“Brothers, I’d like you to meet Aaron Gunner,” Mayes said, seeing Verna to a seat at the end of the couch. She seemed to have no resistance left. “Protector of the innocent and keeper of the peace. Lonnie, you and Marlin remember Gunner, right?”
The big kid with all the hair nodded silently; Mayes told him to pat Gunner down for weapons, and after a while he crushed out the joint he was smoking and got up from the couch to do so. He slapped the detective around for a while, shook his head at Mayes, and sat back down.
“He’s okay,” he mumbled.
Mayes looked Gunner over, enjoying himself. “Care to have a seat? Can I get you something to drink?”
Gunner shook his head. “No thanks.”
“I hoped you might turn up. In fact, I figured you would. I couldn’t see you all of a sudden doing the smart thing, the safe thing, letting sleeping dogs lie. That’s not your style.”
Gunner grinned. “I guess it isn’t.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?” Mayes asked.
“I didn’t. I came to see the lady.”
“Yeah? What for?”
“To ask her a few questions. As you might recall, that’s what I do.”
Mayes frowned. “Questions? What kind of questions? Your case is closed, Gunner; you’ve already got all the answers. You know who killed Buddy and you know who killed Townsend. You even know why. What the hell else is there?”.
Gunner turned to look at Verna. “There’s the matter of the blackmail note that got Buddy killed. And the question of who really wrote it.” Verna was watching him now, wild-eyed. “Everybody seems to be satisfied that Buddy did, I know. But I for one have my doubts.”
“You too?” Mayes asked, grinning again. His eyes were also on Verna. “What a small world.”
“I take it she hasn’t ‘fessed up, yet.”
“No. You take it right. She says I’ve got it all wrong.”
“You do!” Verna snapped, leaping to her feet. “I didn’t have anything to do with that note, I swear it!”
“You should have figured it out a lot sooner than I did, Mayes,” Gunner said, facing him. “If it seemed strange to me that a man like Buddy would try to hit Stewart and Jenkins up for fifty thousand dollars, it had to seem twice as funny to you. Buddy didn’t give a damn about money, or so everyone said. He would have had no use for blackmail, at least not for profit.”
“How the hell would you know?” Verna asked. “You didn’t even know him!”
“No, I didn’t. But you did. Better than Mayes. Better than anyone. You were his big sister; his confidante. The one person he could go to with problems too big to share with anyone else. Like what to do with the knowledge that the guns Mayes and the Brothers were buying from Sweet Lou Jenkins, the very same guns most of our friends here are sporting, had been paid for out of Lewis Henshaw’s pocket.”
“No!”
“Shut up, Verna!” Mayes said. “Let the man finish.”
“The man is finished,” Gunner said. “Buddy asked for his sister’s advice and got it, only it wasn’t what a proletarian in good standing like Buddy wanted to hear. So the lady decided to turn the screws on Larry Stewart herself, without Buddy’s knowledge, and without the benefit of knowing what kind of specific proof Buddy had of Stewart’s deal with Jenkins. I think Buddy told her everything but that.”
“Which would explain why the blackmail note never actually mentioned Buddy’s videotape,” Mayes said.
Gunner nodded. He said to Verna, “The day I found you at your brother’s apartment, you were cleaning up the mess you’d made the night before. Weren’t you?”
“Bullshit,” Verna said.
“You were looking for Buddy’s proof, because without it you had nothing to back up the note with. But you didn’t know what you were looking for, and you found that somewhat frustrating. So you trashed the place.”
“No!”
“Stop lying, goddammit!” It was Mayes. He had the Remington aimed in the vicinity of her lower torso, and his face was contorted with rage. “The cop’s right, and we all know it! Buddy didn’t write that fucking blackmail note, you did!”
He turned to Gunner and said, “Buddy brought the news of the tape to me, thinking it would change my mind about the guns. Only it didn’t, of course. I didn’t give a damn where Jenkins was getting the money for the stuff, and I told Buddy that. If Henshaw was involved, so what? He had no control over what we were going to do with the hardware, and neither did anyone else. That, to me, was all that mattered.
“But it mattered to Buddy. He was as ready as any of us for guerrilla warfare, but he was afraid something would backfire, that the Brothers would get hurt somehow if I went through with the deal. He said he’d go public with what he knew if I didn’t call it off. But I managed to change his mind. I convinced him to wait, to trust me. To give my leadership a chance to show dividends. Because Buddy was my brother, and I was his, no matter what many people thought. I had everything under control.
“And then Stewart got his note. And a few days after that, Buddy was dead.”
Mayes smiled, painfully. “Those bastards never even gave me a chance to talk to him.”
He returned his gaze to Verna and closed upon her, lifting her chin deftly with the Remington’s stout barrel. “But I know what he would have said, all the same,” he said. “He would have said I was crazy. That he hadn’t sent Stewart any blackmail note and he didn’t know who had. Isn’t that right, Verna?”
He nudged the shotgun harder into the flesh of her throat, and waited. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded her head, tears rolling quietly down her face.
“I thought I could make something good happen for both of us,” she said, her voice broken and all but inaudible. “We never had a dime to spare our whole lives, Buddy and me. And I was tired of it, even if Buddy wasn’t. I thought it would be easy.
“Only the fuckers didn’t pay.” Her eyes began to smolder with new life, hot coals glowing red with regret for the nightmare her plan had become. “They killed Buddy instead. So I looked for the tape, just like you said. But not because I thought it could still get me anything—I didn’t care about the money anymore. I just wanted to see Stewart and Sweet Lou squirm when the cops nailed them with it. The two of them nailed to the cross—that’s what I wanted to see.”
She shook her head wildly, crying again. “But I didn’t know what I was looking for! I didn’t know!”
She broke down completely, burying her face in her hands. Unmoved, Mayes shoved her back down on the couch, laughing maniacally.
“You’re right, Cop,” he said to Gunner. “I should have figured it out a lot sooner. But better late than never, huh?”
His friends laughed, too, not wanting to miss out on the fun. The fat man Gunner didn’t recognize and the giant Gunner did slapped their right hands together, standing behind the couch. Gunner only now took note of the large ice chest sitting on top of the coffee table at the center of the room.
“What is all this anyway, Mayes?” he asked. “A picnic?”
The Brothers saw him eyeing the ice chest and cracked up again, privy to some inside joke. Mayes grinned and said, “Yeah. A picnic. Like the one the Texans had at the Alamo.” He moved to the cooler and gingerly pulled off the lid. “Come take a look.”
Gunner obliged, and immediately regretted it. Inside the insulated chest, several pounds of incendiary explosives lay submerged in a clear, yellowish liquid whose odor betrayed the fact that it was kerosene. It was a crude combination that constituted a bomb big enough to level the building they were all standing in and a few others to either side, and Gunner didn’t have to be a demolitions expert to know it.
“Seeing as how we owe you for Brother M.,” Mayes said, “welcome to Roland Mayes’s last stand.” He grinned again, proudly.
“Jesus Christ,” Gunner said, in stunned disbelief. “You have any idea how many innocent people you’re liable to kill with this shit?”
“I’m not interested in lives lost
,” Mayes said. “I’m interested in lives saved. It’s the future I’m concerned with now, Gunner. Not the present or the past. We’re going to make history here today, you, my friends, and I. We’re going to light up the new Big Bang, and change the goddamn universe!”
“Right on,” the kid named Lonnie said.
Mayes went to the living-room window and gestured for Gunner to follow. He took a pair of binoculars from the Brother nearest the window and held the edge of the curtains back so that Gunner might peek out.
“Take a good hard look at the men in that blue Ford across the street,” he said.
It was the same car Gunner had noticed earlier, only now he could see that the clean-cut plainclothes officers in the front seat had not merely dozed off on the job. They were dead, each shot once in the head at close range.
“As you can see, Brother Marlin does excellent work,” Mayes said, as Gunner handed back the binoculars. “They’ve been sitting like that for over forty minutes now—which means they’ll well overdue to be missed. Only one car will come to check on them at first, but that will soon be followed by many, many others. And what will happen then, Cop? Care to guess?”
“A firefight,” Gunner said, suddenly wishing Lilly were around to pour him a stiff drink. “And a big one.”
Mayes nodded. “Exactly. The Man will go off in all his righteous, indignant glory. While the world watches, the paramilitary puppets of the established order will cut this building to ribbons, and one bullet or another, either one of ours or one of theirs, will hit that chest. And my work on this earth will be done.”
“You’re crazy,” Gunner said.
Mayes lay the Remington’s muzzle against the detective’s chest, lazily. “How so?” he asked.
“You’re crazy to try it. And even crazier to think it’ll change a goddamn thing. That’s how so.”
“You’re wrong,” Mayes said. “The time is right. Our people are ready for this moment. How many more great thinkers and leaders do you think our brothers and sisters will watch the White Man cut down before they finally take to the streets? Five? Ten? A hundred?” Mayes shook his head. “No. Not now. Not ever again. I’m betting my life the buck’s going to stop here.”
“And when our brothers and sisters take to the streets? What then? What will they have bought in the lousy three or four days of warfare they’ll be capable of waging against a multibillion-dollar system of government primed to turn them back? A little more respect? A little more recognition?”
“They’ll have a start. And that’s better than the nothing they’ve had up to now, isn’t it?”
“A start to what? To where? We’ve spent a hundred and fifty years trying to prove to the White Man that we can handle civilization just as easily as he can, and you want to wipe that out in a week. I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to get it,” Mayes said angrily. “All you need to ‘get’ is that I’m tired of trying to force social reform on a race of people rendered by the system too ignorant to comprehend my message. Buddy was right; blood must be spilled. And so I’m through talking. I’m through listening. And so are you.” He used the shotgun in his hands to point at a lounge chair facing the couch, near the coffee table. “Go sit down, Cop,” he said.
Gunner gazed into the large, almond-shaped eyes staring him down and saw madness, unabated. He went to the chair and sat down, without argument.
“Guess you should have left well enough alone,” Verna said, smiling at him, her eyes damp and glistening.
Gunner didn’t answer her. He was too preoccupied with the business of deciding whether the next several minutes of his life would be better spent preparing himself for the hereafter, or designing a way to survive. The first would be difficult; the second, nearly impossible. Four sets of eyes were intermittently upon him and there was nothing within his reach that would fare well against either the twelve-gauge rounds of Mayes’s Remington or the nine-millimeter casings of his friends’ MK760s. Whatever he tried now would fail, and fail miserably. He had to wait for an opening, and hope he would know what to do with it when it came. If it came.
Before the police did.
The fuzz-headed kid named Lonnie was lighting a fresh joint. His automatic rifle was in his lap, but he had it turned so that Gunner could look down its barrel, just to remind the detective it was there. It was clear that he had a buzz on, but not so clear how much of one; he still seemed to have a firm command of all his faculties.
A siren started to sound in the distance. The cavalry was on its way.
The fat man and the giant went to the window to join Mayes, the three of them peeling back the curtain to look out. Lonnie looked up once, then turned his eyes on Gunner and kept them there. Verna didn’t move.
“This is it. Get ready,” Mayes told the two at the window. They nodded their heads solemnly and disappeared into the bedroom, taking their weapons with them. Mayes tossed a cursory glance at the others and returned his attention to the street outside.
“You’d better cover that up,” Gunner said to the kid on the couch, pointing at the open ice chest filled with kerosene. “Either that, or put that fucking roach out.”
There was a slight pause as the man with the oversized Afro pondered the suggestion. He didn’t like being told what to do, but finally got up and reached for the lid, the glowing marijuana joint wedged between two fingers on his right hand.
It wasn’t the low-risk play Gunner had wanted to make, but it was the best he could come up with. He reached out with his right foot and kicked the cooler once, hard, splashing kerosene over the edge. A length of Lonnie’s right arm and the front of his shirt went dark with the liquid for only a split second, then burst into flame as the cigarette in his hand ignited, creating a human torch. The big man fell away from the coffee table before the chest itself could ignite and dropped the rifle in his other hand to fight the fire, screaming in agony, his eyes a testament to abject horror.
As Verna’s own screams joined Lonnie’s, Mayes whirled away from the window, but too late: Gunner’s newfound MK760 raced the sawed-off Remington into position and won, spraying a haphazard nine-millimeter line of fire that brought the head Brother of Volition to his knees, clutching at two wounds in his upper body. The two men in the other room appeared at the bedroom door immediately after, only to run headlong into a hail of bullets they never had time to answer. They fell one on top of the other, face down in the carpet, and were still.
Gunner looked around for Verna and just caught a glimpse of her as she ran out the front door. To where, he couldn’t imagine. The wail of the onrushing siren was almost deafening now. She wasn’t going to get far.
And neither was Mayes, though he was still alive. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him, watching in a daze as the kid named Lonnie smothered the last of the flames burning his right arm with his blackened, shredded shirt. Most of the right side of the kid’s upper torso was black, as well, and he looked to be in shock, no threat to anyone anywhere, soon.
“Let it go, Brother Mayes,” Gunner said, wearily.
The sawed-off Remington lay on the floor not far from the head Brother’s right hand, and despite the pair of leaking holes in his chest, Mayes was trying to find the strength to reclaim it. Outside, the police siren had stopped, and now the two men could hear the sounds of frantic activity in the street, doors slamming closed and radios sizzling with static.
Mayes’s hand moved closer to the gun, his eyes on the cooler atop the coffee table.
“You blow that ice chest now, and you’ll make history, all right,” Gunner said, pulling the bolt back on the automatic rifle he was holding for emphasis. “They’ll call you the biggest black American fuck-up ever born.”
Gunner said nothing more. He just let Mayes make up his own mind.
Because that was the least he could do, for a brother.
t turned out that Roland Mayes was unwilling to settle for infamy over fam
e. For all his altruism, he still had a certain fondness for himself and his place in history.
The great war between the races he had originally hoped to lead never took place. His well-publicized arrest and subsequent imprisonment were catalysts to a number of minor, unrelated incidents of protest nationwide, inevitably, but millions of heads did not roll and blood did not flow freely in the streets. White America, it seemed, had survived yet another threat to its stranglehold on the destiny of Black America, and Black America, at least until the next Roland Mayes came along, had resigned itself once again to wait, to persevere, to keep the dream alive that the system that continued to work against it would someday heal itself.
But the Brothers of Volition episode did not come and go without making some valuable impact, however minor, on the lives of several principals involved. If nothing else more substantial had been accomplished, Lilly Tennell had slowly learned to own and operate the Acey Deuce without her husband’s assistance; Mean Sheila Pulliam had discovered the hard way that you don’t make a racket when ambushing a man from behind; Terry Allison was shown that a dinner date with a given black man could be as thought-provoking and stimulating as one with a given man of any other race, color, or creed.
And Aaron Gunner finally figured out what it was he wanted to be for the rest of his wretched life.
Which is why he went out of his way one Tuesday afternoon in late November to catch up with an old friend, a man with a motor-mouth and a heart of tarnished gold. His search started and ended in Will Rogers park in Watts, on a hard wooden bench near the basketball courts and a drinking fountain that didn’t work. The friend was sitting there in ragged clothes, his skin as dark as the leather of his shoes, an old fishing cap atop his gray head. There was a bottle in a paper sack in his left hand.
“What’s happening, Too Sweet?” Gunner asked, sitting down beside him.
Too Sweet Penny grinned a toothless grin. “How you. been, Gunner, my man? I seen you on TV, you know that? On the six o’clock news, I think it was.”
“Yeah. That was me.”
Fear of the Dark Page 17