LITMIR.BIZ

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of Inglewood and Watts, but he don’t got Crenshaw. Everyone know Crenshaw belong to the Turk.”

      Rashan was known as the Turk on the street, at least by those who didn’t know him well. The outfit’s turf is shaped like a crescent, running from Santa Monica around the southern edge of downtown, up through East L.A. and reaching into Pasadena. Rashan controlled Crenshaw, but there was only a nebulous border separating his territory from Papa Danwe’s turf.

      “All right, you give me a call if you hear anything else.” Nods all around.

      “Jamal in some kinda trouble, D?” Marcus asked.

      “I think y’all might need to recruit another player,” I said. “Jamal won’t be going skins anytime soon.”

      I left Crenshaw and drove back to civilization. I took Santa Monica Boulevard into Beverly Hills. I’ve always liked Beverly Hills. The outfits exist by virtue of the fact that most people don’t pay any attention to what’s going on around them. It’s charming. No other place has reached Beverly Hills’s level of clueless perfection, with the possible exception of Vegas.

      A vampire can walk down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping and pausing for the occasional snack, and no one will even notice as long as he’s wearing the right suit. A sorcerer would have to turn a demon loose in Gucci to attract attention.

      The art opening was like any other of its kind. When I walked in, the gallery was bustling with the young, rich and fashionable in-crowd. This was L.A., though, so everyone had two out of three working—they were all faking the third.

      I was there to meet an associate, a connected probation officer on the outfit’s payroll. His name was Tommy Barrow and he was twenty-nine years old. He used his secondary income, drug connections and gangster stories to circulate with the art-opening crowd and chase women who were out of his league.

      I spotted him standing by an abstract painting in animated conversation with a salon blonde. Her swimsuit-model body and pouting lips advertised one of the many nearby clinics.

      “Hi, Tommy,” I said. “Who’s your friend?” The blonde wore a diamond-and-ruby pendant that nestled in her prodigious cleavage. A red arrow painted on her chest wouldn’t have drawn more attention to her neckline.

      “Sandy, this is Domino, a friend of ours,” Tommy said, his voice low and conspiratorial.

      Sandy’s tastefully decorated face brightened and the pouty lips stretched into a sunny smile. “Oh, so you work for Tommy in, you know, the business?”

      I looked at Tommy and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged apologetically. “Not exactly,” I said. “You could say we answer to the same boss.”

      “Oh, I see,” Sandy said. “Can I ask what you do, or would you have to kill me?” She giggled, bringing a delicate and bejeweled hand to her mouth but making sure I could still see her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. In the outfit, I didn’t get any real sexism from the guys and I didn’t deal with cattiness from the girls. I had juice, and that’s all that mattered on the street. I only ran into that kind of shit from civilians.

      I laughed, turning from her to Tommy, and then back to her. I put the smile away. “I wouldn’t have to.”

      She stopped in midgiggle, and I could almost hear the little wheels in her head turning as she tried to figure out if I was joking or not.

      Tommy laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. “That’s a good one, Domino! Sandy, why don’t you run along so we can talk business?”

      Sandy lit up again and the smile reappeared. “Oh, okay!” she bubbled. “It was nice to meet you, Domino.” She bounced away and I turned my attention to the painting on the wall, some kind of abstract brown swirl on a yellow background.

      “Looks like shit.”

      “It is,” Tommy said, following my gaze to the painting. “Dog, I think.”

      I looked closer. It was. The artist had lacquered it to the canvas.

      “Let’s go outside for a smoke.”

      Tommy nodded, grinning. “Those things will kill you, Domino.”

      I have a purification spell that rules that out, but I didn’t mention it. It’s the kind of thing that pisses people off. They don’t really mind if you smoke as long as it kills you. Out on the sidewalk, I drew a Camel and lit up.

      Tommy immediately began scanning the area for attractive female pedestrians. “So what can I do for you, Domino?”

      “Jamal is dead,” I said. Tommy’s gaze immediately snapped back to me. I wouldn’t be able to keep the murder a secret, and Tommy would need to know eventually.

      “When? How?” Tommy asked. His store-bought tan had lost a little color.

      “Last night. Probably a hit.”

      “Jesus. Who did it?”

      “Hard to say. Jamal isn’t talking.”

      “How did he die? Where did you find him?” Tommy was fishing for all the details that would allow him to spin a good insider report to impress his friends.

      “Skinned and crucified in his apartment, magical ritual. Squeezed.”

      Tommy let out a low whistle. “Damn. Hell of a way to go.”

      “Yeah, Tommy, not the best.”

      “So what do you want from me? You want me to call it in?”

      “No, just report him AWOL the next time he comes up on your schedule. I don’t need a police investigation, even if it is half-assed.”

      Tommy nodded.

      “What I really need is information. I already ran Jamal’s homeboys through the paces. They don’t know much.”

      “Okay,” Tommy said, thinking hard. “Like what? I was his PO. It was my job to keep him out of Chino. I guess I knew Jamal about as well as anyone.” For once, I didn’t think Tommy was exaggerating, at least not much. A probation officer was the closest most outfit guys ever came to a confessional. Jamal probably told Tommy Barrow things he’d never tell his friends or family.

      “I need to know if he was up to anything unusual. Maybe he had something going on the side, maybe he made a new enemy.”

      Tommy shook his head. “Far as I know, Jamal was a stand-up guy. The outfit was his life, and he wouldn’t try to run something under the radar. He thought he had a future with the outfit…and more to the point, he didn’t think he had a future without it.”

      That fit with what I knew about the kid. He was smarter than most, and ambitious. It wasn’t exactly helping me connect him to Papa Danwe, though.

      “Any new habits? New friends?”

      “Yeah,” Tommy said, after a moment biting his lip. “He was hanging out at the Cannibal Club. He had this thing he was trying with bondage and that kind of stuff, to work on his craft. He said it was a good place to find girls who were into that.”

      The Cannibal Club was a nightspot in Hollywood that was popular with the black leather and porcelain fangs crowd. It was hard to picture Jamal there, and once you did it was a funny picture. Hollywood wasn’t Papa Danwe’s turf—none of the outfits controlled it. Still, maybe Papa Danwe had something working at the club. Maybe Jamal had gotten in the way.

      “What about family?” I asked. It bothered me that I hadn’t thought about it before. Jamal had been a person before he’d been a corpse and a problem for me to solve.

      Tommy shook his head. “You know the story. Father split, mother OD’d when Jamal was fifteen.”

      “Okay,” I said. “You got anything else?”

      “I don’t think so, Domino. If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

      “Do

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