Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“No, no, Mother, you stay lying down. I’m Hatake Imaham, Mother.”

“I’m Ettie Washington.”

“We know.”

Ettie tried again to sit. She felt helpless, weaker than she already was, on her back.

“No, no, no, Mother, you stay there. Don’t get up. They brung you in like a sacka flour. Them white fuckers. Dropped you down.”

There were two dozen cots, bolted to the floor. The mattresses were an inch thick and hard as dirt. She might as well have been lying on the floor.

Ettie had a vague memory of the cops moving her here from the hospital room. She’d been exhausted and doped up. They used a paddy wagon. There was nothing to hold onto and it seemed to her that the driver had taken turns fast – on purpose. Twice she’d fallen off the slick plastic bench and often she banged her broken arm so badly it brought tears to her eyes.

“I’m tired,” she said to Hatake and looked past the huge woman to the other occupants of the cell. The detention center was a single large room, barred and painted beige. Like many Hell’s Kitchen residents Ettie Washington knew something about holding cells. She knew that most of these women would be in here for pissy crimes, who-cares crimes. Shoplifting, prostitution, assault, fraud. (Shoplifting was okay because it helped you feed your family. If you were a prostitute – Ettie hated the term “ ho ” – it was because you couldn’t get a job doing decent work for decent pay; besides at least you were working and not on the dole. Assault – well, whaling on your husband’s girlfriend? What’s wrong with that? Ettie’d done it herself once or twice. And as for ripping off the welfare system – oh, please. Trees ripe for the picking…)

Ettie had a taste for some wine. Wanted some badly. She’d snuck a hundred dollars into her cast but it didn’t look like anybody here was connected enough to get her a bottle. Why, these’re just girls, here, most of ’em babies.

Hatake Imaham stroked Ettie’s head once more.

“You lie right there, Mother. You be still and don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I’ma look out for you. I’ma get you what you need.”

Hatake was a huge woman with cornrows and dangling, beaded African hair – exactly the way Elizabeth had worn it the day she left New York City. Ettie noticed that the holes in Hatake’s ear lobes were huge and she wondered about the size of the earrings that had stretched the skin so much. She wondered if Elizabeth wore jewelry like that. Probably. The girl had an ostentatious side to her.

“I’ve gotta make a phone call,” Ettie said.

“They let you but not now.” The woman touched her good arm, squeezed it gently.

“Some son of a bitch took away my pills,” Ettie complained. “One of the guards. I need ’em back.”

Hatake laughed. “Honey, them pills, they ain’t even in this building no more. They sold an’ gone. Mebbe we see what we can find, us girls. Something help you. Bet it hurts like the devil’s own dick.”

Ettie almost said that she had some money and could pay. But she knew instinctively to keep the money secret for the time being. She said, “Thank you.”

“You lie back. Get some rest. We look out for you.”

Ettie closed her eyes and thought of Elizabeth. Then she thought of her husband Billy Doyle and she thought of, finally, John Pellam. But he was in her thoughts for no more than five seconds before she fell asleep.

“Well?”

Hatake Imaham returned to the cluster of women on the far end of the cell.

“That bitch, she the one done it. She guilty as death.” Hatake didn’t claim to be a real mambo but it was well known in the Kitchen that she did possess an extra sense. And while she hadn’t had much success laying on hands to cure illness everyone knew that she could touch someone and find out their deepest secrets. She could tell that the hot vibrations radiating off Ettie Washington’s brow were feelings of guilt.

“Shit,” one woman spat out. “She burn that boy up, she burn up that little boy.”

“The boy?” another asked in an incredulous whisper. “She set that fire in the basement , girl – didn’t you read that? On Thirty-sixth Street. She coulda killed the whole everybody in that building.”

“That bitch call herself a mother,” a skinny woman with deep-set eyes growled. “Fuck that bitch. I say-”

“Shhhh,” Hatake waved a hand.

“Do her now! Do the bitch now.”

Hatake’s face tightened into a glare. “Quiet! Damballah! We gonna do this th’way I say. You hear me, girl? I ain’t kill her. Damballah don’t ask more than what she done.”

“Okay, sister,” the girl said, her voice hushed and frightened. “Okay. That’s cool. Whatcha saying we do?”

“Shhhhh,” Hatake hissed again and glanced out the bars, where a lethargic guard lounged out of earshot. “Who gonna see the man today?”

A couple of the girls lifted their arms. The prostitutes. Criminal Term batched those arraignments and disposed of them early, Hatake knew. It was like the city wanted them back on the street with a minimum of lost time. Hatake looked at the oldest one. “You Dannette, right?”

The woman nodded, her pocked face remained peaceful.

“I’ma ask you do something for me. How ’bout that, girl?”

“Whatchu want me to do?”

“You talk to yo man when you get into the courtroom.”

“Yeah, yeah, sister.”

“Tell him we make it worth his while. After you get out, I wan’ you to come back.”

Dannette frowned. “You want… You want what?”

“Listen to me. I want you to get back in here. Tomorrow.”

Dannette had never stopped nodding but she didn’t understand this. Hatake continued, “I want you to get something, bring it in here to me. You know how, right? You know where you hide it? In the back hole, not the front. In a Baggie.”

“Sure.” Dannette nodded as if she hid things there every day.

She looked around at the other women. Whatever she was being asked to do was being seconded by everybody.

“I’ll pay you for this, for coming back again.”

“You get me rock?” the girl asked eagerly.

Hatake scowled. It was well-known that she hated drugs, dealers and users. “You a cluckhead, girl?”

The pocked face went still. “You get me rock?”

“I give you money,” the huge woman spat out. “You buy whatever you want with it, girl. Fuck up your life, you want. That your business.”

Dannette said, “What it is you want me to bring you back?”

“Shhh,” whispered Hatake Imaham. A guard was wandering past the door.

“Hell of a visiting room.”

“Oh, John, am I in the soup?”

Pellam told Ettie, “Not exactly. But you’re walking around the edge of the bowl, looks like.”

“It’s good to see you.” They sat across from each other in the fluorescent-lit room. A roach meandered slowly up the wall, past the corpses of his kin crushed to dry specks. Beneath a sign that read NO PHYSICAL CONTACT John Pellam took the bandaged hand of Ettie Washington. The squat uniformed matron nearby looked coldly at this disregard of regulations but didn’t say anything. Pellam said. “Louis Bailey’s going to get you out on bail.”

Ettie looked bad. She seemed too calm, considering everything that had happened to her. He knew she had a temper. He’d seen it when she talked about her husband – Billy Doyle’s leaving her. And about the time she was fired from her last job. After years working for a jobber in the Fashion District she’d been let go without a single day’s severance. He expected to see her fury at whoever had set the blaze, at the police, at the jailors. He found only resignation. That was a lot more troubling to him than anger.