Page 21 of So Smitten

“I’ll take your word for it,” Faith said.

They ordered food and picked a booth near the back of the diner, away from listening ears. When they sat, Faith said, “All right, Keenan. Here’s the deal. You’re honest with me, I’m fair to you. You tell me what I need to know, and we get you out of here in time for a wonderful afternoon with Yadira, sound good?”

Here I am making a deal with a criminal, she thought.

“Yeah, all right,” Keenan replied. “What do you want to know?”

“We want to know who killed Harvey Harris and Vincent Mariano.”

“Well, I can’t help you with Vinny,” Keenan said. “I don’t know what he did for the gang, but I know he didn’t cross anyone. I also know he wasn’t very high up. He was kind of like me, just a contractor. From what I’ve heard, he was good at whatever it was he did, and he never stole from anyone. I would say wrong place wrong time, but he got messed up real bad. So did H-Bomb.”

“Tell me about H-Bomb,” Faith said.

Keenan looked anxiously around the diner. Besides the three of them, there was an elderly couple enjoying a lunch date and a younger couple looking harried as they tried to corral three small children who were playing tag around the dining table. There was no sign of anyone suspicious.

He still lowered his voice when he said, “The Syndicate is pretty sure the Bulgarians are responsible for him.”

“The Bulgarians?”

“Yeah, man. They’re bad dudes. I heard that they had a beef with some guy down in Miami, and they hung him by his toes and took turns hitting him with a baseball bat. Like a pinata. Supposedly, only his legs were left by the time they finished with him. Everything else was spread all over the room.”

Faith decided she wasn’t hungry anymore. She set down her half-eaten sandwich and said, “Did Harris have beef with the Bulgarians?”

“That’s what I heard. H-Bomb… he was… volatile, shall we say? He was better at making enemies than friends.”

“What was the nature of their beef?” Michael asked.

“Girls, I’m guessing,” Keenan replied. “H managed the street girls in Atlanta. The Bulgarians tried to muscle in a couple of times and H ran them out. The last time he got violent. They ended up beating one of the Bulgarians to death. Then he got cocky and warned the other gangs that they’d end up the same if they messed with him.

“And where was the Syndicate in all of this?” Faith asked. “Did they approve of H running his mouth like that?”

“They let their street captains figure their own stuff out,” Keenan said. “As long as they don’t bring trouble down on leadership or get the law involved, they stay out of the way. That’s why there’s no infighting. It’s actually a pretty smart way to run things. They get their cut, and they get plausible deniability in case anyone does screw up.”

“So why are people acting like they’re going to avenge him?” Michael said. “If they like to keep distance between the street captains and leadership, why are people up in arms about Harris’s death?”

"Those are all H-Bomb's crew," Keenan said, "Everyone in the projects is H's crew. The Syndicate—the leaders, anyway, they don't come anywhere near the streets. I don't think they're even in Atlanta. They probably live across the country in some mansions in Los Angeles, hobnobbing with celebrities and walking their designer poodles across the Hollywood Hills. See, you gotta stop thinking of the Syndicate as a gang. They’re more like a mafia or a cartel. The street gangs pay them tribute and the Syndicate gives them access to lawyers and resources when they need it, but the people who call the shots—the real shots—you’ll never see them.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

They finished their lunch and left Keenan at the restaurant at his request. “You can’t take me back to the club,” he said, “then it looks like you chauffeured me. I gotta go back bitching about how you dumped me on the street when you couldn’t get me to confess to anything and made me walk back. It looks bad enough that the FBI picked me up anyway.”

“Might want to think about taking a night off from the club,” Faith suggested, “just in case.”

“Yeah,” Keenan said ruefully. “Damn. I'm telling you, man, the best tits you've ever seen."

“A shame,” Michael said drily.

Before they left, they got the name and last known address of one of the Bulgarians, a lieutenant named Iliev, who when things were going well, would supply the Syndicate with girls. Keenan suggested he might be willing to give the name of the trigger man in exchange for immunity.

Faith groused about that on the drive to the address listed. “It’s like they’re equals,” she said, “like we have to talk to them like we owe them something and not the other way around.”

“That’s the way things are sometimes,” Michael said. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but New York, Chicago and L.A. all tried the strong-arm technique. It only made things worse for the little people caught in the crossfire, not to mention it increased gang participation tenfold in affected neighborhoods.”

“So what do we do? Legalize drugs and prostitution and just let everyone do what they want?”

“There are some studies that suggest that exact solution,” Michael said, “Take it out of the hands of the criminal underground and put it somewhere it can be regulated.”

Faith stared at him. “What do you think?”

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