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[b]Bennett Beach[/b]


The Beach was Pierogi Paradise. Russian expats and gangsters mingled with the old Jews of the neighborhood. Yiddish and Cyrillic script cohabited on walls and storefronts. Kosher meat hung from store windows. Dig those Hassidic Jews. Dig those wild beards and hats. ZZ Top meets Run DMC. Feature those Russian bears in six thousand dollar suits. Slavic whores walked the streets. Beautiful and wearing cheap clothing, but dead eyes underneath all that makeup. Sinister pimps nearby, drinking strong coffee and smoking Polish cigarettes. Operating with impunity in the early afternoon. 

Two-car convoy through the beach, Wise in front and Slam tailing. He gave the guy a long leash. Wise's unmarked made him as a cop from a mile away. Slam smoked cigarettes. Slam chain smoked butt to butt. He craved vodka and avoided hitting babushka's pulling carts. Wise's unmarked pulled in to a restaurant beneath the raised subway track. Slam drove by. The sign out front in English, Yiddish, Cyrillic: Nikola's Tea Room.

Timewarp back to his days on the streets. The Tea Room was where the Chechen ran business. He remembered how the fuck looked. Black suit with no tie, goatee, prison tats on his hands, and looking as Slavic as the chow at Abramowicz's Deli down the street. Slam heard the rumors around town: the Chechen was former Russian intelligence turned Russian Mafiya. No, he was a krusading KGB Kommando who had a kill kount in Afghanistan that approached triple digits. No, he fought the Russians in Chechnya. Ruskies raped his mother and he slaughtered an entire battalion in the name of revenge. The FSB had a six-figure bounty on his head. Putin himself had decreed that the Chechen would be killed if he ever left America.

Slam shook the Chechen down one time. He dunked his head into a fishtank. Two-Gun Grogan roared with delight. Grogan called the move Russian Dip. Slam parked his heap down the block and watched from the rear view mirror. Wise walked out twenty minutes later with a duffel bag. Wise chucked it in the backseat of his unmarked and hauled ass. Slam waited twenty seconds before following. 

Back on the highway and across town again. Slam drove with one hand. The other hand groped along the dashboard of the passenger side. He steered with his knees, he swerved, he got beaucoup bad looks from passing motorist. Slam pulled a half-empty bottle of Fireball up from the floor and took slugs from it. 

The crusade for booze let Wise get ahead. Slam sped and caught up just in time to see him get off the highway. Two-car convoy into the westside. Racist cops called it the Congo and they always showed up in force. Open air drug markets abound, junkies doing the dope fiend lean ditto. Feature those liquor store/check cashing places. Wise rolled into the Finger and Slam had to call off the tail.

The Finger == The Milton Finger Housing Projects. Six twelve story tall high rises surrounded by twenty low-rise housing projects. A small kingdom for Jefferson Skeevers to rule over. Skeevers, one of the few remaining gangsters from the days before the Bat broke the Mob.

Slam sat in his heap and watched corner boys serve junkies speedballs. The Bennett Beach to the Finger run proved that Wise was dirty. No doubt about it in Slam's eyes. But what in the hell did it have to do with Jim Gordon's disappearance?