Last Man Standing (21 page)

“Web London,” said Peebles, who stopped and coughed and then blew his nose, “has been with the FBI for over thirteen years
and with Hostage Rescue for about eight. He’s highly thought of. Got lots of commendations and things like that in his file.
He was badly injured and almost died during one mission. Militiamen thing.”

“Militiamen,” said Westbrook. “Right, that’s white people with guns think the government’s fucked
them
over. They ought come see us black folk, see how good they really got it.”

Peebles continued, “There’s an investigation currently going on into the shooting in the courtyard.”

“Twan, tell me something I don’t know, ’cause I’m freezing my ass off and I see you are too.”

“London’s going to a psychiatrist. Not one at the Bureau, an outside firm.”

“We know who?”

“It’s a group at Tyson’s Corner. Not sure yet of the psychiatrist seeing him.”

“Well, let’s get that nailed down. He’ll talk to the shrink about things he ain’t talk to anybody else about. And then maybe
we have a talk with the shrink.”

“Right,” said Peebles as he made a note.

“And Twan, can you tell me what the hell they were going after that night? Don’t you think that might be important shit?”

Peebles bristled at this. “I was just about to get to that.” He rustled through some more papers while Macy meticulously cleaned
his pistol, wiping away from the barrel dust motes that apparently only he could see.

Peebles found what he was looking for and glanced up at his boss. “You’re really not going to like this.”

“There’s a lot of shit I really don’t like. Tell me.”

“Word is that they were going after you. That building was supposed to house our entire financial operations. Bean counters,
computers, files, the whole deal.” Peebles shook his head and looked offended, as though his personal honor had been impugned.
“Like we’d be stupid enough to have that centralized. They sent HRT in because they wanted to bring the money guys out alive,
to testify against you.”

Westbrook was so stunned by this that he didn’t even take Peebles to task for saying “our” financial operations. They were
Westbrook’s, clear and simple. “And why the hell they think that? We ain’t never even used that building. I ain’t never even
been in the damn place.” A thought suddenly seized Westbrook, but he decided to keep it to himself. When you wanted to deal,
you needed to bring something to the party, and maybe he had something, something to do with that building. When Westbrook
was just starting out on the streets, he had actually known that place real well. It was part of government-funded tenement
housing built in the 1950s and designed to give poor families the subsidies they needed to get back on their feet. What it
ended up being twenty years or so later was one of the worst drug areas in the city, with killings nightly. White kids in
the suburbs watched TV at night while Westbrook had watched homicides in his own backyard. But there was something about that
building and others like it that maybe the Feds didn’t know. Yeah, that one went in his “deal-making” file. He started feeling
a little better, but just a little.

Peebles perched his glasses on the end of his nose as he eyed Westbrook. “Well, I’m assuming the Bureau had some undercover
working this thing and that agent must have told them otherwise.”

“Who’s the damn agent?” asked Westbrook.

“That we don’t know.”

“Well, that’s shit I
got
to know. People going around lying about me, I want to know who it is.” Something very cold had suddenly seized in Westbrook’s
chest even as he tried to put on a strong front. Now he was not feeling so good. If a Bureau agent had targeted what he thought
was Westbrook’s operations center, then this meant the FBI had turned its attention to him. Why the hell had they done that?
He wasn’t that big an operation and he sure wasn’t the only game in town. A bunch of crews did things a lot worse than he
did. Now, nobody walked over him and nobody touched his turf, but he had played it low and cool for years, causing nobody
trouble.

Peebles said, “Well, whoever tipped the Bureau off knew what strings to pull. They don’t call up HRT unless they got something
very serious to go on. They hit that building because it was supposed to be filled with evidence to be used against you. At
least that’s what our sources say.”

“And what’d they find there, except the guns?”

“Nothing, place was empty.”

“So the undercover was full of shit?”

“Or else
his
sources were.”

“Or else they set him up, to set me up,” said Westbrook. “See, Twan, the cops ain’t going to care what’s
not
there. They still gonna think my ass was behind it ’cause it’s on my turf. So whoever did this was taking no risk. They stacked
the deck against me right from the go. Ain’t no way I could win that. Am I right, Twan, or you see it different?”

Westbrook studied Peebles closely. The man’s body language had very subtly shifted. Westbrook, who had made the noticing of
such things an instinct, an instinct that had saved his life numerous times, definitely picked up on it. And he knew its source.
Despite his college education and his skill at managing the business, Peebles was just not as quick as Westbrook was at sizing
up a situation and coming to the right conclusion. His street instincts paled in comparison to his boss’s. And there was a
simple reason for that: Westbrook had spent years surviving on those instincts and all the while honing them to an even sharper
precision. Peebles had never had to do that.

“You’re probably right.”

“Yeah, probably,” said Westbrook. He stared grimly at Peebles until the man finally looked down at his papers.

“So the thing is, as I
probably
see it, is we know jack-shit about London, only that he’s seeing a shrink ’cause he froze up. He could be in on it and just
faking everybody out and saying it’s all in his head.”

“I’m certain he is in on it,” commented Peebles.

Westbrook sat back and smiled. “No, he ain’t in on it, Twan, I was just seeing if you could finally show me some street mind.
You ain’t there yet, bro. Not by a long shot.”

Peebles looked up in surprise. “But you said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what I said, Twan, I can hear myself talk, okay?” He hunched forward. “I been seeing the TV and newspapers,
catching up on this dude Web London, Twan. Like you say, man’s a damn hero, got his ass shot up and all.”

“I’ve been following it too,” said Peebles. “And I didn’t see anything that convinced me London’s not in on the setup. In
fact, the widow of one of his own men thinks he was in on it. And did you see what happened outside his house? The guy pulled
his gun and fired on a bunch of reporters. He’s crazy.”

“No, he fired in the air. Man like that, if he had wanted to kill anybody, they’d be dead. That man, he knows guns, that’s
easy to see.”

Peebles wasn’t backing down. “I think the reason he didn’t go out in that courtyard was because he
knew
the guns were there. He went down right before the guns started shooting. He
had
to know.”

“Is that right, Twan? He had to know?”

Peebles nodded. “You wanted my informed opinion, that’s it.”

“Well, let me inform your damn opinion some more. You ever been shot at?”

Peebles looked over at Macy and then back at Westbrook. “No. Thankfully.”

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot to be thankful for. Well, see, I have. You too, right, Mace?”

Macy nodded and put his pistol away as he followed this discussion.

“See, folks don’t like to get shot at, Twan. It just ain’t natural to like something like getting your head blown off. Now,
if London was in on it he coulda done lots of shit to stay away from that hit. He coulda shot himself in the foot during training,
ate some bad food and put himself in the hospital, run into a wall and broke his arm, all sorts of shit so his ass not even
been anywhere near that place. But he was, he hauling butt with all the rest of his crew. Then he can’t haul no more and his
team gets shot up. Now, a man on the take, what’s he gonna do if he is stupid enough to go on the gig? He gonna sit back,
maybe fire a few rounds in there and then go see the shrink saying his mind’s messed up. But what a guilty man ain’t gonna
do is go out in that courtyard and mess with those machine guns. He gonna stay nice and safe and collect his money for setting
everybody up. Now, this man, he went out there and did something even I ain’t got the balls to do.” He paused. “And he done
something else just as crazy.”

“What’s that?”

Westbrook shook his head and decided it was really fortunate for Peebles that he was so good at the business end because he
was surely lacking everywhere else. “Unless the whole world’s lying their asses off, that man saved Kevin. Ain’t no way a
guilty man gonna bother with that shit.”

Peebles sat back, looking thoroughly whipped. “But if you are right and he’s not involved, then he won’t know where Kevin
is.”

“That’s right. He ain’t. In fact, I ain’t know nothing, do I, except shit that don’t matter?” He said the last with a hard
stare right at Peebles. “And I ain’t no closer to getting Kevin back than I was a week ago, am I? You happy about that, Twan?
’Cause I ain’t.”

“So what do we do?” asked Peebles.

“We keep a line on London and find out what shrink he’s seeing. And we wait. Them folks took Kevin didn’t do it for nothing.
They’ll come to us, and then we see what happens. But let me tell you this: I find out somebody sold me and Kevin out, baby,
they could run to the South Pole and I’d find ’em and feed ’em to the polar bears limb by limb, and folks think I’m shitting,
they better hope they never find out.”

Despite the severe chill in the room, a bead of sweat crept down Peebles’s brow as Westbrook adjourned the meeting.

T
he air here was not fresh, the smells noxious at times, yet at least it was warm. They fed him all the food he wanted and
it was good. And he had books to read, though the light was fairly poor, but they had apologized for that. And they had even
given him sketchpads and some charcoal pencils when he had asked for them. That had made his imprisonment easier. When things
were going badly in his life, he could always turn to his drawings for a measure of solace. And yet despite everyone’s kindness,
every time someone came to the room he was convinced that it would be the moment of his death, because why else would they
have brought him here but to kill him?

Kevin Westbrook looked around at a room that was far bigger than the one he had at home, yet it seemed close all around him,
as though it were shrinking or he was growing larger. He had no idea how long he had been here. Without the rise and fall
of the sun, telling time was not possible, he had found. He never thought about calling out anymore. He had tried that once
and the man had come and told Kevin not to do that. He said it very politely and in a nonthreatening way, as though Kevin
had merely walked across a prized flower bed. Yet Kevin could sense that this man would kill him if he yelled out again. It
was always the soft-talking ones who were the most dangerous.

The clanking sound was always there, that and the hissing and the sound of running water nearby. Collectively it would probably
cover any noises he could make, but it was very irritating, and interrupted his sleep. They apologized for that too. They
were much more polite than captors probably should be, thought Kevin.

He had looked for ways to escape, yet there was only one door to the room, and it was locked. So he read his books and drew
his pictures. He ate and he drank and he waited for the time when somebody would come and kill him.

While he was sketching another drawing decipherable only to him, Kevin flinched when he heard the footsteps. As he listened
to the door being unlocked, he wondered if that time had come.

The man was the same one who had told him not to yell. Kevin had seen him before but didn’t know his name.

He wanted to know if Kevin was comfortable, if he needed anything else.

“Nope. You treating me real good. But my grandma be worried about me. Maybe I ought be getting on home now.”

“Not right now,” was all the man said. He perched on the large table in the middle of the room and eyed the small bed in the
corner. “You sleeping well?”

“Okay.”

Then the man wanted to know, one more time, exactly what happened between Kevin and the man in the alley, the one that had
grabbed Kevin, given him the note, sent him on his way.

“I didn’t tell him nothing, because I ain’t had nothing to tell him.” Kevin’s tone was more defiant than he would have liked,
but the man had asked him these questions before and he had told him the same answers and he was growing weary of it.

“Think,” said the man calmly. “He’s a trained investigator, he may have picked up on something you said, though it didn’t
seem important when you said it. You’re a smart boy, you’ll be able to remember.”

Kevin held the piece of charcoal pencil in his hand, squeezing it until his joints cracked. “I went down the alley like you
told me to. I done what you told me to, and that’s all. And you say he ain’t gonna be moving or nothing. All messed up and
stuff. Well, that ain’t happen. He scared the crap out of me. See, you were wrong about that.”

The man put out a hand and Kevin flinched, but the man merely rubbed him gently on the shoulder. “We didn’t tell you to go
near that courtyard, did we? We said to just sit tight and we’d come get you. See, we had everything timed out perfectly.”
The man laughed. “You really made us jump through some hoops, son.”

Kevin felt the hand tighten on his shoulder and despite the man’s laughing he could tell the fellow was upset so he decided
to change the subject. “Why you have that other boy with you?”

“Just something for him to do, just like you did. He made some nice money, just like you did. In fact, you weren’t supposed
to see him, but we had to change things, see, because you weren’t where you were supposed to be. Cut it pretty darn tight.”
The hand tightened some more.