“Leave your lights on, DJ,” I said. “And angle park so they’re on the side and back of his car.”
I did the same thing on the other side and turned my lights back on, bathing the rear and both sides with light. Then I shut off the engine. I could see the effect our arrival had on Bumpy. His face looked panicked, as he peered out the back window, struggling against his bonds.
“Okay,” I said, “he knows we’re here. Kill the lights.”
Tony and DJ came over to my car as I climbed out. “What’s the plan?” Tony asked in a low voice.
“I want names and addresses,” I said. “And I want to know how many girls this guy has personally killed.”
“Here’s his cellphone,” Tony said, handing it over. “He got three calls while we were coming out here. Caller ID showed just a number for one of them. The other two were from someone named Malik. Be sure to check his texts.”
I took the phone and scrolled through the recent call log first. Bumpy had called or been called by Malik ten times in the last two days. The guy got a lot of incoming calls late at night. Many of them were just numbers, not in his contact list. I guess that was to be expected for a drug dealer, though.
Next, I checked recent text messages. He and Malik had an ongoing conversation going back more than a month. The most recent was from Malik, asking him where he was.
Security didn’t seem paramount to these guys. In a text conversation from a week ago, Malik told Bumpy to “round up every puta in town and kill them all.” Bumpy then asked if he and the Boyz could have fun with them first, to which Malik replied, “As long as they end up floating out to sea, I don’t give a fuck.”
The text messages went on to describe what Bumpy and his crew had done to at least eight women. Scrolling back farther, I found where Malik told Bumpy to “take a few brothers over to Razor’s and kill him, then tear his place apart.”
Razor was the name of the guy whose place Alberto had been staying at while his mother was out turning tricks.
The next two exchanges turned my heart cold.
There’s a kid here.
Send the little shit for a boat ride.
“Malik must be the head honcho,” I said. “And this Bumpy seems to be the one who takes care of his wet work. At the very least, he’s responsible for killing eight women. One of them was Alberto’s mother.”
DJ turned suddenly and lunged for the car door. I grabbed him by the arm and held him back.
“Easy, man,” I said. “This guy’s not leaving here. But I want to know what he knows first.”
DJ looked at me with fierce conviction in his eyes. “He was probably the one who beat Alberto up.”
I handed him Bumpy’s phone. “Those texts were the night Alberto was taken. Malik ordered him to send Alberto down the river in a little boat to die in the heat out on the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I’ll kill this fuck with my bare hands,” DJ growled.
I nodded somberly. “He meets Satan tonight,” I said, my words as cold as ice. “But we do this slow and methodical.”
“What’s your plan?” Tony asked again.
I looked from DJ to Tony. “Bumpy is going to die here tonight,” I stated flatly. “Whether that’s from extreme pain or a bullet in his brain depends on how tough he is.”
Both men looked me in the eyes and nodded. Having read the texts, we were all in agreement.
“Get him out of the car,” I said to Tony.
Tony wasn’t real big, but he was wiry and powerfully built. When he opened the door, Bumpy kicked out his cuffed-together feet at him, so Tony grabbed his ankles and yanked him out hard. Bumpy’s head hit the door sill before he was dumped unceremoniously onto the dirt.
Bumpy looked around, dazed. “Whatta you guys want, man?”
“Pick him up,” I growled. “And open the trunk.”
Tony opened the car door and reached inside. The trunk lid popped open. Then he and DJ dragged the gangbanger to the back of the car.
“Cut the cuffs off his wrists,” I instructed. “And hold his arms tight.”
Bumpy struggled after the plastic strap was severed, but DJ and Tony were too strong.
“I can get you anything you want, man,” Bumpy pleaded. “Money, meth, women, guns, anything! Just let me go.”
“Is that right?” I asked, grabbing him by the hair and straightening him up. “Can you get Carmel Marco back? Or any of the other girls you killed this week?”
“They was nuttin’ but hoes, man. Those MS-13 punks been killin’ ours, too.”
I punched him squarely in the face—a big haymaker from way in back. Blood spurted from his nose as his head rocked back.
“Where does Malik live?” I roared at him.
The blow stunned him, but he just shook his head and spat blood on the ground. “That the best you got?”
I wrestled his right hand away from DJ and folded all his fingers except the pinky. Then I looked him in the eyes. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know, Bumpy. Every time you refuse or give me the wrong answer, you lose part of a finger. That simple. We have the rest of the night and I’ll work my way all the way up to your shoulders if you don’t give me what I want to know. By the way, that was your first wrong response.”
I pressed his little finger into the gap between the car’s body and the trunk lid, then slammed the trunk closed. He screamed in pain as blood spurted from the stump of his finger.
“Got a lighter?” I asked DJ.
He produced one, a mini-butane torch, for lighting campfires. In seconds, with Bumpy screaming in pain, DJ cauterized the stub of his pinky to stop the bleeding.
It took two more
