Chapter 6
He awoke in the morning without conscious thought and lay on his bed for a while, orienting himself.
The city made itself known through the constant growl of traffic coming through the thin windows. He got up and did his customary survey of the street below through his hotel window and then went to the wardrobe and turned on his phone again.
No messages, no voice mail, no missed calls.
He looked across the room to check if his children were still sleeping and then called the garage first and then Diego. He got no response from either of the numbers and pulled apart the phone again and slipped it into his pocket.
He woke his children and spent a couple of hours with them, pushing back the real world as long as he could, but finally it was time to get them to the daycare center and check them in.
An hour later, he was driving a yellow cab, after paying its driver handsomely for the day, driving back to Brooklyn. In the passenger seat was a map of Brooklyn with six red crosses marked on it.
5Clubs had stashes for the crack and meth and stuff they moved all across the borough, and those red crosses were the stashes that Shattner knew of.
If the warehouses were operational, the gang was operational.
The stashes were not your conventional warehouses. They were apartments in which families lived.
The occupants were usually gang families or connected to the gang in some way and got to live free in the apartments in return for having the drugs stashed in their homes. It was a neat setup by Cruz and worked so well that not once had any of his warehouses been raided. His genius lay in the location of those apartments. Some of those were in the most run-down, deprived neighborhoods of Brooklyn, such as Brownsville, and some were in the wealthiest neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights.
Shattner drew up to the first address, a single-family home that housed a gang member and his wife and three kids, a two-storied building off Christopher Avenue and Newport Street in Brownsville. As soon as he drove on Newport Street, he realized this was a bad idea.
He was the only white male driving a cab in the neighborhood, and if he stepped out of the cab, he would stick out and be remembered. He drew near as slowly as he could without drawing attention, spotted the house on his left ahead, and slowed down further.
Nothing. No one.
He debated coming back up the street for a second pass, but discarded that thought and headed to the next cross.
He made his way past upmarket cafés and bistros till he came to an imposing apartment block in Brooklyn Heights. The apartment was on the third floor and was occupied by a lawyer who represented 5Clubs. The apartment was guarded whenever it housed a load.
Shattner parked his cab a block away and hoofed it across to the apartment block, grabbing his caffeine fix on the way. He walked past the block, his cap pulled low, and peered inside the entrance through the corner of his eyes, but couldn’t see anything. He knew the block had CCTV coverage, and he reckoned he could make a couple of more passes safely before he attracted attention.
It was on his third pass, when he had almost given up, that he saw Aleksander, one of the gang’s hit men, talking with the concierge in the entrance. Aleksander was a nasty piece of work; Shattner had seen him casually break the knee of a bystander near the garage just because Joe Bystander had stopped in his tracks to make a phone call and Aleksander had bumped into him from behind.
Aleksander’s presence indicated the gang was still operational, so the garage was closed for other reasons.
Maybe Shattner was suspected of being a snitch by Diego and Cruz, and hence the garage was closed till Shattner was taken care of. Shattner didn’t know and didn’t waste time speculating. He glanced at his wrist. Just past noon and still time for his next visit, one he was not looking forward to.
Elaine Rocka was born with a scowl and an opinion and never failed to display either or both at the slightest provocation. Which explained why she had run through three husbands and had no children. Husband number three had left her a sprawling five-bedroom home in the Bronx where Elaine now lived with a couple of cats and dogs for company. If her opinions bothered her pets, they didn’t let on.
Elaine Rocka was Shattner’s sister-in-law.
She had never liked him and hadn’t ever hidden that dislike. She thought her sister had ruined her life by marrying him.
Elaine Rocka had one redeeming quality in Shattner’s eyes.
She loved his kids and never lost an opportunity to keep them with her. Shattner drove the cab to Pelham Bay in the Bronx and wove his way to Laurie Avenue. He parked outside the short driveway, climbed the few steps and banged the knocker, fully knowing she didn’t like it banged. He could hear the deep silence in the house, and then a dog barked from its deep interior, and he could hear steps approaching the door.
Elaine flung open the door, robustly built and elegantly dressed; her scowl threatened to split her face apart when she saw Shattner.
‘Prick,’ she said by way of greeting. She turned her back on him and polished the brass knocker, which was shining brighter than a mirror, with a cloth tucked away in her waistband.
‘What do you want?’ she asked coarsely. ‘Ran out of bread and come begging again?’ referring to the one time Shattner had asked her for financial help after his discharge from the army.
‘The kids,’ Shattner replied, stuttering a little in her formidable presence, ‘could you keep them for a few days while I sort out some issues at work?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘In deep shit again, are you? Right, I forgot. That’s where you wallow normally, don’t you?’
‘Elaine, please… I need your help. Can you take them in just for a few days? I wouldn’t have come to you if I could put them up with someone else.’
A wrist shot out and grabbed Shattner’s shirt. ‘Put them with someone else, would you, you prick? Where are they?’ Her eyes moved past him and searched over his shoulder.
‘They aren’t here. I’ll bring them in the evening,’ Shattner replied as he tried to pry himself loose from a grip that was suffocating him.
‘What about that tight bitch? What have you told her?’ Elaine asked him, politely referring to Mrs. Harwood.
‘That they’re unwell and that they’re visiting you for a few days.’
‘Six p.m. Don’t be late. They need to be fed,’ she said as she stepped back into her home and started shutting the door in his face.
Shattner dug into his pocket and brought out a roll of bills and handed them to her. The heavy hand pushed him back, and he stumbled on the steps.
‘I don’t need your wad, you prick. Only the kids.’ The door slammed in his face, her dogs barking a contemptuous chorus in farewell.
Shattner went to his cab and sat a long while. He observed the slight trembling of his hands, the tight band of pressure around him taking its toll. He picked up the phone to try the garage and then dropped it when it rang, the shrill tone unexpected and grating in the confines of the car. He looked at the display and saw that it was an unknown number.
He held it to his ear. ‘Hello?’
‘Chollo, we have to meet tomorrow, come to the place where we did the first transfer, at eleven.’ Diego’s voice was harsh, brooking no refusal.
‘Diego, where the fuck are you, man? The garage has shut down, and you aren’t picking up your phone. What’s going on, man?’
‘Tomorrow, eleven.’ Diego hung up, ignoring his questions.
Shattner took deep breaths, calming himself, and looked at his hands. They were still trembling. They always did when the threat level went off the scale. He looked at Elaine’s house and thanked himself for making the arrangement with her.