Flood (29 page)

JoJo plucked a cigarette from the loose pack and stuck it in her mouth. She patted herself like she was looking for matches, then let her left hand trail down my chest to my crotch and groped around, squeezed—the gun stayed on her face. JoJo took her hand away, leaned back against the seat cushion, fired the wooden match against the sole of her boot. “At least you don’t get a hard-on behind sticking a gun in my face.”

“I’m here on business, okay?”

JoJo took a deep drag of the cigarette. Her sweater looked like it was going to burst a few threads and I could see the outline of the wire-support bra—she must have been the only whore in the city who wore one.

“Show me the picture,” she said. I watched her face for a clue to her mind and gave it up. I took the Xerox of the mug shot out and handed it to her.

JoJo studied the picture intently. Her eyes narrowed. “That motherfucker, it’s him! I find this cocksucker and he’s dead. On the house. I don’t need your fucking quarter. It’s him . . .”

“Hey,” I said, to snap her out of it.

JoJo swiveled in her seat to look at me. Her face was dead-white under the makeup, red blotches mottled her cheeks—her eyes were crazy. I spoke softly, gently. “Listen, it’s okay. It’s okay, JoJo. I want him too, all right? I know he’s a bad guy. It’s okay—there’s lot of people wanting him now. Relax . . . just relax.”

I patted her rock-hard shoulder, stroked it—but I never moved the gun from her face. JoJo finally took a deep breath, handing me back the picture. “I don’t need this—I’d know that cocksucker anywhere. I don’t need you to tell me what to do. If you want him, you got him dead.”

“Look, I just want you to—”

But she went on like I hadn’t spoken. “And if you’re one of his freak friends, if this is a test, tell him I’ll always remember, okay? He’s dead. You don’t like it you can just fucking blast away right now.”

“JoJo . . . JoJo, listen, babe. I’m not his friend—I don’t even know him, okay? And I
do
want him. Just call me when you—”

“No calls. I see him, he’s dead.”

“You want the grand?”

“Not if I have to let him live.”

“I’ll pay you a grand for his
head,
okay, JoJo? When you finish with him, just take off his head, okay? And call me. When I see his head, I’ll pay you the money.”

And JoJo smiled like a little girl with a new doll. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Okay, we got a deal?”

“We got a deal, pal,” said JoJo, and slid over to open her door, leaving the Cobra’s picture and her purse in the car. As she was walking around the back to my side, I grabbed the .25 and popped the clip, jacked the shell out of the chamber, then worked the clip until I was holding a handful of bullets. When she came up to the window I gave her back the purse with everything inside. JoJo leaned in the window, shaking her rump for new customers like she was saying good-bye to an old one. She gave me a wink with one droopy eyelid, and I had the Plymouth in gear and moving even as she was turning away.

I got to the highway before she did and turned downtown, feeling the chills in the back of my neck like the time I had malaria. I put my gun back where it belonged, kneading my left forearm with my right hand to restore the circulation. I had been holding the piece like it was a lifeline—with JoJo so close to me, I guess it had been.

After a few blocks, I felt a stabbing pain in my chest and realized I hadn’t drawn a breath for too long. I got my breathing under control, checked my hands for the shakes—I had them, all right—and started to look for Michelle.

44

I DREW A total blank for a while—then I spotted Michelle working the other side of the highway. I hooked the Plymouth into a rolling U-turn and watched her face as I wheeled up alongside her. As soon as she saw it was me she started to run to the car. I pushed the passenger door open and she was in and we were moving again.

“What’s on, honey—somebody chasing you?” she asked.

“I got to talk to you. Not around here.”

“I know a spot,” she said, and directed me down by the Municipal Building—she sent us east like we were headed for the drive but told me to pull up short near Pearl Street. It was a big construction site with no workers around. No police patrols either, but lots of citizen activity a few blocks away. Safe and quiet.

I rolled down my window, offered a smoke to Michelle, who declined in favor of her own brand. She smokes these long skinny things with pink paper and black filter tips she gets from Nat Sherman’s. I tried one once when I ran out of my own—they don’t taste bad.

“You know JoJo?” I asked her.

“Everybody knows JoJo, baby. Why?”

“I’m still looking for that maggot, right? The Cobra?”

“So you went to
JoJo?
Are you completely bonkers?”

“Maybe I am. I know she’s a rough-off artist. I never met her before today but I know her rep. I thought I’d run the thing by her, tell her about the bounty and—”

“What bounty?”

“A grand cash, no questions asked, no testimony needed.”

“And you told JoJo?”

“Yeah. How could I know she’d go into the fucking Twilight Zone on me?”

“Burke, you didn’t show her a picture, did you? Or an artist’s sketch?”

“Yeah, I did. How did you know?”

“And then she just went off, right?”

“I
said
yeah. What’s the story?”

“Sweetheart, I thought you knew about JoJo. Sometimes I don’t see how you can do your work, ignorant as you are. JoJo used to be a sweet young thing. One of those country broads—got tired of the farm and turned tricks back home down in Cornballsville. So she comes up here to make money in the big city, right? And where do you think she decides to set up shop? Delancey and the Bowery, if you can believe it. And she’s out there without a daddy, thinking those double-sawbuck tricks are major bucks, you know? Now there’s nothing down here but
experienced
black ladies, honey, plus a few little white-bread runaways that the pimps are afraid to let work near the Port Authority because there’s warrants out on them, and all.

“And the working girls don’t tell her nothing about the Life, you know—they just try and pull her into one of their old man’s stables. But JoJo’s not going for that—she’s going to do a solo act. So one night this freakmobile shows up on the corner—two punks in front, another pair in the back. Ain’t no working girl with any smarts getting in
that
car—but the other bitches play like it’s no big deal and old dumb JoJo goes for it and they take her away to some room one of them had and they keep her there for three whole days—tie her up and fuck her and do a bullwhip number on her and make her spread for some Polaroids—they just go the whole freako hog. And after they pull a couple of trains on her they send out for pizza and let the delivery man have a shot. They call up all their friends and invite them too. And when they’re finally going to leave, JoJo’s a bloody mess and she ups and asks them for the
money.
Can you believe that? Well, one of them just goes nuts behind that and he takes a baseball bat to her and when the cops find her half her skull is caved in.

“They take her to the hospital and put a steel plate in her head and get her patched up and then some detective comes in with one of those mug-shot books and shows them to her and she starts screaming, “That’s them,” and points to
all
of them and jumps right out of the bed and they have to knock her out with the needles . . . JoJo ends up in the psycho ward for a year or two until she learns how to play the game and they spring her. Now she just gets even—every day, every way. Baby, you show her anything that even
looks
like a mug shot and it’s Psycho City.”

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that for myself. She doesn’t recognize any of the pictures?”

“JoJo doesn’t recognize anything period. She runs a fifty-fifty blend of hate and crazy. I can’t even
tell
you some of the things she’s done to johns. You go into a hotel room with JoJo and you’re not walking out under your own power.”

“I think she’s not waiting for hotel rooms anymore, Michelle—she’s packing. I think she would’ve blown me away right in the car if she’d had the chance.”

“It’s so sad. I talk to her sometimes, Burke, but I can’t help her. Those freaks put her on another planet, what they did to her.”

“Pass the word on the bounty, okay?”

“It’s for real?”

“You bet your ass,” I said, opening the door for her.

“Baby,
please,
not for a lousy thousand dollars,” said Michelle, stepping out of the Plymouth to do her work.

I set out to make a few more stops, spreading the word. I wanted every dope addict, every hustler, every take-off artist in our area to be looking to score on this one.

As I rolled back uptown I looked across the highway and saw JoJo, still sitting on the same piece of concrete, smoking her cigarette and waiting for her connection. I thought about the steel plate in her head and got another chill. I’d never show her another picture—of anybody—ever.

I found the industrial building on West Twenty-fifth Street, took the freight elevator to the roof, walked across to what looked like a pair of greenhouses stacked side-by-side. The hand-lettered sign on the door said PERSONALIZED GRAPHICS: SAMSON/LTD. I rang the bell and waited. I heard the click that told me the door was open, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Two men working at individual drafting tables—one in his late thirties, very short hair, tight tanned skin with prominent cheekbones and delicate clean hands, wearing a blue oxford-cloth buttondown shirt with narrow rep tie—the other, shorter and heavily muscled, long blond hair and an earring in his left ear. He was wearing a cut-off dungaree jacket with no shirt underneath, showing a giant tattoo of a daisy on one bicep. The clean-looking one said “Burke?” and I walked in and laid the photo of the Cobra on his drafting table. “He been in here?”

“I never talk about my clients.”

“Neither do I.”

He looked back up at me, down again at the picture, and said no in a quiet voice. I said, “Call me if he does,” and walked out. One of the “personalized graphics” they did was passports.

The next stop was a print shop I know where they would let me use their machinery and pay for whatever I did without looking at it—they didn’t want to know. One of the few legitimate things I’d learned in reform school was how to run a printing press. Making up some WANTED posters with enlargements of the Cobra’s mug shot was no problem. The photo blew up nice and clean, hard to miss. I set the type so the posters read WANTED FOR GENOCIDE AGAINST HISPANIC CHILDREN in bold red type and added a long list of the Cobra’s alleged rapes.

Pablo’s people would put them up all over town, especially in Times Square. Una Gente Libre wouldn’t put their own name on anything like this, especially after Goldor, but the word would get around and the Cobra would know there were some serious people on his trail.

I threw the bundle of posters in my trunk and bought a paper—nothing on Goldor yet, so I went to a pay phone and called Toby Ringer. I told him that I’d heard Wilson had snuffed Goldor so I was giving up my search for him. The harsh intake of breath at Toby’s end told me that he knew Goldor was dead. My phone call would make sure there’d be an APB out on Wilson.

Over to another phone, where I called my preppie reporter pal and gave him the hot scoop on a genuine mercenary recruiting operation right in the middle of Manhattan—putting together a string of soldiers of fortune to fight in Rhodesia and South Africa. A terrible scandal and an affront to black people everywhere, he agreed. I promised to call him back in another day or so with names and locations and he said he would go in there undercover and expose the situation for his readers. Christ.

It was getting into the late afternoon by then, so I rolled the Plymouth back toward the warehouse looking for Max before I made the call to the phony gunrunners. I pulled in, killed the engine, and waited. Before I was halfway through the first cigarette Max dropped onto the hood. I vacated the front seat and we went into the back room to talk.

I pulled the lapels of my jacket to show Max I was talking about clothes, made the sign of something falling softly through the air, bowed deeply to show my appreciation of the robes he had given to Flood.

Max dropped his own head in the briefest of bows, flowed into his own version of Flood’s crazy
kata
and ended with a two-finger strike, his hand darting in and out so quickly that only the rush of the silk sleeve ripping through dead air alerted me. He looked the question at me—could Flood do that? Could she finish the job, or was she just a dancer? So I told him about Goldor and the Cobra and what I wanted to do, how I wanted it all to end—a hiss came from Max. He was warming up.

He followed me to the workbench where we cooked up another stencil out of some cardboard we kept lying around. I found a dozen or so of the little spray cans and pointed toward the car, made signs to show all the doors opening at once and people jumping out, walking down the street looking straight ahead—walking like warriors. I explained what the spray cans were for as Max smiled.

It was still about a half hour before six so Max and I got out the cards and we played gin until it was time. My mind was on other things but I still beat him—Max is too superstitious to count cards like I had showed him. I hooked up the on-line phone set and dialed the gunrunners. James answered on the first ring—I guess he does all the public speaking for the two. “Yes?”

“It’s me. I have a proposition for you. I’ll pick you up in two hours, right where you are, and we’ll talk, okay?”

“Certainly,” he said, and I rang off.

I gestured to Max that we were going to meet the same characters who had been in the warehouse before. He made the sign of a man reaching for a gun and I told him no—it wasn’t going to be a duel, just more talk. Seated at the table, I reached for an imaginary steering wheel and turned it a few times as if I were peering through a windshield. I looked a question at Max, pointing first at him then out into the street. He nodded, he would get us a car. I pointed at my watch and Max held up one finger—it would take him about an hour.

Max faded out the door and I hooked up the phone again and called Flood. “Hi, baby.”

“Hi. Are you working?”

“Working hard.”

“Anything yet?”

“I got most of the ingredients, but . . . uh . . . the cake’s not in the oven yet.”

“That’s good—I’m very hungry.”

“Me too. I’ll be working late tonight. Okay to come by when I’m finished?”

“Yes, call first. How late?”

“After midnight.”

“I love you, Burke.”

“You don’t have to motivate me—I told you I was on the job.”

“Don’t be a coward—you can say you love me too.”

“Later,” I said, and hung up. I disconnected the phone, went back inside, and looked through the paper Max had left. I couldn’t even concentrate on the race results. Stupid Flood.