Walter Mosley - Known to Evil

"I got it. I got the whole twenty-five hundred. He, he, he said I had to the end of the week. Mr. Meeks said I had till Friday."

My gaze didn't waver.

"I don't have the money on me," he said. "It's in a safe deposit box. But I can get it."

I looked so deathly certain to the tennis pro he must've thought that I was planning to push him off the roof.

"Where is Angelique Lear?" I asked.

Shad's tanned white skin went suddenly pale. His fear deepened with a sense of the unknown.

"I don't understand," he said.

"Angelique. I want to know where she is."

"But, but…"

He leaped from his chair. I lunged, too, hitting him on the cheekbone with a schoolbook right-hand lead. Shad fell and stood… then fell again. It was the kind of punch that catches up with you as the moments click by.

Shad was on his back with his hands up over his face.

"I don't understand," he said. "I already told Grant. That's where I got the money to pay Meeks."

"Mr. Meeks," I reminded.

Shad's lips trembled.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

"What did you tell Grant?"

"That, that, that Angie had broken up with me a few weeks ago… But then she called me the other night to borrow some money. She said that she was at her friend Wanda's house."

It bothered me that this coward would call Angelique by the nickname I decided on.

"Stand up," I said.

He did so.

I knocked him down again.

"Do you know what happened at Wanda's place?" I asked the bleeding young man.

"No. What happened?"

I answered him with threatening silence.

"Angie had been moving around a lot," Shad whined, "and Grant said that he had the answer to a scholarship she'd applied for. I didn't see anything wrong with that."

"Did you call her to tell her that he was coming?"

"He said that he wanted it to be a surprise."

"Stand up."

"No."

"Where is this Grant?"

Shad tried to crawl away on his back, looking very much like the worm he was.

"I can get down on my knees to beat you, boy."

"He met me here. Paid for a lesson, just like you did, only he had the right clothes. After the lesson he bought me a drink and asked about Angie."

"Didn't that make you suspicious?"

"I needed the money. He said it had to do with a grant. That wasn't unusual. Angie was always getting grants and stipends. She's the luckiest person I know."

"What did he look like?"

"Bald, white, maybe forty."

"What was his first name?"

"I don't know. Maybe Grant was his first name."

I could have broken his jaw with a well-placed kick. I certainly wanted to.

"Have you heard from Angelique since last night?"

"No. No."

"If you do," I said, "and you tell anyone-anyone-I will come back here and throw your sorry ass off the roof. Do you understand me?"

Shad nodded, sniffling some of the blood back up into his nostrils.

Lorna was waiting on the other side of the door.

"Do I have to call an ambulance or something?" the sweet young thing asked.

"He can walk and talk all right," I said. "He might need an ice pack and a towel."

"Let his mother give him that," she said.

ON THE STREET I looked at the fancy phone that my self-titled telephonic and computer personal assistant (TCPA), Zephyra Ximenez, had provided me with. Breland Lewis had called four times.

I went into a chain coffee shop and ordered herbal tea. I needed something calming so that the violence coursing through me didn't overtake my good sense. Six sips after sitting at a small round table I inhaled deeply and sat back against the wall.

I missed smoking… very much. A cigarette calmed me down more than a quart of chamomile tea and thirty minutes of zazen sitting combined. But tobacco also cut down on my breath, and a good wind was a necessity in my line of work. The kind of situations I got into could run a regular guy ragged.

Twenty minutes or so after I bloodied Shad's face I entered my lawyer's ten digits.

"Breland Lewis, attorney at law," a mature female voice recited.

"It's Leonid, Shirley."

She didn't even say hello, just patched the call through.

"Leonid?"

"What's the big deal, Breland?"

"It's Sharkey. I think you better see him tonight, or at the latest by tomorrow morning."

"Why's that?"

"I need you to get some feel for what we're getting into. These new charges have a federal spin on them. He's expecting you."

"You told him about me?"

"I said your name was John Tooms. He thinks you work for me, that I'm sending you over to help out."

RON SHARKEY WAS PART of the past that I'd never shake.

The first time I heard of him was from a man named Bob Beam. Beam offered $7,500 to get his business partner in trouble with the law.

"All I need is for him to get fouled up on some charge that would make him have to come up with ten thousand dollars or so," he told me in my office-I was set up on an upper floor of the Chrysler Building at that time.

Beam was a squat, wide-faced white man. He smiled like a satrap sitting on a mound of silk pillows.

"Why?" I asked.

Beam was suggested to me by a technology smuggler named Frog Cornbluth. It was a valid reference but Frog's endorsement didn't come with any insurance and so I wanted specific details in case it blew up in my face.

"Ron and I own a company that imports chip boards," Beam told me. "The last time I did a run to Beijing I was told by a reliable source that a large company there was thinking of buying us out. That could mean millions. I'm still in deep debt from my last business and I'm only a junior partner in the company. My profit would be gone before I got the chance to count it."

"So how will getting Ron into trouble help that?" I wasn't outraged by the suggestion. This was business as usual for me.

"Just enough trouble to make him have to get a lawyer. I happen to know that money's tight for him. I'll offer to buy some of his stock at a cut-rate price and then enjoy the windfall when the company's sold to Wing Lee."

It turned out that Ron made regular trips to Toronto to visit a small computer company that they supplied. I wondered aloud if there might be a way to secrete an illegal substance in the toe of a shoe in his suitcase. Bob, smiling broadly, said that that would be no problem.

I had a friend who had a friend who worked a regular job in international airport security. A call was made and Ron Sharkey's bags were searched. The drug was discovered. But it was closer to a pound than the agreed-upon two grams.

Ron signed a power of attorney over to Irma, his wife. She attempted to make the deal with Bob but something about his financial status scotched the trade before the money made it into Irma's account.

Bob didn't tell me that he was having an affair with Ron's wife. Irma told Ron that she couldn't raise the money and that she didn't want to threaten their son's future by selling the only property they had-their house. Ron, being a good sort, said he understood and made a deal with the federal prosecutor to accept an eight-year sentence-with no chance for parole.

By that time I was out of the loop but I learned what happened after the fact.

Bob was hired by Wing Lee to stay on as president of the company, keeping his junior share. Irma divorced Ron and married Bob. Three years later Bob died of a heart attack and Irma remarried. This third husband embezzled from the thriving new chip-board company and ran down to Brazil.

In the meanwhile, Ron had been broken by a system that produced more hardened criminals than it ever took in. The one-time honest businessman had been the bitch of half a dozen lifelong criminals. The monotony and terror of incarceration had made him a drug addict. On the outside he became a low-level dealer and half-assed burglar.