by Sheena Kamal
“What dog?” Brazuca asks, but Parnell isn’t listening.
“—and I was the one who took it upon myself to find out where she went when she skipped town. That wasn’t part of the deal. Plus, I’m doing them another favor. I didn’t have to call those guys in Detroit to take care of her. They—I offered up an option, on account of our close relationship, and y’all said that’s what you wanted. Her gone for good. These things take time, you know.”
“We did want her gone, but someone’s got to be held accountable for the delay.” And maybe he’s not thinking clearly because, before he can stop himself, he repeats, “What dog?”
This time Parnell hears him. There’s a moment of confusion, then he turns hostile. “What do you mean, what dog? The dog that’s in the pictures we keep sending.” He narrows his bloodshot eyes. Takes a closer look at Brazuca. “What did you say your name was? Oh, wait. You didn’t.” He puts the cleaver down and pulls his phone out of his back pocket—the same phone that Brazuca picked up from the driveway. Parnell grabs Brazuca by the hair once more, yanking his head back, and takes a photo of his face with the camera on his phone.
When he releases Brazuca’s head, he makes sure to slam it on the ground. Lights explode in Brazuca’s brain and he lies there gasping. Parnell disappears up the stairs, taking all the weapons with him, even the cleaver, and switching off the lights. The lock turns on a door upstairs.
It takes several long, sweaty minutes for Brazuca to thread his aching legs through his bound arms so that his hands are now in front of him. He just manages to pull himself into a seated position when the door opens again. The light switches on. There’s a moment of blindness, then his vision adjusts.
“Jesus,” says Stevie Warsame, as he comes down the stairs. “You alone down here, Bazooka?”
“Yeah,” Brazuca says, falling back against the wall. “Where’s Parnell?”
“Took off in his truck.” Warsame cuts through Brazuca’s bonds with a penknife attached to his keychain. “Those two assholes I was following were headed for the U.S. border, so I turned back. Good thing I did, too.”
Brazuca nods, shakes the kinks out of his limbs.
Warsame glances toward the stairs. “We better go.”
“He won’t be back anytime soon.” If the photo Parnell had taken of Brazuca’s face could have been sent via the phone, he wouldn’t have left. Which means that he had to go somewhere physically to get in touch with his Three Phoenix contacts. “Got a storage compartment full of weapons down here,” he says, rising to his feet. He owes Lee a tip and can’t, in good conscience, let a stash of weapons like this go unreported. It isn’t strictly homicide related, but it’s the best he’s got.
It’s only much later that Brazuca takes a ride from Warsame from the police station, where they’d given their statements, back to his MINI. Curtis Parnell is officially in the wind, with a photo of Brazuca on his phone, but Brazuca pushes it from his thoughts. He has another worry on his mind.
Warsame glances over at him. “What?”
“How the hell did you find me, anyway?”
“Needed some info for my invoice, so I tried to call. You weren’t answering.” Warsame shrugs. “Tracked you through the camera. It put you in the house, and I figured you were in trouble when I saw Parnell leave in his truck.”
Brazuca reaches into his jacket and pulls out the small Canon that he’d borrowed from Warsame. The lens is smashed beyond repair, but on the underside of it is a dark, almost unnoticeable sticker just beginning to peel off at the edges.
A sticker apparently monitored by Warsame’s phone. “You track your spare camera?”
Warsame shrugs. “I don’t lend my shit out without some assurances.”
Feeling a migraine coming on, Brazuca reaches over to turn off the radio. His head can’t take Warsame’s house music right now. He’d refused to go to the hospital, because why waste time? It would be a miracle if he doesn’t have a concussion. Apparently Warsame thinks the same thing because when they reach Brazuca’s MINI he insists on following Brazuca back home.
“I’m not going home,” Brazuca says, as he gets out of the car. Down the street, the Parnell house is still blocked off by police. A group of neighbors gather around the police cordon, trying to get a glimpse inside. According to the cops at the station, they’d found a veritable arsenal of guns stashed in the basement, along with bricks of heroin and cocaine, which may or may not be cut with fentanyl and Wild 10. “I’ll take it from here. Thanks for the ride.” He fishes for his spare key from the magnetic case under the muffler, trying to ignore that Warsame has followed him.
Warsame shakes his head at the muffler key, but Brazuca has his reasons. Last year he’d been stranded at a remote gas station when a woman had thrown his keys into the bushes. He never wanted to experience that level of panic again.
“Amateur,” Warsame says. He leans against the driver’s door and stares hard at Brazuca. His famous smile is gone now. “You’re being reckless, dude. That ain’t like you. You won’t let me drive you to the hospital or even back home. There’s something you’re not telling me. I’m all about the war on drugs and shit, but I’m not your sidekick. I didn’t save your ass just to keep on doing it because you’re on some mission. You hear? You need to tell me what’s going on. Right the fuck now.”
In another universe, one where his leg wasn’t shot to hell, his head wasn’t pounding like someone had taken a drill to it, and a great urgency hadn’t taken hold of him, maybe he could have moved Warsame out of the way. But they are in this universe, and Brazuca can’t remember the last time he ate anything or where his real keys are. He just doesn’t have the strength to keep quiet anymore. A cold fear has been building inside him parallel to his headache, each feeding and giving life to the other. And there’s the knowledge that the woman who left him stranded without car keys is once again at the center of his problems.
It’s like karma walked up, kicked him in the nuts, and then stole his lunch money.
He tells Warsame about the conversation he had with Parnell, who confirmed the Three Phoenix link. The triad had gone quiet in Vancouver after the disappearance of their head honcho Jimmy Fang but, the last time Brazuca checked, still had a presence in China where, according to Grace’s research, there was easy access to those underground chemical labs that produce synthetic opiates like fentanyl and Wild 10.
But that’s not exactly what’s on his mind.
“Nora’s got a dog, Stevie. And she was taking care of Crow, who’s sick. Until she left town a little while ago.” He rubs his head, tries to remember the date she left but can’t seem to pin it down.
“Where did she go?”
“She never said.”
Warsame goes silent for a moment as it hits him. “You don’t think Parnell was talking about her?”
Brazuca doesn’t say anything. The biker had said he knew some rough people in Detroit. That the woman was in danger. A woman with a dog, who was taking care of a sick man.
He pulls out his phone and dials a number.
He’s not surprised when Nora doesn’t answer.
31
There is a sound coming from the front of the house. I close the fridge door and am about to duck back into the basement when I realize what exactly is bothering me about the soft creak of a floorboard underneath a foot. The smell of patchouli has dissipated, so I know it’s not one of the hippies. And the activists are so loud that I can’t imagine them being stealthy in any situation . . .
Stealth, that’s what it is.
I move to the back door, but before I get there, I hear Nate on the stairs, coming up from the basement.
It’s too late now to run, or to warn him.
I grab the largest knife from the holder on the counter and am moving toward the basement door when Nate steps into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
A muffled shot rings out. Nate falls to the floor. Not in slow motion, not like in the movies. There is a muted b
ang and he crumples immediately. Standing behind him is a figure clad in black, hood up over his head. He is the same height as the man in my motel room, but this time I can see his face. His broken nose is taped over and his eyes are on me. He raises the gun again. In the split second I have to think, I upend the kitchen table. It falls to the floor with a loud crash. Another shot splinters the wood behind me, but I’m already out the door.
It is still dark outside, the morning light has yet to filter in. There are so many boarded-up buildings on this street to hide in, but I duck behind a pile of rubble instead. From there I dial 911 on my phone, give Nate’s address in a hushed whisper, and say a man has been shot. Come now.
Then I wait until I hear the footsteps careen past me, pause at the end of the street, and continue on.
When I get back to the house, Kev is sitting on the floor with his brother’s head on his lap. I can’t tell if Nate is alive. Tears stream down Kev’s face. Ash is on the phone with emergency services. She’s shouting that they need to hurry, none of this bullshit about neighborhood response times. Then she names a soul goddess of the city, one of the many famous singers to come out of Detroit. Do they want to be responsible for her nephew dying?
There’s so much blood.
I’m suddenly a child again, walking into a room where unspeakable brutality has been done to a man I know. A kind of sickness overtakes me. One with which I am well familiar. I need my support group, but they wouldn’t understand this. I long for Whisper, but she is someone else’s guardian angel now. I want someone to give me something to do, but everyone in the room is busy watching a human tragedy unfold. Kev hasn’t bothered to wipe his tears away. Nate doesn’t seem to be breathing.
Nobody notices me.
I walk out as quickly as I entered and wait out front for the first responders to show up. I wonder how much violence a person can reasonably handle before she goes mad, if she hasn’t already.
My fingers are curled around a knife, but I can’t remember how I came to be holding it. Am I in shock? I must be. Because I can swear that, once again, someone is trying to kill me.
Part Four
32
“Nora lives with Crow now,” Brazuca had explained to Warsame on the way to the town house. “She left her dog there. It would be the first place she’d come back to. She loves that damn dog too much to stay away.”
When they get to the town house, they find Whisper howling up a racket and an ambulance idling outside. Brazuca leaves the car running. Sprints over to the ambulance. “Hey,” he says to the young paramedic who’s just about to close the van door. “Who’s in there?” He tries to get a look inside but the medic shuts the door firmly.
“Sorry, sir, are you the neighbor who called?”
“No, I’m a friend of that household, though. Is it a woman in there, Nora Watts?”
The paramedic shakes his head. “It’s a man. Medication in the house tells us that he was being treated for cancer.”
“Was?”
“Sorry, is, but he’s in bad shape. Excuse me, but we’ve got to get going. If you’re a friend, can you do something about that dog? Her noise is what got us called over here in the first place.”
Brazuca watches as the ambulance pulls away, lights flashing. Warsame makes his way over from a parking spot about a half a block down. “Nora?” he says, nodding to the departing ambulance.
“Crow.”
“Holy shit,” says Warsame, who had known Sebastian Crow since he and Leo got together. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Cancer,” Brazuca says. He glances over at Warsame. “Paramedic said it looked bad. Somebody’s gotta tell Leo.”
Warsame shakes his head and backs away. “Nope. Uh-uh.” They are both well aware that Leo hadn’t taken the breakup well. Neither of them wants to be the one to share this news with him.
“I gotta deal with this Nora thing. You get Leo to the hospital and I’ll take the dog.”
“You see why I don’t answer the phone when you call?”
“You don’t answer the phone when anyone calls.”
“Because of this kind of shit!” Warsame says, stalking to his car.
After he leaves, Brazuca goes into the house through the unlocked back door and finds the list of important numbers Nora had stuck to the fridge. Being Nora, she’d also left addresses, physical descriptions, and emails for each of the emergency contacts. She didn’t leave an address for where she was going, though, and that’s also classic Nora. Brazuca slips the list into his back pocket. Whisper trots up to him and sits at his feet, staring at him expectantly.
“What?”
She whines.
“We’ll go to the hospital, okay?” he tells her. “We just gotta see about Nora first.”
At the sound of Nora’s name, Whisper rises and goes to the door, ready to leave.
33
Before Brazuca last year, I’d been celibate for over a decade. I avoid intercourse like the plague or, at the very least, some nasty venereal disease. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why and, besides the obvious events of my past, which I refuse to name, it’s simple. Sex represents an end for me. It is never a beginning. It’s a wave good-bye, with a fuck-you-very-much thrown in for good measure. It’s a breakup song on repeat.
But it has never been a breakup song like this.
As I sit outside Nate’s hospital room, I can’t help feeling that this has surpassed your average heartbreak jam and has become some country music shit, straight out of a Western. Where the cowboy comes back to his girl, and spends the night, and is ready to settle into a life of raising cattle (or whatever the hell it is that cowboys do). But in the morning his worst enemy rolls into town, guns blazing, and shoots his girl down. Except that this time, it isn’t some anonymous girl who has been waiting with her arms open. It’s a man named Nathaniel Marlowe. An artist with a voice like Sam Cooke. Who can play the guitar like Buddy Guy. Someone who moves people and is moved by them. Someone with a future, who could have name-dropped at any point that he was related to a soul music deity, but chose to make his own way in life. In his basement studio, he took me to church. I sang again, in a way that I haven’t done in as long as I can remember. Without inhibition.
With my heart open.
I want to go into the room to see him, but I can’t seem to make myself cross the threshold.
What I’m feeling right now is I’m nobody’s idea of a cowboy.
I’m not sure what is happening, only that my worst enemy hasn’t come to my town with his ammo in tow. I have inexplicably come to his. And I don’t even know who he is. The desire to leave this godforsaken city becomes an itch, just underneath the membrane of my skin. Just out of reach. But I can’t go yet because there’s something here that I’m not seeing. There is also revenge to be sorted out, if I’m being honest.
There are two hippies waiting with me outside the room, discussing in low tones what will happen to their rally now that the entertainment is out of commission. They have to be quiet because Nate’s brother is on the warpath. All talk ceases as Kev steps outside Nate’s room and looks at me. “You were there when it happened?”
I stand up, peer past him into the room where Nate lies, still and sedated. He’s just had a thoracotomy. The bullet missed his heart, but hit his lung, hit an artery. He almost bled out on his way to the hospital. He is still in critical condition, the blood loss keeping him unconscious. “I was in the kitchen, heard a noise, but Nate came up before I could do anything about it. I saw him go down and saw the man with the gun behind him. He pointed it at me, so I ran. Hid down the block and called 911. You know the rest.” In a hushed whisper on the way to the hospital, I’d already told Ash about the man with the tattoo, the broken nose. I left out that I’m quite clearly the target because it’s just not something I can put in words to anyone else.
Kev sits on a bench nearby and buries his face in his hands. “We stay out of all the nonsense that goes on around here. We stuck with this
city when everybody who could leave left. And for it to go down like this . . . Nate never hurt anybody. Ever.”
“He served in Afghanistan.”
There’s something seriously wrong with me that I would even say this aloud. Kev thinks so, too, by the look he gives me. “You think some Afghani came all the way up here to pay his dues? Come on. I’m talking about the here and now. Black man always gets shot.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I say, because we’re in America, and it is. I’ve just seen it with my own eyes. The elevator doors open at the far end of the hall. I notice it before Kev does. Spot the plainclothes cops taking their sweet time in the hall, looking at room numbers as they walk. There’s not much time left, so I say quickly, “Is he going to make it?”
Kev rubs his jaw, stares at a point behind me, and shrugs. His mind is somewhere else. “I’ve got a Ph.D. in American history. Did he ever tell you that?”
“No.” One of the cops stops to check something on his phone, then discusses it with the other cop. It’s a man and a woman, and even at a distance I can tell they’re police officers because of the way they are looking at the people they pass in the hallway. Only a cop or a real estate agent looks at people that way. With eyes that seem to say, It’s only a matter of time.
They still haven’t noticed us.
“He wouldn’t. Guess he didn’t tell you he sent his army salary back home to help me pay for school, either? I am who I am because of him.”
But who is he without him? This is the question we leave unspoken. Kev has retreated into himself and his memories of his brother, who is lying there fighting for his life. There is no reaching him now.
I walk away, careful to keep a calm, unhurried pace. From around the corner, I hear the detectives introduce themselves to Kev. I slump against the wall and listen to their questions about the shooting. I could at any point reveal myself and tell them that I was the target, am the target, but I don’t. If I don’t understand it, how could they?