It was a city located on the extreme southern tip of Southwest Alabama. The population was somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand. Besides farming, the major industry consisted of a few textile and paper mills. The year was 1984; the time Orwell predicted a major social upheaval. It was not quite that drastic, but a new breeze was blowing through the town.
It was past sundown and natural light was slowly fading away. In the wooded area the trees made it seem a bit darker. The fairly secluded area was uneven in its density because some trees had been cut for paper wood.
The battered Chevy has navigated the very bumpy dirt road and then turned off several feet onto a road that now led to nowhere.
Two people occupied the back seat of the Chevy. A shapely young woman’s face was distorted as she moaned and cooed. Her only clothing was a pair of tight-fitting shorts. The pimply-faced young man next to her stroked her full breasts.
“Oh honey, let’s do it now,” she purred.
The woman searched out the zipper of her lover’s pants. In no time at all she had released his huge erection. Standing, she undid her shorts and wiggled out of them.
“How do you like my goodies?” she asked with a smirk.
“You know I love it darling.”
“You better say that.”
Grinning slightly, the woman flopped down and made a perfect connection. At twenty-two, she was five years older than her boy friend. She was allowed to control their love making any time she felt the need to. On top, staring out the rear window of the car at the rows of pines, she thrust her body up and down quickly, enjoyed the sensation of her breasts being fondled, slowed the pace, and then picked it up on route to a satisfying orgasm.
The woman eased back and leaned against the dividing seat. “Hey, want your cock sucked?”
“Sure do now,” mumbled the young man.
“Well you won’t get it.”
Gleefully, the woman pulled up her pants and scooted out the car, bare breasts and all.
“What are you doing, girl?”
“Come and get me. Get me before I yell stop, and I’ll suck you til it falls off.”
The woman crossed the road and skipped several feet into the woods and ducked behind a tree. In the car the man sighed and fastened his pants. He left the car and headed in the direction the woman has taken. As he neared the tree the woman darted away and began trotting through the spaced out trees.
“Come and get me. Come and get me,” she called out.
She skipped about and cut loose running at about mid-speed.
Reluctantly, the man trailed after her.
The young woman was so into the power she held over her lover she didn’t pay any attention to where she was running other than avoiding the trees. When he came after her faster she became careless. She didn’t notice the muddy, marshy land she treaded upon. Before she realized it she had sank into the mud and it was almost up to her bare knees.
“Oh. Damn! How did I git in here?” she exclaimed.
The man arrived on the scene and laughed at what he saw. “Hey, what are you doing in all that mud?”
“Come help me outta here.”
“Hell naw. I ain’t gitting down in that mud. Git out the best way you can.”
Angry, the woman attempted to pull herself out of the mud, but found that he leg was caught.
“Shit, you can’t fool me with that one.”
“I ain’t playing now. I really can’t git the hell outta here.”
“Aw hell.”
The young man came out of his shoes and rolled his pants legs up as high as he could get them. Timidly, he sank down into the muddy earth and hauled himself over to his lover. He grabbed hold of her right arm and tried to yank her toward him.
“That crap ain’t gonna work. My goddamn foot is caught.”
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
The young man dug his hands down into the earth near the woman’s left foot. He touched something that felt like cloth. It seemed to be partially twisted around the woman’s ankle. He did his best to untwist it.
“Now pull your foot.”
The woman’s foot came free and she was able to raise it off the ground. The man kept feeling the object the foot had been hung up by. He fumbled around and then jerked his muddied hand upward. In his palm he held an earth-coated suit coat button. He slid his hand over a bit further.
“Oh shit, this can’t be what I think it is.”
“What?”
Not answering, the man moved a foot or so to the left. He planted both hands into the earth again until he felt something solid. He yanked as hard as it took. A pale white hand was attached to a blue suit coat.
When the woman eyed it she freaked and fled the muddy area as quickly as she could. On solid ground she flopped to a sitting position and covered her eyes with a pair of muddy hands.
It didn’t take long for the secluded area to become engulfed in a flurry of activity. After the discovery the young couple hurried back to their car. First they used the remainder of their ice water to clean themselves. They made it to a nearby house and reported their discovery to the police.
The first authorities on the scene were a pair of uniformed patrolmen. The couple guided them to the location of the body. They sized up the situation and radioed in for the necessary help.
The road that had once led to a mini-lover’s lane now led to the scene of a tragic loss of life.
The headlights belonging to a green Ford lit up the bumpy road. The Ford parked behind marked and unmarked police vehicles and a police ambulance. A uniformed officer carrying a heavy duty flashlight was standing at the turn off to the road leading to nowhere. He called out to the officer in the ambulance.
A pair of plain clothes officers left the Ford. The eldest was of average height and a bit stocky. Although he was only in his mid-fifties, his hair had gone completely white. His forehead was wrinkled and he had bags under his eyes. Yet there was still fire in his dark, narrow eyes. His name was Henry Clayton. He was the chief of police.
The uniformed cops, the detective, and Chief Clayton came together in the same spot.
“Chief,” the officer with the flashlight said. “Uh, it’s out this way.”
“Well. Let’s get to it.”
The officer with the flashlight led the way, shining the beam on the ground. No one spoke during the short journey. Marching toward death sometimes made a person lose their desire for conversation.
At the scene of the discovery the body had been pulled from its muddy grave. A canvas sheet now covered it. On the scene were the two original uniformed officers, a medical examiner, and a detective.
The city’s police department didn’t have a specific Vice division. It just assigned members of the Special Investigations unit to the task of battling an ever-growing drug problem. One member of the unit was David James, a tall slender, pinch-faced man in his thirties.
When James saw the group approaching he moved out to meet them. “Chief, uh, we just lost a damned good man.”
“Then you’re sure it’s Bobby.”
“Yeah. It’s a damn shame. A damn shame.”
The medical examiner joined them. “Hey Henry.”
“Jack. What can you tell me?”
“Not much. He’s probably been dead two or three days. It looks like he might’ve been shot in the back of the head a couple times.”
James said: “I heard from him three days ago. He said the set up was going smoothly.”
The chief lowered his head. “An execution. It was that bastard Killerbrew. I know it. I’m gonna burn his ass sooner or later.”
Alone in the car, Chief Clayton drove slowly toward a residential section on the edge of the city. He parked in front of a one story house covered with light green aluminum siding. He left the car, approached the house, and rang the doorbell.
In a few seconds, Janice Carlton, the woman Bobby Wallace had lived with, answered the door. She was a plumpish woman with innocent, little girl type features. She wore a robe over her pajamas.
“Chief. I wondered who it was at this hour. Is there-”
“May I come in?”
Janice stepped back and allowed Chief Clayton to step into the living room. “This has to do with Bobby, doesn’t it? Did something happen to him? Has he been injured?”
“Uh. We just found his body a little while ago.”
It appeared as though Janice was going to take the news in stride. But then she moved in the direction of an end table and slapped all the articles to the floor.
“Damn him! Damn him!” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “I told him to stop playing around with them damned criminals. But he wouldn’t do it, though. He loved it. You tell me why. Can you?”
The chief felt like his heart was going to burst from his chest.
Muriel Clayton, Chief Clayton’s wife of almost thirty years, moved to answer the ringing doorbell. She was the type of attractive woman that aged gracefully.
From the moment she opened the door and saw her husband’s expression she knew things hadn’t gone well. She had over twenty years of experience at being a cop’s wife. Most of that time was spent in New York where Henry Clayton had worked his way up from patrolman to Captain in various divisions. There had been talk of him advancing higher in the department, but he had hated inter-departmental politics, and avoided it as much as possible.
When Chief Clayton retired after twenty years on the force he took a job at a security firm. He quickly realized it wasn’t work that suited him. After a year of doing little or nothing he received an offer from a first cousin who had been elected mayor of an Alabama town. He took the job as police chief mainly because it would get him back in law enforcement at what he perceived would be a slower pace than what he had been accustomed to in New York. In the first year or so his perception had been correct. But in recent months the problem of drug abuse and related crimes began to soar at an alarming rate. He had attempted to combat the problem with more funds and better training of officers. There was some success but not enough to quell the problem. And now within the space of four months one undercover officer had been seriously injured, and later resigned from the force, and another had been murdered.
The chief had crossed the room and taken a seat in his all time favorite overstuffed easy chair. He sipped from the scotch and water he held in his hand.
Chief Clayton had come to the conclusion that the city’s problem with drugs had reached the critical stage. If something wasn’t done soon he felt things could completely spiral out of control that way it had happened in the large urban areas throughout the country. Still, foremost in his mind was a man called Killerbrew. He knew Killerbrew was the man behind the injury of one undercover cop and the death of another. He knew he didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with either crime. Yet he was determined to nail him and his people for anything he could. He knew what was needed was strong, decisive action. The only stumbling block was choosing the course of action that was the absolute best.
He was a thirty-three year-old black man, slender and just under six feet tall. His hair was of medium length, and he had semi-long side burns, and a fairly thick mustache. He had the kind of features, depending on how he presented himself, that could give off the air of being conservative and studious, or hard-nosed and mean, or anything between those extremes.
He stood in front of the dresser mirror in the bedroom. He was putting the finishing touches on his work outfit. He wore a cream-colored crew neck shirt, a flashy black sports jacket with gray trim. His final touch was the solid gold ring he slipped on his finger. He opened the dresser drawer and came out with a silver-plated .22 automatic. He stuck it in his belt so that his jacket would hide it from view. Victor Nance was ready for work.
In the medium-sized house’s living room, Lillian Nance was seated on the sofa reading the evening newspaper. She was a petite, shapely light=skinned black woman with shoulder length jet black hair, a pug nose, smallish mouth, and arching eye brows over dreamy brown eyes.
Victor entered the room. “Hey baby. How do I look?”
Lillian lowered her paper and said: “Like some common street thug that thinks he’s cute.”
“Hey, that’s the part I’m playing, baby.”
“You call it playing. I call it dangerous.”
“Aw baby. Don’t you think I’m a pro? Don’t you.....Aw forget it. I have to go.”
Nance opened the door and moved to the enclosed front porch. In his mind he cursed himself for speaking to his wife at all.
Her feelings about him working undercover had soured since he barely missed being shot in the face by a crazed drug dealer he had been attempting to arrest. She had wanted him to get out of Vice, but he still couldn’t bring himself to do it, even though it was having an adverse effect on his marriage.
Three minutes later a dark green compact parked in front of the house. Nance exited the house, locking the door behind him. He moved to the car and got in the front seat with his partner.
Danny Martin was at the wheel of the car. He was a stocky, dark-skinned bearded black man.
“I see you dressed to kill and ready to go,” Danny said.
“Always am.”
“Well let’s get to it then.”
The car pulled out onto the streets of Gary Indiana, a city known as a major producer of U.S steel, and being the home town of Michael Jackson.
“Are you nervous about this one?” Danny asked.
“Naw. It’s under control.”
“What would get me is it’s gonna be three of them, and they want you to show up alone.”
“The street vines says those dudes ain’t known for pulling rips.”
“Yeah, But you never know when they’re going to start.”
“I’ll have my antenna out.”
As it turned out the location of the buy was only a couple blocks from the home of one of the detectives working on the case. So they decided to use his garage for their base of operations.
Danny swung the car into an alley and continued to the middle of the block. Two other cars were already parked near a gray brick garage with a metal door. Danny eased in behind them.
“The boys are already here.”
Nance checked his watch. “Yeah. We better get going.”
They left the car and started up the narrow walk that ran parallel to the garage. At the garage door Danny knocked hard three times. The face of the garage owner, a tall black detective, appeared at the door glass. It was opened and Danny and Nance stepped inside. A balding white detective and a smallish latino detective were also present.
Tools, auto supplies, and house and garden equipment were along the walls in the garage. A card table had been set up near the center of the room. Resting upon it was a cardboard box and a gym equipment bag.
“You dudes got here almost on time,” the black detective said.
“We better get right to it,” the latino detective added.
They all moved toward the table. Nance removed his jacket and handed it to the white detective. He took off his shirt and gave it to Danny. The Latin detective opened the cardboard box and revealed a standard body mike used by the police. The mike was wrapped around Nance’s torso and held in place with adhesive tape.
“The money is in the bag,” said the latino detective. “Remember the deal now. When you’re ready for the deal to go down mention the word high. And if it breaks down say something like what is this. Or what’s going on.”
“Gotcha.”
“We’ll cover the front and back. And the black and whites in the area will be standing by.”
Nance reached out to reclaim his shirt.
Outside in the alley, Nance went alone to the compact with the gym bag in his hand. The plan was for Nance to go ahead first and have the others follow on his heels. At a red traffic light he had stopped for, Nance activated a walkie talkie and said:
“Hey, I’m ready to test the wire.”
“Go ahead baby,” Danny’s voice said from the walkie talkie.
Nance broke off into a few bars of My Girl by the Temptations.
“Did y’all get all that?”
“Loud and clear. Unfortunately. You all right, brother.”
One more block down and a couple to the right put Nance near a small red brick house built close to the ground. Where the house was positioned put it just as far from the street as it was from the alley.
Nance sat quietly in the car for about two minutes. He left the car with the gym bag in his left hand. He wanted to keep his right hand free in case he had a draw his weapon.
Over a period of five weeks Nance had purchased first a hundred dollars worth of uppers, downers, and heroin substitutes from the inhabitants of the house. His second buy was for two hundred, and now the clincher would be for five hundred.
When Nance reached the house he knocked on the door hard once, hesitated, and then rapped on it twice in rapid succession.
The sound of a couple locks being clicked open could be heard. The door swung open and there stood a dark-skinned, muscular black man called Ace.
“Vic my man.”
“Ace the ace.”
“Come on in and let’s get the show on the road.”
Nance stepped inside. Ace shut the door and secured the pair of bolt locks.
The lay out of the house was such that the living room led directly into the dining room with adjoining rooms on either side.
Seated at the dining room table playing cards was a slender caramel complexioned man with a Michael Jackson haircut. Across from him was a skinny pallid looking woman with spaced out eyes.
“Let’s go. I’ll git the shit.”
“Ha. You’re a poet and don’t know it.”
Ace moved across the room and went into an adjoining bedroom. Nance continued on to the dining room.
“What’s happening y’all?”
“Hey baby,” the woman said, flashing a smile that did little to improve her features.
“Who’s winning?”
“This bitch just done got lucky,” the man said.
“I must git lucky all the time cause I sure do kick your ass in cards a lot.”
She cackled with laughter. He turned the cards in his hand face down on the table top.
“Aw, let’s put it to rest, bitch. Did you check out the play-off game last night?”
“Yeah.”
“That Bird is a tough white boy, ain’t he?”
“Yeah. Especially when he’s hitting from outside. They still could’ve lost if they didn’t get some breaks on calls at the end of the game.”
“Boston always gets them calls. I don’t like’em that much myself, but I got a chance of winning a double quarter off of ‘em.”
Ace entered the room carrying a shoe box. He placed it on the other side of the table from where the card players were seated.
“Here it is my man.”
“Yeah.” Nance unzipped the gym bag and tossed an envelope of money on the table top. “You can count it.”
“Naw, I trust you.” Ace opened the box containing several small plastic containers of pills. “Here it is, baby.”
“Well all right. It’s gonna be some flying high pretty soon.”
Nance was deliberate in the way he transferred the bottles from the box to the bag. A loud, booming sound came from the rear of the house.
“What the fuck is that?” exclaimed the woman.
“Either a bust or a rip,” the man replied.
Everyone’s moments accelerated. Nance backed toward the living room. The woman exploded from the table and made a bee line to the front door. The man followed her and then peeled off to an end table. Ace held his ground as if he was calculating which move to make. The woman reached the door just as the first lock on the door was busted open by a sledge hammer. The noise of the blow froze her in her tracks. Ace heard the detective coming from the rear as they made their approach and decided he should dart into an adjoining bedroom. Nance took off after him. The man with the Michael Jackson hair scrambled to gain possession of a Saturday Night Special type revolver from the end table drawer. By the time he did the second lock had been smashed open and the latino cop roared in toting a shot gun.
“Put it down, brother!” barked the latino cop.
The man dropped the gun to the floor.
In the bedroom, Ace scrambled to get a window open. Nance drew his gun and pointed it at him.
“Freeze it, Ace!”
Ace looked back over his shoulder. “What the hell are you talking about, man? We gotta split.”
“You do. But I don’t.”
“What?” A look of recognition came to his face. “Dammit! You’re a motherfucking pig-assed cop.”
“Up against the wall, shithead!” snarled Nance.
By the time the group of detectives had left the premises they had confiscated a good quantity of pills, a fair amount of marijuana, a couple revolvers, a .45 automatic, sawed off shot gun, and assorted knives, brass knuckles, and blunt instruments. It was a good bust.
Danny was at the wheel of the compact and Nance was in the front seat next to him. They headed for Nance’s place. Danny said:
“You still planning on taking your vacation this summer?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t really thought about it.”
“You better start. The way you been talking about how you and your lady been having trouble. See, what you got to do is whisk her off somewhere nice like Vegas. Or better yet, take her to some little island where all you have to do is screw and eat and party and sleep and screw some more. You get her in a well-screwed mood, and she’ll forget about all the problems y’all been having.”
“Yeah. For how long? We might be better off taking separate vacations.”
“Forget that, man. That’s a bad move. Bad, bad, bad. Very bad.”
When Nance returned home the only light in the house came from a night light along the wall in the living room. He crossed the room to the hallway, stopped and removed his shoes before entering the bedroom. Lillian was in bed asleep. Nance noticed she was still wearing flannel pajamas even though the weather was getting warmer.
“Maybe we are in trouble,” he whispered to himself.
He sat his shoes down carefully and took off his pants and shorts. He went to the closet and got his pajama bottom. The closet door always had a squeak to it. By the time he slipped the bottom on Lillian had awakened and snapped on the lamp near the bed. She said:
“I hope you’re not going to hop in bed without washing up after you done been sniffing around a bunch of dope fiends. I guess you did whatever you had to do okay.”
“If you were so concerned why didn’t you wait up for me?”
Lillian sat more erect in bed. “I had to take a pill to calm down and go to sleep. You know that.”
“Lillian, why do we keep going through this? Why do you put down what I do all the time?”
“I used to think I could get you to leave that undercover mess alone. Now I. I don’t know why you keep doing it.”
Nance moved closer to the bed. “Baby. Can’t you see? I’m good at what I do. I can handle whatever comes up.”
Lillian slammed her fist down upon the bed. “Dammit Victor. Do you think I’m a fool? The streets are full of crazies. How long will it be before some drug dealing degenerate blows your head off? Damn! I can’t take this.”
“You knew I was a cop when you married me.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t expect this.”
“Well maybe we should just.......Uh, I’m gonna sleep on the sofa tonight.”
“I won’t miss you.”
Nance turned to leave. By the time he reached the door the room had gone black.
The city park was located on the South Side of Chicago. It wasn’t in terrible shape, but it wasn’t in great shape either.
The basketball courts were in good condition, but the tennis courts had so many
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.01.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-7730-9
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