That made me smile, a gentle abstracted smile I could feel against the foreign material of my face. I turned my head and looked up at him. “You don’t need to promise.”
“I like to. So you know I’m serious.” His dark eyes scorched mine for a moment, and feeling threatened to come back. I shoved it away. “Jill?”
“Go. Find out what kills the thing.” I pushed him, gently. “Then come get me. Okay?”
“Okay.” A short nod, his hair falling forward over his shoulders. Silver glittered, and his high cheekbones caught the last of the dusky light. He always looked good in dimness, and even better in strong light. “You got it.” He turned and headed for the Impala. I don’t know if he looked back, because I took the opportunity to fade into a pool of shadow between the unnecessary SWAT van and an ambulance, then ran soft and light for the alley that cut between an old abandoned grocery store and a newer but equally abandoned building that had been an auto parts supply store. I could cut over to 142nd and get a cab there. I had enough cash for anywhere I would need to go tonight.
I did not look back. I kept going.
Chapter Twenty-one
The flesh gallery was just starting to pulse with nightlife. Long legs in ragged fishnets under short skirts, the motion of hips back and forth, the glitter of eyes under mascara and thick eyeliner, cheap jewelry and the ubiquitous jackets now that the wind had risen. Coming down off the mountains, the winter wind was cold, full of the smell of sage and stone. It whistled in the canyons between skyscrapers, and here on Lucado it filled the night with knives.
The girls were nervous, and I didn’t blame them. I examined the street from a good vantage point on the roof of a tenement, pulling my tattered coat around me. I waited, taking deep lungfuls of the cold wind.
The street danced; they were like shoals of fish glittering and turning in sync. Clicking of platform heels against concrete, the sound of car wheels, catcalls as the girls stamped their feet and tried to keep warm. Cars pulling in, cars pulling out, doors slamming, windows creaking as they slid down.
I had stripped the cuff from my wrist, and the scar burned under the cold kiss of wind. The night came alive, colors and sounds curdling under the lash of preternatural attention, my mind open, still, receptive.
I saw it. The Cadillac.
It slid like a stiletto through the shoals of tired girls, and some of them cast frightened glances at it afterward. I moved, brief wind in my ears as the world turned over and gravity caught me, plummeting, hitting the ground and rolling to bleed momentum. Cold concrete, pebbles digging into my back, then I was sliding through the shadows, just a flicker of motion in the darkness.
The scar, the scar, I’m moving like a hellbreed. Like a Trader. A five-story drop off a roof and here I was, running.
By the time I reached the quiet little brownstone he was already inside, and one of his muscle troop was on the front steps. The muscle, thick and heavy in a long coat with a bulge under his left arm where the gun was, never even saw me. I simply came straight out of the shadows and hit him, the crack of bone breaking in his face a sharp sweet sound.
Then I was inside, and the other thug was at the end of the hall. I took him too, a short tubby man powerfully built for all his lard, smelling of frijoles and grease; with the heatless scent of a killer on him too. Well, Ricky certainly doesn’t skimp on the help, does he?
The short one went down easily and quietly, I pulled the strike at the last moment so as not to break his neck.
I slid up the stairs on cat-soft, cat-quick feet, and burst into the bedroom.
Diamond Ricky had a girl in there with him, a half-naked child with high brown breasts who was rolling the top of a stocking down her thigh. I saw her from very far away and spared her less than half a thought. There was a low table with a mirrored tile fouled with cocaine holding down a fan of twenties, a white leather couch; the ceiling held mirrors too as well as the closet on the far wall. Electric light was soft and dim from three green and blue lava lamps on a glass shelf; the nightstand held a paper bag (full of something illegal, judging by the smell) and a 9 mm that would do him no good.
The thick musky-green smell of pot filled the room, both old and new; Ricky had just lit a joint and was reclining on the bed, his hand inside the open fly of his trousers. He saw me and his mouth fell open, the joint falling from his fingers over the side of the bed. I was on the bed in one leap, my left-hand fingers sinking into his throat and the gun in my right hand rising up to lock onto the girl, who hitched in breath to scream. Her face hadn’t lost its babyfat yet, she was barely old enough to be walking to school by herself, let alone be in a room with a pimp.
“Shut up,” I snarled, cutting through her gasping inhale. “Shut the fuck up.”
She did, clutching an incongruous bit of feathers to her chest. Some kind of lingerie, probably Ricky’s contribution to the fun and games. Her long dark hair quivered, and the lipstick smeared on her lips made her mouth into a wet dark hole.
“Pick up the money.” I pointed the gun toward the table, she edged over and looked at Ricky, then jerked the money out from under the tile. The cocaine scattered on the tabletop. Snow on glass plains.
I made a tiny motion with the gun toward the door. “Go out the back door, or you’ll be shot.” The softness in my voice made it a promise. “Go home, if you have a home. If you don’t, check into a hotel. But if I see you on the street tonight, or if you tell anyone, I will find you.”
It was an empty threat. I wouldn’t have cared. But she believed it, and her eyes darted toward Ricky. I tightened my fingers in the pimp’s throat, and he moaned, a shapeless sound of terror.
She scrambled for the door, and I heard her bumbling along as she tried to get dressed on the stairs while running. I listened—yes, she went out the back door.
Good girl. I turned my attention to Ricky, who was choking as my fingers tensed. “Ricky.” I sounded meditative. The gun swung around, settled against his forehead. “Now you and I are going to have a little chat, cabrón. A very cozy little talk. You’re going to tell me about your playmates, and we are going to have a lovely special moment right here on your bed. Bet you like that, don’t you?”
Ricky was wet with sweat; it rolled in great beads from his brown skin. He had a hard-on, and he smelled of oil and smoke, as well as fried cheese. A thin curl of smoke lifted from the joint on the floor.
The smile pulled my lips back into a snarl of effort as the scar on my wrist pulsed, every fiber of my body straining to pull the trigger. But instead, I loosened up a little on his throat.
“Now,” I whispered. “Your meeting. With Jonte and the boys. Who else was there, and what was said? Take it from the top.”
He did.
Pimps are predictable creatures. They have their routines and their habits, and the fact that most of them are into petty drug dealing doesn’t change that. If a pimp gets picked up, his girls bail him out, usually with the help of his lieutenant.
But if a pimp ends up dead, with his second and his muscle crippled, the girls freefall for a while. The drugs come from other dealers, some of whom are weak and move into the power vacuum to become pimps. Or they come from new pimps that rise like maggots from a corpse to take the place of the old one.
I wish it was harder for them. God, do I wish it was harder.
Wish in one hand, Kismet. Spit in the other. See which fills up first.
I followed the chain up, each pimp telling me a little more, and saved Jonte for last. He was a big, broad, soft-in-the-middle black man with a wide genial smile and two front teeth cased in gold that rang sweetly against the floor the second time I backhanded him. Eleven pimps, each of whom had been at the meeting with Rocadero, who was dead probably because the redheaded Sorrow didn’t need him any more. The pimps being alive either meant that they weren’t important or that she still needed them to supply something, whether it be flesh or cash.