The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [6]
Some people standing along 124th Street recognized Parker. Isiah Parker had been around the neighborhood for a long time. A lot of people knew Isiah. Even more of them had known his brother, Marcus.
Familiarity aside, nobody was going to stop the scum dealer he was chasing. You stopped some South American-looking guy in Harlem, you could wind up dead, or in even worse trouble.
Besides, chase scenes were fun to watch on a slow-moving summer afternoon, better than a Sylvester Stallone movie at the Loews Theatre.
One Hundred Twenty-fourth Street was like a graveyard for old, busted-up Plymouths, Chevys, Fords. A few neighborhood dudes clapped for the footrace going down on the otherwise hot and boring afternoon. Nobody seemed to care why the chase had started.
Finally, Parker was running almost side by side with the Colombian drug pusher. He looked over at the other man—almost like he wanted to pass, instead of catch him.
The drug dealer was Pedro Cruz, all right. The bearded Colombian tough didn’t even know how to look frightened. He was trying to figure how to go for his gun and keep running full speed at the same time.
His right hand was clawing furiously inside the flapping nylon vest, which he wore over the bare, brown skin of his chest.
Parker finally took a full-stride lead on Cruz.
Suddenly, Isiah Parker seemed to be floating backward in time and space…
His arm came up, his elbow bent, and it smashed full force into the drug dealer’s chin.
Cruz toppled over in a complicated three-point cartwheel. He ended up in a crumpled heap against a sagging cyclone fence that was full of holes, so that everybody in the neighborhood could get in and out of the yard as they wished.
Isiah Parker was pleased that he hadn’t shot the drug dealer. He took out his .22 revolver and pointed it up at the hunched-over, snooping superintendent on a nearby brownstone porch. The superintendent cringed, and tried to slime away.
“I’m a police officer…,” Parker said between gasping breaths. “Call the Nineteenth Precinct…”
The superintendent grinned as if he had just won on Family Feud or Wheel of Fortune. He shuffled back inside his building and called the police. He appreciated a good chase scene on Miami Vice, or on his front porch, for that matter. Harlem was still pretty good for that, at least.
At three in the afternoon, New York undercover detective Isiah Parker was still wearing the Orange Julius T-shirt and his stained juice-stand apron. He’d lost the leather hat somewhere, a nice chapeau, too.
The strange outfit made him seem like a regular New York workingman. It made him feel like part of the gritty neighborhood; it didn’t matter which neighborhood.
This neighborhood was in southern Harlem, between Broadway and West End Avenue. Parker stood on the street corner, sucking on an orange Italian ice, checking out the scene. He was noting little things he would need to remember tonight, this night of revenge.
Finally, Isiah Parker headed back to the Nineteenth Precinct in Harlem, where he was still on duty until four-thirty.
8
West Ninety-ninth Street; Midnight
ON THE SOUTHERNMOST border of Harlem, the summer night had turned sticky-hot, almost fetid. A few blocks away, families were sleeping out on fire escapes and on tenement rooftops.
A battered black Ford Escort was parked halfway between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue on Ninety-ninth Street. Three men were cramped inside the car, waiting in the darkness.
At twenty past twelve they were rewarded for their diligence and patience.
“That’s them now. They’re here. Blue Mercedes.”
A man named Jimmy Burke spoke softly inside the Escort. He straightened himself behind the car’s steering wheel. He gestured down Ninety-ninth Street, toward a town house known to the men in the Escort as Allure.
The four-story town house was overshadowed by the neighborhood’s taller and more stately apartment buildings. Discreet and inconspicuous, its midblock location allowed visitors to slip in and out with a minimum of