by Jason Trevor
This was enough, thought Joe. He yanked a suppressed .45 Colt 1911 out of one of the holsters and clicked a round into each of Bone’s and Cornbread’s legs, then turned and delivered four more into Toad’s and Tony’s legs. The four of them stayed on the pavement, cursing, howling, and bleeding. Biggie scampered across the bench to the other end, away from Joe. Joe held the pistol straight down at the end of his arm as he slowly walked to Biggie.
“Is the rest of the crew at the house on Delano?”
“Go fuck yourself,”
Joe leveled the gun at Biggie and gently rested the muzzle of the suppressor on the bridge of his glasses. “I said, is the rest of the crew at the house on Delano?” The muzzle was still hot and it burned a circle into Biggie’s forehead.
“They at the crib,” he muttered, looking away from Joe’s gaze and escaping the hot silencer.
“And the other house? On Tierwester, close to the end. You know the one,”
“Joey and his girl are in the clink. Place is locked up until they get out,”
“Good boy. No new holes for you tonight. Phone.” He held out his free hand, with the menacing brass knuckles now sporting Bone’s hair and blood, and Biggie begrudgingly handed over his iPhone. Then Joe gathered up the eight shell casings and collected their remaining cell phones from their pockets and hips. As it would be, one of them serendipitously had an interesting little spiral notebook in his pocket with Foster’s name on it. Joe remembered seeing it in Detective Sims’ hand at Foster’s and Ellie’s house the morning after Foster was shot. The car stereos continued to bump as he scooped up the pieces of the bat and his white jacket from the curb, then strode purposefully back to his Suburban.
“Kill ya later,” he tossed over his shoulder to the five of them. “I’ve got a date on Delano,”
Chapter 15
“Tony ain’t check in yet,” announced Bullet to Slag, Meat, and Thump.
“Call him. He prolly busy selling a lot,” retorted Thump.
“Nigga, I did call him! I called all five of them! No answers!”
“Texted too?” The four Blood Brothers in the living room of the house on Delano suddenly fell quiet, and someone muted the television. The game of dominoes on a card table, surrounded by Schlitz cans and Hennessey bottles, was now forgotten as the three players looked at Bullet.
“Motherfucker you know I did, or I wouldn’t have said nuthin’ and niggas ain’t answering! My brother always answers me!”
“Five-oh didn’t try nothin’ or there’d be noise on the horn,” indicated Meat as he pointed a thick finger at the police scanner in the corner of the room. Then Bullet’s phone rang. The caller ID showed it was Tony.
“Nigga, where you been? I been calling you!” yelped Bullet as he answered.
“Oh, sorry. Tony’s got a broken jaw and some bullet holes in his legs, so he can’t talk right now,” said an unfamiliar voice. “I left a message for you with Biggie, but I don’t think the memo was delivered because you set my house on fire. Why don’t y’all come out to the porch so I can deliver it in person? I’m right out here,”
“You gonna die tonight,” said Bullet defiantly. Then he hung up the phone and tossed it on the table amidst the dominoes. “Grab a piece. Homes that shot Biggie says he shot Tony too and is outside. Says he wants to talk to us,”
“We goin’ pop a white boy!” Whooped Thump as he snatched a Ruger .40 with a laser sight from the coffee table.
The four of them filed out onto the cracked and broken concrete porch of the old house, holding pistols straight out in front of them, fingers on triggers. There wasn’t a sound besides the humming of the old window unit air conditioner hanging crookedly out of the bedroom window at the end of the porch. No one was around, but an ugly old Suburban with unpainted ground effects, big-assed bumpers, and new wheels sat in the narrow street, less than 20 feet away. Its engine was running, but it didn’t look like anyone was in the driver’s seat. They looked up and down the block at Rosalie and Anita Streets, just a short distance in each direction, and across the street at the shiny new houses some rich snobs had built a while back. Everything was still.
“Come on, motherfucker! Let’s talk!” Boomed Meat. Thump switched on the laser sight and squared it on the Suburban as he stepped around a lawn chair on the porch. Slag and Bullet rolled their eyes at him. “Dumbassed toy,” muttered Meat.
Two half-circle shaped doors swung open and to either side on the top of the Suburban, and an enormous gun appeared between them, one of those army types with a bunch of barrels that spun around as it fired. It was hard to see in the dark, but it looked to Thump like the minigun he used when he played Call of Duty. They could barely make out the silhouette of a man standing behind it.
“Oh, shit! Run, niggas!” yelped Thump as he dove back toward the door. The gun lit up in a continuous flash of firepower, buzzing as it sprayed the porch with bullets. In the first sweep across, Meat and Slag fell straight down in puffs of red cloud. Thump and Bullet clamored through the door on hands and knees as the spray of bullets rained through the window and across the room over their heads. The window unit hissed out a cloud of freon and crashed onto the concrete porch. Joe lowered his aim and sprayed the width of the house a few times, barely missing the two of them as they dove out the back door into the yard. A flexible plastic hose was now attached to the discharge chute of the gun, and hot shell casings scattered and danced around Joe’s feet on the expanded metal. He continued to spray the front of the house and the porch until the belt ran out. A section of rotted wood fascia fell from the porch ceiling and dropped onto the two bodies, along with dirty old insulation and bits of trash from the attic.
Making a mental note to find a better way to collect those burning brass casings, Joe cleared the gun, lowered it back into the truck with a loud slam of the turret doors, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He carefully lowered the wheel and motored the seat back up, and then put the truck into gear and drove slowly away, a full four minutes before the police arrived. The freeway was only 8 blocks away, and his Suburban would be tucked safely back into the warehouse before anyone even knew the body count.
◆◆◆
Cody stretched sleepily from the comfort of his bed to reach for the ringing cell phone on his nightstand.
“Yeah, Sims,” he moaned groggily, glancing at the clock. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. He suddenly bolted upright in the bed. “A what? Who? When? That was two hours ago! Call Le in the gang unit, too. Clear it with Franks and Wakefield, but I’ll really need his help on this. Yes, wake them up. They’ll understand when you tell them who the vics are. I can be there in twenty,”
Cody hung up the phone and threw it aside. He dove out of the bed and almost fell on his face from his bare feet tangling in the sheets, then rushed to his dressing chair and snatched a pair of suit pants and a jacket from it.
“God almighty, that son of a bitch is going to shoot up the whole city. You just don’t want to piss some guys off. This has got to stop. He thinks he’s doing right because he’s wasting a bunch of bloodthirsty gang-bangers. They may be sacks of shit, but they’re supposed to have due process like anyone else. What’s he going to do when there’s collateral damage? When some poor kid who has nothing to do with it takes a bullet?”
Cody paused for a few seconds from babbling to himself to think about what he had just said.
“Surely a guy as good as he is at this shit wouldn’t let an innocent bystander get hurt. Doesn’t matter. We have to bring in all of the Blood Brothers. He’s not going to stop killing them. Now they burned his house, the law can’t stop him. Those guys’ death warrants are signed unless we get them off of the street. Maybe Le can talk them into coming in voluntarily, for their own protection. They gotta take him seriously now, right? They aren’t going to go back and try to retaliate again. Nobody is that stupid,”
He paused again.
“Yeah, they probably are. This won’t stop unless I can find a way
to stop it,”
He rushed out the door of his apartment.
◆◆◆
“Oscar! Just the man I wanted to see!” Joe was surprised to find him milling around the warehouse in the middle of the night. Apparently, even an M134 wasn’t enough to scare away a desperate Honduran.
“The judge give bail to Jefe, but hermana and I have no money. I hope you make work for me so I can bail him out! I scared you be mad to see me, but I wait here until morning to try. I’m glad you come now. I’m glad you want me,”
“Oh, I don’t have any more work for you,”
“No?”
“Just questions. About Jefe,”
◆◆◆
“Okay, so why the hell did he leave five of them alive, and then go kill the others?” Le was baffled.
“No idea,” Sims shook his head. “As far as I have known this was always about revenge. Either he hurts them all or he kills them all. I don’t know what the mixed bag is about,”
“You were right about this guy. They need to be afraid. This dude is a genuine mad dog killer,”
“No, he’s not,”
“Come again? Did you see the same two crime scenes that I just saw?”
“A mad dog kills indiscriminately. There’s not a drop of blood on this man’s hands that didn’t come from a body with Blood Brothers ink on it. He’s on a mission,”
“Some mission. Vigilantism is still murder, no matter how justified he feels,” Then a light bulb went on in Le’s head. Sims saw the change in his expression.
“New thought?”
“It’s a PSYOP,” he groaned. “He’s not just killing them. He’s getting into their heads first. We had specialists on the ground with us in Kabul whose only job was to mess with the other side’s heads. They were called PSYOP’s,”
“Okay, so this is a military thing. What’s a PSYOP?”
“Psychological warfare. He’s scaring them, injuring them, taunting them, and making them live in mortal fear as much as he can while he picks them off a few at a time. The more non-fatal injuries they sustain while watching their friends die at his hands, the more he gets into their heads,”
“That’s crazy. He’s leaving a trail of witnesses and evidence behind. Why be so risky? Why not just button it all up in one night?”
“Maybe he can’t get to them all at once. They were split up tonight, and some of them are in jail where he can’t get to them. He’s got to know that this is a culture where snitching is a greater crime than murder, so he’s not worried about witnesses, and how much evidence has he really left for us? He policed all of his brass from both crime scenes, and that house has at least a few thousand bullet holes in it. The dudes at the street drugstore around the corner were attacked with at least two different blunt weapons besides being shot, but we have no weapons and no gun. The guy spent years serving in special operations forces, and he learned some pretty powerful skills that we are no match for so far,”
“He has to make a mistake sooner or later,”
“You better hope he does, because we’ll never catch him at this rate,”
◆◆◆
“So, here’s how this works,” Joe said to Oscar, once the warehouse was locked up tight and they were walking down the highway toward the hotel. “I’m going to ask you questions. If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll pay you mucho dinero and you can bail Jefe out,”
“Si. Anything!” Oscar nodded.
“If you don’t tell me what I want to know or you lie to me, policía are going to find you in a dumpster. Comprende?” Oscar’s eyes widened into the frightened stare that Joe recognized from his minigun test.
“No savvy dumpster!”
“Um, gran bote de basura. Savvy?”
“Big trash?” he pointed at the dumpsters next to a warehouse as they walked by.
“Yup,” Joe suspected his calmness as he said it was what scared Oscar the most. Whatever worked.
“Me inside?”
“Muerto, dumbass,” Joe said flatly. “But only if I don’t like what you say,”
“I say verdad! What you want to know?” Oscar huffed as he struggled to keep up with Joe. He was much shorter and Joe was walking fast. He didn’t want to get stopped and tossed by a curious patrol cop only a few hundred feet from the hotel.
“Were you and Jefe stripping cars in The Heights?”
“Si,”
“That’s why he’s in jail?”
“Si,”
“Did you buy cars from the Blood Brothers?”
“Who?”
“Black guys with two B’s and a 3 on their necks,”
“Oh, Biggie and his friends! Si, they bring three or four cars a night before policía come to our door. I mess up and tell policía about Biggie. Jefe tells me to only say ‘abogado’ but they trick me,” he hung his head, ashamed that he had ratted.
“Did they bring a silver Z71 pickup with a black toolbox on it?”
“Si, the night before policía come. I had it almost all chopped up when they come,”
Joe grabbed Oscar by his tee-shirt and yanked him into his face. “They shot my friend to death stealing that truck!” Then he collected himself and pushed Oscar away. “But that wasn’t you. You couldn’t have known. Tell me about Biggie. What’s he look like?”
“Flaco, like you but with no muscles. The only one with glasses. He always do the money with Jefe,”
“A skinny guy with glasses, huh? I know that guy,”
“You know him? Can he help me?” Joe was astounded that Oscar wasn’t making the connection between Biggie and Joe’s anger. This dude was dense.
“I shot him and fed him a light bulb. He can’t help you with shit,”
“Oh,” Oscar sucked in his breath, finally beginning to realize Joe’s capacity for violence. “You feed him light bulb? Comer una bombilla?” They were both surprised when bubblegum lights flashed behind them and a siren yelped.
“Don’t say a friggin’ word. You don’t speak English. Not a word. Unless you quieres comer una bombilla,” Joe said without moving his mouth. A precinct 4 constable’s cruiser rolled up alongside them and the passenger window motored down. The constable driving the car shined his sidelight on them and spoke from across the car.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Why are you walking on the highway at this hour?”
“Hi,” smiled Joe. “I work pretty weird hours, and I needed something from the 24-hour Walmart a little way past the freeway interchange here. When I tried to leave, my truck wouldn’t start. I was walking to a friend’s house nearby to see if he could help when I ran into this guy. He thinks he can help out with my truck instead of me bothering my buddy in the middle of the night. Oscar, is it?” he turned to the nervous little man next to him. Oscar nodded. “I don’t think he speaks much English, but I know enough Spanish that I was able to ask for help,”
“From a complete stranger on the roadside in the middle of the night?” The constable looked skeptical.
“Actually, he came to me panhandling first. I’m not sure he has a place to stay. I’m going to see if he has family I can call when we get back to my truck. I left my cell phone in there,”
“Hermana,” Oscar said, trying to play along.
“Sister? You have a sister we can call?”
“Si,”
“There we go. Barter isn’t dead after all!” he quipped to the cop.
“If you had your cell phone at the truck, why didn’t you just call your friend instead of walking to his house?”
“I did. He didn’t answer and he lives close. I just forgot the phone trying to be careful about locking up my truck. It’s an Escalade, and I didn’t want it getting messed with in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of the night. In fact, I’m kind of worried about it and want to get back, if you don’t need anything else. We wouldn’t complain about a ride, if you’re allowed,”
“No, I’m afraid I’m not allowed. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Bobby,”
“Joe Danton. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Joe extended a hand into the window of the car for a shake. The constable ignored the hand.
“You got ID, Joe?”
“Sure do, but I can’t say about Oscar. We just met,” Joe produced his wallet and opened it to display his driver’s license on one side and his veteran’s ID on the other.
