Bronx Requiem(38)

She kept her head down and her hoodie pulled up, pictured Biggie Watkins or Whitey bursting into McDonald’s, walking up to her, and shooting her in the face.

God help her if Whitey Bondurant found her. She’d been around him only a few times, but he was the scariest man she’d ever seen. Big, with a creepy albino face and dead, weird-looking pink eyes. Usually, Bondurant wore sunglasses to protect his eyes, but if he talked to you or looked at you he always took them off to see you better. Nobody wanted those crazy grim-reaper eyes staring at them.

Amelia forced herself to stop thinking about it. She’d done what she’d done. They were going to kill her. Maybe they’d still kill her, now in an even more horrible way. At least she’d die knowing she had killed Derrick Watkins first.

So now what?

She stank from fear and tension, and working all night at the Point. She needed regular clothes, not this whore outfit smelling of gun smoke. And shoes. And a place to hide. Her sixty dollars was down to fifty-three and change. She needed money, but not by turning tricks. Never again.

She had a gun, but knew she couldn’t do a strong-arm robbery.

She blinked and sniffed, fighting off the need to cry. She thought about what she had done to earn the money sitting in dead Derrick Watkins’s pocket. Forget about it, she told herself.

She thought about those men who were supposedly friends of her father. Maybe she could find them. Maybe they would help her. But how could she find them? She didn’t even know who they were.

She finished her last french fry and the rest of her Coke. The food had revived her. She had to move on. But where? And how long could she last without money? And how long before they found her and killed her?





20

Crouching below the dashboard of the Dodge, Palmer heard the fading squeals of the Mercury Marauder’s tires telling him his attackers had fled. The wail of police sirens told him help and protection were on the way.

He half fell, half crawled out of his wrecked car. Palmer stood and drew his service gun. There was nothing to shoot at, but he wanted to look like he might have been shooting.

The first patrol car appeared at the top of the block.

Palmer walked out into the middle of the street, holding up his badge wallet, shouting his name, rank, and precinct number at the cops piling out of their patrol cars.

*

In the small, empty yard behind Derrick’s house, the last of his crew except for Tyrell Williams dropped down onto the ground from the fire escape ladder. They ran through the backyard, climbed over a wrought-iron fence, scattering in all directions. Biggie Watkins struggled over the gate last and then lumbered off toward Jerome Avenue.

Back at the fire escape, Tyrell, still woozy and off balance from the brass-knuckled fist to his face, had taken a long time reeling down the steep fire escape. He’d just managed to get onto the drop-down ladder that hung about five feet above the ground behind the Mount Hope house. Near the bottom of the ladder, he lost his footing, dropping hard enough to make his legs buckle, and fell to the side, smacking his head on the packed dirt.

Everything turned black for him again.

*

Out front, Palmer had been yelling a description of a black sedan into a police radio, possibly a Ford Crown Vic with four armed men leaving the scene of a shooting. He would have bet money one of the men was James Beck, but he kept that to himself.

He quickly organized the four uniformed cops on the scene into a raiding party. As two more arrived he told them, “Go search the back.”

One of the cops broke open the front door, and they all headed up the stairs of the rickety three-flat. They quickly searched the first two floors, finding them empty. On the top floor, the broken front door of the last apartment stood half open. Palmer moved to the front of the pack. He held his SIG in a two-handed grip, kicked the broken door out of his way, and shouted, “Police! Everybody down. Down!”

He leaned into the room and saw the bloody, bullet-riddled corpse of Derrick Watkins, slumped in the armchair. He stepped into the apartment, motioning the cops behind him to enter.

He walked to the body and stood in front of the dead man, as if claiming ownership of it. He told the other cops to check the apartment. Three of the four cops made their way to the rear of the apartment, while the fourth cop stood next to Palmer, who holstered his gun and bent over to get a closer look at the body, wincing at Derrick’s destroyed face. Whoever had shot him had done a thorough job of it.

Cops filtered back into the front room, talking to each other in raised voices, their police radios crackling. The cop who had stayed with Palmer pulled out his radio and reported in to his precinct about the discovery of a deceased black male shot multiple times. It annoyed Palmer. He considered this his case, but he was too tired to say anything.

He checked his watch. Almost 4:27 P.M.

Palmer asked, “Anything back there?”

All three cops confirmed the apartment was empty.

“All right, guys, this is a crime scene. Let’s seal this place off.”

He ordered one cop to go downstairs and close off the entrance to the building. He ordered two others to search the lower floors more carefully for weapons, drugs, or other bodies, and then to check the buildings on each side to see if they could find witnesses.

He told the cop who had stayed with him, “Okay, you and I are going to search this place more thoroughly.”

The cop had already discovered the two pillowcases on the couch filled with guns. He opened one of them and tilted the makeshift bag toward Palmer, who walked over and looked at the pile of guns. He bent down to take a sniff. “Doesn’t smell like any of them have been fired. Just leave them there. Go in the back and work your way to the front. See if you can find anything. Guns, drugs, money. The usual.”