The Executioner's Game

by Gary Hardwick

  Nappy got up and strolled out of the house. Behind him he heard Jimon struggle and choke until he fell silent.

  Nappy walked into the hazy sunshine of the day and headed toward the Buick. He got into the car and settled into the plush new leather seats he’d installed. He bought new seats every two years for the vintage car. The smell of African incense filled the interior. He started the car, and the big V-8 roared to life. Nappy pulled away from the little house, rolling down the dismal street.

  He didn’t worry about the gunfire. In this neighborhood no one would call the police, and even if they did, what had he really just done? No crime in talking two men to death. That would be a great case, he thought. Let’s see the system try to convict him of that.

  Nappy pushed a button on his sound system and Al Green came on singing “Let’s Stay Together.”

  Chokwe Muhammad had gotten his nickname in the hospital the night he was born. The thick black hair he’d been born with was tightly wound into curls that separated nicely on his head. They looked like kinks, or naps, as they say. His father had called him Nappy as a joke, and the name stuck.

  Nappy hid his criminal activities by starting an organization called Black Truth that published a newspaper he dubbed The Radical. It was his way of merging his past and his future. Black Truth was his way of remembering his father, a former sixties radical, and it provided an excellent cover for his business.

  Black Truth was popular in the neighborhoods. It was regularly raided by the police and had been put on the FBI’s subversive list, which only made him proud.

  Nappy reasoned that his criminal activities were just a resource. The black man had been left the drug trade as the only means of support for his efforts.

  Nappy’s Black Truth was dedicated to exposing government conspiracies and oppression. He was pleased to learn that there were many people like him in the country who questioned the essence of government purity.

  Nappy turned down a residential street, parked, and approached his mother’s house. He’d been planning to go to his office but remembered that he had not made his weekly check on his family.

  He walked up to the little house on Maine. Unlike the other houses on the block, this one was pretty. It was nestled between a vacant lot and another house that looked like something had fallen on it. There was prosperity in this little home.

  Nappy climbed the steps and pressed the doorbell. The door opened, and an old black woman peered out. She was sixty or so and very round. She had a headful of gray hair that was cut into a neat Afro. She looked at Nappy from behind thick glasses, her face hard and unsmiling.

  “You got a gun?” asked the woman.

  “Why do we gotta go through this every time?” said Nappy. “I ain’t giving up my—”

  The door slammed in Nappy’s face, and he heard the sound of receding footsteps and the old woman’s curses.

  “Rita!” yelled Nappy. “Open this damned door!”

  A moment passed, and Nappy hissed, cursing to himself about the old woman. Soon he heard approaching footsteps, accompanied by Rita’s complaining voice.

  The door opened, this time by another woman. She was about the same age as the other, but much thinner and sporting black-and-gray dreadlocks. She smiled at Nappy.

  “I’m gon’ kill her, Mama,” said Nappy. “I swear.”

  He hated Rita, but she was his mother’s best friend and had nursed her through an illness some years back. Rita was a strong and very religious woman who now shared the home with his mother, serving as cook, maid, and protector. She didn’t like Nappy for very obvious reasons.

  “No threats in my house,” said Tawanna Muhammad, Nappy’s mother. “Come on in.”

  A half hour later, they were sitting at the kitchen table eating. Nappy wasn’t hungry, but when your mother wanted to feed you, you didn’t dare say no.

  He sat with his mother and his niece Jewel, a young girl of sixteen. She was dark brown, with glowing skin and big brown eyes that pierced your heart even from a distance. She was a magnificent young woman, and he was determined not to let the city snuff out her light.

  After his sister died leaving young Jewel, Nappy had begged his mother to move the child out of Detroit, but Tawanna didn’t want to leave the city. And so Nappy had to settle for the protection he bought with fear.

  After dinner Rita and Tawanna left. As soon as they were gone, Nappy spoke to his niece.

  “I do a lot of things I’m not proud of, but in the end I’m trying to be a good man. You got to remember that.” He thought about his action in Dearborn and the trouble that was to come. And then Nappy handed Jewel a wad of cash under the table. “Don’t let Mama or Rita know you got that.”

  “I never do,” said Jewel.

  Nappy’s concern about his niece was more than paternal. One day Jewel would assume his position and carry on his work at The Radical, but when she did, the paper would be legitimate. He’d make it so with the money he’d been saving and the big stories he was getting from Wolf.

  He was too smart to think he’d ever see the dream turn into reality himself. He was too old and too tainted. He’d give Jewel the dream, and he’d share it through her. By the time she got out of college, he’d be giving her the New York Times of alternative newspapers.

  Nappy said good-bye to his mother. He offered her money, and she said no, insisting that she had enough for right now. He looked outside and found the thugs across the street gone, out for their night’s work. He worried about his family living here in the danger of this lost place. But his mother was still a tough old bird, and she was not going anywhere.

  Nappy kissed his niece good-bye in the doorway, then got into his car and rode off.

  He traveled the city for a while checking on his street dealers and making sure the money was flowing the right way. Business was good, and so he eagerly headed off to his place of business to close the deal on the day’s activities in Dearborn.

  Nappy drove the Buick onto Linwood Avenue and was soon in front of the offices of Black Truth. The red, black, and green sign proclaimed the organization to be THE LIGHT OF THE PEOPLE. Armed guards kept watch on the place.

  The Black Truth offices occupied almost the entire block, sharing shared space with a soul-food joint and a small printing company that Nappy also owned part of.

  He walked inside, not lingering with his people. Ten workers buzzed about the office. Nappy’s criminal organization was much bigger, but the street dealers were not allowed to come close to this place. The FBI would have liked nothing better than to catch him on another drug charge.

  Nappy entered the premises slowly and deliberately, as he always did. He didn’t want anyone to think he was in a hurry or in any way different from how he was on any other day. What he, Tevin, and Jimon had done would bring the cops, and when they and the FBI came, they wouldn’t hear anything incriminating from anyone. That was, if they came at all. Nappy never underestimated their stupidity.

  He walked down the hallway to his office, located in the back of the building. The lights were low, and the sounds from the outer office faded. Soon all he heard was the muted noises from the street outside.

  Inside his office Nappy immediately sensed a presence. He scanned the place, and his eyes settled on a figure nestled in the far corner. The man was half turned away from him. Nappy approached the man slowly, as he always did. Sudden moves were not healthy in this man’s presence. Nappy didn’t ask the man how he’d gotten in or how he’d evaded detection by his staff. He knew by now that this man had his ways, that he was like a ghost when he had to be.

  “Is it done?” asked the man in his scratchy, tortured voice.

  “Yes,” said Nappy.

  “And your operatives?”

  “Just like you said…what was it called?”

  “Backwashed,” said the man, who got to his feet. He stood straight at attention and turned. Nappy was always aware of the grace and elegance of his movements. It was one of the first things he
’d noticed about him when they met.

  “Excellent,” said the man. “I have your payment.”

  The man reached into his pocket and removed an envelope, tossing it to Nappy. Inside, Nappy found a copy of a secret FBI plan to detain inner-city populations in case of domestic terrorism. The containment plan was clearly aimed at African-Americans.

  The man come toward Nappy. Light from the dimmed overhead lamps moved over him, cutting his face into sections of shadow and light as he approached, and soon Nappy looked directly into the mangled face of Alex Deavers.

  “Things will happen swiftly now,” said Deavers.

  “What things?” asked Nappy.

  “The government will react, and the community will fall into its politically correct responses. So we must be quick with phase two.”

  “It’s already begun,” said Nappy. “I got a nice little crew of boys who are gonna go into the Arab neighborhoods and raise a little hell.”

  Deavers didn’t respond. He went to the window and looked out. In the back of the building, he saw Nappy’s nameplate. His face contorted. No one could tell, but he was smiling. It was ironic humor indeed, he thought. The Buick Electra’s nickname was a Deuce and a Quarter, which stood for the car’s number, 225, an ominous integer that only Alex understood.

  “Nice ride,” he said.

  At 4:35 P.M. in Dearborn, a fire started in the cellar of an Arab-American community center. The incendiary device was crude, but effective enough to set off a fire that engulfed the building and sent two people to the emergency room.

  Cries of anti-Arab violence were immediately sounded. The FBI was called in, and the city was placed on a high terrorism alert.

  Amreeka

  The specters moved with a fierce quickness in the early hours of the morning. It was still very dark outside, and they took advantage of that fact by wearing dark clothes. Invisible and lethal, they carried the seeds of death in their minds.

  They approached the dwellings of their enemies and struck with precision and power. They left their curse on homes, schools, and businesses. They smashed cars and blighted billboards. They even put their mark on busy intersections for all to see. They had power, and they wanted everyone to know it.

  The vandals wreaked havoc and spread hatred that night. They had been well paid by a man who was of Middle Eastern extraction and who seemed not to care that he was harming his own people. This man in turn was paid by a white man who had known criminal ties. The white man had been paid by another white man, a friend who trafficked in inner-city drugs. And that man had been given his instructions by one of Nappy’s best lieutenants.

  The specters finished their work and moved on. The city lay behind them, bearing the mark of their anger and nurturing the seeds of rising discontent.

  Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, is home to the largest Arab population outside the Middle East. There are some three hundred thousand and counting.

  The first immigrants arrived in the 1870s. They were from the Ottoman province of Syria, an area that would become known as Lebanon. Their numbers swelled as they brought their relatives from overseas to the land they called “Amreeka.” They flooded in: the Lebanese, Yemenites, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqi Shia, and Chaldeans. They came in droves, populating the city of Henry Ford’s birth and giving rise to an ethnic minority that has defied assimilation and built a political and economic power base.

  Alex Deavers had been aware of this for many years through E-1. In fact, he had put together the first national database on Arab-Americans after the initial terror attacks on soldiers during the Carter administration. He was an expert in the area and was happily surprised to find that the CIA and E-1 had chosen this city in which to hide their dirtiest secret.

  Alex stood near Tiger Stadium. It was closed down now and abandoned, a ghost of itself. Alex loved baseball and lamented the new stadiums and their corporate sponsors. Who wanted to watch the almost spiritual game of baseball in a park named after a goddamned financial institution?

  Alex tilted his hat a little as a car passed by. There were homeless men about, and he couldn’t help but think of them as scavengers and the stadium a dead animal. He got into another car and drove away, certain that this would be a great day in his quest.

  An hour later a parking-lot attendant called the city’s impound service to take away a car for which he had no key or parking receipt. The car had been sitting all day in his lot, close to the McNamara Federal Building. When the tow-truck operator popped the lock on the car, he discovered thick wires running from the steering panel into the backseat.

  Within minutes the fire department and four agencies of law enforcement, local and federal, were on the scene. The city bomb squad traced the thick wires and successfully removed them from the car’s full gas tank.

  In less than an hour, the place was a full-blown police crime scene and media circus. Stories about the vandals Alex had sent to Dearborn to deface certain areas with anti-Arab slurs were all over the news. Everyone was waving U.S. flags and copies of the Constitution. The victimization process was well under way, he thought. Today the media would report that someone had tried to strike back.

  The attempted attack near a federal facility was seen as retaliation. The antiterrorism unit in Detroit would be mobilized, and by tomorrow the city would be placed on its highest level of alert ever.

  Now more local and federal police power would be shifted to protect public buildings and concerns. Correspondingly, they would decrease manpower in other areas. This was what Alex had been waiting for.

  Nappy and his minions had done a good job in Dearborn. The armies would now be set against each other, and they would grapple in the arena of public opinion. Once the situation was set, Alex would be able to make his move.

  He suddenly became dizzy. The bootleg meds were catching up with him. He sat down and collected himself. The dreams of Africa were not as bad as they once had been. They had faded to rough, hazy images of pain, the jungle, and the sun.

  He was aware that he was not operating at 100 percent. Sometimes he felt righteous in his quest. At other times he felt as though the whole thing was a bad dream from which he’d just awakened. The fabric of reality shifted constantly in his head, and only the contents of that black case and the items it had led him to in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York reminded him he was not completely insane.

  Chinatown

  Luther had found Alex. His street work wasn’t nearly as neat as he wanted it to be. He’d been lied to, led down false paths, and generally fucked over in the last few days. But he had found what he needed to know about Alex’s whereabouts, as well as the man called Nappy.

  Nappy was a street alias. Hampton had discovered that Chokwe Muhammad was on the government’s list of subversives. His father and mother were sixties radicals and known anti-American activists. It was also no surprise that Nappy was engaged in the drug trade and had somehow been recruited by Alex. Sharpie had been a valuable source of information in this regard.

  Getting to Alex had also been complicated by the terror alert in Detroit. There were more cops than ever on the street, and under the Homeland Security Act they had greater powers to detain people. Luther did not fancy himself a political person. At best he was a cynic, but he always thought it sad that so many laws that sought to protect the people shredded parts of the Constitution to achieve their goal.

  In the end Alex’s race had betrayed him. There were not many white men frequenting the areas he traveled, and many people had “heard” about a white man who was handing out money and who was not to be trifled with. But no one had actually seen him. Even disfigured and desperate, Alex was still largely invisible.

  Luther could barely restrain himself as he prepared to take Alex. A thudding rap tune by David Banner still echoed in his head as he slipped further into mission mode.

  Hampton had reported back to Kilmer that they had found Alex. Luther wasn’t sure whether that had been a good thing
to do. He had his suspicions about this mission. E-1, like any covert government agency, was steeped in dangerous secrets and lies. Luther knew many stories about the agency and had been witness to what it would do to keep its secrets. And they’d all signed the vita pactum, which in a sense forfeited their lives to the agency.

  Alex was speaking to Luther through this mission, and Luther had to know what he was saying before he completed the mission and neutralized Alex.

  Alex was living in three places in Detroit. He had a far-east-side place, a protected house that he basically rented from a smalltime drug dealer. He also had a motel room on the north side just south of Eight Mile Road. And he had the place Luther was now near, a tenement near Third and Porter in what had been home to Detroit’s Asian community years earlier.

  It figured that Alex would be here, Luther thought. His last crime had been committed not far away. And with the terror alert, Luther was sure that no one was working too hard to solve that crime.

  The building was an old-style apartment house. Its name had been Crest Manor, but all you could see was CR__T MA_OR on the stone lintel. There were only a few families living there, if you could call them families. The building was home to low-grade prostitutes, lower-grade dealers, and the normal people from the bottom rungs of life.

  “There are many innocents in this building,” said Hampton to Luther from his remote location.

  “And Alex will not hesitate to endanger or kill them.”

  “Stay on him,” said Hampton. “We can’t afford to lose him again.”

  Luther didn’t appreciate this comment, but he didn’t say anything. He did plan to do just as Hampton suggested, though. An E-1 agent was not humane—he was purposeful. It was the fulfillment of his mission that was humane.

  Luther attached a Janlow silencer to the end of the P99. It was a bit bulky, but the high-tech alloy would cut the noise to almost nothing.