While Jake Ellis had gotten ready, when Mrs. Garrett gagged again, Mr. Garrett had seen an opening and hurried, bent, and picked up one of his discarded blades with his left hand. That gunshot popped and he dropped the blade. Another shot from the .380 added an extra exclamation point to the conversation. Garrett stood, held his bloodied right arm.
Jake Ellis grinned. “Want to tell me all about Dick Gregory’s book now?”
Garrett was defiant, wanted to call Jake Ellis a nigger again. It was in his eyes.
Jake Ellis stood tall. “Nigger, nigger, nigger. Well, this nigger has your Darwin Award.”
I said, “This ain’t about that slur.”
Jake Ellis said, “Oh, bruv, we are way beyond fighting over European slurs. Way beyond that. This has nothing to do with San Bernardino. This man came to where I live, to where you live, bricked my car, set my town on fire, kidnapped you, and he has abused his wife?”
Monkey-faced Garrett barked, “You’re still a nigger. You’ll never be more than a nigger, and you know that. Being an African nigger hanging with an American nigger won’t make you a better nigger, nigger.”
I saw why Garrett had been a problem for San Bernardino. No one told a king what he could not do. He was still the fucking king of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit mansion.
Done pretending, Garrett attacked the weakest of the lot. “You cunt. You worthless cunt.”
“Fake Christian. You haven’t been to church once since we married in one.”
“This is your last chance, Elaine. Don’t walk away from me. Throw me that gun.”
“This is my gun. I bought this with my money. You can’t get mad and take this away from me like you will my allowance or clothes or my shoes or my car. This. Belongs. To. Me.”
I moved and Jake Ellis looked at me. He saw me pulling pillowcases off pillows.
“What you think you doing?”
I said, “When you get tired of hitting the heavy bag, it’s my turn to tenderize that fool.”
Garrett snapped, “Motherfucker, I will rip your balls off.”
“Nah, bruv, I got this.” Jake Ellis held up his big mitts, hands of stone, and shooed me away, untracked me with his determination. “I’m the only unlawful detainer we need tonight.”
“Serious?”
“You mad, bruv?”
“Not mad. You know I got mad love for ya.”
I dropped the pillows at my feet. My joggers felt wetter, heavier, colder. My dark skin was ashen, pale, hands wrinkled from the water and looked like my flesh had aged a hundred years.
Mrs. Garrett said, “His eyes were supposed to be on the sparrow. I’m the sparrow. I am. He was supposed to watch over me.” Then she made a hard face, wiped tears again. “Alexa. Play Biggie Smalls. I know I’m West Coast, should play some Tupac, because word to God, I’ve been ready to die since I was born. But this special moment calls for some Notorious B.I.G. Play ‘Somebody’s Gotta Die.’” Mrs. Garrett gave that command, then added, “And play that shit loud. Play it on the Apple Booty setting. Not the low setting for Dickie Bird. Let’s get turnt up.”
Notorious B.I.G. came to life, took over ten thousand square feet from the grave.
She reiterated, “Alexa, Apple Booty setting. Song on repeat until I say otherwise.”
Hard-core rap filled the room like deadly smoke that heralded the start of an out-of-control wildfire. So did the anger in Jake Ellis’s eyes. His expression was that of a fighter at the opening bell, and he was ready to reduce a city block to ash. He was a fire that could be seen from outer space. Garrett raised his wounded arms the best he could, eyes wide, gunless, consumed with fear, and he backed up across the carpeted floor as Jake Ellis danced closer, backed around furniture that made this room look like the perfect showroom, stumbled over shoes, and when his back touched the wall, when he was cornered, when there was no room left for flight, his eyes widened more, and he knew he had to fight one-on-one. Garrett screamed like he was releasing all fear, like he was summoning some superpower, and went at Jake Ellis, raised his wounded arm and took the first swing at the Ghanaian who had trained on concrete in Africa’s sun. He went after a man who had never been knocked down, a man who never lost a fight.
While that one-sided fight went on, I looked back, but no one was behind me.
Mrs. Garrett was gone. I caught her limping toward her closet, hoodie down as she ran her hands over her bald head, did that over and over, remembering her hair, her vanity, rubbed like she couldn’t believe that this was where a promising life had taken her. She stopped limping, turned around in bits, slowed by agony, looked back, and she saw Jake Ellis handing her husband his ass ten times over. She nodded, content, then frowned at Mr. Garrett, gave daggers to a man who had said revealing things when she was drowning. He probably woke up each day boasting of his genetic superiority, and she knew he had considered her Compton relatives inferior people. White trash. He had probably told her they had better genes at Walmart than the gene pool in her lower-class family. Whatever she was thinking, while Biggie Smalls gave a beat that two fighters didn’t follow, she nodded at me, then closed her double doors.
She hobbled away from her zookeeper and struggled to get back into her cage. Gun in hand, the wounded creature went where she felt safest from the architect of her pain.
Even angry, even after being abused, that woman wasn’t capable of killing. She couldn’t even watch her abuser, the man who didn’t hesitate to do the same to her, being beaten.
He was still her husband. Maybe she punished herself for her choices.
I understood. Once upon a time, I had been the cuckold, and I understood. You loved them. From your soul, you loved them. Right or wrong, you loved them. Through the pain you loved them. And no matter how wrong they did you, you still couldn’t kill ’em.
Each day was a new day and you hoped it would turn around.
Each day you hoped what was going south would self-correct and find true north.
You told yourself if you loved them hard enough, they would have to love you. You knew if you could make them love you all barriers would lift. You hoped that prenups, legal or metaphorical, would go away. You believed in the power of love. You believed in your love story.
But Time laughed. And eventually you realized nothing would change. What you felt was only what you felt. There was no love by osmosis. The one you loved would never feel what you felt.
They’d never love you. Two would never become one. You realized that where you were, ten degrees hotter than the basement of West Hell, was as good as it was going to get.
And in the end, all you could do was bow your goddamn head in defeat and walk away.
I was more worried about Mrs. Garrett than anything else.
Some of her last words had chilled me. “. . . because word to God, I’ve been ready to die since I was born.”
She had said that like it was her mission statement. Like this life was over.
While an incensed Ghanaian easily outboxed her husband, while a true pugilist from Africa outfought a silver spoon who had boxed behind the walls of Princeton, while a man who learned to fight under Africa’s unrelenting sun knocked her husband to the ground, stomped him, then beat him with a lamp so hard he would earn cuts that needed a dozen staples, while a blow from the lamp broke Princeton’s wrist, while solid face shots knocked half his teeth out, Mrs. Garrett was in that room, alone, wounded, humiliated, despondent, with a loaded gun.
“Somebody’s gotta die.”
Biggie Smalls rose from the dead and stressed that theme.
“Somebody’s gotta die.”
A hit dog was gonna holler, and with each hit, Garrett howled like a bitch in heat. But my heart drummed hard because I was afraid Mrs. Garrett was about to blow her brains out.
Many people walked to that door and pondered the abyss, but not all tried to enter
.
I’d be lying if I said checking out never crossed my mind. I’d dealt with depression in my mid-twenties. I didn’t even know I was depressed. Like other black men, I just called it the blues, then put on some music to match my mood; then it was me and Jack Daniel’s working it out.
I stepped over everything that had been wrecked, took deep breaths, exhaled and shoved aside things that had been turned over, stepped and had to avoid broken glass. Garrett was begging for mercy as I held the wall and tried to get out of this boxing ring and hurry to that double door. I wanted to bang and make sure she wasn’t in her closet about to buy an e-ticket to Jesus. One bullet could turn her closet into a mausoleum.
The moment I stepped out of the enormous bedroom and put my wet feet onto the wooden floors, the second I faced four more king-size bedrooms on this level, with Biggie masking any noise from downstairs, I saw movement. I jerked, paused, and as Biggie Smalls gave the beats to Garrett’s beatdown, my heart thumped hard as I looked toward the front of the manor. I took a step, then froze and stared through a dimly lit home, squinted and tried to see beyond magnificent chandeliers, spied toward the circular driveway in front of the estate.
Two black SUVs were out there in the dark, bushwhackers creeping out of each one.
CHAPTER 28
JAKE ELLIS STOPPED standing over Garrett like Muhammad Ali had done when he taunted Sonny Liston, and ran to me when I roared his name. Both of his hands were covered in once virginal pillowcases that had been turned a bright revenge red, each Rorschached in blood.
I said, “We got company.”
Jake Ellis asked, “Koti?”
“No sirens. No flashing lights. And they’re just sitting there like they are waiting for us to finish up and come out so they can put us in a full set of restraints.”
“Handcuffs, leg irons, and waist chain, and security boxes over the restraints’ keyholes.”
Jake removed the bloodied pillowcases, dropped them on the shiny wooden floor.
He asked, “Do you remember the layout? How many exits this maze have?”
“Too many to count.”
“Each exit is an entrance. So they can hit us from a dozen entrances.”
“Jumping that wall in the back might be the only out.”
“I wish the other side of that wall was a part of Mexico that went into the heart of Ghana.”
“Has to be a ladder around here. But we’d still have to drop to the other side.”
“We’d have to skydive and run across the neighbor’s sprawling estate. Floodlights might hit us the second our feet touched ground. Then we’d have to find a way out of that yard.”
I said, “Two black faces jumping a white man’s wall and running like Tubman.”
“People at the mansion on the other side of the back wall are Chinese. Bruv, the Chinese have an entire museum equating blacks to animals in China. A lot of them hate blacks and despise Africans. The way we look right now, in this zip code, we jump that wall and they might shoot us down like we’re two King Kongs on top of the Empire State Building.”
I spoke louder than the bumping music. “What are our options?”
Jake Ellis responded in kind. “Your gun ran dry.”
“Don’t forget the cache of weapons we left sleeping at the bottom of the pool.”
“We wrapped them good?”
“The Glock I managed to pull from Davy Jones’s locker worked fine.”
“Then I’m sure the other handguns and the assault rifles will be okay too.”
I nodded. “We need to get to those. But we don’t know what’s out back.”
Jake Ellis went back to the Garretts’ bedroom. Sounded like he hit Garrett five or six more times, then came back with the two blades that Garrett had held when he faced us. Jake Ellis handed me one. We went down the stairs bit by bit, expecting trouble to be waiting, maybe with guns. At ground level, the brother I had left behind on my journey up was still there, on his belly, on the cold marble floor, hands over his head. Biggie’s rant masked our descent. The traitor looked up, saw me and Jake Ellis, saw the blades, and cursed to God. He shook but kept his hands spread out like he was waiting on LAPD to take him away.
He’d been free to go a long time ago, but not all men knew how to be free.
Jake Ellis asked, “What’s the plan, Mississippi?”
“Front door, Ghana.”
“Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“You know it.”
“You’ve got balls almost as big as mine.”
“Bro, I was just in freezing water.”
“Bruv, steel balls don’t shrivel. Who’s going first?”
“Neither one of us.”
I called back to the terrified young man on the floor.
I told him, “Get up, bushwhacker. Get on your feet, Stepin Fetchit, and come here.”
* * *
—
THE MOMENT HE stepped out, it was like being surrounded by SWAT. Every man on that team was either white or could pass for white. The men threw the bushwhacker down, put him down hard enough to break bones, then had knees in his back and neck, practically suffocated the brother. Not until then did they call out to their boss. When we heard the name they called, blades in hand, Jake Ellis followed me out the front door. Four guns aimed at us. Red dots moving back and forth across our hearts. We stood where we were, blinded by bright light.
They came at us, ready to put us down, barking orders as we dropped the blades.
CHAPTER 29
THEIR LEADER WAS a bearcat, as lethal as LAPD, as no-nonsense as Olivia Pope, and moneyed like an A-list movie star. This crew didn’t work for Garrett. They were here for Garrett on behalf of their superior. The back door to the second SUV was opened and their employer was let out. She was a drop-dead-gorgeous woman of a certain age who had slayed in her twenties and was still slaying now. She was timeless, ageless, and made being in her fifties look like she was barely in her thirties. Even at these moments before sunrise, she was style and grace, flawless in a hot white jumpsuit, iced up, and had a physique that’d send most women scrambling for the gym. Body, hair, skin, fashion, she lived in a state of consistent slayage. She was a doll. A real Sheba, with amazing gams. The word on the street was that her father had been a hard, shotgun-carrying blues man people called Big Slim. That one-legged, hard-drinking Mississippi gangster had been a rough, tough, mean son of a bitch who had run a pool hall in North Hollywood, a pool hall that had prison rules and housed a den of con men, thieves, murderers, double-crossers, and assassins. When boss lady was young the old man had sent her away to protect her. It had been better that no one knew he had a kid. Couldn’t be exploited. He lived in that pool hall and didn’t want her to pick up on the life in North Hollywood, so he had sent her to live in San Bernardino, an hour east of LA, near the military bases and the area formerly known as Sunnymead, where real estate was cheaper and the area was considered safer than the drive-by culture in LA. Far enough away, but close enough for him to drive and see her once or twice a month. When Big Slim’s love child, a child some said he made with a Jamaican streetwalker one night, landed east in that place some people called West Hell, which was more about a part of hell itself than any geographical accuracy, she was barely a teen, but trouble was already in her blood. She ran things to the point that many gave her the city’s name.
She was called San Bernardino. She was our boss.
She was here. She had left her throne.
I guessed we were in trouble.
She smelled like French wine and Italian perfume, both top-shelf.
Pasadena smelled like desert, lingering smog, and sudden death.
I asked, “Garrett paid his debt? Or you here to collect?”
San Bernardino said, “The transfer finally came through, ten seconds before midnight.”
“Why
are you here? You only show your face on Cadillac jobs.”
“You didn’t think I’d let Garrett talk to me that way and live to tell about it, did you? He messed with my cabbage, then called me talking out the side of his neck, popping off like he wants a Chicago overcoat. You think I was going to let him talk to me like that and call it a day?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t think you would.”
“You have one minute. What happened here?”
Her security detail at our back, Garrett’s sole bushwhacker still on the ground, I told San Bernardino as much as I could. She saw we had been through hell since the sun had set.
She asked, “Any bodies?”
“Some out back. Maybe three are ready to be fitted for a pine box. Some were injured pretty bad, because this was life or death, so could need four or five hearses by now.”
She didn’t react, nodded like she already knew. “Who did what to whom?”
“I shot a few. Jake gave two a back-door parole.”
“Then this spot is already hotter than Death Valley.”
“And like LA after the Rodney King verdict, it’s the last place you need to be.”
“I came to confront Garrett. No one talks to me that way. No one.”
“Sleep on that anger.”
“Are you telling me what to do, Ken Swift?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Was there some promotion in my organization that I am unaware of?”
“Was only a suggestion.”
“Did I ask for suggestions? Did I accidentally butt dial you for a consultation?”
“No, ma’am. No, you didn’t. Was just trying to make you aware of the situation.”
“Watch your tone. Don’t get too familiar with me. And no mansplaining. I hate that shit.”
“Sorry if I overstepped my bounds.”
“You did overstep. Take your brake fluid and slow your roll.”
“I apologize.”
“Never let people walk over you. I came to collect my respect. That is one thing Big Slim taught me, if nothing else. My daddy said to never let anyone insult you and be able to walk away. He said everybody will talk down to a colored woman, talk to her any kinda way, but it was my job to never let them get away with it. That’s my job and I’m showing up to work my shift.”
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 28