Deuce’s phone rang. He made a face, answered it. “Yup. Yup.” He pulled out a pen and a sliver of paper, jotted a few things down. “Jermaine? Okay. All right. Yup. Okay. See ya.”
“Who was that?”
“That,” he said, “was my dumb-ass cousin. He’s in the hairpin of a bender like I’ve never seen. Hiding out. I heard a girl in the background, so he’s holed up with one of his hood rats.”
“He get us in?”
Deuce held up the piece of paper. “We have to meet with this dude named Jermaine. I’ve got some more details. This is going to be a fireworks show. You ready?”
I shifted in my seat. “Everything moves toward its end. Looks like this might be it.”
Here was what was going to transpire. First things first: we had to dramatically alter our physical appearances. That went without saying, this information coming from Jermaine as told to the disgraced Reginald.
No problem there. My hair had turned shaggy anyway. Deuce and I shaved our heads, picked up some colored contact lenses. I went with a deep green, and Deuce opted for zombie-like whiteout lenses. “Nobody’s going to believe a black dude like me’s got blue eyes, or whatever, so as long as I’m going fantastical, might as well go all the way.” When I asked him how he expected people to react at the party, he said, “Oh, I’ll be wearing sunglasses until the shit goes down.”
With our newly-shorn hair, we then proceeded to grow out our facial hair. We weren’t going full Grizzly Adams, but we would at least conceal our facial features. We just needed to make ourselves a little less obvious in the crowd.
Since this was a protected shindig, we’d also need a plan that consisted of more than us waltzing into the front door and unloading shells into the crowd. Somehow, Reginald had convinced Jermaine to escort us, but he laid it out for us like this: we had to meet him ten miles outside of Jacksonville and be transported in through the trunk. That meant we had to pack ourselves into his car and ride the whole way.
What we did once we got in was anybody’s guess, but we figured we’d maybe have some drinks, scout the place, and then work our way into the room with the bad guys and unload on them. The party was supposed to be gun-free, but anybody who believed a gathering of ganged-up monsters would be without heat was being sold a bill of goods.
Our plan was to take guns but also leave some in Jermaine’s car. He did not know this, but once we were into it, there was no way he’d deny us. I mean, we’d have the guns, after all.
Reg texted Deuce a date, time, and address, accompanied by the message, “Meet Jermaine there to discuss details.”
“You ever think you’ll forgive Reg?” I asked Deuce on the drive over.
“No,” he said, “but we’ll see how this situation goes. Might heal some of what he did.”
Jermaine was a big guy, rounded off at the edges but sharp in all other aspects. He walked with a pronounced limp. Said he got it in prison.
“I’m only doing this because Reg helped me get my shit together after my first stint in Santa Rosa. He put me up and got me work with local hustlers to get me back on my feet. He’s real good people, but he sounds like he’s running scared. That the truth?”
Deuce crossed his arms. “He’s made some mistakes,” he said. “He’s got some atoning to do, but he’s not directly in trouble, no.”
“It ain’t because of dealings with y’all, is it? Because it would be hypocritical of me to give you some kind of help and—”
“Don’t worry yourself with it, boss man,” Deuce said. “This business is personal, and you can relax about Reg.”
“This is my ass on the line. Not yours. Not Reginald’s. So you need to tell me if you plan on turning over the apple cart.”
“You’re safe,” Deuce said.
Jermaine gave us both the once-over and sighed.
He went into the car’s trunk. He came out with a handful of clothes. Handed me a velour jacket and told me to put it on.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” I said.
“There won’t be many white boys at this thing,” he responded. “Not many white people of any stripe. Maybe the hoes, but they aren’t even allowed to make eye contact with the pimps.”
“Again, I hope you’re registering my incredulity here,” I said.
He shrugged. “You know what they say: Don’t hate the player—”
“Hate the game,” Deuce and I finished.
“Them’s the rules, man. I didn’t make ‘em up. Anyway, put that on and keep your Ps and Qs in the soup bowl. You get hyped up enough to pull a piece, make sure my name don’t cross your mouth. Now, get in the trunk.”
3
The gate. Deuce and I held our breath. Listened. Jermaine’s muffled words with someone asking pointed questions. Still, we made it through. When the car stopped, Deuce and I got out to find ourselves in the yard of a perfectly luxurious southern mansion. It was the sort of place where cotton or tobacco might be harvested a little over a century ago.
People milled around. Drank champagne from diamond-studded goblets. Giggled and laughed on the topic of bitches. It was a parade of peacocks, and the rest of the ostentation was inside.
“This beats all I’ve ever seen,” Deuce said.
“And collectively,” I replied, “We’ve seen a lot.”
Inside, music blared on speakers big as televisions sets. Songs I didn’t recognize. I mumbled something to myself about Son House, because no one could hear me anyway.
It was much brighter in here than I thought it would be. Women danced on tables. Women danced on poles. Women danced with one another. Several made out for their pimps around the room.
Liquor stations doled out mixed drinks and shots. I knocked back a slug of Jack to calm my nerves. When someone handed me a cup of Seagram’s, I didn’t refuse.
I checked the place. Walked around. Waved to Deuce once as he circled a group of revelers. No sign of Hector. Plenty of mischief, but the man we wanted dead was nowhere to be found.
A stairwell led upstairs. This was Dominguez’s place. If the dude holed up anywhere, it would be there. I walked by, checked it out. Big guy in a suit and shades held court by the landing. My guess was, he wasn’t allowing anybody the freedom to roam around.
It was a choke point. I imagined him upstairs, planning all sorts of nefarious dealings in human beings. Torturing women. Relishing the cash he received for ripping low-income people from their homes and forcing them into prostitution.
I imagined killing the bodyguard, imagined storming upstairs and killing him before his henchmen could take me out.
I imagined Deuce making it out alive.
I sipped my drink and rubbed elbows with the people at the Players Ball.
The vibe was off; even I could see that. It wasn’t quite the celebration of objectification I had come to expect. There was an undercurrent of anger, of desperation, flowing beneath this whole event, and it was beginning to bubble up into the party proper. Even the women forced to smile through risk of reprisal had lost the thread. They seemed confused, disoriented, wary.
That’s what you get when you force your will on people.
Problem was, the frilly peacocks at the center of this shindig didn’t seem to notice or care that their people wanted to be anywhere else.
I moved through the crowd, my mind in a lot of places. I thought about how to help these women, what I could do to drag them to freedom.
Then I thought about it not being my business.
My impact was micro. Changing the system was macro. If we got to the bottom of her death, maybe it would give some people the courage to fight back, to step out on their own. I heard the internet was changing things for people. Changing the way even the darkest business was done. If a girl could schedule her own meetings, there was no need for a pimp, no need for someone to “keep her safe” through violence and intimidation.
Then there was a change in the whole tenor of the party. It began small. People complaining over the heat, the spac
e, the location of the bar. Little things, but the sorts of things that matter where a party is concerned.
At one point, I saw an altercation erupt between a pimp and his hoes. She had the audacity to accept a drink from a rival player, and so she got the backside of his hand.
She sat down and cried softly into her hands, but she didn’t talk back.
I waited until he staggered off, pimp cup in hand, toward the bathroom, and then I followed him. Luckily, he ventured off the beaten path and into an unoccupied room. As he pulled the door closed, I slipped in behind him and sapped him with the butt of my pistol.
He sprawled inelegantly against a chair, and I kicked him once as he fell, toppling a chair with him. As he struggled to his feet, a reddish stain appeared on the back of his fedora. I kicked him square on the ass and put one knee in his back as I racked a round into my pistol and pressed it against the soft flesh at the base of his neck.
“One move, and I’ll kill you,” I said.
“You got it, holmes. I’m just looking to get my squirt on back here. Lost my way looking for the bathroom. I wasn’t trying to fuck with nothing back here.”
“You hit that girl. You think that was all right?”
“Man, do you even know where you are?”
I clocked him with the pistol. He fought the urge to scream but still let loose a pained grunt.
“Man, the fuck you doing?”
“Setting you straight. That pimp hand of yours is getting out of control.”
“Come on, homie. You can’t be serious. You think anybody cares about that bitch? You see anybody tell me to stop?”
“I’m telling you.”
“I see that, but let me ask, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
The bejeweled cup he’d been carrying lay just out of his reach. I picked it up and thrashed him with it until the urge to kill him ceased.
“I’m the pimp hand of the pimp hand, you see. I was sent here to regulate half-assed ladies’ men like you, and you made the right move at the wrong time.”
“So, what? You think you’ll just kick my ass and then get away with it?”
“That’s the plan. I’ve got a cleaver in my belt loop. I was ruminating over the idea of taking that hand of yours off at the wrist.”
“You would do no such goddamned thing.”
I snatched off his ridiculous hat, tossed it across the room. Then, I rolled him over onto his back and showed him my left hand. His eyes widened with a premonition of a bad future.
“What goes around comes around, doesn’t it asshole?”
For the first time, there was actual fear in his voice. “Somebody did that to you ‘cause you hit a bitch?”
He didn’t need to know the truth.
At this point, I was standing above him, deciding whether or not to give him a once-over with the pimp cup again, and then he smiled.
He said, “Soon as you let me up, I’m going to take the razor blade out my boot and cut your dick off.”
“You want to go and slap women around,” I said, “give the backside of your hand to one of them sparkly dandies in there, you hear me? Hit the pimps instead.”
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” he said, and I popped him again.
“You don’t hit women,” I responded. “It’s your business to traffic in them, I suppose, but keep your goddamned hands off of them.”
He spat blood on my borrowed velour jacket, so I grabbed his throat and beat the backside of his head against the tiled floor until he begged me to stop.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I did, man,” he said. “I did, man, shit. What’s your problem? We’re all here for the same reason, ain’t we? Jesus Christ, I think you scrambled my brains.”
“What do you know about a girl named Nikki?”
“She was a sex fiend?”
“Funny,” I said.
I punched him. I backhanded him. I dented his pimp cup.
“Okay, all right,” he said. “Nikki, she used to suck dick for money. So what? I used to handle this girl got ganked by one of her johns. Probably what happened to Nikki. What I heard, bitch didn’t know her place.”
“How’d you know that?”
I watched a drop of sweat work its way down his forehead.
“Word gets around. We’re a small community, us hustlas.”
“Tell me somebody else in the community.”
“Shit, everybody here. You gon’ take them in here and fuck them up, too?”
“Somebody who knows Nikki.”
“Knew Nikki.”
“Right.”
He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “Nikki gave it hard as she got it. She was — what’s the word? — mercurial. She wasn’t content with her station in life. She thought she was hot shit. Graduated with honors from her high school. Thought she was better than the other girls giving head because she could read Moby Dick instead of just deep throat it.”
“Who was her pimp?”
“Now, if you think I’m-a tell you that—”
I slapped him the way I thought he handled most of his underlings. He expounded on the subject of fucking my mother and killing my old man, but eventually he settled back in.
“Dude named Othello Dufour used to wrangle her.”
“And Othello works for Hector Dominguez.”
“Right. If I had to put money on it, I’d say the chieftain putting on this party knows the intimate details of how she got chopped up and thrown away.”
“But you don’t know anything.”
“I didn’t kill the bitch.”
“You can help solve her murder.”
“I—Yeah, you right. I might be signing my death certificate, but Hector Dominguez is your man. He’s the man. You want to learn the score on some bitch got pushed through the system, that’s the man you gon’ see.”
The door opened behind me. I turned, gun in hand, only to see the girl the pimp had attacked standing there.
“You all right?” I asked.
She was a youngish Hispanic girl, full lips and bright eyes, dulled somewhat by whatever she was on. She sneered at me and pulled away, knowing, perhaps, that her man — her master — wouldn’t let her off the hook if she gave me any quarter.
“You gon’ let me back to the party, now?” he asked. “I’ve got some business to attend to out there, and, man, you’ve got me sweating some shit I don’t need to be sweating.”
I smiled. “Back to the party? Back in there, where you can sic those human attack dogs on me? Uh-unh, no sir. We’re going to take a trip out that way.”
I pointed toward the back of the house. When he began to shake his head, I slapped him around a little bit, and then I led him to the door.
“Bitch, you comin’?” he asked the girl, but she only stood there, hands on hips, watching me drag him through the house.
“Just wait ‘til I get back in this party,” he yelled. “I’m-a show you what the fuck a pimp slap looks like, up close and personal.”
For every empty threat, I clocked him. His head was becoming a bloody mass, but he was too stupid to shut his mouth.
I pushed him through the kitchen, the white-clad staff watching me as I shepherded the procurer to his untimely exit. He banged against a table, ruining someone’s mise-en-place, and I ran his face through a few plates’ worth of sauce-covered h’ordeuvres before pushing him through the screened door at the rear of the house.
Two dishwashers were smoking cigs, and they cleared out in a hurry as I pushed him headlong into a parked Buick.
He screamed. “Oh, shit, man. I think you broke my collarbone. Jesus Christ on the turnpike, my goddamned shoulder.”
He rolled around a little bit before I helped him to his feet.
“I don’t want to see you at this party,” I said. “You try to make your way back in, or you try to get some of the goons working this party to mess with me, and I’ll find you. I’ll find you, and I’ll show you what it’s like to make a body disappear, do you hear
me?”
At first, he only grimaced, holding his shoulder, but he eventually nodded.
I pointed to the least developed portion of the woods. I said, “I’m going to watch you walk in that direction. Don’t turn back. Don’t say anything. Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Don’t make yourself known to anyone. Do you understand?”
Again, he nodded.
“If you do, what do you think will happen?”
“You’ll kick my ass.”
“Wrong. I’ll kill you. Do you doubt what I say?”
“No.”
“Then go on. Get out of here. If I see you with a woman again, and especially if I think you’re pimping her out, I’m going to come back and find you. Do you get that, too?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Now, get the fuck out of here.”
He started out slowly but picked up speed as he disappeared down the hill behind the house. I watched him go, and as soon as I was certain he wouldn’t turn around, I ventured inside and went back to business.
Hector Dominguez was nowhere to be found. I made a loop around the place and didn’t see him, so I got a drink from the bar and sipped from my temporary pimp cup. Deuce caught sight of me in the living room and shook his head. No sign of Dominguez from his end, either.
As I settled in, I saw the party itself was a grand ordeal. This was not the train of flesh I had expected, but it was nevertheless filled to the brim with women of all persuasions, sizes, and dispositions. They weren’t being paraded around, but they were on display, and whenever a new song blasted over the house’s speaker system, most of them were expected to “get up and dance,” a phrase I must have heard a dozen times in the short period of time I spent in the main living room.
Deuce and I had made a pact not to interact while at the party, lest we be connected in some meaningful way. To put a finer point on it, we were in the middle of the woods with people who made the entirety of their livings via underhanded means. What’s another few bodies tossed in shallow graves?
Dirt Merchant Page 40
