Desperate Souls (27 page)

“So if you had taken salt with us to the Point, we could have poured it on each doorway, and they couldn’t have chased us?”

“Good point. Of course, I would have had to explain everything to you then, and I needed you to see things with your own eyes.” Jake lowered the wadded underwear, revealing his wound to Edgar, who recoiled. “Seeing is believing.”

“Jesus!”

“AK managed to get in one good lick before I bird brained him.”

Leaning closer, Edgar inspected the injury, his lips peeled back in a grimace.

“That look on your face isn’t making me feel any better.”

“You have to go to an emergency room.”

“Yeah, that’s near the top of my to-do list. But I don’t want to leave a corpse in here. I do have office help.”

“You don’t seem very concerned about”—he gestured with his hand—“this …”

“There’s no saving this eye, and since I’m not bleeding to death, I can afford to prioritize my crises.”

“You still carrying that hand on you?” Shaking his head, Jake pointed at the safe.

“Then let’s get out of here. Give me an extra key and your alarm codes. I’ll take you to Saint Vincent’s, then come back here and deal with this stiff.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Edgar pulled over in front of Saint Vincent’s emergency room on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue, an unhappy look on his face. “You took a gypsy cab here after some punk tried to rob you and stabbed you in the eye. You only called me to tell me what happened.”

“Understood. Are you going straight back to my office?”

“No. I’m going to need some tools.”

Jake let that statement stand by itself. “Thanks,” he said, opening the car door.

“Stay alive.”

“You, too.”

Edgar drove off, and Jake sauntered into the emergency room, where he saw scarecrows, homeless people, and generally miserable-looking individuals sitting with impatient scowls on their faces. He gathered that many of them had already been here for a long time. Passing the security guard, his underwear still pressed against his eye, he scrawled his name on a sign-in sheet on a clipboard and stood before a heavyset woman seated behind a glass partition.

Looking up at him with disinterested eyes, the woman said, “Can I help you?”

“I’ve been stabbed in my eye, and I need immediate attention.”

“Please have a seat, and we’ll call you in a few minutes.”

“There are no seats.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Fuck this.
“I said, I’ve been stabbed in the eye, and I need immediate attention.” Removing his balled-up underwear, he revealed his wound to the woman and leaned against the glass despite the pain.

The woman turned white at the sight of the nasty stain he left on her partition.

“Excuse me, sir.” The voice came from behind Jake.
The security guard.

Rather than deal with another tool of the medical system, he closed his good eye and collapsed onto the floor.

“Oh, shit!” someone said in the waiting area.

“Call some orderlies!” the guard said to the woman behind the glass.

That’s more like it.

The orderlies rushed Jake into an examining room.

“He got stabbed in the eye,” one of them said, “and he just passed out in the waiting area.”

The physician, an Indian man, examined Jake’s lacerated eyelid. “Can you open your eye?”

“No,” Jake said, the smelling salts that he hadn’t really needed still burning his nostrils. “There’s nothing left in there to repair anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw pieces of white on the sidewalk and on the knife of the scarecrow who attacked me.”

Reaching forward and leaning close, the physician used his thumb and forefinger to force Jake’s eyelid open. “This is going to hurt…”

No shit.
Jake screamed, but the physician took his time inspecting Jake’s ruptured organ.

“Did you take anything for the pain?”

Just four Tylenols.
“No,” he said, gasping.
Load me up, boys.

“I’m afraid you’re right. That eye is going to have to come out. The procedure is called enucleation surgery and involves disconnecting muscles from your damaged eye.”

“Great. Can I have some drugs now?”

“You’ll be under anesthesia soon enough.”

Damn.
Jake grabbed the doctor’s nearest wrist. “Do whatever you have to do. Just make sure that whoever does the job takes the right one out, and by the ‘right one,’ I mean the left one. I don’t want any screwups; do you understand? I can’t afford to lose both eyes.”

The physician offered him a sympathetic smile. “I understand your concern. It’s normal in this situation. The nurses and surgeons will take numerous precautions so that no mistakes occur. Frankly, looking at this particular injury, there is very little possibility of error.” He turned to the orderlies. “Take him to prep.”

They wheeled Jake out of the examining room.

Jake had never undergone surgery before. Lying on his back in the operating room, he watched in fascination as the nurses made preparations on behalf of the surgeons. Their blue surgical scrubs and gleaming silver equipment made him feel as if he had been taken aboard an alien spaceship. More personnel filed into the operating chamber. A male nurse hooked his arm up to an IV.

“What’s that?”

“Your anesthesia.”

Thank Christ.

A short man with glasses stepped forward. “Mr. Helman, I’m Dr. Fisher. You’re in excellent hands, if I say so myself.”

“Just don’t fuck up my good eye by mistake, or I’ll hire someone to fuck up yours.”

The doctor blinked. “I promise. You’ll be out in another minute. While you’re unconscious, the anesthesiologist will snake a breathing tube down your throat. When you wake up in a couple of hours, you’ll feel sore there as well.”

Jake’s vision turned blurry, and Dr. Fisher’s voice grew distant. He wondered how Edgar was faring with his cleanup operation, then forgot all about him. “More drugs …”

For the first time he could remember, Papa Joe tasted fear. Not fear of dying—that came with the business he had chosen or that had chosen him. No, he feared losing those things that meant the most to him: his position in the world, his family, and the respect of those who knew the streets. At forty-four, he’d enjoyed a good, long run, six of them at the top of the heap. He knew it was inevitable that someone would dethrone him; he just hated that it was going to be his nephew, Daryl, who he refused to call Malachai, let alone Prince Malachai.

In the last three months, his six chief competitors had all been slain or had vanished, which amounted to the same thing. In the short term, his own business increased several times over, which meant good times.

But a month ago, someone had targeted his crews for assassination. Corner after corner fell, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He had to give Daryl props: when the boy moved, he moved
large.
Joe had lost so many men to drive-by shootings and Machete Massacres that many of his surviving people had retired from the business. They hadn’t defected to other operations, because no other gangs existed besides Daryl’s, and Daryl wasn’t recruiting, at least not from the ranks of the living.

Joe didn’t know what Daryl’s soldiers were—brainwashed, enslaved by drugs, hypnotized—he just knew that they were unfalteringly obedient and endlessly replaceable. Some people on the street called them zombies, and Joe didn’t disbelieve them. Daryl’s woman was known to be a Mamba, a voodoo priestess. Joe had never even contemplated selling Black Magic because he believed it was more than a deadly drug; he believed it was truly
evil.

He never thought he’d see the day when the hard drugs of his era—cocaine, heroin, and crack—were replaced by something even more addictive and dangerous, but that day had come. The streets he knew would never be the same. The city he loved was bound to die a horrible death only to be reborn as something incomprehensible and wicked.

With his ranks thinned and Daryl impossible to find, Joe had ordered the white drug cops Gary Brown and Frank Beck to trace his nephew and assassinate him. He found it ironic that he had been forced to turn to cops to save his operation, but Brown and Beck were the most corrupt cops he had ever met. They were worse criminals than his ilk because they pretended to be something they weren’t: law enforcers. Joe and his fellows were straight up about what they were all about: power and money. The only protection they provided came in the form of extortion. The real parasites on society were Brown and Beck, not the drug lords and dealers who believed in the simple philosophy of supply and demand. And now, less than twenty-four hours after receiving their marching orders, they were dead. Goddamn, those white boys had proven to be a disappointment.

Chess knocked on the open door of Joe’s office. “Wagon’s all loaded, boss.”

Looking around the office, Joe sighed. This had been one of his favorite fronts. “Do me a favor. Close that safe door.”

Chess glanced inside the safe. “But it’s empty.”

Joe had just cleared it out. “I know that and you know it. But Daryl doesn’t know it, and the cops don’t know it. Let whoever comes snooping around waste some time, manpower, and money for nothing. Can’t you just see their faces?”

Laughing, Chess closed the door and threw the lever.

Joe stood up. “All right, brah. Let’s close this joint down. We had some good times in this club, didn’t we?”

“True that, true that.”

Chuckling, Joe led the way out of the office and down the stairs.

They left through the front door. Joe didn’t believe in skulking through alleyways or sneaking out fire exits. A caravan of three SUVs idled at the curb, waiting for them, and the sky had begun to lighten with dawn’s approach. Joe looked up and down 112th Street. Deliverymen unloaded magazines and produce from their trucks, and whores checked their watches. A few scarecrows lingered here and there but no zombies.

Good.
Joe hated zombies.

Chess opened the back door of the middle SUV, and Joe climbed in and sat down beside WMD, who sat with an AK-47 stashed between his legs, pointed at the floor. Chess closed the door and got into the front next to K-Man.