The place in Aldine is a two-hundred-unit apartment complex, one of those sprawling rental communities the size of a small college campus that pop up along big city freeways across the South, promising a pool and a weight room and an easy twenty-minute ride into downtown, or wherever your twelve-dollar-an-hour job is. This one has the nerve to call itself Beechwood Estates.
“Shit,” Rolly mumbles when he sees it.
And Jay, on his own, can immediately see the problem.
For whatever cover a place like this offers, its very uniformity promising anonymity for snoops like Rolly, it also gives off no hint of the character of the man they are seeking. There are no shoes lying about, size ten or twelve, no toys or hollowed-out barbecue pits or shopping bags at the curb, and no trash they could poke through looking for a pay stub, no way of knowing which bag of garbage inside the metal bins in the complex’s parking lot belongs to Hollis.
They’ve got his apartment number, and that’s about it.
The door to the unit marked 27-A is on the first floor of the complex, across an alley from the main parking lot, the one closest to the entrance to Beechwood Estates. It’s a distance of about twenty yards from Hollis’s front door to the truck, which Rolly parks in a dark spot underneath the carport. There’s a fan of glass cut into the top of the door, just above the 27-A. From here, the unit appears completely dark. Rolly snaps off his seat belt. “I’m going in.”
Jay goes for the door handle on his side.
Rolly shakes his head. “I need you to watch my back out here. You don’t hear from me or something looks funky, hit my pager just once.” He reaches across the front seat for the glove box. He taps it twice, and the door pops open. From inside, he pulls out a crinkled bandanna, rolled as tight as a joint. Across the dash, he spreads out the fabric, revealing a set of lock picks, the metal dull from use. He chooses two, leaving the rest sitting on the dashboard.
Jay watches as Rolly slides the picks into his back pocket, just a few inches from the .45 that’s resting in the waistband of his jeans. In under a minute he’s across the alley, under the faux-Tudor awning over the entryway to Hollis’s apartment, and inside the front door. Jay watches it all from the cab of the pickup truck. The radio plays softly in the background, the dial set to KCOH, Rolly being a longtime fan of its blues-and-news format. Tonight, the station is picking up a live feed from the Channel 13 mayoral debate, and one of the moderators, a political affairs editor at the Houston Chronicle, is just now introducing the candidates. KCOH, however, knows which side its bread is buttered on. They open up the phone lines early, cutting away from the debate before it even starts, betting on the fact that its audience would rather listen to one another than to either of the candidates. Tonight’s topic: “What question would you ask the next mayor of Houston?” The first caller is a middle-aged woman from Third Ward–Terri, “with an i”–who launches into a tirade about the dirty seats on city buses. She’s been looking for a job for three weeks and can’t get nowhere clean half the time, looking like a street person every time she walks into an important interview. The call-in crowd is with her until the moment she starts complaining about the stinky food “them Mexicans be bringing on the bus.” The next caller in line–Tammy, “with a y”–tells her she needs to mind her own damn business. “You doing them just like white folks used to do us.” An argument countered by a first-time caller named Roy, who says, “But it is getting to a point where they’re taking everything, coming over here, getting all the good jobs.” To which the radio host says, “Been here, bro’man, long before you. You are calling from Texas. Tejas, baby.” Jay snaps off the radio. He looks at his watch, wondering how much time he ought to give it.
A light blue Chevy Caprice pulls into the parking spot next to him. The driver shoots Jay a funny look as he’s getting out of his car, and Jay, too late, realizes the lock picks are still laid out across the dash, a thief’s tools in plain sight. “I help you with something?” the man says. His driver’s-side door is only a few inches from Rolly’s truck, and this close Jay can tell he’s carrying something in his hands, but can’t make out the shape or weight beneath the frame of the El Camino’s passenger window. Wouldn’t worry him none if it weren’t for the good look Jay gets at his face, sweat and grease lit up by a yellow security light in a corner of the carport. He’s a white guy, early thirties, with sandy, almost tea-colored hair, clipped at the sides, and long enough to touch his shirt collar in the back–a description that matches, almost to the letter, the one Lonnie gave for Alonzo Hollis. On instinct, Jay reaches for a piece, coming up empty, of course. He panics when he suddenly remembers where he left his gun. “I said, can I help you with something?” the guy says. He’s watching Jay closely, but also darting his eyes up and down the parking lot every few seconds, as if he’s checking to make sure there are no witnesses to whatever it is he has in mind. Jay has his cell phone open, dialing Rolly’s pager number.
“Step out of the car,” the guy says.
“Not looking for trouble, man.”