by James Sallis
Felt like the bat was still swacking into me, every breath I took.
I had a drink, had another. Ought to carve notches in the neck of the bottle.
About four P.M. I got up and took one of the capsules the doctor had prescribed. Washed it down with gin and went back to bed.
Woke up hours later with Hosie Straughter crouched over me. Wet rag on my face. Dark outside.
“You all right, Lew? You in there, buddy? I need to call an ambulance?”
“Murgh.” Something like that.
“Getting pretty scary here, Lewis. You okay or not, man?”
I struggled toward the surface. Dark up there, not light. Layer of ice I couldn’t break through, but a space between water and ice, air there I could breathe.
“Goddamn it, Lewis.”
I pushed the wet rag off my face.
My heart pounded. Acrid taste far back in my throat. Stomach aflop. Urgent messages dove and turned like sharks in my intestines.
“Murgh,” I said, hand wrapped around his throat.
“Okay, okay.”
I rolled away. Ears ringing. Every nerve ending felt as though sandpaper had been taken to it.
“Tea on the floor by your right hand.”
I groped and found it. Drank it off in four swallows. It got refilled. It got redrunk.
“You half human now? Regained the power of speech, at least?”
I thought so. But when I opened my mouth, we found out I hadn’t.
“Let’s try it again, then.”
Coffee this time, black and strong. I heard cars tearing past outside, ten o’clock news from the radio in the front room. New riots on college campuses in California and the Midwest. An investigation of alleged racial discrimination on military bases in Vietnam. Twelve “Freedom Riders” in Alabama had been pulled from their bus and beaten.
“Welcome back, Lewis. Had me worried.”
“I feel like hammered horse shit. Like the inside of someone’s shoe.”
“Well, there’s an empty gin bottle and an open bottle of some kind of pills here by the bed. Could have something to do with that.”
“Kind of dumb, huh?”
“Kind of. May not be the dumbest thing you’ll do in your life, but it’s on the list.”
I put an experimental leg over the edge of the bed. Then another. Hoisted myself experimentally to a sitting position. Had to remember: keep good notes. The experiment was a success. I was reinventing the world.
“I don’t suppose you looked in the icebox.”
“As a matter of fact I did, hoping for beer.”
“Anything in there?”
“A pizza with green stuff growing on it. Lots of green stuff. Not oregano or basil, far as I could tell. And a pot of something that may once have been chili.”
“Green stuff on that too?”
“No. But it’s got a nice thick layer of white on top. Penicillin, possibly.”
“I need food.” For the love of God, Montressor.
“Thought you might.”
The experimental legs managed to carry me behind him into the kitchen. I smelled it before we got there. Looking down to be sure I wasn’t drooling all over my feet.
Fried chicken from Jim’s. Frankie DeNoux’s home away from home. Bottom part of the paper bag several shades darker from grease.
“You want plates?”
Yeah, right. And get down the crystal and china too.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Next morning, I called Sam Brown from a phone booth on Claiborne by a school painted pale blue and tangerine, the kind of color scheme I always think of as island pastel, part of the city’s Caribbean heritage.
I said who I was and asked if he had anything for me.
“For you? You better believe it. You’re tall man in the forest right now, Lewis. Word came down. Happen to be free this afternoon about two?”
I told him I thought I could arrange it.
“You sure you don’t need to check your schedule, now?”
“Well, you know how it is: business first.”
“I do, I do. Shame so many people’ve already forgotten that.”
“What’s on?”
“Second.”
It took me a moment. “And who’s on first.”
“Why you are, man. I just told you that.”
“You know, Brown, maybe we’re in the wrong line. We could work up a few more gags, get us some bowlers and checkered suits and have our own TV show.”
“Or at least a guest spot now and then on some white man’s.”
“There is that.”
“And of course we’d have to be careful what we said, or we’d wind up blackballed like Bobbye Belle, having to move overseas because we couldn’t get work in clubs here.”
“Never happened. I read an article about it. All just a misunderstanding.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“So what work do we have?”
“Straight escort job. In and out, an hour, hour and a half tops.”
“Whose pony are we riding?”
“Elroy Weaver.”
A few years back, with a couple of other guys Weaver had formed Black Adder. It was the first truly militant organization for blacks, short on rhetoric, long on action. Adder had lots of enemies both inside the establishment, where the three of them spent a lot of time, accompanied by their Harvard lawyer, in court proceedings, and alongside the establishment, where repeated threats and escalating violence issued from white individuals and groups. Adder probably had as many enemies among its own community: older blacks terrified of rocking the boat any harder, younger ones convinced all we could do was burn the whole field down and start with a new crop.
“Big pony,” I said.
“Ain’t it though? A real dark horse. Weaver’s coming in for a strategy-and-position conference with an undisclosed local organization. The Black Hand, we think. Whole thing’s been kept quiet, Weaver’s even using an assumed name. We pick him up at Moisant, deliver him to a motel out on Airline. That’s it. From that point on, the local group takes over.”
“Who’s picking up the tab?”
“Not a question I ask.”
“Who’s on this, and how many?”
“Six of us. Our best men. I’ll be out there myself-though you won’t see me till we shut it down. Maybe after that we can talk about your future here at SeCure.”
“Where am I in the line-up?”
“Honor guard, Lewis. Man says he wants you there in the car by him.”
Which is where, four hours later, I found myself.
Elroy Weaver was a small man, wiry, with still, dark eyes that stayed on whatever he directed them toward, and below those eyes, a mouth quick to smile or laugh. He’d come off the plane with only a shoulder bag, down the ramp directly to me.
“Glad you made it, Lewis.” He held out his hand.
Not much talk in the car. He asked me a few questions about myself, told me how much he missed his family, being away so much like this.
“You have family, Lewis?”
I told him about my parents and sister Francy up in Arkansas.
“See them often? Keep in touch?”
I shook my head, and he didn’t pursue it.
“No family of your own, then.”
No. Though not long after this, much to my surprise, there would be.
Just past Williams Boulevard a station wagon had tried to beat an oncoming van and got caught halfway through its turn, racking up a couple of other vehicles as it slewed across two lanes and into the cross street. We pulled up and took our place in line. Police and wreckers were clearing the road. Elroy sat watching the operation quietly.
This is what would happen: I’d go into the downtown library to look for another book by Camus and the librarian at the information desk would be named Janie. She’d be getting ready to leave for the day, for some reason I’d ask her, and before I knew it we’d be across the street drinking coffee.
When I to
ld LaVerne that Janie and I were getting married, she just said, very quietly: Good luck, honey. I didn’t see her for a long time then. Janie and I had a son. I got busy drinking and using the marriage to do things to myself that my anger and self-disgust alone couldn’t accomplish. LaVerne wasn’t all I didn’t see back then.
Years went by and David, my son, was gone.
More years, and LaVerne was gone.
We began moving again, past a cop directing traffic, over scatters of gemlike glass.
“Maybe later, Lewis. Further along,” Weaver said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Further along we’ll know all the answers, further along we’ll understand why.
We eased down Airline past ramshackle bars, hole-in-the-wall eateries and blocky abandoned factories with grids of punched-out windows, to the Pelican Motor Hotel. Refrigerated air was painted on the office window. An overgrown drive-in movie lot sat across from the motel.
Time for the transfer, the hand-off. Always the weakest point.
As rehearsed back at SeCure, I got out of the car, leaving Weaver, another guard and the driver inside, and stood several paces away. After a moment Louis Creech stepped from the motel office to join me. He nodded curtly to me as he glanced toward the drive-in across the street. From the corner of my eye I caught a brief flash of light at the top of the screen over there. Could have been a reflection from a passing car. Gone as quickly as it came.
I had known the Sentry was on this job.
Now I knew where he was.
The game plan called for me to fall away at this point, passing Weaver on to Louis Creech. Meanwhile I’d circle around back, check the periphery.
I started around, and when everyone’s attention seemed taken, sprinted down an alley behind the motel and a cut-rate furniture store, back up by the store’s delivery docks, and across Airline.
Just as I hit the other side I looked back. Creech’s head turned toward me. He lifted the walkie-talkie.
Beside the drive-in was what had probably been an automobile showroom, with walls intact but the windows that had spanned the whole storefront, and most of the roof, gone. I dove in there and raced through its junkyard floor: stacks of ancient tires, carcasses of small animals, fast-food containers, remains of campfires. At first I saw no way out. But an emergency exit finally gave way on the fourth kick.
I came back out into sunlight and open air and saw the screen only ten, twelve yards away.
Someone was scrambling away from its base toward the stand of trees behind.
Scrambling as once before he’d scrambled over a Dumpster and through a delivery door.
He was almost to the trees when his foot caught in something-weeds, a tangle of roots, a sinkhole-and he fell.
He got up, looked down, looked behind to see me advancing, and shot off into the trees.
Where I lost him.
I plunged on for some time-thrashing about, turning this way and that, stopping to listen-but there was little doubt my bucket had sprung a terminal leak.
At last I found my way back out. Traffic on Airline was picking up fast. More cars and pickups than trucks now, as people started home from work.
Sam Brown said, “Little ways off your post aren’t you, Lewis?” So much for my bright future with SeCure.
I shrugged and walked over to where my pursuee had stumbled. No doubt about it. A professional’s piece, assembled by hand or made to order. Winchester bolt action, with a Zeiss 10x scope. The rifle’s original barrel appeared to have been replaced. Only the receiver was attached to the stock. The new barrel was free-floating. I’d seen snipers carry similar hot rods.
Sam Brown had followed me.
“Who is he?” I said, looking up.
“You’re the one has trouble, Lewis.”
“Sam.” I stood. “Now, I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but I think we can both assume this weapon is loaded. Since it hasn’t been fired yet.”
I was careful to avoid touching trigger and guard, places on the stock where fingerprints might be, though I knew there wouldn’t be any.
“People know your shooter was on the job, Sam. You go down here, under his rifle, he’s the one did it. No one will say different.”
He started to raise the walkie-talkie and stopped himself. “You’re crazy, Griffin. Crazy as everyone says you are.”
I shrugged. “America. I’ll yield to the majority opinion. What are you going to do?”
Moments shouldered by. Twenty or thirty cars, pickups, service vehicles.
“I authentically don’t know who he is, Griffin.”
“How’d he get on the SeCure roster?”
“Again: I don’t know. You’d have to go higher up on the chain. But my feeling is, he got in touch with us.”
“Everything okay across the street? Weaver handed on safely?”
He nodded.
“Good. I need one of your men to drop me-and this-off downtown, at the central police station. That all right with you?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” Then as I started away he said: “Lewis.”
I turned back.
“This is what you were after all along, right?”
I told him it was and he said he had wondered.
Never as invisible as we think. Us or our motives.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It’s a Winchester, all right. Model 70, 308 caliber, two or three years old. A real hot rod. The new barrel’s a Douglas Premium, floats free for maximum accuracy. Fires a 173-grain, boat-tail bullet in a metal jacket that the ballistics boys tell me can travel at close to 2,250 feet per second.”
“Not the kind of thing you pick up at your local Sears.”
“Not hardly.”
“And it’s the gun used in the shootings?”
“Probably so. They’re still playing with it. And trying to track down sources. Where the Winchester came from, the barrel, scope. But usually we don’t have much luck with this kind of thing. Lot of it’s strictly underground.”
“What about the ammunition?”
“We know where that came from: Lake City, Missouri. There’s no other source. But when we go looking it’ll have passed through eighteen hands and a couple of blinds and there won’t be any way in hell we can trace it.”
“So what do we do?”
“Hope we get lucky. That’s mostly what cops do.”
“You’ve talked to the good folks at SeCure.”
“And to at least three of their lawyers. The company has no official connection with this alleged shooter, knows nothing of his identity or whereabouts, and perhaps it would be best if we did not return for any further chats without a court order.”
“I almost had him, Don.”
“So did I.”
“Oh yeah? That’s not the way I remember it. But thanks, man. Talk to you soon.”
I hung up the phone, went over and sat at the bar. Place called Bob’s I’d never been before, a few blocks town and lakeside of Tulane and Carrollton. Lots of Bobbie Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.
The bartender stepped up and looked at me without saying anything. One of those places.
“Bourbon,” I said. “Preferably from a bottle with some kind of label on it.”
He grabbed one out of the well (yes, it had a label) and up-ended it over a shot glass. Put the bottle back with one hand as he set the shot glass before me with the other.
“Been a long walk,” someone said from the open door behind me. “I could do with one of those myself.” I knew it was open because the bar had flooded with light. And since the whole place was maybe ten feet square, I didn’t have to squint too hard to see who it was once I turned around.
“Is there a bar anywhere in New Orleans you don’t frequent?”
“Course there is. Way bars are apt to come and go, sometimes they don’t stay around long enough to become in-co-operated in my i-tinery.”
“Their loss, I’m sure.”
I signaled the bar
tender for two more bourbons as Doo-Wop took the seat beside me. The bartender could barely restrain himself. The joy of it all.
Doo-Wop drank off the bourbon between breaths.
“Hoping I might run into you, Captain,” Doo-Wop said.
I waited. Finally I waved another drink his way.
“Many thanks.” But he hadn’t touched it yet. “Papa and I had a drink together over on Oak. I don’t know, could of been the Oak Leaf. Papa says there’s a man out there looking for something special. On the loop’s the way he put it. Told me, that captain friend of yours might want to know about this. You want to know about this, Captain?”
“What’s the man looking for, Doo-Wop? You know?”
“You mind if I go ahead and have a taste, Captain? Tongue’s near stuck to the roof of my mouth.”
I told him sure, go ahead.
He put the empty glass down. “Many thanks.” Then: “Man wants a Winchester, model 70. And spare change, Papa says to tell you. That worth something to you, Captain?”
I slapped my last ten on the bar, then picked it up and put down a fifty instead. The fifty I always carried in my shoe, under the insole, back then-to beat vagrancy laws, for bail, whatever. What the hell, I could live a few weeks off that ten. Sure I could.
“Yeah. Papa said it would be.”
Doo-Wop motioned grandiosely, and the bartender loomed up like a ghost ship at the bar’s horizon.
“Double brandy. And one for my friend here-whatever he wants.”
“Where is this man, Doo-Wop?”
“Papa said you’d ask that.”
“Right.”
“Papa says come see him.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“He’s one of mine, Lewis.”
The Oak Leaf looks like something that dragged itself, by brute force of will, out of the thirties into present time. Cypress walls, pressed-tin ceiling, rooms so narrow that people turn sideways to pass. Makes you think how the city itself is a kind of sprawling memory. A few blocks away, the Mississippi waits to flood all this. Only the Corps of Engineers, that brute force of will, holds it back.
“You have to understand,” the old mercenary said. “None of us ever belonged-here, or anywhere else. We’re a society to ourselves.”