Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1) Page 8

  When he tried to leave though, the door locks came down and wouldn’t budge.

  He thought maybe the electric locks were tied to the faulty battery and twisted the key again, but the buttons didn’t work. Then the car radio came back on, though he hadn’t touched it. Another blast of obnoxious static crackled through the speakers. He winced and lunged to switch it off. A voice came through loud and clear.

  “Hey sucker! The fuck you doin’ in my whip? I’ma take your black ass on down to 14th Street and drive you off the pier!”

  Conquer gripped the wheel. Beneath his foot, the accelerator mashed itself to the floor of its own accord, the engine revving loudly, causing the heads of people on the street to turn. Exhaust smoke blew out the tail end.

  As the car shook in place from the roaring of the big motor, the horn blared, and the windshield wipers kicked on, beating furiously.

  Conquer overcame his initial surprise, thoughtfully reached in his coat pocket, and took out his pack of cigarettes. So the attendant hadn’t been lying.

  “Yeah, motherfucker!” the radio bellowed at him. “You in my world, now! The ‘fuck you goin’ do now?”

  Conquer selected a hand rolled smoke, stuck it between his lips and lit the end with his lighter. He leaned back in the seat and took a drag. All around him outside, people clamped their hands over their ears and glared.

  He stared back at them till they looked away, then exhaled, letting a cloud of blue smoke billow out.

  “Yeah, now I’m’a tell you how things gon’ be!” the radio shouted.

  Then the voice stammered, cut short, and began to cough and groan.

  Conquer kept smoking through the tumult. The wipers stopped beating the windscreen first.

  He took his battered copy of Pow-wows, or The Lost Friend out of his inside pocket and flipped to the back.

  Clearing his throat, he read the last page, mumbling around the burning cigarette, puffing all the while.

  “Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drowned in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him. So help me.”

  Just a stopgap, but by the time he had finished, the engine was off, the horn had stopped its bleating, and the only sound in the car was a faint moaning coming from the static-y radio.

  Conquer laid the open book on the dash and turned the volume dial down.

  “Wait!” said the voice. “Wait!”

  Conquer waited till he could barely make out the voice, till he was a click away from shutting it off, before he stopped.

  He tried the door, then raised his eyebrows and blew a fresh cloud of smoke.

  The lock popped open.

  “That’s better,” Conquer said.

  “What’s…what’s goin’ on?” said the voice in the radio.

  Conquer always kept a few specially prepared cigarettes in his pack. The one burning was laced with white sage. His mama had taught him from a baby how to smoke evil spirits out.

  “It ain’t what’s goin’ on, chump,” Conquer said. “It’s what’s gettin’ out. Your spooky ass. Now I’m goin’ upstairs, and in about an hour I’m comin’ back down to clean this car out for good. So make your peace.”

  “What’ll…happen to me?” the spirit groaned, gasping.

  “I expect you’ll go where all pimps go when they die,” Conquer said, gripping the door handle. “And I ain’t talkin’ about 26th Street.”

  “Say brother,” the ghost said meekly, “can’t we work somethin’ out here?”

  “I ain’t your brother.”

  Conquer got out of the car in a cloud of smoke and slammed the door. He mounted the stair up to the place at the end of St. Marks Place.

  What lower form of life was there on earth than a pimp? Conquer had seen them his whole life, prowling up and down 125th and all over Times Square, creeping through Hunts Point in their ridiculous cars, peering over the rims of their dark glasses, twisting women into dollar signs in their eyes. They congregated around the train station and the Greyhound stops like pier anglers, watching for the kind of shiny, wide-eyed girls that came swimming up to the city, looking to be a model or a dancer or an actress, hooking them with their own dreams, landing ‘em and gutting ‘em in some cheap motel and tossing their hearts over their shoulders to the gulls that cruised the underpasses and corners shelling out sweaty wads of cash money for what they were too pitiful to get for themselves.

  A pimp was lower even than his pathetic clientele. He was a modern day overseer, patting himself on the back for lording it over the hearts and minds and the bodies of his charges, convincing them they needed him when the truth was there was nothing more disposable on God’s green earth in Conquer’s mind than a gutter ass pimp. He hated the gall of them; the pride they took in that moniker, in the exploitation of their own women, strutting around the jungle like bright parrots, or fat ass senators flaunting the gains they’d gotten through the labors of others. If the worst aspects of capitalism had a poster child in the ghetto, next to the smack man it was the pimp.

  What he hated the most was the deep down self-loathing they put in him. He remembered ogling their expensive shoes and the shiny cars the same as every other poor kid with newspaper stuffed in the soles of his sneakers. He remembered wanting that power, that style.

  His hatred of pimps had landed him in front of a judge once, and that had dropped him in Vietnam.

  He was happy as hell to drop kick a pimp into the lake of fire. He hoped that motherfucker downstairs had practiced his backstroke. His only dilemma was deciding which method to use to rip the ghost out of the car. He ran his finger along the shelf of ritual books in his office before deciding the old ways were best.

  He had just lit candles and dressed a spirit bottle to draw out and hold the pimp’s ghost and was looking for his copy of Secrets of The Psalms when the phone rang.

  It was Lazzeroni.

  “Hey John. Been calling you all morning.”

  “I been out. What’s up?”

  “Guess who I’m looking at right now? Your buddy Leon Green.”

  “He ain’t my buddy, he’s just got my card. Why are you calling?”

  “Well, I know he’s got your card. We found it in his pants pocket.”

  “What do you mean you found it?”

  “He’s as dead as Abe Lincoln.”

  Conquer sat down on the edge of the desk.

  “Dead.”

  “Yep. My last vice case is also my first homicide. Can you beat that?”

  “What happened?”

  “Why don’t you come on down here and we’ll talk about it. I’ll send a squad.”

  “Don’t bother. I bought a car this morning.”

  “Oh yeah? Police auction?”

  Conquer could hear Lazzeroni grinning over the phone.

  “Where are you?”

  “You know where,” said Lazzeroni.

  Back to Harlem, then.

  He glanced dubiously at the ritual paraphernalia he’d been gathering to exorcise the car. It would all have to wait. He reached into his desk drawer and took out his money mojo, a green flannel bag of herbs and sigils and his first dollar owned, which he kept in the office to attract paying clientele, an inkwell, and nub pen.

  He stuck it all in his pocket and went back downstairs.

  As soon as he got behind the wheel, the radio popped on again.

  “Say brother, can’t we discuss this like gentlemen?”

  Conquer took out the money mojo hand and began tying it to the rearview. He muttered the Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t do a damn thing, but the ghost didn’t know that.

  “You ain’t no gentleman,” said Conquer, when he finished. “You’re a pimp.”

  “Aw now, why it gotta be like that?” the pimp whined, sounding scared.

  “Shut up,” said Conquer, shutting the driver’s door so no passerby
thought he was just out of Bellevue. “Let’s be clear on this. You don’t say a word unless I say one to you first. Only reason I’m not scrubbin’ you right now is I don’t have time. You so much as adjust my side mirror, I’m gonna pull over and make the time.” He tapped the money mojo bag, as though it had any power over the spirit. “Dig?”

  “I dig, I dig,” said the pimp, falling for the bluff. “Just, brother, please, don’t light up another of them squares. Like to kill me.”

  “You’re already dead, fool.”

  He saved only about fifteen minutes getting down to Harlem by car, but he did it in style and comfort, without having to deal with a single hop head or subway nut. The ghost in the car sat quiet until he pulled up across the street from Leon Green’s apartment building on 128th, where the coroner’s wagon and a squad were already parked and a crowd of locals had gathered.

  “Shit man,” said the ghost, breaking the silence. “What we doin’ at The Vatican?”

  “The Vatican?” Conquer repeated.

  “Yeah man, s’what I call it. This is my old crib.”

  Conquer winced to hear that. He didn’t believe in coincidences overly. In his experience, the universe and the ancestors conspired to put you exactly where they needed you to be. Sometimes it was a real pain in the ass.

  He chose to ignore the pimp, for now.

  As he shut off the car, one of the men in the crowd, a straight laced Muslim in the button down suit and bow tie uniform of his creed stepped to the curb, opening his arms and stooping down to peer through the car windows. He smiled broadly under a pair of dark rimmed glasses.

  “Here he is! Here’s the man himself, rolling up in the shiny carriage his dollar chasin’ affords him! The man calls himself Pope. It’s not too late, brother! It’s not too late to cast down the role the white devil’s tossed you…”

  “This motherfucker,” said the pimp. “Slingin’ bean pies and spittin’ Allah day and night.”

  “But repentance is not of those who do evil deeds up until, when death comes to one of them, he says, ‘Indeed, I have repented now,’ or of those who die while they are disbelievers. For them We have prepared a painful punishment.’ What do you say, Pope?”

  Conquer got out of the car.

  “Save it, brother,” Conquer said. “I think it’s too late for Pope.”

  The Muslim man looked over the rim of his glasses at Conquer, scrutinizing. Bemused.

  Pope.

  Well, at least Conquer had a nickname for the ghost now. Maybe now that Lou was in homicide he could get a full legal name from the records. It would make the exorcism easier.

  The front door to The Vatican opened, a uniformed cop holding the door for the coroner and his assistant as they wheeled out a stretcher with a body covered in a white sheet spotted with great blotches of red.

  The crowd gasped at the sight of it being loaded into the back of the wagon.

  Lazzeroni poked his head out of the apartment building and waved Conquer over.

  “Thanks for coming back, John. That’s a sweet ride you wound up with. Didn’t I tell ya? Police auctions.”

  “Yeah yeah,” said Conquer as they went upstairs. “I guess that was Leon?”

  “Leon’s still upstairs,” said Lazzeroni. “That was his next door neighbor.”

  Conquer stopped.

  “The lady in forty six?”

  “Hardly a lady,” Lazzeroni said, pausing on the upstairs landing to flip open a note pad and read. “Arlene Meyers, nineteen. Ohio license, Toledo address. Working girl down the hall calls her Cincinnati. I guess that’s sexier than Toledo somehow. Not as much as Put-In-Bay, if you ask me, though. Damn it! I’ve got to call her parents.”

  So Lazzeroni hadn’t checked her out like Conquer had suggested. Didn’t even remember he’d told him to.

  “You wanted homicide, you got it,” Conquer said with a sigh. “What happened?”

  They went out into the hallway. A couple of residents were standing at the end, peeking over the shoulders of a tired looking cop.

  “Looks like Leon kicked down her door sometime last night, raped her, and then shot her. Or shot her then raped her. We’re not clear on that yet. Any idea why he’d do that?”

  “Did the coroner put the time of death around three in the morning?” Conquer asked.

  Lazzeroni nodded slowly, incredulous.

  “Yeah. Three AM.”

  “Then yeah, I got an idea. What happened to Leon though?”

  They had reached the open door of apartment forty six. There was blood on the ceiling and walls, like someone had exploded. It was going to smell in there for a long time. Conquer got a glimpse of a red mass sprawled on the living room floor before a brutish white beat cop with a face like a ham stepped in front of him.

  “Get the fuck outta here!” the cop roared in his face.

  “Easy, Mike,” said Lazzeroni. “This is the P.I. whose card was in the dead guy’s pocket. John Conquer. Mike Carmody.”

  “Charmed,” said Conquer with a grin.

  Carmody’s eyelid twitched, those bright blues flaring up like he was seeing Ken Norton in the pot at the end of Mandingo. Conquer knew this type on sight and met him with a look he hoped put him in mind of Booker Bradshaw at the end of Coffy.

  “So yeah,” said Lazzeroni. “We can’t figure out what the killer used on Leon, but it’s like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the in there. And it didn’t take long. Everybody on this floor’s been accounted for. I figure somebody came in to help Cincinnati, maybe a john that was sweet on her, saw him kill her, and went nuts. I don’t know. Maybe a junkie, ‘cause the whole place looks like it’s been turned over too. Anything not nailed down is scattered. What do you think?”

  “That’s what you should put in your report, sure,” Conquer said, looking up and down the hall.

  Lazzeroni sighed heavily.

  This wasn’t the first time Lou Lazzeroni had found himself stepping into Conquer’s world. The first time he’d nearly been lost to it. Since then, Conquer had been his go-to guy for anything weird that came his way. He was a decent cop, but he knew when he was over his head.

  “Is this over?” Lazzeroni asked, his voice low.

  Conquer frowned. If he had gone and talked to Cincinnati himself last night, it wouldn’t have happened. Now there were two dead people.

  “Who told you about the girl?” Conquer asked.

  Lazzeroni gestured to a coffee colored woman in a Japanese silk bathrobe, her hair tightly bound in a long red kerchief. She stood smoking amid the other gawking tenants.

  “Aurelia Meadows. They call her Sugarfoot.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Sure,” Lazzeroni said. “Just keep it cool. Carmody doesn’t like you.”

  “Fuck that cracker.”

  “Yeah but I don’t need him going back to the precinct with I got some cinder dick questioning my witnesses. I’ll keep him busy awhile but make it quick, hah?”

  Lazzeroni stepped into the bloody apartment and called for Carmody.

  Conquer went straight to the woman. She was tired looking for the afternoon, and not because she’d slept late.

  When he got up close, he saw the cuts and bruises on her arms, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You Sugarfoot?”

  “You a cop too?” she asked, looking him over with eyes like slow dripping molasses.

  “Cop-adjacent,” said Conquer. He found himself looking down at her feet curiously. They were unremarkable. “Why do they call you Sugarfoot?”

  She smiled faintly.

  “’Cause I don’t drink. When I go to the bar I get Coca-colas with cherry syrup.”

  “How’d you know Cincinnati? You coworkers?”

  She laughed.

  “Coworkers. Yeah, we was coworkers. Used to carpool to work, jabber ‘round the water cooler. Lunch at Sardi’s.”

  “How’d you get those cuts on your arms?”

  She pulled her sleeves down reflexively, her smile gon
e.

  “It’s alright,” Conquer said. “Did you tell Cincinnati about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About the thing with the wings.”

  Her eyes widened and she worried her cigarette.

  “After it…hurt you. It told you you had to tell somebody, didn’t it?” Conquer went on. “So you told her?”

  She only stared at him, but there was a tremble in her lip that hadn’t been there before.

  He wondered if this thing, whatever it was, was being passed on by word of mouth. It had been insistent to Green about telling somebody about it. But then why hadn’t it visited Conquer in his pad on St. Marks?

  “Somebody tell you about it before?”

  She shook her head slowly. He saw her hand creep into the fold of her robe. She had a gold cross on a chain between her fingers.

  No, that wasn’t it, then.

  “When did it come to you?”

  “Three nights ago,” she said quietly, and her voice cracked at the end. “I thought I dreamed it.”

  “Anybody else seen it before you that you know of? Another girl? Your pimp, maybe?”

  She shrugged.

  “Pope never saw it. It showed up the night after he got killed.”

  The bottom dropped out of Conquer’s stomach and he almost rolled his eyes to the ceiling to glare at God and his ancestors directly.

  “Pope was your pimp.”

  She nodded, and brushed her face to catch a tear that slid from the corner of her eye.

  “What is that thing?” she hissed.

  “I don’t know yet,” Conquer said. Maybe an incubus? Some kind of vampire with a weird kink? “What happened to Pope?”

  “Nobody knows who done it,” Aurelia said. “Somebody killed him right out front. Come up behind him and laid him in the trunk of his car. He just bought that car. Said he was gonna trick it out, and then drive all over town, show it off, with me in the front.”

  She wiped at a tear again.

  “He have any trouble with anybody?”

  “Naw,” Sugarfoot said, her voice cracking. “He never done nothin’ to nobody.”