Free Shadow Boys by Harry Hunsicker Page B

moment.

- CHAPTER ELEVEN -
    The next day, I got up and made the judge a pot of coffee. He looked tired and old in the harsh glare of the morning light. This made me melancholy, sad for the people in my life who were slowly going away.
    We visited until the nurse came in to make breakfast. She and I ignored each other for a few minutes until I finished my coffee. Then I went to my townhome and showered and dressed. Since I was going into the field today, I wore Levi’s, a dark T-shirt, and Nikes.
    I called Theo Goldberg and left him a message about the shipment, telling him it was secure for the moment. Then I set out to find Tremont Washington.
    Because of my past employment with the DEA and the Dallas police, I was familiar with the neighborhood where Tremont lived, a hardscrabble section of the city that had fallen out of the poverty tree and hit every branch on the way down.
    West Dallas was originally an unincorporated area known as Cement City, named for its largest employer, the Portland Cement Plant, a cesspool of pollution rendered only slightly less noxious by its proximity to a lead smelter. For much of the twentieth century, the very air in West Dallas was dangerous.
    Singleton Boulevard, the main drag, ran due west from downtown, the street populated with tire stores, fried chicken restaurants, taco stands, and pawnshops.
    According to the information Raul Delgado had given me, Tremont Washington lived with his grandmother in the Iris Apartments on Hampton Road, across from the bucolically named body of water known as Fish Trap Lake. The Iris was HUD public housing, well maintained as those types of properties went but not a good place for a white guy to venture even in broad daylight. The police only responded to calls there in groups of three or more, one of whom was armed with a fully automatic weapon.
    I drove past the Iris Apartments and then down an interior street.
    The wood-framed houses were small, probably much like they’d been when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had called the area home a century before.
    It was midmorning, a sunny day. Every block or so, I passed someone sitting in a lawn chair on the corner, watching what little traffic there was, cell phone in hand. Human radar for the man I was going to see.
    At the intersection of Borger and Vilbig sat a brick house larger than most, surrounded by a freshly painted picket fence. A Cadillac Escalade was parked nose-out in the driveway, a young African American man in a wifebeater shirt and calf-length shorts leaning against the hood.
    I parked across the street and got out. I kept my hands visible. Moved slowly but deliberately.
    The young man stared at me but didn’t seem alarmed. I knew others were watching from the houses nearby.
    The man stuck a cigarillo between his lips.
    “Whatchoo want? Crackertown’s across the river.”
    “Lysol around?”
    “Who’s asking?” He crossed his arms.
    “Tell him Jon Cantrell’s here.”
    He cocked his head to one side like he was trying to figure out what planet I’d come from.
    I said, “Tell him I’m not looking to jam anybody up.”
    Lysol Alvarez was the head of a street gang that ran most of West Dallas. He was half black, half Nicaraguan, one hundred percent dangerous.
    The young man gave me his best tough-guy glare before he pulled a cell phone from his pocket and sent a text. A moment later he looked up.
    “Yo. Front door’s open.”
    I nodded thanks and strode toward the house.
    The yard was tiny but immaculate, manicured like a putting green. Palm trees grew on either side of the walk leading to the porch.
    I pushed open the door and stepped into a living room that looked like it had come from the gangsta edition of Architectural Digest.
    Black leather furniture, polished hardwood floors, whitewashed plaster walls. An abstract painting of Tupac over the fireplace, the color scheme green and orange. On the opposite wall was a flat-screen TV tuned to a basketball game. The sound was