Pipe Dream Read online

  “Can I get the straight?” Johnny Podres said, loosening his tie and glancing around the room at the hardened gray faces that seemed to lurk in every corner.

  “Just wait a minute,” Pookie said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Calm down.”

  Podres was beginning to think it hadn’t been such a good idea to come to this place. The girl was making him look like a fool. But he needed another hit like the first one, when he’d put two caps in the straight and lit it with two matches, pulling the smoke slowly into his lungs and holding it there for what seemed like an eternity. Just one more like that and he could leave.

  Pookie struck two matches and held them so close to the end of the glass tube that it cracked. “See what you made me do?” she said.

  She gave him the straight shooter. He tried to put two caps in, but Pookie stopped him.

  “What you doin’, man?” she said.

  “I’m trying to get a hit,” he said, feeling like the room was closing in on him.

  “You put one cap up in there and you hit it one time, with one match, then you pass it,” she said, as Butter got up slowly from the couch on the other side of the dim room and crept toward the mantelpiece.

  Butter was what you might call the houseman. At least he was this week. The truth was, the house didn’t belong to anybody. It was an abandoned house that people came to to smoke crack. But every once in a while, somebody would clean the place up, maybe bring in some extra candles, and call himself the houseman. Everybody who came in to smoke had to pay the houseman either one dollar or a hit. This week, Butter was the houseman. And Podres was the victim.

  “What you coming over here for, man?” Podres said. “I gave you your hit.”

  “I’m just making sure we got enough light up in here,” Butter said as he put another candle on the mantelpiece. “You know I gotta look out for the house. Everything’s cool, though. Go ’head and smoke.”

  Butter smiled, revealing a mouthful of yellowed teeth stuffed haphazardly between sunken cheeks.

  Somehow, Podres wasn’t reassured. Holding a match halfway between the straight shooter and his lap, Podres watched as Butter placed the new candle on the mantel. Then he felt something slithering down the cushion of his chair. It was a mouse, but to him it felt like someone’s hand. He thought about the four sixty-dollar bundles everyone knew he’d bought from Pop Squaly, and the five thousand dollars he was hiding in his sock. Then he looked at the way everyone was looking at him, and the slithering mouse felt even more like someone’s hand. He noticed that everyone was closer to him than they’d been only two minutes ago. Then he saw Butter’s mouth moving, saying something he couldn’t quite make out. Johnny Podres was from the Badlands, and he knew a setup when he saw one.

  “Yo,” a voice called out from the back door. “It’s Leroy.”

  As footsteps approached the living room, Podres decided that he had to get out of there. He reached into his suit jacket, turned around, and pointed a nine-millimeter at the chair cushion, dropping the straight shooter to the floor with a clatter that broke the silence in the room. After that, all hell broke loose.

  Pookie screamed and threw herself to the floor. Rock, who had been sitting silently in a chair in the corner, dived at Podres. Butter blew out the candle and kicked Podres in the back, knocking him over the chair and into a small pile of trash in the hallway. The gun fell to the floor, slid across the room, and went off with a flash in the corner opposite Rock’s chair.

  “I don’t wanna die,” Pookie whimpered, as she crawled toward the back door.

  “Shut up, bitch,” Butter said quickly.

  When Podres heard Butter’s voice, he got to his feet and swung in that direction, catching Butter with a left hook. Butter fell into Rock, who had grabbed the gun. The impact caused Rock to pull the trigger. The shot went straight up in the air, hitting the ceiling. Three tricks and their customers came running downstairs screaming. Then Podres lunged at Rock and tried to take the gun.

  Podres almost had the gun when Butter, thinking Rock was Podres, punched Rock in the neck, knocking him backward. Rock stood in front of Podres and aimed at what he hoped was the man’s head. There was a gunshot, then another, and what had been an all-out struggle just seconds before became deadly stillness. The bullet hole in Podres’s temple caused him to slide to the floor. Then everything stopped.

  Butter thought he saw a hand with a heavy gold link bracelet pull back the curtain and dart toward the shed kitchen. But the hand was white, and Butter knew that the white boys only came through on Fridays. So he shook the image from his mind and whispered through the darkness to Rock.

  “You all right?”

  “Shut up and get the money,” Rock said. “Hurry up!”

  Rock reached into the dead man’s pockets and pulled out the bundles he had bought. Butter, still numb but recovering quickly, reached into another pocket and pulled out a wallet. He had started to open it when he heard sirens approaching from about a mile away.

  “Five-o,” Butter said.

  Rock finished searching Podres’s pockets and started toward the stairs. “Get his car keys so we can roll. Pookie, which car was he drivin’?”

  For half a minute, Pookie didn’t respond.

  “Pookie!” Rock said loudly.

  “I don’t wanna die,” Pookie managed to mumble through a shock-induced haze of tears from the far corner of the room.

  “Bitch, I’ll make sure you die if you don’t hurry up and tell me what car these keys go to. Get up! Now!”

  Rock slapped Pookie hard and dragged her from the corner. Then he picked her up and carried her upstairs to a bedroom whose window was opposite the bedroom of the abandoned house next door. Butter was not far behind.

  “Dig this here,” Rock said, holding Pookie’s face in his hands. “You can either jump over there or you can wait for five-o. And I know you ain’t tryin’ to go to jail. Them dykes up there would have your little scrawny ass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Pookie jumped across the alley to the other bedroom window. Rock and Butter followed. Downstairs, in the deafening silence that followed the melee, Leroy, who had been coming through the back door when the shooting started, fished out the five thousand dollars Podres had been hiding in his sock. Then he climbed the stairs to the second floor and ran along the rooftops to the end of the block before disappearing into the night.

  Officer James D’Ambrosio pulled up at the back of the house about one minute after Pookie, Butter, and Rock had gone out the front of the house next door.

  “2512 on location,” he said into the radio that sat perched on his shoulder like some bizarre mechanical parrot.

  “Okay, 2512,” the radio squawked back. “Use caution. We’re getting numerous calls from that location reporting gunshots.”

  “2512 okay.”

  “Tell him to wait for backup,” a crusty old man’s voice yelled over the static-filled radio.

  “2512 okay,” D’Ambrosio said, thanking God that his sergeant had sense enough not to send his officers into these places alone.

  D’Ambrosio’s philosophy was simple: Criminals don’t care about anything, but pipers care about even less than that. He had survived many a hairy situation by remembering that simple philosophy.

  “You’re damned right I’m waiting for backup,” D’Ambrosio mumbled to himself, then chuckled. “This ain’t COPS in North Philly.”

  The radio started clicking. Everyone in the district had heard what D’Ambrosio said and they were pushing their “talk” buttons.

  “You’re hanging up, Jim,” somebody said, informing him that his radio was stuck in the talk mode.

  D’Ambrosio pulled out his talk button just as a wagon with two female officers arrived. The sergeant pulled up, and the four of them drew their weapons.

  The sergeant went in first, with the two officers from the wagon following closely. D’Ambrosio brought up the rear. They moved slowly, half exp
ecting someone to rush at them from the dining room or living room. The front of the house had been cinder-blocked and cemented as part of a campaign to close down drug houses, which meant that the back way was the only way out. So when they didn’t see anyone in the rooms that had been the shed kitchen, kitchen, and dining room, they approached the curtain that sectioned off the living room from the dining room.

  The sergeant indicated that the officers from the wagon should cover the hallway. He pointed toward the curtain and signaled to D’Ambrosio. Then he pointed his gun at the corner that would be exposed when D’Ambrosio pulled back the curtain.

  “Now!” the sergeant said in a stage whisper. When the curtain was drawn, the four officers trained their guns on a person who lay in the corner, bathed in the haunting glow of their flashlights. When they saw that he had been shot, they tensed, knowing the shooter could still be in the house.

  One of them went over to check for a pulse. As she did so, the radio squawked. Two more cars had arrived at the house.

  “25A, have 2520 take the front of this property,” the sergeant said into the radio. “Have 25 Tom 2 take the back. We have a founded job here. One male down, no flash on any suspects. Send rescue to this location and inform 25 Command that—”

  “25 Command en route,” the lieutenant said before the sergeant could finish the sentence.

  Two officers came in the back door, flashlights blazing. The sergeant signaled for them to turn their radio volume down. Then he signaled for D’Ambrosio to come with him to check upstairs. He pointed to the basement door and signaled for the female officers to check the cellar. He signaled for the guys from 25 Tom 2 to stay at the back door in case anyone decided to run.

  The officers fanned out, creeping up and down darkened staircases to conduct a room-by-room search of the upstairs and the basement. But it became apparent fairly quickly that the house was empty. After the space under the basement steps, there was no place left to hide. Someone might have hidden behind the hot-water heater, but that had disappeared over a year ago along with the copper plumbing. The doors had been taken—sold to carpenters and junkyards—so there were no closets to speak of. There was no furniture other than the tattered love seat and couch in the living room. And the tub and toilet were filled to the rim with human waste. Not even someone in Podres’s condition could have stood the stench, so that was out, too.

  By the time the search was halfway through, Fire Rescue 1 had arrived. Tom 2 radioed upstairs to the sergeant, who told him to keep rescue out until the house had been thoroughly searched. Two minutes later, after looking out over the rooftops that extended beyond the front and rear windows on the second floor of the row houses on Park Avenue, the sergeant radioed downstairs to allow rescue to enter the house.

  The officers who had conducted the search came back to the living room and watched the guys from rescue declare Podres a 5292—the code assigned to dead bodies.

  “25A, call Homicide, we’ve got a crime scene here,” the sergeant said over the air. “And hold Tom 2 out on the scene on a detail.”

  After the dispatcher answered, the sergeant started mumbling to himself.

  “When are these suit-and-tie guys gonna start believin’ what they see on the news about crack?” he said as he took in the image of congealed blood and gray matter sticking to the wall where the bullet had exited Podres’s head.

  “Sergeant, I think you’d better come take a look at this guy,” one of the fire rescue workers said. “I think he’s a—”

  “Oh shit,” D’Ambrosio said. “That’s Johnny Podres.”

  “The guy who runs the what d’ya call it?” the sergeant said.

  “Yup. The city councilman who runs the Police Civilian Review Board,” one of the female officers from the wagon said.

  “25 Command,” the sergeant said wearily into the radio, “please expedite.”

  “25 Command on location,” the lieutenant said into his radio as he stepped up on the landing that led to the shed kitchen.

  Everyone drew in their breath as the lieutenant strode into the living room of the house. When he saw the figure everyone’s flashlights were trained on, Lieutenant John Flynn put his head in his hand and said to the sergeant, “Call the captain at home. He’ll probably want to notify the commissioner, maybe even the mayor. They’re going to want to know about this one before the press gets a hold of it.”

  What the lieutenant didn’t say was that Podres—the man whose anticorruption record was supposed to take him straight to the mayor’s office—could not have died in a crack house.

  Chapter 2

  When Black reached the top of the stairs in the abandoned house next to the club, he already knew where to go because he’d been there a few times and had taken some old chandeliers that looked like brass antiques. Needless to say, they were worthless, like most of the stuff in abandoned houses.

  Still, the run-down ghost houses were as much a part of the dope game as straight shooters and caps. A piper could go into an abandoned house and strip it, selling the pipes and fixtures to salvage shops and collectors. Or he could pirate some electricity, clean the place up, and turn it into a smokehouse.

  But this place was next door to a storefront church on the corner of Germantown Avenue and Broad Street, so the options were fairly limited. At most, a piper could break in at night and maybe smoke two or three caps by himself. But even that was impossible most of the time, because there were workmen in the club next door at all hours of the night working to refurbish it. They weren’t there that night, though. Black had watched them leave and lock up the place an hour earlier.

  He walked across the dark room and set to work ripping some of the rotting planks from around the hole in the floor until he could get a better view of the inside of the club. There was some sort of backup generator powering lights that ran along the wall, and that helped him to see what was actually in there—power tools, rolls of insulation, and boxes of ceramic tile. It wasn’t much, but knowing he could get at least a couple hundred dollars for that stuff was incentive enough to risk being electrocuted. He didn’t care.

  After listening for a few minutes to make sure no one was inside, Black lowered himself into the hole feet-first and nestled carefully between the wires. He moved slowly, making sure he didn’t jerk any of the wires loose, and it took what seemed like forever just to move about three feet toward the opening in the vent.

  As Black lay prone between the wires, trying to avoid jerking a wire out of some unseen power source, his mind wandered to the son he’d left behind after his wife divorced him. If he was electrocuted, would they come to the funeral? Would the baby know him if his ex-wife bothered to bring him? Would death erase the guilt of being a bad father and a worse husband? Would anyone even find him there, stuck in a vent to an unfinished club?

  After a few minutes, and after seriously considering going back, Black made his way to the end of the vent, pushed his feet through the opening, then hung by his fingertips and dropped down onto the bar.

  “There must be more than this in here,” he said to himself after surveying the array of power tools that were spread out on the floor.

  Hopping down off of the bar, he walked to the back of the club and into the deejay booth. He glanced to his left and noticed that there was a microwave oven and a small television on a shelf next to a back door. On his right, there were some cheap imitation-African made-in-Taiwan prints that probably would be hung on the walls when they finished the place. In the corner, next to the prints, was what looked like some new bathroom equipment. Scattered along another wall were boxes of nails and screws.

  He left those things and walked toward the basement stairs, where a bright light reflected off the cellar wall. He went down the rickety steps, quickly searched through some boxes, and found that there was nothing there but some rusting deejay equipment.

  The heat was stifling; there were two big, rusting oil tanks against the wall, and cobwebs, graffiti, and reddish-brown dust cov
ered everything. It felt like his lungs were getting dirty just breathing it.

  He was getting ready to go upstairs and collect the microwave and power tools when he heard a car pull up outside. There was something familiar about the sound of the car, but he couldn’t place it.

  Before he figured out where he’d heard it before, Black heard voices outside, then keys jangled in the door. The deadbolt slid back, and the only other sound in the building besides the noise of someone entering the club was the double thud of his pulse. He looked around quickly, searching for a place to hide, then walked around to the back of one of the oil tanks and sat down in a mound of dust.

  As the car drove away, the driver yelled that he’d be back in five minutes. Black knew that he could sit perfectly still for five minutes, but sitting still wasn’t his main worry. He was starting to breathe in more of that dust. And the more he breathed, the more he felt like coughing. Black couldn’t risk that.

  He started looking around for some kind of weapon—a rock, a pipe, anything that would give him enough time to get out of there if the man spotted him.

  Black listened as the man began to whistle a Spanish tune. He heard the man’s rubber-soled construction boots pace back and forth across the floor. When the whistling and the walking stopped, he heard the man grunt, as if he were fat and having trouble bending down.

  Behind the oil tank, Black suddenly began to feel very hot. It was as if the dust were closing in on him, daring him to cough. His throat began to itch, then his nose. Streams of sweat began to make their way down the sides of his face, meeting at his chin and dripping down into his lap. His heartbeat, already furious, began to vibrate through his body like the sound of a bass drum. He clasped his hands around his nose and mouth, shut his eyes tight against the swirling dust, pulled his elbows in to his sides, and then sneezed.