Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  Some rusted cars were parked against the far side of the street, reminders of what the neighborhood really was. A woman with mottled skin, wearing nothing more than a robe, smoked a cigarette on the balcony of the building across the street, and watched the proceedings as if they were a TV movie. A few other people peeked through windows.

  But the only people on the street were the police themselves, some in uniform, most not.

  Before we got out, Sinkovich said, “Stay close. If you don’t say anything, they’ll think you’re from my unit. Not everyone knows everyone down here.”

  I nodded, opened the door, and stepped across the stream that swirled toward the gutter. Cigarette butts, newspapers, and candy wrappers circled before they poured over the metal lip into the sewer below.

  The rain had stopped, but the sound of it continued, since water dripped off everything, eaves, signs, doorways. The top of the makeshift tent sagged inward. A giant puddle had formed in the middle, threatening to collapse the entire thing.

  Sinkovich led the way, and I kept pace beside him. As we splashed close to the tavern, my gaze caught something white in a nearby alley. I looked closely and saw the Gang Intelligence Unit’s unmarked white van parked next to the tavern’s back door.

  “What’re they doing here?” I asked Sinkovich, nodding toward the van.

  “Gang killing,” he said. “They’re the specialists.”

  “I didn’t know they specialized in homicide,” I said.

  “Everything to do with gangs,” Sinkovich said. “And given the rise in killings lately, that’s gotta include homicides.”

  His voice was soft. As we got closer to the site, walkie-talkies hissed and spit, interrupted conversations blaring through them like half-heard voices on distant radio stations.

  No press had arrived yet. Even though Sinkovich had gotten the information from a dispatcher, the news hadn’t gone out in a way that reporters would understand.

  Either that, or they were afraid to come down to the Gaza Strip, even for a story.

  I didn’t recognize any of the officers guarding the site, nor did the detectives who were conferring near one of the squad cars look familiar.

  Sinkovich’s face formed into hard lines as he watched someone he knew, but he didn’t say anything to me. I wondered if he would when we returned to the car.

  The water wasn’t as deep here. The sidewalk was wet and covered with puddles, but nothing ran. Still, any evidence that had been here was long gone. I hoped the crime-scene technicians had arrived soon enough to find something. Not even a tent would have protected the site from such an onslaught.

  Sinkovich only had to show his badge once as we approached the tent, and that was to a new officer who got a reprimand from his partner for asking. A number of the cops greeted Sinkovich in lackluster tones—Hey, Sink; Hell of thing, Sink; What’ve you been downgraded to, shitholes these days, Sink?

  Sinkovich answered it all with grunts and nods. If I hadn’t known how well he paid attention to things around him, I would have thought he didn’t even know who was talking to him.

  We stepped into the circle of cops lining the tent. The tavern door, down a flight of concrete steps, was open, and the smell of cigarettes and beer floated out as if it were trying to escape.

  I peered over the iron railing into the tavern and saw mostly darkness. Neon lights flashed on a jukebox in the back, and candles burned in red bubble glasses on a few tables. The bar was recessed, invisible from my vantage point, and the place looked empty. Not even cops had gone inside.

  “Hey, Sink, ain’t this dead guy the guy you partnered with on that bust down here?” someone asked.

  Sinkovich didn’t answer. He stepped past a uniformed officer who was watching the proceedings from the front of the makeshift tent.

  “Sink?” said the same voice. I looked over, saw Chaz Yancy leaning against the tavern’s brick wall. He wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, revealing dark, muscular arms. The shirt blended into his black pants, which ended in black boots. “You knew this guy, right?”

  Sinkovich looked up. “Have a little respect, Yancy.”

  Yancy’s eyebrows went up when he saw me. “If it ain’t the protective daddy from over to the elementary school.”

  He and I had had several run-ins when the Blackstone Rangers were trying to recruit Jimmy last winter. The Gang Intelligence Unit’s white van had been parked outside the grade school during most of Jimmy’s encounters, and the cops inside had watched as the teenage gang members tried to recruit from the ten- to twelve-year-olds.

  Naïve me, I had thought the police would want to stop that sort of thing, but the Unit had some other, more important plan. Or so Yancy had told me.

  “C’mon,” Sinkovich said to me under his breath. He ducked out of Yancy’s visual range, and so did I.

  The uniform held the tent flap back for us, and we stepped inside.

  The interior was crowded. Two photographers took pictures, their flashbulbs blinding in the close space. A detective crouched, writing on a notepad, and another man was taking measurements.

  None of them seemed to be paying attention to the body on the sidewalk.

  Truman Johnson looked smaller in death, so small in fact that for a moment I thought my fantasy was right, that it couldn’t be Truman Johnson. Truman Johnson was an ex-linebacker going to fat, a man with so many muscles that they strained out of his clothing.

  He wasn’t that pile of flesh and bone and blood sprawled on the wet concrete, facedown, mouth open, eyes staring at nothing.

  I recognized his shoes first, the same brown shoes he had worn in the hospital. Cop’s shoes, comfortable and cheap, scuffed from too much use. One was bent in the middle, as if he had been taking a step when he fell forward. The other was twisted sideways in an unnatural position.

  His pants were black, a pair I didn’t recognize, and his shirt—what I could see of its natural color—was blue. His arms were flopped beside him, hands open. He hadn’t even had time to reach for a gun.

  A gun. I looked for it, didn’t see it, but did see the shoulder holster that a man would normally wear beneath a coat.

  “You see a gun?” I asked Sinkovich quietly.

  He shook his head.

  No gun, and for that matter, no coat. I crouched beside the body. The blue shirt was navy on the sleeves where the water had soaked it, sky blue on the collar untouched by anything, and purple on the back where there was shirt at all.

  I made myself look away from the torso. I would give myself a moment before studying that. Instead, I looked at the face—really looked—and my fantasy of this being the wrong body, the wrong man, died.

  The sightless eyes, chocolate brown, lacked the sharp intelligence they usually had. The mouth was open, pursed, as if he had fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation. But the features all belonged to Truman Johnson, a man who, no matter what he said, had helped me a lot more than I had helped him.

  You gonna listen or not? he had said to me during that last conversation, so softly that I had to strain to hear him. There was anger in his voice where before there had been gratitude. He had been thinking about me all day, counting on me.

  I have a proposition for you.

  “You okay?” Sinkovich asked.

  I blinked up at him, then nodded.

  “They said there was a lot of blood. Mostly gone now.”

  I made myself look at the torso. There would have been a lot of blood.

  The shirt was coated, gaping holes blown into—or perhaps out of—his skin. The blood had clotted black in some places, and in a few others, the shirt was blown outward, ragged and protective.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “Gang shooting,” the detective across from me said. He was thin, white, with sandy hair and narrow, beady eyes.

  “How does everyone know that?” I asked. Sinkovich put a hand on my shoulder. Apparently my frustration had found its way into my voice. “Location?
Number of wounds? What?”

  “Witnesses,” the detective said and looked back at his pad, dismissing me. He probably thought of me as a friend, another member of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, someone who lied to himself, saying he was coming here to help, when he was actually coming to confirm what he didn’t want to know.

  Actually, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

  “Where’s the gun?” I asked again.

  This time, no one answered. Sinkovich’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

  “Maybe we should let them do their jobs,” he said quietly.

  “Where’s the gun?” I asked louder.

  The detective looked up at me. “What gun?”

  I pointed at the shoulder holster. “Truman’s gun. He had to have one. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to come down here without one.”

  “Haven’t found it,” the detective said.

  “What about his coat?” I asked.

  The detective frowned at Sinkovich. “Your friend gonna let me do my job or is he gonna kibitz?”

  “C’mon, Bill,” Sinkovich said, and I knew he used my first name, not out of sympathy like before, but because he didn’t want to give everyone here too many clues as to my identity.

  “You see, I figure that there’s no reason to wear a harness like that if you’re not going to wear a jacket over it,” I said, resisting the urge to shake Sinkovich’s hand off my shoulder. “So where’s the gun and where’s the jacket?”

  “Dunno,” the detective said as if I were asking directions to the nearest gas station. “Probably in his car.”

  “Probably in his car?” I said, my voice rising. “You’re not going to check?”

  Sinkovich tugged on my shoulder, pulling me to my feet. “We’re leaving,” he said.

  “We got witnesses,” the detective said. “We already know what happened.”

  “Care to enlighten me?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said, and bent over his notebook a third time.

  Sinkovich pulled me backward. I nearly tumbled into the uniformed officer still peering through the tent flap.

  I shook Sinkovich off. “Just because they have witnesses, doesn’t meant they shouldn’t—”

  “Not here,” he said, pushing me out. “If I’d’ve known you were gonna go nutso on me, I wouldn’t’ve brought you here.”

  “I haven’t gone nutso,” I said.

  I looked at the uniformed officer, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He was a skinny redhead, his nose and cheeks dotted with freckles. His gaze met mine, and I recognized fear in his eyes.

  “And,” I said to that officer as if we had been conversing all along, “there’s water on the roof of this crappy tent you guys put up. It’s about to collapse, which won’t do your crime scene any good.”

  “Like we have a crime scene.” Chaz Yancy spoke from his position against the brick wall.

  Another man stood beside him, wearing a conservative coat over the same black pants and black boots that Yancy wore. The man’s skin was coffee-brown, set off by a wispy goatee that hung to his chest. He watched me with avid black eyes.

  “I don’t know what else you’d call it,” I said to Yancy. “You have a body in there.”

  “And we’ve had more rain in the last hour than Noah saw during the flood,” Yancy said. “If there was any evidence, it got washed away.”

  “How come it wasn’t collected?” I asked. “You’ve been here awhile.”

  “You sound mighty informed, Mr. Grimshaw.” Yancy reached into the pocket of his T-shirt and removed a pack of cigarettes. “You know, you always show up at the most interesting places.”

  “So do you,” I said. “And at all of them, you just watch. Do you ever work?”

  “Bill,” Sinkovich’s whisper was urgent.

  “What’s your connection to Johnson, Grimshaw?” Yancy asked.

  “I live across the hall from his cousin,” I said.

  “The luscious Marvella,” said the man with the avid eyes. He had a nasal voice that grated on me. “You met her?”

  “That woman’s related to Johnson?” Yancy raised his eyebrows. “She’s fine.”

  My fist clenched. Sinkovich grabbed my arm, as if he thought I was going to throw a punch.

  But I wasn’t going to. I wanted information more than I wanted to bash Yancy’s head against the wall. “So who are these witnesses and what did they see?”

  “Oddly enough, me and Jump.” Yancy pulled a cigarette out of the open pack with his teeth. “We were near the van when the kids went by.”

  I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. “Kids?”

  “You know the drill, Grimshaw.” Yancy slipped his lighter out of his pocket. “You’re so smart about gangs.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “The hit.” He flicked the lighter and a small flame burned blue. He cupped his hand around the flame, leaned forward, and lit his cigarette without removing it from his mouth. Then he inhaled, let the lighter go out, and stuck it in his pocket. “Surely a man as smart as you knows about the hits.”

  “And this was a hit,” said the man with the avid eyes, the man Yancy had called Jump.

  I didn’t even look at him. I had no idea who he was and I wasn’t going to give him any attention, at least not yet.

  Yancy exhaled lungfuls of smoke. “Two boys—maybe twelve, maybe younger—ride by on a bicycle. One is on the handlebars, the other is pedaling like his life depends on it. You see it every day, every neighborhood in the city.”

  The cigarette smoke floated toward me, ghostly white.

  “No one thinks anything of it, two kids, going about their business. Not even down here. Me, I’m trained to look at them, and I see that Handlebars is holding something on his lap. I call out to Jump and we start up the alley.”

  “We shoulda got in the van,” Jump said. “We weren’t thinking.”

  “Now most folks wouldn’t’ve even run. To them, it just looks like boys trying to make it home before the next storm hits.” Yancy took another puff off his cigarette.

  He was watching me closely, as if he were gauging my reaction. He seemed to enjoy telling this story.

  “We make it to the mouth of the alley, just as your friend Johnson comes out of the bar. The bike blocks him, startles him, and the kid on the handlebars jumps off, and shoots him, point-blank, shotgun.”

  My breathing was shallow. I didn’t move.

  “We’re running toward him, shouting,” Jump said. “I’ve got my heat and we’re gonna shoot—”

  “But we never have a clear shot.” Yancy took his cigarette out of his mouth, and tapped the ash on the ground. “The bike keeps going, like nothing’s happened. The shooter runs for the curb. A car’s waiting there. He gets inside, we’re shooting like it’s the O.K. Corral, and the car drives off, fishtailing in the wet.”

  “If we’d gotten the van, we might’ve been able to follow,” Jump said.

  “But there was no chance,” Yancy said. “They turned off at the first corner, and disappeared.”

  “You could’ve gone after the bike.” I was shaking. They were right here. Right here, and they didn’t do anything.

  “Jump here ran to the corner just in time to see the kid drive the bike into the back of a van. They were all gone in less than a minute.”

  “License plates?” I asked. “Descriptions?”

  “Got them,” Yancy said, taking another puff off the cigarette, “not that it’ll do any good.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Chances are everything was stolen.”

  “But you haven’t run it yet,” I said. “You don’t know.”

  “Shit, we haven’t run anything yet. We’ve been here, first trying to save your friend there, not that he had a chance, and then trying to make sure the evidence didn’t find itself in the Chicago River.”

  Yancy sounded annoyed for the first time since I started questioning him. He finished his cigarette and
stubbed it out on the brick wall.

  I was trying to process the information. “These kids, they’re a hit squad?”

  “It’s a great method,” Jump said with more admiration than I liked. “The Main 21 doesn’t get blamed at all. It’s just children running wild.”

  “They get paid, usually in candy bars or toys, something they really want,” Yancy said. “A lower-down sets the kids up, sometimes even gives them the bike, shows them how to use the gun, and the kids go after their marks, at least until they get arrested and new kids get recruited.”

  Fury ran through me thick and fine. “They’re twelve?”

  “Or younger.” Yancy’s gaze was flat as it met mine.

  “How long have you known about this?” I asked.

  “This shooting or this trick?”

  “This so-called hit squad?” I asked.

  “Years. They’ve been doing it in one form or another for years.” Yancy flipped the lighter over in his hand.

  Some of the other cops had gathered around us, watching us instead of taking care of the crime scene.

  “Years,” I repeated. “So when the Stones were trying to recruit my son in December, and you advised me to leave them all alone, you knew about this?”

  “Sure.” Yancy smiled, his gold front tooth looking dull in the dim light.

  “They could’ve taught my kid to be a killer and you didn’t fucking care?” My voice was going up again.

  “I care, Mr. Grimshaw,” Yancy said. “I just figure there isn’t much I can do one-on-one.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” I said. “That’s a friend of mine on the ground over there, and you didn’t do anything.”

  Yancy’s smile left his face. “We tried to stop it. We came out of the alley—”

  “The moment you saw the bike, right,” I said, not believing him. “You didn’t come out until you heard the shotgun blast. You didn’t see any car get away, and you didn’t run to the curb. You didn’t even try to do anything to help Truman.”

  Yancy took a step toward me. Sinkovich tried to move between us, but I wouldn’t let him.

  “What the hell do you know?” Yancy asked.