“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Nobody is saying anything, Tony,” O’Leary said into the phone. “I just want to know if you’ve heard of anyone looking for or buying a .308 rifle and ammo under the table.” He ignored the irate tone of the loud voice on the other end and slowly rotated his cigarette back and forth between his thumb and index finger as he listened.
Finally, he had listened to enough of Tony Petrano’s caustic remarks. O’Leary cut him off. “All right, enough of the bullshit. If the cops are looking at my organization for this, then you better fuckin’ believe they’re lookin’ at you guys too. You hear anything, the next goddamned person you talk to is me. You got that? Because if I find out you’re holding back, there’ll be hell to pay.” He slammed the phone into its cradle and felt it flex in his hand. He turned it over and saw a crack running across the keypad. He held the broken phone up so it was visible to Gordon Winter. “Remember when we were kids and shit didn’t break every friggin’ time you looked at it cross-eyed?”
“Sounds like you’re getting the runaround?”
O’Leary ignored the way Winter had discounted his comment about the fragility of modern appliances.
For several seconds, O’Leary stared at the broken phone. Then he yanked the cord from the wall and tossed it in his wastebasket. He turned his attention back to Winter. “This one has me by the balls. No one has heard anything about this whack-job. It ain’t natural that some asshole is shooting the city up and nobody has a clue about who it is.”
Winter contemplated his response for a brief moment. “Are the cops really tryin’ to lay this bullshit at our feet?”
“I don’t know about the rest of the cops, but I don’t think Houston believes we had anything to do with it. He knows me better than that. He should know that I ain’t never hit no one that didn’t give me reason to. Shit, there’s any number of buttheads walkin’ around that I probably should have whacked years ago.”
“Want me to check around?”
“Yeah, but before you do that, I got something else for you.”
“Name it.”
“You recall the woman that came in here yesterday afternoon?”
“Are you referring to the black broad?”
“Yeah, seems some local gangbangers raped and killed her thirteen-year-old daughter.”
Gordon’s face turned hard. “This city is fuckin’ out of control. The kid was only thirteen?”
“Yeah, she was still a goddamned baby.”
“You get a name . . . someplace for me to start?”
“A local shithead who uses the street name Razor may be involved. The name his mother gave him is Jermaine, Jermaine Watts.” O’Leary held out a scrap of paper. “He hangs out in the ‘Bury, around Martin Luther King Boulevard, near Malcolm X Park. Here’s an address for his grand-mother—she’s raising him. I suppose ‘supporting him’ is more accurate.”
Winter stood, took the slip of paper and, after memorizing what was written on it, tossed it into the wastebasket with the now useless telephone. “Consider it done. How you want it handled?”
“Bring him to the usual place and then call me. I’ll talk to him there.”
The smile on Winter’s face was the one that made women grab their kids and scurry across the street. When Jimmy saw it, he knew the job was, for all intents and purposes, done.
“You got a picture of this asshole?”
“No, but he shouldn’t be hard to find. Marian said he has spider webs tattooed around his eyes, like the damn Lone Ranger’s mask.”
“Once I get Watts, what we going to do about this sniper thing?” he asked.
“Since nobody wants to talk, we’ll just have to go bust a few asses. Get me anything you can.”
Winter leaned against the fender of his Lincoln Navigator, sipping coffee from a takeout cup. To a casual observer, he appeared relaxed; however, his eyes were in constant motion, studying everything on the street and missing nothing. If O’Leary’s information was accurate, Jermaine Watts hung out in this neighborhood and it was only a matter of time before he would be roaming around. Winter believed that, as a rule, gang-bangers were as territorial as a pack of dogs and spent most of their time patrolling their turf to protect it from other gangs. Winter also knew that it was unlikely that a white man was going to learn much asking questions in the hood, so he did what he had learned to do as an army ranger; he observed and he listened.
Ten minutes passed before his quarry appeared. Jermaine Watts was still a quarter of a block away when Winter identified him by his tats. The kid bopped along, carrying an MP3 player with an earphone stuck in his right ear. Probably playing an incomprehensible rap song, Winter thought. He acted as if he were king of the streets. His baggy black jeans hung down exposing the top half of a greasy-looking, shiny pair of floral-print designer boxers. He wore a black Celtics cap, coated with enough hair gel to make it glisten in the sun. The cap’s brim pointed three-quarters of the way toward the back of his head. Winter knew the angle designated the gang to which Razor belonged. There was nothing Winter hated more than people who wore hats backward—he believed that only catchers were supposed to do that and this punk was no ballplayer.
“Could you spare some change?”
Winter turned toward the voice. A grubby tramp stood beside him holding his soiled hand out. Winter made no effort to hide his loathing and said, “Change? What you need is to take a fuckin’ bath in sheep dip and scour your cruddy carcass with a wire brush. Now get out of my goddamned face before I do something about it.”
The tramp’s eyes widened with fear and he scurried away.
Winter downed the last of his coffee, crumpled the cup and tossed it into a nearby trash can. He returned his attention to Jermaine, who was still shuffling and dancing his way toward him. As the gangbanger closed with him, his spider-web tats became more defined. The idiot had no idea that his life was about to turn to shit. Winter thought about what lay in Jermaine’s near future and smiled. “Ignorance is bliss . . . ”