Suds and Duds was a little north of 23rd on Dodds in the armpit between Fort Cheatem and Ridgedale. I call it the armpit because of the way the highway loops around Missionary Ridge like a Little League Pitcher throwing a curveball. Not the friendliest place in the city, but that didn’t bother me… Well, not when I was a cop. Now? Maybe a little.
I eased the pistol out of its holster, made sure there was one in the chamber… not that I needed to; I kept the weapon ready to fire at all times, force of habit. Forget what you’ve seen on TV; if you get into trouble, there’s never time enough to rack the slide, aim, and fire. That’s the quickest way to get dead I know.
I knew Suds and Duds from my days on the force. It was a hangout for drug dealers, gang bangers, and folks who wanted to grab a fix and do the wash at the same time.
As I drove, I thought about the paper napkin. Although the phone number rang the S&D business, Phoebe’s drawing, symbol or whatever it was, wasn’t their logo. There’s was cheesy—a basket of dirty drawers with bubbles rising above it.
Phoebe’s drawing was pretty rough, hard to make sense of. A series of circles with points, interlaced, one inside the other, I pictured it in my mind… What it might represent, I had no idea… Or maybe it meant nothing—just a doodle, the product of the active imagination of a rich kid with a bob cut and black nail polish. That didn’t seem likely though. She drew that picture and left it next to her money for a reason.
Was it her way of telling me that she knew they were after her and if they took her, she hoped I’d come looking for her? It was one hell of a stretch, but there was only one way to find out: I had to find her.
I found a parking spot on the street under a bright light a block away from the laundromat. Not that the light would stop the bangers from stripping my car, but it was better than the dark spots down in front of the washeteria where every other car was a piece of garbage compared to mine.
What is it they say? Thieves always steal from the neighbor with the best stuff. So I found a spot between an ’05 Lexus and an ’07 Corvette. I figured if there was any stripping to be done, they’d go for one of those instead of mine. Well, I hoped so.
I locked the car using the button on the armrest, stepped out into the rain, pulled the collar of my jacket up around my neck, and headed down the street to the laundromat on the corner.
“Hey buddy, you got a buck?”
“What?”
I stopped, turned, and looked at the guy lying in the doorway of a store that looked as if it had been closed since before Pontius was a pilot. He looked cold and hungry. The pile of dirty blankets he was lying on was sopping wet, and he’d piled sheets of cardboard, flattened boxes, on top of himself to try and keep dry whatever small part of him he could. It wasn’t often I’d fork over money to a vagrant, but this guy looked half dead. Even so, there was no way I was going to fish out my wallet in this neighborhood. I did, however, have a stray five in my jacket pocket that made its way into his hand. He was oh so grateful.
Hugging the wall and overhangs from doorway to doorway, I finally made it to the bright lights on the corner —I jest, of course. The lights were indeed bright, but the place was a pigpen: sleazy, dirty, where hard-looking women in too-tight pants chewed gum while they waited for their panties fluffing in the dryers. In a neighborhood like that, a laundry stop was more of a dating service for losers looking for drugs and… cheap sex.
I knew I was out of place, but I needed answers. The bell jingled as I walked through the door. It was crowded for a Wednesday night. There was a trashy-looking couple in one corner shooting up and a young woman, just a kid of maybe eighteen or nineteen, bouncing a baby on her knee while checking the messages on her phone. Geez. Babies having babies.
A black kid seated on a stool in the corner looked like he might be a refugee from the weather. He wasn’t doing laundry; he was reading a comic book, Hellboy. I had to stop myself from shaking my head. I didn’t know him, but I knew the type.
“Hey, kid,” I said. “Do you know a chick named Phoebe?”
He didn’t look up from his book. “Hey kid…” That’s when I noticed the wires dangling from his ears. I tugged on one and out popped the bud.
“What the…? What do you want, old man?”
Old man? Geez!
It took everything I had not to smack the kid upside his head.
“Do you know a girl named Phoebe?”
The look that crawled across his face told me he did.
“Naw. Never heard of her.” He put the bud back into his ear and looked down at the comic book pretending to read it.
I grabbed the wire again and jerked the bud out of his ear, taking the iPod with it.
“Hey, asshole, give it back!” He half stood, reaching for it.
I took a step backward.
“She was grabbed by some grungy looking guy,” I said, dangling the iPod in front of him, “big head, no mouth. You know him?”
The kid looked around nervously. “Gimme it.” He raised his hand, about to make another grab for it. “I don’t want no trouble…” His voice trailed off as he looked past me over my shoulder.
I turned around just in time to get punched in the nose.
He was big. I’m talking enormous, a frickin’ Goliath. At six-two and two hundred and fifteen pounds I’m no slouch, but this guy looked like the Empire State Building towering over the tourists. He swung at me again, but the punch was slow and easy to dodge. I sidestepped and threw a punch of my own into his gut. My fist sank in deep. The Pillsbury Doughboy had nothing on this guy. His belly was a never-ending well of flab and blubber. Spit and chewing tobacco came flying out of his mouth and all over my face. How the hell can anybody stand that stuff?
Quicker than you could blink, my gun was in my hand and jammed up into his nostrils. His eyes widened into two white onions and he snorted snot all over the barrel of the gun. I tapped him with it on the bridge of his nose, wiped the crap off the muzzle on the collar of his shirt, then jammed it back up his nose.
“You’re going die young if you keep chewing on that garbage—if the fat doesn’t kill you first,” I told him, wiping the blood from my own nose with the back of my hand.
The kid behind me jumped to his feet and tried to scramble past me and out of the door, but my other hand reached for his collar and anchored him in place. He was going nowhere.
“What’s up with you two?” I asked. “I just need answers to a few questions about Phoebe.”
The place by then had gone completely quiet, except for the hum of the rotating machines. The big guy suddenly came to life, took me by surprise, exploded into action, slammed the gun to one side, then spun around and ran out of the laundry followed by most of the people waiting for clothes, all of them leaving their goodies in the washers and dryers.
Boy, I thought, I never would have believed he could move that fast.
Phoebe, so it seemed, was some kind of plague, and the mere mention of her name struck fear into anyone that heard it. I was now certain there was something going on, and even more certain I was going to find out what it was.
“Look, kid, I’m a Private Investigator…” Where the hell that came from, I had no idea, but it sounded good. “And I need to find her, Phoebe. She’s in trouble and needs help. Now, what can you tell me?”
“Private Eye?” He was astounded. “You kiddin’ me? Don’t even think about it. They’ll take you out so fast you’ll think it’s still yesterday… Private Eye? Really? No shit?”
“Yeah, really. Now tell me. What the hell’s going on?”
“You’s already dead, man. They got an army an’ they’ll chew you up, no matter who you is or what you do.”
There are few things in life that I enjoy more than a challenge—a good Scotch and taking down bad guys are at the top of my list—but there’s nothing I like better than proving people wrong.
“You think?” I said, grabbing his arm. “Come on, kid. We’re going to Denny’s and you can tell me more about this army.”
I dragged him out of the laundromat. The rain had let up a little, which was a relief after the beating it had given me earlier. We didn't say much on the walk to the car, but I did manage to pry a name out of the kid.
“My name’s Stitch.” “What kind of a name is Stitch? Is it a nickname?”
“No, I was born with it. What kind of a name is Harry? Sounds like you need a shave or sumpin’.”
I shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door. I rounded the front of the car, watching him through the windshield, hoping he wouldn’t make a run for it. He didn’t.
I got in behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and turned right onto Dodds. I glanced at the kid—he looked terrified; it was time to get serious. I opened my mouth to speak, but he beat me to it.
“Hey, man. You tryin’ to get us both killed? These guys mean business, man. Look, I love Phoebe, but you're not doing her no favors by goin’ lookin’ for her.”
“Well we’re not doing her any favors leaving her to those thugs,” I said. “She was scared to death running around in the rain tonight trying to get away from someone. What was she scared of, Stitch? Who was she running away from?”
The kid just stared at me like I was speaking another language.
“Come on. If you really love Phoebe…”
He shook his head and looked down at his lap. “I can’t. They’ll kill me if I rat ’em out. They don't care about anyone or anything, least of all me. An’ my dad—”
“I won't let anyone hurt you… Your dad? What’s it got to do with him? Who is he? What’s his name?”
“Lester Tree. He kinda runs things aroun’ here. They call him Shady.”
Shady freakin’ Tree… I thought, stunned by the mere thought of him. Well if that doesn't just beat all.
I just couldn’t imagine that crooked piece of garbage having children. It was harder still to imagine that anyone would want to breed with the slime-ball, but my guess was there’d been a lot of lying and huge quantities of drugs and alcohol involved. No wonder the kid was freaked out.
“That sucks, Stitch,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear it.” And I truly meant it.
“Yeah, well, we can't choose our parents.”
Geez, ain't that the truth.
I got lucky growing up in a normal house with caring folks. This poor kid… geez. It didn’t get any worse than Shady Tree. The guy was a grifter with a passion for concocting stories and schemes that would make a nun blush. His looks were deceiving: he was tall, handsome, well built, wore his hair in dreads, and most of the time he wore a blue do-rag wrapped around his head. His game was anything lowball. He cared nothing for the law and would do anything shy of murder to make a buck.
“So what is it with these guys?” I asked. “Drugs, human trafficking, prostitution? Why are they so interested in Phoebe?”
“Her old man, of course. That dude be bad, man, everythin’ every street mugger aspires to be, ’cept in prison.”
“So what about your dad, is he in on it?”
“Shady? Hah. No way, man. That be way outa his league.”
“I still don’t get it about Phoebe? She’s just a kid. Why is she so important?”
“Her dad was goin’ down, for a long time. I heard he sold her to some dudes; not for money, for protection while he be in the slammer.”
Holy cow… He sold her? What kind of man… Shit, he sure as hell isn’t gonna win a Father of the Year award.
I got it. I shook my head and said, “So trafficking then, forced prostitution? Talk to me about the dudes he sold her to. Where do they keep the kids?” I asked, as I pulled into the Denny’s lot and parked close to the building.
“I don’t know. I used to, but they don’t trust me no more.”
I took the napkin from my pocket and showed him the drawing. “Do you recognize this?”
There was a sharp intake of breath, then he said, “Where you git that?”
“Phoebe drew it before she was kidnapped. We were playing poker at the Sorbonne and some gnarly guy with a small mouth and a big forehead sent the napkin over with this message.” I turned over the napkin to reveal “It’s time to come home” and the kid bit his lip.
“That’s how I got to Suds & Duds. Phoebe wrote the number on the back. What does it mean?”
Stitch wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked out the car window. “I can’t, man. They’ll know I told you and kill me. The big guy in the laundry-mat—there’s a whole bunch just like him. He only ran away because he thought you were a cop, but he be back by now and looking for me. They watch me all the time. I promised them I wouldn’t say nothin’. If they find out I did…”
He opened the car door and started to get out. I couldn’t let him get away without telling me where she was.
“Stitch, please…” I said.
He shook his head. “I gotta go.”
It happened so fast I didn’t see it coming. I heard the sharp crack of a suppressed gun and the kid’s head slammed back into the car door jamb and he collapsed, his brains all over my car. I lurched back in my seat, then looked out through the open passenger door; the big guy from the laundromat was standing in the middle of the lot with a smirk on his face and a gun in his hand.
Son of a frickin’ bitch. He killed the kid.
I jerked my M&P9 from its holster, opened my door and rolled out, keeping the car between the thug and me. I could see him through the car windows, but before I could get off a shot, he and the goon that was with him took off running down the alley.
I thought about it, but I couldn’t go after them. I had a dead kid slumped half in and half out of the front seat of my car.
“I’ll get the son of a bitch,” I promised the kid.