When I came to the last room on the left, the door knob wouldn’t turn. I kicked it in. Hustled inside, waving the gun around.
Two people on the bed, naked and trembling. Smelled like a used toilet and weed.
It was a movie set, ironic emphasis on both. There were cameras and tripods in here, and a few cables, cords, and those light-shielding umbrellas, but the pair on the bed had been engaged in extracurricular “acting.”
“Get the fuck downstairs,” I said.
They got up, started collecting clothes, but I shook my head. “Take the sheets,” I said.
She wrapped herself in one and he the other, and they half-crept out into the hallway, every few steps turning to see what I was up to. “Downstairs,” I said. “Hands up, or else you might end up in a ditch somewhere.”
I checked the other rooms again, just in case. Weapon out and at the ready in each one, but no people. Faint smell of something harsh. Chemicals. Hard drugs. Crack, maybe. Or meth.
When I came back down, Reg and Deuce had the whole crew against the wall.
There were eight, to my count.
It was a mess of tangled limbs. People acting tough. People openly weeping. Easy to tell who was for real and who had buckled like cheap furniture. But we had to separate them out, disentangle them, for our own safety.
“If you’re just here for the porno shoot,” I said, “Get the fuck against the wall.”
People jostled into position. A group against the wall. Bystanders, really. Crying and begging, most of them. The others just stone-faced.
Not their first rodeo.
Renia sat on the couch, hand resting in the lap of a woman I assumed to be her girlfriend. Not moving. Not reacting. Eyeing all three of us like we were contagious.
“Taj Gaines,” Deuce said, jamming his pistol into one dude’s forehead.
“What about him?” the guy asked. He was no actor.
“He’s dead,” Deuce replied. “Some Reapers killed him. I need a name.”
A smile from the boss lady. Gold teeth shining even in this dim room. “Man, shit. Not enough money in the world—”
Reg backhanded her.
She smiled. She spat blood. She said, “Oh, you’re that type of muh’fucka. I see how it is.”
“Did you kill Taj Gaines?” I asked.
Smiling. Bleeding. Blood turning her teeth a different color. “Man, I ain’t had nobody killed who ain’t crossed me. Period. Taj was small fries. Some little nigga, trying to get on the crew. But I don’t know who popped him.”
“Just give us the name of your supplier, then,” Deuce said. “Or whoever’s fronting these...productions. The next name on the chain.”
“Man, you could’ve found that shit out without kicking in my front door, you know,” said the top dog. Still smiling. Hands raised.
More screams. Reg taking his gun and jamming the barrel into lover boy’s face. “Shut her the fuck up,” he said. “Or I will.”
The man, dropping the sheet, pressed one hand against the girl’s mouth. She screamed and cried behind it. More breaking down and whimpering.
Renia smiled. “You look familiar,” she said. “You Taj brother, ain’t you?”
Deuce blinked.
“Yeah, that’s you,” she said. “I thought you was some kind of ballplayer. Now you trying to get dirty? What, that NFL money run out or something?”
The woman at one end kept gibbering. Her boyfriend pushed her to the ground, sat on her. Held one hand over her mouth. “Shut the fuck up!” he said. “They’re going to kill us!”
“Or money?” Deuce asked. “He take some money?”
“Man, Taj got into whatever he could get his hands on,” she said. “If there was some cash missing, it wouldn’t be a surprise to me. But he was one sneaky little motherfucker, so him getting caught was, like, an accumulation of events, know what I’m saying.”
“Okay,” Deuce said.
“You Reg, ain’t you?” Renia asked. “You used to run with—”
Reg hit her. “Shut the fuck up,” he said.
Renia spit blood again. She smiled, leaned over to the goon next to her, whispered something.
“The fuck’d you say?” Reg asked, pressing the gun into Renia’s temple.
“Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re setting your own self on fire, don’t you know?”
“What’d you say?” Reginald said, glancing from them to us. The girl on the ground screaming, sending spittle through her lover’s fingers. The core three, right in the middle, never moving. Not giving us the satisfaction of fear.
“She said you got your own hook-ups,” the guy next to Renia said. “You tell your partners you’re trying to get in the game, man? I bet they don’t know that—”
“Shut up,” Reg interrupted. “Both of you shut up. The rest of you give over your wallets and your cell phones.”
An actor on the corner of the couch said, “You gone have to take it from me, you thug life motherfucker.”
He was a pretty boy, but he must have thought this was a role. Maybe he’d been watching old gangster movies, but he wasn’t ready for what came next.
Reg didn’t hesitate. He smacked Pretty Boy Floyd in the mouth, and after the poor bastard spat out some teeth, he tossed his cell phone across the room. It smacked against the wall, but Reg picked it up, smiling.
“You won’t never figure out my passcode,” he added, dribbling blood onto the carpet.
Reg slid the first phone into his pocket. “Thank you, kindly.”
Deuce and Reg finished collecting cell phones and stuffing them into their pants.
Renia had one arm barred across her girlfriend’s chest. “You better hope my homies don’t figure out who you are,” she said. “They’ll skin you like goddamned catfish.”
“Nice to know,” Reg said, toying with the screen on one of the phones. “You want to help us out by telling us your phone’s passcode?”
“Fuck. You.” She was smiling.
“You do business with the Reapers?” Deuce asked.
“You want to step on a wasp nest?” she asked.
“They keep a shack out in the swamp, anything like that?”
Her eyes shifted. She looked us each in the eyes. “Now I really don’t have a clue what you’re telling me. But if y’all don’t mind, we’ve got some business to—”
A loud sound. A pistol ejecting a round. A body slumped. Deuce looking from me to Reg, Reg starting to tell us to get the fuck out. Other pistols coming out. This was no robbery, they were realizing.
The three of us darting behind a kitchen counter as the next rounds popped off. At least three weapons, maybe more. Screams from the unarmed and the terrified. Men and women asking God to help me now!
Standing up, I put three rounds where they had been sitting. A series of screams. Return fire. In the wake, for just a moment, the sound of a man gurgling. Bleeding. Punctured lung. Opened throat. Bleeding out.
Someone came running. I heard the footsteps, like fists pounding a table. He was coming up the hallway. Deuce pressed himself against the wall, waited.
Dude saw me, raised his gun. He’d slowed to a walk, but his aim was right on.
He fired. Pop pop. Should have taken my head off, but somehow he missed.
Deuce pivoted into the doorway, put two in the his chest. He went down, though not before firing off two more wild rounds.
Renia screamed. “Goddamnit!”
Deuce, Reginald, and I were trapped in the kitchen. The actors and drug addicts were wide open in the living room. The Gs had flipped over the couch and were hiding behind it. Renia and her boys ired blindly over the top at us. Bullets ricocheting off countertops.
The screaming woman from upstairs broke free of her partner and fled. Naked as a jaybird and running through crossfire. A stray caught her in the leg, and she went down but didn’t stop.
She’d seen our faces. She could pick us out of a line-up.
“Stop shooting, goddamnit!”
One of the actors screamed. “Let me the fuck out of here.”
One of Renia’s bodyguards stood up, and Deuce put one in his forehead. Blood spattered the wall, and he dropped limply over one side of the couch.
Another dude rose up and fired. Deuce screamed but didn’t fall. In the wake of the gunfire, I heard a distinct click. Deuce was out of rounds. The other guy got off a second shot.
He started reloading.
Dude by the couch loomed, started moving forward. Thinking we were out of rounds. I laid down on my stomach, crawled sideways. Saw one leg peeking out from beside the table. Fired three times in quick succession and saw him drop, screaming. Reg stood up and quietened him down.
Deuce leaned over, hands on knees. Sucked in two breaths. Spat on the ground like he might lose his lunch. Then he stood back up. A different man was in my best friend’s place.
The look was something alien. His eyes, steeled, were prepared for what came next, and I think Renia saw it, too.
It happened quickly. Renia fired, and Deuce fired, but it was difficult to tell which one did first. One round shattered a window, and shots erupted from all directions. It was a maelstrom of gunfire, and though I didn’t want to admit it to myself later, I balked. In that moment, I’d frozen up and closed my eyes, wishing to be free of the situation.
Deuce hadn’t, though. He’d stepped right into the middle of the tumult, this possessed friend of mine, and grabbed one of the dudes.
He dragged this person down the hallway, stepping over the guy he had gunned down not moments before. I followed in behind him, hearing the porn stars crying their eyes out by the house’s entrance. It wasn’t until we kicked in the bedroom door down the hall that I saw Deuce was actually carrying two people. Reg, moving half-willingly on his own, and bloody Renia.
“Out the window,” Deuce said.
One person remained up front, so the gunshots kept coming. Somehow, impossibly, it sounded more distant than not. Of course, my blood was a series of shotgun blasts in my ears, so I couldn’t actually hear anything, either.
Deuce raised a window and slipped through. He called for us to send Renia through to him. We slid her semi-limp body to him and then followed suit.
We dragged her until we were out of immediate danger. Somewhere off in the distance, police sirens blared, drawing ever closer.
Renia begged us to let her go. Deuce could only drag her so far.
Reg stepped in. “Bullshitting liar,” he said. “She knows Reaper business. Tell ‘em. Tell ‘em.”
His voice cracked. He swung at the air. This had turned out to be a bust.
Renia smiled. She wasn’t as soft as Reg had made her out to seem. “Maybe you got bad information. I don’t know how Taj got his ass killed.”
Reg was desperate. “But you did know him.”
“I knew him. He fucked like an injured dog, but he wasn’t bad people. Too soft for the business.”
“What business was that?” Deuce asked.
She shrugged. Her eyes looked like they weren’t in her face. Far away. Someplace else. “Your brother, he wasn’t ‘bout that life, and everybody knew it.”
“A name,” Deuce said.
“Fuck you, football boy,” she said.
Deuce’s hands slid around her neck and clamped down.
It happened before I could react.
I mean, I’d seen Deuce go blank-faced in the house. I knew that look. It was the Red-Eyed Stranger’s expression. It was a doll-eyed zombie stare, and it was an augur of something terrible.
But I hadn’t expected this.
Reg and I jumped in, but it did no good. Deuce continued strangling her, him dispassionately crushing her windpipe and her struggling for breath. Reg didn’t have any idea what we were up against, but I did. This wasn’t a man we were fighting with. It was the dark side of the afterlife.
“The fuck’s wrong with you, cuz?” Reg pleaded, and Deuce flicked him off like a half-filled backpack. Reg thunked his head on the nearby fence.
By the time we got him off of her, she was not breathing.
My stomach turned. I winced. I caught flashes from somewhere deep inside Deuce’s subconscious, and it was a bad scene.
Deuce was sweating through his clothes. Skin hot to the touch. Palms pressed to the sides of his head. He screamed. Mouth opened wide, the sound of something otherworldly escaping him.
It was a horrible sound. Like the old exorcism videos they used to show on the news.
I reached out, said, “Man, we have got to skedaddle. The cops are—”
A flash. An assortment of images, seemingly unrelated.
Dirt, piled in a heap next to the flickering crackle of a barely visible fire.
Water. Rain, mostly. Dappling the surface of a mossy, overgrown body of water.
Three shadows. Skeletons wearing hats and suits, dangling from ropes attached to bluish fingers, descending into the frame from a great height.
Deuce suspended from a cross of human parts: legs and arms and eviscerated torsos, all writhing in response to his screams. A house on fire. Children disappearing into thin air, then reappearing in puffs of blood and smoke.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, staring through confused eyes at two versions of Deuce. Two versions of everything. The world swayed one direction and then the other, blending and then separating into bizarre, disconnected collages.
“You’ve been hit,” Reginald was saying, dragging me to my feet. He was bleeding from the wound on his head, from where he’d smacked the fence.
“No,” I said, pretty sure I was unharmed.
We scrambled off into the surrounding yard, but Deuce didn’t follow.
“Deuce, come on, man,” Reg said.
He just stood there, staring down at Renia. She was out cold. She was bloodied. She looked dead. She wasn’t going to be producing any fuck flicks in the near future.
Finally, she coughed. She probably couldn’t protest her situation, but at least she was alive. Thank God. Even Deuce couldn’t be redeemed from killing a woman innocent of Taj’s murder.
Or was it Deuce at all?
He seemed to come to the same realization, because he brought his hands up and stared into them as if they could give him a glimpse into the future.
I ran back to where he stood, trying to prod him away from the scene.
“Deuce,” I said, grabbing his sleeve, “We’ve got to go.”
He turned, wide-eyed, and nodded. He didn’t seem to know what was going on, but he did as I asked.
Maybe we’d make it one more day.
We ran away. We avoided the wail of sirens. Deuce tucked his weapon into his pants. Reg and I did the same. We climbed fences. We fled through yards. We gave a good goddamn chase.
We got separated on a side alley littered with condoms and fast food bags.
I turned a corner and ran smack-dab into a cop. Not figuratively, either. I was jarred into the present moment by a knee slamming into my shin bone. Felt like it snapped in two.
“I know you,” he said. “I fucking know you. I’ve seen your face before.”
Before he could make the final connection, I slugged him. Took him down with a crack of my pistol, which I’d snatched free of my belt.
He attempted to get up, face masked by rivulets of blood, but I wouldn’t allow him. I hit him again, a blow that felt, on my end, like it had knocked his head out of shape.
I hit him. And I hit him. And then when he moved, moaning, I hit him again. Tried to knock my face out of his memory. It was the sound of nearby footsteps that separated me from the clobbering I was giving him.
Approaching. Approaching. But not here yet.
And the son-of-a-bitching cop wasn’t out. He was struggling to stay awake.
His head tilted up, his eye socket opened up and crushed, the eye sunken into the cheek, he looked pleadingly at me.
When he spoke, his words made zero sense.
“Eyefontef,” he said, repeating it over and ov
er again as though somehow it would reveal the true meaning.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it. I was driven entirely by desperation at this point.
The cop grabbed my pants cuff. I snatched free and ran away, feeling a very particular queasiness in my guts. The cop’s face would stick with me, I thought, for a good, long time.
By a miracle of some kind, I happened to see Reg and Deuce dart beyond a street lamp down the way. I followed them until it wasn’t dangerous for me to whistle.
Deuce turned and waved once, and I kept pace but did not speed up, make any sudden movements. Sirens blared all around us, but I felt protected by some force beyond my control.
We ditched Reginald’s car and spent the next half hour darting through backyards as Reg called random people he knew, looking for a ride. Most of them denied us, citing the hot situation regarding the neighborhood. Reg got increasingly desperate. Manhunts end when somebody is caught, not necessarily the right person.
Eventually, though, a dude with less sense than balls agreed to pick us up. We waited for him in some bushes off the main street we had come in on.
At some point, Deuce floated back down to Earth. His expression changed, and he looked tormented over what he had just done.
“It wasn’t supposed to go that way,” Deuce said.
“No it fucking wasn’t,” Reg said. He refused to look in his cousin’s direction.
“I’m sorry,” Deuce said, his voice thin and reedy. “
“What the fuck happened to you, cuz? You lose your mind?”
“I—I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t know, either,” Reg said, “but I can’t be running around with you, if that’s the way you act in these situations.”
“Reg, cool it,” I said.
He glared at me, then turned his attention back to Deuce. “I don’t know if you took one too many hits to the skull, but you can’t be choking women out like that.”
“You hit her,” I said.
“But that was in the heat of moment,” he replied. “Deuce, what you did—that was cold-blooded, man. I can’t be down with that. Y’all are going to get me killed.”
The friend showed up then. We ducked into the car and sped away, silent for the majority of the trip back to the neighborhood.
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