Last Call (24 page)
“Maybe one of the guards
conveniently
forgot to sign him in. A guard named Jefferson.”
“Maybe you should have your head examined,” said Jefferson.
The warden sat up, glaring.“What are you saying, Swyteck?”
“Jack, ease up,” said Andie.
“No,” said Jack. “I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t know what’s going on.This was a setup.”
The warden rolled her eyes and threw an arm in the air.“There you go again, getting all conspiracy crazy.”
Jack looked at Jefferson, his focus tightening. “You told Theo you were coming right back with the keys to the handcuffs.”
“I couldn’t find MacDonald.”
“Couldn’t find him,” said Jack,“or didn’t look for him?”
“I looked. I didn’t see him. I wasn’t going to put out an A.P.B.”
“So, you were happy to let the prisoner lie there overnight, without being checked out by a physician?”
“The physician wasn’t in the building.”
“You could have called him in.”
“Hey, Knight didn’t even want to go to the infirmary. So I didn’t push it. I figured he’d be fine till morning.” He looked at the warden. “Look, I went off duty an hour ago. Is this going to take all night?”
“No,” said the warden.“Go home.”
“I’m not finished,” said Jack.
“Yeah, you are,” said the warden.“Go home, Jefferson.”
Jefferson rose and left the room. As the door closed, Jack and the warden locked eyes in a tense stare.
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“Don’t forget our understanding,” said the warden. “No press.”
“No problem,” said Andie.
“No cover-ups,” said Jack, his gaze still firmly on the warden.
“I’ll see to that.”
Theo received a thorough checkup from the on-call physician. The doctor didn’t detect any broken bones, but Theo would have to visit an outside medical facility for X-rays and a follow-up examination. He taped Theo’s ribs, gave him an anti-bacterial ointment for the rope burn around his neck, and wrote a prescription for a painkiller.
“Vicodin?”Theo said hopefully.
“I’m giving you Demerol,” the doctor said.
“Good enough,” said Theo.“Can’t wait to wash it down with a couple shots of Herradura Añejo.”
The doctor peered over the top of his black-rimmed reading glasses, giving Theo a reproving look.
Theo was about to ask where he thought an inmate would get tequila, much less
good
tequila. But lately, just about anything seemed possible in this place.
“Thanks for your help, Doc,” said Cy.
The doctor packed his bag, and the guard escorted him to the locked exit door. Theo and his uncle remained behind in the examination room. Theo was seated on the table, transferring an ice pack back and forth from his swollen knee to the fingers MacDonald had stepped on. Cy leaned against a poster on the wall that, appropriately enough, warned of the dangers of hypertension.
“Is all this worth it?” said Cy.
Theo was breathing in and out, trying to get comfortable with tape around his ribs.“All what?”
“Guard beats the crap out of you. Some inmate you don’t LAST CALL
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even know tries chokin’ you to death. What’re you trying to prove?”
“Ain’t tryin’ to prove nothin’. Just want to find out who took a drive-by shot at me in Overtown.”
“And you think you gotta be in prison to do that?”
Theo inhaled deeply and grimaced with pain. Big lungs were no friend to bruised ribs. “Jack and I agreed that finding the guy who helped Isaac on the inside was the best way to find out who tried to shoot me on the outside.”
The guard returned to the examination room. Cy looked at him crossly.“Can I have a minute with my nephew? We’re talking family here.”
The guard said,“I’m here to keep an eye on him.”
“Two minutes,” said Theo.“Cuff me if you want.”
The guard glanced at Cy, and he backed down out respect for the old man, not any concern for Theo. He cuffed Theo to the rail on the examination table, stepped outside the room, and waited nearby at the reception desk.
Cy had that “Uncle Cyrus” look on his face again—the one that made it impossible for Theo to blow smoke.
“What’re you doin’ here,Theo? Really.What’s this all about?”
“Getting answers.”
“You done your part now.Why don’t you come home and let the FBI or the warden work over the guy who tried to choke you to death? I’ll bet he’s got some answers.”
“He’s a punk who doesn’t know shit,” said Theo.
“What makes you so smart?”
“Because things don’t work that way. Don’t you get it? Jefferson bought him off—dope or something—to act like he was asleep and then jump me after we was alone in the infirmary. Dude doesn’t even know why he was trying to kill me. He’s just a pawn who’s got no idea who the real players are.”
“And you think you can find these real players?”
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James Grippando
“With time, yeah. All I gotta do is work my way up the chain.
The guy who tried to kill me killed Isaac.And whoever killed Isaac doesn’t want
anybody
to know who killed my momma.”
Cy brought his hands to his head, groaning. “After all these years, it finally has to come down to that, does it?”
“Not my choice.That was Isaac’s doing.”
“And what if Isaac just lied through his teeth when he told you he knows who killed your momma, hoping he could talk you into helping him that way?”
“It’s possible,” said Theo.“But I don’t think a bluff would have gotten him the kind of help he needed to bust out of jail. He must have had something on the killer—enough for the dude to whack Isaac after he got out and offered to let me in on the secret. Jack and me are on the same page with this.”
“Jack,” he said, exasperated.“You know I like Jack, but he ain’t the one who’s sitting in jail with a big bull’s-eye pasted onto his back.”
“Careful, old man. If I asked him, Jack Swyteck would change places with me in a minute. And not just to get into Trina’s pants.”
They shared a little smile, and then Cy turned serious.
“I want you out of jail,” he said.
Theo didn’t answer right away.
“You hear me?” the old man said. “I want you out of this place.”
Theo averted his eyes and shook his head slowly.“I can’t just—”
“Theo,” he said, his voice firm but not harsh. He stepped closer.
“I ain’t asking you.”
“What, you’re
telling
me?” he said, scoffing.
Uncle Cy came right beside him and laid his hand on Theo’s shoulder.“I’m begging you, boy.”
Theo could feel the sincerity in his touch, hear the slight crack in his voice, see the moisture building in his eyes.
“Guard!” he called, still looking at Theo.
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The CO entered the room. Finally, Cy lowered his gaze. “It’s time for me to go.”
Theo said,“Hey, it’s gonna be totally—”
Cy raised a hand stopping him, as if to say, “You’re all I’ve got, you’re all I’ve ever had.” The words didn’t come, but they weren’t necessary.
“It’s your decision,” he said, now looking straight at Theo.
“Make it a good one.”
The old man started toward the door, and the guard followed.
Theo watched as they left the room, the pain in his ribs worse than ever.
Andie squeezed one final concession out of the warden before leaving her office. She wanted to see Theo Knight’s attacker.
She knew she couldn’t question a prisoner who’d demanded an attorney. But both her psychology background and her FBI training in criminal profiling had taught her that some things could never be gleaned from mug shots and criminal records.
Sometimes, just laying eyes on the suspect could trigger a thought that filled in another piece of the puzzle.
Duane Holloway was in the hole, one of several small cells in a separate wing of TGK where inmates were kept in solitary confinement. Eager to go home, the warden had no interest in visiting Holloway at 3:00 a.m., and she even allowed Jack to go with Andie, since all they could do was look at the prisoner from outside the cell anyway.A correctional officer escorted Andie and Jack through the maze of corridors and past the security checkpoint that led to the solitary wing. It wasn’t underground (basements were rare in south Florida) but it felt like it.The lighting was dim, the concrete walls sweated with moisture, and the air smelled of mildew. Holloway was in cell number three.
The guard stopped at the solid metal door, slid the slot open 212
James Grippando
like the bouncer at a speakeasy, and flipped the light switch outside the cell.
“What the hell?” the man inside said, groaning.
The guard smiled at Andie.“Feast your eyes.”
Andie went to the slot and peered inside.
Holloway was sitting on the floor, stark naked. He had an annoyed expression on his face, and Andie couldn’t tell if he’d been sleeping or if his eyes simply weren’t accustomed to the lights.
He flipped a double bird to Andie, who was nothing more than a pair of eyes in the viewing slot.
Holloway was smaller than Andie had expected. Had Theo not been handcuffed, the attack would have failed in two seconds flat.
Like many inmates, however, he had impressive biceps and well-defined abs that came from battling boredom with exercise. He also had a tattoo on his chest, and since Andie was standing less than six feet away from him, she had no trouble identifying it.
“He’s Folk Nation,” she said.
“What?” said Jack.
Andie stepped away from the door. “He has a tattoo on his chest with a pitchfork and the letters
B-O-S
.That’s ‘Brothers of the Struggle,’ one of the better-known identifiers for Folk Nation.The pitchfork is also one of their symbols.”
“I know Folk Nation is a gang, but who are they exactly?” said Jack.
“They’re actually not a gang—they’re an alliance under which gangs are aligned. Think in terms of the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox being part of the American League. Folk’s roots are in Chicago, but it has national reach, traditionally aligned with Crips out of L.A.Their rival is People Nation, which lines up with Blood from the West Coast.The big gangs aligned under Folk are extremely violent and have begun to make serious inroads with local gangs in Florida, mostly for the drug trade.”
“Why would one of those Folk Nation gangs want Theo dead?”
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“They don’t need a reason. Random killing can be part of their initiation ritual.”
“Hey!” the man shouted from inside his cell.“Is that a woman’s voice out there? Come jerk me off, baby!”
The guard smacked the door with his nightstick.The prisoner just laughed.
Jack and Andie stepped farther away from the door. “Is that what you think this was,” said Jack, lowering his voice.“A random hit?”
“No,” said Andie, her words flowing as fast as her thoughts were coming to her. “I think Folk Nation is in this equation because O-Town Posse wants Theo dead. I think O-Town Posse wants Theo dead because Moses ordered it. And I think Moses was headed north on the expressway tonight because O-Town Posse is trying to cement its alignment with one of the more powerful national gangs in Folk Nation.”
“Climbing in bed with the big boys out of Chicago?” said Jack.
“Yeah,” said Andie, the picture getting clearer by the minute.
“But I have a good feeling about this marriage.”
“Why?”
“Moses brings way more baggage than he’s worth,” she said, cutting him a sideways glance.“Thanks to our Theo.”
It was the first time Jack had ever heard her say
our
Theo. Maybe it was innocuous. Maybe it wasn’t. But he sort of liked the sound of it.
Moses was in Atlanta by noon.
His new car was nowhere near as stylish as the one
he’d swapped out at the chop shop, but with a dead state trooper under his belt, the last thing he needed while cruising up the interstate was a set of wheels with gang markings. He’d driven all night, keeping his speed at or below the limit, stopping for gas only after he was as far north of the Florida state line as his bladder could stand. His second stop came several hours later at the famous Varsity fast-food restaurant, a greasy-spoon of an institution with irresistible chili dogs and onion rings. It was on Atlanta’s north side, directly across the expressway from Georgia Tech, which meant that the lunchtime crowd rivaled that of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Moses ordered his food to go, added a chocolate shake to make his overindulgence complete, used his turn signal as he exited the parking lot, and continued on his law-abiding way up the interstate and into Gwinnett County.
Atlanta’s most dangerous gangs weren’t only in the city. They ruled from the suburbs.
Compared to Miami’s Overtown, the metropolitan area northeast of Atlanta was like a forest. Unlike Overtown, however, developers in these parts didn’t make a habit of taking the money from banks or housing authorities and running. They actually built things in Gwinnett County—and built and built.
The tree-lined streets slowly gave way to patches of overdevel-opment, entire neighborhoods that seemed to be in a state of identity crisis, not sure if they were residential or commercial.
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To Moses it was all commerce. That was the nature of the gang drug trade.
On a middle-class street behind a supermarket, Moses found the address he was looking for. It was a ranch-style house that needed a paint job and landscaping, but so did most of the seventies-vintage residences around it. He counted nine cars that had arrived ahead of him, four in the driveway and five on the street.
This concerned him. He’d thought only one person knew he was coming—Levon Dawkins.
Moses parked at the curb by the mailbox and hit speed-dial number one on his cell phone. He’d been smart enough to stash the phone before his arrest and maintain the service even while incarcerated. No way could he afford to lose his programmed numbers.
Levon Dawkins was inside the house when he answered on his cell.
Moses said,“What’s with all the cars?”