anything but crack in years and years. Stacks of empty pizza boxes rivaled empty beer cans in height and depth. The door to the adjoining storage room was open. Inside was a hole and a ladder leading down below the building. Two Agents had already gone to take a look at where it led, and one of them had come back and poked his head up to spread the info. “It heads down to another house half a block away,” he said.
“Motherfucker,” Torres said.
Dickson looked hard at Kay. “Anyone slip past you, maybe from one of the adjoining buildings?”
“Motherfucker,” Kay agreed.
4
KAY HAD not seen Christopher in nearly a year and had only spoken to him a handful of times in the interim, the phone buzzing while she was fast asleep, looking over at the alarm clock groggily and seeing the little red LED lights blinking 3:37 or 2:18 or 4:25, sighing miserably and picking up anyway. The voice at the other end of the line slurred or talking much too quickly, despondent or upbeat depending upon the moment’s drug of choice, begging apology for past failures or full of enthusiasm over some new plan that would never come to fruition. He had not visited since she’d moved to Baltimore. Kay had no idea how he got her address.
And yet, when she saw Christopher sitting on the stoop of her house in Fells Point, a small, quaint, lively neighborhood a few blocks from the water, Kay felt no hint of surprise. Because that was the way it always was with Christopher. He had a strange way of showing up when you least expected him. He was wearing a beat-up pair of jeans and a gray hoodie. He stretched himself up from his seat, smiled and waved her forward with his fingertips. “Hey there, little sister.”
And just like that, every other time was forgotten, because there is such a thing as family, thank God, and Kay didn’t have enough left anymore to pick and choose. Embracing him, she was saddened but not quite shocked at how thin he had gotten—she could feel his shoulder blades through his T-shirt. “Brother.”
“This is a nice place you got here,” he said. “Got an extra bedroom?”
“There are three things to love about Baltimore,” Kay told him. “Seafood, the Ravens, and for the cost of a one-bedroom in the East Village you can pay off the mortgage on a mansion.”
“I hate the Ravens,” Christopher said.
“There’s probably a bridge somewhere you can sleep beneath,” Kay said, but then she unlocked the door and waved him inside.
“You eat yet?” Christopher asked.
Kay had not given any thought to dinner. It had not been that kind of day. She had given a lot of thought to drinking, however; had planned on walking down to her neighborhood bar and seeing if the day’s sorrows couldn’t be drowned in a few cans of Natty Boh. But as a rule she did not drink with Christopher, not since they’d been kids cribbing beer from the local bodega with fake IDs, not since it had become clear that her brother was not a casual drinker any more than he was a social imbiber of cocaine. “Not yet,” she said.
“Perfect: me neither. I’ll whip something up.”
“I don’t have much,” she was saying, but he had already dropped his faded duffel bag in the living room and found his way into the kitchen.
Kay couldn’t really cook. Kay couldn’t really draw, Kay couldn’t really sing. Kay wasn’t much good at making small talk or at winning over new friends, at flirting with her preferred sex, at living enthusiastically in the moment. Fate had given these qualities to Christopher in abundance, however, by that curious process by which two siblings, formed from the same strands of genetic material, arrive in the world separate and distinct and somehow seemingly entirely alien creatures. He buzzed about in her cabinets for a while, came out with a frozen chicken and a selection of condiments accumulating dust in her refrigerator and was well on his way towards whipping up a feast by the time Kay had finished changing her clothes.
She took the opportunity to inspect him silently for a moment and did not like what she saw. He’d been beautiful back in the day, dark and sharp and always smiling, the first person you looked at when you walked into the room. How many girlfriends of hers back in high school had blushed and giggled and asked if he ever asked about them, Kay doing her best to explain that her brother was a person best stayed away from as one stays away from a bonfire or a sharp knife or a pool of furious piranha. Fifteen years of hard living had worn half a lifetime into his face. He was thin all over, the skin hung loose off his face and his eyes weren’t bright like they had been.
But, watching him cook, she could almost see the years slough off him. Kay remembered her eleventh birthday, the first without their parents, a fourteen-year-old Christopher trying his hand at a strawberry shortcake, nearly burning their house down in the process but still, so lively and jubilant that she had all but forgotten her troubles. He had always done his best to look out for her, Kay thought. At some point he had just stopped being very good at it.
They made a point of not talking about an
ything serious. Nothing about her work, nor whatever he was doing in lieu of it. Nothing about their family or their past. Just superficial nonsense: if she was seeing anyone (no), if he was seeing anyone (lots of people), if they’d seen any good movies lately, the usual pop culture nonsense. He put the finishing touches on the chicken, spread it on two plates and gave Kay one of them. Then he tore a corner off Kay’s roll of paper towels, tore that corner into two halves, gave one to Kay. “The very lap of luxury,” he said.
“Lots of white cloth napkins in your flat?”
“I’m between flats at the moment,” Christopher explained, “though when last I had them Jeeves made sure the napkins were exclusively silk.”
Kay laughed.
“I’m sorry I forgot your birthday,” he said after a couple of bites.
Kay shrugged. It was something that she had long gotten used to. Christopher did not show up to things: dinners and graduations, court dates and appointments with parole officers. At a certain point you make a decision to keep loving a person in spite of themselves, regardless of what they do to you, or you remove them from your life completely. And Kay wasn’t a cut-and-run type, not when it came to family. Not when it came to anything, really. “Don’t worry about it.”
