by Gant, Gene
All that was for the awesomely horrible offense of waiting-on-curb-for-bus-while-poor. I figured that if the cop sitting in his cruiser behind McDonald’s this night suspected me of walking-down-street-on-sugar-buzz-while-poor, my butt would get nuked. Shaking, I focused my eyes on the sidewalk, straightened my back, and practically goose-stepped down the street. The slightest stumble, I was sure, would bring that fat-faced cop down on me like some colossal burning boulder hawked up from the depths of an angry volcano.
I made it past the old, shuttered building that had once housed a department store, and that placed me out of the cop’s line of sight. I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the night sky. Then, paranoid, I glanced back, convinced the cop was going to pull out and come after me, tires screeching. But no, his cruiser remained out of sight. Head turned, sighing in relief, I again thanked Jesus that I was safe.
That’s when the hand slipped around my neck. It jerked me upward, lifting me onto the tips of my toes as powerful fingers dug painfully into my flesh. I had been so afraid the cop would follow me that I had completely missed the dark figure coming toward me head on.
A strangled cry slipped out before a voice growled in my ear, “Scream and I’ll cut your throat right here.”
This guy was big and smelled of an expensive, musky cologne. He made sure I faced away from him; I couldn’t even see what he wore. His other hand gripped the back of my jeans. He hauled me off the sidewalk, my feet scraping along the ground. We moved into the wide, grassy swath separating the shopping center from the abandoned warehouse that sat across Belz opposite the Wyndham Apartments.
Some instinct told me this was not going to end well.
7
I WAS choking more from fear than from the fingers around my neck. The guy dragged me into the shadows behind the warehouse, and with each step some terrified voice in my head screamed at me to break and run. Yeah, right. The dude carrying me was at least twice my size. Although I only weighed a hundred and ten pounds, that isn’t an insignificant weight when carried over a distance. This man was hustling me along at a fast, steady pace, and he wasn’t even breathing hard.
A car was parked in the warehouse’s loading bay off to the left. The paved driveway leading to the bay was riddled with cracks, through which knee-high grasses sprouted in dry, wild patches. Seated on the car’s hood was the silhouetted figure of a man. As Hercules hauled me into the bay, the man slid off the car and stood with his legs slightly apart.
The only illumination here was the moonlight, and that was partially blocked by the angle of the warehouse jutting skyward. Still, I could see that the man was Hispanic. His hair was plaited into neat cornrows running from his forehead to the back of his neck, where they curled about the collar of his shirt like arthritic fingers. His goatee was twisted into a single braid dangling two inches below his chin. He was dressed in black, his shirt open to reveal a flabby chest and a paunch.
Keeping a tight grip on my neck, Hercules planted me in front of this man. Now I was close enough to see his bright, cruel eyes.
“This him?” Cold Eyes asked.
At first, I thought he was talking to Hercules. There was sudden, violent movement in the shadows behind Cold Eyes’ car, and Larry Neal stumbled into view, followed by a second hulk who must have been Hercules’ twin. Larry went down hard on his knees. His left eye was swollen shut, and his lips were split, blood drying on his chin and around his nostrils. He kept his good eye turned away from me.
“Yeah, that’s him,” he said softly.
Cold Eyes folded his arms behind his back, staring at me with both curiosity and scorn. “Where’s my stuff?” he asked.
My heart, thudding in my ears, drowned out the man’s voice. I read his lips well enough, however, and my mind went into spasms trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
“What? What stuff, man? I don’t have anything. I swear.”
Cold Eyes didn’t buy it. He reached out, sliding his hand into my right pocket. The hand came back with three dimes and six pennies that he contemptuously threw at Larry. Larry turned, yelping as the coins bounced off his back. I tried to inch away and got a slap in the head from Hercules.
Cold Eyes stuck his hand into my left pocket. His gaze hardened. He withdrew his hand and dangled in my face the object he’d found.
It was a small plastic pouch, filled with a quantity of pebble-like white crystals. The panic in my head didn’t allow me to even think about what those crystals were and how they were connected to me. Instead, it kept sending impulses to make myself small, to hide, to run.
“Son of a bitch. You two little punks stole from me.” There was a note of amazement in Cold Eyes’ voice, as if he couldn’t believe someone would be so stupid. I never saw his fist, which swept across my face in a flash and split my lips. The blow would have knocked me to the ground if Hercules had not been so helpful as to hold me upright.
Larry screamed, a loud, thin, hopeless wail, as he scuttled like a spider in his sudden desperation to get away. The thug standing over him moved between us. The thug’s right arm sort of jerked, and Larry’s scream ended in an abrupt, strangled grunt. Larry collapsed like a broken table, sprawling facedown.
My panic went to a whole new level, and I tried to scream, but only a little gasp came out of my throat. Hercules turned me away from Larry. I caught a glimpse of a bearded face, its expression detached and businesslike. Metal gleamed on a massive dark fist, a big class ring with some kind of round gem. There was a jolt, a white flash, and another, more jarring blow that rippled throughout my body. When my eyes snapped open, I realized I had fallen, the concrete floor of the loading bay warm beneath my back. I didn’t know how I had come to be there. Something heavy, slick, and hot covered my mouth. I could feel it sliding down my throat in thick, salty gulps. A hand thumped into my chest, gathered together a wad of jersey, and pulled me up. A fist drew back, splotched with red in the moonlight.
I threw up my hands. “Man, please! Don’t…!”
He hit me again. I was knocked back into that star-spangled half consciousness where I heard, rather than felt, the blows that followed. A whimper bubbled out of me. I hated being small. Somebody was always making fun of me, hitting me… hitting me.
I thought of the cop parked a block away. Why didn’t he have his butt here, shooting real thugs instead of harassing innocent people? God, why does this moose keep hitting me? What did I do? Mama!
Mama was singing to me. She had a beautiful voice. The song was supple and warm, pouring over me like honey. She always sang to me when I was sick, cradling me in her lap, wrapped in her soft, slender arms. Her voice lifted me now, and I was gone.
8
THE SUN was uncomfortably warm. The droning noise was damned annoying, and I hated the powerful odor that clogged my nostrils. The discomfort made me open my eyes.
From the angle of the sunlight, I could tell it was early afternoon. Along with the drone and the smell, a multitude of other sensations came to me. Voices filled my head, crying out in passion, singing in praise, laughing in joy, lashing out in anger, quivering with fear, sobbing with grief, reverently chanting, whispering, pleading, and chatting amiably in a number of languages.
There was more. Children of every creed and color ran, jumped, fought, fidgeted, injured themselves, wept, slept, and dreamed. Billions of people were shopping, cooking, driving, loving, daydreaming, reading, and dying. Crimes were taking place, robberies, murders, assaults, beatings, and extortions by the millions. I could see each event through the eyes of both the victims and the perpetrators.
My consciousness took in all this and more. It was expanding by the moment, for it suddenly included the chemical communication occurring among the mass of flies gorging, mating, creeping, laying eggs, and flying about immediately to my right. Their moving wings created the droning sound, and I knew at once every detail of each insect’s existence without so much as a glance in their direction.
Still more infor
mation poured into my head: voices, thoughts, electronic transmissions, feelings, sensations. There were billions upon billions of them. My brain, unable to process it all, began to register the input as one long, throbbing hum.
“Wait, it’s too much…,” I said aloud. “I don’t need all this… info.” The hum stopped before I even finished the sentence, leaving me with just my own thoughts.
I sat up. The loading bay was very wide, constructed of concrete that still shone white while the huge metal doors set above the dock were coated with powdery rust. The grassy, trash-strewn path that had brought me here curved sharply, blocking any view of the bay from Belz Avenue. The bay’s driveway, leading off in the opposite direction, also bore a sharp curve. Maneuvering big trucks along that sucker must have been fun. I could hear traffic rumbling through the surrounding streets, but this place felt completely isolated.
The flies’ meal was the source of the sharp odor filling the air. I was ready for a better look at what they were eating. “Let me see,” I said aloud. The flies obligingly rose in a black, whining cloud and scattered in every direction. I got to my feet and stared at the two corpses sprawled on the ground.
The body lying against the wall of the dock had belonged to Lawrence Neal. Scenes from his life began to flicker through my head. He had started at age fourteen as a runner for Cold Eyes, delivering packets of drugs to some of the man’s more discreet clientele and collecting payment from them. Larry’s father had gotten sick by that time, suffering kidney failure, and his family struggled financially on just his mother’s salary. The money Larry earned helped keep the family afloat. He told his mother he was working part time as a bag boy at the local supermarket. Distracted by her husband’s illness, Mrs. Neal didn’t become suspicious of Larry’s activities until it was too late to save him.
Three months into his illegal career, Larry let one of his customers talk him into taking a hit from a crack pipe. His life went quickly downhill from there. He began using his earnings to buy drugs for himself. Since he no longer had any money to give his mom, he told her he had been laid off from his job. His addiction grew beyond what he could earn as a runner, and one day he helped himself to the stash he was supposed to deliver to a customer.
Of course, this meant that Larry did not collect any payment for the drugs. He told Cold Eyes the customer had snatched the drugs and run without paying, thinking that Cold Eyes would go after the customer. Cold Eyes broke Larry’s nose and told him that if the money didn’t appear within twenty-four hours, the next thing broken would be Larry’s neck. Larry took the television from his family’s living room and his mother’s gold wedding band and hocked them at a pawnshop. He took the money to Cold Eyes, who said that he couldn’t have crackheads working for him and cut Larry out of his operation.
Over the next three weeks, Larry stole from his family and from his neighbors to support his addiction. With their parents’ consent, Larry’s brothers threw him out of the house. Living on the streets, Larry stole and did even more shameful things to get the drugs his body screamed for. In a particularly desperate moment, Larry got close enough to lift drugs from one of Cold Eyes’ new runners. The boy caught Larry in the act, and to keep his own body intact, alerted Cold Eyes.
Panicked, Larry ran. His addled mind told him to hide the drugs. That way, when Cold Eyes inevitably caught up to him, he would not find the drugs and would let Larry go. Then Larry would retrieve the drugs and everything would be wonderful. The first part of his plan came off without a hitch; he hid the drugs in my pocket. What he had not counted on were the persuasive techniques of Cold Eyes’ goons. By the time those thugs finished with him, Larry was confessing events that never happened. One of those crazy stories was that he had given the drugs to me because I told him to take them for me.
I didn’t like the hot flush of hatred that swelled in me from reviewing these memories. I looked away from Larry’s broken remains, and my eyes drifted across the loading bay floor.
The body lying closest to me was… me. I bent down for a closer look. The body was undoubtedly mine. I’ll skip on describing the condition of the corpses, other than to say that it wasn’t pretty. I felt no distress. Clearly, I was separate from that body. And I wasn’t some ghost. I was in another body, one that was whole, alive, and unhurt. I could feel the hot breeze on my new skin. I didn’t have to wonder how this peculiar dichotomy had come to be; the knowledge was already in my head. For now, however, my only concern was the two corpses.
My detachment over my own death gave way to a moment of pity for Larry. No one would grieve for him. His father was still battling kidney disease, and his mother had focused all her energies on her husband’s care. Both of them had written Larry off after several unsuccessful attempts to get him into rehab. His two brothers hated him for the pain he brought to the family and the danger he put them in. They would regret his passing, but they’d all think his grisly death was no more than he’d earned.
The smell of death would soon attract human attention, and I didn’t want anyone to see us like this. I closed my eyes. When I opened them a moment later, the bodies and their choking aroma were gone, leaving no sign they had ever been there.
I felt a momentary relief, but my emotions quickly shot up the scale to fury as I recalled the three men who had committed our murders. My fear and hatred of rogue cops aside, I’d always been a believer in justice. Anyone who violated the standards of fairness, of right and wrong, was contemptible in my eyes. Crime was an outrage to me: gangbangers blasting each other with combat weapons over their stupid posturing and territoriality, coldly indifferent to the fact that they often killed innocent bystanders in the process; thieves throwing old ladies to the ground and snatching their purses; burglars breaking into homes and grabbing what they wanted. Then there were the politicians who took their personal prejudices and turned them into law, denying gays the rights and protections extended to heterosexuals, gutting government programs designed to help the underprivileged. There seemed to be no end to the number of people who didn’t give a damn about the pain they caused other people.
Whether myself the victim of such transgressions or simply learning of another poor soul’s misfortune, I tended to indulge in revenge fantasies that could get pretty elaborate. As I stood now in that loading bay, my new, expanded awareness opened again. This time, it narrowed itself down until it centered on the thoughts of the three men who’d killed Larry and me. My anger grew, and wicked little ideas began to play in my head.
9
OWEN CUMMINGS was a huge man. Twenty-eight years old, he stood six feet, four inches tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, most of it well-honed muscle. He had a trimmed beard and soft, generous eyes. As you might have guessed, he provided security for a big-time drug lord. He was like me in a lot of ways. He was a loner. He didn’t have many friends, and the only family he had left was his father. His old man was an Alzheimer’s patient in a Fayette County nursing home.
At the moment, Owen was walking down the main hall of that nursing home, a plastic shopping bag clutched in one beefy hand. He smiled politely at everyone he passed. God, how well he wore his hats. Methodic killer on Friday night, dutiful son on Sunday afternoon.
He opened the door at the end of the hall and walked into a small room where the scent of pine cleaner was strong enough to make his eyes water. What made his tears shine even brighter was the sight of his father, a bony, shrunken man dressed in a pea-green hospital gown and strapped to the narrow hospital bed. The little man’s eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. His gaze didn’t shift even when Owen walked up to him.
Owen smiled, a little sadly, looking down as he towered over the bed. “Hey, Dad.” There was no reaction from the old man in the bed, and Owen hadn’t expected any. He opened the shopping bag and pulled out a New York Mets cap. He pulled the cap down firmly over his father’s head. “Gotcha a new one,” he said quietly, tilting the cap at an angle the way his dad liked. His father didn’t move
.
Owen turned and grabbed the remote control from the table next to the bed. He used it to switch on the television that sat on the shelf across from them. “Let’s see if the Mets are playing today.”
He pressed the channel button on the remote. He never saw the channel change. His body dissolved into a beam of energy, in a manner that was a lot like the transporter effect from Star Trek. The energy beam rose through the ceiling of the room and was gone. Owen’s father, his eyes still staring at nothing, gave a little groan. For a moment I worried he was dismayed that his son had vanished. Then he burped, and I felt better knowing it was just gas.
COLD EYES, the drug lord, was legally known as Tyree Jacks. He lived in a huge redbrick house with white shutters among the well-to-do in a ritzy suburb called Germantown. He was sitting at his kitchen table Sunday afternoon, playing a game of Uno with his six-year-old daughter. His hair was still in cornrows, but he had combed out his goatee, which now hung from his chin like a whisk broom.
A small television resting atop the refrigerator was broadcasting the Chicago Cubs/Houston Astros game that was in progress at Wrigley Field. Tyree dared not turn his eyes to the ballgame.
Every time he did so, the little girl snapped, “Daddy, pay attention.”
His wife, Emilia, was peeling carrots at the sink for the pot roast she was preparing. The front of her blouse was dusty with powdered sugar from making cake frosting. Tyree was already involved in the drug trade when he met her. He told her he was an independent distributor, which was certainly not a lie, and Emilia never questioned him about his business. He seemed content in his chosen profession, he made lots of money, and she didn’t have to work, so why should she care that he never mentioned such niggling details as the nature of the products he distributed or the parties he distributed them to? Besides, the fact that he kept this information to himself told her everything she needed to know. Tyree was scrupulous in making sure that nothing about his enterprise could be connected to his wife and child.