Jackie O didn’t entertain many visitors in his Tribeca apartment, purchased on the advice of his accountant many years before and now the most valuable possession that he had. After all, he spent most of his time surrounded by hookers and pimps, and they weren’t the kind of people to appreciate the art upon his walls. Real connoisseurs of art tended not to socialize with pimps. They might avail themselves of the services offered by them, but they sure weren’t going to be stopping by for wine and cheese. For that reason, Jackie O enjoyed a fleeting moment of pleasure when he looked through the spy hole in his steel door and saw Louis standing outside. Here was somebody who might appreciate his collection, he thought, until he quickly realized the probable reason for the visit. He knew that he had two choices: he could refuse to let Louis in, in which case he was likely to make the situation worse, or he could simply admit him and hope that the situation wasn’t already so bad that it couldn’t possibly get much worse. Neither option was particularly appealing to him, but the longer Jackie O procrastinated, the more likely he was to try the patience of his visitor.
Before opening the door, he put the safety back on the H&K that he held in his right hand, then slid it into the holster that lay taped flat beneath a small table near the door. He composed his features into as close to an expression of joy and surprise as his fear would allow, unlocked and opened the door, and got as far as the words “My man! Welcome!” before Louis’s hand closed around his throat. The barrel of a Glock was pressed hard into the hollow below Jackie O’s left cheekbone, a hollow whose size was increased by Jackie O’s gaping mouth. Louis kicked the door shut with his heel, then forced the pimp back into the living room before sending him sprawling across his couch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, so Jackie O was still wearing his red Japanese silk robe and a pair of lilac pajamas. He found it hard to muster his dignity dressed as he was, but he gave it a good try.
“Hey man, what is this?” he protested. “I invite you into my home, and this is how you treat me. Look” — he fingered the collar of his gown, revealing a six-inch rip in the material — “you done tore my gown, and this shit’s silk.”
“Shut up,” said Louis. “You know why I’m here.”
“How would I know that?”
“It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. You know.”
Jackie O gave up the act. This man was not one with whom to play the fool. Jackie O could recall the first time he ever set eyes on him, almost a decade before. Even then he had heard stories, but he had not encountered the one about whom they were told. Louis was different in those days: there was a fire burning coldly inside him, clear for all to see, although the ferocity of it was slowly diminishing even then, the flames flickering confusedly in a series of crosswinds. Jackie O figured that a man couldn’t just go on killing and hurting without paying a high price for it over time. The worst of them — the sociopaths and the psychos — they just didn’t realize it was happening, or maybe some were just so damaged to start with that there wasn’t much room for further deterioration. Louis wasn’t like that, though, and when Jackie O first knew him the consequences of his actions were gradually beginning to take their toll upon him.
A honey trap was being set for a man who preyed on young women, after a girl was killed by him in a country far from this one. Some very powerful people had decreed that this man was to die, and he was drowned in a bathtub in his hotel room, lured there with the promise of a girl and a guarantee that no questions would be asked if she suffered a little, for he was a man with the money to indulge his tastes. It wasn’t an expensive hotel room, and the man had no possessions with him when he died, other than his wallet and his watch. He was still wearing the watch when he died. In fact, he was fully clothed when he was found, because the people who had ordered his death didn’t want there to be even the slightest possibility that it might be mistaken for suicide or natural causes. His killing would serve as a warning to others of his kind.
It was Jackie O’s bad luck to be coming out of a hotel room on the same floor when the killer emerged, after Jackie had set up one of his marginally more expensive women for a day’s work. He didn’t know the man was a killer, not then, or certainly not for sure, although he sensed something circling beneath the seemingly placid surface, like the pale ghost of a shark glimpsed moving through the deep blue depths. Their eyes locked but Jackie kept moving, making for the security of crowds and people. He didn’t know where the man was going, or what he had been doing in that hotel room, and he didn’t want to know. He didn’t even look back until he was at the corner of the hallway, the stairs in view, and by then the man was gone. But Jackie O read the papers, and he didn’t need to be a mathematician to put two and two together. At that moment he cursed his high profile among his kind, and his love of fine clothes. He knew he would be easy to find, and he was right.
So this was not the first time that the killer Louis had invaded his space; nor was it the first time that his gun had pressed itself to Jackie’s flesh. On that first occasion, Jackie had been sure that he was going to die, but there had been a steadiness to his voice when he said: “You got nothing to fear from me, son. If I was younger, and I had the nerve, I might have done the same myself.”
The gun had slowly disengaged itself from his face, and Louis had left him without another word, but Jackie knew that he owed him a debt for his life. In time, Jackie learned more about him, and the stories he had heard started to make sense. After some years Louis returned to him, now changed somehow, and gave Jackie O his name, and asked him to look out for a young woman with a soft Southern accent and a growing love for the needle.
And Jackie had done his best for her. He tried to encourage her to seek another path as she drifted from pimp to pimp. He helped Louis to track her on those repeated occasions when he was determined to force her to seek help. He intervened with others where necessary, reminding those who had her in their charge that she was different, that questions would be asked if she was harmed. Yet it was an unsatisfactory arrangement, and he had seen the pain in the younger man’s face as this woman who was blood to him was passed from man to man, and died a little in every hand. Slowly, Jackie began to care less about her, as she started to care less about herself. Now she was gone, and her failed guardian was seeking a reckoning with those responsible.
“She was G-Mack’s girl,” said Jackie O. “I tried talking to him, but he don’t listen to no old men. I got girls of my own to look out for. I couldn’t be watching her all the time.”
Louis sat down on a chair opposite the couch. The gun remained pointing at Jackie O. It made Jackie O nervous. Louis was calm. The anger had disappeared as suddenly as it had manifested itself, and that made Jackie more afraid than ever. At least anger and rage were human emotions. What he was witnessing now was a man disengaging from all such feelings as he prepared to visit harm on another.
“Now, I got a problem with what you just told me,” said Louis. “First of all, you said ‘was,’ as in she ‘was’ G-Mack’s girl. That’s the past tense, and it has a ring of permanence about it that I don’t like. Second, last I heard she was with Free Billy. You were supposed to tell me if that situation changed.”
“Free Billy died,” said Jackie O. “You weren’t around. His girls were divided up.”
“Did you take any of them?”
“One, yeah. She was Asian. I knew she’d bring in good money.”
“But not Alice.”
Jackie O realized his mistake.
“I had too many girls already.”
“But not so many that you couldn’t find room for the Asian.”
“She was special, man.”
Louis leaned forward slightly.
“Alice was special too. To me.”
“Don’t you think I know that? But I told you, a long time ago, that I wouldn’t take her. I wasn’t going to have you look in my eyes and see the man who was handing her over to others. I made that clear to you.”
Louis’s e
yes flickered.
“You did.”
“I thought she’d be okay with G-Mack, honest, man,” said Jackie O. “He’s starting out. He wants to make his rep. I heard nothing bad about him, so I had no reason to be concerned for her. He didn’t want to hear anything from me, but that don’t make him no different from any of the other young bloods.”
Slowly, Jackie O was beginning to recover his courage. This wasn’t right. This was his place, and he was being disrespected, and over something that wasn’t his concern. Jackie O had been in the game too long to take this kind of shit, even from a man like Louis.
“Anyway, the fuck you blaming me for? She wasn’t my concern. She was yours. You wanted someone to look out for her all the time, then that someone should have been you.”
The words came out in such a rush that, once he had started speaking, Jackie O found himself unable to stop. The accusation now lay between the two men, and Jackie O didn’t know if it was going to just disappear, or explode in his face. In the end, it did neither. Louis flinched, and Jackie O saw the guilt wash like rain across his face.
“I tried,” he said softly.
Jackie O nodded and looked to the floor. He had seen the woman return to the streets after each intervention by the man before him. She had checked out of public hospitals, and virtually escaped from private clinics. Once, on the last occasion when Louis had tried to take her back, she pulled a blade on him. After that Louis had asked Jackie O to continue doing what he could for her, except there wasn’t much that Jackie O could do, because this woman was sliding, and sliding fast. Maybe there were better men than Free Billy for her to be with, but Free Billy wasn’t the kind of man who gave up his property easily. He’d received a warning through Jackie O about what would happen to him if he didn’t do right by Alice, but it wasn’t like they were man and wife and Louis was the father of the bride. This was a pimp and one of his whores we were talking about. Even with the best will in the world — and Free Billy was a long way from having any kind of goodwill — there was a limit to the amount that a pimp could, or would, do for a woman who was forced to make her money from whoring. Then Free Billy died, and Alice ended up with G-Mack. Jackie O knew that he should have taken her into his stable, but he just didn’t want her, even aside from anything else he had told Louis. She was trouble, and in daylight she was soon going to look like the walking dead because of all the shit she was pouring into her system. Jackie O didn’t hold with junkies in his stable. They were unpredictable, and they spread disease. Jackie O always tried to make sure that his girls practised safe sex, didn’t matter how much the John offered for something extra. A woman like Alice, well, hell, there was no predicting what she might do if the need was on her. Other pimps weren’t as particular as Jackie O. They didn’t have any social conscience. Like he said, he’d figured she’d be okay with G-Mack, except it turned out that G-Mack wasn’t smart enough to do the right thing.
Jackie O had survived for a long time in his chosen profession. He grew up on these streets, and he was a wild young man in those days. He stole, sold weed, boosted cars. There wasn’t much that Jackie O wouldn’t do to turn a buck, although he always drew the line at inflicting harm on his victims. He carried a gun then, but he never had call to use it. Most of the time, those he stole from never even saw his face, because he kept contact to a minimum. Now junkies busted into people’s cribs while they were asleep, and when those folks woke up they usually weren’t best pleased to see some wired-up brother trying to steal their DVD player, and a confrontation ensued more often than not. People got hurt when there was no necessity for it, and Jackie O didn’t hold with that kind of behavior.
Jackie O entered into pimping kind of accidentally. Turned out he was a pimp without even knowing it, on account of the first woman that he fell for in a serious way. Jackie O was down on his luck when he met her, due to some no-account Negroes who had ripped him off on a supply buy that would have kept him in weed for the rest of the year. This left Jackie O with some serious cash flow problems, and he found himself out on the street once he’d used up all the favors he could call in. In the end, there was barely a couch in the neighborhood that he hadn’t called his bed at some point. Then he met a woman in a basement bar and one thing led to another, the way it sometimes will between a man and a woman. She was older than he by five years, and she gave him a bed for one night, then a second, then a third. She told him she had a job that kept her out late, but it wasn’t until the fourth night that he saw her getting ready for the streets and he figured out what that job might be. But he stayed with her while he waited for his situation to improve, and some nights he would accompany her as she made her way to the little warren of streets upon which she plied her trade, discreetly following her and the johns to vacant lots just to make sure that no harm came to her, in return for which she would give him ten bucks. Once, on a rainy Thursday night, he heard her cry out from the cab of a delivery truck, and he came running to find the guy had slapped her over some imagined slight. Jackie O took care of him, catching him by surprise and hitting him over the back of the head with a blackjack that he kept in his coat pocket for just such an eventuality. After that, he became her shadow, and pretty soon he became the shadow for a bunch of other women too.
Jackie O never looked back.
He tried not to think too deeply about what he did. Jackie O was a God-fearing man, and gave generously to his local church, seeing it as an investment in his future, if nothing else. He knew that what he was doing was wrong in the eyes of the Lord, but if he didn’t do it, then someone else would, and that someone might not care about the women the way Jackie did. That would be his argument, if it came down to it and the good Lord was looking dubious about admitting Jackie to his eternal reward.
So Jackie O watched his women and his streets, and encouraged his peers to do likewise. It made good business sense: they weren’t looking out only for their whores, but for the cops too. Jackie didn’t like to see his women, half naked and dressed in high heels, trying to run from Vice in the event of a descent on the Point. If they fell in those heels, then, likely as not, they’d do themselves an injury. Given enough notice, they could just slink away into the shadows and wait for the heat to disperse.
That was how the rumors came back to Jackie, shortly after Alice and her friend had disappeared from the streets. The women started to tell of a black van, its plates beaten and obscured. It was a given on the streets that vans and SUVs were to be avoided anyway, because they were tailor-made for abduction and rape. It didn’t help that his women were already a little paranoid because stories were circulating about people who had gone missing in recent months: girls and younger men, in the main, most of them homeless or junkies. Jackie O had seriously considered putting some of his women on temporary medication to calm them down, so at first he was skeptical about the mythical van. No approaches were ever made to them from the men inside, they said, and Jackie suggested that it might simply be the cops in another guise, but then Lula, one of his best girls, came to him just as she was about to take to the streets.
“You need to watch out for that black Transit,” she told him. “I hear they been asking after some girls used to service some old guy out in Queens.”
Jackie O always listened to Lula. She was the oldest of his whores, and she knew the streets and the other women. She was the den mother, and Jackie had learned to trust her instincts.
“You think they’re cops?”
“They ain’t no cops. Plates are all torn up, and they feel bad, the men inside.”
“What do they look like?”
“They’re white. One of them’s fat, real fat. I didn’t get a good look at the other.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you just tell the girls to walk away if they see that van. Tell them to come to me, y’hear?”
Lula nodded and went to take up her place at the nearest corner. Jackie O did some walking that night, talking to the other pimps, but it was hard with some as they were
men of low breeding, and lower intelligence.
“Yo bitch spookin you, Jackie,” said one, a porcine man who liked to be called Havana Slim on account of the cigars that he smoked, didn’t matter that the cigars were cheap Dominicans. “You gettin old, man. Street’s no place for you now.”
Jackie ignored the taunt. He had been here long before Havana, and he would be here long after Havana was gone. Eventually he found G-Mack, but G-Mack just blew Jackie O right off. Jackie O could see that he was rattled, though, and the older man began filling in the blanks for himself.
One night later, Jackie O glimpsed the black van for the first time. He had slipped down an alleyway to take a leak when he saw something gleaming behind a big Dumpster. He zipped himself up as, gradually, the lines of the van were revealed to him. The rear plate was no longer battered or obscured, and Jackie O figured there and then that they were changing the plates on a regular basis. The tires were new, and although some damage had been done to the side panels, it looked purely cosmetic, an attempt to divert attention from the van and its occupants by making it appear older and less well maintained than it really was.
Jackie reached the driver’s door. The windows were smoked glass, but Jackie thought that he could see one figure, maybe two, moving inside. He knocked on the glass, but there was no response.