“So what’s the play?” asked Jerome.
“Once we get into town, you see what you can find out. My friend Ziggy has some old contacts of his own.”
“What about you?”
“My job is to make sure Clair stays safe.”
“How you gonna do that?”
“I already started,” I said. “I called the news stations in Chicago and fed them the story about her rescue from you. I gave all the credit to the honorable Senator Marsh. They should be flooding his office with calls right about now.”
“How will that help?”
“Senator Marsh will have to put extra security on her and the press will have her picture everywhere. No one will dare to try and touch her; not the Bloods, not anyone working for Marsh, not anyone at all.”
“Maybe,” said Jerome still not sounding convinced. “At least for a while.”
“A while is what we’re working for,” I said. “Just long enough to figure out who it is that’s after her and why.”
“Don’t care about why,” said Jerome. “Just who. Then I’ll kill them.”
Couldn’t argue with that.
Ziggy yawned and stretched in the back seat. He turned his head and saw Max staring into his face from the back. He jumped.
Max didn’t.
“Ziggy says he needs to make pee,” he said.
Couldn’t argue with that either, so I pulled in at the next gas station and filled up the Escalade while Ziggy used the men’s room and Jerome got coffee for the three of us. I saw a woman give him a startled look as she passed him at the door to the station. She clutched her purse tight and hustled her kids quickly around him. Couldn’t blame her for that either, he looked a scary mess.
The day was already getting warm, even this early in the morning, and the traffic whooshed past like speeding missiles.
I opened the back hatch and let Max out. He walked over to a fire hydrant sitting in a patch of tall grass and lifted a leg.
“Cute,” I said. “A little cliché, but cute.”
Max looked up at me and kept peeing.
I saw a shadow come up behind me and turned to see a nerdy little guy with thick glasses and a short sleeve shirt with an alligator embroidered on the breast pocket. He popped a chin towards Max.
“That your dog, mister?”
“Depends on who you ask,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Well, I think of him as mine, but if you asked him, he might say it’s the other way around.”
“That’s funny,” he said not smiling at all. He pushed the center rim of his glasses up the bridge of his long skinny nose, just like the guy in the Steve Martin Movie, The Jerk. “But you should have him on a leash.”
“A leash?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have leash laws here. Also you have to clean up his mess if he poos.”
Poos.
I swiveled my head toward him.
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
“No,” he said, pushing his glasses up again. “I’m just getting gas. That’s my car over there. He pointed to a baby-blue Prius.
Figures.
“Are you a police officer or animal control?”
“No,” he said, “but I felt it my civic duty to inform you of the way we do things here, seeing that you had out-of-state plates and all.
Jerome, carrying a cardboard tray of coffee cups, suddenly towered over the man, looking down on him. I thought the civic-minded gentlemen might faint for a second.
“This dude messing with you?” he asked me, his voice sounding like grating boulders deep in the Earth’s crust.
The man with the alligator embroidery looked at Jerome, then at me, then back at Jerome. He scuttled back to his Prius like time was a-wasting, pushing his glasses with that same finger. Where was the Opti-Grab when you needed it?
Max was still peeing; it had been a long trip.
“Why you let guys like that mess with you?” asked Jerome.
“He wasn’t messing with me,” I said.
“Looked like he was messing with you.”
“We were just talking.”
He shook his head and walked back to the car.
I did a quick look around, making sure there wasn’t a sniper scoping me from a car that hated cans, then followed him.
The coffee smelled fresh and rich as I sat back in the driver’s seat. Jerome handed me mine and took a slug of his. It burned my lips, tongue and all the way down, but Jerome didn’t seem to notice. He drank it like I’d drink a cold soda. The guy hardly seemed real.
Ziggy got back in and took his coffee. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my mother used to say, and I realized he’d probably shot up in the stall.
“Anybody need food?” I asked. They all shook their heads to the negative.
“Ziggy wants to know if you want Ziggy to drive for a while,” said Ziggy from the back seat.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the wide eyes, the beads of sweat on his forehead, the dilated pupils.
“No thanks.”
About two hours later, Ziggy was out and Jerome hadn’t said a word, when I saw the big man make a hand gesture. I double-tapped my earbuds, pausing the music. I saw he held the copy of the Bible I keep in the glove compartment for emergencies.
“This a Bible?” he asked.
“Yes, that is what it is.”
“Yours?”
“Yes.”
“You a Christian?”
“Yes.”
“Thought you boys was supposed to turn the other cheek when someone punches you.”
He squinted, emphasizing the cut near his eye.
“That’s a common misconception.”
“Thought it said that somewhere in there.”
“It does, but like all writings, what is said has to be taken in context. You have to take the words said in context with the sentence and the paragraph and the chapter and the book and the testament and then in the context of the entire Bible.””
“So you ain’t supposed to turn the cheek?”
“Sometimes you are, sometimes you aren’t.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Don’t make no sense.”
“Well, okay, how about you turn to the passage you’re talking about, which would be Matthew 5:39, and we’ll go through it?”
He looked at the book then back to me.
“Can’t. Don’t know how to read.”
“Not a problem these days.” I stretched a few distracted driving laws while I thumbed through apps and settings on my phone, popped out my earbuds, and handed them to him. “The whole Bible’s on audio.”
He looked at the buds then back at me.
“They won’t bite.
“Was those in your ears?”
“I Q-Tipped just this morning. Try them.”
Jerome took the ear buds with a disgusted squirm, twisting his lips, and wiped them on his shirt before fitting them in his ears. I showed him how to work the app and let him listen while I watched the road and enjoyed the silence. An hour later I pulled off the highway for a potty break and snacks. When I got back in the car, Jerome had a question for me.
“It says, I think it’s in that book called Romans, that everything that happens, happens because God makes it happen for good. How is my Clair gettin’ stole and maybe killed a good thing?”
I nodded. “A lot of people get caught up on that verse, Romans 8:28. What it actually says, in its natural language, which is Greek, ‘…we know that God works all things together for good with those who love God…’ The meaning, in context, is that no matter how bad something might be, no matter how terrible or seemingly unbearable, if we are loving God and staying close to Him, He can help us get through it. He can make the best of the worst situation.”
“You mean God will help me kill them?”
“No, that’s not what I said. What I said is, that even if Clair were to be… hurt… if you lean on God, He can help you to get through it.
He can give you strength and courage and show you how life is still worth living.”
“I would live so I could kill them.”
I thought about my wife and daughter and how I hunted down their killer.
I shrugged.
“Yeah, maybe.” I tapped the phone. “Keep listening.”
Eleven hours later, we drove into the mean streets of Chicago.
I pulled into a motel two blocks off the freeway called The Star’s Inn. My eyes were heavy and my head felt like I’d gone a couple hundred rounds with George Foreman in his prime.
Jerome’s eyebrows scrunched down and I saw a scab over the brow crack a little, revealing a fresh spot of red.
“You ain’t planning on stopping here.” It sounded more like a statement than a question.
“Have to,” I said. “I’m dead tired.”
“Well, you gonna be able to drop the ‘tired’ part of that speech, you stop here,” he said.
Ziggy laughed from the backseat. “Ziggy says you got that right.”
“You think someone would kill us here?” I asked, not getting it.
“Not ‘us’,” said Jerome.
“Nope,” said Ziggy, “not us.”
“You, white boy,” said Jerome.
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “That is so politically incorrect.”
“Ziggy say that don’t matter diddly down here,” said Ziggy.
“Dead’s dead, no matter how you say it,” said Jerome.
“I can take care of myself,” I said. “Besides, I have got to get to a bed.”
Jerome shook his head. “No. We ain’t getting shot up with you just ‘cause you tired.”
“Shot up?” I said. “Um, I believe you two are a little confused. Chicago happens to have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.”
Ziggy burst out laughing. “Ziggy says you wouldn’t make it to the front door. No sir, no sir, Ziggy says no sir you wouldn’t.”
It was about then I started to notice the little group of teenagers smoking by a car. There had only been two when I pulled in; now there were at least five and they were all looking at me through the windshield. One of them started talking into a cell phone.
“Put her in drive and let’s go,” said Jerome looking perfectly bored.
“Ziggy says it might be too late,” said Ziggy.
Two more black teenagers joined the group and another came out the front door of the motel office.
With one hand, Jerome signaled that I should move forward. “Just run them over if they try and stop you. Go now.”
Tired or not, I’m not as stupid as many people give me credit for. I made a quick spin and got out of there. Suddenly I didn’t feel sleepy anymore.
Jerome directed me to another motel a few miles away and I stowed my gear on a chair by a plain desk before falling face first on the bed. Max got up and laid next to me.
I’d given Ziggy the keys, hoping he wasn’t too stoned to drive, and he and Jerome went off to gather intel while I slept. I dreamt I was at a gas station, dodging bullets fired from a gang of middle-aged fat men, calling me average, while cans of oil and pop and transmission fluid exploded all around me.
32
Ziggy dropped Jerome off and then drove to an old section of town that he knew well from his youth. It took him about fifteen minutes to score a few shards of crystal. Once he’d melted the small splinters, he sucked the clear soup up into a syringe from his private kit and pierced a vein below the bicep of his left arm. And just like that, his mind smoothed and his thoughts, which were beginning to jumble and tumble and stab, straightened out and gelled so that he felt normal. He really never got high anymore, he was far past those glorious days. Now the drug just brought him back to a semi-state of functionality that allowed him to survive; but hey, living was living.
Parking the car down the street, he got out and sauntered along past the store fronts. Whores sent him looks and a few calls, until they pegged him for a broke old junkie, then they mostly left him alone. The first seven shops he sought out had all been either closed or were under new management. He almost gave up hope until he turned the corner and saw Mudder’s Pool Hall, right where it had always been. A car full of young bucks came screeching down the street and shots blasted through the hot summer air. There were screams, though not many, and three other youths walking along the sidewalk pulled out cheap handguns and blasted back. Ziggy heard the plunking sounds of bullets striking car metal, and for a few seconds, this American block was the equivalent of a Middle Eastern war zone. Then the car drove off and the kids who had been shot at and shot back, ran into a building, and everything went back to life as usual. Ziggy shook his head, wondering at the state of the world.
Ziggy opened the door to Mudder’s and stepped in, instantly noting the fact that there was no air conditioning, just big fans that did little more than sweep the smoky air back and forth and up and around in misty swirls that made it hard to see to the long end of the room. The old familiar sound of balls clacking together, with that rich, sharp baked-clay sound, brought a warm feeling to him, helping to mollify the depression that had set in at the change in his old neighborhood and the lack of concern for life in today’s youth. Black boys stood around the tables shooting pool. In Ziggy’s day, the young men wore white wife-beater shirts and jeans mostly, but these boys were outfitted in red and black with lots of jewelry and grills across their teeth. They wore baseball caps tilted at weird angles or scarves that fitted their skulls like a second skin. Some were big and muscular, showing off their bulk by cutting off sleeves or wearing their shirts so tight they must be close to losing circulation. But most were skinny, with a hungry look in their eyes that Ziggy recognized all too well. The hunger had nothing to do with lack of food. No. These boys lusted after other pleasures of the flesh; drugs, money, power, recognition, reputation, the flesh itself. There were girls too. Most of them young, in the fifteenish area, all dressed in outfits way too tight, with high heels as long as their calves and bright lipstick that fit perfectly with their wild hairstyles. Ziggy ignored all of them. He wasn’t looking for kids.
Making his way to the back, he saw a few isolated tables populated by an older crowd. The bar, a cheap looking thing, separated the young from the old and Ziggy sat on the old side. He ordered a beer and waited. It didn’t take long.
“You looking for somebody, old timer?”
Ziggy didn’t know the man, but he looked to be in his thirties. He had tats on both shoulders and sported a red muscle shirt that hugged his pecs and six-pack abs. A roundish scar puckered his right trapezius near his throat, which Ziggy immediately recognized as an old bullet wound.
“Ziggy say he be looking for an old friend,” said Ziggy.
“That so?” asked the man. “What’s his name?”
“Ziggy say his old friend’s name is Westley Banks, but folks knew him better by the moniker Snake Oil.”
The man’s solemn expression changed to a slight grin.
“I member old Snake Oil,” said the man. “He was a tough ol’ bird. He’s dead. Took a load of buckshot in the face ‘bout five years back. Some blue Crip seen him sporting colors on the west side and walked up and shot him dead right in front of his granddaughter.” The man looked down, as if remembering. “Don’t feel bad though. We took out seven for him. And that ain’t a bad thing. How’d you know Snake Oil?”
“Ziggy used to play pool with him right here in this hall, yes he did indeed, back in the day Ziggy did.” Ziggy sipped his beer and wiped foam from his lips. “What about an old cat called Mr. Diamond? Is he dead too?”
The man laughed. “No, no, Mr. Diamond still beating in the chest. You used to play pool with him too?”
“Ziggy says some, but we done did some jobs together too.”
“That so? What kind of jobs?”
Ziggy grinned and drank some beer before setting the cup down. “Ziggy says you’d have to ask Mr. Diamond ‘bout that.”
The man l
ooked at him a little longer then said, “Ok.” He walked away and went through a door on the far side of the last pool table where another man stood guard. A few minutes later, the man came back out and escorted Ziggy through the door. The guard performed a fast efficient pat down on the old man and then let him through.
“Ziggy,” said a very black skinned, very fat man, sitting behind a desk stacked with papers. “Been a long time.”
“Mr. Diamond,” said Ziggy as they shook hands. Ziggy sat opposite him. “I’m sorry to hear about Snake Oil.”
Mr. Diamond nodded. “Most of the old crowd is dead. Not many of us left. You still up Colorado way?”
Ziggy wasn’t surprised to hear that Mr. Diamond knew what part of the country he had holed up in. Mr. Diamond always knew everything.
“Ziggy says yes, sir. That he is. Beautiful country up that way.”
“Right,” said Mr. Diamond. “That and legal pot. I heard you got hooked pretty bad on them drugs. Always thought you was smarter than that, Ziggy.’
Ziggy bobbed his head up and down, taking no offense. “Ziggy done thought he was smarter too, but that was back in the day, sir. These days, Ziggy knows he ain’t half as smart as he thought he was back then. No, sir, not so smart at all.”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Diamond, “I guess none of us is ever as smart as we think when we kids. So what you here for?”
“Well, sir, Ziggy says he got a friend who’s in bad trouble and Ziggy’s here to ask a favor.”
Mr. Diamond just stared at him. “Well, unless the drugs done erased your brain real bad, then you know that I don’t do favors. Nothing in this world ever comes free. There’s always a price.”
“Yes, sir, Ziggy done knows that for sure. Ziggy spoke a little off there. He didn’t mean a favor. What Ziggy means is he’s coming here to you to cash in on a debt.”
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