by Brad Parks
It was getting to be six, which felt a lot like quitting time. And on a normal Friday, after a rough week at the office, I might just head home, curl up with Deadline, and watch Braveheart for approximately the fiftieth time. Except now my copy of Braveheart was just one more piece of ruin in what used to be my house. And, sadly, so was Deadline.
Then there was the other standby Friday-night activity for the suddenly overstressed: going out to some local bar, getting mind-blowingly drunk, and hitting on anything under the age of forty that wasn’t utterly repulsed by me. Except there was the small problem of what I would do if I actually succeeded in luring some lovely young lady into my clutches. Hey, honey, what do you say we go back to my place. I’ve got this great little debris pile not far from here . . .
No, I was pretty much cruising for another night on Tina’s couch—or maybe, if I could stop being such a loser, Tina’s bed.
I just had one last errand to accomplish before I started traveling that way. Call it a mission of guilt: I wanted to see if I could find anyone who had seen Red or Queen Mary since their building got blown up. It wasn’t going to do them a lot of good if they were, in fact, underneath the rubble of Building Five. But I felt like I at least owed it to them to check.
So I made the turn off South Orange Avenue, not far from the Wyoming Fried Chicken where my buddy North Face was likely on patrol, and soon found myself back in the odd nether-world that was the remains of the Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project.
It was its usual empty, forlorn self—though instead of six large, empty brick buildings, there were now five. The search-and-rescue mission had been called off. So it was just me and the ghosts again.
I started looking around for signs of life, peering in the corners and behind the shadows just like I had been doing a few days earlier. The wind was managing to find a way to blow up my pants, which felt even less pleasant than it sounds. I pulled my jacket closer to my body and kept hoping for that whiff of smoke or glimpse of light that would indicate I was not alone.
But I was. Obviously I was. And yet I kept standing there as, what, self-punishment? As if I could somehow atone for Red and Queen Mary dying a horrible death by standing out in the cold and looking for them? What the hell was I doing here?
I was losing it. I must be, right? Why else would I be shivering in the courtyard of an abandoned Newark housing project waiting for two dead people to show up? I felt this hysteria creeping all over me, like my rational mind was separating from me, slipping off into the ether where it would never again be found. I cupped my hands to my mouth and started yelling as loud as I could.
“Rrrreeeedddd,” I hollered. “Rrrreeeedddd!”
I kept bellowing, each time pausing to listen for a response but only hearing the sound of my own voice echoing off cold, hard brick walls.
The Director picked up the call on the second ring, looking at his cell phone like it offended him. It was unusual for one of his people to call at this hour—or any hour for that matter. They were instructed to contact Monty on routine matters. And the Director had set up his organization so most matters had become routine.
“Speak,” the Director said.
“It’s Hector. Hector Alvarez.”
The Director could practically hear Alvarez gulping through the phone. The Director did not like Alvarez, a former drug addict turned counselor. The Director had little respect for addicts. He viewed them as weak, lacking self-control.
But dealer recruitment was not something the Director wanted to do himself. He came up with the idea for recruiting in prisons early on. It just made sense. Most of the inmates were there for dealing drugs in the first place, so they already knew the business. Plus, recruiting in jail meant you weren’t taking the unnecessarily dangerous step of swiping active dealers from other syndicates or gangs.
It hadn’t taken long working through the Director’s various Department of Corrections contacts to find Alvarez. He and the Director had a few beat-around-the-bush conversations, but the Director knew the first time they spoke he had found the right man. Alvarez had the taste for the finer things in life but not the paycheck. He had that sense of grandiosity, common among addicts, that convinced him he was due more than what life was giving him.
The arrangement with Alvarez, as it was with the recruiters in the other prisons, was simple: he received a cash bounty for every dealer he channeled to the Director. Yet while the Director valued Alvarez’s service, he had little patience for the man himself—especially when he was being hysterical like this.
“Get a hold of yourself,” the Director commanded.
“I’m sorry. I just got a visit from a reporter, a guy from the Eagle-Examiner,” Alvarez said through shallow breaths. “I think he’s on to us.”
“Explain.”
“Well, he had one of the dealers with him. Rashan Reeves. I got him for you a couple months ago. Remember him?”
“I do,” the Director said. The Director knew who all his dealers were, even if they didn’t know him.
“Yeah, so the reporter is like, ‘Rashan here tells me you’re recruiting drug dealers from jail. I’m going to write a story about you if you don’t tell me who you work for.’ ”
“And you told him . . . what?”
“Nothing,” Alvarez said, his voice cracking slightly. “I told him to screw off, and that was it.”
“So by ‘on to us,’ you really mean ‘on to you,’ ” the Director said coolly.
Alvarez did not reply.
“Well, you’re calling me,” the Director said. “Is there something you want me to do about this?”
“I just . . . I thought you should know.”
“Fine. What’s this reporter’s name?” the Director asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“I don’t know. He said his name so fast.”
“Carter Ross.”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Alvarez said. “I swear, I didn’t tell him anything.”
“And where is Mr. Ross now?”
“I don’t know. He just left.”
The Director frowned. The Director thought he had rid the world of Carter Ross with one push of a wireless detonator. It had surprised the Director to see Ross alive and breathing on the News at Noon. Clearly, he needed to be dealt with. Immediately.
As for Alvarez . . .
“So, tell me, Hector, how old is that little girl of yours?” the Director asked.
“She just turned nine,” Alvarez replied, his voice faltering.
“How nice,” the Director said. “Tell her happy birthday.”
CHAPTER 8
I must have yelled Red’s name twenty or thirty times, with each repetition a little louder, a little more desperate than the last. I yelled until my throat went raw and I lost the breath to yell anymore.
But he wasn’t there. Or perhaps he was, but only as a corpse buried under several tons of debris. I started walking toward Building Five to, I don’t know, say a prayer or something. Then somewhere off in the distance, I heard a faint voice.
“Who there?” it said.
“Red?” I shouted one final time.
“What you want?” the voice said, and this time I could trace it a little better. It was coming from Building Three. And it sounded like Red.
I ran toward Building Three, pushing my numb legs to move as fast as they could. As I got closer, I saw Red’s patchy-bald head sticking out of a second-story window. I never thought I would be so happy to see an old homeless man in Newark.
“Hey, Red!” I said, feeling some warmth returning to my body. “Remember me? Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”
“Yessir. I got Queen Mary right here,” he said, then lowered his voice for a moment. “I’m trying to get me a little some, you know what I mean?”
I was so happy to see him alive, it didn’t bother me that the image of two aging addicts in the throes of passion was now drifting through my mind.
“Why aren’t you dead right now?” I
asked.
“Oh, you mean with the building and all that? Shoooot,” he said. Red was directly above me, one story up. I was still on ground level, which made me feel like the world’s weirdest Romeo looking up at the world’s ugliest Juliet.
“Yeah, you weren’t in Building Five this morning?”
“Oh, I was there,” Red said.
“Then how did you not get blown up?”
“Aw, hell, youngster, I got more lives than a kitty cat,” Red boasted. “Can’t nothing blow me up.”
“You mean you were inside?”
“Well, I was jus’ layin’ in there with Queen Mary”—more bad visuals—“when I heard this racket coming from the fire escape,” he began, and I imagined this was not his first time telling the story today. “An’ I was thinking, ‘Who’s comin’ visitin’ at this time of the mornin’?’ Our friends ain’t exactly early risers, you know?”
I nodded. Red sounded a little less drunk than the first time I spoke with him, which was to say he might have only been two sheets to the wind instead of the usual three.
“So I stole a peek around the corner, an’ I saw this guy with a bunch of dy-no-mite. An’ I thought he was from the city, come to blow the buildin’ up. They’s always talking about how they gonna blow it up. An’ I jus’ thought maybe today was the day, an’ they jus’ hadn’t told none of us street people, you know?”
“Right,” I said.
“So I watch him go ’bout his bidness, pickin’ out a wall and tapin’ his dy-no-mite and fussin’ with all his doodads. And then he musta gone and taped it to some other walls or something, I don’t know. But as soon as he was gone, I went an’ got Mary. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we best be gettin’ usselves outta here. It about to blow.’ An’ you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘Awww, there you go again,’ ” Red said, and then started howling with hee-haws, punctuating it with some woohoos, then finishing with some hoo-wees. I laughed to be polite, having no idea what he found so funny. Then again, I’m not sure it was fair to expect total clarity from a guy whose last sober day had probably been while I was in the first grade.
“So I said, ‘No, no, Mary, we got to go. I mean, we got to go now,’ ” Red said. “An’ she didn’t say nothin’. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we got to go.’ An’ I done picked her up and carried her out, jus’ like I was Superman.”
I was having a tough time believing Red could carry a well-mannered lapdog—much less an inert old woman—down a fire escape. And apparently so did Queen Mary.
“There you go again!” she hollered from somewhere inside the building. And Red, finding this every bit as inexplicably hysterical as last time, started with a fresh round of har-hars, tee-hees, and ho-hos. I let him finish and he continued.
“Now, we wasn’t out of the buildin’ mo’ than three minutes and, WHAMBO, the whole damn place done gone sky-high, and then it fell down, jus’ like it was a deck of cards fallin’ in on isself. It was a terrible noise like you ain’ never heard. And you know what?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t no man from the city after all. Folks here is sayin’ it was jus’ a man up to no good, jus’ wantin’ to blow up our buildin’ because he don’ wan’ it here no more. Can you believe that?”
“Actually, I can,” I said. “He blew up my house, too.”
Red couldn’t have looked more surprised if a bottle of Majorska vodka up and started talking to him.
“You don’ say!” he said. “Mary, you hear that? Remember that white boy who got us the food? That big feller with the dy-no-mite, he done blowed up the white boy’s house, too!”
“I heard him the first time,” Mary said tersely from inside the building.
“Well, don’ get all sore. I was jus’ sayin’,” Red said, then turned and gave me the universal male shrug that loosely translated to, Women, what can you do?
“Red, tell me something. The guy with the bunch of dynamite, how big was he?”
“Little bit taller than you an’ about twice as wide. He had hisself a neck like a bull.”
Red held his hands a fair distance apart to signify a substantial width. That sounded like Van Man to me.
“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked.
“Sho’ as I’m lookin’ at you right now, youngster.”
This was getting too good to be true. Not only was Red alive, he was possibly the only living witness who could ID a serial murdering arsonist. And, yes, there was the small problem of what, exactly, Red had managed to see through his Mad Dog 20/20 goggles. But it was still a hell of a lot better than nothing.
“What did he look like?”
“Well, like I said, he was a big feller an . . .”
“Do you think you could describe him to a sketch artist?” I said, cutting to the chase.
With that, Red leaned back from the window for a moment, straightening himself.
“Well, now,” he said. “That all depend, don’t it?”
I caught his drift immediately.
“Another trip to the store on me,” I said.
Red flashed a smile that displayed his teeth—both of them—and said, “Make it three.”
With the issue of compensation settled, Red and I hopped into the Malibu, which I turned in the direction of police headquarters. I drove quickly, mostly because Red was stinking up my car so badly I was afraid the upholstery might need to be detoxed if he stayed in there too long. With my non-driving hand, I called Tina.
She answered the phone with all the warmth I expected.
“You’re a total ass,” she said.
“I know, I know.”
“No, you don’t know. I’m sitting here wondering if you’re dead or alive like I’m some kind of damn war bride. I am not a damn war bride!”
Tina was clearly a little crazed (is there such a thing as mind-altering ovulation hormones?). And while in my younger days I’d tried reasoning with crazy women, I had reached the conclusion, sometime in the wisdom of my late twenties, that it was simply not possible. As long as she was immersed in crazy, it was better to just agree with whatever she said until she emerged from said state. I guess you could say I had become a conscientious nonobjecter.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re not a war bride.”
“If you think you’re getting any tonight, you are so mistaken.”
“I never thought that for a moment,” I said.
“For a while, I was thinking about teasing you and leaving you with a crippling case of blue-balls. But the fact is, I am so repulsed by you right now, I’m not sure I even want to be in the same room with you.”
“Definitely separate rooms,” I concurred.
“Make that separate zip codes.”
“So should I find another place to spend the night?”
“Of course not,” she spat. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Sorry.”
“You have no idea how sorry you are!” she said, and then all I heard was the slamming of a phone.
I looked over at Red, who had this knowing smile on his face.
“I’m not sure I understand what just happened,” I said.
“Sounds like you got woman problems,” he observed.
“I suppose I do.”
“Ain’ nothing you can do ’bout it,” Red said with what was, for him, a philosophical air. “Sometimes those women, they jus’ love you so much they gotta yell at you to show it.”
“Is that so?”
“Trus’ me. I’ve had mo’ women love me like that than I can count.”
I nodded. Red started scratching himself. And we left it at that. I found a metered space not far from the Green Street entrance to police headquarters and herded Red inside.
After sliding my business card through a slot in the bullet-proof glass, I explained to the desk sergeant that the musty-looking gentleman with me had gotten a good look at the guy who blew up the Booker T building this morning.
The desk serg
eant, an older guy with a white flattop who was probably just trying to hang on for another year or two until retirement, gave me this you-gotta-be-kiddin’-me look and picked up the phone. He talked for a few moments, then clicked on the microphone that allowed his voice to be heard in the lobby.
“One minute,” he said.
Red had already settled into the ancient couch in the lobby. He probably knew as well as anyone, when you were waiting for the Newark police, you might as well get comfortable.
“So, have you always lived around here?” I asked.
“Naw, I been all over,” he said. “North Carolina. Maryland. Georgia. Served in Germany when I was in the army.”
“You were in the army?”
“What? You think I been a bum all my life?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I began.
“Tha’s okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m jus’ messin’ witchya. I like bein’ a bum. Can’t nobody tell you what to do when you don’t got no boss to please and no landlord to pay.”
Tough to argue with that worldview . . . y’know, as long as you don’t mind sleeping in abandoned buildings in Newark.
“So how long have you, uh . . .”—been a bum—“lived in Newark?”
“I dunno. What year is it now?”
“Two thousand and—” I started.
But he was laughing again. “Come on, now, still messin’ witchya. I guess I been here, off an’ on, for ’bout twenty year. Used to go down South for the winter, jus’ thumb my way down then thumb my way back. But I’m getting’ too ol’ for that. Thumbin’ ain’ what it used to be. An’, besides, Mary’d miss me.”
“How long you and Mary been, uh . . .”—knocking boots—“with each other?”
“Oh, I’d say fo’ or five year now. Off an’ on. Can’t tie me down to jus’ one woman, you know. But sometimes I wonder what woulda happen if we met when we was younger. Maybe things woulda been different. Maybe we woulda had a family . . .” Red said, his voice trailing off.
How about that. Red Coles was not only homeless by choice, he was also a bit of a romantic. I was about to comment on it when Hakeem Rogers emerged from behind a door and motioned toward Red.
