His words hurt. I wanted to throw my ace, the fact that his real motivation was to find the kids I had stashed, that he was working with the FBI, and if successful, he’d put me away for the rest of my life. Tell him to kiss my black ass. Instead, I stood and gave back his stare.
He shook his head. “The bitch didn’t know a thing, did she? You fed me a woof cookie that I gobbled up and went off half-cocked, without covering her because I trusted the information.”
I said nothing.
“You let her get away.”
I walked from the car, leaving him, waiting for him to draw a blackjack or a gun. Come up on me fast, jack me in the head, take me in. Give me the BMF treatment, get me to talk, tell him what he really wanted to know, where the kids were. But that was the point of this whole charade. I knew where they were, and they didn’t, and nothing they could do to me could make me tell him. Robby, more than anyone else, knew that. I didn’t know how they had gotten on to me, but somehow they had.
I’d made a slip somewhere along the way and I think I knew where. When they ran all the information in the computer, my name came up. Along with what I had done to my grandson’s father, the crime that put me on the criminal path was also the last piece to the puzzle. The crime that put me in prison was the key. A blind man could’ve figured it out. They were only guessing, that’s why they surveilled the market where I worked. All the countersurveillance I had done, the codes, and cutouts I’d put in play that Marie thought was pure paranoia had been exactly what had kept her and me and Dad out of the can. But, most important, it kept the kids safe a little longer.
Robby didn’t come after me as I walked across the parking lot. He had simply put me back into play. He’d given the Violent Crimes Team a head start to get set up, ready to follow me. He had also forgiven Mack for his little transgression, coming over to Chantal’s apartment. Worst of all, Robby had just unchained Mack. For a brief second I wondered if the whole thing wasn’t all a setup. I looked up in the air, trying to see the cherry-red light of a helicopter and heard the careful footfalls as Robby slowly followed. He said, “I sent the team out to find her, told ’em do whatcha gotta do.” Another BMF idiom that meant they were free to do what was necessary in order to make the streets safe, which included deadly force with impunity.
I stopped, wanting to turn, walk back, and beat his face in. Instead, I couldn’t look at him. I said, “You know what this means, don’t you?”
He said, “That it’s on?”
“That’s right.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. You forget, I taught you everything you know.”
I turned, the reflection in his eyes a strange yellow in the sodium vapor light of the parking lot. “Did you teach me to put contraband cigarettes filled with rock cocaine behind my ear and act like an out-of-control madman in front of an allied agency that will surely call Internal Affairs to report a dope-smoking lieutenant? When IA calls you in for the interview, give them my name, I’ll give them a statement and character reference.”
His hand jerked up to his ear as his eyes went wide with shock. He’d forgotten about it.
I walked away.
Chapter Thirty
I walked down Wilmington, wondering just how much they knew about the operation, “the life of Bruno,” post Soledad Prison. I thought about hot-prowling their office. They’d have a situation board up with photos, maps, and bullets of information in order to see at a glance, “who was who in the zoo.” Intelligence was power, and at the moment, I was powerless. I shifted my thoughts to the problem at hand. First things first. I had to lose them and be sure they stayed lost. Then I had to think about Chocolate, get to her before they did. I had the edge there. They’d believe her a coked-out street whore with nowhere to go. They didn’t know about all the money I’d given her. She’d be laying her head in a nice warm motel in South Gate with an eight ball of rock and a bottle of sweet wine.
I sat on a bus bench and waited for the bus that now roared down the street not thirty seconds away. I didn’t look for the net thrown up all around. The bus pulled over and stopped. I got up when the door hissed opened, stepped inside, the door closed. The part of the team on foot would be scrambling for their cars while the mobile units jockeyed their cars in a position to tail. The bus picked up speed. The black woman at the wheel of the bus with a pie-pan face, overflowing her seat on all sides, said, “Sit down.”
I changed my mind. Can you open the door, please?”
“Sit down. You can get off at the next stop.”
“Open the damn door. Do it now.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine for several long beats. For a second, I wondered who was driving the bus. Then she braked hard, pulled the door handle to expel the large, angry black man who’d just scared the hell out of her.
I ran back full-tilt to the bus bench where I’d started and cut down a long dirt easement overgrown with bushes, trees, and vines. The second house in, I rolled over a fence covered with vines into a yard with an elm large enough to shield everything under its overgrown umbrella, an umbrella that kept secret three bull mastiffs. Their thick chains rattled, dragged in the dirt toward the intruder in their yard. I clapped my hands, “Manny, Moe, Jack.” It paid to know the neighborhood and to make friends with its inhabitants. The closest dog bowled me over, the others jumped on, their mouths soft on my wrists and ankles as I struggled through them to their doghouse, a toolshed-size building with a low roof covered in asphalt shingles. I crawled in and curled up on top of their smelly, dirty rugs and went right into a fetal position. I tried to imitate the shape of a bull mastiff. At the same time, I worried about the spiders, the large waxy black widows with their bright-red hourglasses on their bellies, disturbed by the new presence, me. Phantoms began to crawl on my skin. The dogs bounced around, excited with the presence of a friend who wanted to play. After a while, they calmed down as the novelty wore off.
Jack, the one with a mauled ear, stayed with me, curled up close almost in a lover’s spoon, his body heat a comfort.
The helicopter came in low, its spotlight searching. Its onboard Flir device displaying heat-signatures of all beasts, four legged, and otherwise. The equipment showed crooks hiding under cars, up in trees, even in houses.
Outside the large doghouse, Manny and Moe’s chain rattled. Jack’s head came up. He bolted out, dragging his thick chain. When I didn’t come out of the other end of the alley or pop out on to the side street, the Violent Crimes Team decided to send a man down the dirt easement to see if he could pick up my trail. Robby was right, “it was on.” This was a maneuver they would never have tried had they wanted to remain strictly sub rosa in their investigation.
I didn’t know the time, didn’t carry a watch, one with a luminous dial or the kind with little techno-specialties that Robby called a deadman’s watch. You carried one on an operation, the alarm could go off, or the luminous dial could give you away at a critical time. He was right, I had learned a lot from him. I tried to track the time in my head. I had to meet Marie at two o’clock.
How long would Robby keep his team in the area thinking I went to ground? How long to wait them out? This is where I had the upper hand. I knew him. Without someone to calm him, explain the options, he always went for the mobile search, too uptight and antsy to sit in one place. I’d always been the one to choose the more logical option for him. Without me, he would send one man to each of the locations they had me down for on his corkboard back in the office, places I’d been confirmed to frequent. Then he’d drive from each of those locations, checking up, always on the move, while his men sat static.