I TOOK THE KIDS to school the following morning. After I dropped them off, I circled the block, getting one last long look at the Starlite. It seemed quiet and almost harmless in the chilly sunlight. Through the cloudy windows of the Starlite café, I could see elderly couples somehow braving the filth for their morning breakfast.
I saw very few cars in the alley, and those that I could see belonged to other houses. Only two cars in the street. The ice on the windshields told me the cars had been there all night, if not longer. And they were parked nearly a block away from the Starlite, so I had no idea if they were even connected to the hotel.
I drove back home in contemplative silence. I felt calmer than I had the last few days. I had spent a few hours after I put Jim to bed examining and re-examining my plan. I saw a lot of flaws, but I had reduced the luck factor to almost nothing.
I could get rid of that hotel, and do it quickly.
Franklin was going to pick up the kids and take them to the after-school classes. We had touched base just briefly this morning, enough for me to realize his talk with Laura had
gone well, at least in his opinion. He wouldn’t discuss Lacey, telling me I needed to talk with Althea. But on the way to school, Keith said that Lacey’s screams had awakened the household twice last night.
“Daddy kills the monsters in my room,” Norene said quite seriously. “I dunno why he can’t kill them in hers.”
That’s my job, I thought, but didn’t say. As I tried to think of some kind of comforting response, Mikie answered her. “Mom says it’s just from the hospital. She’ll get better. There’s no monsters to kill.”
Jim looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I wouldn’t meet his gaze. I remained silent the whole way to the school, letting the kids talk.
While I thought.
And worried.
Back at the apartment, I grabbed those flyers and pulled out the two professionally produced ones. It was still early, but I figured that was better.
I sat on the couch and dialed the phone number at the bottom of Donna Loring’s flyer.
“What the hell, man?” a sleepy voice said.
“I have information on Donna Loring,” I said.
“What?” A rustle, followed by a cough. I had woken the owner of the voice up and now he was forcing himself into full wakefulness.
“This is the number, right?” I asked. “I found it on the bottom of a flyer.”
“This is it, yeah, what do you know?”
“There’s a lot,” I said. “I’d like to tell you in person.”
“Tell me over the phone.”
My stomach clenched. I was going to control this. “There’s a bakery about two blocks away from her junior high. I’ll be in there in twenty minutes, and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t need no damn coffee,” the voice said. “You talk to me now.”
I hung up. Then I got up, grabbed my keys, parka, and wallet, and let myself out of the apartment.
I had used the gangs to my own purposes before. It had been scary and uncomfortable. It had also been an extreme situation.
Like this was.
Before I left the driveway, I checked my gun to make sure it was loaded, and then I put it in my pocket. I needed a better system, if I was going to carry a gun around.
Not that I wanted to, or even planned to.
I drove back toward the school and the Starlite, stopping on a side street two blocks south. I left my hat and scarf in the van and walked the half block to the bakery.
It was a cheerful place, but it had a wary feel. Daylight businesses worked best in gang territory, especially businesses that did most of their business in the morning.
And this bakery looked like so many others across the city. Men in business suits stood in line as they waited for a middle-
aged woman wearing a long dress coat handpick the three dozen donuts she was trying to purchase.
The bakery smelled of fresh bread, cinnamon, and coffee. I joined the line, but didn’t have to wait very long. A young woman joined the man behind the counter, and she took care of the single orders.
Theoretically, yesterday, I had had a donut that originated here, so today I ordered a cinnamon roll and a large coffee. I paid for a second coffee, and told the woman that someone would be joining me a few minutes. I asked her if she minded bringing the coffee when he arrived.
She smiled, and it made her seem both older and prettier at the same time. She didn’t mind.
I left a good tip.
I put my roll and coffee on the only remaining table near the wall. I sat with my back to that wall, facing both the door and the plate glass window, filled with this morning’s fresh pastries.
Then I focused on the cinnamon roll.
It was still warm and gooey, the frosting sweet and thick. I piled butter on top of it, and watched it melt. The bakery was warmer than I had expected. I hung my parka on the back of the chair, but made sure, with a single touch of the hand, that my gun was still easily accessible.
A dozen people had entered and left in the time it took me to get my roll and my coffee. I tried not to look too anxious as I watched the door. I was worried that I would miss my contact.
I shouldn’t have worried. I recognized him when he was half a block away.
Four young men walked down the sidewalk, coming from the south. They wore different heavy coats, and black pants. Two wore ankle boots, which had to do them no good in this cold, and the red tams that were the group’s hallmark. The older two wore combat boots, and no tams.
As they got close, the man behind the counter opened the cash register, grabbed some bills, and disappeared into the back, leaving the girl up front. The moment he did that, two customers left the line. The man waiting for his coffee looked over his shoulder. A woman, sitting opposite me in one of the other tables, stood, grabbed her purse and coat, and headed toward the door, only to stop as the four gang members gathered outside.
A man near me swore. The young woman stood nervously behind the counter. The system for dealing with the Black P. Stone Nation should not have surprised me, but it did. It made me wonder how much this place paid for protection, not just to the Blackstone Rangers, but to the police as well.
The woman slipped her coat on and tried to vanish as she waited, head down, for the four gang members to stop blocking the door.
I pushed the half-eaten cinnamon roll aside and leaned back.
After a moment, all four came in. Three of them pushed past the woman and took her table, cleaning it off daintily as if they worked in the bakery.
She slipped out the door as they moved past her.
The other gang member, one of the men without a tam, scanned the room, his gaze finally alighting on mine. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
I nodded, then kicked the chair across from me back with my foot.
He grinned, grabbed it, and said, “Me and my boys—” “I’m only talking to you,” I said.
His voice hadn’t been the one on the phone. Someone had relayed the message to him.
“I don’t talk without my main men,” he said.
“Then we don’t talk.” I looked over at the young woman behind the counter. She was staring at me in both fear and wonder. I raised my hand and beckoned with my fingers, reminding her about the coffee. She already thought I was an asshole because I was associating with these guys. Might as well complete the picture.
After a moment’s reflection, he sat down. He was too thin, and his eyes were red-rimmed. His nose was caked, and either he or his clothes or both hadn’t been washed in a while.
I was glad I had finished with the cinnamon roll, because there was no eating around him.
“You got information on Donna,” he said.
“You’re not the person who answered the phone this morning,” I said.
“I’m her brother,” he snapped.
This guy was one of Jeff Fort’s lieutenants? He looked too strung out to be someone the head of a gang as big as the Blackstone Rangers would trust. Maybe he had been one of Jeff Fort’s main men a year or two ago, but now, he was just another junkie, one who was getting lost in the product he’d been selling.
My heart sank. I had been hoping for a young tough man like the ones I had met a year ago.
He spoke into my silence. “You said you have news about her. You do something to her?”
“No,” I said, and then clammed up as the young woman came over with a paper cup filled with coffee, a small pot of cream, and five sugar packets. Apparently, she knew Loring enough to know how he took his coffee.
He took it with enough sugar to make me wonder if heroin was his poison of choice.
She set everything down, then glanced at me. Keeping her face out of Loring’s view, she mouthed, Friend? Really?
I ignored her, and she walked away. The line that had existed five minutes ago was gone. Most everyone who had been in the bakery was either gone or sitting silently at the tables, waiting for this meeting to end.
“It’s too quiet,” he said. “Let’s go to my place, talk this through.”
“No,” I said.
“You sure as hell say no a lot,” he said.
I shrugged. “My information, my terms.”
He studied me for a moment, clearly surprised I wasn’t frightened of him like everyone else in the place seemed to be.
Then he grinned. Slowly. “You’re the guy with the scar! You’re a legend, man. You got a flock of kids, and you’ll break a guy’s balls if he gets near them. Literally.”
So the Blackstone Rangers had an organizational memory. That surprised me. I was not surprised that the guy I had used as an example had ruptured something. Apparently that incident had done exactly what I hoped: It had kept the gangs away from the Grimshaw kids.
Too bad it hadn’t kept other predators away as well.
“So,” Loring said, “you got news about Donna, you say.
Which means you want something in trade.”
I had wanted something. I wanted the gang to join me, under my orders, inside the Starlite. But Loring here had that easy doped-up laziness that came from too much drug use, and his men didn’t look a lot better. One tried to watch me, but one of the others had fallen asleep with his head on the table.
The Mighty P. Stone Nation didn’t seem so mighty all of the sudden.
“No trade,” I said. “I just stumbled on something while I was looking for something else.”
“Looking?” he asked.
“I do odd jobs. I was finishing one of those,” I said.
He stirred the coffee with his dirt-encrusted little finger.
The scalding temperature didn’t seem to bother him.
“So who’s got Donna?” he asked.
“No one,” I said. “Not anymore.”
That caught him. He frowned at me. “What’re you saying?”
“I was at a West Side precinct, looking for a missing girl, and the cops there told me about a girl they saw on the street a lot.” It didn’t matter who Loring was, I couldn’t quite bear to tell him his sister had become a hooker, although from the irritation that flashed across his face, it looked like he figured out my meaning clearly enough. “They called her La Donna, the lady, and they found her last fall.”
“Found her how?” His voice had grown chilly. The two awake Stones focused on me. One put a hand on his side. Gun under his coat.
“Someone had killed her,” I said. “Beat her to death.”
Loring was shaking his head. “That’s not possible. She
wouldn’ta been on the street. We made sure she had a home.”
“I don’t think she had a choice,” I said. “I found a man who’d been kidnapping girls and then…sending them to work.”
“She wouldn’t have. She would have come home.”
“He might have told her you didn’t want her anymore. One of the girls I found,” I said as carefully as I could, “said that this man had broken her.”
“Who?” he asked, and he was starting to get jittery. “Who is this son of a bitch?”
I had planned to tell him about Eddie Turner. I’d planned to mention the Starlite. But this young man and his friends were in no condition to do anything. I doubted they even had Jeff
Fort’s ear. And if they did, I couldn’t trust them. If drugs had infiltrated the Stones in this way, then they were completely unreliable on job like the one I had planned. They would have no discipline, and they wouldn’t listen to me.
Innocents would die, and I couldn’t have that.
“His name is Clyde Voss,” I said truthfully. “He chats up girls after school, and eventually takes them somewhere, rapes them, and imprisons them for days, maybe weeks. Then he puts them to work.”
Loring knocked his coffee off the table. Brown liquid spattered across the floor. He kicked his chair over, pounded a fist on the table beside us.
The young lieutenant who had put his hand on his gun pulled it out of his belt. Idiot. That was a good way to shoot something off.
The girl behind the counter had run into the back. A couple of the other customers dove under their tables.
I remained in my seat, watching these jerks tip over tables and kick aside chairs.
Finally, they stopped. Loring pushed his face under mine, his index finger half an inch from my nose. “You’d better not be making up any of this.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Someone shoulda told me Donna’s dead,” he said.
“It was on the West Side. That’s not your territory, right?”
“Still,” he said.
“I’m sure you have someone who can check out the police reports,” I said.
He kept his face close to mine. His teeth were rotting and his skin was turning yellow, either from jaundice or hepatitis.
Then he let his hand drop. He braced himself on the table. “Why the hell would anyone hurt Donna?” he asked more to himself than to me. He raised his head. “What’re you gonna do about this?”
“I told you,” I said. “That’s what I’m gonna do.”
If the organizational memory went real deep, he would know—or someone in the Stones would know—that I had told them something important before, something that had gotten rid of a mutual enemy.
“You want us to take care of Voss?” he said softly, as if no one had heard our conversation, even though the entire bakery had.
“I want you to do what you do,” I said.
“Who’d he take of yours?”
“My family’s all right,” I lied.
“You don’t need no girl rescued?” Loring asked.
“Not anymore,” I said.
He barked out a laugh. “You’re something, old man. Does anyone stand up to you?”
“Not if they’re smart,” I said, keeping up the bravado. It was the only way to deal with these guys.
“Jesus,” he said, and stood all the way up, swaying a little. “This don’t check out, we’ll have us a little talk.”
“It’ll check out,” I said.
The other Stone, the one without the gun, shoved the one who had fallen asleep. He snorted, then sat up, looking like a little boy awakened in the middle of the night.
Loring snapped his fingers, and the others fell in line around him. He said nothing to me. He nodded at them, and together, they walked out of the bakery.
I waited until they had disappeared down the block. Then I stood up, and began putting the tables back into place.
“You’ve done enough.” The man behind the counter had come out of the back room.
“I didn’t expect them to do this,” I said. “I would have picked another place if I thought they’d trash your bakery. I’m sorry.”
“Sure,” he said. He clearly didn’t believe me. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I’m going to.” I put the tables back, set the napkin holders on top, checked for damage. The girl had given Loring a paper cup and the pitcher that held the milk was plastic. Loring had broken nothing with his fit of temper, for which I was relieved. I would have paid for the damage, if there had been any.
I couldn’t have done anything less.
The man carried a mop and bucket around the counter.
“What the hell are you doing with those guys?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “They’ve obviously been here before.”
“Of course they’ve been here,” he said. “About five years ago, they decided they owned the neighborhood. What the hell are we supposed to do about it?”
His hands were shaking. His cheeks were flushed.
“The bakery’s been here a long time,” I said.
“My dad built this place. I grew up working here.” He dry-mopped the coffee first, then dipped the mop head into the bucket and squeezed out the coffee with his bare hands. “I keep praying for these assholes to go away, but I’m afraid worse assholes will join show up in their place.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I used to think they were the worst part of the neighborhood.”
“They’re not?” He looked at me in surprise.
“Everything changes, and not always for the best.” I put a five next to my half-eaten cinnamon roll. “Again, I’m sorry.”
“Just don’t come back, okay?”
It was a promise I could keep. “Okay,” I said, and let myself out.