Chapter 6
In Detroit, Teal was staying in one of the chain hotels over by the Riverwalk while Kenney was in an Airbnb in Hamtramck.
Kenney liked Airbnbs, especially the crappy, midlevel ones: clean, but not fastidiously so, in buildings that were secure but didn’t have cameras.
Before Airbnb came along, one of the players would always stay in a motel, preferably a mom-and-pop operation where you could park your car directly outside your door and didn’t have to enter via a lobby, but those places were thinner on the ground than in the past. It was, Kenney reflected, as though the country was set on taking anything individual or quirky and throwing it under the corporate bus.
It was the Starbuckization of America. And okay, Airbnb was a big business and played hell with the residential nature of cities, but it wasn’t like the company was branding the exteriors of buildings.
The places on offer still resembled homes, and Kenney, Teal, and the Saint were scrupulous about leaving them in the condition in which they’d found them, and frequently even tidier.
A degree of self-interest was obviously involved, but it was also a question of being respectful of the property of others.
They took the woman near Fishkorn. They had to drive around for a while to find her, which was always hazardous, but the police didn’t spend any more time in Fishkorn than they had to.
Fishkorn was up there with Belmont, Van Steuben, and Petosky-Otsego as one of the areas better avoided in Detroit, but Kenney had nixed Belmont and P-O because of the gangs, same with Greensbriar and Franklin Park.
Teal was sure Fishkorn had gangs too—it had drugs, which traditionally meant gangs—but Kenney was insistent, and Teal went along because Kenney hadn’t yet steered them wrong.
Also, Teal liked Black girls, and Fishkorn was about as Black as a man could get without relocating to Africa.
The problem, of course, was that Kenney and Teal were white, and two white guys in a car in Fishkorn screamed “police,” but Kenney had gotten around that by removing the bulbs from the interior lights and adding a tint to the Camry’s windows.
The tint was a far-from-perfect job, noticeably at the rear, which was all creases and bubbles, but it would suffice.
Shortly before they reached Fishkorn, Teal got in the back of the Camry and lay down flat, so now it was just one guy in a murky car, and as far as any inquisitive residents of Fishkorn were concerned, he was probably trying to buy or sell something, even if that something was trouble.
But nobody paid the Camry much attention at all, since folks in Fishkorn were too busy making trouble of their own, avoiding it, or simply being poor.
Kenney had done his homework, as expected, so they bypassed the stretch of West Warren between Greenfield and Wyoming, as that had a bunch of Middle Eastern joints and those people had a way of looking out for their own.
They concentrated on the blocks around Fishkorn itself, where they spotted the woman walking west along Joy Road.
When she turned down Freeland, she was theirs.
Kenney pulled over—not too close or too fast—rolled down his window, and said he was lost, looking for the White Castle.
He made no attempt to open the door and went out of his way not to alarm the woman, who was in her late twenties or early thirties; bigger than Teal preferred, though the color was right.
By the time Kenney rolled to a stop, Teal had the rear door unlocked, and when the woman turned to point back toward Greenfield and the White Castle, Teal was on her.
In the past they’d used chloroform, but it wasn’t like in the movies where someone has a pad pressed against their face and seconds later they’re out.
Two of the previous women had struggled, one of them like her life depended on it, which it had, and Teal took a bad blow to the cheek that was a bitch to explain to his wife when he returned home.
After that, they’d pivoted to a gun or knife, the only difficulty being that some women froze at the sight of a weapon, which meant a delay in getting them into the car.
But Teal now used a more direct approach, and as the target became aware of him, he hit her hard with a blackjack at the base of the skull, then one more time on the same spot to be sure.
Even as she was falling, Teal was using her momentum to steer her into the back of the car, and once she was lying on the floor, he climbed in on top of her and closed the door.
Only then did he apply the chloroform, but not before Kenney had rolled down all the windows, since chloroform didn’t make distinctions at close quarters.
“Good to go,” he told Kenney.
Twenty seconds, give or take. They were getting very good at it. But then, they’d had plenty of practice.