The music from the speakers suddenly fell silent, and before the two men on the nearer end of the bar could lower their voices she heard Lenny say “Seventy-second and Prescott, tomorrow night at nine.”
“I’ll find it,” said the wrestler. They lowered their tones but with a little strain Kicky could still pick up what they were saying. “Why not tonight?”
“I’m entertaining some officers of the law here tonight,” said Lenny, “I got to show them I’m living the life of a solid citizen, know what I mean? Seriously, I need to be here and schmooze these cops up, make sure they get properly wined and dined and laid, so they keeps their nose out of my little sidelines, including yours.” Kicky knew the place referred to. It was an apartment in a seedy building that Lenny maintained as an office and home away from home for the many sidelines he had going that he didn’t want around the club in the public eye. His girls sometimes paid him off there or used the place for tricks. She slipped back down the hall and exited on the ladies’ room end, went back to the booth and sat down. It was dark, and after a minute or two she risked turning around. Lenny was on his way back to her. The big man with the goatee was putting his cell phone away. He nodded to his companion and both of them left the building. When Lenny sat back down, Kicky didn’t mention anything about his brief meeting. Lack of curiosity was another one of her world’s survival skills, and if she made the slightest comment or inquiry she knew that alarm bells would start clanging in what passed for Lenny Gillis’ mind. But she wondered how she might use this new information that had fallen into her lap.
After some more haggling, Lenny and Kicky reached a sixty-forty split agreement whereby she would resume her old employment by working out of the club, at least at first. This wasn’t quite as extortionate as it sounded, since Lenny paid off the cops, and his sixty percent commission covered a reasonably ironclad immunity from arrest. Kicky would report for duty at ten that night, dressed to undress, and until she could work her old client list back up she would take floor trade, club clients whom she chose herself, and turn the tricks at one of the cheap motels lining 82nd Avenue, in this case the Wayside Inn, where Lenny had a special hourly deal with the Iranian manager for his girls. Kicky sighed and resigned herself to six months of driving a twelve-hour shift in the cab five days a week, and two, possibly three night shifts a week working out of the club. Her goal was to raise enough money to get out of Oregon by Christmas. She hoped to hell that It Takes A Village would hold off that long doing anything about Ellie. Maybe the spuckies would shoot them before then, she thought hopefully.
Kicky left the club and returned to her battered singlewide mobile home in a rundown trailer park about two miles away. She didn’t have a car of her own, the cab company wouldn’t allow her to take her cab home, and the buses were full of Mexicans who always dirty-mouthed her in Spanish and pawed all over her, so she walked. She was so sick inside herself at what she was doing that it was all she could do to go home and not go out hunting the streets for some rock, but she knew full well that if she went back to the drugs as well as back to the sex trade, she would be dead or back in prison within a year, and her daughter would be scooped up by It Takes A Village like a barracuda snapping up a minnow.
The prospect of committing sexual acts with drunken and usually unhygienic strange men, even white men, filled her with such disgust that she wanted to vomit even at the thought, but she understood that she had reached the point in her life where her always limited range of choices had virtually disappeared. Kicky knew that America had one rule above all else. Get money. It didn’t matter how you did it, you got money, end of story, or else you ended up like the white-haired bag women Kicky saw pushing their possessions up and down 82nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard in shopping carts. No welfare or affirmative action or diversity programs for poor white chicks. Poor white chicks either stole or put out, or they got left behind. If you had a white skin, you got money or you fell below the point of no return. Never mind all that crap you saw on TV, that lovely diverse, racially mixed society where there was still a middle class and still material things and all was jolly. That was television. It wasn’t real. 82nd Avenue was real, poverty was real, drugs were real, guys and sometimes girls coming back dead and mangled from Iraq was real, and life was a concrete hell for a white single mother. Kicky didn’t know which was worse, the prospect of losing her looks completely to the pipe and the endless minimum-wage labor, or to time and disappointment, or else staying fairly attractive and sexy for a while. Both had their drawbacks and brought a different set of problems.
Kicky opened the trailer door and found her alcoholic mother sitting on the sofa staring at a soap opera on television, a long-necked beer bottle in her hand and a few empties on the coffee table in front of her. “Hi, Mom,” she said. She got a grunt in return. May McGee was a stooped, washed-out woman in her fifties, wearing a sloppy and shapeless dress, who looked like she was seventy. Kicky knew she was incredibly lucky to have her mother still around to take care of Ellie. She had come to an arrangement with May, a twelve-pack of cheap domestic beer per day of baby-sitting, plus whatever extra beer May could scrounge up herself from her own odd jobs and the scrawny military survivor’s pension the U.S. government still paid her, at least intermittently. It was the only income she could ever expect since Social Security had failed a few years before. “Administrative delays” were making those military pension checks further and further between, as with all the remaining federal entitlements, at least where white people were concerned. Kicky hadn’t been married to Ellie’s father, and the Army had conveniently lost their joint “Statement of Domestic Partnership” form, which anyway was supposed to be for gay couples only, so she’d never gotten a dime from the government.
Aside from being a hopeless drunk, May wasn’t a bad sort. She wasn’t a mean drunk, inclining more to maudlin self-pity, but not too often. She never hurt or abused Ellie in any way, she let Ellie watch TV with her and listened to her chatter, didn’t let her wander outside the trailer into the street, and she always made sure that the child got a mashed-up paper plate of dinner of some kind, at least some macaroni or tuna fish or whatever was in the house. She made sure the toddler had a clean diaper on before putting her in her crib for the night, then sitting down in front of the television and drinking until she passed out. Kicky had been raised the same way, and she had at least survived into adulthood. “Mom, I’m going to need you to stay over for tonight, and then maybe take Ellie back to your place for a while,” said Kicky. “I’m going to be working a lot from now on. I’m going out tonight and won’t be back until early.”
“You goin’ back to whoring?” snorted the old lady.
Kicky didn’t attempt to evade the question. “I got to get money, Mom,” she said simply. “I have to get Ellie out of Oregon, out of Child Protective Services’ reach. Otherwise they’re going to take her and sell her to some rich bastards. I know she’d be better off with them . . .”
“Better off than with me, you mean,” grumbled the old lady.
“Better off than with either of us,” said Kicky evenly. “There’s no point in denying the truth, Mom. But that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to let them have her, as selfish as that is. She is mine. Those rich bastards and bitches have taken everything else, and what they haven’t taken for themselves they’ve given to the goddamned niggers and Mexicans, but they’re not taking Ellie. That’s just the way it’s going to be. And for that I have to get money.”
“Just don’t let it drive you back onto the crack this time, okay, honey?” pleaded the old lady, closing her eyes with a sigh.
“I won’t Mom,” said Kicky, crossing her fingers and hoping she could keep to that. It would be hard.
“Mommy!” shouted a small golden-haired personage of eighteen months, wearing nothing but a Pamper, who gallumphed into the room from the bedroom and hugged onto Kicky’s leg. “Up!” she demanded. “Up me!”
“Hi, baby girl,” said Kicky with
a smile, picking up the child. “Ooh, pooh, baby made a boo-boo! You need a change! Come on, let’s fix that!” She snagged another Pamper from the torn bag on the cracked Formica kitchen table and headed for the bathroom, trying not to think of what she would be doing later on.
* * *
When Kicky came into Jupiter’s Den that night, the joint wasn’t exactly jumping. That would come a bit later, around one in the morning. But the mindless cacophony of 1990s retro rock was roaring through the huge speakers, and the silicone-enhanced dancers, naked except for a thong, were twirling around their poles. The drunken yay-hoos of all races were shouting their infantile comments and throwing money on the stage, the overpriced beer and the watered liquor was flowing from the bar in a river. Just like old home week, reflected Kicky sourly as she walked in the door.
She was wearing short hot pants and gleaming vinyl boots with elevated although not quite high heels, a low-cut halter top with no bra (she knew a lot of her potential customers found her tattoos erotic), a wide leather belt, and carrying a shoulder bag purse containing such items as extra condom packs and sex toys. It also contained a canister of pepper spray in a special holster sleeve sewn unobtrusively but accessibly on the outside of the bag. Lenny had a hard and fast rule: his girls carried no guns or knives, because the legal problems involved in cutting or shooting a john or other bothersome person were beyond the limited range of his police clout to fix. Most of the girls had in any case reached the point where they’d rather be raped or robbed than get involved with the law to that extent, and the possibility of getting slashed up or strangled and dumped in a ditch was simply an occupational hazard. The pepper spray was for warding off non-paying drunks and handling customers who got sufficiently kinky to be dangerous. Inside the purse was Kicky’s own specialty weapon, a long sturdy white sock, into the toe of which was inserted a large, heavy closed padlock wrapped in a nylon to keep it from ripping the sock. The result was a crude but effective slung shot with enough torque to be lethal if used with skill. “Locks and socks” was the standard method for settling differences between inmates in women’s prison, and Kicky had become quite proficient at it.
Kicky looked around for Lenny Gillis, but couldn’t see him anywhere on the floor. She shoved through a door marked “Employees Only”—well, she was kind of an employee now—and looked in his office, which was also empty. Kicky figured Lenny was probably in the can, and she was about to go back out onto the floor, when she looked down the hall and saw the doorway into the back alley was open. There was noise. Someone was shouting. Kicky normally steered clear of anything remotely sounding like someone else’s business, but she remembered the strange visit that afternoon of the two men whom she was certain were with the outlawed NVA, and she was keen to find out something more about them and what they were doing with Lenny Gillis, something she could possibly turn to her advantage, pecuniary or otherwise. She slipped outside into the alley.
The shouting was coming from just on the other side of a dumpster. Kicky crept up and peeked around the side of the receptacle. Lenny Gillis was being held up against the wall by a large, black, uniformed Portland police officer, who sported sergeant’s stripes. Lenny was a small man and the cop was big, much bigger and thicker. Lenny’s feet were off the ground. Facing him was an even bigger and even blacker man in plain clothes, a sharply tailored suit and tie ensemble with shoes so highly polished they gleamed like patent leather. This man wore a short-cut Afro and a neatly trimmed Lion of Judah-style goatee beard and moustache, and the rings on his fingers glinted beneath the street light with gold and diamonds. Shit! thought Kicky to herself in shock. It’s the Monkey!
Like any street girl, she had immediately recognized Detective Sergeant Jamal Jarvis of the Portland Police Bureau’s Hatecrime and Civil Disobedience Squad, the feared police unit that constituted the muscle arm of Portland’s ultra-liberal and politically correct establishment. Jarvis had been Vice and Narcotics before he was bumped up to H & CD, and during his years there he had cut a swath of terror and corruption through the local underworld that was legendary even by Portland’s notoriously sleazy standards. Every hooker of any color and every street dealer who so much as sold a couple of joints knew Jarvis, and either paid out to him or ended up in jail, with broken bones or worse. Kicky had always avoided Jarvis like the plague, and one additional reason that she had broken with Lenny Gillis six months previously, besides Lenny’s little multiracial surprise party, was that she had spotted Jarvis hanging around Jupiter’s Den, and Jarvis had spotted her. The word on the street was clear and unambiguous: black, Mexican, and Asian hookers paid Jarvis off in money or sometimes in drugs, but white girls paid in trade. Kicky was not the only white working girl who still retained some vestige of decency and personal standards, and the fate of those who refused or evaded Jarvis’s demands was not encouraging. Such bigoted ladies of the evening tended to end up facing bogus charges and many years in prison, or getting a coffee cup full of acid in the face, or in some cases their dead and violated bodies were found floating in the Columbia River or jammed into a culvert. No one cared much about a few dead white skanks here and there, but there had eventually been such a rash of that kind of thing that even the politically correct Portland Police Bureau realized that they had to do something to avoid embarrassment, and Jarvis had been transferred from his congenial job of keeping prostitutes and drug dealers in line to the even more congenial one of keeping insolent white boys in line.
It would appear that Jarvis had at least kept his hand in on some of his previous sidelines. The ongoing discussion in the alleyway behind the dumpster appeared to have something to do with Lenny’s arrears on his protection money or some other kind of split from his petty rackets. “I gots a thousand comin’ from you, muthafukka!” snarled the uniformed sergeant.
Jarvis was in the process of assaulting Lenny with a heavy, flat, leather-wrapped implement about a foot long, known in police circles as a slapjack. It was just as heavy and painful, but the flat surface left less telltale bruising than a traditional blackjack. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny?” Jarvis droned on, slapping Gillis’ head back and forth with the cosh, each blow a dull and sickening thud that sprayed blood from Gillis’s mutilated and bleeding face, his broken nose and bleeding eyes. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny? Gib Roscoe his money, fukkin cracka, gib Roscoe his money.”
“I haven’t got it!” screamed Lenny hysterically. “I can get it Friday! I can get it Friday! Jesus God!”
“Friday ain’t today, muthafukka!” rumbled Roscoe. “Gimme my props, muthafukka! Gimme my thousand!”
“Whutcha gonna do, Lenny, whutcha gonna do, cracka muthafukka, you gib Roscoe his money,” chanted Jarvis, battering Lenny’s head back and forth with the slapjack. “You don’t gib Roscoe his money, Roscoe don’t gib me my money. I get pissed off when shitty little crackas don’t pay dey props. You think you can fuck de brothuhs, Lenny? You cain’t fuck no brothuhs. You skinny little cracka ass cain’t even fuck you own skank ho’s. Whutcha gonna do, Lenny?” The slapjack rose and fell in rhythm, each blow mercilessly hard on Lenny’s face and skull. Kicky realized with horror that Jarvis was high, on drugs and on shedding white blood. He didn’t really care about the money. He just liked to beat white boys. She also realized that Lenny had suddenly stopped screaming.
So did Roscoe, who let the limp body of Lenny slip down into a sitting position against the dripping alley wall. Gillis’s head lolled, loose and rolling. His face and eyes were bubbling blood, and could not be seen beneath the crimson mask. Roscoe leaned over and felt for Lenny’s throat in the mass of goo, then pulled back his hand and wiped it on Gillis’ trousers. He spoke in a disgusted voice. “Fuck, Jamal, de muthafukka dead. Dat’ll make him pay, won’t it?”
“And it seems that death was quite a surprise to his ass!” said Jarvis, throwing back his head and roaring in mindless laughter. “Didn’t think you wuz ever gonna die, didja, cracker?”
“Aw, shit, Jamal, you a fool!” yelled
Roscoe angrily. “We was takin’ a grand a month off this ofay mutthafukka!”
“No problem, dawg. So we take a grand a month off the next muthafukka who takes over the Den,” said Jamal.
“Now I gots to call in dis stiff, and we gots to investigate and pretend somebody gives a fuck about what happens to white trash like dis,” muttered Roscoe aggrievedly.
“So we finds us another piece of white trash to pin it on,” said Jarvis carelessly. In her hiding place behind the piled cardboard boxes of trash, Kicky McGee suddenly realized her own deadly peril. She tried to back away quietly, and needless to say she managed to back into another stack of piled boxes and knock it over, the glass and cans and junk inside cascading into the alley floor with a clatter.
Jarvis and Roscoe were calloused and brutal men, but their animal instincts were sharp and when need arose they could both move fast. They were on her before she could get ten feet down the alley in her sprint for the door. Jarvis tackled her and brought her down to the ground, while Roscoe launched a kick to her ribs that seemed to explode her whole body with fire. She managed to get her loaded sock out of her purse and get in one good thwack at Roscoe’s ankle as it sliced in toward her a second time. He screamed in pain. Jarvis pinned Kicky’s arms with his knees and raised the slapjack to crush her skull as she lay beneath him. But Roscoe wasn’t so out of it that he wasn’t able to grab Jarvis’s arm. “No, fool, you done enough o’ dat shit for one night! Don’t you get it? You done nabbed the killer of Mister Leonard Gillis!” Roscoe picked up the sock with the lock in it. “Stupid bitch even done provided her own murder weapon!” Roscoe hobbled over to Lenny’s body and took a couple of good swings at the battered head, making sure the sock got good and bloody. “Congratulations, Sarge!” he called out, laughing. “You just done cleared a homicide in record time!” He pulled the radio out of his belt and spoke into it in urgent, clear English: “Two-four dispatch, this is One Bravo Nine. We have a 187, in the alley behind Jupiter’s Den, 4400 block of 82nd Avenue. Suspect in custody.”
The Brigade Page 22
