“Gonna clean up his act,” Maurice said with another booming laugh.
Maurice pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket, twirled it around to make a gag, and started toward me, snapping the handkerchief between his hands. Bo backed away to give Maurice room. I knew that as soon as Maurice gagged and tied me, it was all over. It was probably all over anyway. But I’d be damned if I was going to end up like Claude Jenkins, with my own flesh hanging around my waist like a tattered shirt.
I didn’t really have time to think about it. The shotgun was propped against the back of my skull, like the headrest of a barber’s chair. If the guy behind me pulled the trigger, I’d lose my head. But, at that moment, it seemed like a better way to go than watching myself being cut to ribbons by a coked-out kid.
I let out a scream—as loud as I’ve ever screamed in my life. At the same time, I dropped into a crouch and threw myself backward into the man with the shotgun, driving him through the open apartment door into the hall and slamming him against the corridor wall. The shotgun went off above my head, deafening me with its enormous blast and tearing a gaping hole in the hall ceiling.
The guy with the shotgun and I danced against the wall for a split second, then our feet got tangled and he fell backward to the floor. I fell backward, too, landing on top of him.
He groaned and shouted, “Get off me, motherfucker!” I could feel him trying to work the shotgun loose underneath me.
Pinning the guy with my body and jabbing him with my left elbow, I clawed for my pistol with my right hand. By then, doors had begun to open up and down the hall.
In a flash, Bo and Maurice came barreling out into the hall. Grabbing the front of my shirt in one huge hand, Maurice pulled me off his partner and tossed me against the opposite wall. The Gold Cup skittered out of my grasp. Bo kicked it down the hall and swung his right arm at me. I could see the razor blade guttering in his palm. I threw my right arm up to block him. Our wrists hit hard, and the razor went flying out of his hand. It stuck in the plaster wall with a twang, like a thrown knife. Giving me a ferocious look, Bo kicked me in the leg with his pointed boots. I groaned and he kicked me again.
“C’mon, Bo,” Maurice said with a wild look, and started running up the hall. The guy with the shotgun had already disappeared.
I could hear police sirens in the distance.
Bo pointed a finger at me and shrieked, “You mine, motherfucker! You all mine!”
Glancing up the hall at where Maurice was already bobbing down the stairwell, he took off like a bird dog. His hat flew off his head, skittering around on the tiled landing and finally rolling to a stop against the stair post.
I stared down the hall at his hat. A large chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling with a thump, landing just beyond my outstretched legs and covering me with dust. It was a good thing it had missed me, because I didn’t think I could have moved if a truck had been bearing down on me. I’d used up every bit of energy in my body. I sat there, pouring sweat, my chest heaving, my lungs on fire, the plaster dust swirling around me like a mist. One of my neighbors opened his door and stepped out into the hall.
“You asshole,” he said, staring at me. “Either you’re going to move or we are. I’m sick of this shit.”
I laughed dully. He went back in his apartment, slamming the door behind him. The sound echoed down the hall. I stared at the gaping hole the shotgun had made in the ceiling, at my gun lying halfway down the hallway, at the razor pinned in the wall above my head. Outside, the police sirens had become very loud.
Lonnie, I said to myself, fuck you.
16
MY FIRST impulse was to tell the cops everything I knew. I was that frightened and that furious. But as my pulse slowed down and my temper cooled, I started thinking clearly enough to realize that telling them everything meant telling them about the Encantada and Claude Jenkins. It meant explaining why I hadn’t reported the murder on Friday night. It meant dragging Karen into it. And it meant putting Lonnie back in jail—this time, probably, for good.
Not that I felt that Lonnie didn’t belong in jail. He did. He was too fucking stupid to be running around on his own. And apparently he was still doing just that. At least according to Bo, he was. If Lonnie’s idea of a “big score”—of going off to Fire Lake—was to deal cocaine with folks like Bo, Maurice, and the guy with the shotgun and then to leave me and his wife holding the bag, he deserved to be betrayed to the cops.
But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do it. Instead I ended up making excuses for him, like 1968 all over again. I told myself he must have been at the end of his rope. He had to be at the end of his rope to grab at the cocaine deal to begin with. I told myself that he couldn’t have known that in signing my name on that motel register, he was signing me up for a visit from Bo and the boys. I told myself that, in spite of everything, in spite of what had gone on between Karen and me, he was still a friend—a friend who had turned to me when he’d had nowhere else to go. And you don’t betray your friends.
So when the cops finally came piling up the Delores’s stairs—six of them in close order, their faces cocked like their guns—I made out that I had been assaulted by three strangers, when I’d walked in on an attempted burglary of my apartment. I figured that the fact the three felons had been blacks would be enough incentive to keep the beat cops from asking too many embarrassing questions about the way my apartment had been torn up. But the cops weren’t nearly as stupid or as racist as I’d expected them to be. And then I hadn’t counted on what Bo or one of his friends had left behind him on the living room floor.
A little tube of crack had fallen out of somebody’s pocket and landed in front of my rolltop desk. Just a few rocks, but enough to catch one cop’s attention. I saw it, too, a second after he did. But by then it was too late. The beat cop immediately called in two investigators from narcotics. The narcs listened to my explanation of what had happened and took down my descriptions of Bo, Maurice, and the guy with the shotgun. Then they took a look at the tube of crack and at the way the stuffed furniture had been ripped open, and spent an hour trying to get me to admit that I had been involved in a drug deal that had gone awry.
About half past three, I realized the narcs weren’t going to go away. Like Bo, Maurice, and the guy with the shotgun, they wanted the lady and they wanted me. In covering up for Lonnie, I’d put myself back on the spot. I didn’t know how long the narcs were going to keep badgering me. They did have the tube of crack as evidence. But they didn’t have my fingerprints on it. And given the circumstances, my story—that one of the burglars had dropped the tube during the fight—was as good as any. Good enough to stand up in court. But I couldn’t help thinking it was a very lucky thing that the narcs didn’t know about my bloody footprints in the Encantada office, or about my name on the motel register. If they ever made those connections, I was going straight to jail.
My clothes had been pretty well powdered over with plaster dust, after the scuffle in the hall. And that turned out to be a break. The dust prevented the cops from noticing the bloodstains on my pants cuffs. It also gave me an excuse to wash up and change my clothes. While I was in the bedroom, I phoned Karen at the hotel and told her, as delicately as I could, that there had been some trouble at my apartment.
“Are you all right?” she said anxiously.
“Yes,” I said. “But I think maybe you’d better come over here.”
“Why?” she said.
I didn’t tell her the truth—that I was afraid to leave her alone in that hotel, with Bo and his friends still on the loose. Instead, I said, “I need you.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said immediately.
“Karen,” I said. “Don’t make any side trips, okay? Just go down to the lobby, have the doorman hail a cab, and come straight here.” I gave her the address on Burnett.
As soon as I got off the phone and came back in the living room, the narcs started in on me again. They were playing the old Ike-and-Mike game—the vicio
us cop and the pally one. If I hadn’t just been shot at and threatened with emasculation with a razor, I might have been impressed. As it was, I was only irritated. And the longer they kept it up, the angrier and more short-tempered I became. I’d had enough excitement for one afternoon. I figured the narcs should have known that.
They were good at their act, especially the butch cop—a muscular, middle-aged sergeant named Jordan. Jordan had a walrus mustache, straight brown hair that looked as if it had been trimmed with a hatchet, acne-scarred cheeks, and the droopy, pitiless eyes of a predator. He didn’t know I’d been a cop myself once, because I hadn’t played that card yet—I was saving it for the station house, if it came to that. But I’d heard a story about Jordan once when I was working for the D.A.’s office.
He had been a vice cop before he went to narcotics. And in this town, vice meant rousting whores and homosexuals. The whores could usually buy themselves out of a bust with a blow-job. But the fags were out of luck. Inevitably, they got kicked around—sometimes pretty badly kicked around. Jordan, especially, had a reputation as a fag-hater. The story I’d heard was about a drag queen whom Jordan had busted in a club by the river. Instead of taking him to the station house, Jordan took the queer down beneath the Suspension Bridge. Jordan beat the guy up pretty badly. Then he drew his pistol and threatened to kill him if the queen didn’t jump in the river and start swimming. It was Jordan’s idea of a joke that the guy should swim over to Kentucky and never show his face back in Cincinnati. Jordan actually fired a couple of shots at the poor bastard to get him moving. The fag was so frightened that he jumped in the Ohio and started to swim.
It would have been a typical rogue-cop story if the fag hadn’t drowned. But he did. His body washed up on a bridge pylon downriver a couple of days later. Jordan’s partner covered for him. And the death was ruled a suicide. A few months after that, Jordan was transferred to narcotics.
I hadn’t heard any other stories about him. But getting transferred obviously hadn’t changed his personality. From the moment he stepped in the door, he started baiting me.
There was nothing subtle about his tactics. Jordan thought I was a drug dealer and he told me so. He called me a lot of other names too. His technique was so crude that it would have been laughable, if I’d been in the mood to laugh. But I wasn’t in the mood. And after an hour or so of being pushed around by that tough bastard with the dead eyes, I lost my cool completely. I started shouting back at him, while his partner stood by with a weary, witless smile on his face. The partner, a cop named Lewis, was about ten years older than Jordan and a lot less energetic about the interrogation. He gave up playing his nellie part about halfway through the hour and just stood there and watched as Jordan and I went at it.
Jordan and I kept yelling and jockeying with each other, until we were very close to throwing punches. Even Lewis sensed it. He moved a little closer to where we were standing and kept his hand close to the gun in his belt.
“I’m taking you downtown, cocksucker,” Jordan finally shouted, and jabbed his right fist into my chest. “You’re connected and I know it.” He jabbed me again, hard.
“Connected to what, asshole?” I said, slapping his hand away—hard. “I’ve given you a description of three drugged-out scumbags. Why don’t you go after them, for chrissake? They can’t be that hard to find.”
“And get the niggers off your back, huh, Harry?” Jordan said. “Why should we do you any favors?”
At that moment, Karen walked in.
Jordan gave her a withering look. “Who’s your cunt friend, Harry? Another junkie?”
Karen blanched.
I stared at Jordan for a long moment. I wanted to throw that punch at him. He wanted me to try.
“Read me my rights or get the hell out of here,” I said through my teeth.
“What’s your name, lady?” Jordan said, turning to Karen.
“Her name is none of your business,” I said, stepping between her and him.
“I think she’s holding,” Jordan said to his partner. “Don’t you, Carl?”
Lewis looked unimpressed. Jordan turned back to me with a vicious smile.
“I think we’re going to have to take her downtown for a strip search, Stoner.” He turned to Karen and grinned. “Unless you’d prefer I do it here, honey.”
“Son of a bitch!” I said, and threw that punch.
It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. Stupid for me; stupid for Karen. I knew it while I was doing it. But I just didn’t have it in me to pull the punch.
Jordan was facing Karen when I let go, so he didn’t have a chance to do anything more than turn his head into my fist. And the whole thing happened too quickly for his partner to get in between us. I put my whole body behind a straight right hand and hit Jordan squarely on the chin. He went down in his tracks, like he’d been standing under a piano. Karen let out a little yip, as if I’d stepped on her toes, and jumped back toward the door.
Lewis, the older cop, jerked out his pistol and stuck the barrel in my nose. “That was really stupid, buck-o,” he said in a level voice. He glanced down at Jordan, who was sitting on his butt. “You okay, Glen?”
Jordan didn’t answer for a while. After a time, he nodded weakly and looked up at me. His eyes hadn’t cleared, but they were already filling up with hatred. “You’re going to regret that,” he said, rubbing his chin. He held out his hand to Lewis and said, “Help me up.”
Lewis pulled the gun out of my face and lifted Jordan to his feet. Jordan was still shaken by the punch, but he didn’t want me to see it. “Cuff him,” he said to Lewis. “I’m going to clean up in the john.”
He walked unsteadily down the hall to the bathroom, went inside, and slammed the door behind him.
“You got a good lawyer, buck-o?” Lewis said, pulling the cuffs from his belt. “Or a relative on the force?” He holstered the pistol and cuffed my right wrist.
“I used to work for the D.A.’s office,” I said to him.
“You were a cop?”
I nodded.
“You might have said something earlier,” he said, glancing down the hall. “It would have saved us all a lot of trouble. I’m never going to hear the end of this.” He pulled my left arm behind me and cuffed my hands behind my back. “He’s going to try to kill you when he comes to. You know that, don’t you?”
I nodded again.
“Even if you can get bail tonight, you’re going to take a beating.”
“I know that,” I said. “What would you have done?”
Lewis laughed grimly and said, “One thing I wouldn’t have done is mess with Jordan.”
“About the girl...” I said, glancing at Karen, who had been taking all of it in with a horrified look on her face.
“She’s free to go,” Lewis said.
I turned to Karen. “Go home,” I said to her. “Go back to St. Louis. Tonight.”
She stared at me as if I were out of my mind. “And leave you to these bastards?” she said, staring right at Lewis. The old cop ducked his head.
“Karen,” I said softly, “whether you stay or not isn’t going to make any difference where they’re concerned.”
“How about where you’re concerned?” she said angrily.
“I can’t look after you from jail,” I said.
“I can look after myself.”
“You don’t know what’s going on here,” I said helplessly. I wanted to pull her aside and explain it to her—about Bo and his pals and the cocaine. But there was no way to do it without letting Lewis in on it too.
I heard the john flush. “Please,” I said again. “Go home.”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t understand this, Harry. Any of it.”
Jordan stepped out of the john into the hall. He walked up to us and said to Lewis, “You take him in. I’ve got a couple of things to take care of.” He didn’t even glance at me—just walked out the door.
“C’mon, Stoner,” Lewis said, jerking me by the handcuffs. �
��Let’s get this over with.”
He led me out of the apartment and down the hall. I glanced back at Karen. She was standing in the doorway, staring after me with a stunned look on her face.
“Go home, for chrissake!” I shouted back over my shoulder. Lewis jerked the cuffs again and we started down the stairs.
17
BEFORE THEY locked me up in the Central Station holding tank, I got to make my one call on the pay phone. I called Laurel Gould, my lawyer, and told her I was in trouble.
“What are the charges?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But they may throw the book at me. Possession of cocaine. Possession for sale. Assaulting a cop.”
There was a dead silence on the line. “You assaulted a police officer?” Laurel said, as if I’d told her I’d boarded a flying saucer.
“I lost my temper.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” she said sharply. “Assaulting a cop can be a nasty charge, my friend. And possession for sale is no day in the country. Where are you going to get the money to raise bail for all this?”
“From pushing drugs,” I said acidly. “Just get me out of here, Laurel. I mean it. This cop I punched...he’s very bad news.”
“It’s that way?” she said with concern.
“Very likely,” I told her.
“I’ll be down there in ten minutes,” she said. “With a photographer.”
“Good,” I said, and hung up.
As they were closing the cell doors on me, I called Lewis over to the bars.
“Do me a favor and tell Lieutenant Al Foster that I’m down here?” I said hopefully.
Lewis walked away without saying anything.
After he’d gone, I wandered back to the rear of the tank. There were a couple of cellblocks inside the tank, rows of six-foot by three-foot walk-ins, sided with bars on three sides and stone on the fourth, like animal cages in the zoo. I walked into one of the open cells and sat down on the steel bench suspended from the wall. To the right there was a tiny porcelain toilet smelling of urine and Pine-Sol, with a roll of oatmeal-colored paper tissue sitting beside it. I reached down and picked up the tissue. Tearing off a dozen sheets, I wadded them up and formed them into a mouthpiece. It wasn’t much protection—a toilet-paper mouthpiece. But it was better than nothing at all.
Fire Lake Page 8
