Dusk settled in as we pulled in front of the familiar row of houses on Harmon Street. I parked in the same spot as before across from Dora’s place.
Wilson looked around. “Gee, Pelton, we sure don’t stick out driving this yuppie-mobile or anything.”
The single red bulbs on each porch were lit up like Christmas. Windows were covered with plywood thanks to the car explosion. But apparently business was still booming. Maybe it was all the free press. A man left one of the houses and got into a Chevrolet pickup.
“I’ll be,” Wilson said.
“What?”
“You know who that is?”
I tried to get a look at the driver as he passed us. He wore a ball cap and the collar of his shirt was turned up. It was too hard to tell. “No, who is he?”
“Ted Watkins.”
I think I blinked.
“That’s right,” Wilson said. “Mr. ‘I’m gonna clean up the city.’ The eager senator must be doing it door-to-door.”
Another man walked to one of the shacks and was led inside by a woman.
Wilson looked at the door to Kim Lee’s house, which was still closed, along with the drapes. He said, “You know I can’t get anywhere near them, right? They’ll make me for a cop before I step out of the car.”
Just like the senator, I slipped on a ball cap to hide my face in case the pimps running the street remembered me from the night of the car explosion. “I need you for something else.”
“What?”
“I need you to watch my car.”
He shook his head. “Fifteen years on the job and I’m bumped down to parking lot attendant.”
Kim’s door opened.
“Blow the horn if you see anyone coming.” I got out of the car and waited until the john left before I approached. Kim sat in a chair on the porch in a negligee and lit a cigarette.
“Hey, honey.” She made a motion like she was going to stub out the cigarette.
I leaned against the railing. “Take your time.”
She said, “Time is money, honey.”
“I got plenty of both.”
In the light of the red bulb, she studied my face. “I like you already.” The cherry of her cigarette glowed as she inhaled. She let out a steady stream of smoke. “I haven’t seen you before, honey. I’d remember.”
I recognized her as the girl in the trench coat Galston had visited when Darcy and I got set up. When she finished her cigarette, I followed her inside. She shut the door and pulled the drapes.
“Time is money,” she said. “A hundred gets you thirty minutes. Two if you want it kinky.”
I flashed a money roll I’d put together from the funds found in the crab pots, peeled off two hundreds, and handed them to her.
She started to pull her negligee off.
“I’m into something different,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me.
I said, “Conversation.”
She tilted her head. “You want me to talk dirty to you?”
“Not exactly. I want to know about the two guys with the car that blew up.”
The shape her face contorted into had more wrinkles than anyone her age should have. “You five-oh. Get out.”
I tried to hand her another fifty. “I’m not a cop.”
“You something,” she said. “Get out!” She pressed a button on the kitchen counter. “You got two minutes, big boy. Temp-a gonna come blow you away.”
I pushed past her, pulled the forty-five, and headed for the back of the house. The knob was missing from the back door. I kicked hard. The rusty hinges groaned but didn’t give. I kicked it again. The jamb splintered open. Formosan termites, dirt, and sawdust peppered the floor. The Audi’s horn trumpeted a warning.
Moments later a man yelled from the front room, “Where is he?”
I jumped through the open door and crashed into cans of rotting garbage. Coated with slime, I made it to the corner of the house. Bullets sprayed from a machine gun behind me. As I rounded the house heading toward the street, light mounted somewhere over my head showed someone running toward me. He must have been blinded by the light behind me and couldn’t see me coming. I lifted the pistol in my hand and smashed it sideways into the runner’s face. Legs went out from under him and he landed on his back with a thud. I crouched, turned, and shot out the light a second before the man with the machine gun came around the corner of the house. Still crouching, I held the forty-five steady in my hands and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The machine gun sprayed over my head and the outline of the shooter came into focus. I exhaled, aimed, and put a round in his upper right torso. The force of the forty-five jerked him backwards. His shoulder wouldn’t do him any good for a while, but I didn’t care. I turned and ran to the street.
Wilson crouched behind my car, his arms extended over the roof and a Glock aimed squarely at me. “Freeze!”
I held up my hands. “It’s me. We gotta get out of here.”
He pointed his pistol to the sky.
“Come on,” I said. “Time is money. We can call a meat wagon from the road. They aren’t dead, but they might have friends.”
We jumped in the car and I got us out of there. With the disposable cell, I called it in but didn’t give my name. When I hung up, Wilson was looking at me.
“What?”
He said, “If I run the number, is it going to be the same one you used when you blew up the Chrysler?”
“Who says I blew up anything?”
“Right. What—” Wilson stopped. “You smell like—”
“Don’t say it.”
At Wilson’s house, I took a shower and tossed my garbage-smeared clothes. Wilson let me borrow his, which were a size or two big and a decade or two out of style. He made a few calls to find out what he could about the “trouble on Harmon Street,” or as he put it to me, the “new mess you made.”
We sat on his back patio with glasses of iced tea. Darcy called to say she heard about a shooting in the red light district and thought it might be me. I lit a cigar and filled her in on how far I didn’t get with the unhappy hooker. Darcy said she and Patricia were finishing the story of the EPA and IRS crackdown on Galston and would keep me informed if they found anything new.
I ended the call and looked at Wilson. “You find out how the pimps are doing?”
Wilson flipped open a pad I’d seen him take notes in when he was on the job. “The one you clubbed, name is Anton Henry Smith, has a concussion but is otherwise in stable condition. His partner, a Randall Jackson Clay, calls himself Temp-a, with a hyphen before the ‘a.’ I’m guessing it’s slang for temper, or the guy can’t spell, or both. Thirty years old. This guy should play the lottery he’s so lucky. Either you’re a bad shot or you aimed high. His shoulder is wrecked but you missed his lung by inches.” He looked up from the notebook. “Both have sheets and are being held for questioning. The machine guns they carried guarantee jail time.”
“It is a beautiful world we live in.” I took a drag from the cigar.
“Maybe you should play the lottery, too,” he continued. “The hooker said she didn’t remember what the perpetrator looked like.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She gave you a free pass.”
“Know what that means?”
“We take another shot at her.”
“So to speak.” I got up. “This time you drive. My car smells.”
Around ten PM we returned to the red light district in Wilson’s unmarked cruiser whose keys he’d conveniently forgotten to hand in when they suspended him. He monitored the police radio as he drove to make sure his Brothers in Blue had vacated the scene. I enjoyed riding up front for a change. Every other time I’d been shackled in the back. One street over from Harmon, he pulled to the curb under what had to be the last functioning streetlamp around. I wondered how it was spared when the others had been used for target practice. I put a fresh clip in the forty-five and slid it down the waistband of the extra-large shorts Wilson had loaned me.
Wilson said, “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that since my fellow officers are looking for the gun that shot the forty-five-caliber bullet that went through Temp-a and ended up in a tree.”
“Good, and I won’t mention you drive like an old lady.”
The sound of a car coming up from behind made us duck into the shadows. An American sedan from the seventies rolled by on huge chromed wheels, its bass system shaking the ground. It looked like something out of the comics.
After it passed, Wilson whispered, “What are you gonna say to the Chinese squeeze?”
“That’s really clever, Wilson,” I whispered back. “I was planning on kicking the door in and dragging her out by her hair.”
“As a detective, I always found knocking first worked pretty well.”
We turned the corner and headed up the street where Kim Lee worked. With the two guys who usually watched the street in the hospital, we didn’t bother trying to be sneaky. As if to pay his respects, Wilson stopped by the spot where the Chrysler went up in flames.
“I can’t believe you blew up their car.”
“You can’t prove I did anything.”
A female voice came from across the street. “You bring big money with you, honey?” The end of a cigarette glowed in the darkness.
Inside Kim Lee’s hot pad, Wilson watched her bend over to get two beers out of the refrigerator. I pulled the curtain open to peer out. With no illumination on the street, the darkness was heavy.
Kim Lee set the beers in front of us. “So, you guys want same deal as the ones you asked about, honey?”
I turned away from the window to look at her. “Depends. What’d you have to do for them?”
She took a seat at the table between us. “Why don’t you tell me what you like, honey.”
I took out my gangster roll, unfolded two more hundreds, and laid them on the table. “I like lots of things.”
She reached for the bills but Wilson put his hand over them.
“What I’d like right now,” I said, “is information.”
She moved her hand back and looked at the button on the counter she’d pressed the last time I was here.
“Temp-a’s in the hospital,” Wilson said. “The other one’s in jail. What’s his name? Anton?”
“So it’s just us,” I added.
In the weak glow from the fixture in her kitchen, I saw Kim Lee sigh and drop her eyes. “Am I in trouble?”
“You could be,” I said, “if you don’t answer our questions.”
Wilson picked up the can of beer with one hand and opened a leather badge holder on the table with the other. I guessed it was Rogers’s badge because Wilson had to surrender his own to the police captain.
Wilson raised the can to his lips, took a swallow, and said, “It’s your choice.”
Kim Lee glanced at the badge.
Wilson snapped it shut and put it in his pocket.
“If I talk, they’ll hurt me,” she said.
I leaned in close to Kim. “Ten days ago, I saw one of your career sisters. She was sucking down opium as fast as she could get it, scared to death because someone’s idea of foreplay was assault and battery. The john paid Temp-a’s handlers so he could hurt her. Maybe it’s the same someone we’re after. He might come here next to tie up any loose ends.”
The frown on her face told me she wasn’t impressed. Like she ran across those types of johns every day. And she probably did.
“Did I mention the girl was found with a bunch of nine millimeter holes in her?” I asked. “She was only sixteen.”
Kim Lee focused on her hands resting on the table. “What do you want?”
“Remember the morning you wore the trench coat when you opened a motel door to the big fat man?”
She took her time and eventually nodded.
I slammed my hand on the table. Kim Lee flinched.
“They shot my friend there,” I said. “Who set it up?”
Kim Lee whimpered.
I pounded the table again. “I want to know everything. Get yourself together and spill it.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Th-they pay me. They say I don’t have to do anything except answer the door and look sexy. The fat man, he come inside the room and leave through the back door. They give me a hundred bucks and take me back here.”
I said, “You don’t know anything else about that day?”
She shook her head no.
Wilson said, “You didn’t hear any gunfire?”
She nodded. “I hear something, but I leave out the back door after the fat man.”
Wilson finished his beer. “Is that the only time you met the fat man?”
“Yes,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with me. He has his own girl.”
I gathered my thoughts.
She said, “The fat man said something when we heard the pops. Something like: ‘that should take care of it.’ ”
“All right,” I said. “Tell us about your Thursday night regulars. The ones with the blown-up car.”
“They come every week,” she said. “I think they like each other more than me.”
Wilson chuckled. I would have too if I hadn’t been so mad Galston got the drop on me and Darcy.
I said, “You know the names for your Thursday night action?”
“Besides john,” Wilson said.
Between sobs, she said, “Freddy. Freddy and Chad. That’s all I know.”
I said, “Which one’s the young one?”
“Chad.”
Wilson said, “Who is the fat man’s girl?”
“Alexus,” she said. “Like the car. The other girls say he keeps her in an apartment. No other johns can touch her.”
Wilson made a notation in his pad. “You know where the apartment is?”
Kim Lee shook her head again.