Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“I heard Corcoran’s gang might’ve had something to do with it. You know ’bout his crew?”

“How you know Corcoran?”

“I don’t. I’m trying to find him.”

“Man, that fucked-up, you doin’ that. His set, they some bad O.G.s.”

Original gangstas. Senior members of the crew, who’d earned the status by killing someone.

The young face grew agitated. “Nigger, spic – anybody – dis him, don’t matter who, Corcoran wax him. He see peoples he don’t like, bang, they ass be gone , you know what I’m saying?” Ismail closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fence, looking at the school. “Why you axing me all this shit?”

Pellam asked, “Where’s his kickback? Corcoran’s?”

Impressed that Pellam talked the talk, Ismail said, “I ain’t know were they hang, man.” He kept his eye on Pellam and did a few layup shots. “Yo. You got a daddy?”

Pellam laughed. “A father? Sure.”

The grin was gone. “I don’t got one.”

Pellam reflected that a large percentage of black households were missing an adult male. Then felt ashamed this news bite was his immediate reaction to the boy’s comment.

The boy continued, matter of factly, “Got hisself shot.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, Ismail.”

“There these cluckheads outside on the street, okay? Selling rock. My daddy go out and they just smoke him right there. I seen ’em do it. He didn’t do nothing. They just smoke him.”

Pellam exhaled in shock, shook his head. “They find who did it?”

“Who, the jakes?”

“Jakes?”

“You know, jakes. Joey. The man. The Man . The poeleece?” Ismail laughed with a frighteningly adult sound. “Jakes do shit, you know what I’m saying? My daddy gone. And my mama, she sleep a lot. She do copious shit. Where she be, the shelter I’m saying, there shit all over the place if you got the green. Rock mostly. She do lotsa rock. Men come by eyeballing her all the time. I don’t think I go back there. Where yo’ crib, Pellam?”

A Winnebago, currently stored. A two-bedroom bungalow in L.A., currently sublet. A four-flight walk-up under short-term lease.

“I don’t really have one,” he told the boy.

“Check it out, you just like me! Damn !”

Pellam laughed at this then decided the parallels were unsettlingly accurate.

John Pellam, single, former independent film director and itinerant location scout, sometimes missed family life. But then he’d laugh and try to picture himself attending a suburban grade school PTA parent-teacher night.

“Where’re you going to go?” he asked the boy.

“Dunno, cuz. Maybe get my own crew together. Ain’t no nigger crews ’round here. Get a kickback on Thirty-sixth. I’ma call it the Trey Six Ghosts. How that sound? ‘I from the Trey Sixes.’ Shit, that’ll fuck ’ em up. Fuck up their minds good.”

Pellam asked, “You have lunch?”

“No. And I ain’t have breakfast neither,” Ismail said proudly. “You sit at the shelter, men come up and they, you know, be dissing you and touching you. They ax you come into the back with them. You know what I’m saying?”

Pellam shook his head, gripped the strap of the camera bag. “Come on, I’m hungry. I saw this place up the street. Cuban. Let’s eat, you want to?”

“Rice and beans. Yeah! An’ a Red Stripe!!”

“No beer,” Pellam said.

The boy grabbed the bag from Pellam’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. He listed against what was probably half of his own weight.

“I’ll get that,” Pellam said. “It’s heavy.”

“Shit. Don’t weigh nothing.”

“Yo, over there.”

“There?”

“No, more back. Yeah. Yo. Back is what I’m saying. Back !”

Ismail was pointing out to Pellam where he thought the fire had started. “I smell smoke then see all these flames, cuz. Right here. An’ a big pop. Yeah.”

“Pop.”

“And I run inside th’apartment and I go, ‘Yo, all y’all gotta get out! There this fire!’ And my mama, she start to scream.”

“You see anybody by the window before the fire?”

“This old lady is all. She live upstairs, on the top floor.”

“Anybody else?”

“I dunno. People hanging. I dunno.”

Pellam looked at what was left of the back door. It was metal and had two large locks on it. Would’ve been a tough job to break through. He leaned down and peered through the window. He’d wondered if the pyro could have thrown the bomb through the bars. But they were too close together for anything but a beer bottle; the wine jug never would have fit. Somebody would have to’ve let him in.

“The back door was locked, right?”

“Yeah, they try an’ keep it locked. But, shit, there a lotta traffic, you know what I’m saying? In that back place there, see it, Pellam? This fag doing business, you know? Givin’ head and all. He a cluckhead too.”

A male prostitute… “So people’d come through the back door? His customers?”

“Yeah, we’d sit outside, some of us, what it is, and these guys’d come out the back door and we’d say, ‘Fag, fag…’ And they’d run away. Shit, that was fun!”

“You seen that guy around lately?”

“Naw, cuz. He gone.”

Pellam picked up the building directory, lying where he’d let it fall after Ramirez had tossed it to him the other day. “You know this Ramirez?”

“Shit, Hector Ramirez? His crew be the Cubano Lords. They bad motherfuckers too but they don’t give this nigger no shit. Not like Corcoran. He’s sprung, cuz, Corcoran is. Man be a hatter. But Ramirez, see, he’d wax you but only if he had to.”

Even this ten-year-old was better patched in to the Word on the street than Pellam. He glanced at the name E. Washington on the directory and tossed it to the ground.

A police car cruised slowly past the building and paused. The officer in the driver’s seat was looking his way. He gestured Pellam out of the police tape.

“Ismail-”

The boy was gone.

“Ismail?”

The squad car drove on.

He searched for several minutes but Ismail had vanished. A brittle sound of falling brick and hollow metal filled the night. A soft grunt followed.

“Ismail?” Pellam stepped into the alley behind the building and saw boy, about eighteen, blond, in faded blue jeans and a dirty white shirt. He crouched beside a pile of trash. He was digging something out, occasionally dislodging a small avalanche, leaping back like a spooked raccoon then digging again. He had fine, baby hair, self-cut, ear length. The obligatory Generation X goatee was anemic and untrimmed.

He glanced at Pellam, squinted then returned to his task.

“Gotta get some stuff , man. Some stuff.”

“You lived here?”

The boy said gravely, “In the back.” He nodded toward where the rear basement apartment had been. “Me and Ray, he was like my manager.”

Me and Ray, he was like his pimp.

This was the one Ismail was talking about. The male prostitute. He seemed so young for a life on the street. Pellam asked, “Where’s Ray now?”

“Dunno.”

“Can I ask you some questions about the fire?”

With a grunt of exertion he pulled what he’d been looking for from beneath the pile and wiped at the cover of the book. Kurt Cobain – the Final Year . He gazed at it lovingly for a moment then he looked up. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about, man. The fire. You Pellam, right?” He flipped through the book.

Pellam blinked in surprise.

“So, here’s the deal. I can tell you who started the fire and who hired them. If you’re, like, interested.”