Nothing?
“Never slapped you or Cincinnati around?”
“Not for nothing,” she said, with a shrug.
He lowered his head to hide his expression.
“He have any other girls?”
“Yeah, every bitch in this building under thirty five,” she said. “Pope used to call this The Vatican. Called us his Sister Marys. The day they wheeled him away most of them bitches left, found other pimps. He paid the rent. Me and Cincinnati had a little we’d managed to save up on the side.”
“Awright, baby,” said Conquer, fishing out one of his red and gold business cards and passing it to her. “Do me a favor. You hear or see anything about this thing again, you drop a dime?”
She took the card, slid it into the front of her cheetah print bra.
“Maybe I drop you a dime anyway,” she managed to coo half-heartedly.
He smiled.
He walked past forty seven without telling Lazzeroni goodbye, and practically dove through his car window downstairs.
“Pope!” he called, twisting the radio dial. “That’s your name? Pope, right?”
“How you know The Pope?” came the voice from the radio. “I ain’t never seen you in my life.”
“How’d you die?”
Silence.
“I can light up a smoke and make you talk or you can tell me.”
“Yo, it ain’t somethin’ easy for a man to admit, you dig? Even a dead man. I been inside. Shit went down. I just never thought I’d go out like that.”
Conquer nodded. A hard way for anybody to die. Even a no-good pimp. But he wasn’t about to get sentimental.
“Thing with bat wings, right? Black eyes.”
“Who been talkin?”
“Sugarfoot.”
“Sister Mary Sugarfoot. My baby,” said the voice fondly. “How she lookin?”
“It visited Sugarfoot the night after you died. About four nights ago, right?”
“Could’ve been. Time….don’t make sense anymore. Not here. Wherever I am. Wait, it didn’t kill her though?”
“No,” said Conquer, sinking back in the seat, thinking.
“Ain’t that about a bitch?” Pope exclaimed.
“You were going through the trunk of the car….,” Conquer said.
“Yeah it was late…”
“Three AM?” Conquer asked. The same as the others. It always came at 3AM. The Devil’s hour.
“Yeah. I carried my burner down out The Vatican and I was putting it in the back with the spare,” said Pope. “Motherfuckin’ thing came up behind me. I couldn’t get loose…Bent me right over the bumper, jammed my face in the trunk, busted my tooth off, split a pair of hundred and fifty dollar slacks down the back. God-damn!”
“And afterwards, it told you to tell somebody about it.”
“Huh? Nah, wasn’t no afterwards. That shit was….yo, it done me to death. It broke my goddamn neck in the doin.’”
That was different. The winged thing had demanded that Sugarfoot tell somebody about it. Same thing when it attacked Leon Green. It hadn’t killed either of them, just assaulted them. But it had killed Cincinnati and Leon and Pope, who had been its first victim, as far as he knew. It was easy to figure out what had happened with Leon. He’d been sitting up with his gun. He’d heard it attacking Cincinnati across the hall and kicked in the door. He’d probably shot Cincinnati accidentally in a wild effort to kill the thing. Once attacked, the thing had gone buck wild on both of them. Sugarfoot hadn’t resisted, so Sugarfoot hadn’t died.
But what about Pope?
“Anybody see it happen? Anybody try and stop it?” Conquer asked.
“Man, I was sorta too occupied to notice. I ain’t see nothin’ but the spare tire in my face while it was goin’ at me.”
The other attacks had happened in the building. Pope had been killed outside. And he hadn’t put up a fight.
“You see anybody out on the street?”
“Nah,” said Pope. “That’s why I went down there at three AM. Discretion, you dig?”
Nobody had intervened.
“So why were you putting a shotgun in your car at three in the morning? Where were you going?”
“I was gonna go give it to a friend to hold for me.”
Conquer looked at the radio dials. The big black knobs and the silver teeth-like preset buttons below were all the face Pope had to stare sideways at.
“The truth.”
“That is the truth, man!” Pope insisted. “I thought the pigs might be payin’ me a visit soon, dig? I didn’t want ‘em turnin’ up no incriminatin’ evidence at the crib. That shotgun was kinda warm, you know? Kinda short too. Like Mississippi in El Dorado with The Duke. Yo, you seen that shit?”
“Stay on track, cowboy,” said Conquer. “Why were the cops comin’ down on you?”
“Well, I got a little too exuberant correctin’ one of my bitches, you know? Landed her ass in the hospital. Bitch was brand new. No respect for nothing.”
Conquer fumed, but let him ramble on.
“Actin’ like she all that, pissin’ off my bottom bitch. Black as a burnt match and fresh off the boat from Africa or some shit, but talkin’ like she Tina Turner. Well, sometimes a nigga got to be Ike, you know what I’m sayin? I cut that bitch’s head back to the fat meat, boy.”
He actually laughed.
Bells were going off in Conquer’s ears, and it wasn’t all wrath. Africa.
“She was from Africa?”
“Some place over there, yeah. She had that accent you know? And a form! Stacked! Like a black iron stove, and hot as the griddle. All that lion meat and drum beatin’ I guess. I thought the combination might draw the tricks lookin’ for somethin’ exotic, know what I mean? But shit man, bitch wouldn’t give a trick a blowjob her first time out. I said, ‘Bitch, what the fuck you think I picked you out the crowd at the train station and took you home for? You ain’t no stray dog goin’ lay around all day and wait for me to rub your belly, you got to earn your keep! Got to make that bread!’ She start cussin’ me out in that jungle ass talk. So I combed her hair a bit for her. That bitch goin’ snatch the belt from me! Give me a crack! Shit, don’t no bitch lay a hand on The Pope….”
“You put her in the hospital,” Conquer interrupted, not caring to hear any more. He was ready to put his fist through the 8-track. “Did she get out?”
“Hell naw,” Pope said. “I put that bitch to sleep. Jesus wasn’t goin’ wake her black ass up. But you know, just in case she did wake up, start tellin’ tales on The Pope, I had to tidy up the Vatican, you dig? Can’t shit where you eat.”
“What hospital?”
“Yo, what the fuck does that matter?”
“It matters because you’re on the verge of Hell, pimp,” said Conquer through his teeth.
“You know what, man? I’ma be real. I detect a note of jealousy.”
Conquer almost laughed. He couldn’t believe this motherfucker.
“Is that a fact?”
“Yeah, nigga. You talk all this righteous talk, but you the one sittin’ here askin’ me all the dirty little details. I b’lieve you hate what you can’t be.”
Then Conquer did laugh.
“Yeah, you’re in a real enviable position,” he said. “Look here. Every damn word you say tips you closer over the edge. That’s Hell with a capital H. Imagine what you went through in your last moments on earth stretched out till the end of time, all the bad shit you’ve done in your whole life visited back on you and nothing to look forward to but it starting all over again. Forever. Only reason you ain’t burning already is ‘cause of the way you died. Violent, confused. It’s why you’re stuck in this car. Lead a bad life, leave shit unresolved, get murdered…that’s how ghosts are made. Only two ways you can get out of this situation. One, I rip your ass out and dump you in the Jersey landfill of eternity. Two, you try and make some kinda amends, throw a buzzer beater redemption and get time off from Hell for good behavior. Don’t make a differ
ence to me.”
Pope was quiet a minute.
“Yo, is that really how this shit works?”
Conquer shrugged. Nobody knew for certain of course, but Conquer had a knack for sounding like he knew.
“Hey, take your own chances. But don’t think I’m just gonna drive around with your haint ass. I’m cleaning you out of here soon as I get the chance. Or, you can tie up these loose ends and get out on your own with a little black in your account to weigh against all that red.”
The radio was nothing but static for a while.
“I took her to the emergency room at Harlem.”
Conquer twisted the key and gunned the engine.
“What’s her name?”
“Hawla. H-A-W-L-A. I called her Holla.”
“She got a last name?”
“Maybe once,” said Pope. “I ain’t never knew it.”
The hospital was only a few minutes up the street, but it took him twenty more to find parking, and he was rethinking keeping the car at all when he finally found a spot a block and a half away and walked up and in to the nurse’s station.
He flashed his smoothest smile at the light-skinned, matronly older woman manning the information desk, and she responded with a flutter of her eyes.
“How can I help you, young man?”
“Ma’am, this is gonna sound like a strange request, but I’m trying to find a friend of my sister’s. She may have been mugged and dropped off here four nights ago.”
“Four nights? She’s probably been discharged by now,” she said, opening the admissions records. “What’s her name?”
“Well, that’s the strange part, ma’am. You see, my sister only knows her first name.”
The woman tilted her head back and looked at Conquer through her horn rimmed glasses.
“Well, you understand, I’m not supposed to divulge information about patients except to family.”
“Oh I know it, and I told her you’d probably say that. You see, the hard part is, this girl’s got nobody.”
“Lord have mercy.”
“Yes, ma’am. My sister sent me to visit her, make sure she’s alright. Tell her she’s got a place to stay when she gets out. Her first name’s Hawla. H-A-W-L-A. She’s from Africa, see?”
The woman was paging through the records as she listened. She stopped, and her face fell before she looked back up at him sympathetically.
“Oh my Lord, that poor child?”
That didn’t sound good.
“Marjorie?” the woman at the desk called to the back.
A skinny white nurse came to the counter.
“Will you watch the desk here for a moment?”
The light-skinned lady came around the desk and took Conquer by the hand.
“It’s bad,” she said. “I’m gonna take you up myself.”
She held his hand all the way to the elevator and the whole ride up.
“Do you pray, young man?”
“Yes ma’am.” Every time the rent came due.
She bowed her head and Conquer did the same, and for three floors she gripped his hand and invoked the Lord and all the angels.
When the doors opened, she guided him out.
“I been praying for this poor girl since she arrived. She was dumped out of a car on the curb in front of the ER,” she confided in a low voice as she marched him down the corridors with purpose. “They found her immigration ID in her pocketbook.”
He involuntarily squeezed her fingers, and she squeezed back.
The steady sound of the oxygen machine told him all he needed to know, but he looked anyway.
The girl in the bed couldn’t be more than seventeen. Her head was swollen to twice its size, the bruises over her eyes squeezing them shut. Her lip was split, and all the fingers of her right hand, the hand that had struck Pope with his own belt, were splinted. She looked like a garbage truck had hit her and backed up.
He exhaled at the violence of it.
The nurse patted his hand.
“She hasn’t been awake since. Doctors say they don’t think she will wake up. Too much pressure on her brain.”
Conquer bit his lip. That goddamned pimp!
But he had a hunch.
“Can I sit with her for a while, ma’am?” Conquer asked.
She nodded sadly.
“I’ve got to get back to work. Just see yourself out. I’m so sorry.”
She left him the room.
He shrugged out of his oxblood coat, threw it on the chair at the end of the bed.
He closed the room door and went to her nightstand. Opening a drawer, he found her clothes. A black miniskirt, torn hosiery, a too tight pink sweater, high heeled come fuck me shoes, and there at the bottom, a small, square black pocketbook with makeup and her passport and ID, a little sealed leather pouch on a string, and a pocket Koran with more dog ears than the city pound.
Hawla Hamis, formerly of Chake-Chake, Pemba Island, Zanzibar. Pemba Island. He knew the place by reputation. It was one of the world’s more concentrated nexuses of black magic.
The passport was only a year old. Conquer didn’t recognize the pretty, sullen girl in the photo anywhere in the swollen, cut face sprouting tubes before him.
Was she anywhere in there?
Only one way to find out.
He pushed the door shut and quietly lifted a chair and set it against the handle.
Then he took a stubby white candle from his coat pocket, and set it on the nightstand. It was one of a few seemingly innocuous implements he kept at all times on his person, junk to a white man’s eyes, but some of it more powerful than the Colt Python he sometimes wore under his arm.
He lit the candle. He pulled the other chair close to the nightstand and sat down, staring at the flame.
This was old spirit doctor stuff his mama had taught him as a boy. Sometimes a person would get into a state like Hawla’s, the spirit holding on though the body was giving out, stuck halfway between worlds. Mama had said such people were like breech calves, and had to be eased out of their bodies.
Conquer didn’t know how long he watched the wavering light of the candle, if the day-lit room darkened at the edges of his eyes because of the passage of time, or because a cloud had drifted across the noonday sun. Maybe it was just the shift in his perception. Only the light of the white candle existed, like the last sun in a dimming galaxy going cold. Something moved in the ensuing shadow, the girl’s trembling spirit, lodged in her body. He felt her distress, could almost hear her frightened weeping. The hairs on the back of his neck uncurled and the skin raised. It was suddenly chilly as a gust of waterfront air. He shivered, and that was when Hawla slipped in.
She was a happy, barefoot girl playing with the other children in the ruins of Mkama Ndule. After a day’s play she would sit against the cooling wall of the ancient overgrown mosque and stare up at the purpling sky, watching clusters of straw colored flying foxes chatter from the sagging branches of the warm, sweet-smelling clove trees.
Her father had been a dala dala driver, but he had rolled his truck in a rainstorm and died when she was only a baby, and her mother had gone to the mainland to work and never returned. Hawla had always known only her frail old grandfather, a powerful mganga who worked spirits and dispensed dawa medicine from a basket of horns for the villagers of Pujini. He had told her he was the last of the line who had served the Mwinyi Mkuu rulers at the old Dunga Palace, a keeper of the magic drums that had sounded whenever Zanzibar was in peril.
Though he had forbidden it, she had watched him conjure shetani spirits, some kind of local demons Conquer had never encountered before, in his little room hung with azma – scraps of the Koran used as talismans to control spirits.
Once when she was fourteen she had been playing alone at Mkama Ndule. She liked to pretend she was a queen of a tribe of warrior women, and that the old walls were her palace. A jeep had pulled up nearby. An old white man with a camera and a couple of Shirazi guides had gotten out. The white man
had taken her picture while she played, said nice things about her, but his eyes had scared her. She had tried to run off and go home, but at a word from the white man, the others had grabbed her and taken her to the jeep.
The jeep had gone all the way to Chake-Chake. The men in the back of the jeep had kept her pressed to the floor with their feet. When they had arrived, she had been wrapped in a blanket and taken into a motel. They beat her so that when they unrolled her from the blanket she was too weak to fight the old white man as he slithered on top of her, grunting like a pig.
Conquer had tried to pull away at this, to come back to the hospital room, but some powerful, wrathful force gripped him in the dream state, as though it held the back of his head and forced him to watch every foul attention of the disgusting old man, every quiver of rippling, liver-spotted flesh, to hear every girlish sob and wheezy sigh. The old bastard squeezed blood and tears from her like something picked from a tree, and when he had sucked the rind from her, he threw the leavings to the men who had carried her there, and it had started all over again.
Conquer felt nauseous and outraged. He felt wrathful. But was it his own anger, or Hawla's?
Afterwards, Hawla flopped from the bed and crawled across the room while the white man dozed and the others sat outside smoking. Her legs were too numb to pick herself up from the floor. She found a Koran on the nightstand, the same one Conquer had found in the dresser drawer in her hospital room.
It was as if God had engineered everything, brought her to this terrible place and left her the means for vengeance, a means only she could take. Kiduniani, the way of the world, her grandfather would have called it. Shauri ya Mungu. The plan of God. She found the correct verse, and called out to the shetani as her grandfather had unwittingly taught her.
It was a clumsy, imprecise evocation, too impassioned to be entirely safe. The twisted spawn of Iblisi that came forth into the world had observed the seedy motel for years as an unformed presence from its darkest corners and from under the enseamed beds, drawn from Hell like a scuttling cockroach to chew at the vices and perversities both native and imported by slothful tourists from around the globe like a bitter cud. It was a creature heady with the sensations of the physical world, a perennial voyeur at last invited to participate. It had chosen a shape frenzied and wild, an immense, slick, oil-black figure, leanly muscled, with white shark teeth and bulging, agate eyes, still bearing the bat-like wings that had carried it up from Hell. It dragged a grossly exaggerated member between its hind limbs, its own approximation of a human organ, but little less that than a demon’s scourge. Its wings beat unnaturally quick, as a hornet’s, the terrible buzzing an overpowering sound, machine-like. It reminded Conquer of the high whine of a Loach taking off, which was fine in an open rice paddy, but hell on the ears in the enclosed room.
Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1) Page 9
