by Jason Trevor
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Officer Kent and Detective Le rode quietly together in an unmarked cruiser down Tuam and stopped just past Canfield. Johnny knew the crumbling house a few blocks up on the left, at Scott Street, was a frequent haunt for the Blood Brothers. Since they both had recent, in-person interactions with all three missing ones, the duty fell to Kent and Le to watch and see if they turned up at the house, or if Danton would somehow learn about it and turn up.
A few hundred feet in front of them, Joe peered in their direction through the dirty rear-seat window of his Super Beetle and cursed under his breath. Now he had a place to use his thermite.
Chapter 25
Three tired pairs of legs pushed through the overgrown gate alongside Scott Street and plodded through the tall grass to the house’s side door. The long walk from downtown to Kanya’s house had found it wrapped up in crime scene tape with a forensic seal on the door. Traveling over to Meat’s place on Delano revealed the same, along with thousands of bullet holes. Further trudging to Poppa Burger and sitting for the night at an outdoor picnic table to discuss their options had led Bullet, Needle, and Kanya to the conclusion that their only option was Cornbread’s and Toad’s rental. It was a straight cash crib with no other connection to the three of them.
Bullet and Needle headed straight for a scarred-up old hope chest at the end of a ripped and stained couch, which Kanya flung herself onto. They dug around in the disorganized chest. A moment later, Needle stood up with a cheap .380 automatic pistol in one hand and a Glock 17 9mm pistol in the other. Bullet fished for a few more seconds, all the way to the bottom of the chest, and emerged with an Ingram Mac 10 that belonged to his brother, along with several boxes of 9mm ammunition for it and the Glock.
“That machine gun ain’t gonna bring you nothin’ but trouble,” warned Kanya when she saw it. “It’s been in the chest since Tony popped the raghead in the liquor store with it last year. Po-po find you with it, they gonna send you up for that,”
“Nobody besides you two gonna get that close to me. Don’t care who they are. No Blood Brothers ink, Ima empty this Ingram into them. Shield, soldier, whatever. It ain’t my time to die yet, and this gun is mine if Tony don’t survive,”
“Nigga, he blew up my husband. I get to cap him! Give me that shiny one that Joey always loved scaring people with,” Bullet bent back down and pulled out a nickel-plated .45, which he handed to her. “I’m gonna blow a big-assed hole in him with this. But first, we gots to get some sleep and then figure out what to do about every five-oh in the city looking for us,”
Needle had sauntered over to a front window of the house and peeked through a hole in a yellowed and ripped shade. “Hey, what’s with the crappy green beetle parked up there? Never seen it around here before,”
“Nigga, you’re paranoid. Homes drives a Suburban. Police are looking harder for him than they are for us,” smirked Bullet.
“Yeah, I guess,” sighed Needle tiredly. “It’s driving away anyway,”
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Joe snickered as he valet parked the nasty old Super Beetle at his hotel and headed to the elevator. It was time for more action in Third Ward again, but not before he got some rest. They could sweat it out in that house for a few hours, and he was sure that the two men in the unmarked Crown Vic had not seen them enter the house from Scott Street.
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“Yep, definitely activity in there again. They’re probably afraid to come out,” commented Le as he peered through binoculars at the house from their perch on Tuam. He and Kent had not moved since the night before. They wanted to call Sims with good news, but he would probably want to know who was in the house, not just that they had seen signs of movement and lights switching on and off. “I’m going to call Sims. They could stay in there forever without showing a face. Let’s see what he thinks,”. Johnny shuffled a half-empty Red Bull can from between his thighs to the cupholder after he put the binoculars back down on the console. He fished his phone from under a few empty Cheetos bags and dialed Cody Sims’ number.
“Give me some good news,” answered a tired Cody Sims on the other end.
“We’ve had movement in the house since yesterday afternoon, but no one in or out. Do you want to make a move?”
“It’s tempting, but let’s wait and see if we can find out exactly who it is. Just keep your eyes on the place and update me with any developments,”
“Roger that. We’ll be in touch,” Just as he put the phone down, he glimpsed off-handedly in the side-view mirror, did a double-take, then whirled around in his seat to look behind them. “What the hell is that?”
Kent spun around in the seat and looked behind them. An enormous olive drab green bumper and grille were bearing down on them. It wasn’t fast. It just slowly rumbled down the street toward them. The truck was huge, with a menacing, “stop me if you think you can” stance. “What is that?” asked Kent.
“It’s a deuce-and-a-half, a military six-by-six vehicle,” confirmed Le as he looked closer, “but this is not the place to find one. I think that house up there is about to get a visit from our friend, Danton,”
“Detective, that is not a Suburban!”
“I see that!”
“Can you stop it?”
“Maybe with an RPG to kill the engine. That’s about it. We’re not his targets. He’s never harmed anyone but the Blood Brothers. The fact that you were standing on that sidewalk the other night is probably why we don’t have more bodies on our hands. He saw you there and didn’t want to hit you,”
“That’s all well and good, but what do we do right now?”
“Just stay put. It could just be someone taking their deuce for a drive,”
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Humming an Aerosmith tune to himself as his M35 lumbered slowly down Tuam, Joe reached over to the passenger seat of his deuce and grabbed the sack with the wad of clay thermite stuffed into the bottom of it from on top of a few pistols and an AR15 that were piled up there. He pulled a sparkler and a Zippo lighter out of his pocket and pierced the sparkler through the side of the sack, as far into the clay as he could get it. Now his thermite had a fuse.
As expected, there was bristling and activity inside of the painfully obvious unmarked cruiser when he got within a hundred or so feet of it. He had recognized Le when he saw them from the back of his Super Beetle but had no idea who the other one was. Le would know what a deuce and a half was and would know the futility of trying to stop it. What remained to be seen was if they would be quick-thinking enough to simply stand in his way. That would be the only way to stop him. He would not run over a cop and that much was probably clear by now.
Pulling alongside the Crown Vic, Joe rolled to a stop, threw open the driver’s door, and climbed down, with the thermite in one hand and the lighter in the other. He walked around the front of his truck and was met by Detective Le and the stranger standing behind open car doors, guns leveled at him.
“Whoa, guys. Take it easy,” he said calmly. “I’m unarmed,”
“Let me see your hands!” shouted the stranger.
“You can see my hands,” Joe held up the sack and the lighter. Before either of them could say anything more, he flicked the Zippo open and lit it with one swift movement of his thumb back and forth, then lit the sparkler and slipped the Zippo into his shirt pocket. “I thought you guys would enjoy some fireworks!” He tossed the sack into the middle of the car’s hood and it landed with a thud, flattening on the bottom to the contour of the sheet metal. “If you want to shoot me, it will have to be in the back,” He turned on his heel and walked around the deuce again, resuming his rendition of Love in an Elevator.
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“What the hell is that?” Kent looked at the sack as he lowered his gun, helplessly letting the truck rumble away from them.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good. Get the fire extinguisher, but stay back,” he took a few steps away as Kent reached into the car to push the trunk release in the glove
box before hurrying to the back to retrieve the extinguisher. As he returned, the burning sparkler reached the sack, and for a few seconds, appeared to have burned itself out. Both men stared from a safe distance.
“A homemade dud?” suggested Kent. Just as he spoke, a small section of the sack near the sparkler burst into a white-hot flame and began making a popping noise as sparks of hot slag scattered around it. The flame grew quickly, consuming the sack, and began to melt its way through the hood. Kent ran over and tried to douse it with the fire extinguisher.
“No!” admonished Le. “That’s thermite. You can’t put it out. You just have to let it burn out,” the thermite had now melted through the hood and engine shroud and was burning its way into the intake manifold. At this rate, by Johnny’s estimation, it would melt most or all of the way through the engine block before it burned out. In any case, their car was now an ornament.
Then they heard a thunderous crash from the direction of the house, followed shortly by automatic gunfire.
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“Holy shit, y’all ain’t fixin’ to believe this!” shouted Needle to the other two.
“What’s up?” Bullet got up from the rickety dinette set and headed for the window where Needle was. Kanya looked on from her perch on the couch.
“It’s a big-assed army truck, comin’ down the street toward us,”
As they peeked through holes in the shade, the truck diverted from the street at an awkward angle and bashed cleanly through the cyclone fence as if it weren’t there, plodding unhindered through the tall grass.
“Holy hell!” screamed Bullet as he ran back to the table and snatched up the Ingram, then darted to the front door and threw it open. He sprayed the front of the truck, the tires, and managed to put four holes in the windshield in the two seconds before the Mac 10 was empty. The driver had dropped out of view. Bullet narrowed his eyes as he watched carefully. The truck didn’t slow down. Then the driver popped back up. “Shit!” He ran across to the back of the house as Kanya and Needle arrived with their three pistols in tow.
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After the burst of automatic gunfire, Joe was ready. He shoved the windshield down on its hinges and grabbed the first gun that his hand landed on when he reached over. It was one of his tiny .380 automatic pistols. He braced his arm on the wheel and aimed over the hood at the two people that had appeared in the open doorway, making a perfect line of sight down his arm and over the gun sights with his targets. Firing as fast as he could until it was empty, he saw one body drop to the floor. The other one dropped a nickel-plated pistol that they were holding, grabbed their arm, and ducked out of sight, trying to slam the door but finding it now blocked by a body.
Gunning the big Hercules engine, Joe downshifted as he prepared for impact with the house. The front porch and outside wall collapsed around the charging truck like a house of cards. He barely felt the three bumps from his left three wheels as he ran over the body lying by the door. Now with a full view of the main living area of the house, he saw a woman holding a bleeding arm and scrambling backward into a broken and ugly old dining room table. He’d seen the two B’s with a 3 wedged in between them on her neck from the back of his VW and he felt no mercy. He charged forward until his view of her disappeared below the hood line, crushing her and the table. He continued forward until he had smashed through the side wall of the house, facing Scott Street.
There was a third one. The young guy. Tony’s brother. Where had he gone? Joe checked his mirrors and saw the ceiling and roof sagging toward their inevitable collapse, along with a hallway that led to bedrooms and a bathroom on the other side of the house. He leaned out of the driver’s window and looked back. There he was, fumbling to get an old hope chest open. Probably going for another gun. Joe threw the truck into reverse and dumped the clutch, centering the truck on the hallway as he grabbed his full-auto-converted AR-15. As he rolled backward to demolish the rest of the house, he prepared to empty the magazine into this last punk, but when he was lined up with the chest, the guy was gone. Surprised and still rolling backward, Joe peered around and saw Bullet bolting across the back yard towards the street, with the big nickel-plated pistol in his hand. He had gone out the window. Just as Joe threw the truck back into a forward gear to chase him down, the roof and the ceiling collapsed around him, bringing the rest of the house down. Broken boards, chunks of sheetrock, and sheets of insulation buried the truck on all sides. Plowing through the rubble as fast as he could while wrestling with the wheel and shifter, Joe escaped the mess and bounced onto Scott Street. Bullet was nowhere to be seen. One got away.
He shook himself out of his target focus and realized that the two policemen were running up behind him, guns at the ready. He could hear approaching sirens. It was time to go.
Chapter 26
“So Dick, how’s that proposal to do more dredging on the San Jac River looking?” Greenie asked through a mouthful of steak, glancing sideways at the city councilman sitting next to him as he sawed another piece off.
“Well, there’s a lot of money living up that way, but not enough people to throw around much influence in city hall. I’m trying. That area just floods too much,”
“To be sure. It seems like Houston floods more than New Orleans,” chimed in Robert, a lanky and young aide to the governor who had ridden in from Austin with two department overlords and a state legislator that morning.
“Some parts do flood more than New Orleans,” commented a nearby oil executive.
The ten men around the large table at the Steamboat House restaurant exchanged solemn nods and comments about the frustration of the flooding and the bloat of city and county governments’ delay of effective prevention.
“The city is built on a swamp. Floods are a part of life and have to be expected. San Francisco has earthquakes, Chicago has blizzards, Kansas City has tornados. We have floods,” an unexpected and unfamiliar voice had injected itself into the conversation from a few feet away as it approached.
The group of powerful and influential men all looked up from their meals, surprised. They were confronted by an average height, average build, average hair, and wholly unremarkable man in an off-the-rack suit that would be a crime to pay more than $200 for. What was remarkable was the out-of-place and expensive Bates shoes and knit socks, which Greenie quickly noticed from his vantage point. This was definitely a cop. So, he was that stupid, after all. Greenie stood up before the uninvited guest could speak again.
“Cody Sims, I presume?”
“Edward Green? I’m heading up the recently-formed HDP vigilante task force, and I need to ask you some questions about your associate, Joe Danton. Can we speak in private?” It was phrased as a question as he flashed his badge but verbalized in a tone to make it clear that it was an order.
“Well, Detective, there are a thousand different times and places that you could have ambushed me for questioning. Now that you have all but accused my friend of being a serial killer with no due process in front of some of the most powerful men in the state, let’s retire to the bar where I can tell you that he is no such thing and give you my lawyer’s business card,”
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“He did what?” William was so incredulous that he wasn’t entirely certain about what he had just heard.
“Cody Sims just cornered a business associate of mine during a political luncheon. At least six of the guys there were among the biggest fish in the city and state ponds. He just pissed off half of the state government and a sizeable chunk of city hall,” Joe wandered through the balcony door of his hotel room and leaned on the rail. William followed.
“What kind of experienced detective drags an investigation into politics without thinking he’ll undermine his credibility?”
“I’m thinking that he wanted to fluster Greenie and put him on his heels so that he could trap him,”
“Did he?”
“Greenie is a former Green Beret. Nothing puts him on his heels. He gave the detective his lawy
er’s number and told him to take a flying leap. Sims would have gotten more cooperation if he hadn’t tried such a stunt and just showed up at Greenie’s office,”
“OK, let’s change the subject now. What do you know about a crack house getting bulldozed by a military vehicle in Third Ward this morning?”
“A lot. How much do you want to know?”
“I already know most of it, because two cops were watching. It seems that you even approached them and burned a hole in their car before you did it. The news crews went crazy with that part,”
“Yeah, the thermite worked better than I thought it would. Making it at home can be an iffy proposition,”
“We have first-hand witnesses, who are also cops. I expect a call any minute that a warrant has been issued for your arrest,”
Joe stood up straight and stared at William. “How long, realistically speaking?”
“Any second. No joke,”
“OK, here’s the deal. When they call you asking for my surrender, you call me and find out where I am. Do not risk your freedom or your license lying to them. Be honest about my whereabouts and don’t promise cooperation from me,”
“They’re going to ask,”
“Blow some legal BS up their butts to protect yourself. You and I can’t be in the same room for a while,”
“You’re not going to hurt any innocent cops, are you?”
“Absolutely not, but it will be the most spectacular vanishing act you’ve ever seen,”
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Bullet trudged along Tuam, wondering where to go. The large nickel-plated pistol stuffed into the back of his britches was heavy, and he had to persistently hitch them up so that it wasn’t exposed at the bottom of his shirt. He wished he could go to the hospital and ask Tony what to do. He always had the answers. No, a visit to big brother was a bad idea. Po-po would pick him up for sure if he was seen there. They had been crashing on Meat’s pull-out couch for months, but that place was full of bullet holes. Cornbread’s and Toad’s place was a pile of sticks now, with Kanya and Needle buried under them…
