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Back Dead of Winter Save as PDF
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Marcus “Duke” Ducane had reached the dubious status of legend in Detroit’s criminal underworld. Forty years ago, his multimillion-dollar empire spanned gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, drugs, money laundering and human trafficking. Lawyers and judges, state legislators, city council members, cops and at least two mayors had all benefited from Duke’s weekly and monthly payouts. He had beaten two extortion and racketeering trials and a two-year-long FBI investigation for wire fraud.

After wreaking decades of havoc on Detroit and across five states, Duke Ducane was finally collared for extortion and sent away by a young, eager Detroit Police detective lieutenant—me. Duke got a paltry five years in a minimum-security slam, a prison where he could perfect his golf swing and make new friends in banking and investment portfolio management. I suspect he handed the prosecution the win in a byzantine scheme to retire from a criminal underworld that he felt had become an impersonal, multinational, venture capital machine indistinguishable from any other craven corporate enterprise.

Now, two years after his prison release, he was the proprietor of a high-end recording studio in the northern Detroit suburb of Royal Oak.

“I’m surprised you didn’t want to make a stop at your gun locker before heading out to see Duke,” I said as I brought the Olds 442 to a stop in the small parking lot at the south side of SoundNation Recording Studio.

“If the guys I put a beatdown on were telling the truth, then I want Duke to get the same up-close-and-personal intensive care.”

“What about the Compton twins?”

“You handle ’em,” Tomás said, getting out of the car.

I’d tried handling Duke’s mammoth, psychotic bodyguards all by my lonesome a while ago. The result had been three fractured ribs and a face that resembled beef tartare. Maybe I should have stopped and bought a dozen roses for the twin goliaths. Or at least a twenty-ounce steak they could tear at in the lobby like Cerberus with a fresh soul.

The lobby of SoundNation Recording Studio was no longer the vomit-inducing Jackson Pollock fever dream it once had been. Now it had softly illuminated purple and magenta walls where projections of recording legends—Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, John Lee Hooker, the Supremes, Jack White and Eminem—alternated with photos of a revitalized Detroit and corporate logos. From all indications in that lobby, Detroit was an extremely happy place populated by good-looking people of all ethnic, racial and religious stripes.