Run (17 page)

I’m about to wave Jinx my way when I hear the kiss of tires on blacktop and I make a break for the warehouse but I’m not going to make it so I drop into the grass and hope. Jinx is younger and he’s faster and he hustles up and flattens into the aluminum siding of the warehouse just as the car rolls past the Dumpster and into view, and it’s a Crown Vic, civilian colors but as obvious as month-old meat: It looks and smells bad. Cops.

I put my finger to my lips for Jinx and he nods and holds, and when I look again, the Crown Vic has cruised past the Dumpster and out of sight.

I make my way to the Dumpster, settle back against the warm metal, and say to Jinx: Coming your way. Check out the tires.

He eases over to the far corner of the warehouse, peeks around, and tells me: Radials.

They got whitewalls?

White as snow, he tells me.

Not the locals, then. State troopers, I tell him. Or Feds. How about the haircuts?

Not too short, not too long, he tells me.

Six’ll get you ten they’re Feds, I tell him. Then I tell myself: Which means something’s funky as a monkey.

Damn, he says to me.

Damn right, I tell him. You don’t need no Psychic Hotline for this one. They’re looking for us. Or should I say me. Or—

I don’t even want to go down that road. That one is marked with a red sign.

Jinx says: We got to get our asses out of here.

Yeah.

Now.

No, I tell him. Not now. Not yet. Right now we wait. Something is fucked up here.

He’s got something to say but he’s not saying it, and I lean around the corner of the Dumpster and we both watch the cop car and it’s turning away, it’s heading north along the access road and it’s accelerating and we wait and we wait and then there’s just dust and it’s gone.

I walk out to the access road, read the tire marks, they run right past the parking lot, and I try to think this one through. We got blues at the rendezvous. So maybe CK and the boys didn’t make it out of that building. Maybe somebody got caught. Or killed. Or … maybe CK wasn’t being stupid or arrogant when he gave me this spot, maybe he told me because it’s a setup.

Maybe maybe maybe.

But maybe doesn’t explain one car and two cops, or what happens when I follow that access road into the parking lot. When I look around and see nothing, the kind of nothing that is everything.

They ain’t here, Burdon Lane.

No, I tell him.

What I see is something I haven’t seen for a lot of years. Many, many years, but never too many years to make me forget. It’s not the kind of thing you’re ever likely to forget, unless you were lucky and got yourself a head wound.

I’m standing in the middle of an alien footprint, a place of bent and flattened grass and scattered pebbles, an awkward circle pressed down from the sky, and my gut takes a very bad dip.

They were here, I tell him, and in my mind I see Renny, yeah, I see Renny Two Hand, and he’s parking the Oldsmobile in the lot at the side of the warehouse, where a fleet of indiscriminate cars wait for their turn on the road or for scrap. He drove the Oldsmobile down from the Warwick Hotel, he’s a good soldier and he’s done exactly what I told him, he’s parking the Oldsmobile over there in that line of forgotten cars, and that’s where I walk. And it’s there; Christ, the car is there.

Ain’t nobody here, Jinx calls after me, but he’s wrong. There’s someone, oh, yes, there’s someone. Because there’s the Oldsmobile, third car in a row of the kinds of cars you see and you don’t see, parked next to you at the shopping mall, invisible cars for invisible men, and Renny backs the Oldsmobile into that space and he waits, he waits there for me, and he watches the clock as it winds its way toward one, and he waits there. For me. And that’s when it happens, sometime before one, because he’s a good soldier, he would not have waited past one, that’s when the helicopter floats down from the sky, that’s when Renny Two Hand sits up behind the wheel and watches the shadow coming out of the sun, and that smile comes onto his face, that smile, yeah, that’s the one. Renny, I want to call to him, just as Jinx sees what I’ve seen, and that’s when little pinks of pebbles and dust start spraying onto the hood and then the windshield of the Oldsmobile, and over the wild whoosh of the rotors comes a cough cough cough and Renny Two Hand jerks back in his seat, I’m looking at it now, I’m fucking seeing it, the driver’s door is open and I’m looking at the driver’s seat and I can see, through the punctured windshield, the graffiti of blood, the spray-painted alphabet of death, and Renny tries to slide from the car but he falls to his knees; his right palm leaves its print in red, right there, on the blacktop. He looks away from the men with guns closing in on him. No, he says. The color is draining from his face, running onto the blacktop, the dirt. No. His mouth bends and he calls my name, and that’s when he stands and that’s when—

I push the driver’s door closed, and what’s left of the glass of its window shatters. The Oldsmobile’s got so many holes it’s Swiss metal and the blacktop beside it is still wet and the wet trail leads to a hurricane fence and through a tear in the fence and then down the slope of the
concrete viaduct and into a low gully. I follow the blood to the place. That’s where he laid down and died.

I stand there for a while looking at him. Renny Two Hand. Reynolds James. Then Jinx says to my back:

Maybe I believe you now. Maybe you didn’t kill nobody.

I didn’t kill Gideon Parks, I tell him. But I killed two guys. My guys. At least they used to be mine.

He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look anything but sad. Strangely sad.

I look over my shoulder, toward the east, toward the ocean. There’s something out there, isn’t there? Something just beyond sight. Something that would show me what this means.

Jinx says what I’m thinking:

We need to get little. We need to get out of here.

Yeah, I tell him. But I can’t leave him like that.

Ain’t nothin you can do, man. He’s dead.

I know he’s dead. But I can’t leave him like that. They can’t find him like … that.

Like what? Time is tickin, Burdon Lane.

Time is ticking. But time isn’t the only thing in this world. Standing in that gully, the dust or my allergies acting up maybe, stinging my eyes, I remember the funniest of things. I remember Renny talking to me this morning, telling me something about ordering a pizza. And I remember him saying something else, something about—

How’d he get this far? Jinx says.

They let him. Look. And I show him.

The first shots took his shoulders, arms, put him down but not out. No way he could shoot. About the only thing he could do was crawl.

They probably wanted to have a talk, I tell him, all the while wondering what he could have told them.

I point at his chest. When they were done talking, somebody double-tapped him, right in the heart. Looks to me like it was somebody with something heavy. Like a .44 Magnum.

Renny’s face is calm. His eyes are closed, not tight but soft. Like he’s asleep. But nothing is going to wake Renny up. I try to forget the
wounds, the blood. I keep my eyes on that face and I start doing what needs to be done.

I take the cellular phone from his belt, hook it onto mine. Renny’s jacket is bunched underneath him and I tug it straight, reach into the hollow of his back. It’s a wet mess. He’s not wearing a vest, as if that would have mattered. I find the holster and I find that wicked Colt Python. It’s cold. He never had the chance to use it. Never fired at another man in his life, so far as I know.

Somebody sure fired at him. Two somebodies, from the looks of it. Renny must have taken eight hits. And that’s before the .44 Magnum.

I take his right hand, bend his fingers back to take the pistol grip, and something falls out of his palm. A bullet. It’s a shiny nine-millimeter. I want to wonder what Renny’s doing with a nine-millimeter round in his hand at the moment of his dying. His Python’s a .357. I mean, the guy’s always starting something but never getting it done. But I wonder more about what’s going to happen if I don’t get busy and haul ass out of here. So I stick the bullet in my suit pocket and get back to getting busy.

I fit the Python into his right hand, put his fingers around the grip. Tuck his index finger into the trigger guard. At least now he’s a gunman.

I wipe my hands on his suit coat and I’m trying to leave him when I hear Jinx’s voice coming down at me:

Want me to say a few words over him?

No, I tell him. This is not your business.

Bullshit, he says. This is everbody’s business.

I look down at Renny Two Hand in that gully. I look down at him for the last time and I bow my head like a preacher man and I say the only words over him that anybody needs to hear:

They’re dead, Renny.

Every last one of them is dead.

So they got out of the hotel, got out of the fire, got away from the law, got away from the city, and then they got Renny dead.

This is no surprise. CK had more than a plan. This thing was thought straight through and out the other side. Shoot, shoot, and scoot. Maybe they went down a laundry chute, something as simple as that. Or a service elevator, a set of stairs hidden at the back of the building. Maybe it was something more complicated. Maybe they just sprouted wings and flew out of that hotel like birds.

Maybes don’t matter. Not anymore. Not with your best friend dead on the ground and a couple new notches on your gun. Not when you’re tired and you’re sore and you’re hot and you’re beating the bush with some badass black dude who’s got a hard-on of his own, and when you’re almost back to your car, you find a Crown Vic parked next to it and a couple suits and shoes with thick soles worn by guys with ten-dollar haircuts who are writing things in little books, talking into radios, and just generally standing around being cops.

Jinx hauls up short, just like me. Dittoes.

We back off, huddle behind a thicket.

Think we been made? he says to me.

I don’t have to think. Just the chance is good enough for me.

Let’s book, I tell him, nodding off to my left. Two, three klicks down the road, there’s a truck stop, bar and grill, lots of the big rigs and RVs, lots and lots of noise and confusion.

So we’re humping through the woods again and it’s all some kind of bad Nam flashback, the kind the movie psychos get just before they start revving their power tools. We’re beating the boonies, taking a track that parallels the trail, even if the trail is two lanes of concrete and the only Charlie at its end is some potbellied guy who pours you gas or serves you suds.

Sooner or later we ease our way roadside, and there’s base camp, something by the name of Tito’s Truck Stop, and I remember the place, remember the diner, remember the coffee, remember the greasy home fries, remember the layout, and it’s not great but, hey, like the priest told the guy at communion, it’s all we got.

I give my pal Jinx the thirty-second tour and then: You’re the suspicious-looking minority, I tell him. So you go first. Find a booth in back and sit facing the front. I’ll give you five minutes. You don’t come out, I’m coming in. You got a problem, you call me Jake and I go straight out the back door. And if you know what you’re doing, you go with me.

Fuck you, he says to me. He takes my duffel bag, shrugs it over his shoulder, sticks his hands in his pockets, and wanders out of the tree line toward the truck stop like he’s some kind of boy scout.

He doesn’t look back, heads straight into the bar and grill. I check my watch, and give him five. I try to knock the dust off my suit and then I follow him in.

The place is nothing but what you’d expect: burgers and fries, drumsticks and thighs. No cops. Bartender, a bar, a TV bolted to the ceiling at each end of the bar, and lots of thirsty truckers in between, hanging their wide butts off the stools. Down a long row of booths, most of them empty, there’s a bleached-out stork of a waitress wandering back and forth with plates and mugs and more mugs. In the last booth, there’s my pal Jinx, minding his own business, looking into a menu.

The waitress gives me a smile, I give her a smile right back, shake my head no, and stroll on back to the booth.

I sit. The waitress floats by, and I tell her I want some coffee. I take my hand off my Glock and out of my pocket. I unfold a paper napkin. I put it in my lap. I look at the menu. I find what I want. I put the menu down. I rearrange the silverware. Check the labels on the catsup, the mustard, the sugar, the Sweet’n Low.

I keep waiting for Jinx to look at me and say: Well? But he doesn’t say a goddamn thing, not for a long time. He looks at the menu. He looks at the menu. He looks at the menu.

Then the coffee comes. The waitress does that waitress magic where she pulls a pencil from behind her ear, sticks her tongue into the side of her mouth, and says: Whattyaboyshavintoday?

Gimme a minute, Jinx says. He waits until she retreats into the kitchen, and then he looks up out of the menu, not at me, but at the television set at the far end of the bar, and the bartender, who is twisting up the volume, because CNN is wall-to-wall with murder. Synthesized music swells over this tasteful logo with the silhouette of a guy’s head in the crosshairs of a rifle sight, which ushers in a collage of freeze-frame images and computer-generated text and finally some well-permed talking head who announces the up-to-the-minute coverage of the assassination of civil rights leader Gideon Parks. Interviews with a weeping Jesse Jackson and some tight-lipped U.S. senators give way to glimpses of some very pissed-off black folks in front of some government building, which fades into a relentless parade of sound-and-vision bites. There’s the usual statement from the President, something about tragedy, something about healing, something about the criminals who will be pursued and captured and punished, and then comes the on-scene footage, a wet dream of a Zapruder film shot with network cameras from three different angles, in color and in close-up, and the replays are coming on like it’s the fucking Super Bowl, from the first hit, which tears the Reverend’s head apart, to the five other explosions that rive his upper body into a bloody rag of flesh and broken bones.