Known to Evil

44

Bundy's Barbeque made the hottest sauce in town, and it was only a few blocks away from John Prince's place.

As long as I was waiting for Hush I ordered a big plate of baby back ribs with collard greens and corn bread. They served olive oil with the bread-to cut down on the glut of trans fats, I guess.

I was feeling emotional, like an army reserve corporal who is playing badminton in the backyard with his daughters one day and in the field in Afghanistan the next.

"You sure know how to get into trouble, don't you, LT?" an unmistakable deep voice rumbled.

He was sliding into the opposite side of the booth.

Hush always wore a dark suit and a monochrome tie. There was a spark of excitement in his usually expressionless eyes.

"What?" I asked.

He held out his phone screen with the picture of the dumpy little man on it.

"You remember I told you about a guy named Patrick?"

Hush liked Bundy's because the booth we preferred to sit in was removed from the rest. It was in the back, near the toilet, and was usually the last place anyone wanted to sit.

"This little guy?" I said.

"He's a stone killer, LT. Either walk away or ice him now."

I pretended to think about his words for a few beats, and then said, "You want some ribs?"

Hush let his spine slap against the navy-blue backrest of his bench. A smile, like a jittery mosquito, flitted across his face.

"I know you try to stay away from me, LT," he said. "I know you want a different kind of life. But once you've seen the battlefield you can't pretend that it doesn't exist."

"I'm not tryin' to hide from anything, man. I got a job to do and killing some guy I never met is not in the description."

"I could take a walk down that street," he offered.

"I need him alive."

"Like a cobra needs a mongoose."

"Like the Scarecrow needs a brain."

Again Hush's smile flittered. He slid to his right and stood in an unbroken motion.

"Call me if you have to, Leonid. If Patrick's involved, I can tell you that this is too deep for you alone."

"I got your number."

I'D BROKEN THE LOCK on my lookout building's front door to allow easy access. That night spent on the slanted roof was peaceful. The November chill was bracing and the threat of the man below was like a promise. He, too, felt that Angie was near.

I was the stalker stalking the stalker stalking, like a lone hyena fixed on the spoor of a lion.

At three in the morning I entered a number.

"Hello," he said in a low, guarded tone. You could hardly discern the Spanish accent.

"Diego."

"Brother man."

"Where are you?"

"Down where Indian blood runs pure and often."

DIEGO WAS A CITIZEN of the Third World. I'd met him when a New York crime boss wanted me to do some divorce work for a movie-star friend of his out in Los Angeles. The target, a minor actress, was half Mexican, from L.A.'s barrio. I was teamed up with Diego to make sure the woman would have more trouble than it was worth in a court. She had a brother who was wild. His name was Valentin. Diego and I made sure that Valentin was caught with evidence linking him to the drug trade and very possibly to a string of killings. There was evidence to clear him, but only we had it.

We paved the way for Tony "the Suit" to offer his aid.

That was back when I was working the dark side of the street.

Diego was a phantom no one knew and few remembered. He had done some import-export work for my employer but we became friends over the job.

"I am what they didn't see when they used to look at your people," Diego had once told me.

"I see you just fine," was my reply.

"WHAT CAN I DO for you, LT?" Diego asked over the phone. I heard the loud screech of a bird in the background.

"I'm told by someone I trust that I might need some serious help," I said.

"What kind of help?"

"I need a face that no one here knows."

"What time is it where you are, amigo?"

"Three oh three in the morning."

"I can be to you by midnight. How long?"

"Three days, tops."

"Okay."

"I got five thousand."

"I'll need seven."

"See you then."

NOT FOR THE FIRST time, I wondered about my commitment to leave the criminal life behind. I worked among killers and thieves, made my livelihood from the fact of their existence. I breathed their air and shared their stench. How could I ever stay on the straight and narrow with a length of chain behind me that would put Dickens's Marley to shame?

Diego and Hush (who was retired but not reformed), and Alphonse Rinaldo, for that matter, were all part of the dark matter that was the glue holding together the known, and unsuspecting, world. I was a free-floating radical that sometimes tended the connection between the lightness and this dark.

AT FIVE-THIRTY IN THE morning I clambered downstairs and took a cab to my office.

I'm no Sherlock Holmes. I can't read cigarette ash or pretend to have the most important and up-to-date forensic science stored in my lobes. Neither am I a master of disguises or dialects.

But I do own a ski hat and an old dark-green trench coat that smells strongly of sour sweat-and other human scents. I have a pair of worn-out boots and tattered cotton gloves. And the past few days had produced the grizzled salt-and-pepper beginnings of a beard.

Add to these a pair of plain-glass, thick-rimmed spectacles, and even a Superman like me can be transformed into a down-at-heels black Clark Kent.

"HEY, YOU!" A MAN shouted in the first-floor entrance hall of the Tesla Building. "What are you doing here?"

"Hey, Warren," I said to the building's security guard. "It's me."

"Mr. McGill? What's, what's wrong, sir?"

"It's that damn economic downturn," I said. "Cutting expenses left and right."

The handsome black and Chinese Jamaican stared at me, trying to make sense of the presentation. I smiled at him and shambled out the revolving door.

My heart was fluttering and the morning was just shedding night.