Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (19 page)

By the time I got to the right room, my chest was damp with sweat and my arms were tired from pushing the chair. I really didn’t have time to sleep if I wanted to recover Elijah alive, but I was probably going to need a nap pretty soon.

Jacquarius Madison was not happy to see me, and he probably wasn’t happy about being handcuffed to a bed, or being shot in the leg. So he was, all around, having a pretty bad day.

“Do your friends call you Jacquarius?” I asked.

“They call me Jacques.”

“Like the strap?”

“You’re real funny, old man,” he said in a way that made it clear he didn’t think I was very funny at all. “What do you want?”

“For starters, Jockstrap, it would be nice if you thanked me,” I said.

“Thank you? For what? I ain’t never going to walk right again, because of you.”

A good orthopedic surgeon can fix a leg right up, either by fitting broken bones back together with pins, or by replacing the joint with an artificial implant. But I don’t guess Jacques’s line of work provided him with good health insurance. If you don’t get the right kind of medical care, the ligaments can heal wrong, and the bones can fuse improperly, and you end up with a leg that won’t bend.

To walk with an injury like that, you got to rotate the leg from the hip every time you take a step, or else you have to just favor the good foot and drag the bad one along. It ain’t a great way to get around.

“I could have shot you in the head, like I shot your friend Clarence,” I said.

“Clarence wasn’t my friend. He was my cousin.”

“Well, I did what I had to do, but I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You don’t look real sorry. But it’s okay. I didn’t really like him that much, anyway.”

“I still could have shot you in the head.”

“Well, if I’d taken the piece out his hand, I could have shot you before you ever managed to get the gun from the cop’s holster.”

I thought about it for a minute, trying to test that claim against my foggy recollection of the previous day’s events. I decided what he was saying might have been true.

“So maybe we both ought to thank each other.”

“I’m the one cuffed to a bed and all shot up. I ain’t feeling real thankful. I’m feeling like I want to get some painkillers in me, and then go to sleep, so tell me what you want. I ain’t in any mood for bullshit.”

“I need information.”

“Well, I got some information, and all I wanted to do was snitch. I was ready to sing like Beyoncé for y’all.”

It was like Tequila had told me: He’d sent away his gangster-lawyer and brought in the court-appointed defense lawyer so he could sell out his coconspirators. But then he’d shut up. I asked him why.

“There wasn’t a deal on the table,” he said. “I told everything to the lawyer. He says the cops want information they can use to secure convictions.”

“And your information won’t secure any convictions?”

“Not if the guys I inform on get themselves killed before they get themselves arrested,” Jacques said. “These dudes were desperate, and in serious trouble, and that was before what happened yesterday. Now every cop in the city is after them, and itchy on they trigger fingers. Ain’t none of those dumb shits got good odds on making it through tomorrow alive. If I just give up the dirt on dead people I’ve been associated with, the lawyer says I ain’t snitching; I’m giving a confession. So he told me to shut up and hope somebody important gets taken alive, so I can rat on ’em.”

This all seemed sensible; prosecutors won’t offer lenient deals or immunity for testimony against dead men who can’t be prosecuted. If Jacques informed, and there was nobody better to use the information against, they’d use it against Jacques. The good news was that nobody more sinister than the public defender had gotten to him in the hospital and clammed him up. The bad news was that I needed to know what Elijah had gotten mixed up with, and I couldn’t afford to wait to see how things shook out.

Fortunately, I had a plan. “What if I could spring you, without you needing to worry about testifying against anybody?” I said.

“How you gonna do that?”

“I’m the only witness against you, and I’ve got a touch of what doctors optimistically call mild dementia. Maybe I’m not sure you got out of that truck with Clarence. Maybe I don’t remember you discussing whether or not you were going to shoot me. Maybe you were an innocent bystander I shot by accident while I was confused after a car crash. If you help me, I can help you.”

He was clearly tempted, but he didn’t trust me. “I need to talk to my lawyer about this.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jockstrap. You can’t talk to your lawyer about conspiring with a witness to commit perjury. Witness tampering falls outside of a lawyer’s official purview. If you want to do this, you have got to deal with me, and it’s got to be right now.”

He sort of smirked at me. “What’s your hurry?”

“Your friends took a man out of the backseat of the police car I was riding in,” I said. “I want to get that man back, alive.”

“Oh yeah. That guy.”

“You know that guy?”

“You gonna tell the police you shot me by accident, and I got nothing to do with any of it?”

“I said I’d do that. I’m a man of my word.”

“All right. If you’ll tell the police I didn’t do nothing, I’ll tell you what I know.”

I opened my notebook to a fresh page. “Speak slowly, so I can write down what you say, but not too slowly. I’m in a hurry.”

“Why you got to write this down?”

I tapped my head with my pen. “Like I told you, I got memory problems. Now what do you know about the man who was kidnapped?”

“I don’t know him, like, personally. But I know who he is. That was the man they call the Buck.”

“The Buck?”

“Yeah. The Buck.”

The fuck?

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

By the way, this is why he called himself Elijah:

Every spring, Jews observe the Passover holiday, which commemorates the liberation of the enslaved Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. The Passover celebration centers around a ritual meal called the seder, during which the head of the household reads the story of the Exodus from a prayer book called the Haggadah.

During the seder, we consume the unleavened matzo bread that our ancestors ate when they fled from Egypt, along with eggs to symbolize rebirth and bitter herbs to denote the unpleasantness of bondage. And at four points during the service, attendees who are of appropriate age to do so celebrate the sweetness of freedom by consuming glasses of ceremonial wine.

In ancient times, there was a dispute among rabbis over whether the Scripture instructed us to consume four or five glasses of wine during the Passover celebration. The disagreement was eventually resolved when the rabbis decided that we should go ahead and pour the fifth glass, but not drink it.

There’s a related ancient tradition in which, at an appointed time during the ceremony, we open our doors and invite the prophet Elijah into the house. Traditionally, Elijah visits in order to verify that all the men present are circumcised, and therefore fit to consume the sacrificial Passover lamb, because Elijah is—and this is a real thing—the Jewish equivalent of what you might understand as the patron saint of ritual circumcision.

To give you an idea of how old these traditions are: The Passover sacrifice has not been a part of Jewish worship for about two thousand years, because a Jewish sacrifice can be conducted only in the Holy Temple, and the Romans burned down the Holy Temple along with the rest of ancient Jerusalem thirty years after the death of Christ.

Since nobody’s eating holy meat anymore, there’s no real reason to verify the circumcisions, so this whole component has been de-emphasized in the modern service. Nobody feels particularly enthusiastic about discussing dicks at the dinner table. But, in addition to being the guy who checks everyone’s penis, Elijah is also held to be the prophet who will return in the time of the Messiah to resolve all questions and disputes of Jewish law.

Disputes like the one about the fifth cup of wine.

So these days, we pour the extra cup of wine, and we open the door for Elijah, and he drinks the wine to resolve the dispute. And since the seder service runs about four and a half hours, including the meal, if we pour the wine at the beginning of the ceremony, Elijah’s cup is empty by the end of it.

But, although the wine disappears without fail, nobody ever sees him come in, and nobody ever sees him drink it. Elijah is the stealth prophet; the sneakiest bastard in all of Jewish theology.

And Elijah the bank robber operated the same way. But he made money disappear, instead of wine.

L’Chiam!

26

2009

“I’m the Buck.”

“No, man, the Buck is kind of like a legend. Or a myth or something. Except he’s real. Crazy old Robin Hood dude, who takes down stash houses. You know what a stash house is?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was a cop once.”

Elijah’s bank-robbing glory days in the early 1960s were the very end of an era in which robbers could get rich knocking over banks. Your local Wells Fargo or Citi branch no longer contains what Charles Greenfield described as a “room full of money.” Over the past couple of decades, retail banks have shifted from teller windows to ATM machines. You can’t rob an ATM with a gun. And much less business is conducted with cash now, so banks keep far less of the stuff on hand.

If you walk into a modern bank and hand a threatening note to a teller, you probably won’t walk out with much more than five thousand dollars, and it will probably have an exploding dye pack in it, and the teller will certainly trigger a silent alarm, and you will serve twenty years in federal prison.

If you want to find a room full of money these days, you have to visit one of the few businesses that still use lots of cash: a casino, a Federal Reserve bank, or a drug dealer.

A stash house is essentially a wholesale drug dealer’s equivalent of a bank vault; a secret apartment or building used to store drugs, guns, or cash. Boarded-up windows; doors barred by extremely heavy locks. A place like that would be guarded at all times by at least two trusted guards, probably armed with shotguns.

Because of the almost mythic significance the man had come to occupy in my mind, I was a little bit disappointed to learn that Elijah was spending his time robbing drug dealers. It seemed painfully pedestrian and ordinary. I had imagined him stealing the English Crown Jewels or plundering the treasures of the Kremlin or something. Part of the reason I’d agreed to help the son of a bitch in the first place was because he seemed so scared that I had assumed he was into something exotic and intriguing.

But robbing stash houses made sense, in a pragmatic, unromantic sort of way. The amount of currency that might be held in such a facility was staggering. Pure heroin was worth ten times as much as gold by weight, because it was diluted to 5 percent purity for sale on the street. That meant a kilo of the uncut Afghan stuff became 200,000 hits, which could each sell for ten or fifteen dollars. And Memphis had plenty of junkies to sell it to.

The people who trafficked the pure product out of Europe and up through South America did not like to expose themselves to the dangers of frequent transactions so, instead, they dealt with distribution operations infrequently and in bulk; a suitcase full of junk in half-million-dollar bricks exchanged for a dozen fifty-pound suitcases full of strapped twenty-dollar bills.

If you could clean out a stash house right before a deal like that went down, you could easily steal two or three million dollars in cash. But if you wanted to rob it, you had to find it first; not an easy task, since the location of a stash was likely to be closely held information. And to take out a fortified position like that, you pretty much had to go in with a SWAT team.

“So Elijah robbed a drug dealer?” I said. “Is that who was out to get him?”

“I don’t know of any Elijah. The man they took out of your car was called the Buck. But, yes. He robbed a dude named Carlo Cash.”

“Carlo Cash? That’s his real name?”

“Probably ain’t the name his mom gave him, but it’s all anyone calls him.”

“Who is he?”

“Okay, I only know what I heard from my cousin. But my cousin got a big mouth, so maybe I know a lot.”

“You said you were afraid he’d snitch on you.”

“Boy liked to talk. I don’t run with Carlo’s crew, but Clarence used to sling for them, and lately they been using him as muscle, ’cause he such a big motherfucker. Thought he was moving up in the world, the fat, dumb bastard. He said it was worth two hundred dollars if I backed Carlo’s boys up when they went to get the Buck. I don’t like getting mixed up in this shit, but I can’t turn down two hundo, you feel me? I got two jobs. I stock shelves at the Walmart, and I cook fries at Wendy’s. Both gigs are part-time, so I get no overtime and no insurance. I make seven and a quarter an hour, and I work sixty hours to make four hundred thirty-five dollars in a week. If somebody offers me two tax-free Benjamin Franklins for an hour’s work, I can’t afford not to do it.”

“So tell me what you know about Carlo.”

“If you need meth, blow, or pills, he can provide, but his main business is that good Taliban fire powder. He’s the exclusive local distributor for some kind of Mexican cartel, so if you score in Memphis, there’s better than even odds he’s getting paid. That’s what Carlo and his crew are about. Lots of dudes in this town own all the business on certain corners and blocks and up in certain developments, but Carlo is one of only a couple of guys who own the supply, so all those dealers have got to come to Carlo.”

“Sounds like Carlo Cash is doing well for himself.”

“He was, until six months ago. Now he’s probably dead.”

“What happened?”

“The Buck happened.”

I leaned forward in my wheelchair. “Wait a second. My name is Buck. Why is Elijah called Buck?”

“He’s not called Buck. He’s
the
Buck. It’s a name for some kind of Jewish ghost, or something.”

“Dybbuk?” I asked.