The Martini Shot (7 page)

I had to cross the little road in the back of the complex to get to my mother's apartment. I stepped into it and that's when I saw the black Maxima swing around the corner. Coupla Wallace's boys jumped out while the car was still moving. I stopped runnin. They knew where I lived. If they didn't, all they had to do was ask one of those younguns on the wall. I wasn't gonna bring none of this home to my moms.

Wallace was out of the driver's side quick, walkin toward me. He was smilin and my stomach shifted. Antuane had walked back by the playground. I knew where he was goin. Wallace and them keep a gun, a nine with a fifteen-round mag, buried in a shoe box back there.

“Junior,” said Wallace, “you done fucked up big.” He was still smilin.

I didn't move. My knees were shakin some. I figured this was it. I was thinkin about my mother and tryin not to cry. Thinkin about how if I did cry, that's all anyone would remember about me. That I went out like a bitch before I died. Funny me thinkin about stupid shit like that while I was waitin for Antuane to come back with that gun.

I saw Antuane's figure walkin back out through that fog.

And then I saw the spotlight movin across the courtyard, and where it came from. An MPD Crown Vic was comin up the street, kinda slow. The driver turned on the overheads, throwing colors all around. Antuane backpedaled and then he was gone.

The cruiser stopped and the driver's door opened. The white cop I'd seen earlier in the night got out. Sergeant Peters. My moms had told me his name. Told me he was all right.

Peters was puttin on his hat as he stepped out. He had pulled his nightstick and his other hand just brushed the Glock on his right hip. Like he was just lettin us all know he had it.

“Evening, gentlemen,” he said, easy like. “We got a problem here?”

“Nope,” said Wallace, kinda in a white-boy's voice, still smiling.

“Somethin funny?” said Peters.

Wallace didn't say nothin. Peters looked at me and then back at Wallace.

“You all together?” said Peters.

“We just out here havin a conversation,” said Wallace.

Sergeant Peters gave Wallace a look then, like he was disgusted with him, and then he sighed.

“You,” said Peters, turnin to me. I was prayin he wasn't gonna say my name, like me and him was friends and shit.

“Yeah?” I said, not too friendly but not, like, impolite.

“You live around here?” He
knew
I did.

I said, “Uh-huh.”

“Get on home.”

I turned around and walked. Slow but not too slow. I heard the white cop talkin to Wallace and the others, and the crackle of his radio comin from the car. Red and blue was strobin across the bricks of the complex. Under my breath I was sayin, thanks God.

In my apartment, everyone was asleep. I turned off the TV set and covered my sister, who was lyin on the couch. Then I went back to my room and turned the box on so I could listen to my music low. I sat on the edge of the bed. My hand was shaking. I put it together with my other hand and laced my fingers tight.

After the Park Morton incident, I answered a domestic call over on 1st and Kennedy. A young gentleman, built like a fullback, had beat up his girl pretty bad. Her face was already swelling when I arrived, and there was blood and spittle bubbling on the side of her mouth. The first cops on the scene had cuffed the perp and had him bent over the hood of their cruiser. At this point the girlfriend, she was screaming at the cops. Some of the neighborhood types, hanging outside of a windowless bar on Kennedy, had begun screaming at the cops, too. I figured they were drunk and high on who-knew-what, so I radioed in for a few more cars.

We made a couple of additional arrests. Like they say in the TV news, the situation had escalated. Not a full-blown riot, but trouble nonetheless. Someone yelled out at me, called me a “cracker-ass motherfucker.” I didn't even blink. The county cops don't take an ounce of that kinda shit, but we take it every night. Sticks and stones, like that. Then someone started whistling the theme from the old
Andy Griffith Show,
you know, the one where he played a small-town sheriff, and everyone started to laugh. Least they didn't call me Barney Fife. The thing was, when the residents start with the comedy, you know it's over, that things have gotten under control. So I didn't mind. Actually, the guy who was whistling, he was pretty good.

When that was over with, I pulled a car over on 5th and Princeton, back by the Old Soldiers' Home. It matched the description of a shooter's car from earlier in the night. I waited for backup, standing behind the left rear quarter panel of the car, my holster unsnapped, the light from my Mag pointed at the rear window.

When my backup came, we searched the car and frisked the four YBMs. They had those little tree deodorizers hangin from the rearview, and one of those plastic, king-crown deodorizers sitting on the back panel, too. A crown. Like they're royalty, right? God, sometimes these people make me laugh. Anyhow, they were clean with no live warrants, and we let them go.

I drove around, and it was quiet. Between three a.m. and dawn, the city gets real still. Beautiful in a way, even for down here.

The last thing I did, I helped some Spanish guy who was trying to get back into his place in Petworth. Said his key didn't work, and it didn't. Someone, his landlord or his woman, had changed the locks on him, I figured. Liquor-stench was pouring out of him. Also, he smelled like he hadn't taken a shower for days. When I left him he was standing on the sidewalk, sort of rocking back and forth, staring at the front of the row house, like if he looked at it long enough the door was gonna open on its own.

So now I'm parked here near the station, sipping coffee. It's my ritual, like. The sky is beginning to lighten. This here is my favorite time of night.

I'm thinking that on my next shift, or the one after, I'll swing by and see Tonio Harris's mother. I haven't talked to her in years, anyway. See how she's been doing. Suggest to her, without acting like I'm telling her what to do, that maybe she ought to have her son lie low some. Stay in the next few weekend nights. Let that beef he's got with those others, whatever it is, die down. Course, I know those kinds of beefs don't go away. I'll make her aware of it, just the same.

The Harris kid, he's lucky he's got someone like his mother lookin after him. I drive back in there at the housing complex, and I see those young kids sitting on that wall at two in the morning, looking at me with hate in their eyes, and all I can think of is, where are the parents? Yeah, I know, there's a new curfew in effect for minors. Some joke. Like we've got the manpower and facilities to enforce it. Like we're supposed to raise these kids, too.

Anyway, it's not my job to think too hard about that. I'm just lettin these people know that we're out here, watching them. I mean, what else can you do?

My back hurts. I got to get me one of those things you sit on, with the wood balls. Like those African cab drivers do.

This morning I studied some in my room until my eyes got sleepy. It was hard to keep my mind on the book 'cause I was playin some Ludacris on the box, and it was fuckin with my concentration. That joint was tight.

I figured I was done for the day, and there wasn't no one around to tell me different. My mother was at work at the Dollar Store, and my sister was over at a friend's. I put my sneaks on and grabbed my ball, headed up to Roosevelt.

I walked up Georgia, dribblin the sidewalk when I could, usin my left and keeping my right behind my back, like my coach told me to do. I cut down Upshur and walked up 13th, past my school to the court. The court is on the small side and its backboards are square, with bumper stickers and shit stuck on 'em. It's beside a tennis court and all of it is fenced in. There's a baseball field behind it; birds always be sittin on that field.

There was a four-on-four full-court thing happenin when I got there. I called next with another guy, Dimitrius Johnson, who I knew could play. I could see who was gonna win this game, cause the one team had this boy named Peter Hawk who could do it all. We'd pick up two off the losers' squad. I watched the game, and after a minute I'd already had those two picked out.

The game started kind of slow. I was feelin out my players and those on the other side. Someone had set up a box courtside, and they had that live Roots thing playin. It was one of those pretty days with the sun out and high clouds, the kind that look like pillows, and the weather and that upbeat music comin from the box set the tone. I felt loose and good.

Me and Hawk was coverin each other. He was one of those who could go left or right, dribble or shoot with either hand. He took me to the hole once or twice. Then I noticed he always eye-faked in the opposite direction he was gonna go before he made his move. So it gave me the advantage, knowin which side he was gonna jump to, and I gained position on him like that.

I couldn't shut Hawk down, not all the way, but I forced him to change his game. I made a couple of nice assists on offense and drained one my own self from way downtown. One of Hawk's players tried to claim a charge, doin that Reggie Miller punk shit, his arms windmillin as he went back. That shit don't go in pickup, and even his own people didn't back him. My team went up by one.

We stopped the game for a minute or so, so one of mines could tie up his sneaks. I was lookin across the ball field at the seagulls and crows, catchin my wind. That's when I saw James Wallace's black Maxima, cruisin slow down Allison, that street that runs alongside the court.

We put the ball back into play. Hawk drove right by me, hit a runner. I fumbled a pass goin back upcourt, and on the turnover they scored again. The Maxima was going south on 13th, just barely moving along. I saw Wallace in the driver's seat, his window down, lookin my way with that smile of his and his dead-ass eyes.

“You playin, Tone?” asked Dimitrius, the kid on my team.

I guess I had lost my concentration and it showed. “I'm playin,” I said. “Let's ball.”

Dimitrius bricked his next shot. Hawk got the bound and brought the ball up. I watched him do that eye-fake thing again and I stole the ball off him in the lane before he could make his move. I went bucket-to-bucket with it and leaped. I jammed the motherfucker and swung on the rim, comin down and doin one of those Patrick Ewing silent growls at Hawk and the rest of them before shootin downcourt to get back on D. I was all fired up. I felt like we could turn the shit around.

Hawk hit his next shot, a jumper from the top of the key. Dimitrius brought it down, and I motioned for him to dish me the pill. He led me just right. In my side sight I saw a black car rollin down Allison, but I didn't stop to check it out. I drove off a pick, pulled up in front of Hawk, made a head move and watched him bite. Then I went up. I was way out there, but I could tell from how the ball rolled off my fingers that it was gonna go. Ain't no chains on those rims, but I could see the links dance as that rock dropped through. I'm sayin that I could see them dance in my mind.

We was runnin now. The game was full-on and it was fierce. I grabbed one off the rim and made an outlet pass, then beat the defenders myself on the break. I saw a black car movin slow on 13th, but I didn't even think about it. I was higher than a motherfucker then; my feet and the court and the ball were all one thing. I felt like I could drain it from anywhere, and Hawk, I could see it in his eyes, he knew it, too.

I took the ball and dribbled it up. I knew what I was gonna do, knew exactly where I was gonna go with it, knew wasn't nobody out there could stop me. I wasn't thinkin about Wallace or the stoop of my mom's shoulders or which nigga was gonna be lookin to fuck my baby sister, and I wasn't thinkin on no job or college test or my future or nothin like that.

I was concentratin on droppin that pill through the hole. Watching myself doin it before I did. Out here in the sunshine, every dark thing far away. Runnin ball like I do. Thinkin that if I kept runnin, that black Maxima and everything else, it would just go away.

The woman in
the aisle seat to the right of John Moreno tapped him on the shoulder. Moreno swallowed the last of his Skol pilsner to wash down the food in his mouth. He laid his fork across the segmented plastic plate in front of him on a fold-down tray.

“Yes?” he said, taking her in fully for the first time. She was attractive, though one had to look for it, past the thick black eyebrows and the too-wide mouth painted a pale peach color that did her complexion no favors.

“I don't mean to be rude,” she said, in heavily accented English. “But you've been making a lot of noise with your food. Is everything all right?”

Moreno grinned, more to himself than to her. “Yes, I'm fine. You have to excuse me. I rushed out of the house this morning without breakfast, and then this flight was delayed. I suppose I didn't realize how hungry I was.”

“No bother,” she said, smiling now, waving the manicured fingers of her long brown hand. “I'm not complaining. I'm a doctor, and I thought that something might be wrong.”

“Nothing that some food couldn't take care of.” They looked each other over. Then he said, “You're a doctor in what city?”

“A pediatrician,” she said. “In Salvador. Are you going to Bahia?”

Moreno shook his head. “Recife.”

So they would not meet again. Just as well. Moreno preferred to pay for his companionship while under contract.

“Recife is lovely,” the woman said, breathing out with a kind of relief, the suspense between them now broken. “Are you on a holiday?”

“Yes,” he said. “A holiday.”

“Illiana,” she said, extending her hand across the armrest.

“John Moreno.” He shook her hand, and took pleasure in the touch.

The stewardess came, a round woman with rigid red hair, and took their plates. Moreno locked the tray in place. He retrieved his guidebook from the knapsack under the seat, and read. Brazil is a land of great natural beauty, and a country unparalleled in its ideal of racial democracy.…

Moreno flipped past the rhetoric of the guidebook, went directly to the meat: currency, food and drink, and body language. Not that Brazil would pose any sort of problem for him; in his fifteen-odd years in the business, there were very few places in the world where he had not quickly adapted. This adaptability made him one of the most marketable independents in the field. And it was why, one week earlier, on the first Tuesday of September, he had been called to the downtown Miami office of Mr. Carlos Garcia, vice-president of claims, United Casualty and Life.

Garcia was a trim man with closely cropped, tightly curled hair. He wore a wide-lapelled suit of charcoal gray, a somber color for Miami, and a gray and maroon tie with an orderly geometric design. A phone sat on his desk, along with a blank notepad, upon which rested a silver Cross pen.

Moreno sat in a leather chair with chrome arms across from Garcia's desk. Garcia's secretary served coffee, and after a few sips and the necessary exchange of pleasantries, Moreno asked Garcia to describe the business at hand.

Garcia told him about Guzman, a man in his fifties who had made and lost some boom-years money in South Florida real estate. Guzman had taken his pleasure boat out of Key Largo one day in the summer of 1992. Two days later, his wife reported him missing, and a week after that the remains of his boat were found, along with a body, two miles out to sea. Guzman and his vessel had been the victims of an unexplained explosion on board.

 “Any crew?” asked Moreno.

“Just Guzman.”

“A positive identification on the body?”

“Well. The body was badly burned. Horribly burned. And most of what was left went to the fish.”

“How about his teeth?”

“Guzman wore dentures.” Garcia smiled wanly. “Interesting, no?”

The death benefits of Guzman's term policy, a $2 million  payoff, went to the widow. United's attorneys fought it to a point, but the effort from the outset was perfunctory. The company absorbed the loss.

Then, a year later, a neighbor of the Guzmans was vacationing in Recife, a city and resort on the northeast coast of Brazil, and spotted who she thought was Guzman. She saw this man twice in one week, on the same beach. By the time she returned to the States, she had convinced herself that she had in fact seen Guzman. She went to the widow with her suspicions, who seemed strangely unconcerned. Then she went to the police.

“And the police kicked it to you,” Moreno said.

“They don't have the jurisdiction, or the time. We have a man on the force who keeps us informed in situations like this.”

“So the widow wasn't too shook up by the news.”

“No,” Garcia said. “But that doesn't prove or even indicate any kind of complicity. We see many different kinds of emotions in this business upon the death of a spouse. The most common emotion that we see is relief.”

Moreno folded one leg over the other and tented his hands in his lap. “What have you done so far?”

“We sent a man down to Brazil, an investigator named Roberto Silva.”

“And?”

“Silva became very drunk one night. He left his apartment in Recife to buy a pack of cigarettes, stepped into an open elevator shaft, and fell eight stories to his death. He was found the next morning with a broken neck.”

“Accidents happen.”

Garcia spread his hands. “Silva was a good operative. I sent him because he had a history of success. But I knew that he had a very bad problem with alcohol. I had seen him fall down myself, on more than one occasion. This time, he simply fell a very long way.”

Moreno stared through the window at the Miami skyline. After a while he said, “This looks to be a fairly simple case. There is a man in a particular area of Recife who either is or is not Guzman. I will bring you this man's fingerprints. It should take no more than two weeks.”

“What do you require?”

“I get four hundred a day, plus expenses.”

“Your terms are reasonable,” Garcia said.

“There's more,” Moreno said, holding up his hand. “My expenses are unlimited, and not to be questioned. I fly first-class and require an apartment with a live-in maid to cook and to clean my clothes. And, I get two and one half percent of the amount recovered.”

“That's fifty thousand dollars.”

“Correct,” Moreno said, standing out of his seat. “I'll need a half-dozen wallet-sized photographs of Guzman, taken as close to his death date as possible. You can send them along with my contract and travel arrangements to my home address.”

John Moreno shook Garcia's hand and walked away from the desk.

Garcia said to Moreno's back, “It used to be ‘Juan,' didn't it? Funny how the simple change of a name can open so many doors in this country.”

“I can leave for Brazil at any time,” Moreno said. “You know where to reach me.”

Moreno opened Mr. Garcia's door and walked from the office. The next morning, a package was messengered to John Moreno's home.

And now Moreno's plane neared the Brasília airport. He closed the guidebook he had been reading, and turned to Illiana.

“I have a question for you, Doctor,” Moreno said. “A friend married a first-generation American of Brazilian descent. Their children, both of them, were born with blue-black spots above their buttocks.”

Illiana smiled. “Brazil is a land whose people come from many colors,” she said, sounding very much like the voice of the guidebook. “Black, white, brown, and many colors in between. Those spots that you saw”—and here Illiana winked— “it was simply the nigger in them.”

So much for the ideal of racial democracy, Moreno thought, as the plane began its descent.

Moreno caught a ride from the airport with a man named Eduardo, who divided his time as an importer/exporter between Brasília and Miami. They had struck up a conversation as they waited in line to use the plane's lavatory during the flight. They were met at the airport by someone named Val, whom Eduardo introduced as his attorney, a title that Moreno doubted, as Val was a giggly and rather silly young man. Still, he accepted a lift in Val's VW Santana, and after a seventy-mile-per-hour ride through the flat, treeless landscape that was Brasília, Moreno was dropped at the Hotel Dos Nachos, a place Eduardo had described with enthusiasm as “two and a half stars.”

The lobby of the Hotel Dos Nachos contained several potted plants and four high-backed chairs occupied by two taxicab drivers, an aging tout in a shiny gray suit, and a bearded man smoking a meerschaum pipe. A drunken businessman accompanied by a mulatto hooker in a red leather skirt entered the lobby and walked up the stairs while Moreno negotiated the room rate. The hotel bellman stood sleeping against the wall. Moreno carried his own bags through the elevator doors.

Moreno opened the windows of his small brown room and stuck his head out. Below, in an empty lot, a man sat beneath a Pepsi-Cola billboard with his face buried in his hands, a manged dog asleep at his feet. Moreno closed the window to a crack, stripped to his shorts, did four sets of fifty push-ups, showered, and went to bed.

The next morning he caught an early flight to Recife. At the airport, he hailed a taxi. Several foul-smelling children begged Moreno for change as he sat in the passenger seat of the cab, waiting for the driver to stow his bags. Moreno stared straight ahead as the children reached in his window, rubbing their thumbs and forefingers together in front of his face. Before the cab pulled away, one of the children, a dark boy with matted blond hair, cursed under his breath, and dropped one American penny in Moreno's lap.

Moreno had the cab driver pass through Boa Viagem, Recife's resort center, to get his bearings. When Moreno had a general idea of the layout, the driver dropped him at his
apartamento
in the nine hundred block of Rua Setubal, one street back from the beach. A uniformed guard stood behind the glassed-in gatehouse at the ten-story condominium; Moreno tipped him straight off, and carried his own bags through the patio of hibiscus and standing palm to the small lift.

Moreno's
apartamento
was on the ninth floor, a serviceable arrangement of one large living and dining room, two bedrooms, two baths, a dimly lit kitchen, and a windowless sleeper porch on the west wall where the clothes were hung to dry in the afternoon sun. The east wall consisted of sliding glass doors that opened to a concrete balcony finished in green tile. The balcony gave to an unobstructed view of the beach and the aquamarine and emerald swells of the south Atlantic, and to the north and south the palm-lined beach road, Avenida Boa Viagem. The sliding glass doors were kept open at all times: a tropical breeze blew constantly through the
apartamento,
and the breeze ensured the absence of bugs.

For the first few days, Moreno stayed close to his condominium, spending his mornings at the beach working on his local's tan, watching impromptu games of soccer, and practicing his Portuguese on the vendors selling oysters, nuts, and straw hats. At one o'clock, his maid, a pleasant but silent woman named Sonya, prepared him huge lunches: black beans and rice, salad, mashed potatoes, and pork roasted and seasoned with
tiempero,
a popular spice. In the evenings, Moreno would visit a no-name, roofless café, where a photograph of Madonna was taped over the bar. He would sit beneath a coconut palm and eat a wonderfully prepared filet of fish, washed down with a cold Brahma beer, sometimes with a shot of aguardente, the national rotgut that tasted of rail tequila but had a nice warm kick. After dinner he would stop at the Kiosk, a kind of bakery and convenience market, and buy a bottle of Brazilian Cabernet, have a glass or two of that on the balcony of his
apartamento
before going off to bed. The crow of a nearby rooster woke him every morning through his open window at dawn.

Sometimes Moreno passed the time leaning on the tile rim of his balcony, looking down on the activity in the street below. There were high walls of brick and cinder block around all the neighboring condominiums and estates, and it seemed as if these walls were in a constant state of repair or decay. Occasionally, an old white mare, unaccompanied by cart or harness, would clomp down the street, stopping to graze on the patches of grass that sprouted along the edges of the sidewalk. And directly below his balcony, through the leaves of the black curaçao tree that grew in front of his building, Moreno saw children crawl into the great canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb and root through the garbage in search of something to eat.

Moreno watched these children with a curious but detached eye. He had known poverty himself, but he had no sympathy for those who chose to remain within its grasp. If one was hungry, one worked. To be sure, there were different degrees of dignity in what one did to get by. But there was always work.

As the son of migrant workers raised in various Tex-Mex border towns, Juan Moreno had vowed early on to escape the shackles of his lowly, inherited status. He left his parents at sixteen to work for a man in Austin so that he could attend the region's best high school. By sticking to his schedule of classes during the day and studying and working diligently at night, he was able, with the help of government loans, to gain entrance to a moderately prestigious university in New England, where he quickly learned the value of lineage and presentation. He changed his name to John.

Already fluent in Spanish, John Moreno got degrees in both French and criminology. After graduation, he moved south, briefly joining the Dade County sheriff's office. Never one for violence and not particularly interested in carrying or using a firearm, Moreno took a job for a relatively well-known firm specializing in international retrievals. Two years later, having made the necessary connections and something of a reputation for himself, he struck out on his own.

John Moreno liked his work. Most of all, whenever his plane left the runway and he settled into his first-class seat, he felt a kind of elusion, as if he were leaving the dust and squalor of his early years a thousand miles behind. Each new destination was another permanent move, one step farther away.