by Jason Trevor
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“How in the name of all that’s good and mighty did I pull this ridiculous duty?” Officer Kent mused to himself under his breath. He’d signed up for overtime, expecting to direct traffic at a church on Sunday mornings or something. Who had he pissed off to be guarding four street thugs in a hotel across from the department headquarters? At least he wasn’t in the weather. He shifted in the pretty, but uncomfortable, hotel chair in the hallway outside the door to the room where the remaining Blood Brothers were stashed. Two senior detectives, two lieutenants, AND a captain had met him when he showed up for duty. They were serious about these guys. The instructions were clear. No one in or out unless they have a badge, check on them at irregular intervals. At 1:30 AM he had found them in there playing cards, using folded up pages from the hotel pad as chips, and he had heard them in there talking ever since.
Yawning, he pulled out his cell phone to take a crack at another level of Candy Crush. Just as the game loaded, he noticed something. It was quiet. The talking had finally stopped. Glimpsing at this watch, he assumed they had finally gone to sleep. It was almost 3:00. Better to check and be sure.
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No way those goons would stay in a room around the clock. No stinking way. Joe sat patiently on a folded dirty towel, dressed like a bum, by the bus stop at Travis and Clay, and occasionally pretended to take a sip of the terrible cheap wine sitting next to him in a paper bag. He discretely watched the back of the hotel a block up the street. If they exited, it would certainly be by way of a service door in the back, onto Travis. Even they weren’t stupid enough to parade through the lobby. His Suburban sat in waiting behind him, discretely backed into a parking space in the nearly-empty parking lot and pointed toward the exit onto Travis. It could take hours. It could take days. But they would come. He had to be extra-sharp because he could barely see without his glasses, but wearing them ruined his disguise as a homeless man. He would grab them off of the dashboard of the truck as soon as he needed them, and he wouldn’t need them until they came. Absolutely, they would come.
Chapter 22
Kent strolled quietly into the dark hotel room, pulled out his flashlight, and shined it on the beds, expecting to see four sleeping bodies. Instead, he saw two neatly made-up queen beds from housekeeping’s earlier visit. Backpedaling, he flipped on the light switch by the door.
“Hey! Don’t mess around! Where are you?” he barked at the empty room. The detectives had told him that the four gang-bangers were a major flight risk, and for that reason, they had been placed in a 5th-floor room with windows that didn’t open for them to attempt an escape through. Checking the bathroom and the closet, he peered around the room and finally spotted it. The door to an adjoining suite had been pried open and sat ajar. He hurried across the room and threw the door open. The adjoining room was also dark, save for a shaft of light entering from the hallway where the door to a hall on the other side of the building sat propped open by a hotel iron. Cursing, he keyed the mic on his shoulder and snatched his cell phone from his pocket as he ran to the door.
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Only an hour back at the house from making his rounds in Third Ward, Le blearily grabbed the ringing cell phone from his coffee table, knocking over an empty Red Bull can in the process.
“Yeah, Le,” he snapped into the phone.
“Your POI’s in the hotel went jackrabbit on me. They broke into the adjacent room and took off from the other side of the building,”
“Holy shit!” Le was instantly on his feet and grappling for the TV remote with his free hand to turn off the late-night sitcom reruns.
“I don’t think they went far. They propped a door open so they can come back,”
“Well, go find them! I’ll be right there,” Le grabbed his keys and ran out of his house.
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Rocking on the curb at the edge of Travis Street using the arches of his feet, Bullet held out an open box of Newports to the other three. Needle and Kanya each took one, but Biggie declined. As the three of them lit up, snickering at having pulled one over on the po-po guarding them, Biggie turned to Bullet.
“Needa talk. Just you and me,”
“The fuck you need to tell him that you can’t tell us?” Kanya acted indignant, motioning toward Needle and herself.
“Can’t tell you, so you gots plausible deniability,”
“The hell is that?” scowled Needle.
“Means you can’t tell the cops what you don’t know. Saw it on a detective show on the tube. C’mon, Bullet. Let’s go,” he ushered an unconvinced Bullet across the street, toward the windows of the Police Museum displaying a retired police cruiser from the 1950s.
As they stepped onto the curb across the street, Officer Kent burst through the service door that they had propped open with a maid’s cart. “Just what the hell do you idiots think you’re doing?”
“Havin’ a smoke,” laughed Kanya as she blew smoke in his direction. Kent ignored her.
“I’ve got them,” He said into a phone he was holding to his ear. “They came out a service door on the west side of the building to have a cigarette,”
“I’ll be there in 30 seconds,” replied Le on the other end. “I’m on Clay, just a few blocks off. Don’t let them go anywhere. Cuff them together if you have to,” He hung up the phone and threw it disgustedly into the passenger seat of his personal vehicle, a shiny new Tahoe with the Defender police package that was so rare in civilian vehicles. Just then he saw a black Suburban race north on Travis past Clay, accelerating hard. It had big bumpers. It had ground effects. It had giant commercial truck wheels. It was all one color now, but it had to be their vigilante. He snatched the phone up again.
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“Oh, shit! It’s him! It’s him! It’s him! Get outta here!” screamed Biggie when he saw the truck charging toward them from a few hundred feet away. With everything painted black and the headlights off, the truck looked like the devil coming to get him. He stood, frozen on his injured foot, and stared at it.
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“Why did you assholes have to split up?” Joe shouted angrily to no one. He let go of the wheel, rolled down both windows, and grabbed the other 9mm pistol from a holster under his arm. With a pistol in each hand, he let off the gas as he approached the people in the street, then braked as he passed them. Firing in two directions at once, an unexpected glimmer caught his eye. It was a badge. There was a cop near the pair on the right. He couldn’t risk a stray bullet hitting him, especially trying to aim in two opposite directions at once. He dropped the pistol from his right hand into the dark void where the passenger seat had been and focused his fire on the left side of the street with two hands. Biggie caught two bullets to his chest and dropped where he stood. The other one on the left dove behind a concrete column as the ones on the right scrambled for cover.
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Le rounded the corner from Clay to Travis so fast that it felt like his truck was on two wheels. When the Suburban came into view, he saw muzzle flashes from both front windows, firing at people on the sidewalks. The flashes to the right stopped, but the one on the left continued as bodies dropped. Then the brake lights of the truck blinked off and it zoomed away, northward. He floored his Defender, determined not to let the sonofabitch get away.
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“Shots fired! Shots fired! 1200 Travis, north of Clay,” Kent shouted into his microphone. He saw Le through the window of a black Tahoe charge past and up the street behind the Suburban. “Suspect fleeing in a black Chevy Suburban, northbound on Travis. Detective Le in pursuit in a black Chevy Tahoe. Civilian GSW. Multiple hits. Need EMT’s NOW! Repeat, need EMT’s for civilian multiple GSW victim,”
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Joe saw the truck tailing him with its high beams on. He poured on the gas, yanked the aftermarket e-brake handle bolted to the floor by his leg, and slid sideways onto Congress in a screech of spinning tires and a plume of white smoke. The big, supercharged engi
ne inched toward redline as he approached one hundred ten miles per hour and cut the wheel as hard as he dared through the curve over Buffalo Bayou, then yanked the e-brake again to powerslide westward onto Franklin, racing toward the fork at Washington Avenue. He didn’t have much time. Whatever kind of truck that was, it was fast and almost keeping up with him. The real problem was that his prized Suburban couldn’t outrun a police radio or a helicopter. He needed an exit before they could get organized. An idea hit him. As he approached Studemont, he could see the truck’s headlights getting smaller behind him. He had gained some ground. Using the e-brake for another spectacular powerslide, he barged north on Studemont, almost getting the heavy truck airborne as the road dipped under the Union Pacific train tracks. A split-second before he entered the dark of the tunnel under the tracks, he hit two of the repurposed buttons on his steering wheel. A steel tray just forward of his rear bumper dropped out its hinged bottom, scattering hollow tire stars all over the road in the darkened tunnel. Simultaneously, a row of nozzles dumped 4 gallons of mixed linolenic cooking oil and synthetic motor oil in his wake. After he was sure that all of his oil was dumped, he pushed the red button tie-wrapped to the steering wheel by his thumb, triggering his nitrous oxide system, surging the truck forward, and pushing the digital speedometer in his new gauge set past 140. He reached the Katy Freeway and merged into the thin eastbound traffic before the pursuing truck even reached the tunnel under the tracks.
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The truck was getting away. There was something special about that now-infamous Suburban, Le thought. Somebody had put a lot of time and money into souping it up. He didn’t know anything about Danton’s schedule, but he knew that he had deep pockets.
“Goddammit, where’s my air support?” He screamed at the phone on his passenger seat, now on speaker with a dispatcher.
He saw his temperature gauge creep up toward two hundred seventy degrees as he approached the corner of Studemont, where he had watched from a distance as the Suburban expertly executed a powerslide to the right from Washington Avenue.
“I’m turning north onto Studemont now, but the suspect has a pretty big lead on me. I’m about to overheat. We better have more cars in this chase soon, and some eyes in the sky,” he growled to the phone.
“Stand by,” came the expected response from the phone.
Entering the tunnel under the train tracks at over one hundred miles per hour, the sound of his tires bursting and suddenly going flat caught Le completely off guard. Before he could even react to the noise, the truck spun wildly out of control, doing pirouettes down the wide street and emitting violent screeching noises. Johnny wrestled with the wheel, dancing his feet between the brakes and the accelerator trying to regain control, but the Tahoe stubbornly remained on a wild vector of its own choosing. After eleven nauseating revolutions, the truck came to rest at a crooked angle across both northbound lanes with steam pouring out of the hood and grille. The smell of engine coolant and burning metal filled his passenger compartment as the engine sizzled.
Three onrushing cruisers, lights and sirens hot, dipped into the tunnel, swerved and veered awkwardly, and skidded to a stop a hundred feet short of Le’s truck.
“Southbound lanes! Southbound lanes! Use the Southbound lanes to travel north on Studemont!” he shouted to the dispatcher as he turned, dizzied, to the passenger seat. The phone was gone, flung to a far corner of the truck by the merciless laws of physics.
A minute later he saw cruisers racing by on the southbound side, but it was too late. Danton had surely reached the freeway by now, and they were close enough to the downtown interchanges that he could have gone in any direction.
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Cody Sims screeched his Crown Vic to a stop by the curb outside of the Police Museum a few feet shy of an ambulance that was parked, facing the wrong way. EMT’s were hunched over a body that lay motionless in a pool of blood. Kent stood on the opposite curb, looking disgusted and embarrassed. There was no one else on the scene.
“Where the hell is everybody?” he barked at Kent, who just shook his head dismally. “Le called me. Where is he? Where are the informants? What’s going on here?”
“Your gang bangers broke into the adjoining suite and sneaked out here for a smoke. Right when I found them, someone in a Suburban tore up the street spraying lead. He dropped that one.” Kent motioned to the body on the sidewalk. “The rest took off like scalded coyotes. They could be anywhere,”
“One of them was an inmate on provisional release from the county jail! The rest of them can go knock on this vigilante’s front door for him to shoot them, for all I care, but now we have a jailbreak on our hands to add to this clusterfuck!”
Chapter 23
Sitting listlessly on an upside-down milk crate, Joe stared at his Suburban and the Deuce, parked side-by-side, in his warehouse. He had put so much work into that truck and was so proud of it. Now it was a liability. It had to go. A familiar timid knock rapped on the entry door.
“Come on in, Oscar!” he hollered toward the door. The door squeaked open slowly, just far enough for Oscar to slip through, and he cautiously entered. He looked decidedly nervous. Joe had given him plenty of reason to be, in their most recent encounters.
“I get you message. You want more help?”
“You told me that you and Jefe were stripping cars when he got busted, right?”
“Si,”
“He ran the books and you stripped?”
“Si,”
“How fast do you think you can strip that Suburban?” Joe indicated his precious truck.
“Is big. Extra parts. Tres, quatro horas,”
“There’s an oxy/acetylene torch over there, tool chest where you left it, get busy. Destroy the VIN’s, smash the PCM, cut up the body, all of it. There can be no way to identify the truck,”
“You sell parts?”
“Let me worry about that. Cut it up, but don’t mess around with that big gun. I’ll handle that part,”
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Greenie wandered into an unfamiliar corner bar. Finding a place to have a quiet drink was getting harder and harder. Most watering holes in the city had noisy sound systems and raucous crowds. He just wanted a good whiskey and some calming music to sort his thoughts and settle his nerves. Juggling temp workers was a harder job than most people gave him credit for. He drifted to the far end of the bar, settled into a stool, and stared at a flickering artificial tealight behind the diamond pattern of a small glass shade a few feet away. One day he would find a way to quiet the noises in his head leftover from his time in Iraq.
A slim, young, and well-dressed bartender drifted over to him. He was clean-shaven, black like Greenie but lighter-skinned, and was wiping his hands on a towel that was draped over his left shoulder.
“What can I get you?” he asked, slapping a napkin down.
“What kind of bourbon do you have in the well?”
“Wild Turkey,”
“Ugh. What about on the shelf?”
“Maker’s Mark,”
“How about a higher shelf?”
“Micher’s and Jim Beam Black,”
“Three fingers of Jim Beam Black on the rocks,”
“You got it,” he turned briskly and hustled away.
Greenie stared at the tealight some more and listened to the Myles Davis track playing softly from a speaker on the shelf behind the bar.
“There you go, brother,” the bartender set a whiskey glass down in front of Greenie on the napkin. Greenie snapped his gaze toward the young man.
“What branch?”
“What’s that, brother?” the young man was confused.
“What branch of the military were you in?” clarified Greenie.
“I wasn’t in the military. I go to U of H-“ Greenie cut him off.
“Then you aren’t my brother. Having the same skin color doesn’t make us brothers. My brothers are the men who wore the same uniform and had the same flag on their shoulders as m
e. Got it, son?”
“Yes, sir,” the bartender had sense enough not to get belligerent with him and instead headed over to a customer who was summoning him for another drink.
“He’s just a kid. No need to bust his balls,” came a nearby voice. Greenie whirled around on the stool and found Joe lounging at a table a few feet behind him.
“Damn, Joe! Where’d you come from?” Greenie carried his glass to the table.
“I have to keep a low profile these days,”
“Yeah, but I’ve never been in here before. You tailing me?”
“Nope. Well, only since you left your office. I needed a private place to talk and this works nicely,”
“Your handiwork all over the TV?”
“Do you honestly want me to answer that?”
“No, actually,”
“That’s why I’m here. The DA gave immunity to the cretins who shot Foster, as long as they finger me. Things are kind of upside-down,”
“That’s crazy,”
“My lawyer says the police are looking for anyone I associate with to interrogate. They’ll come to you eventually,”
“I’ve got no beef with the boys in blue unless they come sniffing around my side piece. That’s my retirement,”
