“Ted Watkins.”
I think I blinked.
“That’s right,” Wilson said. “Mr. ‘I’m gonna clean up the city.’ The eager senator must be doing it door-to-door.”
Another man walked to one of the shacks and was led inside by a woman.
Wilson looked at the door to Kim Lee’s house, which was still closed, along with the drapes. He said, “You know I can’t get anywhere near them, right? They’ll make me for a cop before I step out of the car.”
Just like the senator, I slipped on a ball cap to hide my face in case the pimps running the street remembered me from the night of the car explosion. “I need you for something else.”
“What?”
“I need you to watch my car.”
He shook his head. “Fifteen years on the job and I’m bumped down to parking lot attendant.”
Kim’s door opened.
“Blow the horn if you see anyone coming.” I got out of the car and waited until the john left before I approached. Kim sat in a chair on the porch in a negligee and lit a cigarette.
“Hey, honey.” She made a motion like she was going to stub out the cigarette.
I leaned against the railing. “Take your time.”
She said, “Time is money, honey.”
“I got plenty of both.”
In the light of the red bulb, she studied my face. “I like you already.” The cherry of her cigarette glowed as she inhaled. She let out a steady stream of smoke. “I haven’t seen you before, honey. I’d remember.”
I recognized her as the girl in the trench coat Galston had visited when Darcy and I got set up. When she finished her cigarette, I followed her inside. She shut the door and pulled the drapes.
“Time is money,” she said. “A hundred gets you thirty minutes. Two if you want it kinky.”
I flashed a money roll I’d put together from the funds found in the crab pots, peeled off two hundreds, and handed them to her.
She started to pull her negligee off.
“I’m into something different,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me.
I said, “Conversation.”
She tilted her head. “You want me to talk dirty to you?”
“Not exactly. I want to know about the two guys with the car that blew up.”
The shape her face contorted into had more wrinkles than anyone her age should have. “You five-oh. Get out.”
I tried to hand her another fifty. “I’m not a cop.”
“You something,” she said. “Get out!” She pressed a button on the kitchen counter. “You got two minutes, big boy. Temp-a gonna come blow you away.”
I pushed past her, pulled the forty-five, and headed for the back of the house. The knob was missing from the back door. I kicked hard. The rusty hinges groaned but didn’t give. I kicked it again. The jamb splintered open. Formosan termites, dirt, and sawdust peppered the floor. The Audi’s horn trumpeted a warning.
Moments later a man yelled from the front room, “Where is he?”
I jumped through the open door and crashed into cans of rotting garbage. Coated with slime, I made it to the corner of the house. Bullets sprayed from a machine gun behind me. As I rounded the house heading toward the street, light mounted somewhere over my head showed someone running toward me. He must have been blinded by the light behind me and couldn’t see me coming. I lifted the pistol in my hand and smashed it sideways into the runner’s face. Legs went out from under him and he landed on his back with a thud. I crouched, turned, and shot out the light a second before the man with the machine gun came around the corner of the house. Still crouching, I held the forty-five steady in my hands and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The machine gun sprayed over my head and the outline of the shooter came into focus. I exhaled, aimed, and put a round in his upper right torso. The force of the forty-five jerked him backwards. His shoulder wouldn’t do him any good for a while, but I didn’t care. I turned and ran to the street.
Wilson crouched behind my car, his arms extended over the roof and a Glock aimed squarely at me. “Freeze!”
I held up my hands. “It’s me. We gotta get out of here.”
He pointed his pistol to the sky.
“Come on,” I said. “Time is money. We can call a meat wagon from the road. They aren’t dead, but they might have friends.”
We jumped in the car and I got us out of there. With the disposable cell, I called it in but didn’t give my name. When I hung up, Wilson was looking at me.
“What?”
He said, “If I run the number, is it going to be the same one you used when you blew up the Chrysler?”
“Who says I blew up anything?”
“Right. What—” Wilson stopped. “You smell like—”
“Don’t say it.”
At Wilson’s house, I took a shower and tossed my garbage-smeared clothes. Wilson let me borrow his, which were a size or two big and a decade or two out of style. He made a few calls to find out what he could about the “trouble on Harmon Street,” or as he put it to me, the “new mess you made.”
We sat on his back patio with glasses of iced tea. Darcy called to say she heard about a shooting in the red light district and thought it might be me. I lit a cigar and filled her in on how far I didn’t get with the unhappy hooker. Darcy said she and Patricia were finishing the story of the EPA and IRS crackdown on Galston and would keep me informed if they found anything new.
I ended the call and looked at Wilson. “You find out how the pimps are doing?”
Wilson flipped open a pad I’d seen him take notes in when he was on the job. “The one you clubbed, name is Anton Henry Smith, has a concussion but is otherwise in stable condition. His partner, a Randall Jackson Clay, calls himself Temp-a, with a hyphen before the ‘a.’ I’m guessing it’s slang for temper, or the guy can’t spell, or both. Thirty years old. This guy should play the lottery he’s so lucky. Either you’re a bad shot or you aimed high. His shoulder is wrecked but you missed his lung by inches.” He looked up from the notebook. “Both have sheets and are being held for questioning. The machine guns they carried guarantee jail time.”
“It is a beautiful world we live in.” I took a drag from the cigar.
“Maybe you should play the lottery, too,” he continued. “The hooker said she didn’t remember what the perpetrator looked like.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She gave you a free pass.”
“Know what that means?”
“We take another shot at her.”
“So to speak.” I got up. “This time you drive. My car smells.”
Around ten PM we returned to the red light district in Wilson’s unmarked cruiser whose keys he’d conveniently forgotten to hand in when they suspended him. He monitored the police radio as he drove to make sure his Brothers in Blue had vacated the scene. I enjoyed riding up front for a change. Every other time I’d been shackled in the back. One street over from Harmon, he pulled to the curb under what had to be the last functioning streetlamp around. I wondered how it was spared when the others had been used for target practice. I put a fresh clip in the forty-five and slid it down the waistband of the extra-large shorts Wilson had loaned me.
Wilson said, “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that since my fellow officers are looking for the gun that shot the forty-five-caliber bullet that went through Temp-a and ended up in a tree.”
“Good, and I won’t mention you drive like an old lady.”
The sound of a car coming up from behind made us duck into the shadows. An American sedan from the seventies rolled by on huge chromed wheels, its bass system shaking the ground. It looked like something out of the comics.
After it passed, Wilson whispered, “What are you gonna say to the Chinese squeeze?”
“That’s really clever, Wilson,” I whispered back. “I was planning on kicking the door in and dragging her out by her hair.”
“As a detective, I always found kno
cking first worked pretty well.”
We turned the corner and headed up the street where Kim Lee worked. With the two guys who usually watched the street in the hospital, we didn’t bother trying to be sneaky. As if to pay his respects, Wilson stopped by the spot where the Chrysler went up in flames.
“I can’t believe you blew up their car.”
“You can’t prove I did anything.”
A female voice came from across the street. “You bring big money with you, honey?” The end of a cigarette glowed in the darkness.
Inside Kim Lee’s hot pad, Wilson watched her bend over to get two beers out of the refrigerator. I pulled the curtain open to peer out. With no illumination on the street, the darkness was heavy.
Kim Lee set the beers in front of us. “So, you guys want same deal as the ones you asked about, honey?”
I turned away from the window to look at her. “Depends. What’d you have to do for them?”
She took a seat at the table between us. “Why don’t you tell me what you like, honey.”
I took out my gangster roll, unfolded two more hundreds, and laid them on the table. “I like lots of things.”
She reached for the bills but Wilson put his hand over them.
“What I’d like right now,” I said, “is information.”
She moved her hand back and looked at the button on the counter she’d pressed the last time I was here.
“Temp-a’s in the hospital,” Wilson said. “The other one’s in jail. What’s his name? Anton?”
“So it’s just us,” I added.
In the weak glow from the fixture in her kitchen, I saw Kim Lee sigh and drop her eyes. “Am I in trouble?”
“You could be,” I said, “if you don’t answer our questions.”
Wilson picked up the can of beer with one hand and opened a leather badge holder on the table with the other. I guessed it was Rogers’s badge because Wilson had to surrender his own to the police captain.
Wilson raised the can to his lips, took a swallow, and said, “It’s your choice.”
Kim Lee glanced at the badge.
Wilson snapped it shut and put it in his pocket.
“If I talk, they’ll hurt me,” she said.
I leaned in close to Kim. “Ten days ago, I saw one of your career sisters. She was sucking down opium as fast as she could get it, scared to death because someone’s idea of foreplay was assault and battery. The john paid Temp-a’s handlers so he could hurt her. Maybe it’s the same someone we’re after. He might come here next to tie up any loose ends.”
The frown on her face told me she wasn’t impressed. Like she ran across those types of johns every day. And she probably did.
“Did I mention the girl was found with a bunch of nine millimeter holes in her?” I asked. “She was only sixteen.”
Kim Lee focused on her hands resting on the table. “What do you want?”
“Remember the morning you wore the trench coat when you opened a motel door to the big fat man?”
She took her time and eventually nodded.
I slammed my hand on the table. Kim Lee flinched.
“They shot my friend there,” I said. “Who set it up?”
Kim Lee whimpered.
I pounded the table again. “I want to know everything. Get yourself together and spill it.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Th-they pay me. They say I don’t have to do anything except answer the door and look sexy. The fat man, he come inside the room and leave through the back door. They give me a hundred bucks and take me back here.”
I said, “You don’t know anything else about that day?”
She shook her head no.
Wilson said, “You didn’t hear any gunfire?”
She nodded. “I hear something, but I leave out the back door after the fat man.”
Wilson finished his beer. “Is that the only time you met the fat man?”
“Yes,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with me. He has his own girl.”
I gathered my thoughts.
She said, “The fat man said something when we heard the pops. Something like: ‘that should take care of it.’ ”
“All right,” I said. “Tell us about your Thursday night regulars. The ones with the blown-up car.”
“They come every week,” she said. “I think they like each other more than me.”
Wilson chuckled. I would have too if I hadn’t been so mad Galston got the drop on me and Darcy.
I said, “You know the names for your Thursday night action?”
“Besides john,” Wilson said.
Between sobs, she said, “Freddy. Freddy and Chad. That’s all I know.”
I said, “Which one’s the young one?”
“Chad.”
Wilson said, “Who is the fat man’s girl?”
“Alexus,” she said. “Like the car. The other girls say he keeps her in an apartment. No other johns can touch her.”
Wilson made a notation in his pad. “You know where the apartment is?”
Kim Lee shook her head again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
From the front seat of Wilson’s car, I called Darcy and Patricia and had them start digging up anything they could find on an Alexus. Patricia said she’d tried to call Constance but couldn’t get through. On a hunch, I called McAllister.
“I hear our boy’s on the run,” he said.
“Yep,” I said. “You were a big help before.”
“I read about the car blowing up. Nice work.”
I said, “The prostitute they got busted with said Galston’s girl’s name is Alexus. He’s got her up in an apartment but she couldn’t tell us where. Any ideas?”
“What’s the name, again?”
“Alexus. Like the car, so I’m told.”
“I don’t think I know that one. I can check around, call in a few favors.”
“I’d appreciate it. So would the government.” I hung up.
Wilson and I were on Seventeen heading toward West Ashley when McAllister called back.
“I got something,” he said, “but I’m not sure how good it is.”
“I’ll take it, whatever it is.”
“Galston knows everybody’s looking for him. I was told he was packing as we speak. He’s got a boat waiting in the City Marina.”
“Thanks.” I ended the call.
Wilson looked at me. “What?”
“City Marina,” I said. “And we better hurry. We might be too late.”
Wilson’s car was at a stretch where Seventeen became a divided four-lane. At the next light, he blasted his siren and cut ahead of a line of cars waiting to turn left, made a screeching U-turn around them, and headed back the way we came. He radioed it in and was told there were no units in the area.
The police captain patched through. “I hope you aren’t working a case on suspension, Detective Wilson. I thought I made it perfectly clear you were to take time off. If you continue, I will have no choice but to proceed with termination.”
Wilson held the radio in his hands but didn’t press the button to respond.
“He sounds like one of my commanding officers,” I said.
“He’s a real peach.” Wilson slalomed through the traffic with one hand on the wheel. He brought the radio to his mouth. “The suspect is on the run and there are no units in the area, sir. I can make it in fifteen minutes. The feds want this guy. He—”
“I know who he is, Detective Wilson,” the captain said. “But the fact remains you cannot pursue a suspect while under suspension. I am ordering you to stand down.”
Wilson threw the radio in the backseat and punched the accelerator harder.
“We’re not stopping?” I asked.
“We’re not stopping.”
Charleston Harbor was full of boats. The parking lot was well lit and virtually empty. Parked in a handicapped spot was a black Escalade with the vanity plate MLG ONE. The tailgate was open. I got out of Wilson’s car and ran towar
d the yachts. Wilson went to find someone who worked there.
Floodlights illuminated the dock. With no triple-extra-large shapes in sight, I turned and headed to the parking lot. As I passed one of the boats, a life preserver flew at me at the speed of light and tagged me in the face. I lost my footing and fell, sliding across the rough wood surface. Splinters tore my knees and hands. Galston jumped from a boat and kicked me hard in the stomach. The wind blew out my lungs.
A woman yelled, “What are you doing, Mike?”
The decking vibrated underneath me. The fat man rushed down the dock like an elephant on the loose. I got to my feet, gasping for air, and stumbled, losing sight of him when he left the main dock. Wilson was nowhere to be seen. I staggered toward the parking lot. My stomach throbbed where I’d been kicked. The black SUV appeared when I turned the corner. Galston headed toward it. I aimed my gun and fired. The front tire went flat.
“Stop running . . .” I gasped, “or the next one . . . will be in you.”
Galston did what I asked. I closed the distance between us to less than ten feet. He turned around.
“You gonna kill me, kid?”
I cocked the hammer, my breath returning. “You set me and Darcy up. She almost died.”
“You can’t shoot me. You’ll never get away with it. I got too many friends.”
I sighted on his melon head. “You killed my uncle. Why?”
“Listen,” he said, staring at my gun. “Take it easy. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“I count at least three dead and one with a hole in her shoulder, and you’re telling me you didn’t kill anybody.” My finger tightened against the trigger. I thought of my uncle dying in the alley. “Man doesn’t have the right to avoid reaping what he sows.”
Sweat beaded on my forehead and I brushed it off with my free hand. I could taste blood. I wanted blood. But something clicked inside me and I lowered my gun. “I’m thinking I’ll like you better in jail.”
Galston raised his right hand. In a tenth of a second, I registered he was holding something metallic and shiny. I jerked my gun up. The blast came quick. Galston’s face exploded and blood sprayed everywhere. He slumped and fell forward. A silver, two-shot Derringer dropped from his right hand. Behind him and to the left stood Wilson, legs spread apart, his pistol locked in both hands. I realized I hadn’t gotten a shot off.
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