Shadow Boys (26 page)

TEN DAYS LATER

- CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT -

T
HE
L
OAN
S
HARK

The thing about borrowing money is, you have to pay it back.

An important lesson, one that Donny Ray Holecek always tries to impart to his clientele.

You take money from Donny Ray, you gotta make payments.

With interest. Lots of interest.

Simple concept, right?

This fine morning Donny Ray is in his South Dallas office, a picnic table in a park a few blocks from the crumbling Cotton Bowl.

The park backs up to a cemetery, which makes for some interesting visuals when instructing a reluctant client on how important it is to keep current with his payments.

Across the street from the park lie block after block of small wood-framed homes built in the 1920s, most of which suffer from what could be termed “extreme deferred maintenance.”

Peeling paint, weed-filled lawns, broken windows. The only modern features most have are satellite dishes and the occasional late-model luxury car in front of the home of the local drug dealer.

In other words, nobody in the neighborhood is going to give a shit about what goes on in this particular park.

Ergo, why Donny Ray has chosen it as his office.

At the moment, he’s in a meeting with a client who is late on his interest charges.

The client, who Donny Ray affectionately calls “Fuck Stain,” is lying on his back on the picnic table, held down by Donny Ray’s assistant, a seven-foot-tall African American gentleman named Mr. Phyllis.

Fuck Stain—a stockbroker with a drug problem—has been ignoring Donny Ray’s calls, something that is almost worse than not making your interest payments.

Communication, Donny Ray likes to say. That’s the important part of any successful business venture. And Donny Ray Holecek—a pudgy high school dropout from Kosse, Texas—is very successful in his field. In fact, Donny Ray is so successful that he’s considered the biggest purveyor of street money in all of Dallas County.

Donny Ray takes pride in this fact, an accomplishment for which he credits two things: good communication (see above), and passion for the job.

Another lesser element of his success comes from choosing just the right tool for the task at hand. In this instance, a ball-peen hammer.

“Mr. Phyllis,” Donny Ray says. “Refresh my memory. How behind is Fuck Stain?”

The stockbroker groans and cradles his left hand, the one with the two broken fingers, knuckles smashed by the ball-peen hammer.

“Four payments now plus the vig,” Mr. Phyllis says. “Twenty-five hundred.”

Donny Ray clicks his tongue. He points at the stockbroker with the business end of the hammer.

“You got two and a half on you, Fuck Stain?”

“N-no.” The man shakes uncontrollably. “But I can get it for you. I promise.”

“That’s what you told me last week. Isn’t that right, Mr. Phyllis?”

Mr. Phyllis nods.

Fuck Stain looks back and forth between his two captors, hyperventilating.

“And then you quit answering your phone.” Donny Ray shakes his head.

“See, I got a new cell,” Fuck Stain says. “I was gonna call you with the number.”

“But you didn’t,” Donny Ray says. “Which means, before we even talk about the money, I gotta break another finger.”

“Nooo!”
Fuck Stain struggles to get away from Mr. Phyllis’s meaty arms.

“Hold him still, will ya?” Donny Ray grips the hammer.

“I’m trying, boss, but he’s a wiggly sonuvabitch.” Mr. Phyllis reaches for the client’s injured hand but stops. He stares at the street, which is partially obscured by a row of cedar trees.

Donny Ray follows his assistant’s gaze.

A battered navy-blue Crown Victoria has stopped. The driver’s door opens and a man in a black tracksuit gets out.

- CHAPTER FORTY-NINE -

I have a thing for cemeteries.

The solitude and stillness. The desolate sense of peace, brooding yet calm, surrounded by long-forgotten actors from the world’s stage, the bare nuggets of their life story encapsulated on the weathered tombstones.

The magnificent melancholy of it all.

Midmorning. The humidity wasn’t too bad yet, though precious little wind stirred among the oaks and pecans in the graveyard by Fair Park, a few blocks away from the Cotton Bowl.

Old weather-gnarled trees formed a canopy over my family’s plot, a small rectangle surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and set apart from the rest of the dead.

I sat on the tombstone of my father, Frank Cantrell. His final resting place was a few yards away from my grandfather’s.

My cell phone, a disposable model, chirped with a text message from Piper.
R u there??

I replied in the affirmative, gave an exact location. Then I waited.

The gate to the graveyard was visible in the distance, bracketed by a pair of oleander bushes.

The cemetery was in an area that had been lower-middle class a hundred years ago. Now it could best be termed as a neighborhood for the working poor, except there wasn’t much work to compensate the poor. There were, however, a lot of crack houses, people on food stamps, and single mothers interspersed with shotgun shacks, tin-roofed blues clubs, and exotically named Baptist churches.

It was a perfect location for a meeting away from prying eyes.

A few minutes later a white Ford stopped at the gate.

The driver’s door opened, and Piper exited, scanned her surroundings.

She peered over the tops of the tombstones, saw me, then opened the rear door of her car.

A man in handcuffs stumbled out. He was lanky to the point of emaciated, wearing a white jumpsuit with “Dallas County Inmate” emblazoned on the back.

She grasped him by the elbow and together they threaded their way through the tombstones to where I sat on my father’s grave.

Piper stopped a few feet away and mopped sweat from her brow with a forearm.

“Spending a little quality time with the family?” she asked.

I shrugged.

The man stumbled against a tree root but didn’t fall. He stared at the ground, not speaking.

His name was Stephen Duane Chalupnik, alias “Stoma Steve” due to the breathing hole in his throat from the tracheotomy.

He was well over six feet tall and weighed about as much as a grade-schooler. The reasons he looked like a concentration-camp escapee were myriad: HIV positive, screwed-up metabolism, bad jail food—take your pick.

“Any problems getting him out?”

Piper shook her head.

Steve Chalupnik was East Texas hillbilly, what in less polite circles would be referred to as white trash, that of the trailer variety. He had an arrest record as long as the Rio Grande. His criminal history read like the Molesters’ greatest hits album and included such gems as “Sexual Contact with a Child,” “Indecency with a Child,” and the always-popular “Continued Sexual Abuse of a Child.”

He fit the profile of the person Lysol Alvarez had told me about. And sure enough, he’d been arrested in front of the Iris Apartments on the day that Tremont Washington had gone missing.

Stoma Steve glanced around the graveyard for a moment. Then he returned to staring at the ground, not making eye contact with either of us.

“Tremont Washington,” I said. “That name mean anything to you?”

Stoma Steve didn’t reply.

“Let’s don’t make this messy.” I smiled. “Tell me what you know about Tremont and then you can get back to lockup in time for your bologna sandwich.”

“Are you a cop?” Stoma’s voice was croaky from the trach hole.

Piper chuckled.

“No.” I shook my head. “But I’m a guy who can get your child-raping ass brought to a deserted cemetery just because.”

“You hadn’t oughta taken me here. I want to talk to my lawyer.”

“What do you think this is?” I said. “An episode of
Law and Order
?”

Sweat trickled down Stoma’s face, dripped from his nose.

“Your public defender’s in rehab,” Piper said. “Besides, you violated probation.”

“You know who Tremont Washington is?” I said.

He continued to stare at the ground and shook his head.

“How come I don’t believe you?” I stood.

“’Cause I don’t like niggers.”

“Watch the language, cocksucker.” Piper pulled a black plastic object from her pocket. “Or I’ll Taser your ass.”

“Yet you were hanging out by the projects in West Dallas.” I cocked my head. “Not exactly the yacht club.”

Stoma Steve stared at the business end of the electric device, licked his lips.

I arched an eyebrow. “And how do you know Tremont is black?”

Stoma frowned, muttered under his breath. The sharpest tool in the shed, he was not.

“Let’s try again,” I said. “Think back. What’s it been, three wee—”

Bam-bam.

Two gunshots in rapid succession, close by. Hard to tell the direction because the noise echoed off the tombstones, muffled by all the vegetation.

I dropped to my knees, right on top of Dad. Swiveled my head in a 180, scanned the tree line. No one was visible.

Piper shoved Stoma to the dirt and dropped a few feet behind me, checking out the opposite field of view, gun drawn.

Bam.

Another round, a larger-caliber gun or the same one fired closer.

I reached for my hip, grabbed for the pistol I’d started carrying again.

Silence.

Nothing but the screech of the cicadas and the thump of my heart.

- CHAPTER FIFTY -

T
HE
L
OAN
S
HARK—
P
ART
II

Donny Ray knows the five-oh when he sees it.

The old Crown Victoria, the way the man in the black tracksuit moves, the tilt of his head.

In the fourteen years he’s been in business, Donny Ray has pissed off a number of people—dozens of cops, several judges, too many lowlifes to count. He’s been beaten up, stabbed twice, shot at a half-dozen times, run off the road, and banned from three different strip clubs.

But he’s never had anybody aim a silenced weapon at him before.

The man in the black tracksuit pulls the Glock out from under his jacket as he walks through the cedar trees, maybe thirty feet from Donny Ray’s office/picnic table.

In the brief amount of time it takes Black Tracksuit to raise the Glock, Donny Ray calculates his best play.

It’s all very simple really. The law of self-preservation.

This is a hit, a professional one. From this range, the shooter is not likely to miss. Ergo, Donny Ray is likely to die.

And the only thing you can do that’s worse than shooting a cop is to die.

Therefore, Donny Ray’s best bet is to pop a cap in the man in the black tracksuit even though he’s a police officer. Because he doesn’t want to die.

To that end, he drops behind the picnic table as Black Tracksuit fires a single shot, which hits Fuck Stain in the leg.

Donny Ray pulls a Ruger .38 Special from his waistband. Aims at the only target available, the shooter’s legs. Jerks the trigger twice.

Mr. Phyllis, himself no stranger to the ways of the street, has evidently reached the same conclusions as Donny Ray.

From one side of the picnic table comes the roar of Mr. Phyllis’s weapon, a four-inch .44 Magnum.

Donny Ray doesn’t wait to see if any of their shots have found their mark. He rolls away from the table, jumps up, and sprints toward the thick line of vegetation that serves as a boundary to the cemetery.

A tingling sensation on his shoulder. He touches the spot. His hand comes away wet with blood. Black Tracksuit is still in the game.

He pushes through the bamboo, turns, fires twice more.

Then he runs as fast as he can.

- CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE -

Two more shots, closer.

Sweat trickled down the small of my back. The cemetery seemed to have gotten hotter. The air held less of a breeze.

“You see anything?” Piper whispered.

“Nuh-uh. You?”

“Nope. I think it came from your direction.”

A bush on the fence line in front of me rustled slightly, maybe twenty yards away. An animal or the returning wind? Or the shooter?

“You gonna call it in?” I stared at the bush, knuckles white around the grip of the pistol.

“Wasn’t planning to,” she said. “Since I’m not really a cop anymore and I used someone else’s badge number to get Stoma out of lockup.”

The bamboo next to the bush twitched.

I stared at the leaves, focused all my attention.

Movement behind me, then swearing.

“Dang you, Stoma Steve.” Piper’s voice was a loud whisper, angry. “Don’t you dare run on me.”

I glanced away from the bushes, lowered the gun.

Stoma Steve, hands cuffed behind him, was galloping away, long legs making good time with each stride.

Piper holstered her weapon, stood, ran after him. And tripped. She fell face-first, disappearing behind a grave marker.

I looked back to the shrub line.

The man had emerged in the few seconds I’d been turned around.

He was in his midforties, Caucasian. He wore a black tracksuit and a matching ball cap, brim low. The jacket of the tracksuit was zipped up all the way, obscuring the lower half of his face. The way he moved and his overall appearance seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place him, my attention being drawn to the silenced pistol in his hand.

I didn’t move, didn’t speak. He glanced at me for a quarter of a second and then melted back into the vegetation, leaving me to wonder if he’d ever really been there.

- CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO -

Fifteen minutes later

No more gunfire. And no sign of Stoma Steve.

Piper called a friend at dispatch to see if there had been any calls about shots fired in the Fair Park area. So far nothing. Given the usual number of weapons discharged in this particular locale, and the innate distrust most of the inhabitants had for the police, the fact that there had not been a report didn’t seem too unusual.

So Piper and I drove around the area surrounding the cemetery in her borrowed unmarked squad car.

It was nearly eleven in the morning, the day heating up.

Malcolm X Boulevard, the main drag through this section of town, was not open for business yet. The only place that appeared to have any activity was a convenience store that advertised discount cigarettes and lottery tickets. The store was next to a fried chicken joint and a bar called TJ’s Adult Playtime Club.

TJ’s looked like the kind of place you would go if you wanted to learn firsthand about knife fighting and syphilis.

Piper stopped in front of the bar and got out. I stayed in the car. She knocked on the door of the club, got no answer, then went inside the convenience store and the chicken joint only to emerge a few seconds later from each, shaking her head.

After that we drove slowly down the side streets, where we saw a lot of old men sitting on front porches smoking cigarettes, several stray dogs, a Vietnamese guy driving an ice cream truck, and a kid pushing a lawn mower down the sidewalk.

What we didn’t see was a redneck child molester with a blowhole in his throat wearing jail whites, hands cuffed behind his back.

Piper, as one might imagine, was a tad nonplussed.

“Stoma’s a freaking pedophile.” She turned a corner. “And I let him go.”

We were cruising down a street a few blocks south of the cemetery, windows open, letting the sounds and smells of the city wash through the squad car.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll find—”

A hulking figure knelt in the middle of the next block, crouched over something that looked more than a little like a dead body.

“What the heck?” I squinted.

Piper eased off the gas. “Is that Mr. Phyllis?”

“I thought he and Donny Ray got blown up in a car bomb,” I said.

The loan shark and his number-one enforcer were legendary in North Texas law-enforcement circles.

“Nuh-uh. That was his cousin.” Piper shook her head. “Over in Fort Worth.”

The figure glanced up, saw us, and stood.

It was indeed Mr. Phyllis. He appeared to be injured, blood staining his white guayabera shirt. He also appeared to be angry.

“Crap.” Piper jammed on the brakes. “He’s got a gun.”

We were maybe forty feet away. Mr. Phyllis pointed what looked like a small cannon at our car.

Piper yanked the transmission into reverse, mashed the accelerator to the floor.

Mr. Phyllis turned away from us, his gun aimed at the side of the street. The weapon erupted—a plume of fire the size of a watermelon and a roar like a howitzer.

Then a strange thing happened.

Mr. Phyllis’s head snapped back, and he fell to the ground. Like he’d been shot by a silenced weapon.

Piper stopped.

No movement on the street.

She put the car in park.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What if it’s somebody who’s seen Stoma?” She opened her door, gun drawn.

I swore under my breath. She was right; we had to do whatever it took to find Stoma Steve. I exited as well and took cover behind an old Honda parked a few feet in front of our vehicle.

Piper dashed to the other side of the street and hid behind an oak tree.

Mr. Phyllis was obviously dead. The figure on the ground, apparently Donny Ray, was the same or nearly so.

A few seconds passed.

About fifty feet away, a man emerged from between two parked cars.

The shooter in the black tracksuit. His ball cap was gone, the jacket unzipped, face clearly visible.

He walked hunched over like something was wrong with his side. As he approached Mr. Phyllis, I could see that a portion of his abdomen had been blown away. One hand was clutching a tangled mess of flesh and jacket. The other held the silenced pistol.

The man stared at the two bodies for a moment and then fell to the ground himself.

Piper stepped from behind the tree. She holstered her gun.

Her face was ashen. Arms and legs shaking. I realized I was in the same condition, terrified, and not just from the gunfight we’d witnessed.

“C’mon. Let’s roll.” I headed toward the car.

“Did you see?” She pointed to the man in the black tracksuit. “He was using a silenced Glock.”

“The ballistics on Bobby’s or Raul’s gun,” I said. “It was only a ninety percent match.”

“That’s—” She kept pointing. “He—he—”

“Hurry up. We need to get out of here.”

She shook her head as if to rid herself of the images on the street. Then she jogged to our vehicle.

Once behind the wheel, she cranked the ignition, turned around, and sped away, going in the opposite direction of the three dead bodies.

Two thugs and a guy in a black tracksuit.

The latter was Lieutenant Hopper, the chief’s assistant.