Pure Hate (15 page)

Malcolm watched the old black
detective scan the crowd of jiggling naked bodies with a lust that seemed
strangely similar to his own predatory hunger. He watched as time and time
again the detective’s eyes fixed on the blonde with the voluptuous ass and his
hunger doubled and redoubled.

Malcolm smiled. It was the same
choice he would have made were he in search of that particular type of game.
Not because of her ass, but because she looked like a victim, like prey. He
noticed that the stripper was looking back at the detective, a less than
inconspicuous smile playing across her lips. There was a connection. That was
something he could use. The techno-rap song thundering through the small club
ended and the blonde slipped from the lap of the overweight suit she’d been
grinding. She stashed his money in her G-string and walked off with a practiced
wiggle that looked too deliberate, too unnatural, and too rehearsed to be sexy
as she made her way over to the detective. The oblivious stripper passed
Malcolm as he sipped club soda, grinned, and licked his lips, imagining what
her heart would taste like.

James was so focused on CC that his eyes passed
over the grinning shadow eyeing him from the corner without registering a
thing. He was off-duty and his alarms were all shut down for the night. The
only thing James was aware of was his own need, his own lust, and what he needed,
what he lusted for, was CC. She flowed across the room toward him like
something smooth and creamy that someone poured out of a jar. Something poured
across chocolate. James was pleased to see the same hunger in her eyes that he
knew was in his own. She took his hand, then dropped it, and wrapped her arms
around him instead.

“I’m glad you came to see me.”

“I’m glad I came, too. You didn’t have any
problems with your old man about the other night did you?”

“He doesn’t care if I’m home or not as long as I
keep money in the bank account so he can afford to sit on his ass and do
nothing all day.”

“Yeah, that’s about the type of man I’d figured
him to be.”

CC’s face turned sad for a moment. She seemed to
grow weary and depressed all at once. James instantly regretted his comment.

“He was a good man once, ambitious, motivated . .
. I spoiled him. I made things too easy for him. Why be a man when no one
expects you to be? When you have a wife who lets you lay around drinking and
smoking pot like some rebellious teenager, who lets you take her for granted,
take advantage of her? I’d be the same way if I were in his shoes. You know, I
started stripping to help pay his way through law school. He got his BA in
Legal Studies, enrolled in Law School at University of Penn, and dropped out
after the first semester. He keeps talking about going back, but why should he
when he has a fool like me to keep paying all his bills for him?”

“You didn’t make him that way, CC. Just because
this asshole took your kindness for weakness doesn’t mean it was weakness and
not kindness. Some people would appreciate your sacrifices, not take advantage
of them.”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t marry one of those type
of people.”

James was trying his best to sound loving and
supportive, but everything he said just seemed to make her more depressed. Her
arms were still wrapped around his waist, her body still pressed against him,
and he couldn’t help feeling guilty for the erection that was poking through
his pants into her stomach. Not very sensitive of him. His hands kept straying
down her backside and lightly rubbing her buttocks, cupping first one cheek
then the other and softly squeezing. James wasn’t the “Alan
Alda-shoulder-to-cry-on-best-friend” type. He was the “face-first-into-the-pillow-banging-against-the-headboard-
smacking-your-ass-‘Who’s-your-daddy?’” type.

Try as he might to stay focused on
CC’s problems, he was already wishing he could change the subject to something
a little more likely to lead to them doing more in the bedroom tonight than
cuddling and talking. Not that he was against cuddling or talking. He just
preferred to do that after messing up the sheets a little.

“Look, let’s just forget about your husband and
go have some fun. I’ll make sure you have no reason to think of any other man
for at least an hour or two.”

CC smiled.

“That sounds good to me.”

“I’ll meet you outside.”

“Fuck it. I’ll walk out with you. You’re a cop.
What the fuck can they say? I’ll just tell them I’m helping you with a case,”
CC giggled and took James’s arm as they walked out the door.

“And you are, believe me. You’re just the type of
help I need right now . . . the perfect medicine.” Once they were outside the
club, James reached down and squeezed her butt again.

Inside the Star Bar, the darkness in the back of
the club stirred. Malcolm rose and moved with the shadows surrounding him. He
watched the pair slip from the club arm in arm and was pretty sure he knew
where they were going. This was his chance to find out where the detective
lived. He’d been following the man all day, learning his habits, studying him.
That other detective, Baltimore, was fairly uncomplicated, predictable, and
would be easy to deal with. He knew what made the man tick.

Detective Baltimore was full of illusions.
He believed in right and wrong, good and bad, in justice, and he was fighting
hard to hold onto these illusions even though his own chosen profession was so
perfectly designed to dispel them. He’d convinced himself that he and the rest
of the police force and possibly the church and the little old lady who lived
down the street and baked pies and cookies for the neighborhood kids on
Christmas and the nurse who bandaged his booboo when he was ten and fell off
his skateboard and the little kids who rode the school bus that he passed every
morning on the way to work, were the good guys. They were all part of his
world, the world of all that was good and just. They were what balanced all the
horror he witnessed on the streets. They were what he was fighting to protect,
even though every day he discovered the kids on the school bus carried guns to
class and sold dope behind the jungle gym. His fellow police officers were
robbing drug dealers, raping prostitutes, brutalizing suspects, manufacturing
evidence, and taking bribes. The nurse was stealing morphine from her patients
to feed her own habit. The old lady who baked the pies was luring kids into her
home and sexually abusing them.

Baltimore was the type of cop who
could see all the sickness and corruption inside of people and still hold on to
his illusions because he needed them. Without them he could not function. He
needed to believe that there were monsters like Malcolm, and there were the
innocent people the monsters preyed on, and then there were the heroes.

Reality, the way Malcolm saw it, was
that they were all monsters, everyone. They were all evil and corrupt and they
all deserved to die. That punk-ass detective was weak and stupid and would soon
be dead.

Malcolm didn’t believe that Detective
Titus Baltimore could pose him any real threat. He didn’t believe any man
could, but the detective’s nuisance factor was rising. Right now, Malcolm was
sure that Detective Baltimore was harassing Reed again. After James dropped Titus
at the station, Malcolm watched him head over to the expressway, and he could
guess where the man was headed. Baltimore held no surprises for him. He would
be easy prey.

James was the more difficult man to
figure. He held no illusions, no grandiose ideas about morality or justice and
he possessed the same type of hunger that burned in Malcolm. It was in his eyes
when he looked at the stripper. He could see the violent passion burning like
funeral pyres in the detective’s dark irises. Malcolm wondered what kept a man
like that from becoming a man like him. But he was pretty sure he knew the
answer. There was no Reed in James’s life, no huge traumatic event to wrench
away his most integral, most necessary illusions, to take away the very beliefs
that told him every day that the next breath was worth taking, worth the effort
of inhaling and exhaling. That life was worth the struggle to acquire the
commodities of existence. Reed had made Malcolm the man he was and James had no
Reed. But he did have a Malcolm and that was even better . . . or even worse.

Malcolm slid into a stolen Jeep Cherokee,
fortunate that none of the blood from the man he’d car-jacked was still on the
seat to ruin his new Armani suit. The leather had cleaned up well. He’d finally
ditched the Impala. Now that both his and his car’s description were all over
the airwaves, he wouldn’t stand a chance driving around in that thing. It would
draw cops faster than a twenty-four-hour donut shop.

Malcolm watched the detective drive
off. He cradled the Mossberg pistol-grip, pump shotgun that hung down in the
extra-long right pocket of his Hugo Boss trench coat, put the Jeep in gear,
started up the engine and followed after James. Malcolm tried following several
car lengths behind, but after nearly losing him twice, narrowed the space
between them until he was directly behind the detective’s car. The detective
was too caught up in the stripper to notice him anyway.

Malcolm brought the Jeep to a halt and parked it
down the block from the detective’s house. He watched the detective pull the
Dodge into the driveway and practically sprint into the house with CC in tow.
He imagined the two ripping off each other’s clothes with a passion that
resembled fury, never making it to the bedroom, their last strips of clothing
hitting the kitchen floor as the couple followed them down. Their bodies
crashing into each other in a violent maelstrom of flesh against sweating
flesh. Then he imagined what he would do to her and his thoughts filled with
blood and screams.

Up and down the block, lights burned
bright behind drawn curtains and blinds, but Malcolm knew the residents had
long since gone to sleep. They left the lights on so that potential burglars
would think they were still awake. It was an old trick that no longer worked.
Criminals no longer cared if people were awake or not. He guessed the
detective’s neighbors had never heard of home invasion robberies.

From bedroom windows, the flickering
blue light and muffled canned laughter of TV sets played for sleeping viewers.
Somewhere down the block, a stereo blared. Cats stalked through the bushes and
shrubs in front of the neighboring houses hunting rodents. An occasional car
passed.

Children’s bikes and toys were strewn
at random on several of the small patches of grass and dirt that passed for
lawns in Philadelphia, although, as lawns went, Mount Airy did tend to be a bit
more lush than other parts of Philly. Dogs yapped behind fences sensing
something fierce on the wind, a coming storm.

Malcolm crossed the street and walked
over to the detective’s house. He cursed to himself as his boots sank into damp
earth with each step on his way to the back of the house. He’d just gotten the
damned things shined and now, with all the heat around him, he’d have to shine
them himself this time. He couldn’t risk getting caught over muddy boots. A
rose bush had grown wild on the chain link fence that separated the detective’s
house from his neighbor’s and Malcolm grimaced in anger as the thorns snagged
his trench coat and the front of his new suit. He was getting sick of Armani
anyway. The next suit would have to be another Hugo Boss. They just seemed to
fit his build better. Malcolm knew it wouldn’t take the cops long to figure out
that he was still buying suits with Paul’s credit cards, but he wasn’t about to
walk around in rags. He’d have to use the cards once more and then destroy them
before the cops could use them to track him down.

Malcolm crept up to the back door,
making hardly a sound despite his muddy boots. Raccoons, possums, alley cats
and stray dogs called to each other beneath the moonlight. The racket was
nerve-wrenching in the otherwise still night. Malcolm froze for a second,
cursing the damn animals silently before peering through the small window in
the backdoor. There were no lights on in the house, but Malcolm could still
make out the entwined forms of the detective and the stripper coupling
furiously on the vinyl floor just as he’d imagined it,
minus the pain and the blood.

James was not as dangerous as Malcolm
thought, not like him at all. They never were. They all had weaknesses, and
Malcolm was witnessing Detective James Bryant’s. He could smash through that
flimsy kitchen door and kill them both if he wanted. But he had other plans. He
would deal with the other detective first, the white boy, Titus Baltimore. Once
the white boy had been dealt with, this one would drown his sorrows in pussy
and leave Malcolm free to deal with Reed without interference. Malcolm smiled
and slipped back into the shadows, just as James looked up at the little window
in the kitchen door and convinced himself that he hadn’t seen a face there.

Reed was barely coherent when he called his
attorney, ranting about police harassment, a field in which business and
entertainment lawyer Jacob Lanski was not at all experienced. Jacob Lanski had
been Reed’s lawyer since he sold his first novel and was excellent at
negotiating contracts to get both him and his clients the most money possible.
But Reed doubted the man had ever been in a courtroom or been before a judge
standing next to a client in handcuffs, which sounded exactly like where Reed
was heading. Guilty or innocent, when the Philadelphia Police Department
decided they had a good suspect, that suspect quickly became a defendant.
Evidence got misplaced, witness’s testimonies changed, and innocent men went to
jail. Reed was certain the man wanted no part of this and would try to find any
excuse to avoid getting involved in what was about to become a very complicated
drama, but leaving Reed hanging now could mean loosing a very lucrative client.
Like it or not, the man was stuck, if he still wanted Reed as a client.

“Calm down, Reed. Calm down. Just tell me what’s
going on.”

“These cops, they’re treating me like I killed my
own family. They think Malcolm and I did it together or something. Every time I
turn around they’re showing up on my doorstep. They’ve got me so pissed off I
can’t even grieve! Jacob, my family’s dead! Doesn’t anybody understand that?
It’s like my whole life just ended and these bastards are treating me like I’m
a damn criminal!”

“Give me the two officer’s names and we’ll get a
restraining order right away.”

“Detective Titus Baltimore and Detective Bryant .
. . uh . . . James Bryant, I think. I’m not sure. He’s the quiet one. It’s the
other one, Detective Baltimore. He’s the real asshole. Oh fuck! You’re not
going to fucking believe this! I can’t believe this sonuvabitch! He’s back!
That fucking detective . . . Baltimore . . . He’s walking up my fucking
driveway right now!”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ll take care of
this. Let me make a few calls. Be cooperative. Don’t give him any reason to
distrust you. You’ve got nothing to hide. I’m on my way over there.”

“I don’t want to say shit to this guy. I think
he’s trying to frame me or something.”

“Then don’t. Just wait for me to get there.”