The steaming, thick coffee splashed right in Malek's face and thirty-year-old arraignment pit-bull wunderkind Wat Tyler Schulman called it quits right then and there. “Interview over, peeps!” he shouted affably, his short, wide, impossibly shouldered powerlifter’s frame dancing to and fro nervously from classic wing tip to classic wing tip in his wide-lapelled post-hipster’s zoot suit. His flaming red hair was slicked back with pomade tighter than a Parris Island marine’s bunk tucked sharp with hospital corners.
“It’s over when we say it’s over, Watty.” Boyd said this with glum resignation, replacing her now empty “Drink-up-you-have-a-better-chance-of-being-kidnapped-than-getting-married” coffee mug.
Wat smiled, shrugged, and pounded hard enough on the door to make the entire interview room shudder. Boyd was sure she felt the vibration in her knees. The door opened in a flash from the outside and Byron Wurdalaka leaned into the room with a hangdog look asking, deadpan, “Trouble, girls?”
“No trouble, detective,” Wat said with blustery ease. “Nothing we ain't seen here before. Kindly charge Lieutenant Boyd over there with assault and battery on my client, release Mr. Turbot or fucking charge him please, and do it pronto so I can beat the shit out of the next case Major Crimes tries to make at arraignment in about twenty minutes.” He looked at his watch and his face went slack. “Guys, we had better hurry. I could be wrong about the time.”
Malek sat there at the long interview table, not even bothering to look at Boyd’s smoke-stockinged legs as she swung them from the edge of the table where she sat. His knuckles went white, and he wept rivulets of murky coffee tears running down the dark-tan, exaggeratedly porous skin of his taut, angular face. An amber wraparound visor to protect his amblyopic left eye from all light cast a tinted shadow on already grim features.
“No charges,” Malek seethed. “Not for me, not for them. Do your job and get me out of here.”
“Oh, we'll charge you, Malek,” Boyd said, sliding off the desk. “Don't you worry about that. What have you got on him, Byron?”
“Four floaters in the Channel, six corpses at Sang Froid, maybe more if this little fight for supremacy continues LT.”
“Am I here at your little fucking tea party to listen to your bad jokes and your tawdry little fucking fantasies?” sneered Malek, dabbing a handkerchief at his face thoughtfully provided by Schulman. “Charge me or let me the fuck go. I didn't come here to be mocked and insulted.”
Boyd smacked the wraparounds off his smug and mottled face with a wide stroke. Their eyes locked for a nanosecond, then they both simultaneously laughed as Wurdalaka eased in and sat in an aluminum polyethylene chair that was straight out of the seventies, his back set against the wall. Malek sighed, shook his head and buried it in both hands like an exasperated great uncle in the hands of the family misfits.
Detective Sergeant Bim Hundertwasser watched bemused, suspicious and uncertain as whether to laugh himself or to start knocking heads, his thick forearms crossed bullyboy style at his mastiff chest. He would never give up straight thug street cred' for PR, even for now abdicating Police Commissioner Queen Kathleen herself. Oh no. He knew who he was and anyone on the street who didn't, would.
“Malek, you came here for me to annihilate you like the seamy little water beetle you are. That's the only reason you're not in lockup now. How this happens is just a matter of time. Strictly speaking though, up to me, you don't leave here in one piece. Today.”
Schulman grabbed Boyd's arm and wrenched her around to look him in the eye, except he was so short he wound up looking her in the neck. He ground his teeth and whispered loud. “You're getting in deeper than you want to go, Boyd. I'll subpoena room tapes and show this little farce to all. I'll bring IAD down on that nice coiffure like a Tsunami spillage of shit. You had better—”
Boyd pushed him off balance, Wurdalaka tripped him, never having had to get up to do it, and Hundertwasser caught him hard, slamming him against the wall. “Assaulting an officer is a legal taboo, counselor,” he said, wrist-cuffing Schulman hard enough to leave marks.
Schulman was perplexed yet professionally conciliatory: “Guys, this is stupid. You know better than this. It's baseless crap that won't stand.”
Hundertwasser pushed him back amiably and gave him a hard, measured shot to the thorax. “Ya? Maybe so, but you won't stand either, bub.” And he caught him before he fell.
Schulman heaved.
“Get him the fuck out of here, Bim, book him, process him, then lose the ticket.”
Hundertwasser herded the doubled over attorney out the door and down the hall, dragging him out as if he were a wounded calf.
Boyd got up from the edge of the table, wandered over to where Malek's visor had fallen, and replaced it on his stoic, dripping face. “You know, you started a goddamn war in my territory, you stupid cowardly little fuck,” she said with a sort of clipped cheer. “You went and fucked everything with your territorial trafficking squabbles and now your ass is mine. Now and forever.”
“But I don't know—”
Boyd was up and waving her arms at this as if the room cameras really were working, which they never did.
“You don't know, you don't know—blah-fucking-blah. Everyone knows you know.”
Malek stood up. “Make it stick, then, you bitch. But for now, with no attorney and no charge, I'm out.”
“I'll make what's left of you stick to a far wall at Concord Reformatory, don't worry.”
Malek went to the door to the hall and jiggled the locked knob angrily. “Come on, you no good hacks, open the fucking door. Time to book me or let me book!” Malek spun back around expecting a rabbit punch and with a crafty turn at the corners of his impassive mouth bragged, “No matter what you do, whatever bullshit hummer charge you stick me with, I'll be out by dark. It don't matter if you make Schulman a human Jacuzzi for every jocker boyo down at Concord Reformatory that wants to jump in. Lawyers are like laptops—pricey at the beginning, useful until you throw the damn thing out the window and get yourself something faster, better and cheaper. I got another Lawboy booting up in the lobby even as we speak. He'll be here if I ain't out in an hour, stupid clowns.” He sat back down at the table as if he were ready to negotiate. He smiled. “So what do you wanna do until? Game of pinochle? See who's got the biggest dick? So far, I think it's between me and the Lieutenant.”
Boyd punched Malek right in the face so blood splashed out from the sides. His eyes went as dead wide as a shark's and he gulped air hard.
Wurdalaka sat back flat against the wall and snickered in that grating gutter Boston style. “You ain't figured it out yet, Chief, have ya? No matter what the fuck you do, no matter how good the fucking lawyer you got is, no matter if he's from goddamn Hale and Dorr or Dewey, Cheatham and Howe. Simple fact is motherfucker: You ain't got nothing coming!”
Hundertwasser dangled a clean handkerchief before Malek who swiped at it like a truculent kitten. Boyd shook one hand limply in the other and whined a few soft curses.
“What's the matter LT?” Wurdalaka asked, his heels now up on the edge of the table. “You break a nail?”
“You're psychic, Byron. That's it exactly. I broke a nail on that fucking mutt's face, and I just hate that.”
Malek was laughing with his face mashed into the wadded handkerchief. “You broke more than that, Boyd. Say goodbye to your career. You broke it all just to take a swipe at a piece of shit like me. You took yourself down a peg and raised me up about fifty. Fuck all, I should put you on the payroll too!” Despite the satisfied mirth in his voice it sounded as if he were talking into a boot.
Wurdalaka, Hundertwasser and Boyd all laughed.
“They don't make ‘em like they used to do they,” observed Hundertwasser.
“No, they sure don't.”
Wurdalaka got up, stretched, paced and offered an explanation. “Listen, fuckstick, you need to stop watching so many cop shows and reading them Harvard boy mysteries. This is the fucking machine shop where fingers and toes get blown off and no one gives a rat's ass. There ain't no room tape, never has been, never gonna be. We either tape your confession, you write it, we write it up, or there's nothing. No record, no impartial oversight. All you got is three decorated stand-up cops grilling a punk local crew badass not long for this world no matter what happens. Your lawyer? Well, he's a tyro—got out of hand and we put him in protective custody. How did we know the fucking ticket would get lost and that he'd get mis-routed to Concord? We're just cops you know, not the brightest bulbs on the tree. We ain't that great with paperwork, just ask the Globe. Meanwhile, while your new Lawboy boots up downstairs, I could slip my new 45 Ruger here out of its holster, shove it neatly up your ass, blow your entrails out through your eye sockets and IAD would clear the shoot in six months without blinking. Not even the Weekly Dig would bat an eye. Just an unfortunate mishap affecting a deserving felon. Hey, shit happens.”
“'Tragedy and Inquiry at One Schroeder' I can see the backpage header now,” quipped Boyd. “Not even a star-billing death.”
Malek sighed. “The old days is over, ain't they?”
“Over like the Family, fuckstick. Over like Gomez Gomelsky and crew.”
“Over like your Armenian ass, you don't give us the skinny on this war right quick. Over like your goddamn testicles for calling me a bitch!”
Malek released his death grip on the wadded handkerchief pressed to the center of his face and laughed and laughed and clapped his hands as the bloody thing fell to the tabletop. “Oh, you guys are way too good to be working here. I have got to see to it to get you all a better gig. Why I should be shaking in my custom Gucci booties. What choice do I got—I come across, or I become a mishap?”
“Comes the dawn,” said Boyd. “Maybe I'll do it myself.”
Malek rolled the bloody handkerchief into a ball and hit the gunmetal gray wastepaper basket in a single arc with an offhand toss. “So, you're as bad as me.”
“Worse,” muttered Boyd.
“Oh good. I wouldn't have to feel so bad then if one or even a few of my guys catches you alone sometimes and decides to fuck you to death then brings me the head so I can fuck out what's left of your eyes. I mean, you might consider something like that as being ‘“fair is fair’.”
Boyd unholstered her Sig-Sauer and slid it across the table toward Malek, primed, loaded, condition zero. She got down to his level, narrowed her eyes, and glared at him. He took her meaning right away. They had reached the crux of the event and there was no backing down or undoing it. This was unadulterated street, informed and educated by the prison yard. There were few moves to be made here, and yet they had to be made quickly. If he just sat there, Hundertwasser and Wurdalaka would throw him a truly professional beating, and even if he won that beating without grabbing for the gun, they would likely shoot him, anyway.
“Well, what's it to be, bitch?” Malek smiled broadly because he knew at that moment that things had come round his way.
Hundertwasser and Wurdalaka's guns rose up.
Malek spoke jovially. “Well, Lieutenant, then I guess I had better tell you a few things.”
And so he did.
Malek made it clear that there was no war, and then he proceeded to make it clear exactly why there was no war, and for good measure tied in something about a new drug some whack-job crock doc tried to get him to push out through his channels to the street. Thanks, but no thanks. Who needs the grief?
Malek talked and talked, happily, volubly with bonhomie and charm and left free and easy, albeit bloody and rumpled and dabbing at his face as you please.
When he was gone, alone in that drab institutional room stinking of piss, sweat and fear, Boyd broke down and cried inexplicably on Wurdalaka's shoulder, much to his confusion and chagrin. She couldn't tell him why, but it was all there looming in the air like some cheesy special-effects ghost from a Z-grade direct-to-DVD horror flick.
The nightmare she had started would never end and would always come back to her:
The nightmare of Null.
The nightmare awoke from empty dreams and unfulfilling sleep. And why not? He was sleeping the sleep of the unmedicated tweaker—the speed freak brought down by indifference and neglect. Dry and wisplike, Null became active in his Mattapan squat, kicked the floor panel he set up and pirated lights burned the air, humming like restless bugs. Kenny the kid was shivering deep in dreams in a corner of the floor near the bolted entry huddled against a duffle bag of collected weapons and guns from the late drug lord Heavy Cheese LePetomane and the now obeisant replacement called “Do- Rag.” Null yanked him up and threw him in the shower, low-riding pants, filthy boxers and all.
The kid made noises of protest drowned out by the gruff and echoing wail of Howlin' Wolf'’s “Evil.”
He dried himself with a ratty but surprisingly clean towel and helped himself to Null's threadbare set of Good Will Clothing discards neatly folded in an impromptu and homemade chifforobe painted as lead white as the walls of the squat. He squinted, watching the Lord God Almighty snort lines of meth off the clean dull metal face of a filed down machete.
Why not? If God could be a drug dealer, he could certainly snort crystal meth, whether he needed to or not. God did not object if he took some himself. It was a sacrament of sorts.
They hit Codman square, the harsh frost thick and gray in the dark morning air and Ken Embers asked shakily, “Is this the time?”
“It's always the time,” said Null, reluctant God.
They ate at Bardu's Superette on Shawmut Ave, a grimy, seedy quickie mart and coffee shop for day laborers, all-night drunk pensioners, SSI derelicts and their unsupported hangers-on mixed in with the occasional shapeless and defiantly dignified transsexual prostitute. They ate two specials, Egg McNuttin's they were called, scrambled eggs wrapped in flatbread filled with mystery meat and grease and offal downed with coffee. They ate joylessly, mouths bitter and numb with meth, throats constricted and metabolisms pulsing.
Null dragged his persistent charge onto the cramped trolley car of the Ashmont line for the long, drudging ride into Park Street Station to change up shallow, narrow steps for the Green Line Cleveland Circle LRV. The kid was hardly conscious, Null propping him up with an iron-solid shoulder, herding him onto the car. He dragged the boy like a dreamer through the car, yanked some professorial dowd out of his seat and arranged his acolyte across it as he squirmed for purchase, reclining against the Plexiglas window. The kid clutched his hands in threadbare pockets, saying something about theology that was swallowed to a murmur by the groaning of the train.
The trolley dragged on above ground out of the mouth of the underground to the outskirts of Boston, up rills and ridges, following the wavy, tree-congested divergences of Beacon Street past Coolidge Corner and up through Washington Square, the stone Jewish section of town where old banks had been converted to delicatessens. When the trolley jerked to an unsettled stop, Null dragged Kenny Embers up on his feet, who rubbed his eyes and waved away the hands of his deity even as he was herded out the folding accordion door of the train.
It was on University off Beacon, a retrofitted help center—multi-service center it would have been called decades ago, with new MSWs and humanities graduates dealing with social awareness of issues of alternative sexuality, STDs, runaways, drugs, for a pittance or a stipend long ago when youth was far more epidemic. Now, the parcel of prime rental real estate was occupied by the Dapper O'Neil Shelter and Service Group, a final stopgap before the street for dispossessed gay men. This was where Null dragged him, the boy weaving in the street and in his mind still spoiling for a fight when there was no one there and nothing to fight at all.
The building was white-stoned at the façade, a snowy gray ivory with bits of soot-smudge dappling its contours, marred from the latter part of the century before last not quite as old as the building itself. There was a large, dome-ceilinged foyer that opened to a high, curved staircase not quite spiraled, whitewashed with a cheap undertone of blue. The hard wood floors were shellacked to a plastic sheen coating over speckled gouges of damage blackened with time. A cotton pseudo macramé area throw rug covered the center of the floor in crushed and rumpled disarray. A student sat reading Kant's Prolegomena at a gun metal gray institutional desk from 1952. The air had a carbolic, Lysol kind of tinge with motes of dust dancing in the air, defining the light from the high, unshuttered windows and a chicken-wired oriel at the crest of the concave inner dome.
The student, a pudgy dreadlocked hermaphrodite in Wallabys and loose blue shirt tails over olive drab khakis, placed down the Prolegomena and disappeared into a side room, mumbling something in a half decipherable patois. Taking his place just in time to dodge a flailing Kenny Embers was a stocky woman in a knockoff Donna Karan business suit wearing wire trifocals resting heavily on her nose and an incongruously filigreed blouse that bunched up at the stomach right where her skirt tapered in. “Can you get him into my office on your own, or do you need help?”
“He don't need no help,” heaved Kenny.
“No he don't,” assented Null.
The woman shambled off to high ceilinged, cramp-walled side room sparsely decorated with cracked plaster and paint of a dirty cerulean blue and plumped down behind an ancient mahogany institutional desk blackened with age, opened a manila file and began scribbling, ignoring the heavy tilted screen of an outdated computer monitor glowering down on her.
“This is the candidate?” she asked.
“It is,” grunted Null, pushing his unwanted charge down into an aluminum framed green Naugahyde mismatched chair.
“Candidate for what?” croaked Kenny.
“Residency,” the woman mumbled, not looking up from the file. “Mr.—uh?” She cleared her throat.
“Null”
“Null. You realize that Kenny is going to be here for quite a while?”
Glazed eyes wide, Kenny shot up from his chair and Null grabbed him hard from behind, immobilizing both his arms. “Don't you have some milieu therapist type guys here to handle this?” he asked.
She recoiled from the melee, more practiced than shaken, and hit the low-tech wireless intercom added onto the side of the obsolete console phone. The male nurses trundled in, grabbed Kenny off Null's hands with a thick economy of motion. Kenny spat, and Null stood unruffled. Kenny kicked up both legs, Null deftly dodged his kiddie-sneakered feet and one nurse caught an elbow to the chin from Kenny's akimbo flailing.
“Watch out for the hands in his pockets,” Null stated. “He has knives. Kid liked that character in that old Conan the Barbarian movie. The one that swung the double pig-stickers, one to a fist. Better hold him hard or he'll hug those blades right to your spleen.”
They did and Null collected the knives, set them on the administrator's desk.
The Nurses dragged him off, his legs kicking out and back and he squirmed up arched from the torso. The male nurses, moonlighting bouncers or vice versa, barely twitched carrying him off to the Quiet Room.
“Rubber room?”
“Until he settles, then he gets his own room with a bed and some extras. A little comfort, if the dementia lets him feel it.”
“It's gonna cost me.”
“It doesn't have to, Mr. Null, but we only have resources for so many and a long list.”
“Yes, of the well-connected, well-to-do. Sure. I'll play. Set him up good and you'll get our donation.”
“This is hospice care, Mr. Null. It's usually not for the long term, certainly not in Kenny Ember's case, and what's left over from what you give goes down the line.”
“There's no slowdown in death is there?”
“Not that I have ever seen.”
“We have our work cut out for us, don't we, Mrs. Coelacanth?”
Her face darkened and puckered in a little, and she made a soft coughing sound.
“I have no idea what business you're in, Mr. Null. Mine is to hold back a tidal wave of tears with a rusty bathtub.”
“Go easy, Mrs. Coelacanth. We're in like rackets together, you and I.”
“And that would be what, Mr. Null?”
“I dry up that tidal wave you speak of and keep it from your door. I take care of the ones you never see—the ones you shouldn't see.”
“And what about the one you dropped off here, then? What about him?”
Null was unchanged in demeanor—mathematicians, undertakers, and pathologists all had more passion in the throes of equations, embalming and autopsies than he showed in discussing what was presumed to be a torturously dying friend.
“Why, he's a mistake,” Mrs. Coelacanth. “Just another mistake in a world where the wrong routinely run roughshod over the right.”
“Very virtuously spoken ,Mr. Null, but we've no place for high morals in the house of death.”
“Yes. So I'm aware.”
“And you leave this mistake with us and flit off—we hope for the sake of a donation.”
“Yes, exactly. I'll be donating the bodies of those who made the mistake in the first place straight into the earth.”
Mrs. Coelacanth looked pale watching him turn and step out, neither happy nor sad, heavy nor light, just a blur of a soft-spoken man with no really distinguishing features (other than scars) who might as well have been nothing and no one at all.
Toad and Badger came along briskly from the shadows on the dark thoroughfare toting a box of tricks meant to produce a diversion on their way to meet up with Ratty and Mole, or so it seemed in the sooty twilight by the jungle-like treescape of the twisted paths that diverged and connected around Park Drive along the Fens. They were, in silhouette, charming anthropomorphic grotesques out of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, meant to delight and frighten children in a mildly threatening absurdity building toward a comic climax of unresolved violence. And though they were criminals of the hardest kind, that was exactly what they were intending to do as they trundled a dark, heavy box toward the old 1270, a gay club that abutted the schizoid duplex of two others like it: Ramrod and Machine.
What they were intending to do was to mildly frighten and move the gay sex children and chicken hawks of the clubs into a clot of distracting violence to block the arteries of intrigue.
What they intended to do was to survive a meet with Malek the Mallet and the muscle of the Ork, set in principle to dicker out the drugs but in reality was to be just another whack out session to put an end to the wayward inconvenience of Lumpy's master plan.
Lumpy was settled in his mind to whack them out first.
He was going to ambush the ambush and Benway, seeing this, was cannily going along for the ride until he could find a way to serve Lumpy up to the thugs and use him as cover to make a clean break for it and get out on the fast express to Canada.
Benway had plans for the gum, and they didn't include crime crew retribution and a quest for human connectivity relieved by the freeing impulse of breaking heads. They didn't include making Filmore Lakeworry a loved, accepted and valued member of the social order, and they didn't include both of them being schlumped, dumped and buried by the paranoid Malek the Mallet and the Muscle of the Ork.
They did, however, include a whack out on Lumpy and a Canadian getaway with the gum for a foray at the club scene in Toronto—the Canadian ballet, or lap dancing circuit ruled by the Russian mob in that city. They would be easier to deal with than Malek and his crazy-quilt operational terror /aversion of the authorities, keeping them at bay with discretion and stealth when anyone could tell you that the authorities who counted for anything were for sale to the last man, or woman, anyway. Yes, he even believed OC Taskforce Director Kay Boyd had her price, but Malek would rather appease the opposition by whacking out members of his own crew than risk being at odds with a corrupt city government and its jackbooted, thug-bellied police.
Typical Boston.
You couldn't even trust the nature of its own corruption.
Caught for a moment under the blistering street neon, held in relief against the trees and bushes, Toad and Badger became more Lumpy and Benway, looking at once ridiculous and malevolent in the sharp star whiteness of the light, their hard cargo of gum swaying into the shadows like a thick pendulum. A motion detector froze open the light, harsh and fierce, only for a moment, like lightning in a silent storm, and they both stopped dead. Then Lumpy let out with an inarticulate bark or cry meant to startle some beast or drive motion itself perhaps back into being and the two of them trundled the weighty box across Boylston Street directly into a broken pavement alley by a back lot for illicit parking, garbage and the scurrying of rats, human and otherwise. They dropped the box in sandy, graveled dust, which made weedy Benway cough pathetically as Lumpy reached for a rusted crowbar he didn't have to feel for to grasp hard by the bulkhead, of which he used the hooked-end to yank its metal doors open.
A voice cried out displeasure in the usual Boston honk: “Hey, whatcha doin' thay-uh?”
Lumpy was cool. He exhorted, “Just a delivery, man! Cub Group, they know all about this—something special from your friends down at Symphony.” It was right Boston code, invoking both the company whose silent majority owner was the Ork and then again code for the Ork itself. It was a happily recited double threat announcement that invited no retort.
“Don't drop it,” warned the honk.
Too late. The box slammed down with bang to the dry, compacted earth floor of the basement. Lumpy jumped down from the bulkhead's opening, bypassing wooden plank steps while Benway crabbed down gingerly. Lumpy had his arm behind his back clutching his gun, an anonymized snub-nosed thirty-eight with fingerprint proof tape around the handle, a quick discard. Benway bent down nervously, securing the box. One of the young hip-hop thugs from Southie or Dorchester in a spotless white tank top over some kind of cloth prison jeans, looking like a dapper pantaloon clown, stepped up and faced them, hair so slicked with mousse it glistened as if studded with rhinestones in the sharp wooden yellow of the basement light.
“Watcha gut thay-uh, chief?”
“Got a big, good night for you, dollface? And I ain't no chief.” Lumpy made a smooching sound.
The thugboy, who obviously worked at the club tending bar helping the DJ run cords and cables, gaffing, manning any and every other chore at the pleasure of the managers, possibly unpaid but by suspect barter—backstage passes, drugs, VIP access—had no time to question Lumpy's explanation. He was poised to make a remark, but then was smartly elbowed straight in the face, then punched in the spleen with such speed and sureness that Benway had almost no time at all to avoid being knocked down by his falling body.
Lumpy motioned for Benway to grab his feet and together they dragged the thugboy into the open walk-in refrigerator. Thugboy started to rally but Lumpy bent down and cracked him one hard to the jaw, and he stayed down instead, blood trickling out his nose onto the cool, widely divided wooden planks that kept boxes of wine and snacks and kegs of tap beer above a pool of foul dark water resting beneath.
“What now?” Benway asked, failing not to quaver.
He grinned: “Freebies, baby. We just giving this shit away!”
Do-Rag was running down Tremont (pronounced Tree-mont) in the South End. His face was on fire with streaks and forced points of burning that were actually nothing but cold sweat catching the air but which had blossomed all over his body just a few minutes ago.
And why shouldn't it?
After all, he had just met with death face-to-face for the second time in his life and would live to tell about it.
That is, he would live to tell about it if he made no further mistakes. Trouble is, being terrified rendered him prone to making further mistakes. And making mistakes is not something you can survive doing in the meth trade very long. He was more nervous about this than he was about carrying the half pound of crank under his arm that could put him away down at MCI Walpole for about twenty years. He was hustling his way to the no-name crib where Gangsta Boyz piped up and did business. He was going to pitch a room full of street-mean sociopaths as wild as himself, full of grit and fear and cunning, and try to turn them to a meth distribution crew under a new boss they'd never met much less heard of or cared about.
He needn't have worried.
There were blood spatters and bodies by the time he cried “Yo-yo!” through the reinforced door left curiously ajar. Girlish distorted divas in heavy makeup were tending to the two bodies, as if they were still alive. The rest of the young men in the room and their smaller fauns looked shell-shocked, but when Do-Rag started stammering out the new plan they were attentive with a newly serious intent to listen. Some conspicuously had blood on their faces and spattering leathers and boots. Some just had a look on their faces from which only one thing could have been concluded:
Null had been to visit.