Stress (4 page)

It wasn’t that the Indian would run after him. He knew he wouldn’t. The implication, that they could lay hands on him whenever they felt like it, disturbed him more than the thought of being chased. The doorknob turned without resistance and he went in.

The tin-shaped floor lamp directed light downward only, leaving the room’s top half and all but one corner in shadow. Nevertheless he found Wolf’s short dark bulk without having to search for it, seated in front of the painted table where Russell had done all his homework since he was six years old. The Indian’s long hair gleamed like a wet galosh.

“You need a good lock,” he said. “You’d be surprised what people steal.”

“There ain’t a thing here I’d want back.”

Seeing the place through the eyes of a visitor, he realized he meant what he’d said. The Jimi Hendrix albums, posters from
Superfly
,
Shaft
, and
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
, and unmade iron-framed single bed clearly belonged to a spare room over the garage of a house paid for by his parents.

He hated them more than ever then: Dwight Littlejohn grubbing around in the ductwork at Redford High and his wife Elizabeth shuttling the little white pissants to and from school in a big yellow bus. Sometimes, stretched out on his bed blowing hash and letting Jimi’s guitar licks wash over him like a big electric tongue, he pictured himself boarding the bus, spraying its passengers and his mother with automatic fire, then driving the bus to school, through the big front doors, and carving a gory swath studded with spent cartridges down the halls; finishing with his father, who would go down trying to defend himself with a wrench. Come the revolution there would be as little mercy for the collaborators as for the oppressors.

Wolf seemed to have trailed his thoughts. “It’s not such a bad place. You ought to see the cells at Alcatraz. Six by eight and a view of the next cell.”

“You were at Alcatraz?” He’d followed the accounts of the occupation by Indian activists with interest.

“Not for long. I bailed out after two weeks, stole a launch and went back to Frisco. They didn’t call that place the Rock for fun. The white man can have it. If we were going to claim an island it should’ve been Catalina. Where’d you ditch the boat?”

Russell had to run to catch up to the new subject. “I didn’t. I returned it to its slip. I even replaced the gas I burned. Nobody knew it was ever gone.”

“Wipe your prints off the wheel?”

“No need. My prints are all over the marina. I work there.”

“I know. That’s why we used you. That and what Kindu Nampula said about you. Kindu isn’t saying much now. A slug in the liver will do that.”

“I hung around as long as I could.”

“How long was that, till you heard the first shot?”

“Hey, I hung tough even when a brother I didn’t know come running for the dock. Pig shot him three times and I split.”

“Cop see you?”

“No. Too dark.”

“Any cops call on you?”

“
Hell
, no. Why should they?”

“Why? Shit. You’re right. The only street out from the house dead-ends at the lake. Cop wastes Kindu and Leroy and some poor shit, speedboat takes off right after. Why should they check out every fucking power boat on Lake Saint Clair? Hell, there must be a half-dozen marinas with someone working for them pulling a record for Robbery Armed.”

“That was juvie. P.D. pled it down to simple assault and I folded sheets and pillowcases for six months. I been talked to by pigs before. You think I don’t know how to talk to pigs?”

“Maybe you do,” Wolf said. “Maybe that’s what worries me.”

“What about Wilson? He worried?”

“I worry for Wilson. He can’t leave that neighborhood. The feds know he’s there but they won’t go in without artillery because of his friends and they’re scared of touching off ’67 all over again if they go in hard, so they’re waiting him out. You can’t go the same places all the time, talk to all the same people, and know what’s going on. That’s why he keeps me around. I know. What I know worries me. What I don’t know worries me more.”

“Oh, man.” Russell looked to Richard Roundtree for support, but Shaft was more interested in Gwenn Mitchell. “Kindu was here, he tell you how good I am with the pigs. Customs stopped us coming off the bridge from Canada, strip-searched us, tore his LTD down to the fucking frame. All the time saying they got a tip, we was going to Marion till we was white-headed. They separated us, told me it was Kindu they wanted, all I had to do was tell them where to find the shit and I could walk, they was going to find it anyway. I say, you going to find it anyway, what you need me to tell you for? Well, we didn’t walk. We fucking
drove
home after they put the car back together. Us and the eight kilos of smack we had hid out in the muffler. Stupid shits never thought to check and see if it was hooked up to the exhaust system.”

He was shaking. He did the trick, stretched out his arms and spread his fingers, the punctures showing in the tender flesh between them. He felt the tension going out the ends. That would work for a while. He hoped the Indian hadn’t been through his drawers, helped himself. He lowered his arms. “Kindu, he tell you all right. Only Kindu ain’t here. Kindu’s dead, man. So’s Leroy Potts, and all on account of your man inside don’t even know the party’s a cover for a fucking STRESS operation.”

“It wasn’t STRESS. If it was cops they wouldn’t have planted just one officer without any back-up.”

“Since when does a pig sergeant start rubbing butts with Grosse Pointers?” He was feeling aggressive. The shadows had found a crease of uncertainty in Wolf’s forehead when Russell mentioned the inside man.

“Just be stupid when the cops come around,” said the Indian. “Whatever he was doing there, they’ll be asking questions extra hard. They never serve the taxpayers so good as when it’s one of theirs on the hook. And stay clean. Go easy on that shit; it isn’t hash. No more dope runs across the border. No dope runs, period. If you need cash, call.”

No shakes now. What had started out as a ball-busting for Russell had turned into something different. He sat on the edge of the bed, bracing his palms on his knees. They were big hands, large enough to cup a basketball. He had played all through high school and had only recently abandoned his life’s dream of going pro. Something about his reflexes, a congenital defect. One more thing to thank Dwight and Elizabeth for. “Something going down?”

“Maybe. You don’t need to know about it yet.”

“Marina involved? ’Cause if it is I need to know when. I don’t work every day but I can trade off if it goes down on a day I don’t work.”

“I thought it was closed till spring.”

“Only boat rentals. We paint and repair in the off-season. When the lake freezes over we rent snowmobiles.”

Wolf was silent for a moment. “We won’t need snowmobiles,” he said then. “This doesn’t figure to happen before spring. A speedboat won’t do it, though. Can you get hold of a cabin cruiser?”

“How big?”

“How big do they come?”

“Pick a number. Twenty, thirty-five, sixty; Henry Ford got him a hundred-foot retired navy minesweeper on the Canadian side. Can’t get that, it’s a different marina. They miss it anyway. Also it takes a crew of ten to run it.”

“Thirty-five feet is big enough. We’re not ramming the
Queen Mary
.”

Russell felt energized. “Wilson figured we’d score fifty K at the party. If we needed a twelve-foot boat for that, this one must be good for a
hundred
and fifty.”

“Leave the arithmetic to Wilson, okay? Just keep your dick clean, and for chrissake don’t get fired.” Wolf stood. When he reached inside his quilted vest, the shiny magnum in his waistband twinkled. The envelope he took out of the inside pocket was so thick the flap came loose when it struck the painted table. Some of the bills fanned out. “There’s enough there to support all your bad habits till we call you. Don’t hide it here. When the cops come they might bring paper.” He went silent again. Russell could almost see the ribbons of Brut floating around him like in a cartoon. “I sure hope Nampula wasn’t blowing smoke up our asses about you. Wilson trusts me because I’ve got nothing to lose. I trust Wilson because I’ve got nothing to lose. But I look around here, I see a place that’s not so bad. More comfortable than the Wayne County Jail by a long shot. I’m thinking when it comes to a trade, revolutionary ideals may not look so good after all. I don’t care about me. I don’t want to think about Wilson sleeping and shitting in a room six by eight because some little puke found out life’s not like
Viva Zapata
.”

“I said before there ain’t a thing here I want.”

The Indian left. Russell got up and went to the door to watch him descend the stairs, swiveling his big Geronimo head to take in the dark spots where anything might hide. He wondered where Wolf came by the almighty bullshit. Man’s people lost a
continent.
How reliable did he have to be not to fuck up as big as that?

Crises of faith like clockwork there. Man couldn’t makeup his mind.

Battle skipped the physical description. Everybody’s the same height lying down, and only the pallbearers care what you weigh. He took another look at the front-and-profile clipped to the sheet. If afros kept growing at their current rate, the turnkeys at Receiving were going to have to invest in a wide-angle lens.

A sweetheart. Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Robbery Armed, Felony Homicide, drugs probably heroin, Carrying a Concealed Weapon. No time on the last three meant he had more friends with records like his than eyewitnesses at the show-up. Judgment call on whether Parole’s cutting him loose on the ADW after seventeen months cost the taxpayers less than keeping him in meals and denims until 1975; not to mention the poor bastard offed in the robbery last year. Letting Geary/Nampula fly just short of three years on the fifteen to twenty was beyond comment.

Charlie Battle, who liked to play around with numbers, had calculated that the six hundred murders that took place in the city in 1972 averaged out to forty killings per 100,000 Detroiters, outstripping automobile accidents and heart attacks. Without poring over all the reports—he was a dabbler, not a fanatic—he surmised that if repeat offenders were removed from the equation, in particular suspects arrested and convicted for previous violent crimes and released early, the total would fall closer to two hundred, or thirteen per 100,000, bringing homicides down around Midwestern earthquakes and random strikes by lightning. The cops were popping the perps, all right. It was the parole-board appointees who weren’t following through. So of course the city’s answer to the statistics was to beef up police patrols and create a plainclothes commando unit, STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets; he still couldn’t say that one without grinning painfully), endowed with all the stop-frisk-and-clobber privileges of the KGB. Now the holding tank at 1300, the Wayne County Jail, and the two state penitentiaries in Jackson and Marquette bulged with new inmates, obliging Parole to disgorge an equivalent number of their predecessors before their time to clear space. Nothing changed except the faces, and even that was just a rotation. There were more guns on the streets than cars, and in the Motor City there was a shitload of cars.

Leroy Potts, a/k/a Leroy Potts, DOB 9/14/52, was darker-skinned in his photo than Nampula, with a bad complexion, and his natural needed a once-over with the pick. He had two priors for armed robbery, one early conviction for Breaking and Entering, probation and time served. He’d been maybe fixable, should’ve done the max on the B-and-E, if for no other reason than to learn the highway he was on ended in forty feet. Battle looked for the judge’s name in the case. Del Rio. That explained a lot. He turned to the sheet on Junius Harrison.

Age twenty-four, no aliases, one prior with conviction, a three-year pop for possession for sale of marijuana. Nineteen sixty-eight, The Year That Gave Us Nixon, bad time to be caught peddling reefers. Served the full count at Jackson. Battle wondered if he’d had much time to become acquainted with Nampula during the couple of weekends Nampula spent there for sticking guns in people’s faces and threatening to blow their heads off their necks.

Harrison’s mug shot had been taken before he grew his afro. He’d cropped his hair short back then. Medium-dark face, full lips, eyes like a deer’s caught in headlights, normal for an eighteen-year-old arrested and processed for the first time. Aside from that, put him in a jacket and tie and he could have posed for the United Negro College Fund ads. Certainly his face lacked the sullen cast of the others. Nothing in that; Charles Starkweather looked like a kid who delivered groceries. Thirty-six months on a kiddie drug charge was enough to sour anyone on the system. Battle was sour on it himself, and he had a job and a clean shirt.

Trouble was, so had Harrison.

In addition to the dead men’s rap sheets, the file on the killings at the Crownover-Ogden New Year’s Eve party contained statements signed by eyewitnesses, one of whom, a lawyer named Chester Dalgleish, claimed that Junius Harrison had been employed by his firm as an intern since October 1972; that according to Dalgleish’s associates, Harrison had been sent from the office with a message for Dalgleish of a nature considered too confidential to trust to the telephone in a crowded house with seven extensions. The maid who had admitted Harrison through the front door corroborated, reporting that he’d told her he had a communication for one of the guests. That was two or three minutes before all hell broke loose. Stapled to the lawyer’s statement was a photocopy of a hastily scrawled bit of legalese on a sheet of notepaper displaying the company letterhead, found by Forensics in the dead man’s pocket.