The Turnaround (30 page)

You can just call me Charles.
He’d never felt that kind of respect at his home or in school.

Cody stepped out of the stairwell of the building, into the night air. He went to the sidewalk and headed for his car. Two older dudes had come out of a station wagon thing and were walking toward him. They were big but looked to be minding their own. As they neared him, he saw a small gun emerge from one of their jackets.

Not tonight,
thought Cody. His knees shook. He wanted to book but could not. They were up on him quick.

“Don’t think about runnin.” One man was in his face, the barrel of the gun pressed against Kruger’s middle.

“Where your car at?” said the other man, who had moved behind him and was talking softly in his ear.

“Take us to it,” said the man with the gun. He had a square head, Chinese eyes, and pomaded hair. “Open all the doors at the same time.”

Kruger led them to the Honda, hoping to see someone else on the street, hoping, for once, that a police would drive by. But there was no one out, and he opened all four doors with the key fob he had retrieved from his jeans. He was directed to the driver’s seat, and the gun was held on him as he settled into it. The man with the gun got into the backseat and the other one slipped in beside Kruger.

“Put your hands on the wheel and touch your forehead to it,” said the man beside him.

Kruger did it. He farted involuntarily, and the man in the backseat chuckled.

The man beside Kruger gave the chuckling man an evil look, then frisked Kruger while he was in that forward position. He came away with a cell phone and two bags of weed. He told Kruger to sit back and returned his phone and his marijuana.

“Drive to the alley,” said Elijah Morgan from the backseat. When Kruger did not move, Morgan said, “Hurry it up, boy. We just want to talk to you.”

Kruger ignitioned the Honda and drove it behind the building. His teeth were chattering. He thought this only happened to frightened characters in cartoons.

“Keep drivin,” said Proctor, sitting beside him. Kruger went slowly until they came to a spot in the alley where light was not bleeding out from the apartment windows. In this place it was close to full dark.

“Right here,” said Proctor. “Cut it.”

Kruger killed the engine.

“Which apartment you stay in?” said Morgan.

“Two ten.”

“The old man up there now?”

Kruger nodded.

“Is he strapped?”

“No.”

“Is he alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Here’s what I need you to do,” said Morgan. “Call the old man from your cell. Tell him you forgot somethin and you comin back to the apartment to get it. Use your speaker so we can hear the conversation.”

Kruger dialed up Baker’s cell and activated the speaker.

“Yeah, boy,” said Baker.

“I’m on my way back.”

“So quick?”

“I ain’t gone yet. I forgot my iPod.”

“You and your gizmos.”

“I’ll be there soon, Mr. Charles.”

“Thought I told you . . . All right, use the code.”

“I will.”

Kruger ended the call. Proctor took the cell phone from his hand and slipped it into his own jacket pocket.

“What code?” said Morgan from the backseat.

“He likes me to knock on the door a certain way when I come back home,” said Kruger. “Before I turn the door key.”

“Which key?”

Kruger took the keys out of the ignition and held out the one to the apartment. Proctor took the full ring.

“How does that code go, exactly?” said Morgan.

Kruger’s lip quivered.

“Tell us,” said Proctor gently. “What’s gonna happen to him is gonna happen.”

“Knock pause knock pause knock,” said Kruger.

“Do it on top the dash,” said Morgan.

Kruger rapped it out with his knuckles.

“Like Morris Code, Lijah,” said Proctor, smiling at the man in the backseat.

Now one of them had said the other’s name. Kruger knew what that meant. His bladder emptied into his boxers. Urine slowly darkened his jeans, and the smell of it saturated the interior of the car.

“Aw, shit,” said Proctor.

“I won’t tell nobody nothin,” said Cody Kruger. “I won’t.”

Morgan lifted his Colt Woodsman and shot Kruger in the back of his neck. The .22 round shattered his C3 bone and sent him to darkness. He slumped to the side, and his head came to rest on the driver’s-side window. There was little blood, and the small-caliber report had not carried far outside the vehicle. Kruger’s Nike Dunks, trimmed in leather and hemp, drummed softly at the Honda’s floorboards.

“Tool up,” said Morgan.

“I’m good.”

“I’ll be in the hack, waitin on you,” said Morgan. “Soon as I wipe this car down.”

“Get there quick. I won’t be long.”

Proctor got out of the Honda and walked down the alley. Coming around to the front of the apartment building, he saw a Fourth District police cruiser coming down the block, its light bar flashing. After it had passed, Proctor pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. As he neared the stairwell, he fitted the gloves onto his hands.

RAYMOND AND James Monroe stood in Gavin’s Garage beside a white’78 Ford Courier. The hood of the minitruck was raised, and shop rags were spread on the quarter panel lip. A can of Pabst Blue Ribbon sat on one of the rags. James Monroe picked it up and took a long swig.

“Alex Pappas gonna be here soon,” said Raymond. “Why don’t you finish the job?”

“I’m close to done,” said James. “What’s he want with us, anyway?”

“He spoke to Miss Elaine. Least, I had Rodney point him that way.”

“Why?”

“Because he did what I asked. Charles Baker threatened Alex’s family, and he didn’t call the law. He did that for
you,
James.”

James scratched at his neck and had another pull of beer. “What should we do about Charles?”

“I already did it. I went to his group home and got up in his face. I don’t know if he’s smart enough to listen.”

“I guess we’ll see.”

Raymond shifted his weight. “I almost killed him, James. I was carrying that screwdriver Daddy sharpened with the bench grinder he had.”

“I remember it.”

“I swear to God, I was close to pushing the screwdriver straight through his neck.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“’Cause you’re not like that. You’ve got too many people counting on you. That little boy, and your own son, too. Not to mention all those soldiers you’re workin on over there at the hospital.”

“That’s right. I got a lot of reasons to stay right.”

“Charles don’t need killin, anyway,” said James. “He
been
dead.”

Raymond nodded.

“Go on over there and fetch me a crescent wrench,” said James. “While you’re near the cooler, grab your big brother a cold beer.”

“You’re just as close to it as I am. Why don’t
you?
”

“My hip.”

Raymond Monroe walked to the workbench and did as he was told.

Twenty-Seven

C
HARLES BAKER read the letter he held in his hand. It was a good one. He hadn’t addressed it to anyone in particular for security reasons, but it definitely was convincing. Baker had mentioned family several times in the space of two paragraphs. Not saying what he would do to them if he did not receive the money, but getting his message across nonetheless. Implying that the consequences would affect the Pappas family if he, Charles Baker, were to be ignored.

Baker had heard many times that “family was everything.” He supposed that it could be true. Of course, it had been his personal experience that family, and loyalty in general, meant nothing.

Baker had no knowledge of his natural father. His mother, Carlotta, a brown-liquor alcoholic, had been a less than nurturing presence in his life. She had inherited her house, a two-bedroom structure of fallen wood shingles and exposed tar paper heated by an old woodstove. The roof leaked, and when windows got broke they stayed broke.

One time Ernest Monroe had come over with his sons, James and Raymond, and they had fixed the windows, using putty and little bits of metal that Mr. Monroe called glazier points, trying to teach Charles something. But Charles did not want to learn. The Monroe family thought they were doing something Christian, coming to his mother’s house to fix the windows for free, but they were just trying to feel good about themselves, helping out the disadvantaged folks in the neighborhood, doing the work of God and all that. Charles never did like that family anyway. The boys showing off, handing their father his tools and shit, his putty knife and those stupid little points. The father with his job working on buses, wearing a uniform like it meant something, when he wasn’t much more than a grease monkey. Charles didn’t like them coming around to his house, acting superior. Seeing that shithole where he stayed at and feeling sorry for him. He didn’t need their sympathy.

Charles had no father, but he had men around the house. One in particular, Eddie Offutt, who claimed he worked construction but slept off his hangovers till noontime. Offutt had been around for most of Baker’s childhood. He liked to look at Charles across the dinner table with wet and knowing eyes. Charles Baker had listened to him and his mother laugh and drink at night, and he’d listened to them argue, and he heard the slaps across the face and his mother’s sobbing, and he heard them fucking in his mother’s bed. Sometimes Eddie Offutt would come into Charles’s room at night and talk to him real soft with that smell of liquor on his breath, and he’d touch Charles’s privates with his rough hands and put hisself into Charles’s mouth. Telling Charles that it was all right but that others might not understand. Telling Charles that if he told, word would get out to the other boys in the neighborhood. Later on those same nights, Charles would lie on his mattress, listening to the dogs barking in the nearby yards, watching the black shadows of the tree branches, like claws trying to gain purchase on his bedroom walls. Charles’s hands balled tight, dirt tracks on his face, as he thought,
Why was I not born in that house down the road with the fresh paint? Why don’t I know the names of tools, the parts under the hoods of cars, the names of those players on the basketball teams? Why can’t I be hugged by a man who loves me instead of touched by one like this?

It wasn’t just Offutt. Friends betrayed him, too. Larry Wilson had been his running partner when they were kids, his true boy. But Larry went into the air force while Charles was doing his first stay in prison, and by the time Charles had got out, Larry was working for the park service as some kind of ranger in West Virginia. Years later, when Larry Wilson was visiting Heathrow as a middle-aged man, he bum-rushed his family into their car when he saw Charles walking down the block. So went Larry. As for the Monroe brothers, shit, he’d stood tall and gone to jail behind them. Now they were turning their backs on him. Loyalty and friendship meant nothing to them. They didn’t mean dick to Charles, either.

No matter. The second half of his life was going to be different. He’d be coming into money shortly. He had plans.

There was the sound of keys jingling outside the apartment’s front door. Then a rap on the door: knock pause knock pause knock.

It wasn’t the code.

Charles Baker got up out of his seat and walked back to the bedroom, to where Cody kept his gun.

LEX PROCTOR stood in the stairwell of the second floor, listening. He had knocked on the door in the manner that the white boy had said to do, and heard no response, only the scraping of a chair and footsteps.

Proctor reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled free a .38 with electrical tape wrapped around its grip. He fitted the key to the lock, turned it, and stepped inside. He closed the door with his back, keeping his eyes ahead. He looked around the living room and the kitchen. No one was in sight. But he knew that the old man was here.

There was a hall. Proctor went along it with care.

He was pleasantly aware of the knife hanging in a holster under his shirt and against his back. He had paid dearly for it, and it was his prize possession. The blade was over twelve inches long and carried upon it the etching of a bird. Its five-inch handle was lacquered wood. Its pommel plate was thick and made of silver. It was a dagger, and it was weighted for throwing. It was not a hunting knife but a knife for closein fighting. It was designed for the purpose of combat and killing men. One could stab with it or slash with it, as with a sword. The deep gash marks it left, due to its weight, mystified forensics units. One look at it panicked opponents. This was no bullshit Rambo knife. It was called an Arkansas toothpick, and it was a murder tool.

Proctor passed an open bathroom door and saw nothing. He continued down the hall, came to a closed door at the end of it, tried the handle, and found it locked. He knocked on the door and heard that it was hollow, then he stepped back, put his shoulder down, and charged forward.

CHARLES BAKER stood by the dresser, staring stupidly at a drawer holding boxer shorts and nothing else. Cody had got rid of his gun.

At least the white boy had tried to warn him by giving out the wrong code. Baker guessed that Cody had been murdered. Whoever had done the boy was now coming to kill him. Baker could hear footsteps in the hall.

He looked at the window. It was only a second-story drop to the alley. But the window had bars on it. No gun and no means of escape. A lifetime of fuckup and here he was. If Baker were the type to find humor in such things, he might have laughed.

There was a knock on the door. Baker turned to face it.

The door crashed open. A man stumbled into the room and stood straight. He was large and looked agile despite his weight. He held a gun loosely at his side.

“Who sent you?” said Baker.

The man said nothing.

“Say your name,” said Baker, but the man merely shook his head.

Baker reached into the pocket of his black slacks and pulled his switch knife with the imitation-pearl handle. He pushed the button, and the blade sprang out of the hilt.