“Is that so?” said Theo, grunting through the pain.
“Yeah. Looks like your buddy Moses killed a state trooper tonight. Shot him right in the face.”
Theo said nothing. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him.
MacDonald said, “You and me are gonna work together now.
We’re gonna catch Moses.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“I kept my eye on you and Moses. I saw your buddy-buddy act in the cafeteria. I watched you two scheming in the stairwell.”
“Just jail talk, man.”
“My ass,” said MacDonald.“Moses blew this county five minutes after he was released. Got in his car and headed north. Police got a BOLO out, but nobody knows where he is now.”
Theo’s fingers were going numb, which lessened the pain.
“Can’t help you, dude.”
“Yeah, you can. I think you know exactly where Moses was headed when he got out of TGK.”
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“I don’t know nothin’.”
MacDonald raised his boot off Theo’s fingers and gave him a kick to the kidney.This time,Theo couldn’t stop from crying out in pain. He couldn’t tell anyone about his undercover status—the deal was that he would take whatever came, like a regular inmate—
but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up.
And even if he told him, MacDonald wouldn’t believe him now.
The guard knelt at Theo’s side and whispered in his ear, his voice taking on the perverse and gleeful edge of a sadist:“I got all night, tough guy.We’ll see
exactly
what you know.”
Uncle Cy couldn’t sleep.
Lightheadedness had forced him to leave the bar early tonight. It had come on right after Jack called to tell him that a guy named Moses had an O-Town Posse tattoo and killed a state trooper just hours after his release from TGK. Distressing news, but it didn’t account for Cy’s dizziness. That damn doctor still didn’t have his blood pressure medication right. Cy went home and climbed into bed. It felt like the bad old days when he would drag himself home from his gigs, fall onto the bed or sometimes even the floor, and fight with the spins as he tried to find sleep.
Funny thing was, Cy had played his sax so much better when he was high. Or so he’d thought as a much younger man. The owners who fired him from the hottest clubs downtown, the managers who banned him from the big hotels on Miami Beach, the musicians who refused to play with him again—they were all racists or Uncle Toms trying to keep the black musicians down. He kept moving from one gig to the next, drinking, sniffing, snorting, popping, shooting along the way, burning bridges everywhere he went. Eventually he couldn’t find work anymore—except in a place like Homeboy’s, that dive of a joint where Theo’s mother used to hang out. Night after night, he watched her, stoned and stumbling from one bar stool to the next in search of a twenty-dollar trick.When those pockets were emptied, she’d turn to the street. Everyone knew that story’s ending.
Except that her death really wasn’t the end of anything—espe-LAST CALL
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cially not now, with Isaac Reems’s promise hanging out there for Theo to grasp.
Cy sat up in the darkened bedroom and draped his legs over the edge of the mattress.Things were spinning again.A little blood in his head would sure have been nice. He allowed a minute for it to pass, but the mattress was turning, then the floor, and then the entire room. Slowly at first, but steadily gaining speed. The motion was counterclockwise, as if carrying him back in time and to another place—a snippet from his past that he had all but erased.
It was rushing back to him now, and even though his room was a blur, his memories played like a movie in his mind’s eye.
A loud pounding on the front door woke Cy from a deep sleep.
It took him a moment to recognize his surroundings. Not his bedroom. It was the living room. He’d passed out on the couch this time.That was one way for a man of so much talent to cope with playing a hellhole like Homeboy’s.
More pounding on the door. He forced himself up and shuffled across the room. The morning sun assaulted his eyes the moment he opened the door.
“Cyrus Knight?” the man on the porch said.
His head was throbbing, and the cotton mouth was so bad that Cy could barely form words.“What of it?” he said.
The man flashed a badge, as did the younger guy with him.
They introduced themselves as Harmon and Kittle, homicide detectives. Harmon was clearly the veteran, teeth stained from years of addiction to coffee and tobacco, his face creased with the lines of too many crimes, solved and unsolved. Kittle looked too young to be a detective, still battling acne and his hair buzzed like a high-school jock.
Harmon said,“We’d like to ask you a few questions about your niece.”
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Cy scratched his head and cleared his throat.The blinding glare of the sun forced him to keep one eye closed. “It’s about damn time you guys come around,” he said.“Come in.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Harmon.
Cy glanced inside his messy apartment, then back at the detectives.A couple of white guys in an all-black neighborhood.“What’s the matter? My place ain’t good enough for ya’?”
“Seen worse,” said Harmon. “This will just take a couple minutes.”
“Couple of minutes? This isn’t jaywalking.A woman was murdered.”
“How can you be so sure it was murder?” the younger detective asked suspiciously.
Detective Harmon rolled his eyes, as if to say,“Rookies.”“Kittle, the woman’s throat was slit. Let me handle this.”
Cy was sobering up quickly. It was clear that the homicide division hadn’t put its best and brightest on this case. He directed his question to Harmon.“What do you want to know?”
Harmon pulled a pen and small notepad from his breast pocket.
“When’s the last time you saw your niece alive?”
Cy thought about it.“Sometime that same day she was killed. I play the sax at Homeboy’s. She . . . she sort of hangs there.”
“What do you mean ‘hangs’?”
“Hangs . . . you know. It’s her spot.”
The detectives exchanged glances. Kittle smirked. Harmon said,“Did your niece have a job?”
“She, you know, made money as she could.”
Kittle said,“We hear she was a prostitute.”
Cy shrugged.“Might have been.”
Harmon asked,“How well did you know her?”
“Better than most folks.”
“And you can’t tell us what your niece did for a living?”
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is, anyway. I just don’t see why you gotta write all this stuff down and put it in the damn newspaper.”
“We’re detectives, not reporters.”
“It’s all the same club.”
“Sir, I just need the facts,” said Harmon.
“Okay, she walked the street. Big deal.”
Harmon was deadpan.“She have a pimp?”
“Beats me.”
“She do drugs?”
“What do you think?”
“Know anybody who’d want her dead?” said Harmon.
“Not really.”
Harmon made a quick entry in his notebook and tucked it back into his pocket.“Thanks very much for your time, Mr. Knight.”
“That’s it?”
He gave Cy a business card. “Call me if anything comes to mind. Anything at all that you might think is important.”
The detectives turned and started down the steps.
“Hey,” said Cy.
The detectives stopped, but only Harmon looked back.
Cy said, “You ain’t gonna do squat to find the guy who killed her, are you?”
Harmon paused, as if to consider his response. It hardly seemed possible, but Cy would have sworn that the old detective looked even more jaded than when he’d arrived.
“Another black whore gets high on crack and picks the wrong john,” he said.“I’ll do my best. But we can’t work miracles, pal.”
The bedroom suddenly stopped spinning. Cy’s memories faded, replaced by a pit of nausea in his stomach. This time, it had nothing to do with blood pressure. It was Theo he was worried about, and the memories of police indifference had only heightened his concern. He grabbed the phone on the 194
James Grippando
nightstand and called Jack Swyteck at home, who answered in a sleepy voice.
“Sorry, Jack. Hate to get you out of bed.”
“It’s okay,” said Jack, a frog in his throat.“What’s up?”
“I wouldn’t bother you like this in the middle of the night, but I just got a bad feelin’ in my bones. It’s Theo.”
“What about him?”
“I been layin’ here in bed thinking ever since you called me about this Moses. And it finally just comes to me. Theo got shot while Moses was in jail and Theo was on the outside.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Now Moses is on the outside and Theo’s on the inside. See what I’m sayin’?”
The line was silent as Jack mulled it over.“Makes perfect sense,”
he said finally. “A convenient disconnect between the hit and the man who orders it.”
Cy’s response came from deep inside him, a place laden with emotion.“We gotta get my nephew out of that jail.”
The salty taste of his own blood oozed from Theo’s mouth. His ribs hurt, his testicles were swollen, his fingers felt like they’d been slammed in a car door, and the back of his legs still stung from MacDonald’s nightstick.
And no end was in sight.
Theo lay on his side, his back to the guard, the concrete floor cool against his face.There was an art to getting through a beating of this sort, and Theo had been reaching inside himself for all the old techniques. The basic strategy was to leave your body and take a mental journey to some other place as far away as possible. To that end, he’d been thinking a lot about Trina—
the passion in her eyes, the softness of her skin, the tingle of her touch. It wasn’t working as well as he’d hoped.
“For the last time,” he said in a tired voice.“I got no idea where Moses is.”
MacDonald was sitting in the oak chair, resting and breathing heavily.Apparently, knocking the stuffing out of a man in handcuffs was hard work.
“Then you have a huge problem, Knight. Because I still don’t believe a word you say.”
“Why would I protect Moses like this?”
“Because he’s your brotha’.”
“I hardly know him.”
“Doesn’t matter. He helped your buddy Isaac. Just like you did.”
Theo breathed through the pain. His interest was piqued.
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
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“You helped Isaac on the outside. Moses helped him on the inside.”
“How you know that?” said Theo.
MacDonald rose from the chair and kicked Theo in the lower back. It must have hit the sciatic nerve, because the pain shot down Theo’s leg like a lightening bolt.
“I know it,” the guard said, seething,“because you’re gonna tell me all about it.”
Theo heard a key in the lock, and the door opened. He didn’t turn to look, but the sound of footsteps told him that someone else was in the room.
Great.A gang bang.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” the other man said.
Theo didn’t recognize the voice, but he seemed to have seniority over MacDonald, based on the tone.
“Just a little interrogation,” said MacDonald.
The man stepped closer and stopped behind Theo.Theo raised his head to look.
“Eyes forward,” the man said, turning Theo’s face away with a prod of his nightstick to the chin.
The signs of abuse were all over him, and Theo could only surmise that this officer was smart enough to keep Theo from witnessing the reproving looks he was throwing a fellow guard.
“You can go, MacDonald,” the man said.
“But I’m not finished.”
“I said
go
.”
Theo sensed tension in the ensuing silence, but finally MacDonald crossed the room and opened the door. He stopped and said,“I should have cuffed him sooner. Unfortunately I had to use force after the prisoner jumped me. It’ll all be in my report.”
“Beat it,” the man said.
The door closed, and Theo was alone in the interrogation room with the other officer.
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“You all right?” he asked Theo.
“Been better.”
“Can you walk?”
“If it gets me outta here, I can.”
Theo groaned with pain as the guard took his arm and helped him up. The man was black. Thus far Theo had dealt only with white and Hispanic guards, so he didn’t recognize him. He glanced at the name tag. Jefferson.
“Where’s it hurt?” said Jefferson.
“Everywhere,” said Theo.“My ribs, mostly.”
“Come on. Let’s get you up to the infirmary.”
“Just take me to my cell.”
“No,” the guard said.“MacDonald packs a wallop.You need to spend the night in the infirmary. Doctor can check you out first thing in the morning and get you over to Jackson if need be.”
Jackson Memorial Hospital was where Theo had ended up after the drive-by shooting. If this kept up, they’d be selling him a time-share.“I already got stitches in my head. He bust ’em open?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” said Jefferson.
With the guard’s help,Theo put one foot in front of the other and made it to the door. The guard shut off the light, and they started down the corridor. Theo was shuffling his feet more than walking, the pain in his ribs forcing him to favor his left side.
“Good thing for me you came when you did,” said Theo.
“Good thing for everyone.”
This Jefferson seemed like an all right dude. It was worth a shot to probe for a little information.“MacDonald tells me Moses killed a state trooper tonight.”
“MacDonald talks too much.”
“He thinks I know where Moses was headed.”
“Like I said: he talks too much.”
So much for loose lips.
Another guard looked on with mild amusement as Jefferson 198
James Grippando
and his battered prisoner passed in the hallway. They walked another thirty feet and stopped at the iron bars.The buzzer sounded, the door slid open, and they entered the next wing. Theo’s legs were killing him, but thankfully it only took another two minutes to reach the infirmary. The door was made of chain link rather than iron bars. Jefferson unlocked it with his key and escorted Theo inside.