by David Wind
The pimp gave out with a short guttural laugh. “Right…. Now, let’s look at what ya’ll have under your jacket.
I waited until his free hand was six inches away to drop my right shoulder, reach behind me and grab hard at the gunman’s testicles. I caught them and closed my hand into a fist. A loud explosion of breath mixed with a half scream came out of his mouth. He hit the sidewalk hard and curled into a fetal position. I turned, extended my left hand to ward off the pimp’s thrust and reversed my arms to catch the pimp’s wrist. Pulling it toward me then twisting it back. My reward was the sound of popping cartilage. His scream was more like a squeal as he went to his knees.
I knelt next to him and pulled the knife from his hand. “Tell me where the girl went.”
“You ain’t a cop. I ain’t telling you jack shit.”
“You’re right; I’m not a cop—at least the kind who’ll read you your rights. Where did the girl go?”
I moved the knife toward his face, letting him see the blue and green neon lights dancing along the edge of the blade. He didn’t know I wouldn’t use it, and I wasn’t too sure I wouldn’t either. But before either of us could find out, another voice rang out.
“Police! Don’t move.”
Chapter 2
The pimp had the balls to smile at me after the cop had spoken.
I raised my hands. “Good morning, Danny,” I said cheerfully.
Squinting into the shadows, Officer Danny Herman said, “What the hell…. Storm? Gabe Storm?
“That’s me,” I said. Yeah, Gabriel Storm, ex-assistant theatre director, former Sing-Sing inmate, former Army Ranger and currently a PI with hands in the air.
The smile drained from the pimp’s mouth, the cop lowered his weapon and I dropped my arms.
Patrolman Danny Herman was in his early-thirties with a street-wise look to his eyes. I knew him from the streets and the local precinct, located a few blocks away.
He holstered his weapon and I handed him the six-inch blade, then pointed to the weapon laying six feet from the fetal man. “What happened?” he asked, scooping up the piece.
“These two guys took me for a tourist. I tried to be nice, but they took exception.”
“Stupid on their part, but what else can you expect from these two geniuses?”
“You know them?”
His eyes narrowed on the pimp. “Yeah… regular ladies men, these two. They like to run girls ‘till they drop. This is Streeter. Thinks he’s the hottest pimp to hit the streets since The Dead played the Garden. His name is Sammy Warez, or so he says. That one,” he said, jerking a thumb at the guy curled up on the sidewalk, holding his crushed testicles, “Is Jaime Morales.” The cop pronounced it Heimie.
I turned to Streeter. “Want to tell me where a girl by the name of Sugar is?”
The pimp glared at me without speaking. “You will, I promise.”
I looked at Danny Herman. “He’s running a fourteen year old girl. I recognized her from a poster at the Save Them office. Maybe you want to keep your eye on them.”
“I can’t roust them about the girl without seeing her, but I can take them in for weapon possession and assault. You want to press charges? It may help loosen his tongue.”
“I’ll come in the morning and do the paperwork.”
“Sure. I’ll have it all set up. If I’m off-duty, I’ll leave word.”
“Let’s do it that way.”
He used his radio and called in the code.
I thanked him and started in the direction I’d seen the other girl go. I spent an hour walking the streets, looking for her or Sugar and asking around, but got nowhere and decided to head home. As I walked, I called Scotty again, with the same result. He wasn’t answering his cell or the phone in his apartment.
I made it home by five, tumbled into bed and passed out
<><><>
I turned the corner to my block and as I took the last fifty feet of my trek, a man came out the front door of the building, turned into the shadows and walked away. Before unlocking the front door, I gave the buzzer two short hits to let her know I was on my way, then I unlocked the door, imagining she was wearing my favorite mid-length and very sheer negligee—sheer enough to see everything through, but modest enough to make me want to take it off. And Elaine had never been shy about her body, a fact for which I was glad.
I reached our apartment door and started to put the key into the lock, but the door swung open before I could get the key into the lock. I smiled, knowing Elaine had unlocked it when I buzzed up.
The small entry area was dark. I locked the door behind me and walked down the narrow hallway to the bedroom, and to the tell-tale flickering of candlelight. “Lanie,” I had called out. There was no answer.
I walked into the bedroom; anticipation making my heart beat faster. But after taking two steps, my feet locked in place. There was just enough light coming from the candles to see everything, and what I saw rooted me to the spot.
Elaine lay off to one side of the bed. She had a white sheer nightgown on, but the nightgown was torn, and it wasn’t white anymore. A dark seeping stain covered the sheer material. The color glowed moist and black in the candlelight. A fist exploded in my stomach. My mouth turned bitter. A wave of dizziness gripped me and I grasped the doorframe to keep standing. After taking several breaths, I went toward the bed. Each hesitant step was like pulling my feet from wet cement. Elaine’s eyes were open, sightless and staring at the ceiling. One beautiful leg was twisted under, the other half hung off the bed. From the corner of my eye, I saw my father’s Colt forty-five service piece, from his time in Viet Nam, lying near her. I didn’t understand how it could be there. I’d kept it in a special showcase in the living room. Then I looked at Elaine’s chest and knew why the gun was there.
I gagged. My mind had gone blank and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But I knew it was real. “Oh, God,” I cried, “This can’t be.”
I forced my legs to move me to the side of the bed. I knelt down next to her. “Lanie,” I said, looking at her face. Her open eyes were dull and blank. I reached out a shaking hand, and touched her neck. Her skin was warm, as warm as it always was. Hope flooded my mind as I searched for a pulse, but there was none. “Oh, God,” I said again. The words sounded far away. Then I drew her to me and kissed her lips.
Chapter 3
The phone yanked me out of the nightmare. It was nightmare number one. Her death—my fault. I wiped the cobwebs from my eyes, glanced at the clock and picked up the phone. “It’s eight o’clock, why are you calling?”
Her voice could wake the dead—not by fright but by pure sensuality. I often think I hired her because I’d heard her voice on the phone before meeting her.
“Sorry, boss. But there was a call….” Something in her tone brought me awake. I ran my tongue over my teeth, remembering the first Shell Scott book I’d ever read, where Shell wakes up tasting the fungus-like morning mouth molded to his teeth. “What’s up?”
“Chris just called. He couldn’t raise you on the cell or at home. He needs you to meet him at Scotty Granger’s place. There’s been a shooting… I…”
My guts twisted. “What happened?”
“It’s Scotty… Scotty’s dead.”
I hung up without speaking. It took a while to grapple with the news. The sick, gut wrenching feeling of losing someone twisted through me. Scotty Granger and Chris Bolt were my two closest friends. They were, when push came to shove, more brothers than friends.
Once I got myself under control, I dressed and half walked, half ran the twelve blocks to Scotty’s place. When I turned the corner, I stepped into chaos. Half a dozen NYPD cars were parked with their lights flashing—an Emergency Services van and the Crime Scene van completed the package. The trip-hammer beat of my heart slowed as I surveyed the four cops pacing the sidewalk, three uniforms and a single plainclothes cop who was smoking a cigarette. The smoker was detective sergeant Sonny Marks. When he saw me, he dumped the butt and m
otioned me inside.
Ignoring the twisting within my guts, I didn’t bother to ask him anything; rather, I hit the lobby and went to the stairs, skipping the elevator, which would take too long. When I emerged on the fourth floor, three doors down from Scotty’s, the two uniformed men standing there parted to let me by.
Inside, a group of people milled around Captain Christopher Bolt. When he spotted me, he broke off and took a step toward me. His hands were outstretched. “Wait,” he said, putting both palms against my chest. “It’s bad, Gabe, real bad.”
I stepped around him, took two steps into the room and froze. Scotty lay in the middle of the floor; his stomach blown apart, a pool of dark red blood soaked the carpet on both sides of him. If you’ve never been at a murder scene, this isn’t the one to start with: the soft green wall behind him and the ceiling above were spray painted in blood. He hadn’t just been shot; he’d been eviscerated. He wore jockeys and a bathrobe. Both were blood soaked, his jockeys had once been pale blue; his white robe was more red than white.
This wasn’t a murder, it was much more—it was rage. “Jesus…” the word slipped out from between my compressed lips. The shots hadn’t hit his face. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth twisted distorted in a grimace; one leg was under him, the other was outstretched. I looked at what remained of his hands. He’d tried to protect himself from the shooter and the shots had taken them away with his life. In death, I saw him not as he was, but as the fourteen year old boy from my childhood.
I kept staring at his face, not seeing the crime scene markers or the blood on the wall, but rather the man who was one of my two closest friends. I don’t know how long I stood there, maybe thirty seconds, maybe two minutes fighting the bile rising into my mouth.
“Gabe.” Chris’s voice sounded far away.
My hands shook from anger. I forced myself to think. “Tell me what happened.” My words came out like the whispered croak of a half-dead frog.
“We don’t know. It looks like robbery. And we won’t know until we catalog the apartment, if we can.”
I glanced around the room. There was a wall unit, mahogany and glass. Two drawers were open, their contents emptied onto the floor. The shelves were a mess; everything was knocked over. Nothing felt right.
“I’ll catalog it.” My eidetic memory was both curse and blessing. It’s hard to describe how I do it, and while it wasn’t as simple calling up a memory, most times, I could close my eyes, concentrate, and build a picture of everything with startling clarity.
I looked down at Scotty, willing myself not to see my friend, but to see a victim of a crime. I was almost able to do it, until the anger blurred my vision. “I need to look around.”
“Everything is the same. The place was ransacked, every room torn apart. Give me a half hour to let the Crime Scene Unit work and I’ll meet you for some coffee. I… we need to talk. You can come back later, when there’s no-one here.”
It hit me then. Chris was as torn up as I was. His face was the palest I’d ever seen it. I swallowed down my anger. “The place on Eleventh.”
I left, afraid to blink for the fear of seeing Scotty’s destroyed body on the backs of my eyelids. I took the same stairs out as I’d used to get in. I was sweating hard and, by the time I made the corner, my stomach convulsed and what little was in it came out.
When it was over, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked up to find two uniformed cops staring at me. “You got a problem?” I snarled. From the corner of my eyes, I saw a reporter I knew get out of a cab.
The two cops turned away and I headed toward Eleventh Avenue before the reporter saw me. I needed to think, to clear my head of the visions from the apartment.
The people on the sidewalk faded behind my memories of Scotty Granger. We’d met twenty-three years earlier in the junior high school on East Eighty-Third Street. He was the new kid in school. Chris and I had been together since kindergarten. Scotty, at fourteen and a half foot shorter than me, was a runt with the lost and frightened eyes of someone who had no friends.
Well, he ended up with two friends; and, the three of us did everything together— especially going to the movies. Scotty loved the movies almost as much as I did. But, two years later, he introduced me to something even better, plays.
Scotty had known he wanted to write plays from almost before he could write. At sixteen, he told Chris and me he was going to be a playwright.
And he was! He never grew as tall as Chris or me: He’d stopped growing when he hit five foot eight, and he weighed all of a hundred forty pounds dressed. But when his plays were staged, he was ten feet tall and as wide as a house.
Now there would be no more plays. I stopped on the corner of Tenth Avenue and grabbed a light post for support. My anger shook me. I wanted to howl, but gritted my teeth instead. Someone would pay for this. I would make sure of that.
I waited until I had myself under tighter control before releasing the light pole. I had twenty minutes to wait for Chris.
<><><>
The Westside Diner was slow. A half dozen people sat at the counter drinking coffee. Two booths had people in them, counting me. The diner was a throwback from the forties. You know the type, all chrome and vinyl with a checkerboard black and white floor. Old and faded pictures of New York lined the walls. It was a cholesterol heaven of pies, muffins and greasy donuts heaped in scratched plastic covered trays on the counter. Five big chrome coffee urns, like missile silos, were lined against one wall. A rectangular cut-out separated the dining room from the kitchen. Every sound made in the kitchen reached the eating area.
No music played now, the jukebox in the back, a Wurlitzer, a dinosaur from the fifties, still worked, offered a mélange of music from the forties to today. As I looked at my watch, the door opened and Chris strode through.
Chris is an inch taller and ten pounds heavier than me. His dark hair was neat but his face was pale and drained. He was a good-looking guy with an easy way, which too many criminals had mistaken for being soft. They never made that mistake twice.
I glanced at the coffee before me. I had yet to take my first sip. He reached the booth and slipped in across from me. He didn’t say anything: he didn’t have to. I nodded and we waited for a count of ten.
Martha materialized at our table: The waitress had been a fixture at the Westside for the last three decades: Grey hair piled in a sloppy upsweep; her large ankles swollen, the skin hanging over the straps of her low cut sneakers. The beige uniform, complete with white apron, was stained from the breakfast crowd. But no matter what she looked like, she was Martha: she was a part of this place. “Morning Chris, coffee?”
Chris nodded and I said, “I’ll take a fresh one.”
“Sure thing Gabe.”
She walked away, her sneakers squeaking a rhythm of their own on the vinyl floor. “Did you find anything?”
Chris shook his head. A small clump of hair slipped onto his forehead in an exaggerated comma. I closed my eyes for a second as Scotty’s words from years ago popped into my head. ‘Jeez, Chris, you look like superman when your hair falls like that.’
And he did, he looked exactly like Christopher Reeves in the original superman movies. But not today—today he looked like a cop who had seen too much.
“Are you going to question the theatre company?”
His reaction was a quick tightening of his mouth. “Why?”
“Someone may have information.”
His sapphire eyes darkened to midnight as they probed my face. “It was a robbery Gabe. I… I know how you feel. Christ, Gabe, he was my friend too.”
“It doesn’t feel right.” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. My head was pounding because of Scotty’s pointless death.
Martha returned with the two cups of coffee and set them on the table, looked at me and at Chris, and left without a word.
Chris picked up the coffee, blew across the top and took a sip. “It was a robbery,” he repeated.
I know Chris well and something in his voice didn’t fit. Was he holding back? I closed my eyes and pictured the apartment as it had been minutes ago. “No, he’s lived in the city all his life: if it was a robbery, he wouldn’t have resisted. He would have let them take whatever they wanted.”
“We don’t know if it was a him, a her, or a them. We don’t know if he resisted. The shooter may be a crazy.”
“It wasn’t just a robbery turned bad! You saw the body, he was trying to get away, but whoever killed him wanted to make sure he was dead and stood over him until he was! It was a big caliber, maybe a forty-four magnum. And the bullets ripped him apart ─ how many burglars use a weapon like that?”
“Gabe…” his voice was low and calm, “It’s not the way the crime scene coats read the scene. But,” he added, holding up a hand to stop me from speaking, “when the autopsy is done, and if there’s any useful information, we’ll be able to move forward.”
“They won’t find anything,” I said. “It was made to look like a burglary, but it wasn’t.”
“Damn it, Gabe, you don’t know shit, but you want it to be your way so you can go charging around on your white horse!”
His words hit hard. Yeah, the knight in tarnished armor was a scene I’ve played before, but this was different. I knew I was right. There are hunches and instinct and sometimes there’s a special sense telling you what happened, or didn’t happen. This was one of those times where my special sense made itself felt.
I stayed silent, watching Chris cradle the cup between his palms. “I don’t want you going off on this.”
I held his gaze. “Not me.”
“Bullshit. Gabe, let us… let me handle this. If anything shows up, I will tell you first. But let me handle it.”
“Don’t even think about stopping me. You know damned well I can get to people you can’t even find. And I will.” My anger spiked. No one would stop me from doing what I do best.
“If you go off on this on your own, you’ll be just that, on your own.”
