Troubleshooter Page 3

  -6-

  A bright lance of sunshine stabbed into Hannibal’s eyes, making him push his Oakley’s back into place. His courtesy call at the police station had been as frustrating as expected, but he had to verify their awareness of the issues concerning Balor’s property. With that errand out of the way he tried to get comfortable in his own back seat on his way to see the house in person. He really preferred to drive himself because he loved the way the Volvo handled, but now he had a chauffeur, at least for a few weeks. Anyway, it would hardly have mattered in the traffic, thick as shag carpet, flowing over the Douglas Memorial Bridge. They were crossing the Anacostia River, into the part of the District of Columbia carved out of Maryland.

  They were nearing the far end of the bridge when Ray cleared his throat. “Hannibal, I realize most of what you give me will go to that loan shark, but what about you and me? I mean, Cindy, she told me you told Balor you get five hundred a day for solving people’s problems. How can I…”

  “She told you right,” Hannibal said. “Five hundred dollars a day. That breaks down to sixty-five dollars an hour, which is just about how long your job took me. I’ll take it out of your seventh week’s check. Okay?”

  After a long pause, Ray said “Gracias, mi amigo.” Then he took a deep breath and sat a bit straighter. A moment later, in a lighter voice, he asked “So what did the cops say, anyway?”

  “What I expected,” Hannibal answered, leaning forward in the back seat. “Nothing they can do. No real crime being committed. Not enough manpower for stuff like this. And didn’t I know how many murders and robberies they had to deal with, and, eh, like that.”

  “In other words, they just jerked you around.”

  “Basically,” Hannibal said. “You know where you’re going, right?”

  Ray pulled off the highway, stopped at a red light under an overpass and craned his neck. “I been driving a cab in this town for five years, Chico. Say, Hannibal, you really think this gig is dangerous?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Hannibal looked around to orient himself as the light changed and the 850 GLT pulled smoothly forward. “Down there. W Street, not a mile from here. A pair of brothers was shot to death Sunday in the sixteen hundred block. Both in their twenties. Family dispute, they called it.”

  “How you know that shit?” Ray slowed to let an old man cross the street at his own pace.

  “There’s a homicide within a block of here two or three times a week, I bet. I read the papers pretty close.” He did not add that too often, when he read about murders he was reading about this part of the city. He knew Washington D.C. was a totally unique city, and some linked its oddities in different ways. It led the nation in violent crime most years, but did that stem from having a seventy- percent black population? Or could the crime rate have some connection to its gun control laws, the nation’s strictest, preventing law abiding citizens from defending themselves. Or did being the central gathering place for America’s politicians just make the town predisposed to violence?

  As they approached their destination, he leaned back to absorb the neighborhood. In southeast D.C., the community was more like ninety percent black. There was not much activity on the streets during daylight. Here, old men still wore hats that matched their suits, worn shiny with age. Fashions for younger men included knit hats, he noticed, usually in red, black and green. The ladies still looked sharp, and most walked like they knew it.

  Streets here were narrow, lined with sandstone row houses with red or gray exteriors. A few trees stood on each block, looking malnourished.

  Ray pulled to the curb near the corner, put the car in park and lit a cigarette. “We’re here, boss.” He powered down the window. “Up there, second from the end.”

  “Uh-huh.” Hannibal slid his sunglasses off and sat for a moment, apparently staring into space. In fact, he was scanning the street, exploring the environment before he threw himself into it. The target building was red brick and three stories tall with a basement showing a couple of feet above ground, just like every other building on that side of the block. On either side of the door, the front of the building bowed forward, like towers at the corners of a castle. Stone steps led up to the door.

  Slanted stone walls stood in for railings on both sides of the steps, then continued to the building’s front wall, closing in the stoop. A young man in a wife-beater undershirt sat on the left side of that stone wall, staring vacantly across the street. Hannibal knew that empty look. Cocaine did that to a man, about halfway between the immediate rush and the gnawing hunger at the other end.

  In front of the tower-like curved walls small patches of long uncut grass waved. A low chain link fence contained the one on the left. Untrimmed knee high hedges enclosed the lawn square on the right. From looking at the grass, he guessed the building on the end was also abandoned. A cement path, maybe a yard wide, separated the building from its neighbors.

  When he popped his door open, he heard the front door open as well. He had almost forgotten anyone else was around.

  “Want some backup?” Ray asked.

  “No, man, I’m more worried about the car in this neighborhood. Won’t be a minute, anyway. Just a little recon.”

  Hannibal started toward the corner, staying across the street from the target house. Halfway down the block he was about to cross the street when a young voice caught his attention.

  “Ain’t seen you before.”

  He turned to face a boy sitting on the porch of an older single family house. He had a chocolate bar complexion and very short hair. His Redskins jacket was a size or two too big. Deep brown eyes shone with intelligence, but his mouth reflected a wary distrust of the world, probably born of experience.

  “No, you haven’t,” Hannibal said. “My name’s Hannibal.”

  “You Booolshittin’. Hannibal, like that dude in the movies that eats people?”

  Hannibal chuckled. “No, like the general from Carthage who whipped the Roman legions with elephants in his army around two hundred B.C.” After watching the blank look on the boy’s face for a few seconds, Hannibal smiled as he would at an old friend. “I’m moving into that house up there. What’s your name?”

  “They call me Monty,” the boy said, his face impassive. “You don’t want to go in there.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “The Man runs that house.” Monty started playing with a deck of cards. “Grandma says stay away from there. You could get hurt.”

  “Thank you, Monty. I still have to check it out, but I appreciate your warning.”

  Hands in pockets, Hannibal crossed the street and walked, neither slow nor fast, to the second house from the end. On the sidewalk, he slid his shades back into place. When he got halfway up the stairs the man on the stoop noticed him. The door guard, at least Hannibal figured that was his job, had very dark skin, with chipmunk cheeks and hair cut in a flat top. The whites of his eyes were lined and yellowed. His ashy right hand snaked down to close around the neck of a ball bat at his side.

  “What you looking for, Jim?” he slurred.

  Hannibal smiled pleasantly, leaving his hands in his pockets. “I’m from urban renewal, just checking out the real estate.”

  “I’m about to urban renewal your fucking head. Drag your narrow ass out of here.”

  “I’m not looking for any trouble, Bro.” Hannibal backed off a step. “Just need to look around.”

  “Well then you just look the fuck around some fucking where else, dick head.” Chipmunk Cheeks stood up. He was an inch shorter than Hannibal, but wider by enough to count.

  “This is not starting well.” Hannibal’s voice grew more serious. “Can we talk about this? You need a break.” His right foot crossed over his left, then swung in a high, wide arc across his body. Halfway through its journey it raked across the jaw of the man facing him. Chipmunk Cheeks dropped like a felled oak, slowly at first, then gaining speed until he toppled over the wall onto the small lawn. Hannibal took one hand out of his po
cket and opened the door.

  The hall seemed unnecessarily wide. A stairway with a heavy banister wound its way up the middle. One long row of rooms ran down each side of the building, each with its own door to the hall. He saw five doors on each side, but it looked as though the three in the middle were painted shut. Railroad flats. At one time the rooms were probably rented out separately. He tried to imagine what the building had looked like in its original form, when it was a single family residence. Time, and too many poor residents, had reduced the once-proud house to it lowest possible use and now he would have to probe its dirty little secrets and peer into its most embarrassing corners. He figured he might as well start at the bottom.

  He found the door on his right unlocked, so he walked in. It was dark inside and the stench of urine burned his nose. Someone had boarded up the front windows on this side of the building. A small man in a tattered coat lay huddled against the front wall, under the two big windows. Inches away, two others lay curled in balls, with two empty wine bottles lying between them. Still, a sense of emptiness almost overwhelmed Hannibal. This appeared to be a haven for homeless winos.

  Pink flowered wallpaper was crumbling from the walls, and the tile floor was chipped in several places. The two big sliding doors to the next room stood open. From the middle of that front room he could see through the other four to the back door. Each room had a door to the hall.

  Across the hall the door was locked. He knocked politely and waited. A flurry of motion started behind the door, ending in a harsh voice calling “Who’s there?”

  “Meter man,” Hannibal replied. More profanity came through the door, and more shuffling. Then a lock was thrown and the door slid open on a short chain. A beak like black nose poked through the space. Above it two wild eyes glowed. Beneath it hung a short revolver barrel, pointing at Hannibal’s face.

  -7-

  Ray would rather have been walking into that building with Hannibal than leaning against his car at the curb. He was thinking of ignoring his instructions and following anyway, when a weathered Dodge pulled down the street and stopped in front of him. Only the light on the roof marked it as a taxicab. Its window cranked down and a thin Puerto Rican face poked out. Ray smiled in recognition.

  “Yo, Nestor. Como estas?”

  “Not good as you, Ray, from what I can see.” The driver cut his eyes at the Volvo. “That yours? Nice ride, amigo. You using it for a chauffeur job?”

  “Hey, it’s a living,” Ray answered. “But what about you? I thought you were through with that cab company.”

  “Soon, man, that’s why I stopped. Me and Mal are looking at starting our own cab company. Sure like to have you with us.”

  Ray’s eyes lit up and, for a moment, he forgot the string of bad luck that had dogged him since he lost his job. “I’m your man, Nestor. What’ll it take.”

  “We can do this if the three of us do all the work ourselves, at least at first, and if we each bring three, maybe four grand.” Ray’s face fell a bit, then brighten again. “Well, give me a call next week and we’ll see what we can put together.”

  Ray’s ready smile faded as he watched Nestor’s beat up car roll away. He knew he could get the money from his daughter, but he would never ask her such a thing. He was the parent, after all. And he would never gather even so small a sum of money driving Hannibal around town. In fact, he considered, he might not even collect his first week’s pay if his employer got himself killed in that crumbling wreck of a house.

  -8-

  “Let me see your hands.” The high-pitched voice came from under the wild eyes behind the door. “You don’t look like you ought to be here.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing about you.” Hannibal raised his hands to chest level. “Can I come in and look around? Obviously I’m not a cop.”

  “You sure as hell ain’t no junkie,” the gunman replied. “You the new mule? You got the stuff?”

  “Maybe. You got the money?”

  “I got the fucking gun.” Wild Eyes flashed crooked teeth.

  “Too true.” Hannibal’s left hand flicked out and closed around Wild Eyes’ wrist. Hannibal tugged hard, fully extending the man’s arm and pulling it through the space between the door and doorsill. Wild Eyes’ face smashed into the door, slamming it on his arm. The pistol clattered to the floor. Raising his right foot, Hannibal kicked out with all he had, snapping the chain with a pathetic “tink” sound and sending Wild Eyes sprawling across the room.

  This apartment looked just like the one across the hall, except no old men lay huddled in a drunken sleep. The third room revealed three bodies curled up on a double mattress lying on the floor. The fourth room was empty and the room farthest back was a kitchen.

  Hannibal’s stomach flipped and he burst into a sticky sweat under his clothes. This was the shooting gallery, the center of this tiny community. A woman thin as a television Somali sat on a folding chair in front of the stove, holding a spoon over a red electric coil. Her partner, his arm tied off with a catheter, was drawing a long needle out of the crook of his elbow. Oblivious to Hannibal, he filled the syringe from the spoon and handed it to the girl.

  Hannibal had somehow fended off the smell of filth, the roaches, the trash thrown indiscriminately about. He had purposely not reacted to these things but now, with this sight, they all crashed in on him at once and his lunch pushed up into his throat. Refusing to throw up, he turned to go.

  Fighter’s intuition pulled his face back out of the arc of Wild Eyes’ swinging right fist. Then instinct took over and he counterattacked. Right jab, a left hook and a side kick, in a seamless combination, without thought. He was bouncing on his toes when Wild Eyes collapsed, unconscious, on the dirty tile floor.

  Bouncing in a circle also brought him around to face the stove. The girl had snatched a pair of scissors and was advancing slowly with them poised overhead like a dagger. Well, Hannibal didn’t want to slap the crap out of her too, and he did have an alternative. He stopped his legs and reached under his right shoulder for his forty caliber Sig Sauer P229 automatic.

  The woman froze, gradually lowering her scissors. Her eyes were those of a frightened child whose father had just pulled off his belt.

  “What the hell is this?” she muttered, close to tears.

  “This?” he asked, shaking his gun for emphasis while holding it in a two handed FBI grip. “Consider this your eviction notice. Now get your friends and your shit together and blow. I’m going upstairs, and when I get back, I expect you and your pals to be in the wind. Dig?”

  She nodded. Her shooting partner started gathering their heroin and the tools of its use together, shoving things into his pockets. Hannibal backed through the kitchen’s door to the hall, not holstering his gun until he was out of the room.

  The staircase, like the hall, seemed wider than necessary. Despite his light tread, an echo followed him up. At the top he could hear rhythmic grunting from the left. A simple slam lock secured the front door. From his wallet, he drew a credit card. At least, it was the shape and size of a credit card, bearing all the expected color and lettering. The only real difference was that it was made of steel. He slipped the metal sliver between the door and its jamb, popping the door open.

  On a bare mattress in the middle of the floor, a leggy girl, maybe seventeen, was trying to earn a living. She looked up, but her customer continued his desperate thrusts. Her face showed no fear or anger, or even embarrassment. It was more a pleading expression, begging him not to cause trouble.

  Her face, unspoiled yet ruined, made Hannibal swallow hard. He backed away silently, pulling the door closed. After a couple of deep breaths, he tried a door across the hall. It opened, but the first room was empty. He picked up a sharp smell he did not recognize. Stepping silently forward, he peered through the two big doors to the next room. Twenty square panes of glass in two big doors separated him from a circle of young people, male and female, black and white. A small pipe moved from hand to hand, each per
son drawing on it as it moved, often relighting it. Disgusted, he returned to the hall.

  “A shooting gallery, a hooker’s crash pad and a crack house,” He told himself on his way upstairs. “God, what else?”

  The top floor’s first flat was empty, end to end. He soon understood why. The toilet did not work, but someone, or perhaps several people, had insisted on using it anyway, until no one could stand to enter the bathroom.

  Hip-hop music slipped under the last apartment’s front door. Maybe, he thought, someone’s in this house who isn’t among the living dead. Shrugging, he again turned the knob and pushed open the door.

  He took it all in very quickly. This room was well lighted, on electricity pirated from somewhere. It looked like a warehouse for televisions, VCRs and stereo equipment of all brands and descriptions. On the right, a black man with a crinkly beard and shaved head sat at a cheap metal dining table. The table held an assortment of equipment including soldering gear, files and a power sander. The man at the table was busy removing the identification plate from a boom box. He looked up briefly, snapped his fingers, and went back to work.

  With a sound more roar than growl, a pit bull bigger than Hannibal imagined they grew flashed across the floor from the next room. Terror gripped his brain as he slammed the door shut and backed against the banister, his heart pounding and his hands shaking from the sudden adrenaline dump. He jumped at what had to be the sound of the dog hitting the door.

  That was enough for one day.

  -9-

  Cindy Santiago opened the car door, tossing a briefcase in ahead of herself. As her hips sank into the upholstery, Hannibal thought he saw weariness on her face but as she turned toward him, it vanished.

  “Well, how did the new detective team spend its day?” Cindy asked, situating her briefcase behind her calves.