Wolf Hour

17 Amigo, October 2016

The time was six in the evening and the sun hung low over the rooftops of Phillips.

Bob had parked by the playground at Bloomington. He sat eating a hamburger in the Volvo and watched the deal going down outside a nearby house. The same three as before. The Latino in the porkpie hat was clearly running the operation. Rich people from the suburbs in the west often drove to these northern neighbourhoods, like Jordan, to buy grass, or coke or meth. Here in Phillips customers tended to be local. And the goods harder. Heroin. Crack. It looked like that was what was going down here. The same pas de trois each time a customer showed up. A few words exchanged, banknotes, small deals changing hands, fists closed to hide as much as possible and always orchestrated in such a way that the notes and the dope were never held by one person at the same time, since the penalty for selling dope was higher than for giving it away, so the one dealing the dope could always claim he’d given it away if no one ever actually saw him taking the money.

Bob chewed down the last morsel, dried his fingers on the paper towel and started the car.

He drove up to the corner and climbed out.

‘Police,’ he said loudly, holding up the ID card and a pair of handcuffs he’d rescued from one of the packing cases in his apartment. ‘Face the wall. Anyone makes a run for it gets shot.’

The three stared, first at Bob, then to left and right, clearly astonished to see that he was alone.

‘Now!’ Bob shouted.

Reluctantly they turned, put their hands against the wall and spread their legs. Bob approached the oldest of them, knocked the porkpie hat off his head and jerked his left arm, forcing him up against the wall. Then the right arm, and then holding both wrists behind his back handcuffed him.

‘Jamar Clark.’

The words were spoken quietly, but Bob turned toward the young black kid who had spoken.

‘What did you say?’

The boy gave Bob a hate-filled stare but didn’t reply. A couple of years ago Jamar Clark, a black man, had been shot and killed by the MPD during an arrest, and the people who wanted to start a riot spread the word that it had happened while Clark was handcuffed. Bob didn’t doubt for a moment that MPD’s reputation for brutality and racism was well deserved, you just had to listen to Hanson and Kjos when they enthusiastically quoted Donald Trump’s expressed view that the police ought to be tougher with people they arrested; but not even the MPD would kill defenceless people.

‘Here.’

Bob led Porkpie Hat over to the passenger side of the car and helped him into the front seat and — without irony — made sure he didn’t bang his head on the roof as he got in. He fastened the seat belt over him, then got into the driver’s side and drove off.

‘What the fuck is this?’ said the man. His accent suggested Mexico, just as Bob had been hoping. Bob pressed a finger to his lips.

‘Fuck this, man!’ Porkpie screamed.

Three blocks later Bob turned into a quiet street and stopped.

‘I need a little information, amigo.’

‘Amigo my ass!’

‘OK, but I still need information.’

‘I thought you had snitches for that. Or did we kill them all?’ Three front teeth were missing from the man’s wide grin.

‘Now listen good,’ said Bob. ‘I don’t have a lot of time, so here is my offer, probably the best one you’ll get in the course of your probably short life.’

‘I ain’t saying a word to you, fucking asshole cop!’

‘Oh but you will. Because I’m offering you the perfect incentive, which is a fancy word for carrot. Comprende?’

The man’s eyes flashed.

‘I’m not threatening you with prison, I’m not threatening to beat you, I’m not threatening you with what will happen to your kid brother who’s doing time in MCF.’

‘I don’t have no kid brother, you prick!’

‘All I’m doing is offering you this.’

Bob tossed a bundle of something with an elastic band around it onto the dashboard. The man in the passenger seat stared at the long-dead general and president whose portrait adorned the fifty-dollar banknote.

‘There’s two thousand dollars there,’ said Bob. ‘Go ahead and count it.’

The man looked at him with a well-ain’t-you-a-funny-guy look on his face, his jaws working furiously.

‘Oh, sorry, I forgot, you’re in handcuffs,’ said Bob.

The man worked his jaw a little more and then spat. A yellowish globule that coated the general’s serious face.

‘If that’s a rejection then I’m going to ask you to think again,’ said Bob. ‘You make three dollars an hour for getting shot at by gangs, robbed by customers, arrested by guys like me, and now I’m offering you this for what they’re gonna guess I got from you anyway. Because in five minutes’ time I’m going to drive you back there and drop you off without a mark on you, and I’ll be calling out a cheery “thank you” as I drive away. I leave it up to you to work out what your buddies will think I’ve got out of you. And what the consequences will be. So it’s up to you if you want paying for them or not.’

The man looked at Bob. He blinked as his brain tried to process what this asshole cop had just said to him. Bob waited.

‘What d’you wanna know?’ the man grunted.

‘Tell me about Tomás Gomez.’

‘Who?’

Bob sighed. ‘I didn’t exactly pick you because you’re the best-looking or the smartest, I picked you because you’re obviously the oldest. And maybe from south of the border. So dig around, go back a few years in your mind and recall Tomás Gomez. It’s not like you’re snitching on one of your own.’

‘What would you know about that?’

‘Gomez isn’t X-11 any more. He bailed out, right?’

‘There’s lots of people bail out, that don’t mean we snitch on them.’

‘That brings us back to the two thousand, amigo.’

The man looked at the money on the dashboard. Bob waited. Let the gravitational pull of logic do its work. Finally the man gave a heavy sigh. ‘He came over from south of the border some years back. Called himself Lobo.’

‘Wolf?’

‘As in lone wolf. Kept himself to himself, a real loner. But he might just as well have called himself Loco. He didn’t say much, but according to rumour he’d worked for one of the cartels down there, killed a lot of people, the police put a price on his head. Gang boss didn’t believe none of it, I mean, Lobo was just a kid, so he gave him an Uzi and told him to go shoot some of the competition. Lobo went straight to a Black Wolves party, shot the whole thing up.’

‘Hang on. You mean the Lobo?’

‘Well, I dunno, I only know one Lobo.’

Bob stared at the other man. Lobo. The Uzi man. Bob recalled the tales he had heard about the guy when he was starting out in the police, a ghost that showed up and vanished again in the mid-nineties and left nothing behind but a trail of blood. Since the blood in question was gang blood, MPD’s hunt for him had been a half-hearted affair. And when Lobo dropped off the radar MPD concluded that he’d probably been killed and most probably by one of his own and they dropped the whole thing.

‘Go on,’ said Bob.

‘After that Lobo was the security boss’s right hand. But he was too crazy, he had no discipline, he went ahead and mowed down people from other gangs, even when they weren’t even threatening our territory. So they had to take revenge, and that meant gang wars, people going down on both sides, bad for business for everybody. So the bosses took Lobo off the barricades and put him in charge of internal security.’

‘Entailing what?’

‘Checking that no one’s taking money from the counting room or dope from the cutting room, stuff like that. Lobo did a good job. He uncovered not just thieving but snitching too. We had to terminate a lot of guys we’d been trusting blind. Then some of our own people started getting it, Lobo said they’d drawn on him once they knew he was on to them. It happened a few too many times, so the bosses decided they couldn’t have Lobo in the gang no more. They threw him out.’

‘So they didn’t kill him?’

The man shrugged. ‘Lobo always said he was still on the payroll of that cartel he was working for back where he came from. Our bosses were scared to have them breathing down our necks. You said five minutes, pig. If I’m gone much longer the boss is going to think I’ve been giving you fucking state secrets.’

‘OK. So what happened to Gomez?’

‘How the hell should I know? Try south of the border.’

‘You know who Marco Dante is?’

‘No.’

‘Stupid question. You know who he is, and you know he got shot yesterday. Did you hear the news that it was Gomez that shot him?’

‘Like I told you, all I know is that Lobo was plumb crazy. Drive me back.’

‘Last question. Did Dante sell guns to X-11?’

‘I guess he must have sold to every gang that some time or other had the territory where his garage is. So yeah, sure.’

‘Well then, thank you. Lean forward.’ Bob unlocked the handcuffs. ‘You can walk.’

‘Walk?’

‘Do I look like a taxi driver?’

The pusher reached for the bundle of notes but Bob was quicker and grabbed it.

‘Hey!’

‘Just the top one,’ said Bob, pulling out the fifty and handing the bundle to the man, who sat staring down at the pile of newspaper strips in his hand.

‘What the fuck?’

‘You don’t think we’d pay two thousand for a little general information I could’ve got for a packet of cigarettes down at the MCF, or free from a snitch? You’d be better off reading these Situations Vacant.’ Bob pressed the bundle down into the man’s hand. ‘At least they pay minimum wage, unlike X—’

‘I’ll be coming after you and I’ll shoot you down, you fucking pig.’

Bob nodded slowly as he looked out of the windshield. ‘You know what? I have actually considered that possibility. But I decided you won’t be looking for revenge. Know why? It’s a question of economic behavioural psychology. Want to hear?’

Bob turned to the pusher, who now looked more surprised than angry.

‘Because your disappointment has its limits. Behavioural research shows that our reaction to not getting the dollar we’ve just been promised is less negative than losing the dollar we already have in our pocket. I haven’t stolen from you, so you have no economic or moral incentive to kill me. And you have no social motive, since I haven’t publicly humiliated you either, just here, between you and me. See, so you learned something new today as well! Have a profitable evening, amigo.’

He leaned across the man and pushed open the car door.

As Bob drove off he saw the man diminishing in his rear-view mirror. He stood there, arms dangling by his side, and seemed to be shouting something after the Volvo.