King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 (32 page)

  "You like big knives?" Lee asked.

  "Put her down."

  "Give it a rest, Lee," Octavia started.

  "What's the matter, Rondell?" Lee continued being a shit. Sometimes he couldn't help being such a cop. He ran his hand along the blade, deliberate and slow.

  "Don't you touch her." A strain found its way into Mulysa's voice.

  Cantrell rested a meaty hand on Mulysa's shoulder, while he reached for a set of bracelets.

  "Oh that's the way it is. You like that, huh?" Lee turned the blade over in his hands, an awkward fondling, antagonizing the twitch in Mulysa's eyes.

  "No one touches her but me," Mulysa said.

  "Maybe she doesn't mind stepping out on you."

  "Dirty bitch."

  With a wiry strength that they'd all underestimated, Mulysa easily slipped from Cantrell's grasp. The detective grabbed after him immediately, but the way Mulysa fought, Cantrell suspected he was up on something. Lee grabbed two handfuls of the man's shirt and shoved him into a wall. Despite the awkward angle and purchase, Mulysa lifted him from his feet. Cantrell punched him in his kidneys. Mulysa twisted and put his shoulder into the landing, taking the air out of Lee. By the time they were on him, Mulysa had Lee on the ground, punching him in the face. In the ensuing scuffle, Octavia caught a stray elbow in her eye. Even with Cantrell on one arm and Octavia on the other, Mulysa threw his body at Lee. He pushed off several detectives until the three of them pinned him down. Octavia was on the radio, calling for patrolmen. She put her knee into Mulysa's back as Cantrell fitted the cuffs onto his wrists. Lee staggered to his feet, only managed a half-hearted stomp on the thug before Cantrell pulled him up.

 

The door was ajar when they arrived at Rhianna's place. Many times Percy had begged her to move. He offered for her to stay with him where he could protect her. But Rhianna had her situation set up. Between being an emancipated teen, with Section 8 housing, and food stamps, she got by with a little hooking on the side. Percy had already checked in with his brothers and made sure they'd eaten and done their homework before walking Rhianna home. As much as he wanted to be with King, his first duty was to his family. So when the door wasn't completely shut, he put up his beefy arm barring Rhianna from passing. He pushed the door open and flicked on the light.

  The place had been tossed. Quickly and not thorough, the thieves snatched anything of easy reach and quick resale value. He walked slowly through the house though he knew they were long gone. It was a terrible thing when your own home no longer felt safe. Stopping at each doorway, he prayed for God's protection on the house – for the reality of His presence to be made real for him. For a moment, guilt flashed in him. It wasn't but a few months ago he himself had broken into this apartment in search of anything of value in the name of his crack-fiend mother. He had taken a ring, but returned it later.

  "It's gone," Rhianna said.

  "What?"

  "There was a cup, it had been in my family for years. I kept all sorts of valuables in it."

  
A ring.
Percy knew, because that was where he returned it.

  "This lady I used to stay with. Queen. She took me in and was sweet to me. She wanted me to have it. Told me I was its guardian."

  "I'll make it right," Percy said. "I'll call the police. And I'll find the cup."
And the ring.

  "Oh." Rhianna held her belly.

  "What is it?"

  "I think my water just broke."

  Rhianna retreated to her room. The pains grew worse now as she rubbed the swell of her belly. Her Tshirt wouldn't stay pulled down. Her blue jeans now two sizes too small, her belly bulged over her white belt. She waddled to the window. Kids played on the dilapidated equipment, too young to know that the swings shouldn't be so ragged or the monkey bars so rusted. The graffiti was a part of their world. All they knew was the color of childhood, and innocence was preserved even here for a time. Rhianna fell onto the edge of the bed. She set the radio to Hot 96.3 for some hip hop and turned it up. She didn't get that boy, but if she was going to cry, she didn't want Percy to hear her.

  He honored her request to leave her alone.
Your
honor's more important than my comfort,
Percy thought. But he called for an ambulance.

  The fear came in waves. Not fear of the birth pains, those she'd handled before. The fear was the renewed fear of bringing another child into the world. The fear didn't come the first time. All she focused on then was her baby. It never seemed real and even now she felt like she played at parenthood. Visiting her baby when the mood hit her. This time around, she was really scared. Scared because things seemed more real this time. Part of her had really attached herself to the child, had committed to doing it right this time. Maybe it was the shame of having a baby to love her and then abandoning it when things got inconvenient. Maybe when confronted with the depth of her selfishness, she wanted to do things differently. Maybe she was just growing up.

  She would have to find a way to provide for her child. Food. Clothes. Make a real home for it. Courage sprouted up like a tenacious weed, and she dared to dream. Maybe Outreach Inc. could help her get some food stamps and maybe get her first child back. Perhaps she could get her own place, a real place away from the robbing, drugging and killing. Some place safe. Some place where they could be a real family.

  Another wave of contractions caused her to close her eyes. A low moan escaped her lips. She prayed that God would water her courage, allow it to take root and grow. Give her the strength to cling to the hope of a better life.

  "Percy, get in here!"

  Percy trundled through the door. "The ambulance is on the way."

  "Just hold my hand."

 

With walls the color of coughed-up phlegm, the interrogation room – affectionately known as The Box by the detectives – was smaller a room than one might imagine. Manacled to the table because of his carrying on during his arrest, Mulysa rested his head on the metal table. Cantrell flipped open the case file one more time. The bodies at the Phoenix Apartments had been dropped by shots though the medical examiner was at a loss to give him a caliber or make of gun. For all he knew, someone threw rocks at them really hard. Knifings were almost always personal and rarely involved business, though some crews employed knifemen. Yet Mulysa's demeanor betrayed no feelings, nothing could reach his heart. In the young homicide detective's experience, it signaled that Mulysa was guilty as fuck. Now it was a matter of figuring out of what.

  "He been Mirandized?" Octavia double-checked as she stared at Rondell Cheldric through the observation window that opened into the interrogation room. Mulysa nuzzled his head along his arm, sleeping the sleep of the just.

  "Yeah, declined representation," Cantrell said, nose still buried in the file.

  "As many times as he been through the system? He should know better."

  "He knows. And he knows we know," Lee nearly spat with contempt. "He thinks that really proves that he hasn't done anything."

  "How do you want to go at him?" Cantrell turned to his partner.

  Lee smiled.

  The impassive-faced detectives entered the room and Cantrell took a seat across from him. Between him and the door, not needing to voice aloud the reality that the only way Mulysa was to see the other side of the door was through him. Mulysa was no virgin to the system. The man rubbed sleep from his eyes, not acknowledging Cantrell's presence.

  Typically, Cantrell's approach in the box was to be ebullient and respectful, eventually garnering their confidence. Cantrell grew up in the neighborhood, always went with the "I can relate" approach despite the fact he was now po-po, the enemy, as relatable as a two-headed alien. But he ran the same streets, he shoplifted from the same shops, ate fried catfish from the same joints, and haunted the same clubs, like PickA-Disease as they called Picadilly's back in the day. None of the social niceties would be met with courtesy or appreciated, so a small-talk approach was wasted on Mulysa.

  "What does it say about a people when none of the social pleasantries are observed?" Cantrell asked.

  "What?" Mulysa grunted.

  "Nothing. A rhetorical question."

  "What?"

  Cantrell leaned toward this would-be hardass, this brute, this self-proclaimed menace to society, who didn't retreat from the invasion of space. Quite the opposite, as he was comfortable in the close quarters, even matching the detective's advance. Mulysa's rank breath, decayed bits of pork trapped between teeth, sprayed his face.

  "It is hot in here," Mulysa complained. "Why's the white boy got to be behind me?"

  White boy. Lee's face grew hot at the epithet since it was more insult than accurate description. It wasn't like being called "nigger", which would have been automatic go time were the roles reversed. But the sting of derision was there, enough for his jaw to tighten. Lee took more than the occasional hard elbow on the basketball courts over at Northwest High School coming up. He understood the testing behind the comment and the court jostling. He was expected to take it and considering the white to non-white ratio of the streets and the school, he did. But he didn't like it.

  "He make you uncomfortable?" Cantrell asked.

  "Just don't like people behind me is all," Mulysa said.

  "Remind you of when you got sent up?"

  "Men behind you." Lee placed a hand on his shoulder. "Got plenty of them days ahead of you."

  "Rondell Cheldric," Cantrell read while pacing back and forth before closing the file folder he cradled.

  "You know my name?"

  "Folks call you Mulysa. 'Asylum' spelled backwards."

  "You got that, huh?"

  "I'm a clever Uncle Tom."

  "Yeah." He stopped short of an apology but flashed an "it's all in the game" slow nod. "We all out here: you, me, fiends. Like the circle of life. Doing our thing. But in the end, we all get got. Dirt piled on us like we was shit folks trying to hide. That's why it so important to leave a strong name behind."

  "A fierce rep," Cantrell agreed.

  "True dat."

  "You in big trouble, Rondell." Cantrell had a way of using a person's own name as a club, repeating it in a way that forced the person to deal with him.

  "Why? I didn't do nothin'."

  "You hit a cop. That's something."

  "He was touching my–"

  "'Bitches.' Yeah, we'll get to that later," Cantrell said. "Assaulting an officer, in front of other officers."

  "You going down for that, Rondell," Lee clubbed.

  "You got to pay."

  "That's how it works."

  "You do. You pay."

  This was the part of the dance that Cantrell loved, the stage on which they performed. When they fell into a rhythm, knew each other's plays, and today they were in the zone. Rondell didn't stand a chance as they took turns whittling the big man down to a more manageable, a malleable size.

  "Do you know who we are, Rondell?" Cantrell eased away from the table, giving Mulysa room to breathe and settle down. Pull back on the throttle, let him take in the scenery and fully appreciate the jackpot he was in. They actually didn't have much of anything on him. It would have been a fairly friendly conversation – albeit with all the requisite chest thumping – had Mulysa not chosen to act all foolish. All they had was his name and knew that he was mixed up in the situation somehow. Anything he and his bitches had been up to hadn't been reported to the police. Still, he didn't know what they knew. Maybe his bitches would give him up. Blood was hard to clean up.

  "You murder police." Mulysa came out of his stupor from watching the pair of detectives sidle back and forth.

  "You know what that means?"

  "Someone's been murdered."

  "Exacta-mundo." Cantrell pointed the folder at him with the beaming smile of a proud parent, then set it on the table. Mulysa turned to face him. A scar underlined his right eye and he was thick like a tree stump, though his blue jeans still hung from him like drapes. Cantrell resisted the urge to snatch the boy's wave cap from his head.

  "What do you do for a living?"

  "Freelance entrepreneur."

  "You hear this shit?"

  "Drug-dealing scum. You got that on a business card?"

  "I'm into a little bit of this, little bit of that," Mulysa said, not acknowledging Lee. He understood the dance. The disorienting effect of their back and forth, meant to unnerve him. Rattle him to the point where he gave something up. But they had nothing on him. Hadn't even told him what he was being charged with. So he relaxed and allowed himself to get caught up in their little banter game.

  "How long have you been a 'freelance entrepreneur'?" Cantrell asked.

  "Goin' on three years."

  "You like it?"

  "It a-ight."

  "You like women, Rondell?" Cantrell sat down on the corner of the table closest to Mulysa, drawing his attention.

  "Yeah." His breath reeked on top of the wafts of his body odor, a mix of garbage, funk, and unwashed ass.

  "I mean, it's all right if you don't."

  "I do."

  "He look gay to you?" Cantrell asked.

  "He could be half a fag," Lee offered. "Maybe he just prison gay."

  "I ain't no fag."

  "That's a double negative," Cantrell said.

  "Means you are," Lee echoed.

  "I ain't."

  "That's what they call a Freudian slip," Cantrell said. "Part of you may think that you are."

  "I… it… I ain't." The questions and innuendo flew furiously at Mulysa. He wasn't having time to think through the questions, much less his answers. Hated the way they twisted things, damned cops. Not to mention his head ping-ponging back and forth. Cantrell sat entirely too close. Lee pressed in on him with his imposing stance, glaring at him with clenched fists burrowing into the table.