Can this really be the end? . . .
Not yet, no, but soon. The end was looming. The moment of his death was approaching and Sonny knew it. While most people are consumed by a vision of what their lives might be—as egotistical as those visions were, as wrong as they’d ultimately prove—Sonny was possessed by the vision of his
death.
This made him, he felt, Christlike. Our Savior, born to die. Our Flesh, our Blood, counting down the minutes to Calvary. Indeed, he resembled Jesus, at least the Vatican-approved, souvenir shop, Cecil-B.-DeMille version: lean, narrow of face, wispy goatee, long blonde hair, hypnotic blue eyes. Skinny.
Whoa, we’re getting pretty dramatic here, Sonny thought. But when you’re in love with fire, your thinking can easily become apocalyptic.
The image of his death was a complicated one and had been forming since he was a young boy. Unable to sleep he would lie in his mother’s silent, still house (sometimes in her silent arms, sometimes her restless arms) and picture it, embellish, edit. He’d be in a large room, surrounded by thousands of people writhing in agony as gallons of marvelous juice, his sticky concoction, flowed over them. He’d be in the middle of the chaos, listening to their screams, smelling their burnt flesh, watching their agony as the substanceless yet undeniable fire caressed their hair and groins and breasts and fingertips. And he’d be grappling with his enemy—the Antichrist, the creature that had arrived on earth to take Sonny away. Quiet, tall, dressed in black.
Just like Pellam.
He pictured the two of them chained together as the flowing, fiery liquid surrounded them. Strong, sweating bodies entwined as the flames removed their clothes then their skin, their blood mixing. The two of them, and ten thousand others, a packed Broadway theater, a coliseum, a school auditorium.
Sonny was filled with energy and purpose. He
had
to tell the world about the coming conflagration.
And so he did. In his special way.
As the subway rumbled into the station and screeched to a stop beneath him he glanced around and poured the two gallon canister of juice through the ventilation grate. He lit and dropped in after it a novelty birthday candle—the kind that can’t be blown out—stuck in a wad of modeling clay.
With a subdued
whooosh,
the flaming liquid flowed into the vents of the subway cars and inside.
“Happy birthday to you,” he sang. Then regretted his flippancy, recalling that he was engaged in important work. He stood and left slowly, reluctantly, sorry that he couldn’t stay longer and listen to the screams rising through the black smoke, the screams from those dying underground, beneath his feet.
Momma, can this really be the end . . .
The sirens seemed to come from all around him. They were raw, urgent, hopeless. But Sonny thought all the fuss was silly. He was just getting started; the city hadn’t seen anything yet.
Hatake Imaham was holding court in the Women’s Detention Center.
“Now listen here,” she told the young women gathered around her. “Don’t buy that crap. High John Conqueror root? Black-bat oil, lodestones, Bichon’s two-hearts drawing candle? That be bullshit, all that crap people be trying to sell you. Just to take yo’ money. Y’oughta know better.”
Ettie Washington, across the cell, listened with half her attention. She hurt more today than she had right after the fire. Her arm throbbed, sending waves of pain into her jaw. Her ankle too. And her headache was blinding. She’d tried again to get some painkillers and the guards had merely stared at her the way they sometimes stared at the mice scurrying around on the floors here.
“But I know it work,” one skinny woman said. “One time mah man was cheatin’ and what it was—”
“Listen to me. If you got the sight you don’t need them oils and candles and roots. If you ain’t got the sight then there’s nothing gonna do it. You come to
make a sacrifice at my honfour, you leave a few pennies for Damballah. That’s all you gotta do. But mosta the mambos and houngnans in New York’re just out fo’ money.” Her voice lifted, “What about you, Mrs. Washington? You believe in Damballah?”
“In?—”
“The serpent god? Santeria, hoodoo?”
“Not really, no, I don’t,” Ettie said. She didn’t feel like explaining that Grandma Ledbetter, bless her heart, had squeezed every shred of religion out of Ettie by her fierce lectures that mixed Catholicism and fiery Baptist dogma. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem to Ettie very different from the crazy stuff Hatake was talking about. Incense and holy water instead of High John Conqueror root.
Hatake tugged at her naked, punctured earlobe and continued to expound on the silliness of man-fetching spells and law stay-away oil. What was in your
heart
was what was important, Hatake said. Ettie’s mind wandered and she thought again about John Pellam. Wondered when he’d come to visit her again.
If
he’d come. That man
ought
to be a hundred miles away by now. What the hell was he helping her for? She thought with horror how he’d almost been trapped by the fire. Thought about little Juan Torres too. She said a nonbeliever’s prayer for the boy.
Then a noise from the front of the cell. The clank of metal on metal. Some of the women shouted hello to a new prisoner.
“Yo, girl. Weren’t out but one day? You got yo’ ass busted that quick?”
“Shit, Dannette, yo’ bad luck. I staying away from you, girl.”
Ettie watched the young woman with the pocked face and the beautiful figure walk uncertainly into the large cell. She was one of the prostitutes who’d been released just yesterday. Back so soon? Ettie smiled at her but the woman didn’t respond.
Dannette walked up to the circle of women sitting around Hatake Imaham, who nodded to the woman. “Hey, girl. Good to see you.”
Which sounded a little odd. Sort of like Hatake had been expecting her.
And the woman continued her lecture on hoodoo, talking now about Damballah, the highest in the voodoo order. Ettie knew this because her sister had dabbled in that craziness some years ago. Then the huge woman’s voice faded and the women began talking among themselves, very quietly. One or two of them glanced at Ettie but they didn’t include her in the conversation. That was all right. She was thankful for the quiet and for a few minutes’ peace. She had many things to think about and, as the good Lord, or Damballah, she laughed to herself, knew, there were few enough moments of peace in here.
* * *
One of those feelings. Somebody watching him.
Pellam stood on the curb in front of Ettie’s building, wasting his time asking amnesia-struck construction workers if they’d been in the alley when the fire started or if they knew who had.
He turned suddenly. Yep, there it was. About fifty feet away a glistening black stretch limo was parked in the construction site, under the large billboard on which an artist had rendered a dramatic painting of the
finished building. Pellam had seen a number of billboards like this one on the West Side; whoever painted them managed to make the high-rises look as appealing, and as completely phoney, as the drawings of women modeling lingerie in the Saks and Lord & Taylor newspaper ads.
Pellam focused on the limo. The windows were tinted but he could see that someone in the backseat—a man, it seemed—was gazing at him.
Pellam suddenly lifted the camera to his shoulder and aimed at the limo. There was a pause and then some motion in the backseat. The driver punched the accelerator and the long vehicle bounded out of the drive. It vanished in traffic toward the fish-gray strip of the Hudson River.
He stepped off the curb, still aiming the camera, and so he never saw the second car, the one that nearly broadsided him.
When he heard the brakes he spun around and stumbled back over the curb out of the way, falling. He lost some skin on his elbows rescuing the Betacam—which was worth more than he was at the moment.
A man was all over him in an instant, a huge man. Vice-grip hands grabbed Pellam’s arms, jerking him to his feet, lifting the camera away. Not even time to blurt a protest before he was flung into the backseat of the sedan. At first he thought Jimmy Corcoran had found out he was looking for his crew and sent some boys to find him.
Hacksaws. . . . The image just
wouldn’t
leave him alone.
But he realized these men weren’t gangies. They were in their thirties and forties. And they wore suits.
Then he remembered where he’d seen the one who grabbed him, the one with the smooth, baby skin and muscles upon muscles. And so wasn’t surprised to see who was in the front passenger seat.
“Officer Lomax,” Pellam said.
The huge assistant climbed into the front seat and started to drive.
“I’m not an officer,” Lomax said.
“No?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then what do I call you? Inspector? Fire marshal? Kidnapper?”
“Ha. Maybe I should call you Mr. Funny. Instead of Mr. Lucky. Ain’t he a kick?” Lomax asked his assistant. The wrestler didn’t respond.
Neither did the the man beside Pellam, a scrawny cop or marshal, tiny as a rooster. He didn’t seem even to notice Pellam and just stared at the scenery as they drove past.
“How you doing?” Lomax asked. Around the man’s neck was a badge on a chain. It was gold and had a mean-looking eagle perched on top of a crest.
“So-so.”
To his assistant the marshal said, “Take him where we just were.” Then added: “Only where nobody can see us.”
“The alley?”
“Yeah, the alley’d be good.”
This seemed rehearsed. But Pellam wasn’t going to play the intimidation game. He rolled his eyes. Three cops—or whatever fire marshals were—weren’t going to shoot him in an alley.
“We want to know one thing,” Lomax said, looking
out the window at a recently burned store. “Only one thing. Where can we find that shit the old lady hired? That’s it. Just that. Tell us and you won’t believe the kind of deal we’ll cut for her.”
“She didn’t hire anybody. She didn’t torch the building. Every minute you spend thinking she did is another minute the real perp is free.”
This was another line from one of his movies. It sounded better on paper than it did when spoken aloud. But that may have been the circumstances.
Lomax said nothing for a few minutes. Then he asked, “You wanta know a difference between women and men? Women break down easy. A man’ll hard-ass you for days. But you stand in front of a woman and scream and they start crying, they say, yeah, yeah, I did it, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to or I didn’t know anybody’d get hurt or my boyfriend made me do it. But they break down.”
“I’ll share that with Gloria Steinem next time I see her.”
“More of the humor. Glad you can laugh at times like this. But you maybe better listen to what I’m saying. I intend to break that woman one way or another. I don’t care how I do it. Tommy, am I saying this?”
The marshal’s huge assistant recited, “I don’t hear you saying anything.”
Beside Pellam, the skinny cop, the silent one, examined some kids opening a hydrant. He didn’t seem to hear anything either.
Lomax said, “I am gonna stop this fucking psycho and you’re in a position to make it easier on Washington and save a lot of innocent people in the process. You can talk to her, you can—Ah, ah, ah, don’t
say a word, Mr. Lucky. Tell him what happened this morning, Tony.”
“Fire on the Eighth Avenue Subway.”
Lomax was looking at Pellam again. “How many injured, Tony?”
The assistant recited, “Sixteen.”
“How bad?”
“Real bad, boss. Four critical. One’s not expected to live.”
Lomax looked at the sidewalk, said to the driver, “Go the back way. I don’t wanna be seen.”
They were all very grim, these men—two of them outweighing Pellam by fifty pounds at least. And it was starting to occur to Pellam that while they might not shoot him they
could
beat the crap out of him. They’d probably even enjoy it. And break the forty-thousand-dollar camera that wasn’t his.
“You know what we call an easy case? One with witnesses and solid evidence?” Lomax asked.
“A grounder,” offered Tony.
Lomax continued, leaning close to Pellam, “You know what we call a case we can’t figure out?”
“A balk?” Pellam tried.
“We call it a mystery, Mr. Lucky. Well, that’s what we got here. A big fucking mystery. We know the lady hired this guy but we can’t find any fucking leads. And I just don’t know what to do about it. So I don’t have any choice. All I can think of is to start hitting that old lady hard. Am I saying this, Tony?”
“You’re not saying anything.”
“And if that doesn’t work, Mr. Lucky, then I’m going to start hitting
you
hard.”
“Me.”
“You. You were at the building around the time of the fire—like you were supposed to be an alibi for the old lady. Now you’re walking around, talking to witnesses, with that big dick of a camera you got. You’re a man’s been around cops, I can smell that. I think you’ve seen more of ’em than you’d like, you ask me. So before I start whaling on her and on you, I want a straight answer: What’s your interest in all this?”
“Simple. You arrested the wrong person. Getting that to register in your mind—that’s my interest.”
“By destroying evidence? Intimidating witnesses? Fucking up the investigation?”
Pellam glanced at the man beside him. A nebbishy guy. The sort you’d cast for an accountant or, if he had to be a cop, one from Internal Affairs.
Pellam said, “Let me ask you a few questions.” The marshal grimaced but Pellam continued. “Why’d Ettie burn down a whole building if she’s just got a policy on her apartment?”
“Because she hired a fucking psycho who couldn’t control himself.”
“Well, why’d she need to hire somebody at all. Why couldn’t she fake a grease fire?”
“Too suspicious.”
“But it was suspicious anyway.”
“Less suspicious than just burning her place. Besides, she didn’t know about the insurance fraud database.”
“She lost everything in the fire.”