Fire Lake (24 page)

Carter groaned dully and moved his head. It would
take him a while to come around, and I wanted to be prepared.

"See if you can find something to tie him up
with," I said to Karen.

The living room opened onto a tiny kitchen, just an
alcove, really. Karen shut the front door and walked into the
kitchen. She flipped on a light and went through several drawers.

"There isn't any rope in here," she said.

I glanced at the boxes of motorcycle parts and said,
"We can use the chains."

I flipped Sonny over on his stomach and pulled an
oily bike chain from the box. I managed to loop it around each of his
arms, loop it through itself, then bring it back and loop it around
each of his legs. The chain wouldn't have held him if he had had all
his strength. But with a busted nose and a concussion, he wasn't
going anywhere.

While I was hog-tying Sonny, Karen searched his
bedroom, looking for crack. I knew that she'd found something when
she made a little whooping noise. She came striding into the living
room with a tube filled with rocks in her hand. It looked like the
same stuff that Bo had dropped in my living room. Presumably the same
stuff that Lonnie had lost at the motel.

She handed the tube to me.

"Was there any more in there?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "That was all I could find."

I stared at the tube. There were about twenty rocks
in it. A couple hundred dollars' worth. Not enough to get anybody
killed.

"Maybe I better take a look," I said,
walking toward the bedroom. "You keep an eye on him."

I searched the bedroom for about ten minutes, turning
over everything I could find. Twice. There wasn't much to turn-a
mattress and a box spring. A beaten oak dresser. A couple more boxes
of bike parts in the closet. And a few pieces of clothing. When I
couldn't find anything in the bedroom, I tried the kitchen. And then
the living room itself. All to no end. If Sonny had the crack, he
didn't have it in his apartment.

I was just sorting through the last box of bike
parts, when he came around.

"Harry!" Karen called out.

I got up and walked over to where Sonny was lying
face-down on the rug, his arms and legs chained behind him. I knelt
next to him, took out the pistol, and pressed the barrel against the
back of his head.

"You know what that is, Sonny?" I said to
him. He nodded weakly.

"Now you're going to answer a few questions,"
I said. "If you don't answer them, I'm going to kill you. It's
that simple. No second tries. I'm just going to blow the back of your
head off. You understand?"

He nodded again. "Yeah," he said groggily.
"Where's the rest of the crack?"

"What?" He started to cough and hack. "I
gotta get a doctor, man. You broke my nose. And my bridge. You broke
my bridge, man."

"The crack," I said again.

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking
about," he shouted. "What crack?"

"The crack you took off that guy at the motel on
Thursday night."

He didn't say anything for a moment. I tapped his
skull with the gun barrel and he flinched, rattling the chains.

"I didn't take him off," he said in a
frightened voice. "I swear to God I didn't."

"I don't believe you." I cocked the piece,
pulling back the slide and letting it snap forward noisily.

"Christ, don't kill me!" Sonny cried out.
"I'm telling you I didn't take him off. Jenkins did. All I done
was beat him up. All I got out of it was a few rocks, man. That's
all. A few lousy rocks." He started to cough again, then to sob
hoarsely.

"Please. You gotta believe me, man. Jenkins come
over to me at the bar and said he wanted to take this guy off. I was
supposed to rough him up a little while he and his buddy did the job.
That's all I did--rough him up."

"What buddy?" I said.

"That guy, man," Carter said. "That
guy Claude hung around with. That's how Jenkins knew about the crack.
That guy told him, man. He told him it would be going down." "A
black guy?" I said, thinking of Norvelle.

"No, man. A white dude. What the fuck's his
name? A mean fucker. Does a lot of coke."

I glanced at Karen. "Cal?" I said.

Sonny nodded. "That's it. That's the one."
I stood up.

"You ain't going to shoot me, are you?"
Carter said in a pleading voice. "I told you what I know, man."

"What about the night of the murder?" I
said.

"What about it?"

"You told the cops you saw someone."

"Bullshit!" Sonny said. "I told the
cops what I just told you. About how that guy got ripped off by
Jenkins. I don't know nothing about no murder." He rattled the
chains again. "Let me loose, man. I gotta call a doctor."

"Let's go," I said to Karen.

"What about him?" She stared at Sonny with
disgust.

"He'll work himself loose in an hour or so. Or
one of the neighbors will hear him bellowing."

We started for the door.

"Let me loose, man," Carter called out.

Karen and I walked out the door, locking it behind
us. For a good way down the hall, we could still hear him hollering
to be let loose.
 

34

It was close to eleven when Karen drove us out of the
Miamiville Apartments' lot. I let her do the driving because my back
was killing me. In fact, after the fight with Sonny, all my bruises
had begun to ache. I barely made it out to the Pinto. As soon as we
turned onto Wooster Pike, I swallowed two painkillers and a muscle
relaxant, washing them down with the watery remains of a McDonald's
Coke. I told Karen to head straight for the Delores--for our
rendezvous with LeRoi.

If we'd had more time and I'd been in better shape
physically, I might first have tried to check out what Sonny had told
me. But checking out Carter's story meant a confrontation with Cal--a
violent one. And the way I felt physically, I just wasn't up to
taking Cal on. Besides, I figured that once I'd told LeRoi what Sonny
had told us, taking on Cal would no longer be my problem. All I'd
have to worry about was Jordan. And if Sonny Carter was Jordan's only
ammunition, a grand jury would never indict me. Without an
eyewitness, all he had on me was circumstantial evidence.

The highway was deserted between Miamiville and
Fairfax, and for a while the only sound on the road was the tires
singing in the snow. As we raced down Wooster Pike, I stared out the
windshield at the snowflakes blowing toward us and thought of that
Friday morning, three days before, when I'd driven that same stretch
of road through the ice storm--not knowing what I was going to find,
not really sure I wanted to know.

Poor Lonnie. He'd really let himself get screwed this
time. Desperate to make up for all those years lost to drugs and
prison and schemes that had gone nowhcre, he had been an easy mark
for Cal and Claude Jenkins. For all I knew, Norvelle had been part of
it too. Lonnie's old friend from the sixties. Apparently, old
friendship didn't count for much in the eighties--not with that crew.

After his visit to Sy Levy, Lonnie had probably
gotten together with Norvelle at the Cross Lane house, on Wednesday
afternoon--a couple of old dopers, sharing a pipe or a fit. A
communal ritual, right out of the wild old days. Only it wasn't the
old days anymore. Norvelle must have introduced Lonnie to his
roommate, Cal. And Cal, who knew a desperate man when he saw one,
could have sized things up quickly and formulated his plan over a
little base or smack. All Lonnie would have to do to score quick and
big was act as a mule, a role he'd played dozens of times before.
Just transport some crack to this motel that Cal knew about and make
the trade with the bikers.

I wasn't sure how Lonnie had managed to talk LeRoi
into fronting him the lady without a down payment. Perhaps he'd done
business with LeRoi before, back in the sixties or seventies. Perhaps
Norvelle had vouched for him. More likely, Lonnie had promised LeRoi
a bigger cut of the pie if he fronted him the dope to sell to the
bikers. Ghetto blacks and redneck bikers don't mix-at least they
don't in Cincinnati. So it wasn't the sort of deal that LeRoi could
have managed on his own; and, if Lonnie had made it seem big enough,
LeRoi might have gone along with him for the vig.

Once Cal had manipulated Lonnie into getting the
crack and going to the motel, the rest had been child's play: he'd
paid Carter off to knock Lonnie cold; and while Lonnie was out, Cal
and Jenkins took him off for the crack. When Lonnie woke up, he
discovered the bad news--that he'd been robbed of the lady and of his
one last chance to make it to Fire Lake.

Neither Cal nor Jenkins had counted on Lonnie's
trying to kill himself after that. The suicide attempt had been the
only wrinkle in their scam, because if Lonnie had succeeded in
commuting suicide, there would have been no patsy to take the fall
with LeRoi. Cal and Jenkins needed Lonnie alive. That was why Jenkins
had ministered to him in that little storeroom. That was why Claude
had solicited my help--to get Lonnie away from the motel and out of
his life. That was why I had ended up a fall guy too.

"
Sorry, Harry
."
I wondered if Lonnie had known, when he'd written that, how sorry
both he and I were going to be.

Karen had just turned onto McMillan, when the
painkillers kicked in. Worn down as I was, they hit me hard, and for
a few minutes I felt as if 'I was just coming off an all-night drunk.
I must have started singing to myself, because Karen glanced over at
me with a smile and patted me on the leg.

"You okay, there, tough guy? she said
affectionately.

"Never better." I started to laugh. "The
most important meeting of my life, and I'm not going to be there."

"I'll be there," Karen said, reassuringly.

"There could be trouble," I said, almost
gleefully.

"Everywhere you go, there's trouble," Karen
said. "I'm used to it. Besides, after what that creep Sonny told
us, LeRoi should lay off."

I nodded. "He should. He certainly should."

"I'm going to get you some coffee," Karen
said, pulling into the White Castle on Reading. It was just
eleven-thirty, and we were exactly one block from home. So I didn't
put up a fuss.

Karen parked in the White Castle lot and went
inside--into that stainless steel and porcelain birthday cake. A few
minutes later she came back out with three big cups of coffee in a
sack. For the next ten minutes I drank coffee, watched the colorful
White Castle traffic, and jabbered drunkenly. I'm not sure what I
jabbered about, but it seemed to amuse Karen.

"You know what I don't understand?" she
said, pulling a paper napkin out of the sack and blotting up some
coffee that I'd spilled down the front of my shirt.

"I don't understand a lot of things," I
said. "I don't understand why I'm sitting here with you right
now."

"I mean about what Sonny said."

"What don't you understand about what Sonny
said?" I asked.

"If Cal and Jenkins ripped Lonnie off, why
didn't LeRoi know that?"

I swallowed some more coffee and said, "I don't
follow you."

"Well, LeRoi must have suspected Jenkins, right?
I mean he had him murdered, didn't he?"

I nodded slowly.

"From what you told me, Bo and his friends ...
they tortured Jenkins before he died."

I nodded again. "Yes, they did."

"So why wouldn't Jenkins have talked?"
Karen said, looking perplexed. "Why wouldn't he have told them
everything--about Cal and Lonnie and you too?"

I stared at her for a long moment. Either the coffee
was beginning to burn a hole in my stomach or what she'd said had had
the same effect, because I started to feel sick.

"He would have told them." I said uneasily.
"Then why didn't he?" Karen asked.

"I don't fucking know." I glanced at my
watch and then looked up the block, toward the Delores.

"Christ," I said out loud, "we may be
in big trouble."

"I,eRoi wouldn't try anything in your apartment.
Not twice in a row."

"Probably not," I said. "It's what
happens after that, that worries me."

"All we can do is tell him the truth."

"If we know the truth," I said grimly. "If
Sonny wasn't bullshitting us.

"I don't think he was bullshitting, Harry,"
Karen said. "He wasn't smart enough to think up a story like
that. And we didn't find the drugs on him." I sighed.
''Something's missing, then."

Karen started up the Pinto and backed out of the
parking spot. "Let's i)o find out what it is."
 

35

The point that Karen had made sobered me completely.
Why hadn't Jenkins told LeRoi's boys about the way he and Cal had
double-crossed Lonnie? A man would have to be made of a lot sterner
stuff than Claude had been to hold out on Bo with his razor.
Moreover, I couldn't see why someone like Claude would have felt any
loyalty to Cal in the first place. They'd run a dirty little
double-cross--nothing worth holding out about under torture. All of
which left me feeling uncertain about the scenario I'd spun on the
way back from Miamiville. And even more uncertain about what I was
going to tell LeRoi. As we pulled into the Delores's lot, I asked
myself if I really wanted to go through with this meeting. Then I
asked Karen.