The Charlie Parker Collection 2

  “She’s just a child,” I said to Louis.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Save her later.”

  G-Mack had promised to slip Ellen ten percent of whatever the other women made if she acted as his go-between for the night, a deal to which Ellen was happy to agree because it meant that she got to spend a few hours drinking coffee and reading magazines instead of freezing her ass off in her underwear while she tried to entice sleazebags into vacant lots. But it didn’t do for G-Mack to be away from his women for too long. The bitches were already ripping him off. Without his physical presence to keep them in line, he’d be lucky to come out with nickels and dimes by close of business. He knew that Ellen would also take a little extra before she handed over the cash to him, so all things considered, this wasn’t going to be a profitable night for him. He didn’t know how much longer he could stay in the shadows, trying to avoid a confrontation that must inevitably come unless he got together enough cash to run. He had considered selling on the Cutlass, but only for about five seconds. He loved that car. Buying it had been his dream, and disposing of it would be like admitting that he was a failure.

  A figure moved in his rearview mirror. The Hi-Point was back in the waistband of his jeans, but the Glock was warm in his right hand, held low down by his thigh. He tightened his grip on it. It felt slick upon the sweat of his palm. A man stood, wavering, close to the wall. G-Mack could see that he was a no-count, dressed in tattered denims and anonymous sneakers that looked like they came from a thrift store. The man fumbled in his pants, then turned to one side and leaned his forehead against the wall, waiting for the flow to start. G-Mack relaxed his grip on the Glock. The driver’s-side window of the Dodge exploded inward, showering him with glass. He tried to raise his gun as the passenger window also disintegrated, but he received a blow to the side of the head that stunned him, and then a strong hand was upon his right arm and the muzzle of a gun much bigger than his own was pressed painfully into his temple. He caught a glimpse of a black man with close-cropped graying hair and a vaguely satanic beard. The man did not look happy to see him.

  G-Mack’s left hand began to drift casually toward the Hi-Point concealed beneath his jacket, but the passenger door opened and another voice said: “I wouldn’t.”

  G-Mack didn’t, and the Hi-Point was slipped from his jeans.

  “Let the Glock go,” said Louis.

  G-Mack allowed the gun to drop to the floor of the car.

  Slowly, Louis eased the gun away from G-Mack’s temple and opened the car door.

  “Get out,” said Louis. “Keep your hands raised.”

  G-Mack glanced to his left, where I knelt outside the passenger door. The Hi-Point in my left hand was dwarfed by my Colt. It was Big Gun Night, but nobody had told G-Mack. He stepped carefully from the car, falling glass tinkling to the ground as he did so. Louis turned him, pushing him against the side of the car and forcing his legs apart. G-Mack felt hands upon him and saw the little man in denim who had previously seemed on the verge of taking a drunken leak. He couldn’t believe that he had been fooled so easily.

  Louis tapped him with the barrel of his own H&K.

  “You see how dumb you are?” he said. “Now, we going to give you a chance to show how smart you are instead. Turn around, slowly.”

  G-Mack did as he was told. He was now facing Louis and Angel. Angel was holding G-Mack’s Glock. G-Mack wasn’t going to be getting it back. In fact, although G-Mack probably didn’t know it, he was now as close as he had ever come to being killed.

  “What do you want?” asked G-Mack.

  “Information. We want to know about a woman named Alice. She’s one of your girls.”

  “She’s gone. I don’t know where she’s at.”

  Louis raked his gun across G-Mack’s face. The younger man curled up, his hands cupped around his ruined nose and blood flowing freely between his fingers.

  “You remember a woman?” said Louis. “Came to you a couple of nights back, asked you the same question that I just asked? You remember what you did to her?”

  After a moment’s pause, G-Mack nodded, his head still down and drops of blood sprinkling the pitted ground beneath his feet, falling on the weeds that had sprouted between the cracks.

  “Well, I ain’t even started hurting you enough for what happened to her, so if you don’t answer my questions right, then you won’t be walking out of this alley, do you understand?”

  Louis’s voice dropped until it was barely a whisper.

  “The worst thing about what will happen to you is that I won’t kill you,” he said. “I’ll leave you a cripple, with hands that won’t grip, ears that won’t hear, and eyes that won’t see. Are we clear?”

  Again, G-Mack nodded. He had no doubt that this man would carry out his threats to the letter.

  “Look at me,” said Louis.

  G-Mack lowered his hands and raised his head. His lower jaw hung open in shock, and his teeth were red.

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “A guy came to me,” said G-Mack. His voice was distorted by the damage to his nose. “He told me that he’d give me good money if I could trace her.”

  “Why did he want her?”

  “She was in a house with a john, a guy named Winston, and a raid went down. The guy got killed, his driver too. Alice and another girl, Sereta, were there. They ran, but Sereta took something from the house before she left. The guys who did the killing, they wanted it back.”

  G-Mack tried to sniff back some of the blood that had now slowed to an ooze over his lips and chin. The pain made him wince.

  “She was a junkie, man,” he said. He was pleading, but his voice remained monotonic, as though he himself did not believe what he was telling Louis. “She was on the long slide. She wasn’t earning no more than a hundred dollars out there, and that was on a good night. I was gonna cut her loose anyway. He said nothing bad would happen to her, once she told them what they wanted to know.”

  “And you’re telling me that you believed him?”

  G-Mack stared Louis straight in the face.

  “What did it matter?” he said.

  For the first time in all the years that I had known him, Louis seemed about to lose control. I saw the gun rising, and his finger tightening on the trigger. I reached out my hand and stopped it before it could point at G-Mack.

  “If you kill him, we learn nothing more,” I said.

  The gun continued its upward pressure against my hand for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

  “Tell me his name,” said Louis.

  “He didn’t give me a name,” said G-Mack. “He was fat and ugly, and he smelled bad. I didn’t see him but once.”

  “He give you a number, a place to contact him?”

  “The guy with him did. Slim, dressed in blue. He came to me, after I told him where she was at. He brought me my money, told me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “How much?” asked Louis. “How much did you sell her out for?”

  G-Mack swallowed.

  “Ten G’s. They promised ten more if she gave them Sereta.”

  I stepped away from them. If Louis wanted to kill him, then let it be done.

  “She was blood to me,” said Louis.

  “I didn’t know,” said G-Mack. “I didn’t know! She was a junkie. I didn’t think it would matter.”

  Louis gripped him by the throat and forced the gun against G-Mack’s chest. Louis’s face contorted and a wail forced itself from somewhere deep within him, issuing forth from the place where all of his love and loyalty existed, walled off from all the evil that he had done.

  “Don’t,” said the pimp, and now he was crying. “Please don’t. I know more. I can give you more.”

  Louis’s face was close to him now, so close that blood from G-Mack’s mouth had spattered his features.

  “Tell me.”

  “I followed the guy, after he paid me off. I wanted to know where I could find him, if I had to.”

  “You m
ean in case the cops came along, and you had to sell him out to save your skin.”

  “Whatever, man, whatever!”

  “And?”

  “Let me go,” said G-Mack. “I tell you, you let me walk away.”

  “You got to be fuckin with me.”

  “Listen, man, I did wrong, but I didn’t hurt her. You need to talk to someone else about what happened to her. I’ll tell you where you can find them, but you got to let me walk. I’ll leave town, and you’ll never see me again, I swear.”

  “You tryin to bargain with a man got a gun pushed into your chest?”

  It was Angel who intervened.

  “We don’t know that she’s dead,” he said. “There may still be a chance of finding her alive.”

  Louis looked to me. If Angel was playing good cop and Louis bad cop, then my role was somewhere in between. But if Louis killed G-Mack, it would go bad for me. I didn’t doubt that Mackey and Dunne would come looking for me, and I would have no alibi. At the very least, it would involve some awkward questions, and might even reopen old wounds that would be better off left unexplored.

  “I say listen to him,” I said. “We go looking for this guy. If it turns out that our friend here is lying, then you can do what you want with him.”

  Louis took his time deciding, and all the while G-Mack’s life hung from a thread, and he knew it. At last Louis took a step back, and lowered the gun.

  “Where is he?”

  “I followed him to a place off Bedford.”

  Louis nodded.

  “Looks like you bought yourself a few more hours of life,” he said.

  Garcia watched the four men from his hiding place behind the Dumpster. Garcia believed all that Brightwell had told him, and was certain of the rewards that he had been promised. He now bore the brand upon his wrist, so that he might be recognized by others like him, but unlike Brightwell he was merely a foot soldier, a conscript in the great war being waged. Brightwell also bore a brand upon his wrist, but although it was far older than Garcia’s it appeared never to have properly healed. In fact, when Garcia stood close to Brightwell, he could sometimes detect the smell of scorched flesh from him, if a diminution of the fat man’s own stench permitted it.

  Garcia did not know if the fat man’s name was really Brightwell. In truth, Garcia did not care. He trusted Brightwell’s judgment, and was grateful to him for finding him, for bringing him to this great city once Garcia had honed his abilities to Brightwell’s satisfaction, and for giving him a place in which to work and to pursue his obsessions. Brightwell, in turn, had found in Garcia a willing convert to his convictions. Garcia had just absorbed them into his own belief system, relegating other deities where necessary, or dispensing with them entirely if they conflicted utterly with the new, compelling vision of the world — both this world, and the world below — presented to him by Brightwell.

  Garcia was concerned at the wisdom of not intervening once they saw the three men approach the pimp G-Mack, but he would make no move unless Brightwell moved first. They had just been a little too late. Minutes earlier, and the pimp would have been dead by the time these strangers had found him.

  As Garcia watched, two of the men took G-Mack by the arms and led him from his car. The third man seemed about to follow, then stopped. He scanned the alleyway, his gaze resting for a moment on the shadows that obscured Garcia, then moved on, his head tilting back as he took in the buildings that surrounded him, with their filthy windows and their battered fire escapes. After a minute had elapsed, he followed his companions from the alley, but he kept his back to them, retreating from the lot, his eyes scanning the dirty windows as though aware of the hostile presence concealed behind them.

  Brightwell had decided to kill them. He would follow the four men, then he and Garcia would slaughter them and dispose of them. He did not fear them, even the black man who moved so quickly and had an air of lethality about him. If it were done swiftly and cleanly, then the consequences would be limited.

  Brightwell was standing in the grimy hallway of an apartment block, close by the entrance to the fire escape, where a single yellowed window looked down upon the alley below. He had taken the precaution of removing the starter from the fluorescent light behind him, so that he might not be seen if for any reason the lights were switched on. He was about to turn away from the window when the white man in the dark jacket, whose back had been to Brightwell for the duration of their confrontation with G-Mack, turned and scanned the windows. As his gaze fell upon Brightwell’s hiding place, Brightwell felt something constrict in his throat. He took a step closer to the window, his right hand instinctively reaching out and touching the glass, his fingertips resting against the figure of the man below. Memories surged through his brain: memories of falling, fire, despair, wrath.

  Memories of betrayal.

  Now the man in the alley was backing away, as though he too sensed something hostile, a presence that was both unknown yet familiar to him. His eyes continued to search the windows above, seeking any sign of movement, any indication of the source of what he sensed within himself. Then he disappeared at last from Brightwell’s sight, but the fat man did not move. Instead, he closed his eyes and released a trembling breath, all thoughts of killing banished from his mind. What had so long evaded him was now unexpectedly, joyously revealed.

  We have found you at last, he thought.

  You are discovered.

  7

  As I retreated down the alleyway, I tried to put a name on what I had felt as I stared at the window. The sense of being watched was strong from the moment that we confronted G-Mack, but I was unable to detect any obvious signs of surveillance. We were surrounded by brownstones and warehouses, and any one of them could have concealed a watcher, maybe just a curious neighbor or even a whore and her john on their way to a slightly pricier assignation in a run-down apartment, pausing briefly to take in the men in the alleyway before proceeding on their way, conscious always that time was money and that the demands of the flesh were pressing.

  It was only when Angel and Louis began moving G-Mack, and I had a moment to scan the windows one last time, that the prickling began at the base of my neck. I was conscious of a disturbance in the night, as though a silent explosion had occurred somewhere in the distance and the shock waves were now approaching the place in which I stood. A great force seemed to rush toward me, and I half expected to see a shimmering in the air as the circle widened, churning garbage and scattering discarded newspapers as it came. My attention focused on one particular window on the fourth floor of an old brownstone, a fire door close by leading to a rusted fire escape. The window was dark, but I thought for a moment that I saw a shifting against the glass, black momentarily giving way to gray at the center. Buried memories, both alien to me yet almost familiar, tried to emerge from my unconscious. I sensed them there, moving like worms beneath frozen earth or like parasites under the skin, desperately seeking to break through and expose themselves to the light. I heard a terrible howling, and it was as if voices were raised in rage and despair, descending from some great height, twisting and tumbling through the air, their cries distorting and fading as they fell. I was among them, jostled by the flailing of my brothers, hands striking me, nails tearing in a desperate attempt to arrest the descent. There was fear in me, and regret, but more than anything else I was filled with a dreadful sense of loss. Something indescribably precious had been taken from me, and I would never see it again.

  And we were burning. We were all burning.

  Then this half-remembered, half-created past, this phantasm from my mind, found itself bound up with real loss, for the pain brought back the deaths of my wife and my daughter, and the emptiness that their passing had left inside. And yet the torment that I had endured on the night that they were taken from me, and the awful, debilitating pain that followed, seemed somehow less than what I now felt in the alleyway, the footsteps of my friends slowly growing distant, the protestations of the doomed man betwe
en them fading away. There was only the howling, and the emptiness, and the figure lost behind yellowed glass, reaching out to me. Something cold touched my cheek, like the unwanted caress of a lover once cherished and now rejected. I drew back from it, and thought that my response had somehow generated a reaction in the hidden figure at the window. I sensed its surprise at my presence mutate into manifest hostility, and I thought that I had never before been in proximity to such rage. Any impulse I had to ascend to the upper floor of the building immediately disappeared. I wanted to flee, to run and hide and reinvent myself somewhere far away, to cloak myself in a new identity and lie low in the hope that they would not track me down.

  They.

  He.

  It.

  How did I know this?

  And as I moved slowly away, following Angel and Louis to the busy streets beyond, a voice that was once like mine spoke words that I did not understand. It said:

  You are discovered.

  We have found you again.

  Louis was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Lexus when I reached them. Angel was in the back beside G-Mack, who sat sullen and hunched, sniffing gently through his ruined nose. Before I got in beside Louis, I took a pair of cuffs from my jacket pocket and told G-Mack to attach one cuff to his right wrist and the other to the armrest of the door. When he had done so, and his right arm was crossed awkwardly over his body, I got in the car and we drove away from the Point. Louis stole a glance at me.

  “Everything okay back there?”

  I looked over my shoulder at G-Mack, but he appeared lost in his own misery and hurt.

  “I felt like we were being watched,” I said quietly. “There was someone in one of the upper stories.”

  “If that’s true, then there was someone on the ground as well. You think they were coming for this piece of shit in the back?”

  “Maybe, but we got to him first.”

  “They know about us now.”