Midnight Club Read Free Page B

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 notice.
    A dark blue Mercedes stretch limousine had eased to a stop in front of the elegant town house. A steep gray-stone stoop led the way to oak double doors, illuminated by antique gaslight lamps.
    Two men in dark business suits stepped out of the limousine. The men carefully peered around the street before allowing a third passenger to follow them out into the night.
    “Two soldiers…A driver. He sure as hell travels light.”
    One of the men inside the Escort had been stretched across the length of the backseat. Isiah Parker leaned forward now. He had closely cropped black hair, and a smoothly handsome face. His rangy body strongly suggested professional athletics, though Parker would have said it was his skin color, not his body, that made some people think he might have been a basketball player once upon a time.
    “We’ll give the garbage an hour or so to relax and get comfortable,” Parker said, speaking calmly. “Then we go in. Why don’t you turn on the radio, Jimmy? Brothers on Ninety-ninth Street would be listening to a little music, you know. Ba-dahdah-deet. Let’s do it up