Burning Heat

by David Burnsworth

  D-Go said, “I’ll tell you. But white bread has to kneel first.”

  I tasted violence in my mouth.

  Brother Thomas got in D-Go’s face. “You tell me where she is and I’ll try to forget that parole violation you’re carrying around.”

  “You a rat now, Brother?” Raymond asked.

  “What I am is irritated,” Brother said. “I come here, show respect, and you spit in my face and insult my friend. You tell me what I am and what I’m going to turn into in about thirty seconds if’n I don’t get some answers around here.”

  D-Go racked the slide and aimed two inches from my face. The blood in my eyes boiled. Six armed hoods against Brother Thomas and me. This might have been one of those bad situations that ended in another short story on page five of the paper. One that read TWO MEN SHOT DEAD. NO WITNESSES.

  “You wanna shoot, D-Go?” Brother Thomas asked. “That make you feel like a man?”

  “I don’t like the way he lookin’ at me,” D-Go said. “All bad, like he got the yard stare.”

  “’Cause he been arrested before,” Brother Thomas said.

  “That true, white man?” D-Go lowered the gun, the muzzle aimed almost to my right. “You been inside?”

  “I been in the box,” I said.

  “How come you still walking around?” D-Go asked.

  “I got a good lawyer.”

  D-Go laughed and looked at his buddies. “Hear that? He got a good lawyer. Thinks he’s bad ’cause he been in the box. I been in the box too. Five-oh ain’t got nothing outta me.”

  I said, “My advice is get out while you still can. Otherwise get either a good lawyer or a butt plug.”

  A few snickers followed and D-Go’s eyes squinted. He raised the gun and pointed it in my face again.

  Something snapped inside of me. In one motion, I grabbed the gun with my left hand and popped D-Go in the nose with my right. Within a second I felt a muzzle against the back of my head. I held up D-Go’s gun, palm open, and it was taken from my hand.

  “It didn’t have to go down like this,” Brother Thomas said.

  D-Go squealed. “My nose, man!”

  I heard the hammer being cocked on the gun against my head and thought this might be it. Jo’s face flashed in front of my eyes, followed by Uncle Reggie’s. And then my dog’s and Darcy’s.

  “But here we are,” Raymond said. “What we gonna do now?”

  “I say shoot the cracker.” D-Go grabbed for his gun, which was in Raymond’s hand.

  Raymond said, “I got this.”

  “We’re leaving.” Brother Thomas grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the man holding the pistol on me.

  “Not if I don’t say you can,” Raymond said.

  Brother Thomas turned and faced him. “It was you disrespecting me. I say we leaving. You wanna shoot an unarmed man in the back, go ahead.”

  “You better watch out, whitey.”

  I didn’t have to turn around to know it was D-Go.

  We walked to my pickup and climbed into the front seats.

  As I started the truck and drove us out of there, my friend said, “You really gotta do something about that anger you carry, Brother Brack.”

  We passed a young black boy who looked to me to be a few years older than Aphisha. He held a cell phone to his ear with one hand. In his other was a leash incapable of controlling the pit bull it was connected to if the dog decided to act up. I thought about Shelby.

  “D-Go will wanna square things up,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I’m sure it won’t be man to man.”

  “No matter,” he said. “I don’t want you to give him a chance.”

  “Don’t tell me you think those kids are outstanding citizens.”

  “I know they ain’t, mm-hmm,” he said. “In fact, I got a girl in my congregation who got gang raped by D-Go and his friends but she won’t tell the po-lice ’cause she scared for her baby.”

  “Jesus.”

  Brother Thomas said, “That name got power. Be careful how you use it. Those kids think they tough. When they ain’t rapin’ innocent girls and shootin’ people, they hang out in a old garage behind D-Go’s grandmother’s house. She a good woman ain’t got a sense what her grandson doing. If she ever found out … Oh, Lord.”

  If Brother Thomas was trying to discourage me from finishing with D-Go, he had a funny way of showing it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  We pulled into the parking lot of the Church of Redemption and I turned off the ignition.

  “Well, here we are,” I said, “back where we started.”

  “Sometimes when you find yourself heading in the wrong direction, all you gotta do is go back to where you last knew where you was and try a different path.”

  He led me to the rear of the church and into a storage room full of file cabinets.

  I looked around. “Who are you, the J. Edgar Hoover of Charleston?”

  Brother Thomas gave me a serious look that made me think I’d offended him. Then his face broke into a smile. “Um, Brother Brack? Most black folk who know about the man wouldn’t appreciate being associated with him, mm-hmm.”

  “What’s all this, then?”

  “At the risk of proving you right, these here are everything I got on the people of my community. Where they come from and where they are now. For some, it’s where they were last seen. Them’s the sad ones.”

  “You got anything on Willa Mae?”

  “I do and already checked. Nothing recent.” He found the file with her name, pulled it from a drawer, and opened it. “See, I date the inside of the folders when I add something.”

  I saw three dates written on the folder, the most recent was four years ago. “What do you have on her?”

  “Well, let’s see,” he said. “I got a picture of her baptism, a letter I sent her, and a copy of her release from Juvenile Detention.”

  “How did you get that?”

  He looked at me. “Her mother was too drunk to pick up her daughter, so I got the privilege.” He reflected a moment, then said, “For Willa’s sixteenth birthday I gave her a locket I bought off a vendor in the Market. She still had it on the last time I’d seen her.”

  “You put up with a lot, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Brother Brack, it’s what the Lord put me here to do. I take care of the people in this community. They give what they can. We manage.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “We been managing a whole lot better since that anonymous donation we got.”

  “You keep talking about it.”

  “Well,” Brother Thomas said, “one of these days someone will tell me where it come from.”

  Around the time last year when my uncle’s murderer had been arrested the Church of Redemption received two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash, exactly the sum I’d found in a crab pot my uncle had stashed off the coast of one of the barrier islands. As his executor, the money as far as I could tell had been unreported income in his estate.

  “Anything else on Willa Mae?” I asked.

  “No.” He closed the file and put it back in the cabinet. “We’re not here for that, anyway.” He pulled a different drawer out and selected another file, flipping it open. “Here we go.”

  “Whattaya got?”

  “Mary Ellen’s latest address.”

  I looked at him. “Well why didn’t we go there first? I’d have rather not met Pain or D-Go.”

  “Because I got a thousand people to keep track of, Brother Brack, and I forgot she moved into her cousin’s house.”

  We left the church and walked two blocks. From the sidewalk in front of her cousin’s address, we heard moaning. Brother Thomas made a move like he was going to charge the door to the small house but I tugged at his arm.

  I put my index finger to my lips. “Shh.”

  The curtains to the front room were only partially drawn and the window was open. From where we stood, we could see a big white back moving up and down. Bed springs creaked.

&n
bsp; Brother Thomas shook his head, went to the door, and gave it a few good raps. “Mary? You in there, girl?”

  The creaking stopped.

  A man’s voice said, “She’s busy right now.”

  “And I’m her mother,” Brother Thomas said. “I count to three and then I’m calling the po-lice.”

  I went around to the back of the house, picking up a broken broom handle that had been tossed on the ground with other litter. After a few seconds, a half-dressed, fat, white guy, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead, came out the back door.

  I spun him face first into the side of the house and put the stick in his back. “Gotcha.”

  “I-I didn’t do anything.” The man shook and acted scared. “What-what’s this about?”

  “We saw it all,” I said. “The payoff. The saddle ride. All I know is the wife won’t be happy when she hears about this. No, sir.”

  “Let him go,” said Brother Thomas from the back door, his voice low but nevertheless booming.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  My friend nodded.

  I kicked the fat john in the rear end. “Git.”

  Behind Brother Thomas, Mary Ellen giggled as the man took off running. “That was funny.” The T-shirt she wore did a poor job of covering her breasts and bare thighs. Her eyes were dilated. “You boys wan’ a turn? Fifty dollars a piece.”

  Brother Thomas, still looking at me, said, “Get some clothes on, girl.”

  Mary Ellen frowned and went inside.

  “She won’t be much help the shape she’s in,” I said.

  “I’ll put her under a cold shower.” Brother Thomas pulled out his cell phone and hit speed dial. A few seconds later, he said “Trudy?” then asked her to bring another lady with her to Mary Ellen’s address.

  A bang came from the front of the house, like a door slamming. I sprinted around to the street and saw Mary Ellen, still in her T-shirt, duck around another house across the street. At the same moment, a Lexus with big chrome rims approached. D-Go hung out the back door aiming a submachine gun. I dove to the ground seconds before bullets flew, peppering the house. Something burned across my right shoulder. The bullets stopped. The V-8 engine roared as the Lexus sped away.

  A moment later Brother Thomas stood over me. “Brother Brack! You all right?”

  I rolled onto my back and sat up, putting pressure on my arm. Blood seeped through my fingers. I looked up at him. “Tops,” I said.

  Inside the Church of Redemption, I sat shirtless on a table and felt antiseptic burn into my shoulder. I couldn’t keep from uttering at least one “Ouch!”

  Sister Trudy cleaned my wound with a damp cloth. “Hol’ still. You men be such babies. Brother Thomas say to go easy on you. He say you kinda soft.” She was at least fifty and wore a brightly-colored dress over a very full figure. Her thick black hair was curled and pinned up.

  While she worked she hummed a gospel tune I knew from attending Brother Thomas’s church. My dirty T-shirt was wadded up in my hands and I gripped it tightly as she finished wiping my injury, using more pressure than necessary, in my opinion.

  “There you go, hon,” she said. “Good as new.” She touched my face with a latex-gloved hand. “You mus’ spend a lot of time outside. You get any darker you gonna have to check a different box.”

  Brother Thomas belted out a laugh from the doorway. “Sister Trudy sure clean up a cut good, don’t she?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Real swell.”

  “Glad you still with us,” he said. “The po-lice are here. Wanna ask you some questions, mm-hmm.”

  I hopped off the table and walked into the main hall of the church, draping my shirt over my good shoulder.

  The same two detectives that showed up when Willa Mae got shot stood amongst the chairs in the open room. Detective Warrez watched me with some interest. Her partner, Crawford, folded his arms across his chest.

  “Nice to see you guys,” I said. Nice to see her, I meant.

  Warrez asked, “Are you trying to live up to your reputation?”

  “I was only the victim of a drive-by,” I said.

  Detective Crawford asked, “You recognize who did the shooting?”

  Visions of a soon-to-be blown up Lexus danced in my head. “I was too busy ducking.”

  “So you didn’t see anything?” Warrez asked.

  “Not enough for you to make an arrest,” I said, avoiding outright lying to her.

  “Excuse me, detectives,” Brother Thomas said. “Could I steal Mr. Pelton away for a minute?”

  Warrez said, “We’re not going anywhere.”

  Brother Thomas waved me to him, curling his meaty index finger in a condescending fashion as if calling a child.

  A child is what I must’ve been because I followed him.

  “I know you know who done it,” he said. “I can read you like yesterday’s paper. Don’t be thinking about starting your own war with those kids. Let the po-lice handle it.”

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t wanna be called a rat, now.”

  Brother Thomas leaned in, putting his arm on my good shoulder. “We’re supposed to be looking for Willa Mae. Remember?”

  He was right, and I knew it.

  “How much you want me to say?”

  “Everything. What we were doing there. Who we were looking for.” He paused. “Everything except describing the john with Mary Ellen, that is. I don’t want you using that for evil.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but he held up his hand, then pointed to the outside room where the detectives waited.

  I spent the late afternoon at the gym working out with my personal trainer, the dispatcher Marlene’s husband. With my shoulder wound stinging from sweat, I spent the two-hour session reflecting on Willa Mae’s life. Drugs. The skin trade. The connection to Jon-Jon, Trevor, Mary Ellen and Kali.

  Detective Warrez and her partner had unconditionally instructed me and Brother Thomas to “stop any and all inquiries regarding Willa Mae outside of the police department.” If we didn’t, we’d be arrested.

  They’d also promised to roust D-Go and his gang.

  After the workout, I passed out in a lounge chair on the beach below my bar. Shelby slept on a towel under an umbrella. I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Friday, the night before Willa Mae got shot. The Rolling Stones tune on my cell woke me. With one eye open, I reached for the phone and looked at the caller I.D.

  “Hey, Brother Thomas,” I said, still half asleep.

  “Brother Brack? You okay? You don’t sound too good.”

  I coughed. “I was just napping.”

  “The police found Willa Mae,” he said. “She the one got burnt up in that barrel.”

  What he said caused me to sit up. “Then that story about it being a short Latino man was false.”

  His voice broke. “We ain’t gotta look for her no more.”

  “Does Darcy know yet?”

  “How should I know?” He sounded like he’d snapped.

  It was then I realized he had convinced himself she was still alive, if only to continue to have hope—which was now lost.

  “Sorry, Brother. You gonna be all right?”

  “She ain’t the first one from my flock gone to see the Lord. We plannin’ on havin’ the funeral tomorrow.”

  A lone pelican circled overhead and dove into the water.

  I said, “Wanna help me find who did it?” He’s got a date with the business end of a pistol, I thought but didn’t say.

  “I ain’t in the revenge business, Brother Brack.”

  “You’re into finding the truth, aren’t you?”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I thought so,” I said. “Listen, lemme make a few calls. Keep your phone charged and close.”

  I hung up before he could come up with a good reason to talk me out of anything. Willa Mae took the bullet for me and Aphisha. And for that she would be avenged.

  So I did what I always seemed to do in these situations—I call
ed Darcy.

  “I already know,” she said.

  “I figured you did. It now appears that we are investigating the same crime.”

  She didn’t reply and I wasn’t sure if it was excitement or dread. Probably the latter.

  I said, “The funeral’s tomorrow. I got to make a few arrangements in the morning. How about I pick you up at nine?”

  The next day, Friday, opened with an exceptionally burning heat, proving once again that man’s greatest invention was air-conditioning. Especially since the Church of Redemption didn’t have any. Attendees awaiting Willa Mae’s funeral service to begin fanned themselves with the preprinted announcements they’d received upon entering the sanctuary. Three heavyset, African-American women in black dresses and large veiled hats sang a scorching version of “Amazing Grace.”

  Darcy and I sat at the back of the church, she in a conservative black dress that ended just above her knees, and me in a new, charcoal, Italian two-button suit. My favorite news girl helped me pick out the tie.

  Willa Mae had stooped to extremely low places to flee the very people who were now the only mourners of her death. Aphisha and her grandmother, Mrs. Clara Jasper—whom I’d so far let down in my investigation of Willa’s death—had been escorted by Mutt, and all three sat in the front row. Mrs. Jasper held her head high in defiance of her deceased granddaughter’s shame.

  The clicking of heels on the cheap linoleum floor caused me and most of the congregation to turn toward the sound. A woman in her early twenties wore the black pumps echoing in the church. Her black, sleeveless dress stopped a few inches shorter than Darcy’s, exposing shapely legs in black hosiery. The whiteness of her face and arms glowed against the sea of brown and tan skin of most of the mourners. Shoulder-length, dark hair and eyes framed by black-rimmed sunglasses completed the package.

  Darcy whispered, “You can pick up your jaw off the floor now, Romeo.”

  I watched the newcomer take a seat behind Aphisha. “Who do you think she is?”

  “My guess is a colleague of Willa Mae.”

  By colleague, she meant fellow prostitute. That would be my guess, too. Still, it took a lot of stones to show up here amongst this crowd.

  Aphisha ran to the object of our interest, shouting, “Camilla!”