Stagger Bay Read online

  “I want to see under your eye patch,” Natalie said when we were done. “I need to find something out.”

  This was more than I’d bargained for, I’ll admit. But I’d helped make her a widow and I’d imposed on her hospitality. She’d shown me mercy; I could trust her with my life. I reached up, pulled the eye patch off fast before I could change my mind, and stood looking at her, feeling naked.

  I’ll give her credit, she didn’t flinch. Still, I could see in her eyes just how ugly it was. I didn’t have to study my reflection in those big brown eyes to remember how much my own new face repulsed me now. “I know it’s pretty hideous,” I said.

  “People could get used to it if they had to.”

  I opened my mouth to answer, unsure of what was going on here. But the sounds of a scuffle came from outside, interrupting my reply.

  Natalie peeked out the curtained window above the kitchenette sink. “I been waiting for this for a while,” she said with a smile.

  I stepped up to join her and we stood together looking out the window as she held the curtain open for both our benefits.

  Leo was on the ground, surrounded by the 18th Street Crips as they lay the boots into him; their arms pumped as they kicked, and all of them were breathing hard. Leo was curled up in a fetal ball with his forearms up guarding his head. When they were done the 18th Street Crips walked away from him and resumed their various places together in front of Natalie’s porch.

  Leo crawled a few feet away from them, and then tried the difficult experiment of standing upright. He finally managed, but his balance seemed none too certain. When he tottered away down the street he looked as though something had gone missing inside him.

  Natalie still smiled approval out the window as I headed for the door. Her capacity for Christian mercy was limited, and I counted my blessings Big Moe ever placed me off limits to her.

  Chapter 26

  I stepped out on the porch in time to watch Leo creep around the corner of the abandoned bungalow next door. Sam stood off to the side; he hadn’t joined in on the stomping but apparently hadn’t felt the need to stop things either.

  “Hey,” Moe said. He jerked his chin in the direction Leo had disappeared in. “You saw? Beat in, beat out, that’s how the 18th Street Crips roll.” He darted a glance at me as if he wanted me to think he needed my approval. “Just like in Oakland, right? He was getting high on his own supply. Bad for business.”

  I started after Leo. “Don’t waste your time on him, old man,” Sam called softly behind me as I rounded the corner of the next door bungalow.

  Leo was nowhere in sight but the front door was off its hinges and I heard a furtive noise from inside. I peeked around from the stoop, into what passed for a living room.

  Leo squatted against a graffiti-covered wall next to a rolled-up sleeping bag. He’d just set a used match book on the floor, its cover folded back with all the matches burned up.

  He had one sleeve rolled up – tracks ran up and down his arm. Dried blood was crusted around a few of the holes; he wasn’t even washing up between hits anymore. A boot lace was wrapped around his bicep.

  He put a piece of cigarette filter in the blackened spoon to use as a cotton, to strain out any cut sediment in the load he’d just cooked up. With practiced fingers he picked up his syringe and stuck the tip of the needle into the cotton. He worked his outfit one-handed, holding the tip of the needle steady as brain surgery in that puddle of chiva while drawing back the plunger to load up the syringe with his shot.

  Leo set the spoon down, gripped one end of the boot lace between his teeth to keep it snug, and pumped his fist a few times to get his flabby veins fat enough to register on. His eyes glittered as he got ready to slide the point home into his rigidly outstretched arm. He looked like he could see God in that needle.

  Part of me kept visualizing Angela in front of me instead of Leo, watching him play out the exact steps she took the day she did up the hot shot that finished her. Angela, my beautiful girl, down on her knuckles in her own Gethsemane with me nowhere around.

  Leo became aware of my presence and stared at me, rig poised and ready. “What the fuck you want?”

  I stepped into full view, a peeping tom busted in the act. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck you,” Leo said. “A brother has no chance in your cracker world.” He gazed longingly at his ready needle but he wasn’t quite degenerate enough to do up right in front of me. Yet.

  “I know you don’t like me Leo, but you don’t need to. You’re not a victim, that’s all you gotta know.” I gestured vaguely at him, groping toward whatever it was I was trying to say. “You got to be bigger than this, Leo; you can’t give up. Don’t let them make you weak, young blood.”

  “I don’t care what you did at that school,” Leo said, his voice jittering and shimmering. “Don’t mean nothin. Don’t change shit.” His eyes glittered, flickered from side to side. “Hell, man, why couldn’t you have been black?”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, unsure what I was apologizing for.

  Leo jumped to his feet and lunged toward me pulling his hand back fast, and I tensed for him to throw a blow. But instead it was the syringe he threw. The outfit broke apart as it hit next to me and the liquid inside splashed onto the wall.

  “Blue-eyed devil,” Leo screamed, trembling. “Get the fuck away from me.” Then he looked at what he’d done to his own rig, his own stash, and an expression of abject despair crawled across his face.

  Nothing had changed because of my interference here; Leo was a junkie through and through, and would be for the foreseeable future. He started to cry and I creeped back around the corner and out the door, ashamed of this whole wretched fiasco.

  Ashamed for him? Ashamed for me? For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you. Death row had eaten both our daddies alive but we had nothing for each other.

  I wondered, though, what the career options were for a street dealer once he’d been chased off his corner. The Life was a bitch – always had been, always would be.

  Chapter 27

  When I got back to the Crips, Sam beckoned me over. “This is what Moe’s been needing to tell you.”

  Big Moe licked his lips. “If it’s okay to ask, I was wondering just how long you’re going to be sticking around.” He held up both hands as if in placation. “You were always free to come and go as you please. Natalie was just messing with your head, a’ight?”

  I considered. “Well, I was going to lie low long enough for this media thing to die down a tad, and then take off. No offense, but some place far away from Stagger Bay. I got nothing keeping me here.” I looked at Sam, who looked away.

  “Little Moe, come here,” Big Moe said. A wiry black boy wriggled his way through the Crips to stand in front of me.

  “This is my nephew. Little Moe, tell Markus about the Driver.”

  Little Moe was pumped to be hanging with the men, and also seemed excited to be talking to me. “The Driver comes and takes kids if they don’t listen to they mama, or if they be alone,” he said hurriedly, his words piling up on each other.

  “Ah,” I said, wondering what this was all about, wondering when they were going to cut to the chase. Why were they using this eight-year-old kid to be their spokesman? They were all tap-dancing respectfully around me and I fought impatience. “Like the Boogey Man or something?”

  “Oh no,” Little Moe said, his eyes wide. “He real. I seen him. He drives one of those big old hotrods. It’s fast and it’s loud.

  “One time, he drove right past me while I was at the playground, the one up past the hospital at Boat Park. Mama told me never to play alone, never to leave the Gardens, and I knew I was being bad going there by myself. I was scared when I saw him coming, and he smiled at me, and I thought he’d come to take me where he takes all the others.”

  “Others?” I said, watching his face close for signs he was lying. Whatever else, this wasn’t a put-up job by the Crips. Little Moe obviously believed he was tellin
g no more than the truth; he looked less and less happy as he told his tale.

  “Sure. He took my big sister last year, from the Mall. We never found her, but we all knew.” He abruptly stopped his narrative and tugged sharply at Big Moe’s flannel shirt. “It be getting late; I gotta get back, I gotta be to home. Take me to Mama, Big Moe.”

  “I gots to talk to Markus, Little Moe. Jojo, walk him to the crib.” Big Moe’s skinny white partner reached out to Little Moe and the two walked away down the row of bungalows, hand in hand.

  “He has dreams about the Driver,” Moe said, moping at me like an undertaker. “All the kids around here dream about that beast. Like Little Moe said, son of a bitch took my niece.”

  “I don’t know why you’re talking to me. Maybe you need to go to the cops,” I said.

  All the 18th Street Crips had a laugh about that one but I shook my head. “I’m serious, dime him. Fuck anyone that calls you a snitch over being a cop caller; you got women and children to watch out for here.”

  “Think we haven’t tried? The local cops don’t do crap – and any time out-of-town law wanders in to look around, nothing ever comes of it.”

  “Not like I’m a big fan of the Man, but some might find that a bit surprising.”

  Moe snorted. “Shit, dude, you know first hand no one down in the City gives a damn what happens up here in the sticks. And like I say, SBPD don’t never seem to get very excited over it.

  “It used to be he only hit the disposables: hookers and runaways, hitchhikers, street people and such like – he worked Old Town a lot. You may have noticed how squeaky clean it is now. Tell the truth, I didn’t much mind them being gone – a lot of them people had no class at all.

  “He almost never ever touches the locals, though – unless they raise a stank about what be going on. Then they gone, too – a lot of upright white Citizens has disappeared around Stagger Bay.

  “Now he’s after us; it’s our turn. Maybe we should have made our stand before this. Sometimes he still takes out-of-towner white trash from other neighborhoods. But lately, yeah, it mainly be Gardens folks that disappear around town, whenever we leave here.”

  “Sometimes you have to take the law into your own hands,” I observed.

  “That’s been tried, too,” Big Moe said. “More than one person has gone after this guy, some of them old family locals with something to lose.”

  “What happened?”

  “We doesn’t know. They was never seen again, none of ‘em. No one he’s taken has ever been seen again, neither.” Big Moe scuffed the ground with his sneaker. “It occurs to me this is the same guy who killed the Beardsleys.”

  “Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out,” I agreed. I waited for him to continue but he was silent. Instead, Moe and his Crips squirmed around like little boys caught playing hooky.

  “G-Thug-Units,” Natalie said from her doorway. “Macho men.” She jerked her chin at Big Moe. “This one’s too manly to ask for anything. Does my proud brother really need to say what we want from you?”

  Moe was too dark for me to tell if he was actually blushing, but he sure seemed to find the ground exceedingly interesting.

  She smiled in my direction. “Do I need to ask you to do it for me? I’d think you’d be as red hot for the Driver as your own son is.”

  I smiled right back at her even though Sam didn’t. “You don’t think I’d do it just to help out? You don’t think I’d do it even if I wasn’t involved?”

  Natalie snorted, and then turned to go back inside. “You’re a lucky one. Maybe some of your luck will rub off on us.”

  I had my own opinion about just how lucky I was, but as I had no incentive to pop anyone’s bubble I kept my mouth shut. “Take me to Elaine’s office,” I told Sam.

  Chapter 28

  When we got in the Continental, Sam just had to give me the needle: “Sure you’re up to helping me get payback for Karl and Mom, old man? I mean, you being an over the hill one eye and all.”

  “How’s about you shut up and let me think?”

  Sam snickered as he left the Gardens and headed back into town. “Yeah, thinking. That’s always been your forte, hasn’t it? I know Uncle Karl was the brainiac of the family, don’t even pretend otherwise.”

  I cringed as I considered just what kind of war stories my big brother must have filled this kid’s head with. It was plain that Karl had made me the clown of the family saga in Sam’s eyes.

  Chapter 29

  Once back in Stagger Bay proper, the contrast between its well-kept little Pleasantville-style 1950s houses and the stark, broken-down hovels we’d just left was startling. Sam drove us down I Street, weaving in and out of traffic, ignoring the honking of cars forced to get out the way of his motorboat Connie.

  Elaine's office was on the far side of Stagger Bay Center. As we started driving through the Center, I saw the cyclone fence surrounding the School a few blocks down.

  Even from here I could see the warped, torn stretch of cyclone fence where Kendra’s roller had slid into it; could see the charred spots on the asphalt from the grenade explosions. As we got closer to the scene, I grew more and more nervous.

  “Are you all right?” Sam asked.

  I was sweating and breathing hard as I stared at the school buildings now coming into view. Stared at the place where I’d committed multiple murders in front of wide eyed, terrified children.

  “Pull over,” I managed to say. “I need a little air.”

  Sam swooped up next to the bank, almost going up over the curb and taking out an old lady on a walker. But I wasn’t in the mood to zing him about it, and was grateful he didn’t take advantage of my present weakness to make any wisecracks his own self.

  As I staggered out the car I could hear the recess bell ringing down at the school, and I almost hurled in the gutter as those unseen children commenced shrieking and screaming in play. I bent over with my hands on my knees taking deep breaths.

  The nausea passed but I was still trembling as I stood and I saw my pale Cyclops reflection in the bank window. I changed focus to look inside the bank at the wreckage from the robbery: holes in what was left of the false ceiling, as if a great beast had ripped at it; stains and burns on the carpet and walls; a shroud-like canvas draped over one of the teller’s windows concealing whatever homicidal damage had been committed there.

  The children’s shrieks melted into each other, sounding louder and shriller as I turned away from the bank. The kids were no closer, of course. It could only be a trick of hearing that made their laughter warble up and down the scale like the beginnings of a bad acid flashback; it was just echo acoustics off the interposing buildings.

  A Mexican restaurant was down the block, and I walked quickly to it. As I leaned against its front door and almost toppled inside, the brass bell on the knob jingled.

  I slid into a booth while the Mexican couple behind the service counter stared at me. A kid who looked like their son came over, brows raised and a menu in his hand.

  “Jarritos, por favor,” I muttered. “Fresa.”

  The boy hurried to fetch me my bottle of strawberry soda. I sucked on the straw they were kind enough to put in there for me, listening to them whispering in rapid-fire Spanish, pretending they weren’t talking about me.

  Focus on the here and now, I told myself – think of the Stoics. You’re happening but you don’t mean shit, I told the trembling and the still-too-rapid breathing. I’m in charge, not you – You can’t defeat me unless I let you. But my uncooperative body didn’t want to listen.

  The bell jingled as the front door opened, the Mexican family shut up, and Officer Hoffman stood in the entrance. He walked over to me with all his leather gear creaking, and slid into the booth to sit opposite me.

  “I need to change what I told you about Officer Tubbs,” Hoffman said. “I knew her.”

  He looked me directly in the eye for the first time in our acquaintance, giving no evidence he noticed how sweaty
my face was. His hand fiddled with his mace holster; he couldn't seem to leave his tackle alone.

  “I knew you’d tell me when you were ready, Officer Hoffman.” I shoved my bottle of strawberry soda away.

  “I told you before, call me Rick.”

  A lopsided smile assembled and disassembled itself quickly on his face. “You’re standing up to them,” he said. “If you're doing it I can too – right, Markus?”

  “There's nothing to stop you.”

  A curious expression crossed his face, one I couldn’t really interpret. Was he angry? Afraid? “If I knew something important about Officer Tubbs, would you like to hear it?” he asked.

  “You mean Kendra,” I said, insisting that he acknowledge her personally, not as a mere title.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” His newfound confidence seemed to desert him at the sound of her name; he avoided direct eye contact again.

  “Look at you, living in fear,” I said, ‘sarge’-ing on him and gambling with a confrontational tone. “You and I understand each other, Rick. But they don’t have a clue, do they? You say you like me. Prove it. Don’t listen to them, listen to me.”

  As I spoke, Rick’s eyes rose to meet mine and he nodded and smiled as he battened onto my words. “Now tell me what you need me to know about Kendra,” I ordered.

  And he obeyed: “Did you know she didn't usually patrol the bank district? Somebody switched her patrol with Officer Reese at change of watch that same morning.”

  “And there's items missing from the evidence locker. The same drugs the robbers were on, and all the same weapons they used at the bank and at the school.” Rick pressed his palms together in front of him; his nails were bitten to the quick. “Her death was planned.”

  “Can we prove it?” I asked.

  Assuming this was a lie, where was the sting? If it was game, who stood to gain from it? What would it cost me to act like I thought it was true? Hell, who put Rick up to feeding it to me? It was a good thing I liked Twenty Questions, or I'd go nuts in this town.