Playmates (10 page)

"Yes," she said, "that's exactly it."

"And on the seventh day I'll rest," I said.

I got the call from Dwayne on my office phone at four-thirty on a cold drizzly Thursday afternoon. Hawk was with me. We'd spent most of the last hour trying to figure out how to deal with the mess Dwayne was in, and we weren't making much progress. We were in the middle of a five-minute break devoted to a discussion of the paralegal's backside when the phone rang and I answered it.

"I need to see you," Dwayne said.

"How come?" I said.

"I been thinking 'bout what you said and I was wrong to get mad," Dwayne said. "I need to talk with you without anybody seeing me."

"I'll meet you," I said.

"Gotta be private, man. Nobody better see me."

"Wherever you want," I said.

"You know the parking garage by the Aquarium?" Dwayne said.

"Yes," I said. "On Milk Street."

"I be on the top level at six thirty," Dwayne said. "You come in your car and I'll get in."

"Six thirty," I said.

"Don't tell nobody," Dwayne said and hung up.

I said, "Dwayne wants me to meet him on the top level of the parking garage on Milk Street by the Aquarium."

"When?"

"Six thirty. Says he's changed his mind about me being a honkie motherfucker."

"He actually say that?" Hawk said.

"Well, he implied it," I said.

"Hm," Hawk said. "What you think?"

"Could be true," I said. "Or he could be doing what he's told and when I get there whoever Deegan hired instead of you will jump out of a Cutlass Supreme and shoot a hole in me."

"Wonder which it'll be," Hawk said.

"Me too," I said.

We talked a little and observed the paralegal one more time as she closed up for the evening. Then Hawk left and I put my feet up on my desk and my hands behind my head and closed my eyes and thought about things. At six I let my feet down, unfolded my hands from behind my head and stood up. I had the Browning on my hip. I took it out, put it into the pocket of my leather trench coat, put the trench coat on and buttoned it up, turned the collar up, put on the tweed cap that Susan said made me look like Trevor Howard, and headed for the meeting with Dwayne, or whoever.

By six the rush hour traffic had congealed into jams on the Southeast Expressway and the tunnel and the Mystic River Bridge. At the turnpike tolls in Allston they were cursing one another. But in the city the streets were shiny with rain and almost empty. Later the people would come in from the suburbs for dinner, or to hang around Quincy Market with the collars turned up on their Lacoste shirts, but right now the city folks were having a couple of Manhattans before dinner, and I was driving from Back Bay to the waterfront in maybe five minutes, hitting the lights on Berkeley and at Leverett Circle and cruising along Atlantic Avenue by six fifteen. I was driving a black Cherokee that year, with tinted windows. I parked it across the street from the garage and sat looking through my tinted windows at the entrance. No point arriving early.

The rain along the waterfront was canted by the wind from the harbor and came in at about a sixty-degree angle against the windows on the driver's side. At the parking garage there was very little action. A car went in. Two came out. Guys with their ties loosened heading home late. Entry was an automatic gate and a ticket dispenser. At the exit was one attendant in her toll booth. At six twenty-nine I pulled across the street and took a ticket and drove into the garage. I wound up the rampways through the nearly empty garage to the top. There were seven or eight cars parked. I moved slowly down the empty aisle, the Browning out of my pocket now and on the seat beside me. At the end of the aisle in front of me a Ford station wagon backed out of its slot and blocked the way.

Not an Oldsmobile Cutlass after all.

I looked in the rearview mirror. A Chevy Blazer with body rot and a plow hitch had backed out and blocked the aisle behind me. I suspected that Dwayne wasn't driving either car. I was right. The people in the Ford got out of the side away from me and stood behind the car. Behind me another two guys got out of the Blazer. One of them had a shotgun. None of them was Dwayne.

Nobody did anything. I sat. They stood. I picked up the Browning from the seat beside me and waited.

One of the men in front of me yelled, "Spenser."

I lowered my side window. "Yeah."

"Step out and we'll talk." He had one of those plastic Red Sox caps that has an adjustable strap and plastic mesh in the back. The hat crown was too high, and the brim was too short, and he'd done nothing to break it in or shape it, so it sat on top of his head like a saucepan.

"I can hear you from here," I said.

"I wasn't giving you a choice, stupid," the guy with the cap said. "We got you penned in and there's four of us. Get out of the car."

"That's the ugliest baseball cap I've ever seen," I said.

He put his left hand up toward it, then caught himself and rubbed his face instead. "Have it your way," he said.

He and his pal, a very fat guy with an untrimmed black beard, came around the Ford. Each had a handgun. Behind me the two from the Blazer began to move toward me. Behind them Hawk appeared and leaned over the hood of the Blazer and sighted down the barrel of a twelve gauge pump at their backs. The guys from the Blazer didn't see him, but the guys from the Ford in front of me did. I slid across the front seat and out the door on the passenger side of the Cherokee. Blackbeard and the guy with the hat raised their handguns to fire at Hawk. The big boom of the shotgun came just as Blackbeard was slammed back against the Ford. Over the hood of my car I shot the guy in the baseball cap as he was shooting at Hawk and turned and stepped to the back of the Cherokee before he hit the ground and held my gun steady on the two guys from the Blazer that Hawk had trained his shotgun on from behind. Everyone froze.

In real time the whole sequence had probably taken ten seconds. In the slow motion of crisis time it had unreeled in ponderous elegance, and the crystalline immobility that followed was intensified by the lingering smell of gunfire, like an olfactory echo of the big bang.

"The set up got set up," I said.

Neither man moved.

"We can drill you," I said.

They knew that. The guns were their protection, but if they used them they were dead. They knew that too.

Behind them Hawk said softly, "Put them down."

They still hesitated, but only for a moment. The guy with the shotgun bent over carefully and placed it on the ground. The other guy, just as carefully, put the big .44 Mag he'd been carrying on the ground beside the shotgun.

"Put your hands on the roof of the Blazer," I said. "Back away. Spread the legs. I bet you've done this before."

They did as I told them. Then I went to the front of the Cherokee and examined the two guys we'd shot. They were both dead. I walked back over to the quick and patted them down. The guy who'd carried the shotgun had a .25 automatic in the pocket of his leather jacket. I took it. When I stepped away, Hawk came around the Blazer, the shotgun resting butt forward, trigger guard up on his shoulder.

"They picked a good place," Hawk said.

"Yeah. Two gunshots and nothing happens. No cops. No sirens in the distance. One of you guys pick this place?" I said to the two on the Blazer.

The one in the leather jacket said, "No. Frankie did." He made a small head gesture toward the two dead men.

I said, "You can get off the car now." The two men shuffled their feet in from the spread and stood straight and turned around.

"Let's discuss motivation," I said.

The guy in the leather jacket had a Miami Vice two-day growth of stubble. The other guy was dressed against the weather in one of those oversized short jackets with lots of lapels and collars and cuffs and epaulets and doodads. The zipper was diagonal across the front.

"Whaddya mean?" he said.

"Why did you try to kill me?" I said.

"We was just going to talk with you," he said.

"What about?"

The guy in the leather jacket said, "We was told to talk to you about staying away from Dwayne Woodcock."

"Who told you?" I said.

He looked at the ground. The guy in the fancy jacket looked at him.

Hawk said, "We already dumped two of you. You think we going to have a lot of trouble going four for four?"

Fancy jacket shook his head.

"Guy from New York hired us, give us five grand, said to rough you up and tell you lay off Dwayne Woodcock. Said if you were stubborn, or we thought the warning wouldn't stick, we was to kill you. He left it up to us."

I looked at Hawk. "Twelve fifty apiece?"

He smiled and shook his head. "That's embarrassing," he said.

"It's humiliating," I said. I looked back at the two hoods.

"Twelve fifty?" I said.

The one in the leather jacket shrugged. He was still staring at the floor. "Why not," he said.

"Why not?" I said. "For crissake, think how I feel. Some guy thinks I'm only worth twelve fifty to whack? What kind of thing is that to learn about yourself."

Neither one said anything.

"Guy from New York named Deegan?" I said.

"He didn't say his name. He just gave us the money, told us what he wanted."

"How'd he find you?"

"Come into the bar where Frankie works, said he heard Frankie would do this kind of job."

"Worked," I said. "Frankie doesn't work there anymore."

"So Frankie says, sure, and he gets the rest of us and we come to do this."

"Who told Dwayne to call me?" I said.

"I dunno," Leather jacket said. "Frankie just said you'd show up here around six-thirty. Said the New York guy told him."

I nodded. "Okay, beat it. You run into the New York guy tell him he needs to hire better than twelve fifty apiece."

"We didn't know he'd be here," the guy in the fancy jacket said. He looked at Hawk.

"If I knew you were in this price range," I said, "I wouldn't have bothered to bring him." I jerked my head toward the Blazer. "Screw," I said.

The two of them turned and got into the Blazer and pulled away. Hawk walked to his jaguar, parked at the near end of the floor. He opened the trunk, put the shotgun in, closed the trunk, got into the car and backed out. He lowered his window.

"Thanks," I said.

"Twelve fifty," he said, and shook his head happily.

Then the window went up silently and the jag slid away down the ramp.

THE next day I went to see Dwayne. I found him at the field house. He had no classes and he was there with three other players shooting around.

I stood in the shadows at the top of the stands and looked down at him for a while. Two of the managers were there, retrieving balls, keeping the ball racks full. There was some banter, some hoots at a particularly bodacious jam. Davis, the point guard, was the butt of a lot of teasing.

"Hey, white shadow," Kenny Green yelled, "you stuff one." He had a spare net he'd picked up and was holding it open at knee level. Davis went behind his back, drove toward the basket and pulled up for an eighteen-foot jumper, which he swished.

"Hit one of them, Kenny," Davis said. Green, who had never played more than eight feet away from the basket, laughed and cut for the basket and Davis hit him with an alley oop and Green stuffed it.

Dwayne worked methodically around the perimeter shooting jump shots. One of the managers would pass him the ball and he would catch it and in the same motion go up for the shot. Every third or fourth time he'd fake the shot and drive. He did this without pause over and over again. He didn't do much talking, he seemed wholly focused on his workout.

I watched for maybe ten minutes and then moved on along the top aisle of the arena to Dixie's office. He was there. Tommy Christopher had told me that Dixie took Christmas morning off, unless there was a game.

"You got something?" he said.

"Nothing you'll like," I said.

"I haven't liked anything about you since you first walked in here," he said.

I sat in the chair across from him.

"Dwayne set me up last night to be shot," I said.

Dixie looked at me without any understanding.

"I mean he called me and arranged a meeting with me and when I showed up for it, there were four guys there and they tried to kill me."

Dixie shook his head slowly, persistently. "Dwayne wasn't one of them?" Dixie said.

"No, but he arranged to have me there."

"He wouldn't do that," Dixie said.

"No, he just called and wanted to meet me in a parking garage and then decided not to come and, oddly enough, four guys happened to be there who want me to lay off this case and they had guns."

"Parking garage? There was a shooting last night at a parking garage on the waterfront." I nodded.

"Jesus Christ," Dixie said, "was that you?" I didn't answer.

"Jesus Christ," Dixie said again. "I ... what are we going to do?"

"We're going to talk with Dwayne."

"Spenser, Dwayne's a good kid, he's a quality kid, he wouldn't ... he must have been under pressure."

"We'll find out what kind of quality kid he is," I said. "So far he seems to me to be a loudmouthed pain in the ass. I'm way out on a goddamned limb trying to save his neck."

"I know, I know, don't think I don't know that. But the kid is so great. We can't lose him. I mean he's a blow off the court sometimes, I see him in the interviews talking about himself in the third person. I know he can be irritating. But on the court ... Spenser, he is the most coachable kid I ever had. He's got better work habits than I have. He listens, he does what I tell him, he practices more than anybody on the team. He stuck with the program for four years. He could have gone pro after his sophomore year. But he stayed here out of loyalty, out of respect for me and his teammates. Guys with talent like Dwayne, they can dog it through college, take the big pro contract, never really learn the game. Dwayne could pass more, maybe, but he's got all the fundamentals. He knows the game. He feels it. Spenser, the kid is a genius in his own way."