Jackie O was one of the old-time macks, the kind who believed that a man should dress the part. He typically wore a canary yellow suit for business, set off by a white shirt with a pink tie, and yellow-and-white patent leather shoes. A full-length white leather coat with yellow trim was draped across his shoulders in cold weather, and the ensemble was completed by a white fedora with a pink feather. He carried an antique black cane, topped with a silver horse’s head. The head could be removed with a twist, freeing the eighteen-inch blade that was concealed inside. The cops knew that Jackie O carried a sword stick, but Jackie O was never questioned or searched. He was occasionally a good source of information, and as one of the senior figures at the Point he was accorded a modicum of respect. He kept a close eye on the women who worked for him, and tried to treat them right. He paid for their rubbers, which was more than most pimps did, and made sure each was equipped with a pen loaded with pepper spray before she hit the streets. Jackie O was was also smart enough to know that wearing fine clothes and driving a nice car didn’t mean that what he did had any class, but it was all that he knew how to do. He used his earnings to buy modern art, but he sometimes thought that even the most beautiful of his paintings and sculptures were sullied by the manner in which he had funded their purchase. For that reason he liked to trade up, in the hope that by doing so he might slowly erase the stain upon his collection.
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 returned it to the holster that lay taped beneath a small table near the door. He composed his features into an expression as close to 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 of the apartment 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 someone to play the fool with. 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 walking, 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. 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 trace 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 eyes 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 practiced 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 had 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. He 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 him 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.
“Hey,” said Jackie. “Open up. Maybe I can help you with somethin. You lookin for a woman?”
There was only silence.
Then Jackie O did something dumb. He tried to open the door.
Looking back, Jackie O couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. At best, he was going to make whoever was inside the van seriously pissed, and at worst, he could end up with a gun in his face. At least, Jackie O thought that a gun in the face was the worst that could happen.
He grasped the handle and pulled. The door opened. A stench assailed Jackie O, as if someone had taken the bloated carcass of a dead animal buried in shallow ground and suddenly pierced its hide, releasing all the pent-up gas from within. The smell must have made Jackie nauseous, because there was no other way of explaining what he thought he saw inside the cab of the van before the door was yanked closed and the van pulled away. Even now, in the comfort of his own apartment, and with the benefit of hindsight, Jackie could only recall fragmented images.
“It was like it was filled with meat,” he told Louis. “Not hanging meat, but like the inside of a body, all purple and red. It was on the panels and on the floor, and I could see blood dripping from it and pooling in places. There was a bench seat in the front, and two figures sitting on it, but they were all black, except for their faces. One was huge and fat. He was closest to me, and the smell came mostly from him. They must have been wearing masks, because their faces looked ruined.”
“Ruined?” asked Louis.
“I didn’t get a good look at the passenger. Hell, I didn’t get much of a look at anything, but the fat one, his face was like a skull. The skin was all wrinkled and black, and the nose looked like it had been broken off, with only a piece left near his forehead. His eyes were kind of green and black, with no whites to them. I saw his teeth too, because he said something when the door opened. His teeth were long, and yellow. It must have been a mask, right? I mean, what else could it be?”
He was almost talking to himself, carrying on an argument in his head that had been going on since the night he had opened the door of the van.
“What else could it be?”
∗ ∗ ∗
Walter and I separated after our lunch with Mackey and Dunne. They offered to meet up with us again if we needed any more help.
“No witnesses,” said Mackey, and there was a sly look in his eye that I didn’t like. I didn’t care about what they might have heard, but I wasn’t going to let someone like Mackey throw my past back in my face.
“If you have something you want to say, then say it now,” I said.
Dunne stepped between us.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said, quietly. “You handle G-Mack how you want to, but he better be breathing and walking when you’re done, and if he expires, then you be sure to have a good alibi. Are we clear on that? Otherwise, we’ll have to come after you.”
He didn’t look at Walter when he spoke. His eyes remained fixed on me. Only as he turned away did he speak directly to Walter. He said: “You better be careful too, Walter.”
Walter didn’t reply, and I did not react. After all, Dunne had a point.
“You don’t have to come along tonight,” I said, once the two cops were out of sight.
“Bullshit. I’m there. But you heard what Dunne said: they’ll fall on you if something happens to this G-Mack.”
“I’m not going to touch the pimp. If he had anything to do with Alice’s disappearance, then we’ll get it out of him, and later I’ll try to bring him in so he can tell the cops what he knows. But I can only speak for myself. I can’t speak for anyone else.”
I saw a cab on the horizon. I flagged it and watched with satisfaction as it weaved through two lanes of traffic to get to me.
“Those guys are going to bring you down with them someday,” said Walter. He wasn’t smiling.
“Maybe I’m dragging them down with me,” I replied. “Thanks for this, Walter. I’ll be in touch.”
I climbed in the cab and left him.
∗ ∗ ∗
Far away, the Black Angel stirred.
“You made a mistake,” it said. “You were supposed to check her background. You assured me that no one would come after her.”
“She was just a common whore,” said Brightwell. He had returned from Arizona with the weight of Blue’s loss heavy upon him. He would be found again, but time was pressing, and they needed all of the bodies they could muster. Now, with the death of the girls still fresh in his memory, he was being criticized for his carelessness, and he did not like it. He had been alone for so long, without having to answer to anyone, and the exercise of authority chafed upon him in a way that it had not previously done. He also found the atmosphere in the sparsely furnished office oppressive. There was the great desk, ornately carved and topped with green leather, and the expensive antique lamps that shed a dim light on the walls, the wooden floor, and the worn rug upon which he now stood, but there were too many empty spaces waiting to be filled. In a way, it was a metaphor for the existence of the one before whom he now stood.
“No,” said the Black Angel. “She was a most un common whore. There are questions being asked about her. A report has been filed.”
Two great blue veins pulsed at each of Brightwell’s temples, extending their reach across either side of his skull, their ambit clearly visible beneath the man’s corona of dark hair. He resented the reprimand, and felt his impatience growing.
“If those you had sent to kill Winston had done their job properly and discreetly, then we would not be having this conversation,” he said. “You should have consulted me.”
“You were not to be found. I have no idea where you go when you disappear into the shadows.”
“That’s none of your concern.”
The Black Angel stood, leaning its hands upon the burnished desk.
“You forget yourself, Mr. Brightwell,” it said.
Brightwell’s eyes glittered with new anger.
“No,” he said. “I have never forgotten myself. I remained true. I searched, and I found. I discovered you, and I reminded you of all that you once were. It was you who forgot. I remembered. I remembered it all.”
Brightwell was right. The Black Angel recalled their first encounter, the revulsion it had felt, then, slowly, the dawning understanding and the final acceptance. The Black Angel retreated from the confrontation and turned instead to the window. Beneath its gaze, people enjoyed the sunshine, and traffic moved slowly along the congested streets.
“Kill the pimp,” said the Black Angel. “Discover all that you can about those who are asking questions.”
“And then?”
The Black Angel cast Brightwell a bone.
“Use your judgment,” it said. There was no point in reminding him of the necessity of attracting no further attention to themselves. They were growing closer to their goal, and furthermore, it realized that Brightwell was moving increasingly beyond its control.
If he had ever truly been under its control.
Brightwell left, but the Black Angel remained lost in remembrance. Strange the forms that we take, it thought. It walked to the gilt mirror upon the wall. Gently, it touched its right hand to its face, examining its reflection as though it were another version of itself. Then, slowly, it removed the contact lens from its right eye. It had been forced to wear the lens for hours that day as there were people to be met and papers to be signed, and now its eye felt as though it were burning. The mark did not react well to concealment.
The Black Angel leaned closer, tugging at the skin beneath its eye. A white sheen lay across the blue of the iris, like the ruined sail of a ship at sea, or a face briefly glimpsed through parting clouds.
∗ ∗ ∗
That night, G-Mack took to the streets with a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. It was a Hi-Point nine-millimeter, alloy-framed and loaded up with CorBon+P ammunition for maximum stopping power. The gun had cost G-Mack very little—hell, even new the Hi-Point retailed for about 10 percent of what a similar Walther P5 would go for—and he figured that if the cops came around and he had to let it go, then he wouldn’t be out of pocket by too much. He had fired the gun only a couple of times, out in the New Jersey woods, and he knew that the Hi-Point didn’t respond well to the CorBon ammo. It affected the accuracy, and the recoil was just plain nasty, but G-Mack knew that if it came down to it, he’d be using the Hi-Point right up close, and anyone who took one from the gun at that range was going to stay down.
He left the Cutlass Supreme in the garage, and instead drove over to the Point in the Dodge that he used for backup. G-Mack didn’t care if one of the other brothers saw him driving the old-lady car. The ones that mattered knew he had the Cutlass, could take it out anytime he damn well pleased if they needed some reminding, but the Dodge was less likely to attract attention, and it had enough under the hood to get him out of trouble quickly if the need arose. He parked up in an alleyway—the same alleyway in which Jackie O had seen fit to try to confront the occupants of the black van, although G-Mack didn’t know that—then slipped out onto the streets of the Point. He kept his head down, doing the rounds of his whores from the shadows, then retreated back to the Dodge. He had instructed the young bitch, Ellen, to act as an intermediary, bringing the money from the others to him instead of forcing him to return to the streets again.
He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He reached beneath the driver’s seat and removed a Glock 23 from its slot. The Hi-Point under his arm would do if he ran into trouble on the street, but the 23 was his baby. He’d been put onto it by a guy who got drummed out of the South Carolina State Police for corruption and now did a thriving business in firearms for the more discerning customer. The Staties down in SC had adopted the 23 sight unseen, and had never had cause to complain. Loaded up with .40 caliber S&W cartridges, it was one mean killing machine. G-Mack removed the Hi-Point from his holster and balanced both weapons in his hands. Next to the Glock, it was clear what a piece of shit the Hi-Point really was, but G-Mack wasn’t too concerned. This wasn’t a fashion show. This was life or death, and anyway, two guns were always better than one.
∗ ∗ ∗
We descended on Hunts Point shortly before midnight.
In the nineteenth century, Hunts Point was home to wealthy landowning families, their numbers gradually swelled by city dwellers envious of the luxurious lifestyles available to the Point’s residents. After World War I, a train line was built along Southern Boulevard, and the mansions gave way to apartments. City businesses began to relocate, attracted by the space available for development and ease of access to the tristate region. The poor and working-class families (nearly sixty thousand residents, or two-thirds of the population in the 1970s alone) were forced out as Hunts Point’s reputation grew in business circles, leading to the opening of the produce market in 1967 and the meat market in 1974. There were recycling stores, warehouses, commercial waste depots, auto glass sellers, scrap dealers—and, of course, the big markets, to and from which the trucks trundled, sometimes providing the hookers with a little business along the way. Nearly ten thousand people still lived in the district, and to their credit they had campaigned for traffic signals, modified truck routes, new trees, and a waterfront park, slowly improving this sliver of the South Bronx to create a better home for themselves and for future generations; but they were living in an area that was a crossroads for all the garbage the city of New York could provide. There were two dozen waste transfer stations on this little peninsula alone, and half of all its putrescible garbage and most of its sewage sludge ended up there. The whole area stank in summer, and asthma was rife. Garbage clung to fences and filled the gutters, and the noise of two million trucks a year provided a sound track of squealing brakes, tooting horns, and beeping reverse signals. Hunts Point was a miniature city of industry, and among the most visible of those industries was prostitution.
The streets were already crammed with cars as I arrived, and women tottered between them on absurdly high heels, most of them wearing little more than lingerie. There were all shapes, all ages, all colors. In its way, the Point was the most egalitarian of places. Some of the women shuffled like they were in the final stages of Parkinson’s, jerking and shifting from one foot to the other while trying to keep their spines straight in what was known locally as the “crack dance,” their pipes tucked into their bras or the waistbands of their skirts. Two girls on Lafayette were eating sandwiches provided by the Nightworks outreach initiative, which tried to provide the working girls with health care, condoms, clean needles, even food when necessary. The women’s heads moved constantly, watching for pimps, johns, cops. The cops liked to swoop occasionally, backing up the paddy wagons to street corners and simply sweeping any hookers within reach into the back, or pink-slipping them for disorderly conduct or obstructing traffic, even loitering, anything to break up their business. A $250 fine was a lot for these women to pay if they didn’t have a pimp to back them up, and many routinely spent thirty to sixty days in the can for nonpayment rather than hand over to the courts money that they could ill afford to lose, if the poorer ones had $250 to begin with.
I went into the Green Mill to wait for the others. The Green Mill was a legendary Hunts Point diner. It had been around for decades, and was now the main resting place for cold pimps and tired whores. It was relatively quiet when I got there, since business was good on the streets. A couple of pimps wearing Philadelphia Phillies shirts sat at one of the windows, flicking through a copy of Rides magazine and arguing the relative merits of assorted hookups. I took a seat near the door and waited. There was a young girl seated at one of the booths. Her hair was dark, and she was dressed in a short black dress that was little more than a slip. Three times I saw older women enter the diner, give her money, then leave again. After the third had departed, the girl closed the little purse containing the money and left the diner. She was back again maybe five minutes later, and the cycle resumed again.
Angel joined me shortly after the girl had returned. He had dressed down for the occasion, if such a thing were actually possible. His jeans were even more worn than usual, and his denim jacket looked like it had been stolen from the corpse of a particularly unhygienic biker.
“We have him,” he said.
“Where?”
“An alley, two blocks away. He’s sitting in a Dodge, listening to the radio.”
“He alone?”
“Looks like it. The girl over at the window seems to be bringing him his money a couple of times an hour, but she’s the only one who’s been near him since ten.”
“You figure he’s armed?”
“I would be if I was him.”
“He doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“He knows somebody’s coming. Louis talked to Jackie O.”
“The old-timer?”
“Right. He just gave us the lead. He figures G-Mack made a big mistake, and he’s known it since the night Martha confronted him. He’s edgy.”
“I’m surprised he’s stayed around this long.”
“Jackie O thinks he’d run if he could. He’s low on funds, seeing as how he spent all his money on a fancy ride, and he has no friends.”
“That’s heartbreaking.”
“I thought you might see it that way. Pay at the register. You leave it on the table, and someone will steal it.”
I paid for my coffee and followed Angel from the diner.
∗ ∗ ∗
We intercepted the girl just as she entered the alley. The pimp’s Dodge was parked around a corner in a lot behind a big brownstone, with an exit behind him onto the street and one before him that connected perpendicularly with an alley. For the moment, we were out of his sight.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’m not interested tonight,” she replied.
She tried to walk around me. I gripped her arm. My hand entirely enclosed it, with so much room to spare that I had to tighten my fist considerably just to hold on to her. She opened her mouth to scream, and Louis’s hand closed around it as we moved her into the shadows.
“Take it easy,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
I showed her my license, but didn’t give her enough time to take in the details.
“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Understand? I just need a few words.”
I nodded to Louis, and he carefully removed his hand from her mouth. She didn’t try to scream again, but he kept his hand close just in case.
“What’s your name?”
“Ellen.”
“You’re one of G-Mack’s girls.”
“So?”
“Where are you from?”
“Aberdeen.”
“You and a million other Kurt Cobain fans. Seriously, where are you from?”
“Detroit,” she said, her shoulders sagging. She was probably still lying.
“How old are you?”
“I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”
“I know you don’t. I’m just asking. You don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Bullshit,” said Louis. “That’s how old you’ll be in 2007.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, listen to me, Ellen. G-Mack is in a lot of trouble. After tonight, he’s not going to be in business anymore. I want you to take whatever money is in that purse and walk away. Go back to the Green Mill first. Our friend will stay with you to make sure you don’t talk to anyone.”
Ellen looked torn. I saw her tense, but Louis immediately brought his hand closer to her mouth.
“Ellen, just do it.”
Walter Cole appeared beside us.
“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk back with you, buy you a cup of coffee, whatever you want.”
Ellen had no choice. Walter wrapped an arm around her shoulder. It looked almost protective, but he kept a tight grip on her in case she tried to run. She looked back at us.
“Don’t hurt him,” she said. “I got nobody else.”
Walter walked her across the road. She took her old seat, and he sat beside her, so that he could hear all that she said to the other women, and could stop her if she made a break for the door.
“She’s just a child,” I said to Louis.
“Yeah,” he said. “Save her later.”
∗ ∗ ∗
G-Mack had promised to slip Ellen 10 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 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, 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 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, 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 Gs. 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 any of 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 mean 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 merely 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 Bright-well’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.