“In the room, sleeping.”
“Carry on.”
And the call was ended.
We sat in the front seat with an iPad set between us. The image on the screen was the motel room we’d vacated. Neither of us talked. We just waited.
Fifty-six minutes later three men burst into the room with guns out. They were well dressed like the assassins the night before. They spent no more than a minute checking to see if their targets were there.
Then they were gone.
“Your people?” I asked Oliya.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“To begin with we don’t have a hit squad. I would know about that.”
“So — Zyron?”
Oliya hesitated a moment before saying, “Maybe. They’re a big client.”
“You think the top people at Int-Op would play this dirty?”
“I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask that question.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Oliya turned to me, a blank expression on her hard face.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I gauged this apology.
“I should cut you loose,” I said at the end of the assay.
She nodded.
“I mean, you put killers on my ass.”
She gave another assent but with a wordless caveat at the end.
“What?” I asked.
“You need help with this, Joe.”
“I got friends.”
“You have me too... if you want.”
Being a cop is a tough job. You have to make split-second decisions a dozen times every day. Is someone a threat? Do they see you as a threat? What’s waiting behind that door? What would your mother think?
Since I was bounced out of the NYPD, without retirement, life just got harder. I had all those decisions to make without backup, without respect.
These thoughts in mind I asked, “You wanna take a ride out to Brownsville?”
23
Brownsville. It is a place that creates heroes and villains, where people cling to their dreams because they know for a fact that that’s all they’ll ever have. It’s poor and it’s angry, intoxicated and hopelessly in love. It is a place where children learn lessons that they spend the rest of their lives trying to forget. Sharper than a razor, it is the cut you never see coming.
The place we were looking for was on Rockaway Avenue. An unofficial SRO where poor people go when they need a place to lick their wounds.
The broken granite stairs led up to an oak door that, I knew, was braced by corroded, but still strong, iron bars. I pressed the doorbell button and waited a full minute. Then I bumped it again, twice.
“Who the fuck is it?” a grizzled voice inquired. If you didn’t know the speaker you wouldn’t have been able to put a gender on them.
“King Oliver.”
“King? In Brownsville? Tell me it ain’t so.” Now there was humor and maybe a woman smiling back there.
“Yeah, baby, it’s me. You can tell Loopy to put down his shotgun.”
“Loop!” the woman on the other end of the PA system called. “Let that bastard in.”
A moment passed, then another. I turned toward Oliya and saw in her eyes that she had been in places like this before — maybe she’d honed her talents on a thoroughfare like Rockaway.
Something was happening behind the oak door. After a few beats it swung inward.
The man standing there was tall and wide, high yellow in color and bald, mostly. The whites of his eyes were a deeper yellow and his face was the general shape of a butternut squash — the big side down.
“King,” he uttered. It could have been a greeting or a warning.
“Loop,” I said. “This here is Oliya.”
“Ma’am.”
“Hello,” my partner replied in the friendliest voice I’d heard her use yet.
“What you doin’ here, King?” Loopy Wright asked.
“I had a lawyer man put up a guy with you, name of Tesserat. We need to see him.”
“Coleman? He a mothahfuckah and a half. Lucky he don’t get his ass kicked in. Man runnin’ up and down the halls tellin’ folks to be quiet. Quiet? Shit. Come on in, brother.”
Loopy, the huge impediment to aggression, took two steps backward, making space for Oliya and me to enter the ghetto hotel.
Going down a hallway no more than a yard wide, we could hear Loopy’s shoulders rubbing against the walls behind. Maybe forty steps into the journey we came upon a closed door that had a strong light coming from underneath.
I knocked.
“Come on in,” she called.
I turned the knob and entered a room that hadn’t changed much since before the old woman that lived there was born. Once-thick burgundy carpeting lined the floor and an orange felt sofa sat against the far wall. To the right was a doorless doorway leading to a kitchen. To the left was a desk supporting a large lattice of cubicles from which all kinds of papers, keys, and other, less recognizable detritus sat and hung. The swivel chair at the desk was brand-new, made from some kind of space-age material. Mookie, the woman who ran and maybe owned the seven-story guesthouse, always said that you need a good chair for comfort and concentration.
She was sitting in the middle of the orange divan. Mookie was the only one allowed that perch.
“Loop.”
“Yeah, Mook.”
“Bring in some chairs for our guests.”
The big man blundered out into the kitchen. I knew from past visits that there was a toilet beyond that room and a storage closet after that.
“Who’s your friend?” the diminutive old Black woman asked me.
Mookie Hill was more than seventy but not yet ninety. She was taller than my grandmother and yet less than sixty inches in height. Her expression was daring you to contradict deep-set convictions. She could quote from the Bible, chapter and verse, and curse like a sailor from centuries past.
“Oliya,” I said, answering her question.
“Ma’am,” my bodyguard added.
“Look like she could scrap.”
Loopy came out with two metal folding chairs under his left arm. These he shook out for us.
“Wanna drink?” the hotelier offered.
“Not me, Mook.”
“No thank you, ma’am.”
“Well then, what else can I do you for?”
“I’m just here to talk to Coleman Tesserat.”
Mookie’s eyes were squarish and there looked to be a film over them. That aside, she saw everything.
“Why you gonna help a niggah like that, King? He look down on Black folk like he was a white man just off the plantation.”
“He’s married to my ex.”
“What you care ’bout her?”
“She’s the mother of our daughter.”
That put an end to the interrogation. Mookie needed to hear truth in her parlor.
“He’s on floor seven. Number five.”
Mookie’s place was lively. On the way up the carpeted stairs you could hear music and laughter, voices both threatening and with heart. Halfway past the third floor there was a young woman in a tiny red dress lounging comfortably and smoking weed. She took a hefty toke when we were ten steps down and released it when we reached her.
Dark brown skin with painted lips and impossible lashes; she reveled in the beauty of youth. The tips of her processed dark brown hair were frosted with gold.
“You guys wanna party?” she asked when I nodded hello.
“Gotta meetin’ upstairs,” I answered.
“Oh. Okay. You need anything else?”
I stopped and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Toni with a i.”
“What is it that you need, Toni?”
Toni gazed at me, speculating. I imagined that she could float a butterfly with those long lashes.
“You know Fat Cat Tom?” she asked.