Gunmetal Black Read online

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  For my mother, Olga Iris,

  la flor más bella de Puerto Rico.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel traveled a long way to find you, reader. I worked on it on and off for many years, while going to school and working full time. It began as my college thesis and evolved. On September 11, 2001, I lost three years’ worth of work because I kept it at a cubicle inside the World Trade Center. Later that week, I began the story again, from page one.

  Originally, I envisioned Gunmetal Black to serve as a cautionary tale. I grew up in tough neighborhoods in New York and Chicago and I wanted to speak to urban problems. As I matured, so did the novel. It remains action-packed and gritty; a thriller. It has sexy moments, and a touch of romance. The characters are dangerous and flawed, but I strove to make them complex and human as they face great crises.

  While this is commercial crime fiction, it is heavily influenced by the classics. When I began to write at Shimer College, I was steeped in Greek tragedies, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, and others. On my own I read

  Hemingway, pulp fiction, and detective novels; I studied movies to make the plot fast-moving and cinematic; and

  I listened to everything from classic rock to hip-hop, and especially to salsa. The main characters are Latino, but Gunmetal Black is ultimately an American novel.

  I hope you find the story entertaining, easy to follow, and hard to put down. If you do, by all means, recommend it to all of your friends. Enjoy it. Thank you for reading. And be on the lookout for my next novel.

  Daniel Serrano, Esq.

  New York City, 2007

  The wicked roar and growl like lions.

  But God silences them and breaks their teeth.

  —JOB 4:10

  PRÓLOGO

  Murder began when I was ten years old.

  It was a long summer’s day, in the late seventies, and the sun kicked hard enough to melt your wings. We lived in West Town, a Puerto Rican neighborhood near Humboldt Park, in Chicago. Fifteen minutes and a million miles from downtown.

  My father ran bolitas, the numbers, and muscled for a local loan shark.

  “I never take nothin’ from nobody,” he said. “Except what they owe.”

  My father was tall for an Island-born Rican, nearly six feet, and brown. He was thick from rocking push-ups and pull-ups in the park. His street name was Caballo. Rumor had it he earned it by kicking a deadbeat in the style of a crazy horse.

  One time I saw him attack two men in front of a movie theater. He kicked them with his eyes wide and his nostrils flared, and he smiled the entire time. I held his beer. Afterward, we strutted into the theater as if nothing happened.

  The houselights dimmed, the curtain rose. My father lit a cigarette and blew a stream into the red light that flickered above our heads. Smoke floated like the wake of some scarlet ghost.

  My father looked down at me and smiled. “My partner told me this is gonna be a good flick. It got a lotta action in it.”

  “Yeah, Pop?”

  “Uh-huh.” He winked. “He tole me there’s a little romance too.”

  My father smiled down at me, but he must have seen some residue of that sudden violence on the sidewalk. He passed his hand through my hair. “So now you know,” he said. “Don’t ever be a punk.”

  One day my mother was at church. My father lingered in the apartment, mopped sweat off the back of his neck with a white handkerchief, and sipped straight rum. He owned congas, two hand drums carved from wood. They were elderly, scarred by chips, scratches, and varicose cracks. Mostly, they slept in the corner. The leather skins stretched across their tops were filthy from a generation of sweat, dirt, oil, even flecks of blood that my father kneaded into them. Some days, if he drank enough, we’d pretend we were in a salsa band. I sang and he beat the drums.

  But not that night. Instead, the time came, my father dressed, he headed for the door. I asked where he was going.

  “To the moon,” he said. “No kids allowed.”

  “Can you buy me an ice cream, Pop? When you come back?”

  The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He squinted. “Te estás poniendo grande.” He reached in his pocket and flipped me a quarter. “Go down when you hear the truck, OK? But come right back up. And don’t let Mami know you was out there.”

  I nodded. He patted my head and left. I ran to the window and watched my father slide from view, grooving on his private rhythm. I pocketed the quarter and ran down after him.

  In the west the sun appeared as a giant bleeding ulcer on the horizon. I shadowed my father. Large metal cars roamed Chicago like modern buffalo, and one custom horn blasted “La Cucaracha.” The shells of burnt houses reeked of smoke and stale water and stared sullenly through boarded windows. Children frolicked in the geyser of a corner hydrant. On sidewalks and stoops the adults moved slowly, like chickens on a spit.

  My father entered a bar with a sputtering neon sign: LA SIRENA. He exited, rubbed a tall can of beer across his forehead, then cut down a side street to drink and smoke pot.

  Finally, he met his appointment: a tall black man in a wide-brimmed hat. Shadows concealed most of the stranger’s face, but not his teeth, which were made of gold.

  The gold-toothed man slapped my father on the shoulder and grinned. “My brother!” he said. “I thought you got lost.”

  My father shook his head. The gold-toothed man invited my father into a nearby gangway, and they went.

  I crouched in a gutter across the street, between two parked cars. I spotted my face in a curved chrome bumper, and a convex gargoyle version of me stared back. I stuck out my tongue at my distorted self and almost laughed. Somewhere nearby the melody of an ice-cream truck faded and the quarter tingled in my pocket. I held my place and watched the men negotiate as silhouettes framed by the mystery of their business and the final embers of a fiery dusk.

  Then came the horror.

  Another man slithered from the silent shadows. He, too, wore a concealing hat. In his hands was a sawed-off shotgun. The hit man pointed the barrels at the base of my father’s spine, and pulled the trigger.

  BOOM!

  I saw the flash, heard the echo, and the startled birds roared helter-skelter from the trees above. In one sick motion my father dropped to one knee and snapped his face toward the sky. Smoke rose and a sudden hot gush of piss ran down my leg. A scream got tangled in my throat.

  The man with the smoking sawed-off spotted me across the street—I was trembling between the cars. Our eyes locked.

  Am I next? I thought. Is this our secret?

  The shooter froze inside my gaze. But his gold-toothed accomplice did not look in my direction. He snatched the shotgun from his partner, pointed the barrels at my father’s head, and pulled the trigger.

  BLAST!

  I saw a spray of flesh and was knocked unconscious by a tidal wave of grief.

  The earth swallowed my father’s coffin. My mother suffered his demons, but she prayed and wore black in the unflinching sun. I prayed, too, and hoped he was going to God, though I feared that he was going to the other place. I’d seen my father’s partner stash reefer, money, rum, and a gun in the casket before they closed it.

  The títere patted my father’s stiff shoulder before the lid went down. “Everything you gonna need for the next life, Negro.” He looked at me. “Ven acá, nene.”

  I went to him.

  His Puerto Rican accent was thick with alcohol. He rolled his R’s. “You father was a good man. ¿M’entiende? Un hombre verdadero.”

  I nodded.


  “Acuérdate de él.”

  As if I could ever forget. I tried to pull away, but the man held me in place.

  “You gotta be a tough guy now, little man. Unnerstand?”

  My lip trembled, but I nodded, and I swallowed all that pain. It was a jagged rock inside my throat, but I swallowed it. My father was dead and so was my innocence. I was ten years old.

  PART I:

  WINDY CITY

  SHAKEDOWN

  CHAPTER 01:

  MONEY AIN’T A THANG

  Getting out of prison felt different this time. Not that tired, ex-con bullshit about flying straight and keeping legit. Fuck that noise. I mean, I had a strategy, a definite plan, and it was simple. Legal too. Legit even. It involved forming a corporation, keeping books, paying taxes. But that didn’t mean I was a good guy now. Why would it? I wasn’t a born-again Christian, a Muslim, or even just tired of crime. It was that the rackets had never been that good to me. Not enough to justify the sacrifice. The rackets hadn’t been practical.

  Don’t get me wrong: I had my moments. Scores where you hauled so much cash your eyes watered. Hell, I had one five-year era where the crib was sweet, the rides were mint, and the green just kept on flowing. I juggled females and got backslapped by every bouncer in every hot club.

  But that turned out to be a mirage. Mostly, my life of crime had turned up dust. I was slipping through my thirties and the only thing I had to show was a criminal record, scars, and some dirty stories to tell. That, and a little over forty thousand dollars in cold, hard cash that I’d stacked running reefer out of my cell during the second half of a dime, a ten-year bid at Stateville Correctional Center, in Crest Hill, near Joliet, Illinois.

  The forty large was strapped to my body, my gut. It felt like a part of me. I intended to walk out of the main gate, find my way to Miami, and invest it all with a friend who was starting a record label. We were gonna make salsa records. Good ones. Not the commercial crap that’s been killing the genre.

  First I had to sneak the money out of the prison compound. It wouldn’t be easy. Hiding a nut like forty thousand when you’re incarcerated is like trying to cover an elephant with a washcloth. Somehow I pulled it off.

  I checked the mirror and gave the money belt one last tug. It didn’t show. Not under my shirt and my new army field jacket. I winked at my reflection to get the nerves down.

  The final pat-down on my way out was the main hurdle. I’d already undergone a strip search and retrieved the money belt after dressing.

  My escort arrived. He was a new guard I hadn’t gotten to know yet.

  “Thanks for coming, Officer.”

  “Save it, skell. Move.”

  New guards always feel they have something to prove. I picked up my small suitcase, breathed, and took that final march.

  The red-haired guard, who I knew too well, chewed gum, lazylike. It was still morning, but already he sounded tired.

  “Arms up, Santiago.” He began a slow pat-down.

  I held my breath. The red-haired guard had been greased, and so had his supervisor, but you never know. Red let his pudgy fingers linger over the money belt.

  “What’s this?”

  I swallowed.

  “Put on a couple pounds, did we?” He flashed his bleeding gums. “Must’ve been all that high living you did at the taxpayers’ expense.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nothin’ but juicy steaks and red wine up in here.”

  “Save the sarcasm, Santiago. Turn around.”

  I did.

  Red finished the charade and gestured to the guards behind the mesh. “This one’s clean.”

  They buzzed me through. One guard was busy putting up Halloween cutouts of witches and black cats with arched backs. I said, “It’s a little early for that,” but she ignored me. A corrections officer with a receding Afro went down a checklist:

  “Santiago? Eduardo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Recite your number.”

  I did.

  “Eye color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Height?”

  “Six even.”

  “Weight?”

  “Two-fifteen.”

  He looked me up and down.

  “All right, two-thirty-five,” I said.

  “Better. Stand over there. Toes on the line.”

  I stood up straight.

  “Look at the red dot. Smile if you want.”

  I didn’t. The flash went off.

  “Good,” he said. “Talk to Hanks while this thing prints.”

  Another guard handed me my discharge papers. He spoke without looking up. “Don’t lose these, Santiago, these are important. Department of Public Health info, so you can get an HIV test.” He examined the next one. “Says here that you been ID’d as alcohol and/or substance dependent. Did those Pre-Start classes help?”

  “I feel more reformed already.”

  “Anyway, this form is a referral to a treatment program in Chicago. Highly recommend you follow up with that.”

  I glanced at the heading on the form and nodded.

  The guard inspected everything in front of him. “All right, Santiago, the rest of these forms are self-explanatory. Any questions?”

  “None you can answer.”

  He smirked.

  The photographer handed me a warm piece of plastic. “Here’s your ID then.”

  Issued by the Illinois Department of Corrections, it identified me as discharged from state prison. The photo showed the beginning of wrinkles. Little bags under the eyes. Padding under the chin. It had been a while since I had my picture taken.

  “You need a better flash for that camera. I look washed-out. Like I got no color.”

  The paperwork guard closed my folder. “It’s a temp, Santiago, take it to the secretary of state within thirty days. Cough up a dollar, they’ll give you a state ID. Maybe that one’ll capture your pretty side. Now come on. Sign here, here, and here.”

  I did.

  And that was it. My debt to society? Paid.

  Outside it was the Midwest in autumn: cool air, decaying leaves, clouds, drizzle—the smell of these mixed together. I scanned the parking lot.

  A glossy candy apple red Cadillac, one of those long, wide monsters built in the late seventies, idled. It crouched and kept its distance from the prison structure. Heavy metal pulsed behind its tinted windows. I walked toward it.

  Antonio Pacheco, aka “Little Tony,” my oldest friend, slid out from behind the steering wheel. Short and thick, he was dressed all in black. The belt of his leather jacket hung loose. He wore driving gloves and black wraparound shades cocked up on his head, even though the clouds were heavy and gray.

  Tony whistled. “What up, dawg?”

  “¿Qué pasó, loco?”

  We hugged, then looked at each other. I hadn’t seen Tony since his release, a couple years earlier. Standing up close now, I noticed his chin was also thick and visible, even though he wore a goatee. He had new wrinkles too. And his hairline headed for the hills. But he still had the dark, serious eyebrows, the deep-set eyes. He smiled. The fucker still had dimples.

  “Looking good, kid.”

  “Me?” He squeezed my bicep. “How about you? What the fuck have you been doin’, man? Breaking rocks?”

  “A little bit.”

  A dark green spider clung to the side of Tony’s neck. I flicked it.

  “Wicked tattoo,” I said. “Still a gangster, huh?”

  “You know it.”

  I was happy to see Tony. A month earlier he had sent a messenger, a fine young Negrita who popped her gum and told me Tony needed to see me in Chicago when I got out. He needed my help on something. I had a contraband prepaid cell phone inside, and Tony had the number, but evidently this innocent request was something he did not want a record of. The girl he sent didn’t say shit either.

  I was focused on Miami then, and hadn’t planned a detour to Chic
ago. But I owed Tony enough to listen. Plus, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to spend a couple of weeks roaming the city, reconnecting. Seeing Tony outside the gate now made me feel satisfied that I’d made the right decision.

  I smiled. “Tony, did you get my letter?”

  He reached in his pocket, pulled a set of keys, and tossed them. “Got you a room in the old hood. Close to North and California. Near the park.”

  I looked at the keys and pressed the teeth into my thumb.

  “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t know why you spend the money when you can just bunk at my place.”

  I pocketed the keys. “Man, I been sharing space for a hundred years.”

  “Understood.” Tony grabbed my bag. “Is this it? Where’s the library? I know it don’t all fit in this little thing.”

  “I donated most of my books,” I said. “Those pigeons inside need ’em more than I do.”

  “And the congas?”

  “Gave those away too.”

  Tony said, “You committing hari-kari or something?”

  “Naw, man, I just felt like I needed a clean break.”

  Tony nodded and dropped my bag in the trunk. I read his bumper sticker: GAS, GRASS, OR ASS. NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE.

  I tapped the Caddy. “You look to be doing all right.”

  “I manage.” He produced a pack of Marlboros and shook one toward me.

  I put my palm up. “Got nine months free of them shits.”

  “Word? Wish I had the balls.” Tony flipped the square into the corner of his mouth, a trick I’d watched him practice a thousand times when we were teenagers, and later, a million times in the yard, the prison laundry, the kitchen, and his cell.

  He smoked and squinted at the thirty-three-foot wall that surrounds Stateville. “The fucking ass of hell, huh?”

  I nodded. “Remember when you compared it to our version of a frat house?”

  “Hey, I was delirious from lack of pussy, all right? I ever say anything like that again, slap me.”

  We stood there, in silence, and stared at the top of the wall. Tony got the shivers. “Let’s pull up,” he said. “This place is stomping on my buzz.”