Leon snatched the watch off the mark’s wrist and shoved it into his shirt pocket. “Gimme the C-note! Hurry up, before I change my mind!”
The mark took the watch from his shirt pocket to scrutinize it again, especially the 24-karat stamping on the back. He counted out the hundred in tens, fives, and singles. He shook hands with Leon to close the deal and happily faded into the sidewalk traffic.
Tuta, watching and carrying a Coke, paused to glance down at the pile of bills in Leon’s palm before seating herself at a table next to his. She was sexy in candy-striped short shorts. She leaned her nearly nude bosom toward him. “Say, Babio, how about having some fun?” she said with her New York accent.
Leon shoved the bills into his pocket and grinned. “How much, Miss Black America?”
She frowned. “My name is Tuta, and what do you wanta do?”
Leon finger-stroked his crotch. “I’ll go for some cap if it’s righteous.”
“For a short time, it’s fifty for the best in Hollywood.”
Leon stood up. “Let’s take care of business in my car, in back of the joint.”
They went to the small parking lot and entered Leon’s old Cadillac. He stared at an odd tattoo—“Shetani”—defacing the inner surface of one of Tuta’s thighs.
He pointed. “What’s that on that fine thigh, girl?”
She frowned. “Shetani—that’s my boss. Now, let’s take care of business.” She extended a hand.
He counted the fee into her palm, which she shoved into a boot top. He noticed the bulges of other fees in her boot as he unzipped to free his blood-bloated organ. Within several minutes, he bellowed and bucked in climax.
“Don’t forget where you got it, Babio,” the hooker said as she opened the car door.
Leon seized her left arm. He twisted it up near her shoulder blade. He slammed her face down on the seat to muffle her scream. “Bitch, I’ll break your motherfucking arm if you make a sound,” he snarled as his left hand ripped off the cache of bills in her boot.
He pitched her through the open door onto the ground. She slid on her hipbone and lay stunned for a moment. Leon bombed the Caddie into the adjacent alley as the hooker struggled to her feet. She staggered to the alley and saw the Caddie turn into a side street and disappear. Her dollish face was grim as she went to a bank of telephones.
—
High in the Hollywood Hills, swimsuited Shetani sipped champagne in rainbow light at poolside. His rented white stone mansion gleamed like an alabaster palace in the moonlight.
The Brooks twins, on short street break, frolicked in the pool like pygmy whales. Tuta’s call jingled the phone near Petra, seated across the table from Shetani. She picked up the receiver and purred “Hello,” thinking it was a trick calling.
“Calm yourself, Tuta. Here he is,” she said as she gave Shetani the receiver. His perpetual poker face became fearsome with rage as he listened.
“Tut, lay there until the twins get there to help you look for the mother.” He threw the receiver across the tabletop. Petra cradled it. He screamed at the twins.
“Get over here!”
They swam to him, with their cruel, hooded eyes upturned.
“Tut’s been heisted and roughed up. She’s waiting for you at that foot-long-hot-dog joint on Sunset. Find him!”
They got out of the pool and stood beside him. “How do you want him handled if we catch him?” Eli asked.
“Ice him!” Shetani exclaimed. The twins turned and walked away.
Petra was surprised and upset to see him so emotional in the face of such a common street happening. After all, she thought, Tuta wasn’t dead, just bruised a bit.
She said, “Wait a moment,” to the twins’ backs as she placed a hand on Shetani’s wrist. “Say, Daddy, I like Tuta a lot, and I’ve got a hooker’s empathy for her…but don’t you think that killing some mugger jerk is maybe too extreme? I mean, Master, is he worth the heat?”
The twins walked back to the table. The strange look on Petra’s face tipped Shetani that he had overreacted. He said, “I get so fucking mad when somebody fucks over any one of my ho’s I want to bury the bastard. But just beat the bloody shit out of this one and engrave his face with a knife if you find him. He’s black, with a beat-up gold Cadillac. Cruise the South Central ghetto after you comb Hollywood.”
The twins nodded and hurried away. Petra stood. “Master, may I take a little nap before I hit the streets?”
He dipped his head. She walked away.
He felt suddenly chilled. He covered his shoulders with a terry robe and remembered that look on Petra’s face when the Tuta call had blown his cool. His head ached. He massaged his temples. He had felt off-base all day. He took a dope kit from his robe pocket and shot a load of skag. He stiffened at the distant sound of an ambulance siren.
Shetani glanced at his watch. Today was August 20! He closed his eyes. He remembered how, on this date thirty years before, he had taken a running start and shoved his slut mother through an open window.
His eyes popped open. He looked nervously behind him. He wished that she wouldn’t show, to bug him, as she had every year since her death. He cocked his head. Was that her whiskey voice croaking obscenities?
“Albert, only a piece of shit like you would kill his mama. You’re gonna pay, asshole.”
It was her voice, clear and hateful. He spun around in every direction to see her. He stared into the pool. He recoiled when her crushed head, oozing blood and brain, popped to the surface only eight feet away. Its hellish eyes glared through the gore. Its purple tongue whipped out at him.
He screamed in an adolescent voice, “Mama, get out of my face! Go away, Mama!”
The terrible head bobbed in the water and tilted back in maniacal laughter. Shetani scrambled to his feet, shaking like a Parkinson’s victim. He ran for the house, glancing fearfully over his shoulder.
The Brooks twins and Tuta, in a black van, searched West and East Hollywood for Leon and his gold Cadillac. Finally, driver Eli said, “He ain’t in Hollywood.”
Cazo mumbled, “Naw, I guess not. Let’s try the ghetto.”
Eli grunted, abruptly pulled the van to the curb, and parked on North Western Avenue.
“Say, man, why you stop here?” Cazo exclaimed.
Eli said, “ ’Cause you gonna drive some.” He slid from the van to the street. Cazo moved over to take the wheel. He pulled away when Eli got in and sandwiched Tuta between them. Cazo drove south on Western toward South Central L.A. At Western and Sunset, several of Tuta’s stablemates gave a finger-to-the-chin signal to the troubleshooting twins that they were okay.
Several blocks south, Tuta shouted, “There’s his ride!” She excitedly pointed at Leon’s car, parked in a grocery-market lot. Cazo turned into it and parked next to Leon’s Caddie. Tuta pointed toward a group of telephone booths. “There he is, using the phone.”
Eli took a blackjack and a wide roll of masking tape from beneath the seat as Tuta scrambled over the seat to conceal herself.
“Bro, you need my help with that nigger?” Cazo asked.
Eli smiled and shook his head. “Unlock the hood.” He got out and quickly masked the van’s license numbers with tape before he raised the hood.
Inside the phone booth, Leon was concluding a long conversation with his mother, Sadie. He had stopped at the market to buy her a C-note money order. He did this to relieve his guilt for his neglect of Sadie, and for the long-term misery his recent prison bit had caused her.
Cazo stuck his head under the hood of the van when he saw Leon leave the booth. He let Leon pass him and open the Caddie’s door. He sprang and smashed the blackjack down on the top of Leon’s skull. Leon collapsed silently to the concrete between the two vehicles.
Eli knelt beside him and cleaned out his pockets of all cash and slum jewelry. He ripped off Leon’s pants and underwear. Leon stirred as Eli, with a switchblade, carved a gaping bloody “X” on his forehead. Eli stood and systematically kicked the prostrate form from h
ead to ankles. He then went to slam the van’s hood down as gawkers gathered at the scene.
Cazo shot the van away to a nearby alley, and parked. Eli peeled off two hundred from Leon’s roll and gave it to Tuta. “Here’s yours, Toot, and you can split back to work. Look out for the green van, ’cause we gonna switch this one out for a while.”
Tuta shoved the bills very deep into her boot. She kissed the twins’ cheeks and left the van. She stripped the tape from the plates. The van roared away as she turned and walked toward the boulevard.
—
It was a week to the day after Leon received his awful lumps for the Tuta caper that Rucker sat in his kitchen, sipping his morning coffee. His smooth forehead was ridged as he finished reading a scathing article in the L.A. Times. The paper editorialized that a hooker horde had apparently defeated the police in the war on Sunset Boulevard.
Rucker felt a flash of hot pain in his gut that popped out sweat on his palms and brow. He held his breath for a long moment and hoped it wasn’t a flare-up of an old ulcer condition. It had nearly killed him when he was up against robbers and killers in the super-stressful 77th Division in South Central L.A.
He leaned back and closed his eyes against the splash of dazzling sun on the breakfast-nook tabletop. He thought, what a rotten turn of fate’s cards that, within a few weeks, he and his task force had fallen from heroes to horses’ asses, in the media and public opinion. He remembered that he was fifty-two, with retirement in mind at the end of the year. He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t retire until he won the war on Sunset. He told himself he would die before he left the scene dishonorably. He had minutely inspected undercover vehicles and had not solved the riddle of how the wave of new hookers made his undercover guys.
Frustration and anger ached his head. He got to his feet, stooped and feeling ancient. He realized it instantly and straightened his spine. He went briskly to his bedroom to dress for the street.
A pang of Opal need raced his heart for an instant. He was removing his pajamas when the phone rang. It was Leon’s mother, Sadie. She said that Leon was fresh out of County Hospital. He had massive injuries and was recuperating at her place in South Central L.A. Would Rucker come to get some very important information?
Within an hour, Rucker parked in front of Sadie’s modest wood-frame house on Martin Luther King Boulevard. He saw a flutter of lace curtain as he walked to the front door. It was swung open before he could push the doorbell button. White-haired, heavily wrinkled Sadie greeted Rucker with a wide smile and a hug.
“Mr. Rucker, it’s sure good to see you again, lookin’ so well. Praise the Lord!”
Rucker kissed her cheek. “Bless you, Sadie, and I’m happy to see you again.”
Sadie led him through the well-kept living room to a hallway. “Leon’s room is on the right. He’s waiting for you.”
Rucker walked to the rear bedroom, which had been Leon’s since boyhood. Rucker lightly rapped his knuckles on the half-opened door.
“Come in, Sergeant,” Leon said weakly.
Rucker entered the small room, its walls decorated with plaques and trophies awarded for Leon’s excellence in athletics.
“Hi, man,” Leon said as he dipped his bandaged head toward a chair at the foot of the bed.
Rucker sat down and stared at Leon. His broken right arm and hand and his right leg were in casts.
“You have a rumble with the Crips?” Rucker said as he shook his head.
Leon laughed. “No. A robber did this.”
Rucker pressed. “That’s tough…Any tie-in with the info Sadie told me you had for me?”
Leon swallowed hard. “I don’t believe so…but I know the dude’s moniker that owns all them untouchable new ho’s in Hollywood.” Pain deformed Leon’s face as he shifted in the bed.
“Well, Leon, lay the moniker on me, and anything else you know about him and the girls.”
Leon leaned and half whispered, “The dude’s moniker is ‘Shetani.’ That’s ‘S-h-e-t-a-n-i.’ I’m cinch sure, ’cause I overheard two of his bitches rappin’ about him.”
Rucker’s face twisted in disgust. “Leon, are you saying the girls spelled out that name for you, an eavesdropper? Leon, you’re either full of shit or brain-damaged.”
Leon shifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Well, I was, uh, kind of ashamed to tell you how I really caught the dude’s moniker.”
Rucker leaned and patted Leon’s leg cast. “You can trust me with the truth. Tell it!”
Leon licked his chops. “Well, about a week ago, I woke up with a hard-on a cat couldn’t scratch without rippin’ out his claws. Shit, I had to chill on Miss Five Fingers and buy some sure-enough pussy for the first time in my life, and that ain’t no lie. I went to…”
Rucker’s booming laughter cut him off. “You’re funny, you jive-ass would-be pimp. Go on.”
Leon winced as he scooted up on his pillows. “I laid a Big Apple ho in my ride, finer than Prince’s Apollonia. I dug the Shetani tattoo on her thigh. She cracked that it was the name of her boss. My jones fell soft after I paid her and stayed that way. I guess ’cause I knew I was violatin’ the pimp code. She got up to split when I wouldn’t come up with more bread for her time. So I just snatched my bread outta her boot and split.”
Rucker said, “I’ll buy the general outline of that story, but your robber tale stinks. You must be six five and two fifty. I find it hard to believe there’s a robber in L.A. with the balls and muscle to heist you and bust you up like this. C’mon, now, how many jumped you, and why? I suspect your beating is connected to that hooker you refunded on. Well?”
Leon raised his good arm and waggled his palm in the air. “Sergeant, I swear it was just one motherfucker. I never saw his face, ’cause he had it stuck under the hood of a black van. He KO’d me with a sap or piece of pipe. He cleaned me out and did this number on me. And all of that ain’t no lie.”
Rucker said, “What else do you know about Shetani and his girls?”
Leon sneezed into a tissue. “A slum hustler like me from New York told me the dude and all his girls is dope fiends…He’s got a lavender-and-gold ride, and he…”
A bullet of red-hot pain spasmed Rucker’s gut. Rucker’s suddenly reddened face and harsh expression stalled Leon’s voice.
“Hey, Sergeant, why you lookin’ so evil?”
Rucker despised all breeds of pimps. But the breed that hooked young girls on heroin to enslave them, Rucker hated with an all-consuming passion.
Rucker regained his composure. “I’ve got a bit of a stomach problem, Leon. Do you know anything else?”
Leon lit a cigarette. “Nothing, except I was gonna say he’s a tall blue-black dude with green cat eyes.”
Rucker stood. “Thanks, Leon. And I wish you a fast recovery and the best in every other way.” They shook hands.
As Rucker left the room, Leon said, “I’ll be up and out on them streets on crutches in a few days. I’ll hip you to any info I get on Shetani and his ho’s.”
Over his shoulder Rucker said, “Leon, I’ll appreciate that.” He was at the end of the hallway when he barely heard Leon say, “Come here, Sergeant, I just remembered somethin’ else.”
Rucker came back to stand in the bedroom’s open doorway.
“Sergeant, that slum hustler from the Apple pointed out a stallion snow-blonde who is Shetani’s bottom bitch. Her name is Petra, and she’s a stone fox.”
The Petra info brightened Rucker’s deep-blue eyes. “She’s a fox in more than the obvious sense. I and half a dozen of my cops have tried to bust her. Can you recall anything else, Leon?”
Leon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and drummed the fingers of his able hand against the leg cast for a long moment. “That’s all I heard, Sergeant,” he said with a sigh.
“Thanks again, son. I hope to see you on the boulevard soon,” Rucker said as he turned and strolled away.
—
When Rucker reached Hollywood Station, he was both relieved and furious
after getting Leon’s finger on Shetani. Rucker regarded Shetani as the enemy of his reputation, pride, and self-respect as the leader of the now maligned Special Hooker Squad.
Rucker immediately called a friend in NYPD Vice to get Shetani’s real name and rap record. Rucker also got the details of Albert Spires’s commitment to the facility for the criminally insane, when, in grief and rage, he had inflicted multiple mayhem upon members of the staff of the hospital where Tuta died of leukemia.
Rucker took the data into Lieutenant Edwin Bleeson’s office, the commander of detectives.
“Sit down, Russell, and share the good news with me,” Bleeson boomed, with a toothy smile on his caveman’s face.
Rucker placed the Shetani data on the desk as he sat down on a chair beside Bleeson’s desk.
“Lieutenant, the good news is that I’ve ID’d the boss of that stable of seemingly arrest-immune hookers who’ve been giving us all an ass ache. The bad news is that he’s a junkie and certified crazy. He’ll froth at the mouth when we come down on him—six arrests on suspicion of Murder One…went to bat after three of them…got acquitted. It’s all there, Lieutenant.”
Bleeson shook his head as he scanned the pages of the arrest record for other crimes, including burglary, robbery, extortion, attempted murder, assault, pandering, and arson of an inhabited building.
Bleeson shoved the pages toward Rucker. “Russell, he’s a volatile cookie, for sure. I don’t have to tell you to take every precaution when you bear down on Albert Spires. I’ll cajole and con to get you any extra personnel needed to stop him and his operation.”
Rucker stood and took the data back from the desktop. “Thanks, Lieutenant. I needed that,” Rucker said as they shook hands.
“Keep me updated on this investigation, Russell,” Bleeson said as he stood and banged Rucker’s shoulder with a beefy paw.
Rucker turned away and left the room.
A moment after leaving Bleeson’s office, Rucker left the building and nearly collided with Leo Crane on his way in. Rucker grabbed Crane’s coat sleeve as he waved at Crane’s wife, driving away in Crane’s station wagon. Had he really seen a bluish bruise on Millie’s cheek, just below the rim of dark sunglasses? No, Rucker thought, it had merely been an illusion of afternoon sun and shadow.