The Big Bad City (21 page)

“Well now looka here,” he said as Sonny approached, and rose from the table, extending his hand, shaking it warmly, “Sonny Cole, meet Tirana … I didn’t catch the last name, honey.”

“Hobbs,” she said, a little disdainfully, it seemed to Sonny, as if she was looking down her nose at him, for what reason he couldn’t fathom.

“Tirana Hobbs,” he said, “how you doin, honey?” and extended his hand, which she didn’t take, so he figured he’d be taking her to bed tonight, Juju notwithstanding. He pulled up a chair. Tirana was sitting across from him at the small round table, Juju on his right. All their knees almost touched under the table.

“Choo drinkin, man?” Juju asked, and signaled to a man wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with an NFL logo on it. “They got ever’thin, juss name it.”

“What’s that you’re drinkin there, Tirana?” Sonny asked, trying to be friendly, trying to let her know she was gonna end up in bed with him, so let’s cut the thaw, honey, no sense playin games here.

“Gee,” she said, “what can it possibly be comes in a brown bottle and pours out yellow with foam on it?” To demonstrate, she poured more beer into her mug. Sonny grinned.

“I’ll have a beer, too,” he said. He wanted to keep a clear head for what was coming later. Started drinking anything harder, he’d liable to fuck up. “So how you been, Juje?” he said.

“What’s that stand for, anyway?” Tirana asked.

She had yellow eyes, Sonny noticed, sort of glassy now, as if she’d been smoking before he got here. Maybe that’s why she sounded so harsh. Grass sometimes did that to people. They either got mellow or they got mean. He didn’t mind a mean girl, long as she understood who had the cock.

“Juju stands for Julian Judell,” he said.

“That’s a nice name,” Tirana said. “Why’d you shorten it to Juju?”

“Didn’t do it myself, honey. Kids started sayin it and it stuck.”

“Tirana’s a nice name, too,” Sonny lied. He thought it was one of those bullshit names lots of black mothers picked outta some African baby-name book. “Where’d you get such a pretty name?”

“It was supposed to be Tawana.”

“Oh? Yeah? Tawana?”

“My mother didn’t know how to spell it. She thought what they were sayin on the TV was
Tirana
. You remember Tawana Brawley, the one got raped by all those white guys smeared her with shit later?”

“She was full of shit, anyway,” Juju said.

“I don’t think so,” Tirana said.

“I think she was tellin the truth,” Sonny said.

Tirana smiled.

“How’d you get the name Sonny?” she asked.

“I don’t know how. My real name is Samson.”

“Ooooh,” Tirana said. “Strong.”

“Still got all my hair, too,” Sonny said, and smiled charmingly.

“I’ll bet,” Tirana said.

If Juju was noticing any of this, he wasn’t showing it.
In any case, Sonny wasn’t about to let pussy intrude on what was the real order of business here tonight. He suddenly wondered if Tirana bleached herself down there, too, be interesting to find out. But Juju came first. What had to be done with Juju came first. Then they’d tend to other matters. If there was to be any other matters.

Juju said, “So how come you knew where I was at?”

“I asked around,” Sonny said.

“Why was it you wanted to see me?”

Sonny tried to calculate was he suspicious. He decided no.

“Couple things we should talk about,” he said, “you have a minute.”

“Want to take a walk?” Juju asked.

“You mind, Tirana? Just take a few minutes.”

“Time and tide wait for no man,” Tirana said.

“Be the tide’s loss,” Sonny said, and shoved back his chair.

Tirana looked up at him. Same mean smile on her face like when he first came over to the table. He knew for sure now she’d be waiting for him when he got done with Juju.

Outside, the night was cool.

They strolled through streets full of people jabbering in Spanish. He wondered all at once if Juju was of Spanish descent. Julian could be Spanish, he guessed. But Judell? He doubted it. Still, what the hell was he doing all the way up here in Hightown? Lots of laughter, too, on the summer air. People hanging out of windows, looking down into the street. People drinking. Some of them dancing. Like some kind of carnival atmosphere, you’d think it was still early in the evening, number of people in the street.

“So what is it?” Juju asked.

“I been having trouble finding a piece,” Sonny said.

Juju looked surprised.

“You can get any kind of weapon you wish, this city,” he said. “Where you been looking?”

“Well, I had to be discreet.”

“Naturally. But where you been looking?”

“I been asking around.”

“Who you been askin?”

“Point is, Juju, I was wondering you could help me.”

“You want to link me to a gun you goan use in a murder?”

“Who’s talking about any murder?”

“Oh, scuse me, I thought you were planning to do some police officer.”

Juju had been drinking. Otherwise he wouldn’t be talking so loose now. People in the street here were all speaking Spanish, but they understood English fine, and Juju’s voice was too loud. Mention the words “police officer” in this neighborhood, ears went up.

“I don’t know where you got that idea,” Sonny said.

“Maybe from
me
,” Juju said, and burst out laughing.

Sonny laughed with him, faking it along. They were walking north toward the bridge. The crowd was beginning to thin, except for teenyboppers ambling down toward the water for their hand jobs. Behind him, Sonny could hear the laughter trailing, the crowd noises fading. It was a cool, clear, beautiful night.

“Sure, I’ll help you find a piece,” Juju said.

“That’s kind of you, Juje.”

“What I’ll do, I’ll make the initial inquiry, set you up. Then you go do the deal yourself. That way, I’m out of it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

A pair of thirteen-year-olds were standing close together on the rocks down by the water, the girl’s blouse open, the boy’s fly open, too. They saw two big black guys approaching, they zipped up and buttoned up mighty fast, got the hell out of there in a hurry. The men sat on the rocks the kids had vacated. Juju offered Sonny a joint. Sonny shook his head no. Had to stay clear. Had to be cool. Juju lit up. The cloying smell of grass wafted out over the water.

“I’ve been thinkin what you advised me that night in jail,” Sonny said.

He was scoping the area now, making sure there wasn’t anybody else lingering. Two more teenagers were climbing down the bank now. He didn’t have to wave them off. They saw Sonny and Juju sitting there on the rocks, they made an abrupt about-face, moved right on out again. Black power, Sonny thought, and smiled.

“What’s funny?” Juju said, and sucked on the joint. The tip glowed hot in the dark.

“What you said. In jail that night.”

“What’d I say?”

“You said to do it clean, man.”

“Thass right. Why is that funny?”

“Clean piece …”

“We’ll get one for you, don’t worry.”

“… no partners. In, out, been nice to know you.”

“That was good advice, man,” Juju said, and took another hit off the joint.

“But what I realized just recently,” Sonny said, “is I already
got
a partner.”

Juju turned to look at him.

“
You
,” Sonny said. “You the partner. You the only one knows what I’m goan do, man.”

Juju was all at once looking into the barrel of a Desert Eagle.

“Thought you couldn’t find a piece,” he said dryly.

“I found one,” Sonny said.

“Ain’t no need to do this, man,” Juju said. “I’m the one advised you.”

“That’s right.”

“So come on, put away …”

“I’m just
takin
your advice,” Sonny said, and fired two shots into his face.

In this neighborhood, the sound of gunfire was as common as the sound of salsa. Four teenagers, laughing as they came down the bank, heard the shots and immediately turned back. Sonny dragged Juju to the edge of the river.

“Been nice to know you,” he said, and rolled him off the rock wall and into the water.

There was a parking ticket under Sonny’s windshield wiper when he got back to the club. He read the ticket and then tore it up and threw the pieces down the sewer. Rigoberto Mendez was watching him from the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. He told Sonny that Tirana and her bleached blonde hair had gone off with a Dominican who looked very white.

“Where’s Juju?” he asked.

“Last I seen him, he was with some hot babe we met on the street.”

“That’s Juje, all right,” Mendez said.

“That’s him,” Sonny said.

T
HE MORNING STARTED OUT GOOD
. S
ATURDAY, THE TWENTY-NINTH DAY OF
A
UGUST
.

Not too hot, not too muggy. Looked like it was going to be a great day for the beach. Looked like there wouldn’t be too much traffic on the highways leading to the mountains or the beaches; most people who had the wherewithal had got out of the city yesterday afternoon. All in all, it looked good, A distinct change from the night before. Well, the start of the weekend. You had to expect things.

Last night, for example, some kid in a Calm’s Point mall had shot up seven or eight innocent bystanders while trying to target a fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the temerity to quit a violent street gang. The shooter missed her entirely. He also got away. Last night, too, because this was a big city and it was the summertime, and tempers flared during the summer, a man threw another man’s pigeon coop off the roof in an area of the city called Cascabel, which was the Hispanic section of Diamond-back. For good measure, he also threw the owner of the pigeon coop off the roof. Nobody knew what had caused the argument between them.

In another part of the city last night, a kid trying to light a crack pipe had accidentally set fire to his T-shirt, and had ripped off the shirt and tossed it into a corner that unfortunately happened to have a pile of newspapers stacked in it. The papers had caught fire
and caused a consuming blaze in the Riverhead apartment where the kid’s three-month-old sister was asleep in her crib. The little girl suffered third-degree burns all over her body. The kids’ parents had been out dancing.

Also last night, a body came floating in downstream of the Hamilton Bridge on the River Harb, and it was identified as that of a small-time drug dealer and parttime pimp known as Julian “Juju” Judell, who had been arrested for illegal possession only a week earlier, and was out on bail awaiting trial when someone shot him and tossed him in the river. Half his face had been blown away with a high-caliber weapon. The other half had been gnawed away by river rats before the body was discovered under the pilings off Hector Street.

None of this happened in the Eighty-seventh Precinct.

It was a big city.

But on Saturday morning at eight o’clock sharp, because both cops and lab technicians get to work early, Harold Fowles called the Eight-Seven and asked to speak to Detective Meyer Meyer, who had got in some twenty minutes earlier and was drinking a cup of coffee at his desk. Fowles reported that they’d come up roses on the felony-murder suspect, and he gave Meyer a name for the man whose fingerprints he’d lifted from the fire escape. He also gave him an address that was three years old and probably no longer valid.

The good day was starting to go bad.

What Sonny was starting to realize was that except when he was home with the wife and kiddies, Carella was joined at the hip to his partner, the big black cop
whose name Sonny didn’t even know. So unless he wanted to shoot up the whole fuckin police department and Carella’s family besides, he had to catch him either going in the house or coming out of it. Alone. Had to catch the man by his lonesome or a lot of innocent people would suffer. Sonny had no desire to hurt any innocent person.

It never once occurred to him that Carella’s father had been an innocent person who’d been gunned down minding his own business during a holdup. It never occurred to him that Juju Judell had been an innocent person merely imparting wisdom about the ways cops carried grudges over the years. It never occurred to him that Carella—the target of all this surveillance and scrutiny—was himself an innocent person who had, in fact, not blown Sonny away when he’d had the opportunity to do so. None of this occurred to him.

His focus now was in getting the job
done
.

Because, you see, it was beginning to trouble him, the glimpses he had of this man kissing his wife goodbye when he left the house in the morning, the glimpses he had of this man laughing and joking with his partner, the glimpses he had of this man leaving the station house at night, his brow furrowed, his face troubled, like he was deep in thought. This man was beginning to seem like someone he
knew
, someone he might have hung with, the way he felt certain his black partner hung with him when they weren’t out chasing people like Sonny. If circumstances had been a little different he wouldn’t have shot this man’s father—he couldn’t even remember now the series of events leading to the shooting—and wouldn’t now have to take
out Carella himself because he represented a lifelong threat.

That was the whole damn thing of it.

The man had to go because Juju was right, Sonny’d never be able to breathe easy while he was still alive. At the same time, if circumstances were just a little different—

Fuck that noise, circumstances were
not
a little different! Circumstances were what they
were
. Circumstances were what they’d been for Sonny from the day a doctor smacked his black ass and brought him into this fucking white world. The thing had to be done. And it had to be done fast. Before Sonny went all pussy. Before it started going bad.

He didn’t know that it had already started going bad up there in Hightown, where the owner of a social club named Siesta had told a detective from the Eighty-eighth Precinct that the last person they’d seen Juju with was a man named Sonny Cole.

The fingerprints belonged to a man named Leslie Blyden.