Fidelity (4 page)

6

I
T TOOK
them forty minutes to find Ricky Thomas's last known location, an apartment in the projects set uncomfortably close to the Inner Harbor, owned by Shawnee Terice, girlfriend or baby momma or some such. Torres did the honors, pounding on the thin wood with his ham-hock fists. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he boomed. “Please come to the door.”

The commotion inside was loud, and sustained enough to get Torres to give Kay a long, heavy look and for Kay to put her hand around the butt of her service weapon. The door opened to reveal a harpy in stretch pants. “What you want?”

Torres spread his best aw-shucks grin on his face, although Kay wasn't sure who he thought he was fooling. People in this part of Baltimore were not fond of the police, in the same sense that cats are not fond of dogs. “Good afternoon, ma'am. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to answer some questions for us?”

“Ricky ain't here,” she said—yelled, really, the noise cutting through the aperture, along with a fair bit of Shawnee's spit. Shawnee was shaped like a pyramid, a pointed head leading out to a body squat as a radish. The skin of her face was wrinkled and strained from hard living and bad decisions. She looked at the two of them with eyes the color of rusted metal.

Torres smiled a little wider, his eyes flickering over to Kay, then back at the door. “Ricky who?” he asked.

She blinked twice. “I don't know no Ricky,” Shawnee said, adjusting herself so that her fleshy bulk shielded the interior. “Who said anything about anyone named Ricky?”

“You know, ma'am, and I hope you don't mind me saying so, but I don't see much of a future for you as a professional poker player,” Torres said before setting one hand on her shoulder and casually shunting her aside.

“You can't come in here! You ain't got no warrant! You can't come in here!”

“It's called exigent circumstances,” Torres began to explain, though he didn't get the chance to finish, because as he pushed open the door there was a quick flash of movement, and Torres tore forward like a hound after a coursing hare. Half Torres's size and probably a third of his age, still the suspect—who Kay thought was Ricky but couldn't say for certain—seemed like he was moving in slow motion. Torres got one hand on the back of his hooded sweatshirt and then the sound of tearing fabric was followed, in close succession, by the sound of Ricky being slammed against the linoleum floor. Kay winced in unconscious sympathy.

“Christ, Ricky, you see what happens if you aren't careful?” Torres continued in his easy lilt, bending down to cuff the suspect. “You could have really hurt yourself. And you went ahead and you ruined your shirt! Now what kind of thinking is that,” Torres continued, standing the still-stunned Ricky up and setting him on the sofa. “Gotta be more careful, man. Whatever would Shawnee here do without you?”

In answer, Shawnee began to enter into a prolonged monologue of intense, even impressive vulgarity. Notwithstanding which, Kay cuffed her and set her down beside her boyfriend.

“Keep an eye on the loving couple,” Torres said. “I'm going to have a quick look around.”

Kay nodded and took up a position midway between the exit and the door Torres headed through, making sure she could offer her partner backup should the situation require it while still keeping an eye on the two suspects. Being put in irons had done nothing to halt Shawnee's continued slew of high-pitched invective, a torrent at once unceasing and shockingly profane. Ricky kept quiet, although he looked up at Kay with unconcealed hate. It was a look Kay had long since grown used to from working law enforcement in Baltimore, and she no longer felt any particular way about it.

Especially with Shawnee still screaming madly in her ear. One thing that even a casual involvement in law enforcement will teach you—or life generally, for that matter—is that woman, whatever her deficiency in size or strength, is in no way inferior to man in viciousness. And since humanity, in its wisdom, had seen fit to create all sorts of tools by which a weaker person might defeat a stronger one—knives and spears and shining black 9-millimeter Berettas—it behooved a person not to treat a perp casually on account of their sex.

“. . . and your mother was twice as bad,” Shawnee finished.

“Keep talking about my parents,” Kay said flatly, turning to face the shrieking woman. “You're apt to piss me off.”

Probably it wasn't a plan, exactly; probably Shawnee was just cracked out and hated cops, and had enough practice being arrested not to be particularly frightened at the concept. But either way, in the instant when Kay's attention slipped from him, Ricky was up from the couch and hit her turned head with his shoulder hard enough to set her tumbling. Then he was off at a sprint, drugs forgotten, house forgotten, girl forgotten, nothing left but freedom, freedom, freedom.

He was two steps out of the house when Torres caught him with a blow to his temple that sent him flying off the stoop and into the surrounding bushes. One of the upsides to these little shotgun shacks was that they didn't take long to search and they had back exits. After finishing with the first, Torres had apparently used the second to cycle back around to the front. A fortuitous scenario, otherwise they'd have been left to chase Ricky down Pratt Street with his hands cuffed behind his back, a situation that wouldn't have done much credit to anyone.

Torres managed to stand Ricky upright, but you could see he was still dazed from the punch, blinking and trying to focus on anything besides the pain in his head and the buzz in his skull.

“Don't hit my partner,” Torres said. “What the hell kind of gentleman are you? Didn't your momma teach you any manners?”

Ricky's girl was still screaming, an ongoing stream of profanity spewing forth like the blood from Kay's nose.

7

A
RRIVING BACK
at the office, they put Ricky and his ingenue into separate holding cells and turned to processing the narcotics they had taken from his house. At one point a few drops of blood from Kay's nose fell on the cellophane wrapping of a cube of heroin. Torres took one look at the eyes above the wounded nostrils, the rage not quite simmering, and decided not to make a joke about it.

Afterward, however, when it was time to have a chat with the man who had broken her nose, Torres decided to make what he knew would be an unsuccessful effort to get his partner to take a few hours off. “You sure you want a piece of this, Ivy? You got tagged pretty good there.”

Kay threw the bit of bloody cotton into a nearby wastebasket. “I'm sure.”

“We won't even get anything from him anyway. Whatever time he's looking at on the drugs won't be enough to convince him to rat on his boss, not with Williams cutting threads like he was a tailor.”

Kay didn't respond, just turned her cold green eyes towards the room where Thomas sat shackled.

“Your problem, Kay,” Torres said, shrugging and unlocking the door, “is you're too damn chatty.”

Torres was widely considered to be one of the best interrogators within the Baltimore Field Office. Some combination of his size and good-old-boy manner had the effect of convincing casual criminals and half-hard corner boys to drop their guard, chat a little, get loose and talkative—sometimes, though of course not always, and Kay thought this was going to be one of the not-­always days. Looking at Ricky Thomas, a veteran of the gangster culture since he was a youth, well versed in criminality and in the strategies law enforcement used to combat it, Kay did not see a particularly tractable opponent.

Especially when he saw Kay walk in behind her partner, a nasty smile sliding out over his stony facade. After two years working violent gangs in Baltimore, Kay had grown used to that sort of look: searching, sexual, aggressive. It meant nothing to her. It rolled off her like the winter rain off the Bureau car.

“How you doing there, Ricky?” Torres asked, lowering himself into a chair with an audible sigh. “How's the head? We can get you another ice pack if you want one.”

The aforementioned ice pack sat on the table, lukewarm and untouched. Ricky had not seen fit to use it. “It don't hurt none,” he said. “How about you, girl? How's that shiner I gave you? Looks like a beaut.”

Kay did not respond except to take the seat next to Torres—next to and just a bit behind him. She pulled out a small leather journal and a pen, opened the first and held the second between thumb and forefinger.

“Now what kind of a way is that to act?” Torres asked, shaking his big bull head. “I thought we talked about this already, Ricky: you gotta show respect to women. Didn't your mother teach you anything?”

“You're wasting your time,” Ricky said.

“You don't even know what we want yet,” Torres answered
through a smile. “Maybe we want to send you on a free visit to Disneyland. Maybe we want to give you tomorrow's winning lotto numbers. Would you say no to that?”

“You think this is my first time in a box? I grew up in these rooms,” he said, gesturing at the four walls surrounding him. “And I know how all this works.”

“If you've got such depth of experience,” Torres said, smile slightly less bright, “then you ought to understand what it means that we caught you holding two kilograms of heroin.”

“I know what it means.”

“I've seen your record, Ricky,” Torres continued over him. “I mean, I've browsed it: the whole thing makes for heavy reading, like carrying around a dictionary. And unlike Agent Malloy over there, I've never been much on studying. But still, I got enough of it to figure, what with you on parole till, hell, the year 2100 or some such, that whatever judge we pull might not prove so sympathetic to your being slapped with possession with intent
to distribute. And what was that one other thing . . .” Torres snapped his fingers loudly, the sound echoing like a shot in the tight confines of the room. “Assaulting a federal officer. Let me ask you a question, Ricky: How you feel about Christmas?”

“It's fine.”

“New Year's?”

Ricky shrugged.

“Halloween? Easter? Cinco de Mayo? Do they celebrate Cinco de Mayo in prison, Ricky?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

“No? That's too bad, I'm all sorry to hear that, I truly am—because without your cooperation, it's going to be a long time before you get to kiss a girl beneath the mistletoe, or eat turkey with your family, or go on an Easter egg hunt. Something like . . .” Torres spent a moment in deliberate consideration.
“. . . twenty years?” he asked, turning back as if asking Kay for her input. When she didn't respond, even to look up from her book, Torres turned back to Ricky. “Maybe a few less, if you get some lefty judge to hoodwink.” Torres had a big, boozy sort of voice, like an carnival pitchman, and it echoed in the small confines of the room for a second or two after he spoke. Then there was silence, just the breathing of the three inmates, barely audible. It went on awhile.

“Let me tell you how this is going to go,” Ricky said finally. “You gonna dick me around here for a while, because it makes you feel like a big man, and then I'm gonna tell you where to go with it and demand to see whatever shit-for-brains public defender gets assigned my case, and then I'm going to spend the next couple of years in a box. Ain't no thing. Ain't no thing to me, not a bit. Going inside, it's like going back home. Hell, they probably been keeping my cot warm for me.” He leered as wide as a man in handcuffs could leer. “But one thing that's not gonna happen—one thing I'm not gonna do; one thing I wouldn't never do—is talk to any damn five-oh.”

Kay sat mostly forgotten in the corner of the room. Her book was open but she wasn't looking at it, and the pen in her hands sat uncapped and unused. Kay kept meticulous notes, because it was important when building a case to create a clear paper trail, but for herself she barely needed them. In truth her exceptional memory was a mixed blessing at the very best: memories she would have preferred to forget kept shiny and new by the undiminished force of her own recollection. But professionally it was a valuable asset, one that had already gained her some renown within the Baltimore Field Office.

“You're that tight with Rashid Williams?” Kay asked quietly.

It was the first thing she'd said since entering the room, and that alone seemed to give it a certain weight, even for Ricky, who
turned to look at her full on. “First, I ain't got no idea where Ra is hiding out at. That's what you're after, you're wasting your time. Second, if I did, I wouldn't tell you anything.”

“Because you're so close?”

“It don't matter how I feel about Rashid. If I hated Rashid like the devil, you still wouldn't get nothing out of me.”

“But the two of you are friendly.”

“Brothers to blood,” Ricky said, smirking.

“Interesting,” Kay said. “Interesting.”

Now it was Ricky's turn to be interested. “Why you say that?”

Kay shrugged, as if she weren't really paying attention. “Family interests me. The connections we build with people, the relationships. The things we owe one another, or the things we decide we owe one another.”

“Family's all there is,” Ricky said, nodding his big head in agreement.

“You're no kin to Williams, though.”

“Close as.”

“Came up together?”

“Shit, I known Ra since before anybody be foolish enough to let us hold weight. Playing pickup ball on the mini-baskets and drinking quarter waters,” Ricky said, growing expansive with nostalgia.

“Just two young boys with dreams of becoming corner kingpins, dropping bodies and selling grams?”

“Fuck else we gonna do? Become bankers? Where we was from, it was sling crack or work at McDonald's. And I wasn't never about wearing one of those hats.”

Kay had heard it before, and it wasn't altogether false, but she didn't think it was entirely true, either. Circumstances limit one's course of action, but they didn't define one's character, one's identity. Ricky had made the choices that would lead him to
a jail cell, and Rashid had made the same. Of course, she allowed no hint of this disapprobation to show on her face. “Yeah, yeah, you and every other two-bit corner boy south of Penn Station want to drop Rashid's name like you were twin sucklings. I've read your sheet: you're at the bottom of the pole, Ricky, and just cause you once walked past Williams at a party when you were in high school doesn't make you friends.”

“You ain't know what you talking about,” Ricky said, getting heated. “Ra and I go back to when we was seeds. Used to bust into Rite Aid and walk out with all the candy we could carry, sell it the next day at school for a dollar a pop. Shit, only time we ever bothered to show.”

“Where'd you hide the stash?”

“His grandmomma's house. Only place to. Down in the basement. Perfect till the rats got to it.” Ricky smiled at the thought of malfeasance gone by. “Came down one day and found the wrappers torn up, all our work ruined. Must have eaten through four pounds of chocolate in one night.”

Kay closed her book with a loud snap, turned her attention, or at least her eyes, to Torres. “Why are we wasting our time with this zero?” she said. “Says he won't tell nothing but that's just 'cause he's got nothing to tell. This guy knows Rashid Williams like I know the pope.”

“You calling me a liar?” Ricky asked, simmering.

“Nice to see you're following along.”

“Fuck you.”

“Let me tell you something, Ricky: I know everything there is to know about Rashid Williams. I eat Williams every morning with my oatmeal. I know Williams better than any friend ever knew him, any lover. Ricky doesn't have a grandmother; both of his grandmothers are dead. We check that kind of thing.”

“She was his mom's cousin or some shit,” Ricky said. “Miss
Dee, we used to call her. I practically grew up in that woman's house; don't be telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.”

“Yeah? You and Williams, the uncrowned kings of West Baltimore.”

“West Baltimore?” Ricky looked like he was going to spit, then went ahead and decided to actually do so, a thick wad of phlegm going against the wall. “Potomac and Lombard—born there, come up there, gonna die there,” he said.

“More likely the inside of a cell,” Kay said, standing abruptly. “Let's go,” she told Torres.

Torres looked up questioningly, trying to figure out his partner's ploy, what he was supposed to do to help her out with it.

But Kay didn't seem to be playing a game. “We got what we need,” she said.

“Bullshit,” Thomas said, but there was a damp spot on his forehead. “I didn't tell you nothing.”

“You told us everything,” Kay said flatly and with no excess of emotion, like she was explaining something simple to someone stupid. “You just didn't realize it.”

But outside the interview room Torres seemed as skeptical as Ricky. “If this is a ploy to get him to open up,” he said, shrugging, “I applaud the effort, but it won't work. We can let him stew awhile but he's not going to break.”

“It wasn't a gambit,” Kay said, showing some sign of excitement for the first time. “Name of Dee, lives near Potomac and Lombard. What do you think, Torres: Worth making another stop?”