“It’s gonna be good for your future, man.”
Foreman kept his tone friendly. “Thanks for thinkin’ of me, but I’m already doin’ all right.”
“I’m not talkin’ about you doing better. I’m talkin’ about you makin’ the right decision here so you can keep what you got.”
Foreman stared through the roiling smoke at McKinley. He nodded slowly, his dark eyes shining wet in the light.
“You should have got straight to the point from the get-go. I understand you now, Horace.”
“Good. It’s just a short walk from here to there.”
“Who we talkin’ about, exactly? And how many?”
“Dewayne. Zulu, I expect.”
“You got some kind of plan?”
“Simple. We walk on over there, cross that DMZ, and knock on their door. Tell ’em we want to give them, what do you call that, one of them olive branches. Tell ’em we want to talk. There’s been too much killin’ lately, can’t we all get along, some bullshit like that. They let us in the house, we take ’em down. Like I said, simple. We outnumber their guns, and we got surprise on our side. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“When?” said Foreman.
McKinley said, “They’re over there right now.”
Foreman stood out of his chair, dropped his cigar to the scarred hardwood floor, and crushed it under his shoe. He released the safeties on both of his guns, reholstered the revolver, racked the slide on his Colt .9, reholstered it, and straightened out his leather.
“We gonna talk all night,” said Foreman, “or we gonna do this thing?”
“Damn, big man,” said McKinley, “you make a decision, you don’t fuck around.”
“You the one made the decision, Hoss. I’m just a man with a couple of guns.”
MARIO Durham lay on his back. The bullet had taken out the bridge of his nose and one of his eyes. His hat was still fitted to his head, which rested on the street in a river of blood.
“He looks real casual, doesn’t he?” said Nathan Grady. “Like he just laid down in the street to take a nap. I like the way he’s got his hand in his pocket, too, don’t you? Except for his face, you wouldn’t even know he was dead.”
Strange and Quinn were inside the yellow crime tape, standing beside Grady. Kids and adults from the neighborhood were behind the tape, some talking to uniformed officers, some laughing, some just staring at something that would give them bad dreams later that night. The photographers and forensics team were still working over the body and had not yet covered Mario up.
“Why is he like that?” said Quinn.
“My guess is the bullet severed his cerebral cortex,” said Grady. “When that happens it freezes the victim at the moment of death. I’ve seen it before. Mario was probably standing on the corner, his hand in his pocket, when he took the bullet. He died instantly, I’d say.”
“Standing on the corner doing what?” said Strange.
“Well, one of the locals said they saw little Mario there earlier in the evening, looked like he was selling something, or trying to. When we get into his pockets we’ll find out.”
“He got killed over drugs?”
“Could be. Looks like an amateur killing. A pro wouldn’t put a forty-five to a man’s head. I mean, a twenty-two would have been sufficient, right? One thing’s for sure: He didn’t get killed for his sneakers. You see ’em?” Grady laughed. “My man here is sportin’ a pair of ‘ordans.’ Or maybe I’m missing something and that’s the rage these days.”
Strange and Quinn did not comment.
“Anyway, he’s dead. Justice in Drama City, right? Thought you guys would want to see him. For closure and all that.”
“You call his kin?” said Strange.
“His brother, the drug dealer. He’s coming down in a while to ID the body. I’m gonna let him tell their mother.”
“Thanks for calling us,” said Strange.
“Yeah, sure. Take care.”
Grady motioned to the photographer, indicating that he should take another picture of the corpse. Strange guessed that the photograph of a bloody Mario Durham, “sleeping” in the street with his hand slipped into his pocket, would soon be hanging on Grady’s wall.
Strange and Quinn ducked the crime tape and walked to their cars.
“Get in for a minute, Terry,” said Strange, nodding at his Caprice. “I want to talk to you before we go home.”
DEWAYNE Durham looked out the back window at the alley and the house on Yuma. The house was all lit up inside, and McKinley was standing in the kitchen with a man, big like him but muscular, not fat.
“Foreman,” said Durham. He raised his voice. “Bernard, better get in here.”
Soon Durham felt Walker behind him, looking over his shoulder.
“That’s Foreman, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck’s goin’ on?”
“I don’t know. But they’re leavin’ the house.”
“Maybe they’re just goin’ to their car.”
“You see either one of their cars out in that alley?”
Durham heard Walker pull back the receiver of his Glock and ease a round into the chamber of the gun.
“They’re comin’ over here,” said Walker.
Durham watched them cross the alley. His fingers grazed the grip of his gun. “He ain’t hidin’ nothin’, either.”
“I can smoke ’em both, they get close enough.”
“Before you do that,” said Durham, “let’s see what they got on their minds.”
chapter 34
THE overheads of cruisers flashed the crime scene and threw colored light upon the faces of Strange and Quinn. A meat wagon had arrived for Mario Durham, and its driver was leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette. The neighborhood crowd had begun to break up and many were walking the sidewalks back to their homes. Some kids had set up a board-and-cinder-block ramp in the street and they were taking turns jumping it with their bikes.
“Same old circus,” said Strange, looking through the windshield from behind the wheel of the Caprice. He was holding his cell phone, flipping its cover open and closed.
“You feel robbed?”
“A little. In my heart I know I shouldn’t, but there it is.”
“I do,” said Quinn. “Everything we did today, all the running around and all the sweat, and I feel like we didn’t accomplish jack shit. Like we were one step behind everyone else.”
“Well, we’re not the law. They do have a little bit of an advantage on us. Anyway, we got the girl and her kid to a safe place. That was something.”
“Not enough for me. I’d feel a whole lot better if I’d accomplished something.”
“There’s always tomorrow.”
“I was thinkin’ you’d come with me over to Naylor before we head back to Northwest. Talk to those boys about Linda Welles.”
“Tonight?”
“Damn right.”
“Nah, man, my day is done. I’m gonna go home and have a late dinner with Janine, see my stepson, make sure Devra and the boy got settled in all right. Pet my dog. You need to go home, too.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Look at me, Terry. Promise me that’s what you’re gonna do.”
“I’m going home,” said Quinn.
“Good man,” said Strange.
Quinn listened to the click of the cover, then looked at the cell in Strange’s hand. “You gonna use that or just wear out the parts?”
“I been debating on making a call.”
“To who?”
“Dewayne Durham. I got his number from Donut, remember?”
“And what would you tell him?”
“It would be an anonymous call. I’d tip him that his brother got done by Horace McKinley or one of his people. I was thinkin’, a call like that, it might speed along McKinley’s demise.”
“Why would you do that?”
“McKinley threatened me, Terry. Threatened my family. Talked about me losing
my license, my business, everything.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time you been threatened. You said it earlier, you let yourself get disrespected like that every day.”
“This was a different kind of threat. Boys like that don’t concern themselves with licenses and businesses. They want to take you out, they take you out. Got me to thinkin’, it was the same kind of threat I got on my answering machine the night my office got burgled.”
“He’s working for the same people broke into your place.”
Strange nodded. “Would explain for real why he was so interested in hiding this witness. And he got all emotional back there, implied that he was protected. Which is why he goes about his business down here and doesn’t take the long fall.”
“Protected by who? The FBI?”
“Whoever. The government. Mr. Big. I don’t know for sure, and I never will know, most likely. You get the general idea.”
“But you’re not gonna make that call, are you, Derek?”
“No. I’m not in the business of killing young men, no matter who it is. Anyway, McKinley’s gonna die or be locked up soon enough, I expect, without my help. They can’t keep him out of jail forever.”
“And then you’ll be out here defending him.”
“Could be. But not defending him. Defending his rights. And yeah, there’s a difference. McKinley himself called me on that one earlier tonight. And I’ve been trying to work it out.”
“So have you?”
“Not entirely. It’s an ongoin’ process, I guess.”
“What are you going to do about the ones watching you?”
“Nothin’. Just keep doing my job. I already decided I’m not gonna let them fade me.”
Strange made a call to Lieutenant Lydell Blue. He told him about the house in the woods off Wheeler Road, gave him the license plate numbers off the red El Dorado and the Avalon, relayed what he’d seen and some of his suspicions, and reported on the death of Mario Durham. Blue thanked him, said that they’d get the local branch of the ATF involved, and commented that Strange and Quinn had had a full day. It prompted Strange to remind Blue about a full day they had both had together, thirty years earlier, involving two Howard girls, a bag of reefer, and a couple bottles of wine. Strange laughed with his friend and ended the call.
“Well, let me get on my way,” said Strange. “I’m about ready to go to sleep right here.”
“I’m gone, too,” said Quinn, touching the handle of the door.
“Terry,” said Strange, holding his arm. “Thanks for your help today, man. You know I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
“No problem.”
“Go home,” said Strange, staring into Quinn’s eyes.
Quinn pulled his arm free. “I will.”
“Always interesting with you around, man.”
Quinn smiled. “You, too.”
Strange watched him walk across the strobing landscape to his car. Head up, strutting, with that cocky way of his. He wanted to scream out Terry’s name then, call him back, tell him something, though he didn’t know what or why. But soon Quinn was in his Chevelle, cooking the big engine, and driving up the block.
Strange started the Caprice and slid an old O’Jays, Back Stabbers, into the deck. That nice ballad of theirs, “Who Am I,” with Eddie Levert singing tender and tough like only he could, filled the car, and Strange felt himself unwind. He put the car in gear and headed for home.
“YOU crossed that line,” said Dewayne Durham. “Might give me the impression you want to do me some harm.”
“I wanted to talk to you, is all,” said Horace McKinley. “Didn’t think it would work too good, us shoutin’ at each other across the alley.”
“Ain’t nobody here but me and Zulu.”
“My troops are all out workin’, too. What with all this talk I hear about us goin’ to war, thought it’d be a good time to sort some shit out.”
“What about you?” said Durham, looking at Foreman. “You always talkin’ about stayin’ neutral. Why you out here, Ulysses? Why you standin’ next to him?”
“Horace called me,” said Foreman. “Asked me if I’d mediate this discussion. Said y’all would need someone in the middle, someone who wasn’t gonna take no sides. It’s in my interest that the two of you work this out. So here I am.”
Durham and Walker stood on the back steps of the house on Atlantic, looking down at McKinley and Foreman, who stood in the weedy patch of yard. On McKinley’s ribbed wife-beater, high on his cowlike chest, was a wet purple stain. The butt of his gun rose from the waistband of his warm-up suit. He wasn’t trying to hide that he was strapped, and neither were Durham or Walker. Durham guessed that Foreman was wearing his iron, too. They all knew. But to mention it would be akin to admitting fear. And this was something none of them would ever do.
“We gonna stand out here all night?” said Foreman.
“C’mon in,” said Durham.
Durham and Walker gave them their backs and walked through the door, electing to lead rather than step aside to let the others pass. They were followed by McKinley and Foreman into a dark kitchen lit by a single votive candle and then a hall, where they found their way by touch against the plaster walls. Then they were all in a living room furnished with a card table and a couple of folding chairs. Candles had been set and lit on the floor, on the card table, and on the stairway. Drums and bass played softly from a beat box on the floor.
Durham and Walker stopped walking and turned. McKinley and Foreman also stopped and faced them, the card table between them. They stood with their legs spread and their feet planted. The big men filled the room. Candlelight danced in their faces and the flames from the candles threw huge shadows up on the walls.
“Go ahead and talk,” said Durham.
McKinley spread his hands, keeping them in the area of his gun. “We just need to slow down some, think before we let our pride go and start some kind of drama we can’t take back.”
“Keep talking.”
“Want you to know, straight away, that I didn’t tell the Coates cousins to fire down on your boys at the school that night.”
“They did it anyway.”
“Those ’Bamas was just wild like that,” said McKinley, searching out the corner of his eye for movement from Foreman. But Foreman was just standing with his shoulders squared, looking straight ahead.
“New gun?” said Durham, nodding at the grip of the automatic, tight against the folds of McKinley’s belly.
“Sig forty-five,” said McKinley.
Durham felt heat come to his face. “My brother, Mario, was shot dead tonight.”
McKinley nodded solemnly, thinking that it had happened about thirty years too late. Someone should have shot the motherfucker when he’d popped out his mama’s pussy, much good as he’d been to anybody his whole sorry-ass life.
“Too bad he died,” said McKinley.
“You wouldn’t know nothin’ about it, then.”
“I guess the po-lice caught up with him. Heard he had some trouble with a girl.”
“Nah,” said Durham, his lip trembling. “Wasn’t the police.”
“Who it was, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Prob’ly just some fat motherfucker with a forty-five.”
The four of them stood there, staring at one another, saying nothing, watching the light shift in the room.
“Well, Zulu,” said Durham, “I guess we done talked too much.”
Foreman reached and cross-drew his guns just as Durham and Walker went for theirs. They never touched their guns. They dropped their hands to their sides, knowing they had been bested, looking at their own deaths down the barrels of the .357 and the .9. McKinley pulled his Sig and held it on the men.
“You did talk too much,” said Foreman, snicking back the hammer of the revolver, disgust on his face. “Too got-damn much. For a minute there I thought you were gonna try and talk us to death. You had the draw on us, too. Motherfuckin’ kids out here p
layin’ gangster. Shit.”
McKinley laughed shortly. “Do it, big man.”
“Yeah,” said Foreman. “Okay.”
Foreman turned the LadySmith on McKinley and squeezed off two quick rounds. McKinley’s blood blew back at him and Foreman kept firing, moving the gun from McKinley’s belly to his chest, plaster exploding off the wall as the bullets exited his back. McKinley grunted, reached out for something, and lost his feet. As he fell, Foreman shot him in the groin and chest. Then the hammer fell on an empty chamber with an audible click.
Foreman still had the Colt trained on Durham and Walker. He holstered the revolver expertly, without looking for the leather, and faced them. Smoke was heavy in the candlelight. Foreman’s ears rung from the boom of the Magnum. He did not squint, looking at them, and he kept his voice even and direct.
“Hope you learned a lesson here tonight,” said Foreman. “I was a cop. Still am in my mind. You punk-ass motherfuckers out here, think you can threaten a police officer. You are wrong. Tellin’ me what’s good for my business. I don’t give a good fuck about him, or you, ’cause there’s always gonna be someone to come along and take y’all’s place. You who think you’re so special. Y’all ain’t shit. Think about that the next time you get the idea you’re gonna rise up.”
Durham said nothing. He had raised his hands in defense and they were shaking. He wanted to lower them, but he couldn’t move them in any direction at all.
“I hear sirens,” said Walker.
“Police gonna have to respond to this one,” said Foreman. “That gun does make some noise. Anyway, it’s your problem, not mine. I know you won’t mention I was here.”
“We’ll take care of it,” said Walker.
Foreman stood over McKinley and fired two shots from the Colt into his corpse. The force of the rounds lifted him up from the hardwood floor. Then the body settled in the mix of plaster and blood.
“That’s for talkin’ shit about my woman,” said Foreman, holstering the Colt.
He walked off, disappearing into the darkness of the hall. Durham lowered his hands, hearing the back door open and shut.