Detroit Combat (11 page)

“Tomorrow we will be makers of pornographic films. I will wear dark glasses and maybe even a wig, and you will be cold and businesslike and order people around who come to see us.”

She kissed him softly. In his ear, she whispered. “You could star in a pornographic movie, James Hawker.”

Laughing, he answered, “I already have, Clare. I already have.”

FOURTEEN

“I hear you're looking for talent?” The boy appeared to be no older than thirteen. He had curly blond hair combed into a punkish rat's nest and an eye twitch that he couldn't quite control.

Hawker, feeling ridiculous in an expensive black wig and an open-necked shirt, nodded. “We're always looking for the right kind of talent. You're an actor?”

“Yeah, I've done some stuff. You know, some skin projects. But I have a rep, and the rep would have to okay any job I took. But this rep is good. If you need actors, she can get you all you want—and any age you want. If you're interested in me, maybe she can do the whole cast for you.”

Hawker drummed his fingers on the desk. “You mean like an agent?”

“Yeah, right, a rep or agent—whatever you want to call it.” The kid shifted nervously back and forth on the balls of his feet. Hawker began to understand why he wore long sleeves. The kid was in the room, but his glassy eyes were about a hundred miles west on the heroin highway.

“We usually don't have any trouble getting our own people.”

The kid nodded, his head bobbing. “That's not what I hear on the street, man. The shit on the street says you want to make a flick filled with angel babies, and angel babies ain't so easy to find.” The boy's head bobbed faster. “You getting a lot of twelve-year-old boys and girls reading your ads and applying for jobs? Angel babies aren't going to come hunting for you, Jake. But I guess you know that by now. From what I hear, you and your chick have been doing nothing but striking out ever since you opened this studio last week. Everyone who shows up gets turned down.”

“Are you here for yourself or your agent?” Hawker reached into the desk, took a pencil—and also switched on the tape recorder. He began doodling on a notepad. “What's wrong if we just want to hire you? What's the big problem if we'd rather cast the project ourselves than turn it over to some pimp agent who's going to knock you for twenty percent and us for ten percent plus a point or two on the gross?” Hawker smiled. “Why shouldn't the actors and producers share the profits instead of making it a threesome?”

The kid began to rock faster now, distraught. “Hey, I hear what you're saying, man. It makes sense. But I got this rep, like I said. She's a heavy lady. Very, very heavy, you know? Her word's law.”

“So you didn't really come here looking for a job? You came as a messenger boy.”

“Came looking for work, man. You could have rolled with the idea about seeing my rep. You could have hired me in a second. I need the dough, man. The bread would truly be welcome.” The kid pivoted and reached for the door.

“That's it?” said Hawker. “You're giving up that easily? Come on, we've got a film to make. We could use you—you and all your friends. We need kids, man, and we're paying fair prices.”

The kid stepped into the hall. He smiled. “I hear what you're saying, man. But I got no opinion in the matter. What my rep says goes.”

As the kid began to step through the door, Hawker called after him, “At least tell me how to get in touch with you. Leave a phone number or something.”

The boy turned. In the same tone a teacher uses on a slow pupil, he said, “You don't get it, Jake. My rep will be in touch with you. She sent me as a gift, the easy route for you. It was a fucking
social
call, man, and you refused. She wants to supply the actors for your project. You can say yes or no, but if you say no, I feel sorry for you, man. I feel very sorry.” The kid flashed a wolfish grin just before he disappeared. “If you say no, your luck turns real bad all of a sudden. Nobody should have that kind of bad luck, Jake. Not even you.”

A few seconds after the kid was gone, the door to the back room of the studio opened. Clare Riddock stepped through. She clasped her hands together and shook them at Hawker. She was grinning. “They took the bait!” she exclaimed.

Hawker touched his index finger to his lips to silence her. He tiptoed to the door and looked out. The kid was gone. Hawker shut the door, laughing. “You ever see the movie where Peter Matthiessen and Peter Gimble go in search of the great white shark? I know just how they felt after waiting and waiting, and then finally seeing that big shark cruising at them from the lagoon.”

Hawker took the woman in his arms and hugged her. She knocked his wig askew, and they both laughed. “You really think he works for Queen Faith?”

“Who else could it be?” insisted Hawker. “Look at it this way: We've been hanging around this stinking office for six days now, and every kook, kink, and slimeball
except
for a Queen Faith representative has been here. It's got to be her. There's no one left in Detroit.”

Clare was obviously pleased her plan had worked so quickly. Her face was flushed. Hawker drew her to him and kissed her on the forehead. “You've got a first-rate mind, lady.”

“We had some luck too.”

Hawker threw his arm around her and they walked to the window. They had leased a cheap fourth-floor suite on a suburban street pocked by used car lots, bowling alleys, funeral homes, and walk-up apartments. For Hawker, the days there had been pleasant only because he had the woman to keep him company—and because there had been no further reports of kidnappings in the Detroit area.

His rescue of Brenda Paulie and the subsequent disappearance of her slavekeeper had obviously stung the organization. They had lowered their profile.

Now Hawker wanted to do more than sting the Queen Faith organization.

He wanted to destroy them, to annihilate them. More precisely, he wanted to destroy Queen Faith.

At night it was increasingly hard for him to sleep—and not because he now had a steady and demanding bed partner in Clare Riddock. He found it hard to sleep because he couldn't help speculating about who Queen Faith was, what she was, about what such a dangerously twisted woman would look like.

But he knew the time would come when all his questions would be answered. He knew the time would come when he would stare the woman in the face and pronounce judgment on her.

Could he kill her? Hawker had never killed a woman before.

But he had never met anyone like Queen Faith before.

Hawker and the woman stared down through the window as the boy came out into the street. He glanced right then left. Suddenly a black Olds with tinted windows came screaming around the corner. A door was pushed open, the boy jumped in, and the car screeched off.

“I should have thought of that,” the woman said, clapping her palm to her forehead. “We should've had a tail waiting for them.”

“No, a tail would have been dumb. If they spotted it, we'd be marked as cops right off. We wouldn't have been able to get close again. Let's just stick with your plan, Clare. We'll keep giving them rope until they hang themselves. It may take awhile, but I think we'd better let them come to us.”

It didn't take nearly as long as Hawker'd thought.

FIFTEEN

At five
P
.
M
. they locked the doors of the film studio, which Clare had whimsically incorporated as
Double Exposure
, and rode the elevator to the ground floor.

The woman was talking about where they might have dinner. The food at The Three Sisters was unbeatable, but neither of them wanted to go there because of the memories it would bring to mind.

As they walked out onto the street and turned toward the parking lot, the woman was saying, “I could cook. We could buy some steaks—or maybe some lobster. We could go to your place, build a nice fire, and eat there.”

“I don't care where we eat just so long as I can take off this god damn wig, get out of these pimp clothes, and go for a run.”

She laughed. “It's not a ‘wig,' James, dear; it's a toupee—didn't you listen to the sweet fellow who sold it to you? Besides, it looks perfectly natural.”

“It feels like a ball cap made out of Brillo pads.”

“Black hair is very becoming on you, darling. I especially like the gold chains around your neck. Quite macho.”

Hawker leered at her. “Being macho has nothing to do with gold chains and a bushy head of hair—as I will show you when we get home.”

“Promises, promises.”

Hawker took her arm as they turned down the alley into the parking lot. The sun, a pale swath behind the December clouds, was already dropping beyond the tallest skyscrapers. It was dusk in the city: cold, gloomy, fast becoming nightfall. They had come in separate cars. She had come in her Toyota because, with its hatchback, it was easier to bring another of the movie props they had been gradually collecting—the latest a cumbersome suspension mike that was said to have been used in a local production of
The Music Man
. That it didn't work made no difference. Hawker had driven his Corvette because he'd had a lunch appointment with McCarthy's friend, Detective Randolph White.

It had been a productive meeting. White was all McCarthy'd said he was—a facts-and-figures man who seemed more at home behind a desk than he would leading a big-league bust. Hawker asked him to use the computers in conjunction with NCIC to get a list of all the local porno producers who had been arrested in the last few years.

“From those names,” Hawker told him, “see how many women you come up with. I'm interested in real names, aliases, anything that can put me on the track. These porno people put a lot of stock in a name. It's one of those adolescent obsessions that they don't seem to outgrow—maybe because most of them still function on an adolescent level. I'm willing to bet the name ‘Queen Faith' is just one in a long line of stage names for a very tough, very twisted woman. It's just too unlikely that she got into the business without working her way up through the ranks first.”

White agreed and promised to do everything he could to sniff out a few leads for Hawker.

So it had been a good day, a productive day in what was by now a coldly calculated hunt for the woman who had brought so much terror to so many other women. They had had luck. Now it was up to Hawker, up to the vigilante ex-cop to plan their assault so carefully, so efficiently that, when he was finished, the kidnap/porno ring would be nothing but a seared scar, smoldering in the memories of the few who lived through it.

The hardest thing would be to lose the woman, to cut her out of the picture the moment he had a sure fix on Queen Faith's location.

There was no way he was going to let her risk her life on some midnight assault.

For now, though, he had to let her play along. There was no harm in it. She seemed happy and (as Hawker grudgingly admitted to himself) he was happy—really happy—for the first time in a very long while.

Clare held out the keys. “Would you mind unlocking the doors for me, Hawk? It would not only be chivalrous, but it would give my freezing little fingers a chance to warm themselves.”

“I thought slavery went out with Lincoln, lady.”

The woman waggled her eyebrows. “No, it supposedly went out with the feminist movement. But it was all really just a trick—and you silly men fell for it.”

Hawker reached out for the keys … and was momentarily confused as the expression on the woman's face changed. Her eyes grew wide, and her mouth contorted as if to scream.

The vigilante wasn't confused for long.

Someone shoved him from behind, almost knocking the woman and him to the ground. He whirled around to see that three men had been waiting for them behind another car. They looked like members of a motorcycle gang. Their hair was long and greasy, and they wore leather James Dean jackets. Two of them were taller and heavier than Hawker. But it was the smallest of them who did the talking.

“You the pair that wants to make that porno movie?” the man asked without preamble. He had bad teeth and his brown hair hung in braids down his neck. The name “Fritz” was sewn in white script above the left pocket of his jacket.

Hawker stepped in front of the woman. As he did, he gave her a reassuring pat on the hip. “Yeah,” he said. “We're the ones. And if you three want a screen test, you're going about it all wrong.”

Fritz's grin broadened. He turned toward his friends as if to poll their reactions, then hit Hawker so quickly with a backhand that the vigilante didn't even have time to react. “Let's not be a smart ass, okay, buddy?”

Hawker regained his balance and wiped the blood from his nose. His eyes had become cold blue orbs. He said nothing.

The man laughed. “Pretty boy here doesn't like being slapped, does he, boys? Pretty boy is getting real mad, isn't he? I bet pretty boy is afraid we're going to take his sexy little lady, huh?” The smile vanished from the man's face and he pointed his finger at Hawker. “If you want to keep that big-titted bitch, asshole, you'd better listen to every word I say. We hear you want to make yourself a movie. Well, that's real nice. The people we work for make movies too. But they also rent actors. That's the way they make money, understand? They rent actors to other moviemakers.” The man paused and reached beneath his jacket. He brought out a wicked set of brass knuckles and slid them on over his gloved hands. He said, “When these movie people rent our actors, everyone is happy. The people I work for get paid; the moviemakers get paid; and the actors—” He turned and grinned at his two big friends. “—get to gang bang each other in front of a camera and act like big-shot stars afterward.” Fritz looked at the brass knuckles then looked at Hawker. “You get my meaning, asshole?”