“So the old vic was your first and only sting,” Rucker said as he dropped the evidence for booking into his coat pocket. Suddenly the scene was brilliantly lit by the headlamps of two screeching police cars. Both young uniformed officers instantly recognized Rucker. Within an hour, Pee Wee Smith, the hooker thief, was booked for grand larceny from the person. Big Cat Jackson, her notorious New York pimp, was booked for the attempted murder of a police officer. He was listed as critical in a county hospital, under police guard. His silver pimpmobile was impounded and searched. Ten ounces of high-grade heroin was discovered stashed behind a headlamp of the machine.
Two hours after the bust and shooting, Rucker had completed his written reports. Drained, he left Hollywood Station for home, driving his personal white Lincoln Continental. He drove through the balmy May night to the far-west end of Sunset Boulevard. He turned into a quiet, tree-filled street of well-kept houses. In the middle of the block, he pulled into the driveway of the attractive cream stucco house where he had been born.
He pressed a Genie device inside the car that swung up the garage door. He pulled into the garage. He punched the gizmo to shut the garage door and got out of the car. He went to unlock the kitchen door. He stepped inside the shadow-haunted house, and loneliness assaulted him.
Rucker switched on the kitchen light. His ruddy face was drawn with fatigue. “Jesus Christ!” he thought. “I need a drink of whiskey.” Instead, he got a glass of orange juice. He dropped his beefy six-four frame onto a seat in the breakfast nook. He closed his eyes in bittersweet reverie. He remembered Jim and Ellen, his dead parents. His cop father’s voice and laughter had rung throughout the house like a baritone bell. Remembering his mother’s tender, loving care and dulcet lullabies when he was a child misted his eyes.
He left the kitchen. He went through the dining and living rooms, still furnished with antique pieces. He ascended a red-carpeted stairway to the master bedroom. He paused in the doorway. He almost reeled in the lingering fragrance of Shalimar. Nora, his wife, had loved the perfume, before cancer snatched her from his arms forever, five years before.
He sighed and went to sit on the side of the bed. He stared at her pillow and remembered the countless a.m.’s after hair-raising shifts on the robbery detail in the deadly 77th District, in South Central L.A. He’d tiptoe into the bedroom. He’d gaze at her, asleep, and fall deeper and deeper in love with her and her angelic face, framed with silky red curls caught in a spot of moon glow.
Now he stared at a picture of his new love on a nightstand. It was the image of Opal Lenski, a striking fifty-year-old brunette. She was a New Yorker who had met Rucker the summer before, while on vacation in L.A. Leo Crane, her nephew and Rucker’s close friend and a member of his Special Hooker Squad, had introduced him to the seductive widow. They had been instantly attracted to each other.
He switched his eyes to an unopened fifth of Cutty Sark on the dresser. He kept it there to prove to himself that he was strong enough to resist booze. The bottle also served as a visual reminder that his drinking problem had nearly forced the beauteous Opal to cut him loose. He had returned from a nightclub restroom to find a handsome punk hitting on Opal. The young stud ignored his command to get lost. In an alcoholic rage, he had punched out the intruder and broken his jaw. He and Opal hurriedly left the scene before the police arrived. In the car, he had ranted Opal into tears with his accusation that she had encouraged the punk’s advances. He had promised her that he would stop drinking if she forgave him. He had, with difficulty, kept that promise for a year.
He felt his heart gallop at the chance he’d have to ask her to marry him when he took his upcoming vacation in New York. He went to the dresser. After the shooting, he needed a drink to guarantee restful sleep, he thought. As he picked up the bottle, he heard it gurgle like a demon’s chuckle. Maybe he was strong enough to take one drink just to sleep tonight. He remembered repetitious warnings he had heard at AA meetings against sober alcoholics’ taking that first drink. He slammed the bottle down on the dresser top.
Rucker showered and came back to the bedroom to do push-ups until he fell asleep on the carpet. An hour later, he was bombed awake by the telephone. He picked up to hear from the station that Big Cat Jackson was dead of shock and loss of blood. He’d be notified as to the date of the coroner’s inquest, mandatory in police-related deaths. His hand shook uncontrollably as he replaced the receiver.
He got the bottle and ripped off its seal. He chugalugged a third of the whiskey before he got into bed, in the buff. He lay there, comforting himself with the fact that he had not tried to kill the madman. He rationalized that Jackson was the real killer of Jackson.
Rucker fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of his upcoming retirement. Peace of mind and sound sleep would have been impossible had he known that a psychotic black master pimp would soon arrive in Hollywood. He would work his horde of bust-proof hookers on the streets of Hollywood, with a fallout of misery and death into Rucker’s life.
It was a carnal night on 125th Street in Harlem. The master pimp Shetani sat in his parked car. He had a rare smile on his brutish black face as he studied the sidewalk parade. Crack dealers serviced customers in cars. Half-naked hookers, square pushovers, and sissies clogged the street and bars. Sex, crime, booze, and dope ruled the treacherous night. The melded odors of bargain colognes and steamy armpits rode the sweltering air like a sour aphrodisiac for gawking male bangers.
Several black pimps in gaudy machines honked at Shetani as they cruised by. A half-dozen kids descended on him and chanted, “Mr. Shetani, how ’bout dustin’ off ya ’chine, pretty and clean?”
He nodded. They ragged off imaginary dust on the spotless car from bumper to bumper. He gave the leader a twenty-dollar bill to share with the others. They split into the neon catacombs.
Immediately Shetani recoiled from the awful breath and ravaged face of a middle-aged hooker.
“Hey, sweetie, how about a lovely three-way trip with Kansas City Nettie for ten?”
His first impulse was to spit in her face. Couldn’t the ugly hick bitch see that he wasn’t a trick? Her almost white face and green eyes filled him with instant rage. The hag reminded him of the person he hated most.
He scowled. “You ugly bitch. Hit on me after you get a face transplant.”
She reached into her bosom. He scooped up a pistol on the seat beside him. He aimed it at her forehead as she drew a switchblade. She backed away and jaywalked across the street. A moment later, he was jolted from a poisonous memory of his mother by a crunching blow to the rear of his mobile castle.
He jammed his pistol into his waistband beneath his suit coat, against his back. He sprang to the street to confront two young black men seated in an ancient Ford with Florida plates. The Ford’s shattered right headlamp had apparently bashed a large dent into the pimpmobile’s rear fender.
Shetani went to the driver’s open window. The Floridians grinned up at him. “Are you niggers crazy?” Shetani snarled as his hand moved under his coat, toward the pistol.
“Naw, man, we ain’t crazy. Why don’cha give a signal or somethin’ when you pullin’ out into traffic?”
Shetani felt body quakes of rage as he jerked the pistol free and held it tight against the side of his leg. He decided to kill the pair. He eye-swept the sidewalk in the immediate area and saw a cluster of people eyeballing the action. He shaped one of his hideous smiles as he backed away to his car.
He got in and keyed on the engine. The pair grinned at him as the Ford moved down the street past him. He pulled out behind them. He watched them pass a stick of grass back and forth.
Shetani tailed them to a large rooming house on a quiet street. He put his hat on the seat. Then he screwed a silencer on his pistol. He parked and left his machine. He sprinted fifty yards, to trap the Floridians in their car. He peered at them through the rear window. They were still passing the grass.
He paused behind the car for a brief moment, to catch his breath and
to draw his gun. In the blue spot of a streetlamp, he was fearsome to behold. He looked like a monstrous black cat on its hind legs, dressed in pimp people finery.
He got down on his knees and crawled on grass to the front of the car. He popped up to full height and sprang to face the windshield. They couldn’t see him, with their faces pointed toward the roof of the Ford in laughter. He froze, gripping the pistol with both hands at arm’s length, aimed at them. He needed them to see him before he killed them. They wiped happy tears from their eyes. The driver saw him at the instant that he put lighter flame to a joint. His maroon eyes in the flare were gigantic, and his jaw hung crookedly. His companion stared at the driver for an instant before he zoomed his eyes to the doomsday vision of Shetani.
He fashioned his graveyard smile as he watched them jamming their backs against the seat in desperate escape reflex. He fired twice, at the center of their foreheads. The silencer made the shots sound like the pop of corks. The deceased slumped on the seat, with faces pressed together. He saw they were identical twins.
He put his gun away. He saw brain gore dribble from neat holes in their foreheads. He turned away and went to his car. The silent street still slept. He shot the car away, for Times Square.
On the way, the memory of his mother in the face of the hooker hag haunted him. He wished that he could have wiped out the image of the hag with the Floridians.
—
Times Square neon glowed like pastel flame against the skyscape. Shetani drove his gold-on-lavender Continental through the racket of traffic to his den of hookers off Times Square.
He drove to the rear of the Regal Hotel. He owned the building. Retirees occupied three floors of the building.
He drove into a brilliantly lighted garage and parked beside a huge blue van. Its presence indicated that his fifteen-girl stable had been brought home by Petra, his main woman.
Froggy, the garage guard and car polisher, a dwarfish black man with scraggly gray hair, rushed from a cot to open the driver’s door of the Continental. “Hi, Cap, you goin’ out anymore?” Froggy said in the croaking whisper he got after his throat was slashed in Spanish Harlem, by a food vendor who caught Froggy’s hand in his pocket.
Shetani shook his long head as he slid his six-four frame out of the Lincoln. He said, “Take the car and get that dent knocked out.” Froggy’s eyes widened in shock as he noticed the damage. “Sure, Cap, first thing. Did you ketch the dude that done it?” Shetani smiled. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Froggy, with mouth agape, eye-swept Shetani. He was adazzle in a baby-blue glove-leather suit, with a fiery network of diamonds and rubies on his throat, fingers, and wrists. Froggy exclaimed, “King Shetani, the cleanest player in the Apple!”
Shetani patted Froggy’s shoulder as he moved toward a private elevator. Froggy closed the garage door and locked it. Shetani entered the elevator for the lift to the fourth floor, his domain. He stepped out onto white plush pile carpeting in the entrance hall. It was lit by a crystal chandelier that cast a pink glow. His thin, cruel lips shaped a rare smile to hear the shuck and jive of his slaves waiting for his arrival in the living room ahead.
He moved across the carpet past a floor-to-ceiling mirror. He turned back to check out his reflection. He was the product of a blue-black West Indian father and a green-eyed Irish mother.
He adjusted his baby-blue tie and palm-brushed his luxuriant mop of processed curls. He finger-stroked a widow’s peak that slashed down across the ebony forehead of his ugly-handsome face. He gazed hypnotically into his strange eyes, burning like green lasers in their deep sockets. He adored his unforgettable face. He was proud of the mesmeric pull and fascination it had held for the platoons of young whores who had humped their hearts out in the street so he could afford to live like a prince for the past twenty-five years.
An orphan and escapee from a final horrible foster home, he had made his debut as a street hustler at fifteen in Harlem. He remembered why, at twenty, he dropped his real name, Albert Spires, for “Master Shetani,” his moniker. One night, he had been drawn to the scene of a street emergency in Harlem by the flashing red lights of an ambulance. The attendants lifted the alcoholic victim, a middle-aged African immigrant, onto a stretcher. She suddenly opened her eyes and stared up into the apparently unearthly face of Albert Spires, awash in fire-red light. She recoiled in terror and jumped from the stretcher. She fled into the night screaming, “Shetani! Shetani!,” which a fellow bystander translated as “Satan” in Swahili.
Now Shetani turned away from the mirror. He stepped through black satin drapes into a blue-lit sunken living room. His ethnically mixed stable of young junkie whores, lounging on couches and giant silk floor pillows, broke into ecstatic chanting: “Hello, Master Shetani! Hello, Master Shetani!”
He threw up a palm to silence them as he moved to seat himself in a thronelike chair of royal-purple velour.
All sixteen of the girls were bathed and naked for the delicious ritual of the spike. His compelling eyes fixed on the face of each girl with deep, probing intensity. He did this to reinforce their conviction that he could read their minds.
He nodded to Petra, his main woman and stable straw boss, seated beside him on a pillow. The ravishing blonde Amazon said softly, “Master, love, no one requires punishment and everybody’s money is respectable. May I rise?” He nodded. She went to a corner of the spacious room and wheeled a blond wood serving cart back to Shetani. He shuffled through sixteen envelopes, with stable names and cash amounts noted in ink on each.
All eyes watched raptly as he put premeasured amounts of distilled water and China-white heroin into a miniature brass pot atop a tiny butane stove. He turned it on and watched blue flame lick at the pot bottom for a minute or so before he turned off the stove.
He took a syringe marked “P.” for “Petra” in ink on a strip of masking tape, from among fifteen other syringes individually marked on the cart top. He wrapped a bit of filter cotton around the needle point. Then he drew the syringe full from the pot.
Petra positioned herself on hands and knees with her buttocks between Shetani’s legs. He shot the dope into a vein between her vulva and high inner thigh. Petra kissed her master’s feet and seated herself on the floor beside him. She watched as the others received their good-night dope. She hugged each of them.
Petra and Shetani were finally alone. “Master, later I’ll show you a surprise package I brought you. May I sit on your lap so you can hold me?” she said in a child’s voice, with her dope-dreamy eyes upturned.
He flung his arms open. “Get up here, sweet bitch, close to my heart, where you belong,” he said in his silky baritone that vibrated in the blue-lit stillness like muted thunder.
She rose from the floor pillow and nested her naked curves on his lap. He held her very close. He rocked her gently as he made an erotic crooning sound deep in his throat that shivered her with excitement.
“Oh, Daddy darling, I’m going to start missing you terribly the minute I get on the plane to L.A.,” she whispered.
His white teeth fanged into the side of her throat, and she gasped in pain.
He said brutally, “Miss me? You negative motherfucking bitch, how can you miss me when you know I’m always with you, awake or asleep, tricking or crapping? You know the power of my spirit will always be beside you, watching you, guarding you. Miss me? Petra, don’t ever again hurt and insult your sweet master like that.”
She said softly, “Forgive me. You know I’m your slave until I cash in. Master, I meant I’ll miss your arms and your delicious candy dick. I wish I had a supply of your nectar in a jar so I couldn’t starve for it while I’m taking care of all that business in L.A.”
He finger-stroked her face. “Petra, your L.A. business is not that complicated. You scout Hollywood and the rest of L.A. for the chance that our family can get down there and make lots of bread. Off your reports, I’ll decide to move or stay here. But I hope you find Hollywood fine and dandy. If so, I’ll wire you t
he bread to lease a monster house. Shit, we all deserve to live and hustle in the sunshine for a change, like rich suckers, in a fucking mansion in the hills.”
They laughed. Petra whispered in his ear, “Sweet Master, can I have some bye-bye candy?” He bit her earlobe and sucked scarlet skin berries on her throat.
“Sic your candy, you one-track-minded freak-dog bitch,” he commanded as she unzipped his fly and his wombstroker leapt free in the blue haze.
As she performed state-of-the-art fellatio, he tattooed crimson stripes on her alabaster ass with a coat-hanger whip. He leaned to feather-stroke her clit. Shortly she made a shrill sound through her teeth. They both climaxed, and then Petra stood. She took his hand and led him to her bedroom, to present the surprise. She paused at the bedroom door to whisper, “Master, I stole her around nine in that coffee shop with the pink front in Times Square. She’s seventeen, obviously gorgeous, and fast! She’s holding five bills. I told her to personally give you her first money.”
She opened the door, and they stepped inside the gold-and-white lair. They stood at bedside, looking down at the cream-colored sexpot. She was nude and supine in the junkie limbo between heavy intoxication and sleep. Green fire flared from her slitted eyes.
Shetani, a fanatical reincarnation buff, barely suppressed a gasp. He trembled and sat down on the bed beside his new slave. He leaned to scan every plane of the girl’s face. His whole body vibrated with excitement and joy. He was certain the girl was his dead baby sister, returned to life. She was Tuta Spires!
Anxiety jolted him. He had to find a way to get her off the street without blowing his career and rep as king of pimps. Awful rage twisted his face for an instant. He vowed to himself that he would find the man or woman who had turned her out in her second life and kill the guilty one.
He felt the girl’s pulse. Petra said softly, “Master, she’s all right. The Harlem jive ass that turned her out in the street and on stuff was copping three-percent garbage. I gave her a very light hit of stuff when we got home.”