Schism

Quinton left school and waited at the curb for Johnny. It wasn’t like Johnny to be late. A black GTO idled down the block. Tiny Tim walked idly toward him from behind. The GTO pulled up in front of Quinton just as Tiny Tim stepped up behind him. The car door opened and Quinton was pushed violently through the open car door against the driver with another body collapsing onto the seat behind him, shoving him upright and slamming the door.

Go! said Tiny Tim. Alfie floored it.

Ya fuckers! What the hell do you want? Quinton yelled.

We jus’ wanted to talk to you a little while. Ya know, in a friendly sort of way. He glanced at Alfie and they both laughed.

Where we going?

You’ll see. In a couple of minutes they pulled into a parking lot. Alfie and Tiny Tim got out of the car. Go on, get out! they said to Quinton, dragging him out of the car.

Now, boy, you wanted ta be a Raven’s Claw, so we took uh vote and voted you in. Provided, o’ course, that you make you bones and all that. And we here to help you wid dat!

Quinton stared at them in shock. What you fuckers expect me ta do?

Aw, don’t look so worried. It’s no biggie! Yo’ just goin’ ta knock ova your firs’ convenience store, dat’s all.

Not on yo’ life, Ah’m not. Ah don’t wants ta be uh Claw!

"Ya already is uh Claw. Ya just got ta complete yo’ membership application. Alfie drew his tattooed body close to QT and, holding his cheeks in both hands, got nose to nose with him. Quinton could see the red veins in the whites of his eyes. It’s an exclusive group you belongs ta now. Ya don’ want ta disappoint us, do you?"

No, QT mumbled.

Louder, boy!

No! QT shouted in his face.

Good, good! Now, da plan is simple! We goin’ ta Mona’s Minit Market an’ while we’s parked out front, you be going inside an’ rob it at gunpoint. Soon as you got da shit, run on back ta de car an’ we leave. Tight and out o’ sight!

Yeah, Ah hear you. Ah ain’t got no gun.

Not uh problem. We got one just fo’ you, just fo’ dis here mothafuckin’ job. He took out a lightly oiled rag and carefully unwrapped a compact automatic handgun. Looky here, it’s clean, no nasty serial numbers. How tight is dat? Alfie thrust the gun into QT’s hands. Go on, check it out, make sho it’s loaded. You don’t wants ta git in dere an’ got ta jack uh shell in da chamber b’foe you can smoke it. An’ just another thought, Tim an’ Ah is armed, an’ much faster than you be, so don’t git carried away wif da gun, okay? Now, git back in da ride an’ let’s roll!

A couple of minutes later, they arrived at Mona’s Minit Market. Alfie backed the GTO into a parking place next to the door facing out. Tiny Tim jumped out, holding the door for Quinton and said, Go! Go now!

Quinton jumped out, his heart racing.

SCHISM

A Detective Mike Eiser Novel

By

Clabe Polk

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-365-8

SCHISM:

A Detective Mike Eiser Novel

Copyright © 2016 by Clabe Polk

All Rights Reserved

Edited by Felicia Sullivan

Edited by Monique Happy

Cover art by Covers by Christian

Please visit Clabe Polk's website at http://clabepolkmysteryadve.ipage.com

Table of Contents

PART 1

PART II

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

EPILOGUE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FROM THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EXCERPTS FROM ANGELICA

PART I

Fourteen Years ago a pregnant woman stood washing dishes at the kitchen sink in a small duplex just off Bankhead Highway in urban Atlanta. Competing with sweat, tears ran down her cheeks as she faced the thought of bearing and raising her second child in the Bowen Homes Projects.

Her first, Jimmy, now two years old, played on the floor with an old cracked phonograph record and a baby book, laughing and throwing it the few inches his little arms could reach. The phonograph record had been broken before he was born when Kat Thomas’s husband, Frank Thomas, had thrown it at her in a drunken rage. That was the same night he left her. She never saw him again, although she heard through the grapevine that Frank had tried to enforce protection on a man that had blown his head off with a shotgun. Two and a half years later, she still didn’t care.

Kat, short for Kathryn Addison Thomas, had grown up in Atlanta’s infamous Bowen Homes Projects with her mother, a waitress at a local dive who spent much of her time dodging the groping fingers of ignorant classless lowlifes as she waited tables. Her father was an itinerant preacher who, when he wasn’t drunk, preached in tiny corner mission churches, then on the street corners themselves. Later, unable to overcome the drink, he would pass out and be gone for days.

Kat’s husband Frank was a small-time thug enforcing a protection racket for a gang. They’d grown up next door to each other in the projects. One day she went out with him against her better judgment and wound up pregnant with Jimmy. They moved in together, and although he beat her when he was drunk, she had learned to live with his drunkenness, partly because she was starved for love, and also because she knew Jimmy would need a father. When she was three months pregnant, Frank was sent to jail for a short stretch. When he got out, his abuse increased right up until the night he left them. Jimmy never knew his father.

Knowing the pain of rejection, abuse, and loss, Kat never wanted to feel those things again. Neither did she want her son to ever feel them. For two years, she struggled with little hope, keeping her head down and caring for Jimmy while rival gangs fought over turf all around her and drugs flowed through the hood like flood waters. Eventually, she met another man, Sylvester Silly Brown, who made her feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. He was part of the inner circle of an infamous Atlanta narcotics operation, the Westside Dragons. Even though Sylvester was a thug, to her, he was everything that Frank wasn’t. Soon, she was pregnant with Quinton and the reality of living as a single mother of two babies in the Bowen Projects sank deeply into Kat’s mind. Sylvester said he loved her and wanted to marry her.

Standing at the sink, she allowed herself to dream of a tiny summer wedding after Quinton was born, with white flowers and Sylvester in a tux, Jimmy toddling along with the ring. Her tears, although they were happy, were seasoned with bitter reality.

***

Mad Dog MD Lincoln looked over the three cars parked along the street; his cars, filled with his ‘niggas’, all loyal members of the Raven’s Claws, a street gang looking to expand their drug distribution network into the Bowen Projects. To do that, they would have to displace the Westside Dragons, who were firmly in control of the Bowen ‘hood. The war had progressed for some time with casualties on both sides, but tonight, Mad Dog Lincoln, a Claws lieutenant, was determined to seize control of Bowen for the Claws once and for all. Some of the Claws would not be happy about tonight. After all, not all of the Claws agreed with Mad Dog’s direct militant approach to gang politics or his downright violent approach to inter-gang relations, but his followers were loyal. Sitting on cars, drinking from bottles of whisky and beer, toking up on pot, armed to the teeth, they were determined to strike a blow for the Claws.

***

Blue neon signs flickered in a sign that announced the The Foxy Lady Lounge on Bankhead Highway. Those inside were already occupied by the strippers dancing on the tables and those outside were either passersby or headed inside to be occupied by the same strippers. Three or four men were normally passed out in the parking lot, but tonight there were none. Tonight, the leadership of the Westside Dragons was here for a meeting and the gang members were out in force for security. True to form, the members of the security team were either drunk or drugged in the parking lot. Breaking up the meeting about nine o’clock, the governing board had a final round of drinks and headed outside to where a lone Raven Claw hidden in a car across the street dialed a cell phone.

When the Dragons’ governing board emerged from the bar, Mad Dog’s caravan swept through the parking lot with shotguns and semi-automatic weapons blazing. There were multiple injuries inside the Foxy Lady from more than one hundred rounds that penetrated the walls. No one outside was left standing. The Dragon leadership was massacred; the Claws were triumphant.

***

Kat heard the gunfire from her kitchen sink, her hands grasping the counter with white knuckles. No one had to tell her what had happened. She knew from hard experience and from the direction of the sound exactly where the shooting had occurred, and she had a good idea who was doing the shooting. She also knew that Sylvester was there. Choking back sobs, she knew in her heart that Sylvester was gone…dead…shot down in a senseless power play by Mad Dog Lincoln and the Raven’s Claws, long before she ever knew it to be true.

Oh, God, she prayed, please let me live long enough ta get mah children out o’ this place!

That night, she began working to move her small family out of Atlanta, but Jimmy would be four years old, and Quinton two, before she could start a new life in Poplar Bluffs.

PART II

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER

CHAPTER 1

Da Snitch

In a nondescript warehouse in the Port of Savannah, Milton Davis Lincoln slammed the lid down on the last crate in the back of a van and climbed carefully out. He met the stares of the silent men facing him. Mad Dog had always made sure his fear was never seen, even when they scared the shit out of him as they did now.

All right, it all dere! he said to the silent men. He gestured to a second van parked a few feet away. Dere’s da transfer vehicle. Yo’ money be in da passenger seat. One of the silent men nodded and walked to the van, opening the passenger side door and then the briefcase. He nodded to the first man, and everyone relaxed a little.

To the three men behind him wearing black hooded windbreakers, MD said, Get in. Dey’re waitin’ fo’ us in Atlanta. One climbed in behind the wheel, the others climbed in the back; MD took the passenger seat. One of the silent men opened the warehouse door and both vans sped toward it.

Instantly, two black Chevy Suburbans rounded the corner of the building and blocked the open doors. Two other Suburbans pushed through the rear doors, followed by a storm of SWAT officers in full combat gear splitting and advancing along both walls of the building. Their great cover had become a great trap.

The silent men spilled out of the van, opening fire with automatic assault weapons. One focused on the Suburbans in the doorway and two fired at each group of advancing SWAT officers. All three died in seconds.

Rolling out of the van onto the floor, MD’s three men came up firing and, like the three silent men, died in seconds. MD rolled behind the front tire, partially under the van. As he moved to draw his gun, suddenly there was silence. A SWAT officer stamped a booted foot down on his hand from behind, stuck an assault rifle in his ear, and disarmed him. Before he fully understood what was happening, his hands were cuffed while SWAT officers pried the crates open in the back of the van. MD looked around. He was the only one left alive.

A SWAT officer handed an AK-47 from the back of the van to a tall, thin man wearing a navy blue windbreaker with a yellow ATF patch on the back. He walked over to where MD lay bound and held up the AK-47 for him to see. "Guess today’s not going to be your most profitable day is it, Lincoln?

MD stared at him. Yo’ knows me?

He bent down close to MD’s ear and said quietly, Sure. We’re old friends. You just don’t know it, yet.

Two hours later, MD sat alone in an interview room. The room contained a table, three chairs, and a mirror on the wall that MD knew to be an observation window. It also had a locked door that eventually opened to admit the same tall, thin, humorless man wearing khaki pants and an ATF golf shirt, and a short, stocky man wearing a false smile under constantly shifting eyes, a black suit and red tie.

The thin, humorless man held out his hand. Mr. Lincoln, I’m ATF Special Agent Jack Cagle, and this, he gestured toward the other man, is Assistant U.S. Attorney Archie Spellman.

MD just stared at them, making no move to take Cagle’s outstretched hand.

Okay, Mr. Lincoln, said Spellman, I won’t beat around the bush. We have you dead to rights for gun smuggling and a number of other Title 18 charges we haven’t had time to think about yet. You’re looking at numerous years in prison, especially given your record to date.

Ah’m not afraid o’ jail, MD said.

So far your worst experience has been five years at a Florida prison farm for drug trafficking. I’m talking about high security federal prisons for terms of twenty-five years or more.

Who is you kidding? Ah’ve heard all ‘bout federal country clubs.

Those are prisons for low level white collar criminals who are serving relatively light sentences. Spellman made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm. I’m talking about an extended stay in one of the toughest prisons in America, where you’ll become some jolly green tattooed giant’s bitch within a week. He chuckled quietly to himself, his shifty eyes glancing at Cagle. They’ll pass you around for years. Meeting Spellman’s eyes, Cagle grinned.

Yo, so, if you got me dead ta rights like you said, why ain’t you putting me away instead o’ putting me ta sleep?

Well, it could be advantageous to the government to keep you out of jail for a while. We’re not as eager to slam-dunk you as you may think."

Wadda ya mean? What ah gotta do?"

We know the Raven’s Claws move guns into Atlanta and other major cities and that those guns turn up on the street.

Yeah, so what?

We’d like to know when these gun shipments happen, that’s what.

Ah don’ know anythin’ ‘bout de gun shipments. You talkin’ to da wrong man.

I guess if you’re the wrong man, then you won’t mind gettin’ up close and personal with the tattoos in prison, will you? observed Cagle.

What chou offerin’?

We know a little about the profits in those operations, Spellman answered, and that you’ve been the middleman because you have the contacts with the suppliers. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that we know people who need the merchandise and have the money to pay for it.

So, what chou need from me?

We need someone to arrange the transactions, just what you’re doing now for the Claws. We need to divert the flow of weapons from the Claws’ buyers to ours. You’ll be a government informant.

Da Claws’d kill me fo’ dat. You crazy, man!

What you tell us about the Claws we use against the Claws. You broker deals with your suppliers and we broker deals with our buyers, your information about the Claws is used by the government to keep them out of the picture, you stay out of jail, better yet, you stay alive, and everybody, except the Claws, of course, is much happier.

Yo’re gettin’ rich. Ah’m takin’ da risk an’ getting shit!

You get a get out of jail free card, said Spellman. We keep your ass out of prison for as long as the entire operation goes smoothly. If it doesn’t go smoothly, you go to prison, end of story. Your contact is Special Agent Cagle. Everything goes through him. You don’t crap unless he authorizes it!

Da Claws’ll kill me. What could ah tell dem dat would make dem believe me?

Tell them you bolted out the side door when it went down and were the only one to get away, Cagle suggested.

Now you really wants me dead! Ah can’t tell dem ah ran away. Fuck that shit.

Okay, said Spellman. "Tell them the operation apparently wasn’t clean on the government’s side and the Grand Jury failed to indict you on our evidence, so the investigation’s continuing. For our part, of course, we neither confirm nor deny whether there even is an investigation."

Ah’ll think ‘bout it. Ya’ know what I’m sayin’?

Don’t think long. The offer’s only good until tomorrow morning.

***

MD was sick and getting sicker. He didn’t want to face Nick Scar Wheeler, the Raven’s Claws’ default president, but he couldn’t put it off any longer. He parked his black Lincoln Navigator in front of a building with a sign Nick’s at Night near I-20 and Candler Road in Atlanta, checked his .45, and jacked a round into the chamber, just in case.

Whoa, niggas, Scar said when he came through the door. Look what da cat done drug in! MD’s back! Scar advanced and clapped MD on the back, then held him at arm’s length while his twisted gaze probed deep into MD’s eyes. Yo, why is yo’ ass here if mah niggas and my mothafuckin’ guns ain’t? Where is dey?

MD swallowed. Scar, we got raided. ATF took us down! We lost da guns. What ‘chew thinkin’, man?

An’ da niggas?

Dead. SWAT took out bof dem an’ da contacts.

Scar grabbed MD’s neck and pulled his head until they were nose to nose. "An’ why didn’t dey take you out wif dem?

Cuz dey came at me from behind an’ disarmed me!

Scar chuckled. The chuckling quickly escalated to a belly laugh that died as quickly as it began. So, what da hell is you doin’ here? You should be either dead or in deh federal lockup.

Ah wasn’t indicted. Dey fucked up da case somehow.

Scar turned away and instantly turned back, a .45 pointed straight into MD’s left eye. Dey fuckin’ turned you. You a fuckin’ federal snitch. He cocked the .45.

MD threw up both hands, palms out. Shit, Scar! You think Ah’m fuckin’ nuts? Ah’d be an idiot to come in here an’ lie ta ya. Ah ain’t dat fuckin’ stupid.

Scar stared at him a moment, then laughed. He stuck the .45 in the waistband of his pants and turned to a bottle on the bar and poured two glasses of bourbon. Passing one to MD, he said, Yo, c’mon. Let’s drink ta luck, bof good an’ bad!

***

Scar Wheeler looked at the four other Raven’s Claws sitting around the table: the Claw’s governing council. He sighed. We gots problems we needs ta address. We lost da last shipment ta ATF, so obviously dey’re on ta us an’ we gots ta change our delivery an’ transportation methods. Afta losing our contacts in da raid da t’other day, ’Ah’m not sho our suppliers will continue ta deal wif us and shit. An’, then dere’s Mad Dog. He’s been running dis here fo’ us, but somethin’ doesn’t add up afta da raid. First, he’s da only survivor, an’ second, dey fail ta indict him? Not in mah mothafuckin’ lifetime! Ah think he be a rat.

He looked at each of them and met silent nods from