Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1)

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Conquer reloaded and looked out across the burning Bronx. Hell, even the next building over was smoldering now. Another insurance job. There was a homemade pigeon coop, and the wild-eyed birds were flapping like hell against the chicken wire to get clear of the fire.

  He’d just jammed the speed loader into the cylinder and flicked it shut when the roof door crashed open and Essangui came charging at him.

  Conquer dropped to one knee and fired police style. He couldn’t believe how piss poor his marksmanship had gotten. Either that or the kid had some kind of bullet turning magic of his own. He clipped the end off the bow bouncing on his back so the string lashed wildly. He blew a hole in his gorilla cape. But nothing hit dead center where he was aiming.

  Then Essangui was on him, those big hands coming down on him like bowling balls. His gun went hurtling over the edge into the alley below where some bum would find it and pawn it for a bottle of O.E.

  It was hard to get up his defenses. He wasn’t fighting a man, but a wild gorilla, flailing huge limbs, striking with forearms and curling back hands. Conquer tried to remember Baba Hamilton’s training, tried to keep control of the bigger man’s center line, but he was all over the place, driving him back to the edge of the roof.

  Then an unexpected dip of the arm under Conquer’s crotch and he was hefted into the air over Essangui’s head like a wrestler.

  Well, thought Conquer, this is it then. He’d die like Black Adam, flung off a roof by some ghetto Tarzan.

  Essangui ululated like a Zulu and heaved him clear across the gap to the next roof over. His strength was incredible.

  Conquer smashed directly into the pigeon coop. It collapsed around him, and he was scratched and squirted with pigeon shit as the gray flying rats beat for the smoky sky.

  He lay blinking under the corrugated tin sheet roof, cut and bleeding, feeling as though he’d tried to kiss a barreling cement truck and been chastised.

  He coughed in the thick smoke from the burning building. It was billowing from the open stairway door. He could glimpse the flames flickering up the steps.

  There was a heavy thud, and then Essangui was standing over him like a great idol shrouded in the smoke of sacrifice.

  “Neat trick,” he managed, spitting up blood.

  “You’re gonna burn here, O.G.,” said Essangui. “Enchanters gonna rule the Bronx. And I’m gonna rule the Enchanters. Can’t nobody take that from me.”

  “How about King Solomon?” Conquer groaned.

  Harlem’s own mob boss. Every numbers runner, every pimp, every muscle for hire in the borough answered to him.

  “Fuck that old man.”

  “You think he taught you this shit out the kindness of his heart?”

  Essangui glared, and Conquer knew his hunch was right. King Solomon dealt in magic too. No way Essangui had come by this power on his own. The gangs the Enchanters rumbled with had always done odd jobs for Solomon. Deadbeat beat-downs, torch jobs, it was how they’d afford their swell patches and weed. But the Enchanters had never bowed to him. Likewise, Solomon had always turned up his nose at Preacher’s low class Puerto Rican magic, and peace among the gangs surely didn’t help his agenda any. Trading in the Enchanters’ Santeria and Hoodoo for this hybrid African and European black magic, this takeover reeked of the old gangster’s meddling.

  “Nobody taught me nothing.”

  “Bullshit, boy. You can hardly read. And who the fuck else could smuggle a gorilla into the Bronx but King Solomon?” Lazzeroni had been right about that. “He came to you promising a kingdom of your own. All you had to do was get rid of Preacher and a couple other boppers who were messin’ with his business. But you ain’t gonna be no king. Just another baron. You know what a baron is? Baron answers to the real king. King Solomon says jump, what do you say?”

  “Shut up,” growled Essangui.

  “How highhhhh?” Conquer said in a mocking sing song.

  Essangui curled his lip. He reached down and tore the tin roof from off of Conquer. The pigeons Conquer had been holding beneath it flew from his hands, cooing and fluttering madly in Essangui’s face.

  Conquer grabbed a sharp piece of broken wood and stuffed it in the big man’s abdomen. For as hard and defined as his muscles were, they didn’t stop the shard of plywood from going in.

  Essangui doubled over, burping up blood.

  Conquer got up and ducked under a heavy swing, following up with a kick to Essangui’s midsection that drove the wood further in.

  Essangui tried to shriek as he had before with his arm pinned, but more blood bubbled out.

  Conquer gave him a few shots, blocked a half-hearted jab, and came behind him, grabbing the dangling bow string. He looped it around Essangui’s neck and drew it taut, pulling him across the roof like a dog on a leash.

  When he reached the open roof door, which now burned within like a furnace, he levered the big man over his back, flipping him over and down the stairs into the fire.

  Conquer straightened, spotted a piece of pipe, and picked it up. He got a glimpse of Essangui rising up in the flames, coated with fire and whirling, staggering back upstairs for the exit, before he kicked the door shut and slid the pipe through the handle.

  Something heavy hit the barred door, something howling.

  Something that ceased its efforts by the time Conquer found the fire escape.

  J.K. was sitting, leaning against the front tire of the Cordoba when he got downstairs. He looked pale, and his vest was soaked in blood.

  “Damn!” said J.K. “O.G., you look like I feel.”

  “Kid, I’ll always look better than that,” said Conquer. “Get in the car and you can ride with me to the hospital.”

  “I don’t know if I can get up,” J.K. moaned.

  “Then roll to the curb so I don’t run your ass over when I leave,” said Conquer, getting in.

  He almost passed out waiting for the kid to flop into the passenger’s seat.

  “Don’t bleed on the seats,” Conquer murmured, though he was pretty sure he was himself. He started the car.

  “What about Essangui, yo?”

  Conquer looked at the kid.

  “You’re President now,” he said.

  “Did you kung fu him or what?” J.K. asked, then, before Conquer could answer, “Hey O.G., you think maybe I could start takin’ lessons over at that dojo?”

  “Sure, kid,” said Conquer. “If Baba Hamilton lets me come back, I’ll vouch for you.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. I’ll even coach you all the way to the goddamn Olympics.”

  “They got kung fu in the Olympics?”

  “If they don’t, they should.”

  Conquer switched the radio on to drown out the kid’s questions. ‘Down and Out In New York City’ was playing. Not even James Brown could make the drive to Montefiore’s emergency room feel shorter.

  He leaned way back in his seat, and his eyelids began to flutter, but the wheel remained steady.

  There was a burst of hissing static.

  “Yo, I got this, Conquer,” said Pope.

  Gradually, he let his fingers go loose.

  No one really gives a good goddamn.

  CONQUER WILL RETURN IN: FEAR OF A BLACK CAT….

  (Preview)

  John Conquer was reading a story in the Daily News about a dude who had married his lady atop the Empire State Building in a gorilla suit, his bride dressed as Fay Wray, when his strawberry egg cream gurgled dry and a shiny black Cadillac squealed to a fast stop in front of the Gem Spa.

  Two overlarge brothers with their hands in their coat pockets popped out of the back like Jimmy Cagney gangsters and made a beeline for him. He didn’t need to drop a nickel in the Zoltar machine to know they weren’t here for the havala. In their pressed maroon and peacock blue suits, they were as incongruous in this neighborhood as the wraith-thin, mohawked white boys of St. Marks Place would have been in their ripped jeans and t-shirts on stage at The Apollo.

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sp; When they gained the curb, Conquer arched his empty cup across their path into an overflowing trashcan. The two suits stopped in their tracks and jumped back down in the street as it sailed across their path.

  He grinned at their what-the-fuck faces. Not so tough they’d risk a stain on their swanky threads.

  “The Man wants to see you,” said the one in the maroon suit, around a toothpick of all things.

  Conquer knew these dudes by sight if not by name. He knew who they meant when they said The Man.

  The Man was King Solomon Keyes.

  Pushers, prostitution, numbers, everything you could think of that shot like a load of Mexican horse through the veins of Harlem was controlled by The Council, the seven high rollers who kept the Luccheses swimming in pasta and Cadillacs with black dollars and black misery.

  Every hustler and lowdown junkie on the street knew that. They knew the names “Mr. Untouchable” Nicky Barnes, “Gaps,” and “Jazz.” They knew Fisher, Rice, and Muhammed. They knew them as the players who had stepped in to fill Bumpy Johnson’s Barlettas when his gangster’s heart had seized up over a plate of chicken and grits one night at the Wells Restaurant on Lenox Avenue.

  What only a handful of folks knew was that Bumpy’s death had been anything but natural; that the real power in Harlem belonged to the man who had bumped Bumpy, and that his killer had done it without even lifting a finger.

  King Solomon Keyes had called down the power of the old spirits and laid a trick on Bumpy Johnson. Some said it had been goofer dust in his slipper or sprinkled on the scruff of his favorite fighting dog; others, that King Solomon had captured his foot track and buried it in a little pasteboard coffin in the Trinity Cemetery with Bumpy’s name on it. However he’d done it, it was a hit that none of Bumpy’s hired muscle could have even seen coming.

  Ever since then, King Solomon had been the hidden hand guiding The Council, the shadow casting a pall over all of Harlem, lording it over not only the numbers and the guns, but the powders and the doctors, the witches and the loa, the angels and the fiends; not just the master of the body of Harlem, but the jailer of its soul.

  John Conquer knew, and though they had never met, he had butted up against the Devil of Harlem for years in little ways, ever since his return from Vietnam. Before he’d straightened out, got his P.I. license, he’d led a street gang called The Black Enchanters that had kept King Solomon’s pushers out of a corner of The Bronx, fought them trick for trick.

  Since getting his office on St. Marks Place, he’d stumbled across more than a few of King Solomon’s magic plots, and kicked over every last one he’d come up against.

  Conquer was the cat they called when something more than the double dealings of man or the infidelity of a wayward spouse went down (although he wasn’t above collecting his fee for those either). Hoodoo, Vodoun, a bit of western and even eastern magic….if Conquer didn’t know it, he had a book on it. There was even a homicide lieutenant on the NYPD who kept his card in his wallet.

  Unfortunately, like most times you needed a cop, Lt. Lou Lazzeroni was nowhere around.

  Conquer dropped his newspaper and put his hands in the pockets of his oxblood leather coat. The two gangsters tensed. Maroon flashed a bit of the handle of a .38 in his waistband.

  “Easy, slick,” he warned.

  The other one in peacock blue suit wrenched open the back door of the Caddy and gestured that it was time to go to the ball.

  Conquer stepped forward, and Maroon put a hand flat on his chest. That hand scurried over him like a spider till it found a lump in his inner pocket, unzipped it, and drew out a green flannel bag. That was alright. It was just a Steady Work mojo, full of devil’s shoestring, pyrite, and gravel root, dressed with oil.

  “Hard times, Conquer?” said Maroon, leering at the green bag as he tucked it into his coat pocket. “Maybe this’ll bring me some luck, eh?”

  It wouldn’t. Touching it had killed its power, causing the working spirit within to depart. Good riddance, thought Conquer. It hadn’t been doing its job in a couple weeks anyway. Business had slowed to a trickle ever since he’d done that job for the graffiti kids down in that station yard. Councilman’s Grierson’s crazy son had let loose a ritual-born monster in the subway tunnels a month ago. It had gobbled up a lot of bums and a Krylon kid. Conquer had devised a special hybrid sigil to keep it at bay before destroying it.

  He was constantly reminded of the case since the kids had taken to throwing that sigil up all over the city. He saw it on trains, bus stops, walls….always next to his scrawled tag, Conquer, a tiny crown over the ‘o.’ It was a good thing no normal person could read the wild, illegible lettering, or the anti-graffiti cats would be knocking on his door.

  Maroon’s hand didn’t find what it was looking for; the big nickel-plated Colt Python Conquer sometimes wore. He had left it in his desk drawer when he’d gone out this morning. Maroon found a couple of his good luck trinkets, his copy of Pow-wows, or The Lost Friend, but not the red flannel protective mojo hand he kept pinned inside his pants, or the Bullet Turning mojo of his own invention sewn up in his jacket seam, or the silver dime tied around his ankle to alert him of tricks. Those hadn’t failed him yet. They, along with the Isis Knot belt buckle, were all the protection he had on him now. It wasn’t the Colt, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at either.

  He sighed and got into the back of the Cadillac, the stooge in the blue suit sandwiching him on the other side.

  The driver, a skinny cat in canary yellow, pulled away from the curb and steered the car uptown on the FDR, giving Conquer the scenic tour of the river on the right.

  Nobody said a word during the trip, which was fine by Conquer. Baby Huey came on the radio, and they slipped into Harlem proper, along 125th street, all the glory and tragedy of the people on parade. House Méchant burst bright and outlandish out of a liquor store on the corner of East 25th, raising a shrill ruckus and trading flashy, razor jibes with the statuesque queens of House Labeija, both of them uniting against a gauntlet of finger-wagging street preachers as they stumbled home from some all-night ball. An old lady dragged two wailing kids down the sidewalk. A correctional bus let out a gaggle of big men from Riker’s, clutching bulky paper bags that contained all they had in the world. Some of them scowled so hard at their surroundings they may as well have gotten right back on the bus. Three big-legged whores leaned like carhops in the window of a shining two-tone red and white El Dorado, the chrome blinding in the sun, the ermine cuff and bejeweled hand of the unseen driver hanging out the window, dangling a cigarette in a long black Penguin-style holder. A man pissed copiously on a wall. Two junkies lay across a subway grate trying madly to get at something, arguing. A nervously smiling straight laced dude in a shabby brown suit pushed Percy Sutton flyers at every one of them, and a loud group of teenagers in cut-sleeves swarmed him like locusts and left his papers scattered all over the broken sidewalk like a flock of birds sucked through a 747 intake.

  Sometimes he missed living in Harlem.

  Sometimes.

  They passed Baba Hamilton’s dojo and Mustafa’s bookstore .They turned at Thomas Jefferson Park where he’d used to play as a kid. By the time Maroon had begun to sweat and rub his eyes behind his shades, Conquer realized where they were heading.

  “What’re we doing here?” he demanded.

  ‘Here’ was 343 E 115th Street, the four story apartment jammed between a Spanish nail salon and a bodega where he’d grown up after his mother had died. Mamalawo Consolation Underwood had been the closest thing he’d had to a mother since his own had been run down by a taxi cab on the way home from work when he was nine years old, and this was her place.

  Maroon and Peacock got out of the car.

  “Why the hell are we here?” he demanded again, when he got onto the sidewalk.

  They led him upstairs to apartment 3C. He pushed past them when he saw the egg white of bare timber like open wounds in the splintered front door half-hanging from one twisted hinge.
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  The apartment looked smaller. The last time he’d been inside had been the day he’d left for jail. It had all the familiar decorations and furniture in all the familiar places; the depictions of black Obatala and white Jesus still hung from the walls, the pigeons cooed in their corner cage, and the banana rasp snails clung placidly to the glass of their terrarium on the stand by the television. A new addition he didn’t recognize, a Fela Kutti poster, hung crooked on one wall. Conquer noticed Mama Underwood’s iron staff lying half under the easy chair. That was bad news. A Yoruba Mother of Mysteries would never let her ‘opa’ lay. To do so was to invite misfortune, as it was tied to the bearer’s wellbeing.

  The couch was overturned. Behind it, a girl of about twenty lay on her stomach on the floor, her right arm and half her face and shoulder protruding through the broken glass of the window overlooking the alley where she’d apparently fallen. She had on a yellow satin jacket with something embroidered in black lettering on the back; something that was pilfered by multiple gunshot wounds. Big ones. .45’s or .44’s. Her back looked like the aftermath of an airstrike. The wall in front of her was splattered red from the exit wounds that must have erupted like a chain of volcanoes. Her hands had been hacked off. He noticed one broken nail on the carpet painted red.

  There was a large lake of congealing blood in the middle of the floor and what looked like the mark of arterial spray across the snowy, hissing television set. A bottle of red nail polish, a brush, and a file lazed in the lake like drifting boaters. The lake of blood spilled into a broad river that flowed into the kitchen. Conquer hastily followed it, the bottom sliding out of his stomach as he went.

  King Solomon’s color guard didn’t stop him.

  He found Mama Underwood lying spread out on her back in the kitchen among the ruins of the broken card table where she’d spent many an evening in her Japanese housecoat, working her policy books or reading hands. He hadn’t seen a body so bad since Đắk Sơn. She looked like a mess of hogs had been at her, her magnolia-patterned caftan ripped to shreds, her big stomach laid open so that he had to put the back of his hand to his face against the smell of her exposed organs. Her head had been torn, not cut away. The flesh of her rolling neck was ragged. There was red everywhere, making a scarlet grid out of the black and white tiles, spattering the stove. The smiling Gelede headdress on the counter seemed to weep blood. There was a deep set of slashes down her face, and the skin was partly dislodged from her skull so that her teeth showed through her nostrils and one bulging hazel eye looked out over the ruins of her forehead, like someone had pulled a ski mask out of kilter. Her head rested on her chest, pressed at the temples between two knobs of bloody bone jutting from wounds at the ends of her flabby arms. Like the corpse in the front room, her hands were missing. Kola nuts lay scattered in the sticky dark blood. Her hula girl ashtray was smashed.