closed the door behind her. She hesitated at the top of the short stairs, turning to her left to stare directly at Mable Broadbent. Mable did not move. It was a test of wills. After an endless ten seconds, the woman on the stoop shouted, “Fuck you, bitch.” By any standard, Mable had won that round. The woman I took to be Kalisha made a left and moved toward Surf Avenue. I got out of my car. As I did so, I looked to where Mable had sat in her front window. She was gone.
I stood in the shadows across the street from Kalisha. She checked her watch and paced as if she were waiting for someone to pick her up.
“Kalisha?”
“Whatchu want?” she barked, her pride still hurting from losing her stare-down with Mable Broadbent.
She had a svelte, angular body. Up close, she was a pretty woman with almost yellow-brown skin and green eyes, but she exuded a kind of hardness that argued against her looks. She wore an expensive, grassy perfume, and way too much of it, so much that it dominated the scent of the sea and sewerage. Kalisha’s clothes cost some bucks, but cheapened her somehow. She stared at me as if I were a lone roach caught out in the light. I realized I had crossed the street fully prepared to dislike her, and nothing about her was changing my mind.
“You want some company, baby, you a long way from Mermaid and Stillwell. Twenty bucks’ll get you all the black pussy you can handle down there.” My silence made her uncomfortable, and she reached a hand into her bag. “I ain’t in that life no more.”
I showed her my old badge, bluffing to the max.
“That supposed to get y’all a discount?”
“No, just your attention.”
“Now you got it, whatchu want with it?”
“To talk about Malik.”
“He dead.”
“No shit. That’s why I wanna talk.”
“Fuck y’all.”
“Sorry,” I said, “not interested. Now it looks to me like you’re waiting on somebody. I bet he won’t be thrilled if he has to come collect you over at the 60th Precinct. You think?”
“Whatchu wanna know ’bout Malik?”
“Where’d he get the money for half a key of coke?”
The belligerence in her face was replaced by blankness. The question scared her and she didn’t like being scared. She liked showing it even less.
“I don’t know whatchu talkin’ ’bout. Malik didn’t-”
“Bullshit, Kalisha. Malik was a loser, a guy that didn’t have two nickels to rub together his whole life. Then he scores a fine-looking woman like you and he’s dealing weight. Something changed. Maybe he got some new friends, some white boys, maybe. You wanna talk to me about that?”
“Fuck y’all. Ain’t met a cop had a dick bigga than my pinky.” She demonstrated, waving a ringed little finger my way. It was false bravado. She’d grown shrill and any sense of composure was gone from her voice.
“That may be, but it doesn’t answer the question. Listen, Kalisha, you don’t talk to me now, okay. But there’s gonna be some detectives coming around on a regular basis starting tomorrow. So even if you aren’t talking, maybe Malik’s buddies will think you are. You know, maybe I should just wait here with you till your ride shows up. Maybe I should chat with him. What do you think?”
“Oh, fuck, man! Why you gotta fuck with a girl’s life like that?”
“It doesn’t have to be this way if you just talk to me.”
“Ask your damned questions, man.”
“Malik ever talk about a cop named McDonald?”
“E-I-E-I-O. He the guy owns that farm, right?” She smiled, and for just a second, I saw there were still remnants of a little girl inside the hard woman in front of me.
“No, Kalisha, Larry McDonald bought the farm. He didn’t own it.” Took her a second to process that. “Oh, he dead too. Well, Malik didn’t never talk about no cops, not by name, anyway.”
“Okay, how about Dexter Mayweather, Malik ever mention him?”
“You crazy? D Rex been dead almost as long as I been alive. Malik was just a boy when that man was killed. How he gonna know anything about that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of Malik’s new friends mentioned something. Just a question.”
Something flashed across her face-unease, maybe. If I had blinked, I would have missed it.
“Whatchu talking ’bout, Malik’s new friends? He didn’t have no friends but me. And why’s all the questions you ask ’bout dead men? Dontchu know nobody but dead men?”
“I know lots of people, Kalisha, but I’m most interested in Malik’s friends.”
“Look, I told y’all, I don’t know nothing ’bout friends.”
“Then where’d he get the money for the coke?”
She checked her watch again. “Look, my john-I mean my new man gonna be here any second. Won’t look good, me standing here talking with you. Can’t we talk another time?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow.”
“When I say tomorrow, it’s not a question. I’ll meet you at this corner at two.”
“Okay, then, just get outta here now.”
I did as she asked, retreating into the shadows across the street. I turned to look back at the hard girl. Yet, as hard as she was, Kalisha just seemed a sad, bitter woman from the darkness in which I now stood. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old and life had already beaten all the good out of her. I couldn’t help but wonder what another twenty-five years would do to her. What small percentage of her soul would remain? I needn’t have worried.
I heard the rumble of a loud engine coming down Surf Avenue. Even before its brakes squealed and the car pulled over, I knew something was wrong. But what? I couldn’t seem to think fast enough. My head was foggy, my mouth dry, my heart racing.
“Look-”
Before I got the second syllable out of my mouth or taken a full step, the barrel of a shotgun stuck through the open window of the passenger door. There were two flashes and roars. Kalisha’s head fairly exploded and her lifeless torso sat down, one rubber leg under her, the other kicked out toward Sea Gate. The Camaro gunned its engine and fishtailed, smoking its back tires as it went.
I was swimming in quicksand as I came back across the street. The acrid cloud of burned rubber swallowed up the twin puffs of gun smoke like finger food, and its stink overwhelmed the cordite, the sea, the stench of human waste. Strangely, I could still smell grace notes of Kalisha’s grassy perfume, although the neck and ears on which she’d
I ran to my car and took off. No lights had come on since the shooting. No new faces had appeared in second floor windows, at least none I could see. They were there all right. When the cops showed, no one would have heard or seen a thing. When I was on the job, I used to think the lack of cooperation was just pure hatred of the cops. Not anymore. Some of it was hatred and resentment, sure, but mostly it was resignation. This is how life worked. This is how it was in the Soul Patch. What was another dead nigger? What was another murdered prostitute to the cops?
As I tore down the street, I once again found myself thinking of Israel Roth and Auschwitz. “You can get used to anything,” he’d say. “The very essence of humanity is adaptability. Some people think it’s what makes us great. Me, I think it’s a curse. There are things we shouldn’t be able to live with.”
I also thought of Mable Broadbent. What would she do with her grief now that Kalisha was dead?
I found the Camaro down by Coney Island Creek. As I turned the corner it was already in flames. And when I saw the long, wet rag sticking out of where the gas cap should have been, I knew it was only a matter of seconds until the whole thing blew apart. It didn’t disappoint. For decades, the city used to have free firework displays along the boardwalk on summer Tuesday evenings. Those displays were fun, but nothing compared to an exploding
