Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

The station house is all but empty. SOS isn’t a typical district headquarters with a traditional overnight shift. But Carla is already at her desk. And—what the fuck?—popping something into her mouth.

I’m just walking in as this happens, as she’s throwing her head back and swallowing. She spots me and clumsily screws the lid back on the bottle and throws the bottle in her work bag in a single fluid motion that is supposed to be casual, nonchalant, no big deal, nothing to see here.

I say the prayer again: Please don’t give me a pill popper for a partner. Please let that be vitamins or ibuprofen .

She nods to me. She looks strung out—thin, too thin; dark circles under bloodshot eyes. She looks more likely to vomit than solve a case. But what the hell—she got no more sleep than I did last night, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed was never on tap for today.

Whatever. I don’t have time for that right now.

Sosh and Mat Rodriguez are in by six. We’re meeting with the whole squad in two hours, but I’m reporting to the superintendent and my lieutenant in one hour, and I wanna see what we have so far.

“Tox screens came back on the victims,” says Rodriguez.

The dead carrier, Stanley Wilson—Frisk—tested positive for cannabis. So did the presumptive target of the shooting, Dwayne Sears—Shiv. The unidentified dead girl on the porch had heroin in her blood.

“Stolen 4Runner in Melrose Park’s a dead end so far,” Sosh tells me. “Family that owns it, it’s there when they go to bed, gone when they get up. Melrose Park has shit for POD cameras, at least on the residential streets. We’re still reviewing the ALPRs and the PODs on the Eisenhower.”

“All right, so where’s Ronnie Lester?” I ask.

Lester walks in as if on cue. Ronnie’s a UC in the Fifteenth—the Austin neighborhood—in the heart of Nation territory. He must be in his midtwenties at least, if not thirty, but I swear he could pass for a teenager. Short and wiry, his kinky hair sprouting like a fountain off his scalp to his shoulders, a black White Sox jersey and tattered jeans and high-tops. Without the lanyard around his neck holding his star atop a series of gold chains, you’d make him for the Imperial Gangster Nation drug dealer he’s pretending to be.

“Griffin, shit, I know you.” Ronnie gives Carla a fist bump. The rest of us introduce ourselves.

“I got five minutes,” he says, not taking a seat. “If you’re lookin’ for word on the shooter, I don’t got it.”

“Nobody’s talking?” Sosh asks.

“Shit, everyone’s talkin’ . But nobody knows .”

“Jericho wants K-Town, though,” Carla says. “Right?”

Lester makes a face, as if she just said the most obvious thing in the world. “Jeri-Curl wants the whole damn city, girl. Probably get it, sooner or later.” He looks over the squad room, new and shiny, so different a workplace from the one he has on a daily basis, on the streets of Austin. “Whatever happened, man, we’re gearing up now.”

We . He’s been undercover a long time. Hard to get out of the role. Better that he doesn’t, in fact. So not they but we .

“Gearing up for the Hustlers,” I clarify.

He lifts a shoulder, yes. “Everyone’s puttin’ it on us, so Jericho’s got us preppin’. Shit’s gonna get thick.” He spends two syllables on that last word.

“Say we catch the shooters,” I say. “What are the odds we get them to talk about Jericho? We got any chance at all?”

Ronnie smiles at me as if I’m an idiot.

“So no chance,” I say.

“You remember Stevie Lewis? Stevie Woo-Woo?” He can tell we don’t. “Kills a Disciple in Harvey. We pick him up, got him dead to rights on the shooting, he says he’s willing to give up Jericho for ordering it. His throat accidentally runs into a knife in county lockup. But Jericho, he don’t stop there. They shoot Stevie’s brother coming out of a liquor store. They tag his face so many times we need DNA to ID him. They find Stevie’s mama, they pull a train on her—okay, sixty-year-old woman—then strangle her and leave her naked corpse in the middle of Augusta Boulevard. And then, in case anyone didn’t get the point, they burn down the motherfucker’s house.”

So nobody talks.

Ronnie points to us. “Only way you’re getting those shooters is if Jericho gives them to you.”

He doesn’t know we’re already working that angle, and I’m not gonna tell him. For his sake.

“Think he’ll do that?” I ask.

He shrugs again. “With this heat, could be. Didn’t expect to kill no cute little baby girl.” He looks at his phone. “Gotta move. Don’t think I’ll have anything for you, but if I do, I’ll get word to you.”

He looks back at Griffin. “SOS, huh?” He makes a fist of congratulations.

“I’ll walk him out,” she says when he’s halfway to the door. “Maybe he’ll tell me something else.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because I was a UC, too.”

Like it’s a fraternity, a bond. Carla pops out of her chair. It spins when she does so. Resting on her chair is one of the pills she’s been taking. Must have fallen out when she tried to hastily put them away as I walked into the station.

We break up our powwow. I walk over to her chair, scoop up the pill, and drop it in my pocket.

I have a right to know.

Just as a patrol officer, Officer Bostwick, rushes into the squad room.

“Detective Harney,” he says, “I think we got something on the tip line.”

Chapter 23

DAMIEN PEPPERS, a.k.a. Junior, stares at the ceiling with lifeless eyes, a gunshot wound to his forehead with stippling, suggesting it was close range. Of course it was close range. He was executed.

But not before he was tortured, shot once in each shoulder, once in each thigh.

“But why?” asks Carla. “For information or punishment?”

Neither of us knows yet. We don’t even know yet if Junior was responsible for the K-Town shooting. We know he’s Nation through and through, one of Jericho’s top “troopers,” or gunmen. Assassins. Jericho needed someone dead; Junior was one of his boys.

Kudos to Officer Joe Bostwick, overseeing the tip line, who listened to the woman calling in anonymously just a few minutes before six this morning. He got the name, ran his sheet, and realized it was credible. He passed it to me. Our team—Carla, Sosh, and I—headed straight over, while Mat Rodriguez rushed to the emergency judge for a search warrant just in case we needed it.

Nobody answered at the house, but Carla stood on a crate and peeked through a window and saw blood spatter and spent shell casings on the carpet. Exigent circumstances. We entered the front door at around the time the judge was signing the warrant.

They did more than shoot him. They made him hurt first. They did a number on his girlfriend, too. Evidence of sexual penetration, vaginal trauma, says the ME on the scene, before they put a bullet through her head, too. So to Carla’s question: Why?

Could be this was the Hustlers’ work. Andre Oliver learned that Junior was one of the shooters, or maybe just suspected it, and sent some boys over for a combination of retaliation and the extraction of information—information like who was in the car with Junior at K-Town.

Maybe. But I don’t think so. That would mean that “Sir Andre” violated his promise to me of a twenty-four-hour cease-fire. Not that I’d expect him to be honest. But I would expect him to be smart. I don’t see how it helps him to piss off the Special Operations Section. He could’ve waited twelve hours and done the same thing.

But who knows how people think? Maybe, against all reason, Andre thinks he has no choice but to retaliate, and he didn’t want Junior caught—he wanted him dead.