Hammered (11 page)

I slide the giant old BMW-Amazonas motorcycle gently around the square frame of the cleanest house on the street and into its trash-heaped backyard like a fish nosing into a reef. There are armed guards and a high wall around it, but Razorface lives in the neighborhood he grew up in. Sitting on the back porch, cleaning a gun, he waves to me as I pull in.

I look around for Emery, who is usually in attendance, but Face’s lean and wary lieutenant is nowhere to be seen. Two adolescent boys play basketball in the cracked driveway, so I park my bike in the uncut grass by the weathered frame of a two-car garage and walk back up to the house.

“Nice day,” I say to the boys. The taller one turns to stare, fascinated; I let my eyes slide off him and over to Face, who rises, smirking, and gives me a hand up the three wooden risers. Not that I need it, of course.

He grins at me, steel teeth like the grille on a ’57 Chevy.
It never ceases to amaze that somebody would do something like that to himself on purpose—but then, I’ve seen some piercings and other body modifications that make Face’s teeth look like a tattooed biceps. And they do make him … memorable.

“Nice as a day ever gets around here.” He gestures up to the glazed-blue sky overhead. There’s something special about September skies in this part of the world. In Toronto, I remember a lot of rain in autumn.

The porch railing creaks as I lean against it. Face settles down in his chair and returns his attention to the pistol disassembled on newspaper spread on his glass-topped table. Watching as he wets a square of gauze and threads it through the needle eye of a cleaning rod, I smell gun oil and the sharper scent of cleaner. He turns his head and shouts over his shoulder into the kitchen door. “Baby, get Maker a beer?”

“Razorface,” I begin, and let my voice trail off as he looks up.

“Going to tell me you have to drive?”

His woman comes out of the house with two cans of beer. If you can dignify the stuff Face drinks with the name. She juggles a plate of sandwiches in her other hand, setting it down on the porch rail before she hands a can to each of us. “Thanks, Alyse,” I say as I take it.

“Don’t mention it. You here to try and steal my man again?” Her black eyes sparkle. She cocks her head to one side and rolls her shoulder back, hands challenging on her ample hips.

I crack open the beer. “No one could ever compete with you, Leesie. Your cooking keeps him home.”

Head bowed over his pistol, Face grunts toward the newspapers. Smiling, Alyse picks up the plate of sandwiches and holds it out to me. I take one—bloody roast
beef and processed cheese on white bread Maman would have shuddered over. Holding the beer in my other hand, I take a bite.

Alyse turns, and Razorface absently takes the plate from her. She bends her neck and half smiles, half frowns. Then she looks back up at me, alert and quick as a bird. “Maker, you do something about that cop friend of yours sniffing where he don’t belong, you hear me? I’d hate to see that boy get hurt.”

Mouth full of roast beef sandwich, all I can do is nod. I swallow half-chewed food and mumble. “I’ll do what I can, ma’am. You can’t lead a horse to water, eh? Has Mitch been here?”

Face looks up as she nods her head once. He’s got an odd expression on his face as he puts the tools down, wipes oil from his hands onto a rag, and picks up a sandwich.
Sching.
There’s nothing quite like watching Razorface eat roast beef on white bread with too much mayonnaise. Like a deli slicer.

“Woman, why do I put up with your ass?” He says it around a mouthful of food.

She straightens her neck and looks down at him, broad-shouldered Dominican goddess. “Because nobody else can handle you the way I can, baby.” She turns and saunters back into the house, and Face watches her until she’s out of sight behind the screen door. When she’s gone, he shakes his head in admiration and turns back to me.

He takes a long swallow of beer before he speaks. “That pig … yeah, I seen him. Hell out of his jurisdiction. Don’t know what Hartford P.D. wants up here on the Ave. We take care of our own. Besides, your boy isn’t homicide, and he’s barely been a detective a year. What’s he doing on a case like this?”

“I don’t know. How do you know what he’s assigned to?”

The big man laughs, shaking his head from side to side. “I’m s’poda know these things.”

It takes me a second to get the half-chewed meat and bread down.
Mitch, what are you after?
I chase the food with a swallow of beer. “Face, tell me the truth. You have anything to do with this business? Mashaya Duclose?”

“You trust me to tell you the truth?” He turns the beer can slowly in his hand before he lifts and drains it. Never taking his eyes from mine, he crushes it casually and pitches it at a paper bag beside the kitchen door. He misses.

“I trust you with my back. What the hell is with the dance-around today, eh?”

A moment’s quiet assessment before he drops his gaze and scratches behind his right ear, gold hoops sparkling in the light. “Shit, Maker. S’weird, I dunno. Cops in my end of town, cops getting killed in my town. Looking for a dealer that I can’t find and they can’t find … just damned weird.”

My eyebrow tries to crawl up into my hairline. The basketball thumps the asphalt driveway. “What was that again?”

He starts reassembling the gun. “Just what I said. Me and the boys have been looking all week, and nothing. Nobody knows nothing. The guys that sold the shit, they from out of town, and the word is they went right back wherever the hell they come from. They were trying to move in, I could do something.”

I’ve a pretty good idea what Face’s “something” might entail, but I nod anyway. “Any idea where they were from?”

“I think from the City.”

Only one city in this part of the world is the capital-C variety. “Ah.” I run my tongue across my teeth. Silence hangs between us for a moment, and I think about the odd standoffishness in his manner today. He won’t look up and
meet my eyes, and it takes a little while to make sense of why. “Razorface, are you worried for me?”

“You got somebody looking for you.”

“I know.” I wince as I hear my own tone, but I can’t make myself soften it—a dog that can’t stop growling over a bone.

“You got some kind of trouble?”

I move away from the porch railing, walking the length of the rickety structure. I stand there for a moment, watching the basketball game. The older boy is pretty much slaughtering the younger one, and frustration shines behind the sweat dripping down the smaller kid’s face. I know the feeling. “I’ve always got some kind of trouble.”

He laughs. “You living in the world, ain’tcha? Family trouble or other kind of trouble?”

“I haven’t got any family, Face.” I turn back over my left shoulder to look at him. He’s black-and-white out of my bad eye, the reassembled automatic in his hand picked out in red by the targeting scope.

Standing, he drops the pistol into a shoulder holster and shrugs it on. He used to shove it into his waistband until I told him a story about a guy I knew in the army who shot his balls off doing that. Standing there in the shade of the porch on a bright September day, I abruptly remember him as a skinny preadolescent, blood running down his soot-covered face from a glancing wound on his forehead. It’s so vivid an image I can almost smell the smoke.

Those were bad years, in the thirties when things in the States were even worse than they are now. My first time in Hartford, I wore a baby-blue peacekeeper beret and thought I was invincible. South Africa didn’t happen until two years later.

No, I really don’t have any idea why I came back here to retire. Must be the fond memories. I’m so wrapped up in
them I miss the first part of his sentence when he speaks again.

“… gonna tell me what’s going on with you so I can help, or you gonna keep playing your cards in your vest pocket?” He comes up and lays a baseball glove mitt on my shoulder.

“I …”
It’s an old habit, Face. What they don’t know can’t hurt me.
I change the subject. “This cop. You never said if you knew anything.”

“Course I don’t know nothing. I know something maybe you don’t, though. This Duclose. Mashaya. She was my baby’s momma’s little sister.”

His baby’s momma. That could be any of twenty women.
The implications come clear. “She’s from the neighborhood. A cop.”

“South Arsenal neighborhood. Got her high school and everything. Family’s from Trinidad. Good kid, they said.”

“So that’s why she was on this end of town. You think maybe what she got killed for wasn’t related to her job?” I notice I still have half a sandwich in my hand and take another bite. Leesie hates it when people don’t finish what she fixes.

His hand slips off my shoulder. “Some people don’t be so happy when some bitch from the neighborhood grows up to be a pig, if that’s what you mean. They might do something about it. But I would’ve heard ’bout that. This wasn’t no local issue.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “Mashaya, she had friends here. Nobody downtown cares if a few bangers OD.” He goes silent, and I know he’s thinking of Merc.

“You’re saying she was working on her own time.”

“It ain’t a crime unless white people or rich people die. She talked to a lot of people. Talked to me. Maybe got close
to something.” His hands windmill slightly as he struggles to articulate his thoughts. “Somebody saw her get shot. Sniper bullet, one shot. Tore the back of her head clean off. White van came around the corner thirty seconds later and five guys cleaned up the scene and were gone before my boys even heard about the shooting. That’s fast.”

I start to see the outline of the picture he is painting for me, in his awkward way. Face isn’t stupid. He’s keen as the razor blade he keeps in his pants pocket. I’ve seen the man in a ten-thousand-dollar sharkskin suit cut to fit like a second skin, and you don’t get to be what he is if you’re not smart enough to remember the names and family histories of every petty criminal in the city.

Oral communication, however, is not his strong point. I finish the end of my sandwich as an excuse to think. “That’s
professional.
You’ve got a feeling about this,” I say at last.

“I got nothing but feelings, and they all making my knuckles itch. But I think we talk to the people Mashaya was talking to, we get close to the people she got close to …”

“We get shot in the head with a high-powered rifle and our bodies turn up in the river. Good plan, Razorface.”

He shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking of going on down to New York City. What do you say?”

I wipe my hands on my pants, leaving behind a greasy mayonnaise stain.

“I’ll drive.”

The door to Gabe Castaign’s office stood open on the gray-carpeted hallway, and Elspeth paused there. She heard his voice, carefully cheerful, the enunciated tones telling her that he was speaking to a machine. “… hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!” She rapped the door sharply and stepped into the room just as he tapped the disconnect. The fuzzy image hanging in the air over his phone dissolved into transparency.
How odd—whoever he was calling still has the factory message up.
“Gabe?”

He was already looking up to greet her knock. “Elspeth. Come in please.” He stood and came around the big desk, a mirror of her own, scooping a pile of manuals off the seat of the upholstered chair to his right. “What can I do for you?”

She stepped onto soft carpeting identical to that in her own office, except in a masculine medium gray blue, complemented by periwinkle drapes. He’d hauled them to the side and turned off the projected babbling-brook landscape, revealing a less-than-enticing view of slanting sunlight across a well-stocked parking lot. A breeze ruffled the curtains; Elspeth smelled warm concrete. She hadn’t realized the windows would open. “I was hoping you were settled in and we could sit down and talk about the project.”

“I’d like that. Pull up a chair.” He set the manuals on the edge of his desk, away from the interface plate, and gestured to the one he’d cleared. The skin of his hands showed faint irregularities of color, speaking to Elspeth of old deep burns or something else requiring skin grafts.

She shook her head. “How about I buy you dinner?”

He checked the time in the corner of the flat monitor pane canted at an angle like a reading stand over the top of his desk. Elspeth found it interesting that he preferred the pane to contacts or a holographic interface. Still, she imagined he spent a lot of time staring at it. “How did it get so late? Sure, let me grab my jacket. My roommates are at a friend’s place for dinner.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks.

I wonder what quote roommates unquote are.
She stepped back as he walked around the desk, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning the cuffs before he brushed past her to take his coat down off the peg beside the door. “What do you want?”

“Anything’s good,” she answered, wondering if he meant—or caught—the double entendre. “I wonder if that little noodle shop on the corner by the university is still there.”

He took the knob in his hand and held the door open for her. He passed his thumbprint over the sensor as well as turning the key in the lock. “When was the last time you were there?”

She almost laughed in realization. “About thirteen years.”

“Ah.”

Elspeth could see evening light through the double glass doors at the end of the corridor as they walked. She knew he was waiting for an explanation. “I’ve been out of Toronto for a while. I’ll tell you about it if I get a couple of beers in me.”

“You do that,” he said, as the outside doors whisked open before them, enfolding them in warm autumn air like a humid exhalation.

An hour later at a restaurant still called “Lemon Grass,” Elspeth picked up her chopsticks and leaned forward over the steaming bowl of noodles, closing her eyes to inhale. “Jesus, that smells good.”