by Joe Ide
Isaiah kicked down the door and charged in, Dodson right behind him. The barrage continued. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Bullets coming from the hallway blew up dishes on the counter, punched holes in the microwave. The girls were hysterical, curled up on the car seat, hands up protectively. “Get out, get out!” Isaiah shouted, and they scrambled past him, escaping through the back door. Ken stuck his head out from behind the washing machine.
“Over here!” he said. Isaiah and Dodson rushed over and pulled him and Benny to their feet. “Thank God!” Ken said.
The Red Poles came stumbling into the room, two of them bloody and crawling, Skinny covering their retreat. He saw Isaiah, turned to shoot, and was smacked in the head with something that went poof!—white powder covering him like a handful of flour. He screamed and choked, his hands clawing at his eyes, Isaiah and Dodson hustling the captives to the door.
Leo left Zar and went down the hall, realizing only now that he’d been shot. His vision was going on and off like a flashlight with a fading battery. His brain wasn’t connected to his legs anymore, and they were moving by rote. He thought about Misty and that as soon as this shit was over with he’d marry her. Maybe she was right about luff.
He entered the back room, stepped over the two Charlie Chans, who if they weren’t dying already were pretty close to it. Something in the air burned Leo’s eyes and scalded his throat. That skinny asshole was staggering around screaming. Leo shot him behind his ear and went out the back door. He could feel himself shutting down, a cloak of chain mail weighing on him, everything dimming and getting farther away. He could just make out the black guys helping Ken and Benny cross the parking lot. He raised his gun and aimed at Benny. He wanted him to know that he hadn’t escaped from Leo the Lionheart. “Hey, Benny,” he said. “Pay me my—” He never heard the gunshots or saw the mama-san behind him, screaming as she shot him five times in the back.
Chapter Thirteen
I Am Killing You for Sure.
Isaiah was getting desperate. He had nothing to link Marcus with Seb except a phone number in a work log and that didn’t equate to murder or anything else. It was time to take action. It reminded him of the Black the Knife case and trying to kidnap Goliath, the giant killer pit bull. He could either do something dangerous, bordering on stupid, or give up and walk away. He wished Dodson was with him.
At five in the afternoon, Seb came out of the Nyanza Bar. Isaiah followed him to a modest house in Cambodia Town. He was fidgety and apprehensive. If he came up dry here the investigation was over. Seb parked in the driveway and went inside. Isaiah watched from the Audi and did what he should have done a while ago. He got out his phone and did property searches on Seb’s addresses. The apartment, the condo, and the house were all owned by a corporation with a PO box for an address. Seb’s holding company. There was an IN ESCROW sign posted on Seb’s lawn and the Jaguar was brand-new. The previous one was only a couple of years old. New house, new car. Seb was going upscale.
The next morning, Isaiah returned at seven. A little after nine, Seb came out of the house and checked the front door to see if it was locked. He ran his eye over the Jaguar, not admiring it but inspecting, scrutinizing, looking for a dust mote, Isaiah thought. With the suit and cane, the neighbors probably thought he taught African studies at UCLA. Seb drove away but Isaiah waited, wary of Seb’s OCD. He might come back to confirm or correct something, and ten minutes later he did, to see if the front door was really locked. Still skeptical, he got back into the car and left again. Isaiah waited another twenty minutes and drove around to the alley behind the house. He got an extension ladder out of the backseat and gathered some tools.
The attenuator box was mounted under an eave. It enclosed the siren or bell that would sound when a motion sensor inside was tripped. Isaiah set the ladder in place and climbed up to it. The box was metal, with ventilation slots and a key lock. Easy to pry apart, but there might be a secondary mechanism that would go off if you forced it open. Isaiah took a can of liquid Styrofoam, put the straw into a slot, and filled the box. The liquid would harden in a couple of minutes and encase the alarm so you could barely hear it.
Isaiah set up at the back door and used a twenty-volt HSS drill with a cobalt bit to drill a hole on either side of the keyhole, cutting the screws that held the locking mechanism in place. As soon as he opened the door, the motion sensors would pick him up and send a distress signal to the monitoring company. They would call Seb to see if it was a false alarm, but he would be twenty minutes away and if the monitoring company called the police it would take a while for them to get there. Isaiah had once made a study of police response times to burglar alarms. Over ninety percent of them were false so they were low priority for the police, especially residential, the response times ranging from forty-five minutes to two days. For a residential alarm call in Cambodia Town the police might never come.
Isaiah slipped inside. He couldn’t hear the alarm, the Styrofoam trick had worked. The living room was furnished with expensive white leather furniture. The floors were white, the walls were white, colorful pillows as accents; not a wrinkle, fingerprint, footprint, or speck of anything anywhere Isaiah could see. The hardwood floors were a grayish white. The grain wasn’t maple, cherry, or oak. Something else. Bamboo maybe. A jade ashtray, an ornamental lighter, and three coffee table books were laid out on the coffee table in a grid. A sterile arrangement of fake lilies was set on the mirrored mantel, everything in the room just so. It was as if Seb had taken a page out of a catalogue, called the company, and said Give me everything in the picture. Yes, the lilies too. African sculptures and masks were placed around without conviction like Seb had thought Well, I suppose I must put up something. Isaiah was starting to feel foolish, wondering what he could possibly find that would link Seb to the murder. A diary? A video of Seb admitting he was the killer? A note to Gahigi to steal a car so they could run down Marcus? The only reason he didn’t leave was because he was already here. Shut up and keep looking, he said to himself.
Gahigi was in the basement, lying on his narrow bed. Seb had offered him the second bedroom but Gahigi liked it down here. The impenetrable walls and the damp cement smell. The transom of frosted glass, narrow as a gun slit. The spindly chair. His sparse wardrobe hanging on pegs, his two pairs of sneakers lined up beneath them. Seb said it looked like a jail cell. But to Gahigi, it was a fortress. Come down the staircase and you’d be an open target for the .45 he kept duct-taped to the headboard. Seb wanted to decorate the place but Gahigi refused. This felt right. This was his due. He lit a cigarette. He didn’t know what he was going to do today or the next or the next. He thought he should be making a decision, but he didn’t know what to decide. When he tried to think of something, all he saw was a long road of red earth leading over a hill into the bright Rwandan sun.
He had a cold. Nothing serious. Sniffles and a slight cough. Seb insisted he stay home. His plans were reaching their conclusion, and the last thing he needed was to get sick. Gahigi was pulling on his pants when he heard the footsteps. He looked up and tracked them across the ceiling. He hadn’t heard Seb’s car arrive. It was someone else. An intruder.
Isaiah went into the office first, as immaculate as the living room, the smell of cigarettes suppressed with something springtime fresh. He opened a few drawers and cabinets but didn’t see anything relevant. There was nothing unusual in the room, the only oddities were copies of People and Los Angeles Magazine, stacked neatly on a shelf. Again, he wondered, what was he looking for?
In slow motion, Gahigi crept up the staircase, his bare feet going heel to toe, touching the steps like cat’s paws, the gun held across his chest, his other hand out in front of him, ready to move a branch or a palm leaf or anything else that might brush against his clothing and give him away. He reached the landing. The doorknob was old and squeaky. He deliberately hadn’t oiled it, leaving it as a trip wire to alert him if someone was invading his lair. Ever so gently, he turned the knob in tiny increments,
feeling the points where it tightened and easing it through. It was taking a long time, but he wouldn’t rush. Stealth, he had learned, was a greater weapon than a gun. He pushed open the door with his fingertips.
Isaiah looked at the framed photographs lining the hallway. There was one of Seb as a boy, sitting on a bare bed, bandages covering the stump where his leg was cut off. He was staring at the camera as if to say What now? Another photo showed Seb and Gahigi as boys. Gahigi’s scars were fresh and deep; his attacker nearby judging by the look on his face. The boys were dressed in scraps of filthy T-shirts and eating what looked like Cream of Wheat out of aluminum bowls. Another was of Seb in a hospital hallway standing on a prosthetic leg, probably for the first time, the loneliest boy in the world. There was Seb as a young man, posing under a rose arbor with an elderly white couple. Seb’s arm was around the woman, the man frowning and standing apart like he was hoping he’d be out of frame. There was another of Seb under the arched entry of an imposing old church. Isaiah guessed fourteenth, fifteenth century, a huge stained-glass window, twin spires, elaborate cornices and reliefs. Seb was wearing a glen plaid suit that was not new and too big for him. Probably a thrift shop purchase, but he seemed immensely pleased with himself. He looked like a servant who’d been given his employer’s cast-off clothes.
Without knowing why, Isaiah went down the hall with his camera, taking pictures of the photos. He was halfway along when he noticed that the light in the hallway had changed almost imperceptibly, the smell of cigarettes was slightly stronger. He turned and saw Gahigi standing fifteen feet away, and for the second time in as many days, he was looking down the barrel of a gun.
“Put your hands on de wall,” Gahigi said.
“Please don’t shoot me,” Isaiah said. “I didn’t take anything, I was just curious.” He shrugged with his palms out like he’d made a stupid mistake.
“Put your hands on de wall,” Gahigi said. “You will do dis now.”
Isaiah raised his hands chest-high. He tried to work up some tears but couldn’t. “Come on, man, please, just let me go, okay? Please?” Get closer to me, he thought. He remained stationary, thinking Gahigi was unlikely to shoot him in Seb’s house.
“Do what I am telling you!” Gahigi said. “Put your hands on de wall!”
Isaiah tried to look terrified, which wasn’t hard to do. Gahigi walked toward him, holding the gun straight out, his eyes like lanced blisters. Isaiah wished he’d practiced the move with Ari more. Come on, get closer.
“Do as I say or I am killing you now!” Gahigi shouted.
Okay, close enough. In almost one motion, Isaiah turned sideways, out of the line of fire, grabbing Gahigi’s wrist with one hand and the gun barrel with the other. He twisted the barrel upward as Gahigi pulled the trigger, BLAM! The bullet hitting high on the wall. Isaiah wrenched the gun away, but before he could turn it around, Gahigi lunged at him and they crashed to the floor. The gun slid away, and they grappled, Gahigi on top. He was trying to get his hands around Isaiah’s throat, but Isaiah straitjacketed him with his arms and legs, holding on like a bear cub on a tree trunk. Gahigi squirmed and torqued his upper body, his chin on Isaiah’s shoulder, his hot breath in Isaiah’s ear. Gahigi worked an arm free and waggled his body like a swimming snake. Isaiah couldn’t see anything but the ceiling, but he knew Gahigi was going for the gun. There was no way to stop him, and getting out from under him would free him up completely. You must do whatever you can to win. You win or you die! Isaiah took Ari at his word and bit Gahigi viciously on the neck, tasting salt and then blood. Gahigi screamed. Isaiah bucked him off and scrambled to his feet, kicking the gun away as he ran down the hall.
“You are a woman!” Gahigi shouted. “I am killing you! I am killing you for sure!”
Isaiah sat in his easy chair and tried to get comfortable. Gahigi was strong. The grappling had left bruises and pulled muscles. No one had ever snuck up on him like that. The fight had rattled him. You know you won’t live forever, but that’s an abstraction. Being helpless, fighting for your life, realizing you could have easily been killed makes you afraid—of your attacker, yes, but the real fear was of mortality. Death was palpable, and you’re suddenly aware that you’re alive by the thinnest of margins. Cracks appear in the unconscious belief that of all the thousands of people who will die today, you won’t be one of them. But now you might. Wrong place, wrong time, an accident of circumstance, and your days on earth were over. You were vulnerable, and like the white rhino or the panda bear, your extinction was out of your control.
Something else was nagging at him. Something he’d seen at Seb’s house. A slide show of scenes blinked behind his eyes. Blink. Drilling through the door lock. Blink. The sterile living room. Blink. The ordinary office. Blink. The photographs. He lingered on them, visualizing each one. Nothing clicked. He went on with the slide show. Blink. Gahigi with the gun. Blink. Grappling and falling to the floor. Blink—Isaiah sat up. Wait a second—the floor.
Excited, he rushed to his office and got Marcus’s work log. He found Seb’s name and the circle containing the notation: ISLANDER CHALET 8-47 BAM LT GRY. That was hardwood flooring. Islander was the brand name, 8-47 the model number, BAM was bamboo, LT GRY was light gray. He got online and looked at samples. They were identical to the flooring in Seb’s house. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Marcus had installed it. The hardwood was laid throughout the whole house, a big job. Tearing out the old floor, prepping the subfloor, laying down plywood and a moisture barrier, cutting door casements and a dozen other things before installing the actual hardwood. For a man working alone, that was at least two weeks’ work. Did Seb really not remember Marcus after seeing him every day for fourteen days, maybe more? And the floor was a reminder every time Seb walked on it. No, Seb remembered Marcus. Bile burned Isaiah’s throat. Rage wrapped itself around him, squeezing him until he thought he’d burst. Calm down, he thought. You don’t have all the facts yet. You don’t know what happened. It was that exasperating question of motive. If he knew that, he thought, everything else would come together.
Seb took Gahigi to the emergency room, his friend’s mood so black it was like a storm cloud in the car. The doctor stitched him up and gave him a tetanus shot.
“You’re lucky you didn’t sever an artery,” she said. “I want to start you on intravenous antibiotics, keep you overnight. How did this happen, anyway?”
“Dis is none of your business,” Gahigi said. He got up and left, not bothering with the release forms. By the time he and Seb got in the car, Gahigi’s bandages were soaked through with blood. Seb knew better than to say they should go back, a wild look of slaughter and chaos in his old friend’s eyes.
“I am killing this woman, Seb,” Gahigi said. “I am killing him all de way.”
When they got home, Gahigi wanted to clean up the blood in the hallway, but Seb insisted he take a shower and rest. He felt a jab of panic when he saw Isaiah’s camera on the floor. He scrolled through the pictures, but they were shots of his old photos, nothing telling, thank goodness. But the pictures of the Accord were a shock. After all these years, Isaiah had actually found the car. How was that possible? The young man was indeed dangerous. Maybe there was a way to reconstruct the past. No. That was absurd. There was nothing to reconstruct. It had been eight long years since he’d driven the car into that amiable fool and felt the satisfying crunch of his body breaking apart and somersaulting through the air. There was no evidence, no witnesses, no documents, no videotape, and the police had ruled it an accident. Seb was still uneasy. Isaiah was smart and determined; a risky loose end, and many of his criminal acquaintances had tripped on one and ended up in prison.
Other than that unpleasantness, Seb was happy with the way things were going. He’d closed the deal on the house in Brentwood. Given his desperate beginnings, Seb thought he’d feel victorious signing a seven-figure check. Instead, he felt oddly disconcerted, unable to reconcile the well-dressed man in the real estate office with the emaciated b
oy with lice in his hair who came from a village where wealth was measured in goats. It didn’t seem possible that one had evolved into the other. They were more like separate entities, one remembered, one here and now. How could anyone have come so far and survived?
After the Tutsi man cut Seb’s leg off, he left the boy to die in a tall patch of elephant grass. In shock and bleeding, Seb managed to crawl onto the road and was nearly run over by a truck full of French peacekeepers. Seb’s father said their mission was to stand around and watch the slaughter. Luckily, Seb was taken to a UN outpost instead of the local hospital, which had become a warehouse for mutilated, flyblown dead bodies.
Seb was eventually sent to an orphanage, where he slept on a dirt floor, ate mashed bananas and boiled sorghum every day, and drank water that smelled like mud. Here Seb met Gahigi. The kinship was immediate, the two boys bonded by their horrific injuries. Seb was thin and weak after months in the hospital, walking on crutches fashioned from tree branches and strips of leather. Gahigi, who was older and tougher, protected Seb from the other boys, who had nothing to do with their anger and despair except purge it on each other. Seb taught Gahigi to read. For the next two years they were inseparable.
Seb was one of the fortunate, adopted by a Christian couple from Northampton, England. Gahigi was stoic when Seb boarded the bus with his new parents, but Seb wept at leaving behind his only friend in the world. His adopted mother, Mrs. McAllister, spent most of her time knitting scarves and mittens for the homeless or baking something inedible for a church function. She introduced Seb to her shocked neighbors as her adopted son from Rwanda, more pleased with herself than with Seb. Mr. McAllister hardly spoke a word to him. If they were in a room together or met each other going in and out of the bathroom, he’d give Seb a look that said I can’t believe it. The gutter monkey is actually in my house.