Out of the Blues

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  “Namaste.” Salt turned around to find Pepper, wearing a black face mask, bowing to her. He was in all black: jeans, T-shirt, protective vest, and jacket with “Narcotics” in large reflective letters on both sides of his chest and in larger letters on his back.

  “Doing the full ninja, huh? You look like a character in the movies. Actually this whole thing feels surreal,” she said. “Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick,” she said, bending from her waist.

  “Stick with me, kid,” said Pepper, Bogart accent behind the lip holes.

  “You know—” she began to say.

  The SWAT lieutenant circled his finger above his head and everyone started for the vehicles. Huff and the Things trotted toward the car.

  “We’re moving.” Pepper interrupted, nodding at his team already loading up. He ran toward them.

  Pepper was already out of earshot, jumping in with his team. “You know . . . You know more than you think,” she said as the door to the van shut. “Namaste, Pepper. Namaste.”

  The back door of the SWAT transport had barely shut when, led by the commanders in marked cars, they sped out of the lot, the caravan of vehicles tight behind, leaving no room for citizen traffic. She’d no more than sat down in the front passenger seat, door not yet closed, when Huff put the pedal down and tore out behind Wills and Gardner’s Taurus.

  The inside of Huff’s unmarked smelled like stale French fries with a vanilla deodorizer overlay. The Things in the backseat were quiet. Huff was quiet. And then they were there—twenty police vehicles, blue lights splashing against the pinks and purples of the neon sign on the metal derrick above, “Dolls, Dolls, Dolls” flashing over a reclining female silhouette. The glowing full moon shone from between the steel frames. SWAT—rifles and shotguns at port arms, boots thudding, ran along the sides of the building, secured the entrance, and surrounded the flat, big, one-story club. Salt, Huff, and the Things covered the front beside the entrance. Vibrations from the music inside pulsed the concrete bricks at Salt’s back. The Narcotics team swarmed the dozen or so cars in the black-surface parking lot, doing tactical quick peeks before clearing each car. Salt lost sight of Wills when his car followed some of the others to the rear of the club.

  SWAT was in. There were two or three brief screams followed by sharp commands and muffled yells, and then the team leader came over the dedicated radio frequency to give the signal that the people in the main areas had been detained and that Narcotics could enter to assist and search. The black-clad detectives streamed in, silent, fluid, guns held snug to their legs. Salt couldn’t tell Pepper from the others. As they went through the double doors, the pounding music bubbled out. It seemed like it took only seconds to secure patrons and employees and the all clear was given, and then Salt and Huff’s team entered.

  She rounded the flat-black wall in the alcove that separated the entrance area from the main room and holstered her weapon. One of the SWAT guys yelled, “Somebody find the damn light switch.” No one had yet located the house lights, and the stage was bathed in a pink-and-gold swirling disco glow. Multicolored pin lights bounced off the black-tiled drop ceiling. Patrons occupied four or five of the tables: one gray-looking white man sat by himself among the mostly black clientele, two dark-skinned women with shaved heads were at another table, while three older black men sat at a four-top table; there were several younger guys sitting together wearing fake-diamond pendants and shiny athletic jerseys. A dancer in high heels and a G-string sat on the edge of the three-foot-high stage casually swinging her legs to the heavy-on-the-bass music that blared from speakers overhead. She was cuffed in front with plastic flex cuffs, but someone had been chivalrous and thrown a windbreaker over her bare shoulders and pendulous breasts, which were taking a rest on her soft belly, only partially covered by the jacket.

  Bumping and scraping, accompanied by barked words, orders, or radio checkpoint queries, came from farther within the club. Two heavyset female employees in Dolls-logoed T-shirts, also in plastic restraints, sat on the floor of the hallway that led toward the back of the club. Strategically positioned SWAT guys stood ready while Lieutenant Shepherd directed her team to begin the search for drugs. “Somebody find the lights,” she said. “They can probably use your help backstage.” She pointed Salt to the far right of the room. “In the dressing room.” Huff nodded, acknowledging Salt’s departure while he and the Things sat down at one of the tables and began to interview the occupants of the room, all of whom had their phones face-down on the tables in front of them.

  “Can I talk to you?” the gray man asked as Salt passed. “I need to go home—my wife.”

  “Give us a few,” she said, knowing it would be past his bedtime before he made it home. His phone was already lit and vibrating.

  Another of the SWAT team officers, a tall woman, stood at the entrance to the backstage area, face shield in the up position. “Salt.” She smiled, a giddy gleam in her eye, teeth sparkling in the disco light.

  “Girlfriend,” she said, walking past and through the beaded curtain and beginning to feel some relief at the initially safe entry.

  Two racks of sequined and feathered garments crowded a narrow passage through to a classic noir dressing room—incandescent bulb-lined mirror stations, more costume racks, and a shower-curtained changing room in the rear. There was even a lit cigarette, its plume of smoke drifting up from a glass ashtray on the dressing table beside a very dark-skinned girl with a large yellow butterfly painted around her eyes. She wore only a pair of iridescent wings. “Whatever you find ain’t mine,” she said, wings fluttering as she gestured to the masked narcotics detective standing over her.

  “What might we find, madam?” asked the detective. He grinned and winked at Salt.

  “Who you calling ‘madam,’ Black-face?” Her wings beat faster.

  Two more narcotics men, neither of them Pepper, had begun the dressing room search, beginning at the curtained-off area.

  Turning to go back to the main room, the answer obvious, Salt asked anyway out of courtesy, “You need me?”

  “Thanks, but she ain’t concealing,” said the detective with Madam Butterfly.

  Back in the main room music was still pumping from the ceiling corners. Another SWAT guy occupied a staircase leading up to a low-windowed room overlooking the club, where Lieutenant Shepherd could be seen moving back and forth while one of her team stood on the balcony in front of the window fiddling with an electronics console. Wills and Huff were assisting the two female barkeeps to their feet, bringing them into separate corners to be questioned. Another narcotics detective yelled down from the balcony, “Sarge, ask them where switches for the lights are. We can’t get them to come on at the control panel.” Huff leaned toward his detainee, then yelled back. “Mop closet”—music cut off abruptly, the room suddenly silent—“second door on the left,” Huff yelled, now unnecessarily loud. A glass shelf behind the bar came unhinged and its contents, glasses and bottles, came shattering to the chrome coolers underneath. The nearby detective winced and shrugged.

  “I’ll get the lights.” Salt went to find the light box, breathing better now that the danger had passed. Realizing her shoulders had been hunched, she lowered them and rolled her head, loosening her neck muscles. The door she was looking for was marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in black plastic letters. The mop closet and all the other rooms—main room, dressing room, restrooms, and office—had been cleared as SWAT made their way through. But Salt, out of habit, stood to the side of the door as she opened it and did the quick peek, feeling a little self-conscious. A single fluorescent tube lit the closet in which there was a bucket, a mop, cleaning supplies on metal shelving, and the electrical panel. She opened the panel and flipped the lever marked for the house lights. Salt stuck her head out and confirmed the main areas were now lit. The closet stank of sour mop. Dust and pieces of insulation fell from the exposed crawl space above, where there was no finished ceili
ng, only ductwork, pipes, and wiring. The music blasted back on briefly. More debris drifted from above.

  Units were reporting in on the radio. “Clear.” “Team One, Clear.” “Clear Narcotics, Team Two.” “Product, Team Three.” Salt listened to the units, allowing herself a second of relief—Team Three was reporting success in locating the stash. She hoped it was indeed a stash, not just a joint in an ashtray.

  She looked up at the falling particles, upended the bucket, and stood on top of it in order to grab the top of the attached shelves and pull her head through the ceiling opening. As her eyes adjusted to the unlit space, DeWare’s skull-like face came into focus. From a prone position near the edge his eyes glared out of the dark, inches from her face. She let go and dropped back to the closet floor as he came down on top of her, bringing with him part of the metal shelving, one of the brackets slashing her arm and shoulder. DeWare slammed her to the floor and tore the gun from beneath her injured arm. He stomped her shoulder, head, and hand, making an umphf sound each time he slammed the heel of his boot into her. She lay there unmoving, waiting for her chance, but he stuck his head out the door, her gun in his hand as he slipped from the closet. She pushed up and staggered out on his heels. Salt instantly, instinctively knew it was Pepper, still wearing his face mask, coming out of the stairwell at the other end of the hall. DeWare with her gun was headed straight at him. She stumbled, grabbing for DeWare, realizing Pepper wouldn’t risk a shot if she was in the line of fire. Just as she caught his leg, DeWare fired at Pepper, who ducked into the stairwell. “Hold your positions. Hold your positions,” ordered a commander from somewhere below.

  DeWare turned, put the gun to her head. “Get the fuck up or I will blow your fucking brains out right here and now.” He dragged her past Pepper and the cops stacked behind him in the stairwell, then out the back door to the parking lot. He backed her toward an SUV, her shoulder going numb, blood soaking down the sleeve of her ripped jacket.

  “I am going to shoot each one of your feet, your hands, and then your legs if you do not get in the ride and drive exactly how I tell you.” DeWare shoved the gun into her right breast, opened the driver’s door, and motioned her behind the wheel. As he got in the backseat, he fired twice in Pepper’s direction, at the back door of the club. DeWare put the gun beside her cheek and cocked the hammer. “The Homes,” he said as she put the vehicle in gear. “And give me your walkie-talkie.”

  “My hand is fucked-up,” she told him, trying to get to the radio on her left side. She drove out to the deserted thoroughfare that fronted the club. At least two of the fingers of her left hand wouldn’t work and pain shot up her arm, but she got the radio off her belt. DeWare grabbed it and threw it from the window.

  “Move it.” They passed a few lone, hollow-eyed pedestrians. “Put the speed on or you will die.”

  North on Metropolitan, Salt began to feel woozy and dissociated, while her body seemed to buzz. She drove mindlessly, knowing the streets to The Homes; in her sleep she could get there. She tried to interpret the sounds of DeWare’s movements in the seat behind her. He smelled of the metallic scent of stale sweat tinged with crack cocaine, rendered by new sweat and adrenaline.

  The citizens who traveled these streets by day had good reasons to quit them by this hour. DeWare’s dark face, his body in dark shirt and pants, twisting and turning in the backseat, created a shifting black void that blocked her view in the rearview mirror. The street in the rearview appeared deserted, though she felt certain that Pepper and others must be following. They passed a new-looking Taurus, headlights off, parked at a dark, closed gas station pump. A mile later DeWare told her to turn left onto a one-lane street. He reached over her shoulder and turned the headlights off. “Keep driving.”

  She strained after the sound of a vehicle passing on the road, but once again saw no lights. The white pavement of the deserted street, made fully visible by the moonlight, was ragged with long, jagged cracks.

  “Stop,” he said. “Stop here.”

  They were at the bend of a little street, a street that led to nowhere and she knew it. It had been intended as an access to the adjacent low-lying property that developers had failed to develop. High weeds bordered the broken pavement. About a hundred yards away a single streetlight, farther past the bend, was the only sign that the street was still intended for use.

  DeWare grabbed her by the throat with his left hand, his fingers closing on the gold chain around her neck, slippery with blood. “Saint Michael,” she said.

  He jerked the chain and medallion from her neck. “Just the souvenir for Preacher Prince,” he said. “He loves him some gold.”

  “Prince,” repeated Salt.

  Entering under and emerging from the lone distant circle of light was a beater, a ghetto junker, Oldsmobile or Buick sedan circa 1970s. It slowly rolled toward them, one of its headlights flickering and the other pointed sideways. Unreasonably, Salt thought that on a slow night in a patrol car she’d have stopped it and, if all else was well, given the driver a warning to get the headlights fixed. She was beyond reality. “You were trying to shoot me but instead you shot the bluesman.” She could ask DeWare anything now. He was going to kill her and wanted to brag first—to show her he had power.

  “You think this little gold man saved you? That man got shot ’cause he turn his back. His bad. And now I get another chance at you. Seem like Preacher right about God want me to be the one kill you. He and my boss say I’m born to be the hand of God, born to be a killer.”

  “Your boss—Spangler?”

  “Yeah . . .” DeWare’s voice trailed off as the Buick came alongside them and stopped. He moved to the back passenger side. “Yo, Shawty.” The SUV was higher than the beater, so from where she sat neither the car nor its occupants on the other side were visible, although its exhaust, thick and pungent, plumed in the moonlight.

  “Man like to know what’s happnin’ his streets. Know I’m sayin’? Who drivin’?” asked Lil D, whose voice she immediately recognized.

  Salt lost awareness of the pains from her injuries. She felt a sense of time condensing. Lil D’s and DeWare’s voices—inflections, pitches and tones, small words, a hiss, grunts and guttural noises—were amplified by the silence of her other muted sensations.

  “Aw, Shawty. This bitch mine. Man don’t have no reason . . .” DeWare stopped talking as the beater’s door opened and closed.

  Lil D appeared in front of the SUV, his long white T-shirt light blue in the full moon, the birthmark on his neck barely visible, and came around to Salt’s window. “This that bitch cop and she fucked-up,” Lil D said through the open window to DeWare, still on the passenger side in the backseat. Salt tried to open one eye. “You done fucked up bringin’ this shit here,” he said.

  “It ain’t like that.” The overhead light came on as DeWare opened the back door and got out from the other side of the SUV, his dark shape following Lil D’s path around the front of the vehicle.

  Salt held up her left index finger and thumb, signaling Lil D that DeWare was armed. Time slowed. Face framed by the SUV’s interior light, Lil D closed his eyes and drew a breath. Salt heard his intake of air. He swiveled his neck once as he lowered his hand. DeWare rounded the front bumper and there was a flash from Lil D’s waist and three blasts. DeWare folded to the pavement. Salt’s ears rang as Lil D went to where DeWare lay. “My name D, motherfucker.” His words came to her muffled beneath the roaring in her ears. Then he came back to her. She could not hold her head up but was trying to keep her eyes open, resting her right cheek against the steering wheel. Lil D opened the door of the SUV. “You just witness a murder now, didn’t you?”

  “No,” said Salt. “Defense.” She was barely able to stay conscious, just vaguely aware of the arrival of another sound, the distant motorized flapping of a helicopter.

  Lil D opened the door. “Get out.”

  “My shoulder . . .”
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  “Get out. I’m tryin’ my best here to make us even.” He pulled her out.

  Salt fell onto the weedy stubble beside the street.

  “I’m going to give you two presents,” said D, “one from me to you.” He dropped the gun he’d used to shoot DeWare beside Salt and took another from his camo jacket. “Number one. You found that gun in the car. Didn’t you?”

  Salt nodded to the lie.

  “Number two present is DeWare auntee. She the one hear DeWare making the deal ’bout killin’ that white woman and her girls, the deal with Tall John. Tall John the one put DeWare on them.”

  The whirly sound of the copter was getting closer, missing them by only a couple of miles, its searchlight bouncing off a few low clouds over the city.

  Salt fell back on her rear, knees bent.

  “And don’t keep fuckin’ shit up. Man ain’t gone like none a’ this,” said Lil D, going back to the Buick. He laid rubber speeding off, the beater’s exhaust fouling the air Salt gulped as she crawled to DeWare while watching the red taillights disappear down an abandoned construction access in the weedy field.