Fostering Death (7 page)

He sounded like a campaigning politician. I wondered if he had his sights set on more than a promotion within the police department. Home detention was better than being locked up, I thought. And I’d have to pay the extra monitoring fee. It would also severely restrict what I could do with my hours outside of work. That, of course, was the point.

Chapter 5

A
ARON
W
AS
L
EANING
A
GAINST
the railing around the steps to my basement apartment, eating what looked like a piece of pizza and drinking from a bottle in a bag. Probably beer. Or whiskey. He had a joint tucked behind his ear.

As if my day hadn’t been bad enough. Aaron was one of the last people I wanted to deal with right now.

I visually scouted out the area. I didn’t see any patrol cars. No one was standing around, studying the nondescript contents of any of the surrounding store windows. None of the cars parked along the street seemed to be occupied by anyone pretending to nap or read a newspaper. A brown box truck was parked halfway down the block. Maybe it had some surveillance equipment in it. Maybe Aaron was wired.

Come to think of it, I’d seen that truck parked around here a lot lately.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

His eyes took a few minutes to focus, blinking rapidly. He seemed surprised to see me. “Jesse?” he said.

“Yeah. What are you doing here?”

He shoved the rest of the pizza into his mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed. “Just hanging out,” he said, a string of cheese hanging from the corner of his mouth. “Want a piece of pizza?”

I didn’t see a pizza box anywhere. “No, thanks,” I said.

He shrugged and reached into the voluminous kangaroo pocket of the hoodie he wore under his jacket and pulled out another piece. It was more than a little mangled. And covered with lint.

I couldn’t help but ask, “How much pizza you got in that pocket, anyhow?”

He blinked a few more times. The pupils of his eyes were dilated. He was high on something. “A whole pizza. What’s that—eight pieces?” he said. “I had to wait until it cooled down a little before I stuck it in my pocket. Zee really likes pizza. So I brought him some.”

No accounting for taste. But even if the pizza had started out pretty good, I didn’t think being carried in the pocket of Aaron’s grimy sweatshirt could help. “So who’s Zee? And where is he?” I asked.

Aaron looked around. “I dunno. Haven’t seen him.”

“So what are you going to do with the rest of the pizza?”

“Eat it, I guess. I think I got the munchies.” He giggled. “You want a piece?”

“You already asked me that. No, thanks.”

He crammed the next piece in his mouth, took a swig of the contents of his bottle in the bag, and gestured toward me with it. “Want a drink?”

“No, thanks.” I had visions of serious bodily fluids smeared all over the mouth of the bottle, not to mention swimming around in whatever was in the bottle. I’d have to be dying of thirst before I’d share Aaron’s drink. He was pretty skinny, his skin was bad, and he itched. He probably used drugs any way he could, including intravenously. I couldn’t imagine he’d be any more fastidious about sharing the rig he stuck in his arm than he was about his jacket or his food. A recipe for AIDS.

“Look,” I said. “Why do you spend so much time hanging out around here? There ain’t a whole lot going on around here. Most of the stores are out of business. Even the liquor store’s shut down. Just me and the old folks who live on the second floor are around. Except for the nutcases who come to the Tabernacle.”

Aaron scratched the side of his neck. Hard. He drew blood.

“Don’t nobody bother me here,” he said. He got a crafty look in his eyes. “Maybe you’ll get some oxys for me? Or meth? I can pay good money for it.”

“If you got money, you can get whatever you want. You don’t need me.”

His mouth sank into a sulky pout. “I got to go to Baltimore to get anything like the meth you got. Down on Park Heights. It’s a long way. The gas is expensive, and besides, they cheat me.”

City drug dealers cheating a naïve redneck who came down looking for a deal, pockets full of money? Big surprise there. I grinned, remembering his woeful tale of the white pebbles they’d sold him as crack.

If this was being recorded, I needed to clear up the bit about him ever getting meth from me.

“You never got meth from me. Or anything else. I’m clean. I plan to stay clean. Tell that to whoever’s putting you up to hanging around asking me for drugs. The answer is—and always will be—NO!”

Aaron blinked rapidly again. “You don’t have to yell.”

I took a deep breath. I needed to keep control of myself. “Look,” I said more calmly. “I’m on parole. I’m not getting involved in drugs. They won’t do you any good, either. You plan to hold onto that job?”

“Of course,” Aaron said. “I been in the last day or so.”

“I noticed.”

He smiled and licked his dry lips. “But I don’t think I got to worry too much.”

“You got a doctor’s note or something?” I asked.

“I don’t need no doctor’s note. But I can get one if I need it.”

I supposed he could, if the police were using him as an informant. Since I’d been working at Quality Steel, the cops had broken up a scheme a few of the employees had set up, hiding drugs and fake IDs in shipments. One of the people involved had been an executive. I was pretty sure that if they wanted to continue the investigation the management would cooperate. Even if it meant leaving a loose cannon like Aaron in a job. At least, on the packing line, he wasn’t likely to get anybody hurt.

I stepped past Aaron and started down the stairs. “I got to get some sleep,” I said. “I got to go to work tonight.”

“Okay.” Aaron took a long drink from his bottle. “I’ll just hang out here for a little while more.”

“What for?” I asked.

“In case somebody shows up.”

“Who would show up?”

Aaron shrugged and pulled another piece of pizza out of his pocket. He raised his eyes to look straight into mine and grinned. “Just somebody’ll make sure I get what I need. And that you get what you deserve.”

I gave him a hard look and headed for my apartment.

He grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Jesse. Wait a minute.”

I swung around, my fists clenched. Aaron backed off, stumbling over his untied bootlaces. “Hey, man. No offense. But I got something to tell you. Something you’d want to hear. But you got to give me something back for telling you.”

I looked around. Still no cops that I could see. And the brown truck was driving away. I grabbed Aaron by the neck of his jacket and hauled him toward the alley. We needed to be out of sight, but I wasn’t about to let him into my apartment.

The bag with the bottle crashed to the sidewalk.

Aaron lost his footing, and the jacket started to slip in my hand. I shoved my other hand into his chest, lifting him up, and repositioned my grip on his shirt collar, pushing him ahead of me into the alley.

I slammed him up against the dirty brick wall. His head bounced against it, but he didn’t seem to notice. My forearm pressed into his neck. He tried to balance on the tips of his toes, but it was my arm that kept him from collapsing into a heap on the dirty pavement.

Aaron’s bloodshot eyes opened wide. His rancid breath came ragged in my face.

“What the hell do you want?” I hissed. Using my other hand, I frisked him for a wire and patted his clothes for a recorder of some sort. I found nothing but a few empty plastic baggies and his wallet. Not even keys. I didn’t stick my hand onto the pocket with the pizza.

But I had no idea what kind of tiny new transmitting or recording devices they might have hidden on him.

Aaron’s mouth gaped open and closed a few times. Spittle dripped from his lips. He made a choking sound.

I eased up a little on his throat.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He blinked rapidly. “I was waiting for Zee,” he gasped.

I pressed a little harder.

“And I wanted to talk to you…”

“Talk away,” I said. “Then get your sorry ass away from here and stay away.”

“I ain’t done nothing.”

“Showing up at my place is doing something,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Did the cops put you up to this?”

“What do you mean?” he asked again.

“The other day. You showed up here. There were two cops sitting in a patrol car in the alley, watching. You want me to believe you weren’t trying to set me up?”

His eyes widened. “Cops?” he asked.

I just stared at him.

“Yeah.” He coughed. “I remember. But they didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Then why didn’t you just take off?” I asked.

“I wanted to go into your place,” he said, trying to raise his hand to his dripping nose. He couldn’t get it past my arm. “Then they couldn’t see what we were doing.”

“We weren’t doing nothing.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So why are you here now?” I increased the pressure on his throat. He made that choking noise again.

“Just trying to score.”

“I don’t buy that,” I said, ignoring his strangled noises. “I done told you, I got nothing to give you.”

“Not give,” he said, his eyes watering. “Sell.”

“Yeah? If I did have something, which I don’t, I wouldn’t sell it to you. I don’t need money that bad.” I might like money as much as the next person, but I liked my freedom much better.

“Not for money,” he said.

“Then what?”

“Information.”

“What could you possibly tell me that I’d want to know?”

“About the old lady.”

That gave me pause. “What old lady?”

“The one whose funeral you went to.”

How the hell did he know about that? I hadn’t gone to the actual funeral, but that didn’t make a difference. “What do you know about her?” I asked.

“You gonna let me score if I tell you?”

“No. But I might not kill you.”

Aaron tensed up even more, if that was possible. I pressed harder.

“You wouldn’t do that. They’d send you back to prison.” His voice was raspy.

“No place I ain’t been before,” I said. “And it might be worth it. But first they’d have to catch me.”

Aaron coughed, and his eyes filled with tears. “Please, Jesse.”

I eased up a bit. “What do you know?”

“Nothing, really.”

I increased the pressure again.

“Okay. Just something I heard.” He coughed again.

“What did you hear?”

“This guy I get stuff from sometimes. He had a lot of money. Said he got it from his mother. That she owed him.” He paused.

I leaned on my arm. “And…?”

Aaron coughed. “He said she wouldn’t give him no more. And he was screwing this girl who was there helping her. A housekeeper or something. When she wouldn’t give them no more money, they roughed her up a little. But she fell down the stairs. She maybe died.”

“He roughed her up?”

“He says Rose, or whatever her name is, was the one who hit her.”

“Rose?”

“The housekeeper. See, Rose isn’t legal. He thinks maybe she’s letting him screw her so maybe he’ll marry her. Then she can file for a green card.”

“When did you hear this?”

“Last week sometime. Or the week before. I dunno exactly.”

“What’s this guy’s name?” I asked.

“I just know him as Zee. I dunno his real name.”

“What does he look like?”

Aaron tried to shake his head, but I held him too tight. “Just a guy. He don’t use meth, so he don’t look too bad.”

“What does he use?”

“Mostly oxys. He says he could get them from the old lady. But he can’t no more.”

“Why is that?”

“Because she’s dead. But he’s got a big stash somewhere. When things cool down, he’ll get them. Or maybe send me for them. Give me a cut.”

“So where’s this stash?”

“I dunno. But he says it’s worth a lot.”

It would be, I thought. But only if the two of them didn’t take all of them themselves.

“Where does he hang out?”

“Here.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“He hangs out with the weirdos in the temple.”

“Is he one of the members?”

“I guess. Sometimes he wears those yellow robe thingies.”

Who but a member would be dressed like that? “What does he look like?”

“Just a guy.”

Not a whole lot of help. “White or black?”

“White.”

“What color hair?”

“Brownish.”