Sudden Prey

hand and Daymon thought, If that fucking Jas has gone and ordered out for a pizza when she’s up there by herself . . .
    He was waiting for the kid, when Martin stepped up behind him and pressed a pistol to his ear: “Back in the garage.”
    Daymon jumped, but controlled it. He held his hands away from his sides and turned back to the garage. “Take it easy,” he said. He didn’t want the guy excited. He’d had a pistol in his ear before, and when caught in that condition, you definitely want to avoid excitement. He tried an implied threat: “You know who I am?”
    “Daymon Harp, a jigaboo drug dealer,” Martin said, and Harp thought, Uh-oh.
    The kid with the pizza followed them inside, spotted the lighted button for the garage door opener, and pushed it. The door came down and Martin prodded Harp toward the stairs at the back.
    “Take the position,” Martin said.
    Harp leaned against the wall, hands and feet spread wide. “Got no gun,” he said. He looked sideways at Martin: “You’re not cops.”
    “We’d be embarrassed if you was lying about the gun,” Martin said. The younger guy patted him down, found the wad of cash and pulled it out. “Ooo,” he said. “Thanks.”
    Harp kept his mouth shut.
    “This is the deal,” Martin said, as Butters tucked the money away. “We need some information from you. We don’t want to hurt you. We will, if you get stupid, so it’s best for you to go along.”
    “What do you want?” Daymon asked.
    “To go upstairs,” Butters said, in his soft Tennessee accent. Harp looked at him out of the corner of his eye: Butters had three dark-blue tears tattooed at the inner corner of his left eye, and Daymon Harp thought again, Uh-oh.
     
     
     
    THEY CLIMBED THE stairs as a trio, and now the southern boy had a pistol barrel prodding Daymon’s spine, while the other focused on his temple. They all tensed while Daymon unlocked the door. A woman called down an interior hall, “Day? That you?”
    Butters left them, padding silently down the hall, while Martin stayed with Harp. The woman came around a corner just as Butters got to it and she jumped, shocked, as Butters grabbed her by a wrist and showed her the gun. “Shut up,” Butters said.
    She shut up.
    Five minutes later, Harp and the woman were duct-taped to kitchen chairs. The woman’s hands were flat on her thighs, with loops of tape around her upper arms and body. She had a sock stuffed in her mouth, held in place with two or three more wraps of tape. Her terrified dark eyes flicked between Harp and whichever of the white men was in sight.
    Martin and Butters checked the apartment. The landing outside the front door, Martin found when he opened it, was blocked by a pile of brown cardboard appliance boxes. The boxes made a practical burglar alarm and buffer, should the cops come, but still provided an escape route if one were needed.
    Butters checked the two bedrooms and found nothing of interest but a collection of vinyl 33-rpm jazz records.
    “Clear,” Butters said, coming back to the front room.
    Martin sat down in a third chair and, knee-to-knee with Harp, said, “You probably know people like us. Met us in the joint. We don’t much care for black folks and we’d be happy to cut your throats and be done with it. But we can’t, this time, ’cause we need you to introduce us to a friend of yours.”
    “Who?” Daymon Harp asked.
    “The cop you’re working with.”
    Harp tried to look surprised. “There’s no cop.”
    “We know you gotta go through your routine, but we don’t have a lot of time,” Martin said. “So to show you our . . . mmm . . . sincerity . . .” He chose his words carefully, softly: “We’re gonna cut on your girlfriend here.”
    “Motherfucker,” Harp said, but it wasn’t directed at Martin. It was simply an exclamation and Martin took it that way. The woman’s eyes bulged and she rattled around in the chair, and Martin let her. Over his shoulder, he said, “Ansel? See if you can find a knife in the kitchen . . .”
    There was no one standing in the street outside the laundromat, which was a good thing for Butters and Martin, because Harp wouldn’t talk right away, and for one short moment, even with the gag, with the windows shut, in the middle of winter, even with that, you could hear Jasmine screaming.
     
     
     
    THE MICHIGAN STATE prison sent a single escort with Dick LaChaise. LaChaise was four years into a nine-year sentence, and not considered an