Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life

by Mosley, Walter

  “Pedro!” she said.

  “He’s not listening, but I don’t blame you for the try.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No.”

  I rummaged through the little bag for a while and then looked up. Lana was beautiful. So what if she wanted me dead? I was already pretty much dead to the world. I could die one more time again in her arms.

  I was about to drift off into a morass of individual desires and disgusts, but I reined these digressions in.

  “Where’s the key, Lana?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Not only do you have it, it is on your person.”

  “Why would say that?”

  “Because you plan for every exigency,” some overeducated soul in my entourage offered. “And you were worried that maybe you’d fail to kill me again.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill you.”

  “Where’s the key?”

  Suddenly, without my cognition, Lance came out of nowhere and, taking Lana’s pistol in my left hand, he cocked back the hammer and pressed the muzzle against her temple. I didn’t know that I was left-handed. I didn’t realize what Lance had been planning.

  “You killed me, bitch!”

  “Don’t! Please, don’t!” Her right shoulder went way up with this new threat.

  In the background of my mind, a struggle had broken out. Murderers and the murdered called for vengeance. God-fearing souls begged for forgiveness. The cacophony of mental cries in anguish and rage was almost deafening. But I couldn’t hear the words because Lance was trying to pull the trigger and I was doing my utmost to stop him.

  I got the upper hand because there was a hierarchy that I, more or less, controlled. The hand holding the gun belonged to me, unless I lost focus. But once I rededicated my mind to constrain physical motion, Lance was displaced.

  When he understood that he could not kill her immediately, he started to talk.

  “You killed me, Lana, and now I’m gonna do that to you. You took away the sun and rain and good whiskey. I was ready to run with you, and you just shot me like dog.”

  A memory of Bernard “Berry” Richards came up before the bellicose assembly in my mind. He was wearing dark clothes drenched in glistening blood. He was begging for his life, but Lance did not heed him. Lance killed his brother and moved on without even a prayer.

  Lana, for her part, chose silence as her plea. She looked into the eyes of the many, and they relented, granting her a reprieve.

  They did, but I didn’t.

  When Lance tried to put the pistol down, I held it in place.

  “The key,” I said. “You hand it to me of your own free will, and I will send you on your way. Don’t, and I will shoot you and take it off your corpse.”

  A minute went by. My hand began to cramp, but I kept from shooting.

  Lana reached down and took off a scarlet pump. Therein, taped along the arch, was the key to her survival.

  Lance was crying again.

  I smiled and put down the gun.

  Across the street, I saw a familiar black van.

  “Put it down on the dash and get out,” I said.

  “You’re not taking my car.”

  “Au contraire.”

  “What about Pedro?”

  “He’ll be safer with me than with you.”

  “Can I at least have my purse?”

  I took a hundred-dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to her.

  “Take a taxi back home and wait there for forty-eight hours. Don’t go anywhere or talk to anyone. I’ll send you the bag in a couple of days. Do what I say and righteous retribution will be denied.”

  “How did you survive?” she asked.

  “What did you do with the body?” It was a question I had almost forgotten to ask in the distress of the moment. After all, I barely averted a murder and maybe made six hundred thousand dollars in moments.

  “I called the Moving Man, Ed Coffers.”

  “You drugged me and shot me in the back.”

  “Through the heart just like you always said. You used to say that a shot like that would make cops think that it was an amateur job.”

  “But you turned me over to Ed. Nobody ever finds the bodies he gets.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side.”

  “The safe side of murder,” I said. “That’d be good title for a novel.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Get out.”

  She opened the driver’s side door and was about to get out. Then she turned. I put a hand over the pistol, just to be on the safe side, but she didn’t pose a threat.

  “It wasn’t Ed who came,” she said.

  “No?”

  “It was this black guy who called himself Winters. I asked him why he was there when I called the number I had for Ed. He said that Ed had started a national concern and did his service through franchises all over the country.”

  “Why you tellin’ me this?”

  “Same reason you aren’t killing me, I guess.”

  Lana got out of the car and walked half a block before hailing a taxi. I sat there side by side with Lance Richards.

  “She was something else,” he said in the central chamber of my mind.

  “She slaughtered you.”

  “And I killed my brother, walked away without a prayer or a backward look.”

  “What would your brother have done if the tables were turned?”

  “He’d have tried to save me and, failing that, he would have left me alive, taking the chance that I wouldn’t have turned him over.”

  This was Lance Richards, only he was telling the truth for maybe the first time in his life. He’d always blamed others when he had to hurt them. They made him mad or were unconscious threats, they would have done the same thing or they were fools who deserved what they got.

  No more.

  The impression of Lance dissipated, and he blended into the chorus of my mind becoming one of the many murmuring voices that continually echoed in the background of my perceptions—like a host of monks singing Gregorian chants at a twenty-four-hour chapel on the border of Vatican City of the future.

  When Rosetta finally woke up, I was sitting at her kitchen table, using one of my many personae to make Lana’s driver’s license into Rose’s, lifting Rose’s image from her own license.

  “Have you been up all night?” she asked, the silk kimono falling off her left shoulder.

  I had driven Lana’s car to the Kasbah Kasino’s outside parking lot, leaving the man named Pedro near consciousness but still stunned. Dr. George Forsythe, one of my more educated skull brothers, had decided that the would-be murderer would live and so I left him in the backseat.

  From the Kasbah, I made my way to an alley behind Las Vegas High School where one of the city’s rare brick walls stood. I used one of these bricks as my private safe-deposit box for various properties that would not be secure on my body, with my friends, or in my house or car. I loosened the mortar around the only black brick in the wall and pulled out the two-quart, triple-strength baggie. Therein, I had secured various proofs of other peoples’ crimes committed either with me or in circumstances I had become aware of. And there was the safe-deposit box key that I put there only a few hours before being slain by my lovely partner. I had taken this precaution because I knew Siggy Petron had put a black spot next to my name.

  Then I took a radio-cab to Rosetta’s house and spent the rest of the morning using the skills of Johnetta Reis, a very competent counterfeiter.

  Johnetta’s expertise was foreign passports. She could whip up Japanese or Hungarian papers with paper clips and Polaroid stock. A simple Nevada license, especially since Lana had so generously donated hers, was no trouble at all.

  So when Rosetta came in on me and asked if I had slept at all, I said, “A lot on my mind.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Giving you
a document to get us into a certain bank in Phoenix.”

  “That’s where the money is?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re not planning to rob that bank, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. The money was already stolen by somebody else.”

  “But the bank is holding it legal,” she said, making this statement a condition with her tone of voice.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, wondering what voice in my choir expressed itself with such humility.

  “How much is it?”

  “At least fifty thousand,” I said, “minus the five thousand I already gave you.”

  “You don’t know me, Jack. How can you be sure I won’t turn you in?”

  “I’ve already been turned into something that I don’t at all understand,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  At that moment, Rosetta’s phone sounded in my pocket.

  When I pulled it out, she said, “Why do you have my phone?”

  “Just to make a call about our money,” I said as I touched the green icon at the bottom of the tiny screen. “Hello?”

  “Lance?”

  “Rolly?”

  “Roaches told me to call you and say when some chick called and asked about you. I gave her this number.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fournier. And tell Roaches that he doesn’t have to worry about me.”

  There was another call coming in on the line.

  “I gotta go, pal,” I said. “She’s already calling.”

  The new number had a Cincinnati area code. I smiled while switching calls.

  “Anna? Is that you?”

  “Ron?”

  “The next best thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Listen, babe, I’m going to give you an address. Come by yourself.”

  “What kind of trouble are you in?”

  “You will have to look me in the eyes and hear my words to even have a chance to understand.”

  Anna was always the brains of our partnership. I resented her when the chief paired us up. But over time, I came to realize that she had the gift of cold logic, which kept you alive in the field.

  “What’s the address?” she asked.

  “Who was that?” Rosetta asked when I handed her the phone.

  “The woman who’s gonna watch our ass.”

  “Your wife?”

  “You are the only woman in my life,” I said honestly.

  This declaration surprised Ms. Lawson. She was a little defeated by it.

  “You need me to leave?”

  “It would be best if your face wasn’t on Anna Wolf’s radar,” I said. “She’s a cop, of sorts, and more efficient than any shark in the sea.”

  Rosetta smiled then. “I knew when you came in the restaurant that you were trouble, Jack Strong. And I could see in your eyes that you knew I was a woman who liked a man like you.”

  “Go to your mother’s house. I’ll call your cell phone when it’s time for us to jump. I took your car last night but you can take my T-Bird, it’s parked out front. The key is probably in the visor.”

  Sitting in the living room of the modest house with the blinds drawn and all the lights on, I cleaned the pistol that Tamashanter had lifted from a corpse. Now and again, I considered going out to the black van and asking them who the hell they were and why were they following me. But such a move was ill advised—I knew. The men in that car had known me as a dead man, as a whole barn piled high with dead men, women, and children—and maybe an animal or two. That was a terrible kind of knowledge that might repeat itself if I wasn’t careful.

  The murmuring chorus that made up the background of my mind was very quiet while I sat and thought and cleaned. I suspected that I, and at times my needs, controlled the level of interference that the many I was comprised of could exert.

  When the door chimes sounded, I had just spent a good hour in almost absolute internal silence.

  While I approached the door, points of view began to pop up like unbidden ads on a computer screen when you’re surfing the net.

  “It might be the gangsters,” someone painted in red letters on a brick wall.

  “There’s a man out there,” came the paraphrased snippet from a paranoid blues song.

  “Let me get that door,” Sergeant Mortman offered.

  Ignoring my disparate sensibilities, I pulled the door open.

  Anna had put on some weight in the last seven years, and the small lines around her eyes were just a bit more pronounced. She was still lovely however. …

  This last thought surprised me. The Ron Tremont in me never thought, or allowed myself to think, about this bronze-skinned woman romantically. We were partners. After a few years, we were even friends. She tried to give me CPR and mouth-to-mouth on that desolate highway in the early morning, when I was dying and she had tears running down her face. …

  “Who are you?” she said, letting her hand drop into the open purse hanging from her right shoulder.

  “You bring Little Benny or Big Bertha?” I asked referring to her pistols of choice.

  The confusion on her face brought a friendly smile to my lips and eyes.

  “I always told you that I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but …” I began the old quote.

  “… if it was true, they’d bring you back in the body of a federal felon just to show you how the other half lives,” she said completing the quote. “Ron, it doesn’t look like you. Not even a little bit.”

  “Come on in. I’ll make you an egg sandwich.”

  I turned my back on her and walked toward the kitchen. Every word I said was calculated to remind her of her dead partner, Ron Tremont. I was him: the big fat white guy who felt that his country, culture, and race were the only things holding back the darkness that the rest of the world represented.

  In the kitchen, he had the five-six FBI agent sit on a high stool next to the countertop stove. Bacon was sizzling in a sectioned cast-iron pan while two whole-wheat slices from the refrigerator waited patiently in the toaster.

  “I know you like ’em runny,” I said as she stared.

  “What name are you going by?” she asked.

  “Jack Strong.”

  “And how is it that Jack Strong says all the things that my dead partner used to say seven years ago?”

  There was tension in her face and eyes. No one but Ron Tremont would have seen it. That, more than anything else so far, convinced me that I was some kind of abomination set loose upon the world for reasons unknown.

  I melted butter in the two smaller squares of the skillet and broke eggs into them.

  “Did you see the black van parked outside?” I asked.

  “They’re watching you?”

  I depressed the lever on the toaster and said, “There’s no mustard, but she has mayonnaise. I sliced some onion and tomato, too.”

  “Why are they on you?” she replied.

  I took that as my cue to tell the story of Jack Strong: how he woke up in a hotel bed with scars and patches, a black man’s ring finger and a woman’s pinky, with memories so broad and far-reaching that he does not believe that he is just one man or woman, or maybe not even wholly human. I left out the part about the slaughter of three thugs in a back room at the Steadman Casino—Anna was a law enforcement official, after all.

  Her response was to question me in detail about memories of being Ron Tremont. Foods I liked and transgressions I committed. For a while there, the fat man had a hot and heavy affair with a nineteen-year-old named, of all things, Cherry. He didn’t think that Anna knew about the liaison, but now she disabused him of that notion.

  “Tell me the nickname, the real nickname,” she demanded, “that Ron had for Chastity ‘Cherry’ Hirsch.”

  The FBI agent, residing somewhere in the folds of our brain, got shy, but that didn’t matter. I knew the name.

  I smiled and nodded and said, “Cherry Bomb.”

/>   I handed her the bacon and egg sandwich and she started eating, shaking her head as she did.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  “Chastity would explode in that Mongoose Motel room we used.”

  “Not that,” my ex-partner said with a wry grin. She never approved of my skull brother’s sexual predilections. “You. I mean you’re sitting here looking like some Vegas hood who’s been doing push-ups out in the prison yard with all the memories of my lizard-brained ex-partner. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Mason Daub was investigating you there that last year,” I said, using my most intimate knowledge.

  “Me?”

  “I didn’t understand it at the time,” I continued while she chewed. “Now I see that unconsciously he resented a black woman on the team. He found out that you were involved with a group in college that an earlier administration had labeled subversive.”

  “What group?” she asked, gazing at him with eyes that even her old friend could not read.

  “Sisters of the American Revolution.”

  It wasn’t anything, just some foolishness that three black girls at Wesleyan College cooked up to feel political and empowered in a white world. They had little meetings and made plans to take over Corporate America by attaining positions in hiring and placing very capable people of color in key positions while at the same time hiring incompetent white men for similar jobs. That way, they figured, they’d take over from the inside. It was pretty smart, but Anna and her friends were just playing. It didn’t mean a thing.

  Too bad that one of the Sisters later took up with a pretty but bent young brother named Filo Drammon. Filo was stealing from a warehouse he worked for in Massachusetts. He’d take a couple of handfuls of computer chips that were in transit, throw them into his pockets, and drive them down to Florida once a month where some enterprising offspring of ex-Sandinistas would smuggle the government-controlled technology down to Cuba.

  That made Filo’s crime interstate and international, and so when the search of the innocent woman’s home turned up a diary that mentioned a current day FBI agent, our supervisor, Mason Daub was notified.

  In the beginning, Ron Tremont also despised Anna. He had changed his perspective but, for reasons of job security, had not shared this new opinion with his white compatriots. So when Daub approached him, he pulled out a file that a previous supervisor had him compile, implicating Daub in some fairly innocent prostitution ring run by his brother. Daub just passed along money and phone numbers, but it was enough for the main office to send him into early retirement—if they ever found out.