“Now! Make this left!”
Moss veered in front of an oncoming car and made the left. They cruised down a steep hill, a side street with run down houses climbing the hill. At the bottom, there were low-slung garden apartment style housing projects. From an unlit basketball court, dark black faces peered at them as they passed.
“I’m telling you, son. I’ve been in this game a little while now. There ain’t nobody back there. It was a kid that broke the taillight.”
“Why ours?”
“Why the fuck not? You paranoid, Cruz? That the problem?”
Cruz didn’t like it. The variables were piling up. Two girls in a trunk. A broken taillight. It was supposed to be a quick snatch, and then a return drive to New York. Goodbye, Smoke Dugan O’Malley, you worry about your problems, I’ll worry about mine. Instead, two people were already dead, and this Lola girl would have to go when all was said and done. She would have to go just as surely as the skinny girl, her roommate, would have to go.
And all the while, Cruz thinking about getting out. Face it. He was no good for this business anymore.
Moss cruised the side streets, moving slow, making random rights and lefts, stopping at all stop signs. They passed a parked police car. The cop was inside, writing something in his book. He didn’t look up.
“We done out here? You mind if I get back and get on the highway now? That’s all we need, a porky little pig try to pull us over for a broken light,” Moss said.
“That’d be one dead pig,” Cruz said absently. He meant it. No matter what trouble he himself was having, he knew Moss would drop a cop without giving it much thought.
He checked in back of them one last time. No one back there. Just dead, deserted streets.
“Yeah, go for it,” he said. “Make a left here.”
Moss made a left and climbed back up toward Washington Avenue.
“I think you’re losing your focus, son. We got the girl, like we said we were gonna do. Okay. The man’ll either give it up or he won’t. If he don’t, then we got problems. But in the meantime, we got this extra girl back there. And that’s a problem right now. She’s baggage back there. I can’t have that and neither can you. It’s bad for business.”
“I see what you mean,” Cruz said. To Moss, his decision to spare the roommate must have looked like weakness. To Moss, this entire job must have looked like weakness.
“I hope you do,” Moss said.
They were back on Washington Avenue, right near the chicken takeout again. A group of dark-skinned men sat out on plastic lawn chairs in front of another eatery, this one with no sign on it at all. The whole long strip of the avenue was darkened and nearly deserted. As they headed down the street, a few people loitered here and there in the gloom, standing around in ones and twos.
“Let me see your phone,” Cruz said.
“Son, you need to stop giving orders. Your big shot orders got my little buddy killed earlier today.”
Cruz and Moss crossed eyes like swords. Now was not the time for the show down with Moss. Or was it? Cruz pictured whipping out his gun and blowing Moss away right here in the car. It was one measure of how far he had fallen that Moss would say these things to him. The deeper measure, however, was that Moss was still alive. He couldn’t fight the man – Moss was too big, too strong. In the old days, Cruz would have just killed him instead.
“Lend me your cell phone, will you?” he said. “I want to call Dugan so that we can save this job before it goes all the way down the shithole.”
“That’s better,” Moss said. “I thought you didn’t use cell phones.”
“In an emergency, I’ll make an exception.”
Moss handed him the phone, a small black number with a lot of meaningless features. Cruz scrutinized it for what he needed, the green SEND button for one. He fished in his pocket for the girl’s home number, straight from the dossier.
“What’s the story with this phone?” he said. He hated cell phones. He didn’t even like to look at them. Cops could snatch these conversations right out of the air. Cops could trace back these phone calls. Somebody dies, and then what? The cops check the phone records, right? And here’s this cell phone number. Hell, maybe it’s right there on the caller ID. Shit, he hated these things. Lazy people used cell phones.
Moss shrugged. “It’s clean.”
“How clean?”
“It’s PCS. Completely digital. Encryption codes make it almost impossible to intercept the call.”
To Cruz, it sounded like so much mumbo-jumbo. “What about trace-backs?”
“The phone belongs to a gentleman from Fresno, California. He paid the whole contract, a whole year, up front. He likes to travel a lot, this gentleman. He’s got coverage everywhere in the great forty-eight. Anybody traces back a call, they’ll find out this gentleman made that call.”
“Who is he?”
Moss smiled, showing the gap in his front teeth. “Someone who don’t exist anymore.”
Hal leaned up against a telephone pole in the dim light along Washington Avenue.
Thirty yards away, the Cadillac was parked in the lot of the old bread factory. Now it was an office building, a low-rent warren filled with the offices of low-budget social service organizations. Hal glanced at the Caddy. Darren was hunched down low, probably wondering what the hell he was doing out here.
“Come on,” Hal said under his breath. “You know you want me.”
All the same, he was starting to worry. He had seen them make that sudden turn down the side street. But he knew those streets. He knew there was nothing down there for them. He knew it. There was nothing down there but machine shops, auto shops, and housing projects filled with refugees from African wars. Imagine, the wretched of the earth, refugees from Somalia and the Sudan, the desert, the baking heat, the sand storms, being relocated to Maine. It was like a cruel joke. Don’t like all the warfare, you desert nomads? Here, try snow and ice six months out of the year.
A car was coming along the avenue.
Hal looked at his shoes.
It passed, and he looked up. A green Ford Taurus. The broken taillight shone bright and white as it receded in the distance. They were heading for the highway.
“Ha! I knew you couldn’t leave me!”
He stepped into the shadows and ran for the Caddy.
It was cramped and dark in the trunk.
At times, little beams of light stabbed in through some crack above their heads. It was hard to breathe. They were on their sides, hands cuffed in front of them, facing each other. For a while, Pamela had hyperventilated. Now, as Lola watched her, Pamela simply lay there, eyes wide like saucers, tears streaming down her face, her lower lip quivering.
“Listen!” Lola hissed. “Pamela! Listen to me.” Pamela was beyond listening.
The car hit some kind of dip in the road. They went down and then up. It was like riding a roller coaster. Lola nearly fell over on her face. The car accelerated, and she guessed they were on the highway now.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, not sure if she was saying it to Pamela or to herself.
She thought of the moment the two men burst into the apartment. Smoke was on the phone, shouting something into her ear. Then that massive man with the stringy hair was there. He seemed to fill the entire room. And she had fought him. Kicked him. Punched him. Knocked the gun out of his hand. Knocked him down.
When he had slapped her, it was like a car crash, the force of it. He was that strong. She had been stunned. No one had ever hit her that hard before. And she knew he hadn’t hit her nearly as hard as he could.
But he wasn’t unbeatable. None of them were. They could be beaten, and she could do it. Maybe if Pamela… no, Pamela was a goner. Well, you could hardly blame her. Two strange men storm the apartment, handcuff them,
