Hellhound (7 page)

Vernon grabbed him by his throat and lifted him straight off the ground a good foot and a half. Trey leaped to his feet. He knew Alvis had a gun in his waistband but also one under the couch. He went for the latter.

“Sit down, Trey, before I wring your neck, too,” Vernon croaked. “Now,
bitches
, who’s got what? I’ve got money, but I clearly don’t have your attention.”

No one knew what to do. This was a school bus driver. Nicest guy in the projects. One of those big guys who laughed like you imagined Santa Claus might. Trey remembered a time that he’d slow his bus so a kid could catch up, only to earn a horn blast from a taxi. Mr. Lester had lowered his window, flipped the guy off, and cursed him like no one had ever heard before. It was the kind of thing that could’ve gotten him suspended, but not a kid told on him. It just made them respect him that much more.

Figuring it was up to him, Trey went to the coffee table, reached under, and pulled up a wooden box that was taped beneath it.

“You looking for something specific?” Trey asked, making himself a calm sea for Mr. Lester to gravitate towards.

“Pills,” Vernon spat. “What you got?”

Trey held the box out to Mr. Lester as the big man lowered Alvis. Alvis shot Trey a dirty look as he straightened his collar. Mr. Lester picked through the box, plucked out three bags with about fifty pills all told, and tossed five $100 bills back into the box, ten times what the pills were worth.

“You want change, motherfucker?” Alvis asked, still smarting.

Mr. Lester fired the back of his hand so hard across Alvis’s face that the young man flew backward before crumpling to the ground, knocked cold. Trey stared at Mr. Lester, figuring the only time he’d seen someone punch like that was in a boxing match.

The older man nodded to Trey, as if the blow to Alvis’s face hadn’t happened at all. “Thanks, Trey.”

Trey nodded, having no desire to earn a punch to the face himself. Mr. Lester exited, disappearing down the stairwell at the end of the hall.

“What the fuck?” one of the other guys, nicknamed Pluto, asked.

“I think we just made a shitload of money. When Alvis wakes up, we should go celebrate.”

Everybody liked this idea. Trey caught Janice’s eye, seeing that she approved of the way he’d handled himself. Not only that, she was doing nothing to hide the fact that her gaze was melting the clothes right off his body.

This
would
be a good day.

A
teenage girl was dead over a bag of chips. Shot through the neck, she was in blue jeans and sandals, a white tank top, a reminder that summer was around the corner. She’d recently polished her nails. Her hair looked as if that’s what she’d spent most of the morning on. Maybe she was on her way to see someone when she decided they were not only good enough for a couple of hours in front of a mirror, but a bag of chips, too.

Well, she’ll never know
, thought Leonhardt as he stared down at her dead eyes.

“What do we think, fourteen? Fifteen?” Garza asked.

Leonhardt handed over the girl’s pink Hello Kitty wallet, momentarily wondering if she’d boosted that, too.

“Fourteen!” Garza announced.

“Check your math,” Leonhardt muttered.

Garza eyed the date on the school I.D. again and whistled. “Thirteen. Shit. Jury’s going to murder him.”

Leonhardt looked over at the old Korean man sitting at the back of the tiny convenience store. Two officers were waiting for an interpreter to arrive from the courthouse on 121st to take his statement, but Leonhardt didn’t imagine he’d be saying much then, either.

“Nah, he’s going to walk,” Leonhardt said. “He’s paid up.”

“What do you mean?” Garza asked.

“Look at him. He’s doing exactly what he’s been told to do. Is that a look of guilt? How about worry? Nope, that’s only minor frustration. He’s more pissed about the sales walking past his closed front door than the corpse he’s got on the floor. I’ll bet when we pull the tapes…”

“If there are any tapes in the machines,” Garza interjected.

“Oh, I’ll wager you a ten-spot there are,” Leonhardt retorted. “Bet that’s the first thing he checks every day, down to the second. Probably got a grandson who does it digital, so there aren’t any tapes, but easily transferable digital files. Anyway, we’ll see the girl come in, look around, wait for him to look away, then stash a couple of chip bags in her backpack. He’ll confront her, things will get nasty—does she look like the type to take shit to you? Especially from an old man in a rundown bodega.”

Leonhardt moved to where he imagined the two players would’ve been standing when this happened.

“Nah, he asked to look in her backpack, she got nasty, he made a grab—not for her, but for his property—and she probably took a swing,” Leonhardt continued. “He’ll sell it on the tape. He felt threatened. And then he waits, skitters backward, and waits to feel threatened a second time. If she was smart, she’d back up and leave. But she took one step towards him. Now, he’s scared for his life. He pulls the .38 out of his back pocket and fires a single shot. He’s lying in a prone position on his back and, if necessary, can claim it was meant to be a warning. His high-priced lawyer will paint a very specific picture of a man fearing for his life, not knowing if this girl had a weapon. The jury will buy it as his weeping family will fill the galleys every day for this, their sole breadwinner. Even if he has no family, they’ll be there.”

Leonhardt caught the shopkeeper’s eye and realized he was listening intently.

“Wait, how’s he going to pay for a high-priced lawyer?” Garza asked.

“He pays money to the Triad for protection. See that symbol behind the cash register?”

Garza glanced over at a small triangle with three dots in it over a letter in Chinese script.

“That’s for the Heaven and Earth Society, the first Triad from a helluva long time ago,” Leonhardt continued. “If you’re Asian and come up in here, you know not to fuck with this guy. If you’re not and you pull something, well, he can act with impunity, knowing some of the best lawyers on the East Coast will back him.”

“For five bucks or whatever they rake in from this?”

“Nah, for the five bucks they rake in from everyone else for proving that their protection is worth the percentage. It’s a smart business model.”

“Jeez,” Garza scoffed, looking at the old man. “Thought protection meant they’d burn you out if you didn’t pay.”

“Gotta keep current with demand. If this is what the people can use, this is what you provide.”

Leonhardt pretended he didn’t see the black-toothed smile emerge on the old man’s face.
The next one
will
bring a gun and you’ll be the one on the slab
, Leonhardt thought, hoping the look on his face would reflect this idea.

The old man’s smile disappeared.

The radio of one of the patrolman squawked. “Domestic violence call, Triborough Projects,” said the dispatcher.

The patrolman hit the black button on the side of the shoulder mic. “Shouts or shots?” he asked.

“Sounds like a guy choking his wife,” replied the dispatcher. “Neighbor’s listening through the wall.”

The location of the incident gave Leonhardt pause, but hearing the method sparked the detective into action.

“Let’s go,” he told Garza.

“Since when do we respond to domestic violence calls?”

“Humor me. Would love to say otherwise, but I’ve got an extraordinarily bad feeling about this.”

•  •  •

The sensation of murdering his wife was downright orgasmic for Vernon long after Helen had slipped into unconsciousness. How different were her initial choking cries of alarm from those of ecstasy? Even the look on her face had been curiously similar. She closed her eyes, her mouth open with her lips arched at an odd angle like a fish gasping for breath or someone about to cough. Her body quaked, unable to control its movements anymore. She slapped at him, but in the same ineffective fashion as when he used to go down on her and would keep going even when she’d clearly had enough.

All that said, part of him felt ridiculous over the fact that all this had given him an erection. He’d never been into any kind of extreme sex. For this to be the way his body informed him that it just might like tripping down such a particular garden path was bizarre.

Whatever the case, he shoveled another handful of amphetamines into his mouth and swished them down his throat with a beer. He placed his hand back on his wife’s throat and continued squeezing. He’d heard once that strangling someone didn’t always lead to death. The person being strangled usually passed out from lack of oxygen to the brain and the person doing the strangling walked away, only to have the victim revive. Vernon was determined to stave off oxygen long enough for the brain to die.

His neighbor, Mr. Jeffcoat, had been beating on the wall for a good ten minutes, shouting about calling the police. It only stopped when he apparently went to make good on that threat.

It wasn’t until the pounding on the front door began that Vernon realized time was short.

“Police! Open this door!”

Vernon raised his wife’s unconscious body over the faux marble kitchen counter and brought it down with such fury that it not only snapped her neck, it also tore her flesh, nearly decapitating her. He stared down at her engorged tongue as it lolled out of mouth and then headed into the living room.

The mastiff was just sitting there by the television, having watched the proceedings without apparent interest.

“Worth the wait?” Vernon grunted at it.

The dog didn’t so much as turn its head, much less bark. Its eyes stayed fixed on Vernon as he made his way to the window, unlatched its locks, and shoved it upward.

“This is your last warning!” bellowed a voice from the other side of the door. “Open this door or we’ll be forced to break it down.”

“Fuck yourselves!” Vernon called out as he stepped onto the fire escape landing.

He’d tied the rope to the railing a little while before. In fact, that’s what Helen had been sticking her nose into when he’d decided to go ahead and finish his business. He slipped it over his head and tightened it around his neck.

See you soon, bitch
, he thought.

As his doorframe shattered under the weight of a handheld battering ram, Vernon climbed to the top of the railing and leaped off.

•  •  •

The murder-suicide of Vernon and Helen Lester changed things at Neville Houses. Becca felt it the second she had reached the block as she walked home from school. No one was out in the courtyard. People in the businesses across the street stared and pointed, letting each customer know what had brought all the police and emergency services vehicles to the buildings across the street.

Becca had heard about the deaths at school. One of the students had been in the office when the news came in and heard teachers talking about it. Word traveled fast, particularly since it related to someone that some of the students knew or had known.

For Becca, the Lesters were just two more recognizable faces in the building. Since she didn’t go to P.S. 108 or P.S. 30, she’d never ridden one of Mr. Vernon’s buses. Still, she was aware of him. The fact that he’d killed his wife before killing himself couldn’t help but trouble her.

It was the dog
, she thought.

She didn’t know how the dog got to the Lesters or, really, anything about its m.o., but it had lived with Mrs. Fowler, and now she was dead. Without a master, the animal must’ve wandered away. Not even twenty-four hours later, more death.

As Becca approached Building 7, a handful of officers tried to block her path.

“I live up there,” she said matter-of-factly.

“We’d like to call up and have one of your parents escort you to your apartment, if that’s all right,” the officer said.

“My brother’s up there asleep,” Becca explained tersely. “He works nights. I’d rather you didn’t wake him up, as you sure did a lot of that last night.”

The officer was taken aback. He wasn’t sure how to respond to this. That’s when Trey walked up from across the courtyard and grabbed Becca by the shoulders.

“I got this. She’s my sister.”

“You got
what
, Trey? You think I can’t handle this?”

Trey rolled his eyes. “Give it a rest for a second, Becca. Ken’s up, just went for a walk. He called in. Doesn’t want us home alone tonight.”

“It’s the
dog
!” Becca exclaimed. “They have to get that dog!”

“Okay, Becca, they get it. You’re crazy. Let’s go.”

Trey had just begun pushing Becca towards the building’s entrance when a voice boomed after them.

“What dog?”

The half-siblings turned as Detective Leonhardt hurried up to them. He glanced from Trey down to Becca, as if attempting to divine Becca’s credibility.

“What dog?” he asked again.

“The big dog that’s been making people crazy,” Becca replied urgently. “Mrs. Fowler had it last.”

“A dog?” Leonhardt asked.

“Yes, a dog,” Becca replied, exasperated at being made to repeat herself. “You calling me a liar?”

“Ma’am, I certainly am not.”

Becca straightened a little, clearly delighted to be called “ma’am.”

“Can you describe the animal?” Leonhardt asked, popping out a pen and pad of paper.

“It’s a big black dog,” Becca began. “Biggest dog I’ve ever seen.”

“Tall? Like a Great Dane?”

“No, muscular. Short-haired. Like a bull. We’ve got a picture…”

Trey squeezed Becca’s arm and she cut herself off. Leonhardt noticed but pretended like he didn’t.

“You have a picture?”

“We saw one online that looked like it,” Trey said.

“But you saved it? She said ‘we’ve got.’ That could be really helpful.”

Trey stared back at Leonhardt, knowing the detective was sending him every kind of warning in the book with his word choice and body language.

Don’t make me go Bad Cop on you and your sister
.

Trey was about to reply when Becca chimed in. “We’ll check the computer if you want. I don’t want to wake up my brother, but I could email it to you.”