King of the Corner (11 page)

She spread a light scented oil over his back, buttocks, and legs and worked it into his skin starting with the shoulders. Her hands were strong and she knew something about massage; his muscles responded as they had in the hands of experts when he was with the Tigers. She cracked his fingers and toes and smacked the soles of his feet and braced a hand between his shoulder blades while she bent back each of his legs in turn with the other, stretching him like a bow. Finally she applied powder, spread his legs, and grazed her palms over him with light, feathery strokes, paying special attention to the area between his thighs. He thought his erection would push him off the table.

“Turn over.”

When it was finished—three minutes was as long as he could hold out—she handed him a clean towel and he showered again and dressed. Outside the locker room she met him in a yellow kimono, took the towel and the zipper bag, now empty, and escorted him to the door with her hand in the small of his back. “Full price next time,” she said. “And come back during business hours.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lynda, with a
y.
What’s yours?”

“Keith.”

“Come back enough times and we’ll call each other by our
real
names.” Just before she closed the outer door between them she smiled. He decided the makeup was misleading; she was younger than she looked.

At the bottom of the steps he almost ran into Maynard Ance getting out of a yellow cab. The bail bondsman had traded his overcoat for something lighter, but the industrial-strength suit beneath it was the same one he always wore, unless he had a closet full of them.

“Get a good workout?” he asked Doc.

Doc felt too good to be defensive. “Did I break a rule?”

“Not if you washed up afterwards.”

“How’s the Coachmen?”

“Third in line at the garage. Taber in the office?”

“He was when I left.”

“Get in the cab. I’ll bring him out.”

“Where we going?”

“Hertz. I just called the Wizotskys. That little scroat Roy skipped last night with their car. He didn’t even stay the night”

Doc sat in the backseat and contemplated an angry boil behind the driver’s right ear. He felt mellow after the massage, as if he had had two beers on top of an hour in the whirlpool. When Ance and Taber came out of the building they were carrying cased shotguns. The driver got out and opened the trunk for them. Taber climbed in the passenger’s seat in front and Ance got in beside Doc.

“How many guns do you own?” Doc asked.

“Not that many. We took these out before we dropped off the bus. Those mechanics are all thieves.”

At the Hertz office downtown they waited thirty minutes while a Cadillac was being gassed and prepped. Taber stayed outside with the shotguns to avoid panicking a clerk. Sitting in the office, Ance said, “I always ask for Fleetwoods after the time Budget stuck me with a Toyota. Fucking Japmobiles are too small even for a sawed-off. Besides, I buy American.”

It was a midnight blue V-8, not as big as they used to make them but bigger than anything else on the road. There was room enough in the trunk for everything in Ance’s arsenal and a Honda Civic, and the bail bondsman could have stretched out on the fabric-covered backseat if he wanted to. Doc drove, with Taber beside him. The suspension was slushy and there was too much play in the steering wheel, but Doc liked the instant response he got from the big engine when he pressed the pedal. “Where to?”

“Ypsilanti. Wizotsky says Roy has friends there he hangs out with sometimes.”

“Okay if I play the radio?”

“You can piss out the fucking window as long as you keep your eyes on the road.”

He went past reggae and country and about eighty rap stations before stopping at a call-in talk show, a phenomenon he had gotten hooked on in prison; most of the people he heard there made him feel better about his own situation.

“… twelve-seventy, all-talk. You’re on the air.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, you’re on the air.”

“Am I on?”

“Sure, go ahead.” The announcer sounded patient.

“Okay, well, um, I think the City of Detroit should erect a statue of Wilson McCoy in Hart Plaza. That’s one brother who stuck to his guns, you know?”

“The ones he didn’t sell to support his habit,” Ance said.

The announcer said, “I get where you’re coming from, and a lot of people would agree with you. But probably a lot more would say that McCoy represents a negative image of African-Americans.”

“Just the white mother—” The radio crackled and he was off the air.

“WXYT Twelve-seventy talk radio, what’s on your mind?” the announcer asked the next caller.

“Hey, that guy was full of it. The only thing McCoy done right his whole life was kill himself. Them Mountains of Mohammed—”

“I think you mean the Marshals of Mahomet.”

“Huh?”

“Go on.”

“The FBI should of burned them M-and-M’s out a long time ago just like they done the Panthers. I had it with all this sixties crap. To hear some of these coloreds you’d think you was in some kind of time warp. They overcame, already. What do they want now?”

“For one thing, they don’t want to be called coloreds.” Crackle. “WXYT One Two Seven Oh, talk to me.”

Taber reached over and turned off the radio. “Gab, gab, gab. Some people got nothing better to do than listen to their gums flap.”

“Sounds like the M-and-M’s are lining up another god,” Doc said. “In case something goes wrong with Mahomet.”

“Nothing to us, till they have to make bail.” In the rearview mirror Ance ran a cigarette under his nose and sniffed both ends. That was starting to get on Doc’s nerves.

Ypsilanti looked like pictures Doc had seen of Detroit in the fifties: elegant old Victorian and Queen Anne houses advertising rooms for rent and blocks of horizontal storefronts and neighborhoods showing signs of early decay. A phallic water tower built of brick dominated the skyline. At the bail bondsman’s direction Doc took a succession of side streets and boated into a curb in front of a blue frame house with gables and turrets and shingles shaped like fish scales. Two of the windows had VACANCY signs in them.

They got out. Ance opened the trunk, unzipped the shotgun cases, and laid them side by side on the backseat with the butts sticking out. “No sense stirring something up if we don’t need them,” he told Doc. “You see one or both of us come running out of the house, have ’em ready to hand out when we get to the car.” He and Taber went up the flagstone walk to the porch. They wiped their feet, opened the screen door against the complaint of a spring, and let it clap shut behind them.

Doc was starting to think about lunch when he heard the first shot. A windowpane in one of the turrets tipped out in two big pieces and fell a long way to the grass.

D
OC STARED AT THE TWO HALVES
of glass shining on the lawn. The second shot got his reflexes going.

He circled to the other side of the Cadillac, placing the car between himself and the house, opened the rear door on that side, and slid out one of the shotguns barrel first. As he was shucking the case from the Ithaca the screen door popped open. An older reflex, going back to hunting trips with his father and brother, kicked in and he pumped a round into the barrel.

The man running down the walk was several inches shorter than Taber and as broad as Ance, but softer, encased in a jacket of flesh that jiggled under his sweatshirt as he ran. He had a round red face and an adolescent beard like spun sugar. Doc slung the shotgun across the roof of the Cadillac, his finger wrapping the trigger. “Stop!”

His own shout rang in his head louder than the two shots. The running man braked and had to catch himself to avoid falling on his face. He gaped uncomprehendingly at the shotgun and the man crouched behind it. Doc doubted he was twenty.

A moment crawled past. Doc wasn’t sure what to do next.

The screen door opened again and Taber came barreling out. Something in his right hand caught the light. When he saw what was going on his pace slowed to a trot. He caught the fat youth by the neck of his sweatshirt and shoved him forward stumbling. The young man clutched at the roof of the Cadillac with both hands and Taber kicked his legs apart and patted him down. Doc lowered the shotgun and came around to their side.

“What happened?”

“Puke took a shot at us. He was lucky to hit the window with this piece of shit.” He held up a dull black revolver with plastic side grips with a wood grain printed on them.

“I heard two shots.”

“He did that when I took it away from him. That time he hit the floor.”

Ance came down the steps from the porch. His face was a deep blood color and he was breathing hard. “I’m getting too old for this shit. Two years ago he’d’ve never gotten out of the room.”

“Kid’s faster than he looks,” Taber said. “Doc threw down on him.”

The bail bondsman nodded and held out a hand. Doc gave him the Ithaca. Reaction was setting in; he put his hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking. “This is Roy Wizotsky?”

“This is Roy Wizotsky’s friend Darryl Stemp. Darryl’s got a drug problem, don’t you, Darryl? Can’t get enough of ’em, that’s Darryl’s problem. While Darryl was busy showing us his marksmanship, his friend Roy rabbited out the back door and over the fence.” Ance rammed the butt of the shotgun into the fat youth’s right kidney. He mewed and his knees buckled but he caught himself on the Cadillac’s door handle. Ance stepped around him and slammed the butt against that hand. Stemp gasped and knelt on the curb, hugging the hand to his body. Ance braced himself against the car with one hand and kicked Stemp’s knees out from under him. His chin hit the door. He rolled over onto his side and curled up. His sweatshirt rode up his back, exposing eight inches of pink skin and the cleft of his buttocks.

“Where’d he run to?” Ance was puffing now.

Stemp mewed. A car turned into the street, slowed as it neared the Cadillac, then sped up. The driver was an old man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Doc always wondered where they shopped. Ance caught Taber’s eye and held out the shotgun. Taber worked the slide out of habit, ejecting the shell Doc had pumped in and racking in the next, and placed the muzzle against Stemp’s neck under his left ear.

“Where’d he run to?” Ance repeated. He was leaning back against the car, mopping his face with a white lawn handkerchief.

“I don’t know.” It was muffled.

Taber twisted the shotgun. The skin wrinkled below Stemp’s ear.

Ance said, “That’s too quick. Let’s take him back and lock him up for a while. In a few hours when those big purple maggots start crawling all over him he’ll forget all about what a good friend Roy is.”

“If he don’t the first like the last one,” Taber said.

“That one had a bum ticker. Darryl’s is all built up from carrying around all that blubber.”

Stemp said something. It sounded like “salt cellar.”

“Speak up, Darryl. Don’t mumble.” Ance booted him lightly in the kidney he’d bruised earlier.

“Phelps-Sellers.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Dormitory at Eastern Michigan,” Taber said. “I was a campus cop there after I left Detroit. Not good enough, Darryl. What room?”

Stemp spoke again. Accordion?

“Custodian,” said Taber. “There’s a little apartment off the storage room in the basement of Phelps.”

“What’s Roy’s connection?” Ance asked.

This time Doc heard the word “friend.”

“This scroat’s more popular than Trojans,” Ance said. “Scrape him up and let’s get going.”

Doc said, “Are we turning him in?”

“And dick around half a day waiting for some Polack sergeant to take down my complaint? We’ll cut him loose soon as we get Roy. It’s either that or bust all his fingers so he can’t use a telephone. Lessons are lost on guys like Darryl.” The bail bondsman took the other shotgun off the seat and Taber lifted Stemp by the waistband of his jeans and dumped him into the back. Stemp had bitten his lip when his chin hit the door of the Cadillac; a bright thread of blood ran down onto his shirt. Taber produced a pair of handcuffs and manacled the youth to the door handle.

Ance cased the shotguns, locked them in the trunk, and got in beside Stemp. “Let’s see that piece.” Taber passed the black revolver over the front seat. Doc started the motor and waited for orders. In the mirror Ance swung out the cylinder and peered down the barrel. “You got an eye for the exotic, Darryl. You don’t often see a gun from Bangladesh. Where’d you get it?”

“Guy in Pfleen.” The split lip was getting in the way.

“Shit, nobody in Saline knows nothing about guns,” Taber said. “Why didn’t you go down to Toledo?”

Stemp said nothing.

Ance said, “You’ve been out of it too long, Taber. These days people from Toledo come up to Detroit looking for ordnance. They wouldn’t make the trip for a piece of shit like this, though. Ever shoot it before today?”

Doc didn’t hear the answer. Taber told him to drive to the end of the block and turn right. Doc pulled out into the street.

“… need is an old tire and a long piece of twine,” Ance was saying. “Prop the gun up on the tire and pull the trigger with the twine tied to it. That way if it blows up all you lose is the tire.”

Taber said, “Better yet, let Roy shoot it. That way you save the tire.”

“Pfuck you.”

The directive ended in a loud grunt Doc figured Ance had used his elbow. But when the bail bondsman spoke again his tone was friendly.

“Roy’s no friend of yours, Darryl. Friends don’t jump the fence while their friends are getting the crap beat out of them. A scroat like you needs a stand-up guy. ’Course, what’d a stand-up guy be doing with a scroat like you?”

With Taber directing, Doc drove across a hilly campus studded with old brick Gothic buildings with vines crawling up the walls and space-age structures that looked as if they were preparing to blast off from their foundations. Students carrying books walked along the sidewalks and sat on the grass reading and crossed the streets without looking. It seemed to Doc that the college crowd was getting younger.

“Pull in by that dumpster.”