Part of it was the warning from Santini from Zian back in New Jersey, and from Cermain Oaks at his spot. But it was more than that.
What alerted me, what changed me, and well I knew it, was a feeling of death and danger in the air. I was never the contemplative type. I knew how to get somewhere, and a few other things any guy needs to know to get by, but of course any guy out in the world, or a solicitor, a junkie, a pusher, orphan, a pimp, any one of them is likely to become thoughtful. And sometimes I’ve wondered if danger doesn’t actually have an almost physical effect on the atmosphere.
I’ve little to explain such on idea. I’m a man with few words, and most of those picked up in reading whatever came to hand and listening. There’s times when the air seems to fairly prickle with danger. This here was one of those times.
The apartment buildings were black now except on the far side where the last of the sun was tipping them with fire. The grass was taller moving a mite in the wind, but everything else was still, and we rode in silence.
We could hear the engine twining as it moved through the street and glass shattered. Every second we looked for a gun shot, but we heard nothing, saw no one. Only pedestrians lurking around, only the sky darkening overhead.
And then we saw a man standing head down, gazing.
The dead man lay close by. The wind ruffled his shirt and touched the edge of his silk handkerchief. There was no need to get down, for I knew him at once. Aileen Enrique had been a good hand repping for an organization from over toward Ekalaka when I’d last seen him.
The bullet had gone in under his left shoulder blade and ripped out the pocket of his shirt. From the angle of the shot and the place it hit, I judged he had been shot from fairly close up.
He had been a man of integrity and he still was lying there with the dark curls ruffling in the wind. He had folks somewhere back east, I recalled.
We weren’t talking much when we got back to the apartment, and we didn’t ride up to the door until it was close to noon.
Nobody in his right mind takes a man’s death lightly. And Aileen Enrique had been young and full of living. It worried me, seeing him like that, but it worried me more when I scouted around, for I found the tracks of blood.
Aileen had been shot in the back while running away from somebody or something, and my guess is he was shot at a range of no more than seventy feet or less. Studying out what sign I could find, it was plain enough that Aileen was in a hurry wherever he figured to go or who he was running away from.
After a lifetime of reading sign, a man can see a lot more than appears on the ground. And although I hadn’t much to go on, it was my feeling that the last thing Aileen Enrique expected was to get shot. He had stopped once he had walked away, maybe to say something, and then four or five steps further.
Whoever had fired that shot had pulled off about as cold blooded a killing as I ever did see, nailing him with the first carefully aimed shot, and killing him dead.
There was nobody at the apartment when we got back, and no sign that anybody had been there. Neither of us felt much like talking.
Standing there in the apartment pacing, I suddenly realized that Jaquan and me were fairly up against it. This was no scare.
This was the real thing, and we were facing up to trouble sure enough.
It gave a man something to think about, realizing of a sudden that he might go the way Aileen Enrique had. There was a good man, a rider, a hand, an if ever, there was any, he was one. And surely that was why he where dead. Or that was how it shaped up.
If it so happened that I was to go like Aileen, there was nobody to mind, nobody that would give it a thought after a few days had passed.