1 Motor City Shakedown (17 page)

“We are if you stop yapping at me and leave me alone.”

Darren nodded and he walked out into the afternoon sun with Issabella.

The big woman picked up the envelope and put it behind the bar. She looked at the door as it swung shut behind the two lawyers, her mouth curled in a discrete smile around her cigarette.

*

Johnny Two Leaf franticly raised the shotgun when his cell started bleating The Sex Pistols’ “Liar” out into the Marquette crematorium’s empty expanse. At first he glanced around the big oven-room in a saucer-eyed panic. Johnny had been snorting heroin for nine hours straight and topping the experience off with “5-Hour Energy” pills to keep him from nodding out.

Despite the drug-soup confusion in his head, Johnny managed to recognize the cell phone ring for what it was and fumbled it open in his hand before voice mail could cut it off.

The little screen told him ‘OldFukinWaNkEr’ was calling. Johnny groaned and put the cell to his thrice-pierced ear.

“
What's the rumpus then?” he said.

“Where the hell are you?” his father barked into his ear. “Simon says you never showed up.”

“Chap has it right, I suppose,” Johnny chirped. “No time for all that bollocks. Had myself a bit of, what they call it? An epipha-nanny. No sense mucking about with Simon and his midnight security job. Not when I’m striking out as an entrepreneurial bloke. A regular Captain of industry is where I find myself this fine morn’, dear father.”

“I thought we agreed no more of this silly-ass accent. You’re full-blooded Ojibwe, Johnny. Have some pride.”

“Pride, is it? Pride is what’s got the Chief chewing out his proper English like a sharp right Yank?”

He held the shot
gun up in his free hand and squinted down the length of it. He was sure Vernon Pullins had a vice and file in the little shed behind the crematorium, somewhere amid all the tools. Johnny figured he should cut the barrel down, maybe get himself a coat—a black one, like a trench coat, maybe – so he could carry the shortened shotgun around under his arm, on a sling, like a proper gangster.

“You’re killing your mother with this nonsense, John.”

“No need for worries. Poor bird. Tell mum I’ve found meself.”

“That probation officer called. He’s
been
calling.”

“Bloody h
ell.”

“I won’t bail you out, John.”

“No worries, Chief. Everything’s tip-top. No need for all that bloody bollocks, right?”

“You don’t even know what that means, John!”

“Ta, pops.”

Johnny shut the cell. He stared at it for a moment, the drugs slouching through his synapses sending him conflicting impulses. A remote part of him almost walked out of the crematorium, almost made the journey through the woods outside Marquette, almost took him home with sheepish apologies on his lips. But that part of him was very small, and far away, so he didn’t pay it the slightest attention.

Instead, he tossed the cell phone into the corner of the oven-room, squinted down the shotgun’s length, and blew the cell phone into a hundred little pieces. His ears pulsed with the sudden shock of the gunshot reverberating off the concrete walls.

“Solid.”

Johnny slunk into what used to be the office of the crematorium, before Vernon had been killed. During the two years Johnny had worked as Vernon’s lone Upper Peninsula employee, Vernon had only ever come around during the bi-monthly shipments. Other than that, Johnny had been the master of the little cinderblock building nestled deep in the woods surrounding Marquette.

When he hadn’t been picking up bodies from around town or burning them in the property’s lone oven, Johnny had occupied most of his time using the remote location as a hideout from his father, his future, and reality in general.

As such, the little office had been transformed into a three-dimensional representation of Johnny Two Leaf’s inner self. A Union Jack flag was affixed crookedly to the wall above the desk, sagging where its weight was winning the fight against the staples, pins and nails that Johnny had inexpertly stabbed it with. The floor was carpeted in fast-food wrappers, empty cigarette packs and discarded comic books. The file cabinet in the corner looked like the victim of a violent crime—its doors spilled open, a confusion of papers and unwashed dishes pouring out of them. The walls were pocked with holes from those times when Johnny relieved his boredom and restlessness with a hammer from the tool shed. The room stank of uneaten food, cigarettes, and body odor.

The one change Johnny had made in the three days since he’d learned on the t.v. new
s that Vernon had died in Detroit, was to the desk in the center of the room. After an hour or so of genuine grief over Vernon’s demise—Vernon had been a kidder and a laugher, and a real mate, really –Johnny had experienced his epipha-nanny.

With a satisfyingly dramatic sweep of his arm, Johnny had cleared every last object from the top of the desk, scattering the purchase order receipts, invoices and medical examiner releases to the floor. Those were relics of the old business, and Johnny was in a new line of work.

Now, in place of the paperwork that had cluttered the surface of the desk, seven pounds of heroin were stacked in neat shrink-wrapped bricks.

Johnny rested the shotgun’s length across one shoulder and st
ared down at the brown narcotic pyramid with the sort of joy a man might display when surreptitiously watching his new-born son sleep. Future possibilities abounded.

He ran a hand heavy with cheap, thick rings t
hrough his shock of bleached-blond hair and grew a wide, enthusiastic smile. Visions of money and notoriety, of strip clubs and sleek black SUVs, thundered through his mind’s eye.

Johnny Two Leaf, Righteous Kingpin of Marquette. The Ace of the Game.

“Bloody Johnny,” he said, and hefted the shotgun into both hands, holding it across his chest. “Bloke what's got the coppers on the run and the birds callin’ his name proper-like.”

FIFTEEN

They’d been cutting through downtown, heading for the Detroit office of the FBI, when Darren yelped for Issabella to stop the car and pull over. Flustered and suddenly apprehensive, she wheeled to the curb, checking all her mirrors for some sign of what had Darren animatedly fumbling to get his door open before they were completely stopped.

“What—" she started, but he was out, his tall frame slipping up and away like he was propelled on wheels.

He came to a lurching stop on the sidewalk a few yards away, and Issabella watched him for a minute. Then she buried her face in her hands and struggled not to swear into the interior of her car.

Darren came back. When he was seated again, he had four wax paper-wrapped hot dogs in a bag and two Styrofoam cups of pop resting on the dashboard.

“Seriously?” she said. “A hot dog cart? I almost had a heart attack.”

“Wait until you try these,” he said with a grin, and held two of the wax paper cylinders up for her. “They are worth the risk of cardiac arrest, I promise.”

He took a big bite of his hot dog and ch
ewed happily. Issabella unwrapped one and stared at it skeptically. She took a bite. Darren, his mouth still full, nodded knowingly at her and said “Mm-hmm”. Issabella swallowed and dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

“Alright,” she said. “It’s a very good hot dog. Not ‘panic your driver into a near-accident’ good. But good.”

“I had an ulterior motive,” Darren said. He sipped his pop.

“Share.”

“We’re not really going to go to the FBI.”

“Hmm. That’s odd. I thought for sure that was what we were really going to do.”

“I thought you might.”

“I think I thought that because it’s what we agreed to do.”

She took another bite, chewed it, and sipped her pop. Darren wadded up the wrapper from his first hot dog and started opening the second one.

“Well,” he said. “I think we have to answer some questions first. By ‘we’, I mean ‘you’. I’ve already answered them.”

“Okay.”

“What are we doing?”

“That’s vague.”

“I mean, what is our aim here? If we go see this FBI guy and t
ell him what you’ve figured out…“

“T
hat Vernon was the transportation guy for the Evil Police drug ring,” she finished, and favored him with a self-satisfied grin. “That he was using his crematorium business as a cover and was probably having the drugs sewn up in the bodies of the John Does and indigents he was getting through his contracts with the county. You mean that?”

“Yes.”

“And then he’d drive his crematorium truck up to Marquette and the drugs would get distributed up there. And he’d burn the bodies in the ovens there. And that’s why the gas bills up there are sky high and down here not so much.“

“Izzy, I already said ‘congratulat
ions’, you know.”

“And nobody would pull him over on his way up there,” she continued, still beaming with smugness. “He’s got a truck full of corpses and it’s all marked up with biohazard stickers or whatever. And even if he did get pulled over, what cop is going to go searching through a bunch of dead bodies? It was actually a really good system, when you think about it.”

Darren finished his hot dog. He sipped his pop and stared out the windshield.

“Say it, Darren.”

“I already did.”

“Not ‘congratulations’.”

“Then I don’t know what you mean.”

They sipped their pops noisily and the afternoon traffic burped past them.

“Say it.”

He sighed in exasperation.

“Fine,” he said. “You win. You won the game.”

“That must have hurt.”

“I’ll be alright,” he said. “So, now that we have that out of the way, answer my question.”

“I forgot it.”

“What’s our goal here? What’s the outcome you want? The money side of things is gone. There’s no legal work to be done. What’s the deal?”

Issabella thought about it for a minute. She kept seeing Eugene Pullins’ face, the sad little man recounting how he had tried to shepherd his little brother away from trouble. She thought about the breathless, gossipy way her mother had talked on the phone a
bout the cop-killing black man. She thought about the newspaper headlines.

“They slan
dered our client and killed him,” she said finally. “They killed a defenseless man in a hospital bed. And we were the ones who were supposed to be protecting him.”

Darren chewed the ice from his cup and nodded his head.

“I think we’re of like minds, Izzy.”

“This is the weirdest legal case I’ll ever be on, isn’t it?” she said.

“Probably.”

“So, you have a plan.”

“I do, in fact.”

“Do I need to pack an overnight bag?”

Darren laughed and kissed her again.

“See?” he said. “Like minds.”

*

Agent Schultz stared down the slope of wind-whipped garbage at the black, cracking corpse of Noel Hammond below. Smoke rose out of his remains and swirled around the basin in the center of the county landfill. Schultz thought he looked like some failed super-hero-- rocketed to Earth, his trajectory carrying him askew of Kansas and a kindly adoptive family, instead delivering him here, his impact blasting a crater among the heaps and crests of refuse.

Detroit Superman, dead on arrival.

The crime scene techs in the basin milled on unsteady feet among the shifting garbage. As Schultz watched from the lip of the basin, a tech crouched over Noel’s corpse and gingerly removed the dead cop’s badge. The thick copper pin on the back of the badge had been stabbed through Noel’s sternum.

“We need to go arrest Al Phelps, pronto.”

Schultz glanced at the agent beside him. Matthews. A young guy, new to the job and new to Detroit.

“You think so?” he said.

“You’re kidding, right? If Smokey down there really is who that badge says he is, who else do you think would have done it? You served Al his papers and spooked his ass. This is Al cleaning up loose ends.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s not to know?”

Schultz stared back down into the pit of trash. The little copper badge went into a baggie. Techs took photos.

“It’s like a staged performance,” Schultz said finally. “Or a framed piece of art. Our killer sets Hammond in the
dead-center
of a valley of garbage, stabs him
dead-center
with his badge so identification is immediate. And burns him. Doesn’t bury him or hide him. Burns him to death in the wide open so he gets found right away. Why the hell would Allen Phelps do any of that?”

Matthews gave him a flat look.

“So you’d stand here and ask that,” he said. “So it looks like some crazy psycho did it. So he doesn’t get hit with being a cop-killer on top of all the other shit you’re trying to put on him.”

Schultz didn’t answer. The techs had walked a gurney down to the bottom of the basin of trash. One of them was unrolling a body bag. Schultz thought about Phelps, out there in the world and desperate to cut off any source of evidence. He thought about his afternoon lunch with the lawyer, Issabella Bright.

“You can hold this down?” he said.

“You have something more important than this?”

Schultz remembered how Issabella had been so engaged with their conversation. He’d wound her up on purpose, filled her head with facts from his case and sent her out to poke around the hornet’s nest.

“Yeah,” he said, stalking off toward his car. “I do.”

*

All of the panic and pressure of the last day was gone, evaporated, leaving Allen Phelps in a clear-headed state of detached purpose. The department’s gossip-channels were bleating and braying the news that Noel’s corpse had been found in a garbage dump. Three different people had called to fill Al in on the news, none of them aware of his situation with the feds.

His first act had been to race out and do a foot patrol around the Fort Shelby Tower. No cops. No reporters. Just a quiet late-morning stream of pedestrians. Which meant that Noel had never gotten the job done. The lawyers were alive. He walked and watched and thought, eventually coming to a stop over the two broken pieces of Noel’s cell phone laying at the curb.

‘Malcolm Mohommad.’

Al pushed the disquieting thought out of his head and drove out of Detroit. The stash—the pooled millions in cash that he and Noel and Lee had amassed since beginning their enterprise –was buried on state land inside a closet safe, two counties north.

When he hit the Jeffries Freeway, aiming himself north, Al pushed the button that sent his window humming down. Wind and traffic sounds climbed inside the car with him. He pulled his wallet out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open on his lap. Once he had taken all the cash out, he threw the wallet out the window. His cell phone followed.

Allen Phelps was calm because he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had no more lies or deceptions to manage, no more roles to play. The man hurtling north was the same man who had stalked the deserts and mountains of foreign lands, a man who lived on mission clocks and a simple, reductive certainty that objectives were all that defined him.

He had three. First, he would collect the money-stash. Then he would continue north to Marquette and collect the unsold pounds of heroin from Vernon’s crematorium there. All of the northern product was getting delivered to Canadian contacts Darnell had supplied. If he could deliver whatever was still left to those contacts, he could add those riches to the money-stash. After that, it was all flight and evasion until he could get to a jurisdiction that wouldn’t extradite. But that was far down the road, he knew. The cash and heroin were simple, easily attained goals. After that, he would have plenty of room to breathe in the wild expanses of the Upper Peninsula. He could plan his route to safety then.

Allen Phelps stared fixedly into the future as the road disappeared under his wheels.

*

Malcolm was not overly mindful to disguise the fact that he was following Allen Phelps as the Lieutenant drove deeper into the rural stretches of Michigan. He always kept at least one vehicle between his and the TAC lieutenant’s, but did nothing beyond that.

He understood predators as well as he understood prey. A rabbit knew in the deepest part of itself exactly what it meant when a winged shadow appeared and danced over the grass ahead of it.

But Allen Phelps was no rabbit. As far as he was concerned, all of the sky was his and his alone. Malcolm weaved through the afternoon traffic, his window down, and listened to the snapping rush of wind sing him dark promises.