Free Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith Page B

they gonna find the rapist and save the child, but the stink of that reward money is thick in their nostrils.
    And he was so close to that little fucker last night on the dump.
    “That close,” he said to Boston once the chopper clattered away and they made it back to the car. “That fucking close,” holding his thumb and index finger a few millimeters apart.
    That close to the half-mil.
    The mob parts slowly to let them through and just in case these losers get any ideas Angel cocks the .44 as Boston slides the Civic between the men. Angel prefers a knife—likes to do his work up close—but with these bastards on the street a man needs a gun.
    He hears the sounds of sirens heading this way. Too much heat this little Cindy thing is bringing to his turf. Not a good idea to be driving around in this stolen car. Not today.
     “We gotta lose these wheels,” Angel says and Boston shoots the Civic behind a half-demolished store, THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE still painted in red on the peeling walls.
    Angel is already half way out the car when he sees that Boston has dug in the glove box and produced a bottleneck, sucking on it as he holds it over a lighter flame. Angel catches the sweet-sour whiff of Mandrax mixed with weed. A white pipe. This muscle relaxant is the downer of choice, out here on the Flats.
    Boston sucks for a long while, eyes closed, before he leans back and lets go of a cloud of smoke, holding the pipe out to Angel who is ready to refuse, then he thinks what the fuck, maybe he needs to chill him out a bit, and he sits back down and takes a hit.
    He doesn’t do much of this shit, Mandrax, and feels it smack him between the eyes like a cattle hammer, and then it’s like his body is deboned, his flesh melting back into the car seat. He sits there, mind blank, staring out at the hot sky. Boston takes another hit and passes the pipe back to Angel who, as he grips it, has a sudden crazy flash that it’s a relay baton and that he’s in a race. And that if he doesn’t win the race he’s dead meat.
    He escapes the hot, airless Civic, drinking air, watching another crowd of men stopping cars, staring through the windows at the passengers inside.
    Boston, lanky as an NBA player, comes and stands beside Angel and kicks at a beer can with his giant Reebok. “So, what the fuck we do now?”
     “Jesus Christ, my brother, just think of all that fucken money,” Angel says. “All we gotta do is find us that kid.”
    “Ja, and how the fuck we gonna do that?”
    Before Angel can reply the white police chopper comes clattering low over Tin Town, sending people running from the blades. Boston turns his back and covers his head with his hoodie but Angel just stands there with his eyes shut, in the middle of the sandstorm, and lets the wind and the dust and the Mandrax suck him up high till he has a helicopter view across the rotten shacks and fucked-up houses and acres of garbage.
    Puts himself in the head of that little fucker who took the kid. Where would he go, the little jockey? Where would he hide? For sure nowhere in Tin Town or Paradise Park, not with these money hungry bastards running the streets. And not on the dump that’s crawling with cops and the greedy homeless.
    Then Angel has a vision, honest to Christ, clear as if he’s watching TV, and he starts to laugh as he opens his eyes and takes off down the road, Boston falling in beside him.
    “Where we going?” asks Boston.
    “Only place nobody bothering with that little jockey and the white girly.”
    “Ja? Where’s that?”
    “The graveyard, my brother. The fucken graveyard.”
     

27
     
     
    Ishmael takes a leak. Out of respect he’s careful to keep the stream of piss off the graves, aiming at a skinny tree with no leaves. He’s walked a bit away from the sleeping kid, not wanting her to see him.
    He watches the helicopter moving slow and low over Tin Town, the blades chopping up the air. The Red Ants are still busy tearing apart the shacks at