The Lost Brother (18 page)

He gets in the back seat. Nods to Chavez when Kellogg makes the introduction.

Kellogg pulls away. Heads across town.

Long: He know what’s up? (To Chavez) You know what’s up?

Chavez: Yes.

He holds up Kellogg’s rifle. Long: You know how to use that? Chavez: I know how.

Long: Kellogg, when’s the last time you cleaned it? Kellogg: Never. Long: Great.

Kellogg: You seem awfully anxious to fight. Long: I just want the boy. Kellogg: Me, too. Chavez: Me, too.

Long: You do know who you’re fucking with, don’t you? Both of you? The FBI. The police. Maybe New Africa. Seriously backed-up motherfuckers. They can make anything that happens look like anything they want. Especially if no one’s around to dispute them.

Kellogg: Don’t be so naive.

Long: What? I’m the one telling
you
not to be naive. Cop-trusting white motherfucker like you, you the naive one.

Kellogg: I ain’t naive, I’m saying, don’t
you
be naive. I mean, they don’t have to kill us. Think about who we are: an alcoholic detective run off the police force, a three-time convicted murderer, and a wetback dishwasher.

Long: So I’m saying we go, I make a play to get the boy out. You guys back me up.

Kellogg: You got a play?

Long: You got a phone?

Kellogg hands it to Long, who takes it, dials.

Long: Tell me the address.

Kellogg does.

Khalid, in his office, sweating, answers his phone when it rings.

Long: Hey.

Khalid, who was expecting a call but not from Long: Where are you, man? You ain’t doing nothing stupid, are you?

Long tells Khalid the address. Long: Is that it?

Khalid, sighing: Yeah. How’d you get it? Long: Don’t worry about that. Khalid: You’re not going there, are you? Long: I’m on my way now.

Khalid, frightened: Listen, brother, you got to think on this. Those men over there, they are scared and stupid, and that’s the most dangerous combination there is.

Long: Call them.

Khalid: And tell them what?

Long: Tell them you’re sending a man over there to take care of the boy. Tell them it’s a stone killer you know will do it right and who, even if he does get caught, will gladly take the rap with his mouth shut because he’s such a brainwashed New Africa fuck. They knifed the man who took care of the boy, right? Tell them the guy you’re sending over, me, has a prior for knife murder, so he’s perfect to take this heat. Tell them they’re to give me the knife they used, and the boy, so if I get caught later I’ll have the murder weapon on my person. Tell them to let me take the boy away because I’ve also got a string of molestation charges on my record and one conviction. In fact, tell them you’re going to let me take the boy in the woods, do shit to him, kill him, and then they can be hero police and come get me, killing me when I resist arrest. Okay? I know a tall guy just got out of Lorton with this sheet, so if they check their computer the story will fly.

Long gives Khalid that ex-con’s name.

Khalid: And what happens when this don’t all come through?

Long: You the man, motherfucker. This’ll all just give you more shit on the big shots. More control over them.

Khalid: What’s going to keep the boy quiet? He saw all the tapes. Saw the homeless man who took him in get cut. How we going to keep him quiet?

Long: I’ll keep him quiet. I’ll tell him if he talks, he dies. With what he’s seen this last week, he knows what death is. I ain’t worried about him. He’ll be leaving town anyway. I talked with his grandmother, and she’s taking him to England, of all the fucking places. Believe me, she’s going to back us on this. She’s as scared that he’ll talk as you are. She wants him alive. She won’t let him say boo. Khalid is quiet.

Long: Do this, man. Come on. I’m the one swimming in the shit. You just get me in the door.

Khalid, sighing: Okay.

Long: I’m on my way, so call them now.

Khalid: Yeah, okay. Okay, man. That is, if they ain’t done the boy yet.

Long: Call them
now
. Right?

Khalid: You just play your end right. I’ll take care of my part.

Long turns the phone off.

Khalid dials a number for the cellular phone the men at the house are using. A man answers with a grunted uh-huh.

Khalid: Mallory? Mallory: Yeah.

Khalid: I got a problem and a solution at the same time.

Mallory: What?

Khalid: The boy say anything new?

Mallory: We haven’t gotten to him yet. We’re still working on this Preacher guy. I should say the FBI agents are working on him. He told them the boy didn’t call anyone except his sister. I believe him. He said the boy was in shock the night his parents got killed, and he found him wandering down the alley, and the boy wouldn’t let him take him home or to a hospital or the police because he was too scared. I told you all this.

Khalid: This Preacher guy, he saw the tapes, though? He admit that?

Mallory: Yeah. Not at first, but eventually, because he had to explain why he didn’t call the police or the FBI, and it’s only seeing the tapes that would scare him off doing that.

Khalid: He’s still alive? The Preacher guy?

Mallory: I told you, we need him alive when we shoot him, because an autopsy can determine if the shots were postmortem.

Khalid: We can cover that if we need to.

Mallory: Of course. But the fewer people in on this shit the better. Bad enough I got to deal with these Goof Squad idiots. They’re scared shitless about getting caught.

Khalid: Aren’t you?

Mallory, laughing: I got the tapes, dickwad.

Khalid: Your boss, the Mayor, is going to want them.

Mallory: For a cool million, they’re his.

Khalid: I’ll give you a million.

Mallory: I knew you didn’t make copies!

Khalid realizes he’s blown his earlier bluff on that point. Realizes again how incredibly stupid he was not to have made copies.

Khalid: I’ll give you a million and a better ticket out of all this. ‘Cause you got trouble coming. Mallory: You said that before.

Khalid: Henry James’s brother, Long, got the address somehow. He’s on his way over right now. He is the meanest motherfucker you’re ever going to meet in your life, and that’s his nephew you got there.

Mallory, anger jumping into his voice: You cocksucker, you told him!

Khalid: No.

Mallory: Bullshit! How else could he find out?

Khalid: I don’t know. He’s smart. Anyway, he’s on his way over. Now, if you agree to sell
me
the tapes, I won’t call him back and tell him I’ve warned you he’s coming, if we got a deal, I’ll make everything come out right.

Mallory: You cocksucker, you gave him the address to get leverage on me, to make me make this deal.

Khalid: Sounds like something
you’d
do.

Mallory, angrily conceding: All right. What’s up?

Khalid: He expects me to tell you to let him take the boy. You’re supposed to trust him to finish the boy off and take any rap there might be for Preacher’s death too. So that plays into us. When he gets there you tell him Preacher’s not dead and that he has to finish him off, so that it really will be him who killed the man.

Mallory: Can this guy Long, can he kill someone with a knife? That ain’t the same thing as shooting them.

Khalid: He won’t have no trouble with that part. He’ll be happy to, to prove his story to you. So you let him in. Let him finish Preacher off. Let him go in the room where you got the boy. Let him get the boy. He’s holding a knife in his hand. He’s a bloody mess from the first killing. You see him. Shoot him. Then kill the boy, with the knife, and say that Long killed Preacher and the boy, and you killed him.

Mallory: I told you before, I’m not killing the boy. It’s hard enough for me to let it happen. I’m sure not doing it myself, and I’m
sure
not doing it with a knife. I told you, there’s this one FBI fuck here who’s anxious to do it. What a sick fuck. A genuine bigot, if you know what I mean.

Khalid: And you thought they didn’t exist anymore.

Mallory: No, I just thought they were all black now.

Khalid: Fine. I don’t care. Let him do it. Just make sure the Preacher and the boy
and
Long get set up the right way And bring me the tapes. I got your money right here.

Mallory: And I’m not shooting Long. It would be too conspicuous. I’m going to let the FBI handle the whole thing, and I’ll just be around to supervise things for the Mayor. The FBI guys, they got their story together without me in the picture. They say they got the address from the wiretap on the grandmother’s house. Came over. All the killing started when they knocked on the door and the kidnapper panicked and they had to shoot him, but it was too late to save the boy. Now I guess they’ll say Long got here when they did, saw what the Preacher did to the boy, and went crazy stabbing him, and they had to shoot
him
. No, even better—Long,
he
kidnapped the boy, killed the Preacher when he came around, and killed the boy when the FBI showed up, and then they killed him.

He pauses.

Mallory: Man, call Long back and tell him not to come. Khalid: It’s too late.

Mallory: Do you have any idea what a house of cards this all is? What if someone saw us all come in when we did and later testifies as to the discrepancy with our reported time of arrival? That’s just one thing. There’s so many things that can go wrong. The last thing we need is a new factor. This is all too tender, man. It’s too tender to be fucking with.

Khalid: It’s too late. Deal with it. With him.

Mallory laughs nervously. Turns off his phone. Shakes his head. He knows the realities. Knows how many fires he’ll be putting out and how little chance he has of keeping it together. Thinks about running but knows he has no chance if he does that.

He wonders how he could have let himself get pulled into all this. Just a few hours ago he was home watching television. His phone rang.

It was the Mayor, who told him the FBI director had just called to say the Goof Squad he’d put on the James boy’s “kidnapping”—whose sole effort consisted of monitoring the boy’s grandmother’s house for a ransom call that no one expected would ever come—had got an address for the boy. The Mayor wanted Mallory to go along as his personal representative and liaison. Specifically, to get the tapes. Of all the Mayor’s police, Mallory was the one he turned to when he needed someone to work with white cops or, in this case, FBI agents, because Mallory was the only white cop in the Mayor’s police club.

So Mallory went with the Goof Squad to get the kid. To get the tapes (although the Director was to be allowed New Africa’s blackmail tape of him). But not to hurt the kid. To be part of the rescue team.

Then the man who’d found the boy that night, Preacher—who had not known who the boy was or why he was wandering around the alley, but had just taken him to his own emergency home and nursed him, as he could better than almost anyone because he’d been through so much himself—then that man, upon answering the door tonight, turned to run out the back. Mallory was the one knocking on the door. The agents were in the back. They pushed Preacher back inside.

Preacher, strangely terrified, maybe from having seen the tapes, from thinking the Jameses were killed for them, grabbed a kitchen knife. Came at one of the agents. The agent ducked aside, grabbed the man’s knife hand. Another agent, the psycho bigot, grabbed the knife and, furiously, started cutting Preacher. Mallory stepped in, but it was too late. Preacher was cut too bad to live long without emergency medical treatment, and maybe not even then. And the agents said they weren’t going to let one of their own go before a black jury on murder charges. These agents were the biggest fools the Director could pull together, and now their stupidity was blowing up on them all. They refused to call for local police or an ambulance.

The agents called the Director, who told them to set up the frame on the Preacher. (Mallory called the Mayor, who, upon hearing what had happened, said the line was bad and hung up.)

The agents locked the boy in a closet until they could decide if it was necessary to kill him. Mallory searched for and found the videos, while the agents interrogated the dying man, who, they learned, called himself Preacher.

Although the home was owned by Preacher’s grandmother, and she was dead, the estate had not been settled. The electricity was still on, and there was a VCR and a television.

Mallory, using the VCR, fast-forwarded through the tapes, none of which were very long, to make sure of what he had. He’d seen them all before, of course. Except for one.

It was of Henry and Jessica James, and Jimmy Close, of all people. Mallory, curious as to whether the tape might have some of the same value as the others, watched a minute.

Jimmy Close: I have this woman now, Joan Price, she’s a tiger. Electric. The best public speaker I’ve ever seen in person. But her push is Nazi-like to me somehow. That’s not fair, I know, and we all use the Hitler allegation too easily, but still I can’t help but see how quick she is to say “they” hate “us” and then use that as justification to hate back. She’s not the only one that does it. She’s just better at it than most. And white. She’s got this thing now where all she does to warm up an audience before she speaks is set up a big-screen TV and play tapes of blacks cheering the Simpson verdict. She lets that picture of the smug face of racial victory sink in to the white audience. Has a banner hanging over the screen saying “Eighty percent of blacks think Simpson is innocent of a crime because eighty percent of blacks don’t think that killing whites is a crime.”

Henry James: Every bigot in America, black and white, loved that verdict.

Mallory fast-forwarded to check for anything important. He stopped to listen one more moment and heard Henry James say: “I know what you mean. I’ve got a brother, an older brother, named Long. He’s well known in this city, on the streets. The city doesn’t know he’s my brother and would hardly believe it. But I know it, and I never forget it. Not a day goes by I don’t think about how he lost his own life’s value so many years ago. It’s his fault, not society’s. It happens to whites as well as blacks. But all those people we’re losing, we have to find. That’s what my life is about. I think that’s what yours is too, brother.”