Ray gave the eyes to Pike. 'What?'
Pike shook his head.
I said, 'The DA would file if they thought they could win, and maybe there's a way we can give them that. Maybe not on James Edward, but on something.'
Ray Depente waited.
'If you want Akeem, you're going to have to go to him. That means his home, and it used to be a crack house. It's fortified like a bunker. But once we're in, I'm betting we can find something that the DA can use to put D'Muere away.'
Cool T said, 'Ain't no way we can get in there. Goddamn police use a goddamn batterin' ram to get in a crack house. Where we gonna get that?'
Ray glanced at Cool T. 'There are other ways.' He looked back at me. 'If it was worth it. If it would lead to that sonofabitch getting what he deserves.'
'We won't know until we get there, will we?'
Ray nodded. 'Why are you doing this, Cole?'
'Because I liked James Edward, Ray. Hell, I even like you.'
Ray Depente laughed and then he stood up and put out his hand. 'Okay. You want to help out on this, we'll let you help.'
Forty-two minutes later Joe Pike and I cruised past Akeem D'Muere's fortified home in Joe's Jeep. We parked six houses down on the same side of the street in an alley between a row of flowering azalea bushes and a well- kept frame house with an ornate birdbath in the front yard. Ray Depente and Cool T were one block behind us, sitting in Ray's LeBaron. Akeem D'Muere's black Monte Carlo and the maroon Volkswagen Beetle were parked at the front of his house, and a half-dozen Gangster Boys were hanging around on the Beetle. A couple of young women were with them. I wondered if they called themselves Gangster Girls.
Pike said, 'Brick house across the street. Clapboard two doors down, this side. Check it out.'
I looked at the brick house across the street and then at the clapboard house. A heavy woman with her hair in a tight gray bun was peeking from behind a curtain in the brick house and a younger woman, maybe in her early thirties, was peeking at us from the clapboard. The younger woman was holding a baby. 'They're scared. You live on a street with a gang for your neighbors and I guess peeking out of windows becomes a way of life. Never know when it's safe to venture out.'
Joe shifted in his seat. 'Helluva way to live.'
'Yes,' I said. 'It is.'
A tall kid leaning against the Bug's left front fender looked our way, but then went back to jiving with his buddies. All attitude, no brains.
Pike pulled a pair of Zeiss binoculars from the backseat and examined the front of D'Muere's house. 'Windows set close on both sides of the door. Bars on the windows.'
'What about the door?'
'Solid core with a couple of peepholes. No glass.'
'Does it open outward?'
'Yep.' Pike put down the glasses and looked pleased. Dope dealers often rebuild their doors to open outward instead of inward. Harder for the cops to bust in that way. It was something that we'd been counting on.
Fourteen minutes after we parked in the alley, Cool T turned onto the far end of the street in Ray Depente's LeBaron and drove slowly toward D'Muere's as if he were looking at addresses. He stopped in the middle of the street, and said something to the kids on the Volkswagen.
I said, 'Now.'
Joe and I rolled out of the Jeep and moved through the backyard of the near house and into the next yard toward D'Muere's. We moved quickly and quietly, slipping past bushes and over fences and closing on D'Muere's while Cool T kept the gangbangers' attention. Akeem D'Muere's backyard was overgrown by grass and weeds and thick high hedges that had been allowed to run without care or trimming. A creaky porch jutted off the back of the house, and a narrow cement drive ran back past the house to a clapboard garage. The garage was weathered and crummy and hadn't been used in years. Why use a garage when you can park on the front lawn? Ray Depente appeared from the hedges on the far side of the yard and held up a finger to his mouth. He was wearing a black Marine Corps-issue shoulder sling with a Colt Mark IV .45-caliber service automatic. He pointed to himself, then gestured to the east side of the house, then pointed at us and then at our side of the house, and then he was gone.
Pike took the back of the house and I moved up the drive along the side. The windows along the back and sides of the house were barred, and many had been covered on the inside with tar paper, but there were gaps and tears in the paper and I moved from window to window, trying to see inside. Cool T drove away as I made the front corner of the house, and then I faded back to the rear. The rear was so crummy we could probably pitch a tent back there and no one would notice. Pike and Ray and I crouched in the bushes beside the porch.
Ray said, 'Two rooms and a bath on my side. Three full-sized windows, all barred, and a half-sizer on the bathroom. Someone was in the bathroom but the other two rooms were clear.' He looked at Pike. 'Will the door work?'
Pike nodded. 'No problemo.'
'How about the front?'
'No problemo.'
I said, 'Kitchen and two rooms on my side. I made six people, four male, two female. No children.'
Ray nodded. 'Any way out the windows?'
