And Sometimes I Wonder About You (15 page)

T
he construction site was on Rector Street not far from Trinity Place. It was a half-block lot surrounded by a high pine-board wall. On one side there was a slender corridor that separated the site from the brown brick wall of its neighbor. Twill led me down there about thirty feet or so until we came to a jury-rigged door that had been secured by a padlock threaded through the raised eyes of two metal slats. I say “had been” because the slats had been ripped free and the door hung open.

“I thought you said he had a key,” I said.

“He does.”

I took out my .38 and Twill pushed the door open.

We entered a long pine passageway that ended at another door with the lock ripped off. The inner sanctum of the building was a broad concrete floor with the seventeen-story metal frame of the would-be office building hovering above us like the reconstructed bones of some long-extinct dinosaur.

There was a chill in the air that I hadn’t felt outside.

“This way,” Twill whispered.

On the southeast side of the site stood a box tent made of heavy brown canvas. Its door was just a slit that flapped around a bit.

“There a guard in there?” I asked my son.

“No. I mean if there was somebody he would have found out about the locks, right?”

I was about to say that maybe a guard had come and ripped off the locks but just then five men came through the slit in the canvas tent, disproving my unspoken speculation.

Five men, all of them under the age of twenty-five. Four were what must have passed for muscle in Jones’s army, and one, bleeding from the mouth and nearly unconscious, was being held up by the arms between the two largest volunteer soldiers.

We were, all seven of us, surprised.

There was no more than a few feet between us.

“Stop right there,” I said, expecting my words to become their actions because of the gun in my hand—but I was wrong.

The men holding the prisoner dropped him and lunged at me, completely ignoring the potential for death. There was a split second for me to choose—death or bruises.

My greatest weakness is that I’m not afraid of a fight and I am always confident that I will emerge the victor. The guy on the left was a light brown hue, like some chicken eggs. He reached me first. Flipping on the safety with my thumb, I slammed him in the temple and then moved to the far side of his falling body to block his compatriot while I shoved the pistol in my right-front pants pocket.

My second challenger cut a second off the time it took to reach me by leaping over his fallen comrade; too bad that this opened him up to a straight left to the jaw. He fell also.

I heard a scream of agony and turned to see that Twill had buried a medium-sized hunting knife into one of his opponents’ left foot. The young man looked to be a mixture of Asian and Polynesian genes. He fell on his butt grabbing at the haft of the knife. Before I could help Twill with his other challenger I felt a blow to my right cheekbone.

The light brown guy I had felled with my gun was up again like some tireless zombie in a B movie. He threw another punch that I was able to avoid. I hit him six times to the body and he went down. But it was like a tag-team match because his partner, who was white, jumped at me again. I blocked his blows and hit him with my best.

He went down as his partner staggered to his feet.

“Stay down,” I told him.

He threw himself at me but I sidestepped, allowing him to crash into a steel girder.

Twill was on the move. The guy left standing was black and wiry but he wasn’t trained. Twill had been working out in Gordo’s Gym beside me from the age of eight. He knew how to bob and weave. He knew how to hit, too.

Looking back at my enemies I saw that the light brown guy was unconscious. He was beefy and had thrown his full weight at me. When flesh and bone hits tempered steel there’s no instant recovery.

The white member of the Rainbow Coalition of Street Fighters was still coming though. I sidestepped once and he failed to grab me. I sidestepped again and the frustration began to show in his face. Now I was looking at my opponent and at Twill and his man beyond. The Far Eastern soldier was still trying to staunch the bleeding from his foot. He’d taken off his shoe and sock and was holding the injured appendage with both hands like a yogi attempting some advanced blood-asana.

I took a deep breath and for the first time the white attacker stopped, looking for a way past my fists. That was okay by me, I could use the breather. But then Twill’s guy got in a lucky punch, hitting Twill in the gut, which lowered him to one knee. The black attacker was closing in and my common sense diminished with each inch. But then the man who was being dragged from the tent leapt on the attacker’s back and Twill picked up a chunk of brick and hit the guy multiple times to the rib cage.

I smiled broadly at the outcome, and this confused my enemy. He turned to see if something was coming up behind him and I took the opportunity to land a haymaker on the side of his jaw. The jaw was definitely broken and the man was surely out.

I was breathing hard and so was my son. Two of the four we fought were unconscious and the other two couldn’t get to their feet. Twill was supporting the prisoner and smiling at me.

“You okay?” I asked my son.

“Just fine, Pop.”

I took a handkerchief from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to the kid we’d saved. He pressed the cloth to his mouth, pulled it away to see his blood, and then pressed his mouth again.

“Fortune?” I asked.

He nodded.

“We better get out of here,” Twill said.

The three of us walked and staggered through rush-hour foot traffic across to the E train station. Fortune had cleaned up his face pretty much and the bleeding had stopped. Like his four assailants he wore blue jeans, knockoff cross-trainers, and a black T-shirt. He was what people descended from the colonized world called white, and quite beautiful: full lips, blue eyes, and tawny hair that formed into ringlets. He might have been a minor god from a Mediterranean pantheon come to Earth to see what the big deal was about love and death.

“Why didn’t they kill you, man?” Twill asked as we waited by the southmost stairwell for a train to come.

“I don’t know,” the slightly woozy godling replied.

“Why would they?” I asked.

“When Jones sends bodies after you he expects bodies in return,” Fortune said, mouthing a homily probably repeated a dozen times a day by the Jones acolytes. “When they busted in on me I expected
’
em to cut my throat.”

The train came and we got into a car that had only a few straphangers headed uptown at that time of morning.

I appreciated the sharp pain in my cheekbone. It was like a Zen bell ringing in the darkness of deep meditation. This clarion note obliterated the passion unleashed by Marella, leaving my mind open and free.

“Those boys are gonna report to Jones,” I said.

“Yeah,” Twill agreed.

“Maybe we can leave Fortune off here at Hush’s place.”

“What about me?” Twill asked.

“No,” I said. “I want you somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“For easy access.” I didn’t want Twill around Hush too much or for very long. Both my friend and son were psychopaths and sociopaths. Together they might create something that I couldn’t protect Twill from.

“Who’s Hush?” Fortune asked.

W
e called Hush while walking from the West Fourth Street station. He was waiting for us at the door when we got there.

“Come on in,” the killer said, ushering us into the posh entrance hall of his old-time Greenwich Village mansion.

Waiting for us in the octagonal room was Tamara, Hush’s wife. She was a black woman with a plain face but with spirit so powerful that it seemed to add a dimension to her visage; next to her stood Liza Downburton wearing a pale blue kimono that she must have borrowed from the lady of the house.

“Fortune,” Liza cried, and she ran to the pretty young man, caressing him, kissing his face. “What happened to you?”

I had never seen the young burglar except with the bulges and bruises on his face, so he looked normal to me.

“He sent the four after me.”

“And you fought them?”

“More like they took turns fightin’ my head. Twill and his father come to save me.”

“The two-man cavalry,” Hush said softly.

“Come on in the living room,” Tamara said. She’d put a hand on my forearm because she had a soft spot for me since I’d saved her life and her son’s.

“Where’s Thackery?” I asked as we moved from the red tiling of entrance hall to the oak floor of the living room.

“At the French school,” Hush and Tamara said together.

There were eight bright yellow padded chairs set in an oval around a pink marble table of the same shape. Everyone but Tamara took a seat. Liza pushed her chair closer to Fortune so that they could hold hands.

“I’ll go get us some ice tea and biscuits,” Tamara said.

“Don’t put ice in Fortune’s,” Liza said. “He’s got sensitive teeth.”

The two women glanced at each other and I saw a connection.

Hush saw it too. He didn’t look bothered, but anyone knowing Hush didn’t want his attention on them for any reason.

“What happened?” Liza asked again.

Twill gave the explanations with a word or two interjected here and there by Fortune.

For his part Fortune had gone to ground under the construction site. The entrance was hidden by the brown canvas tent.

“I didn’t wanna dig out the transmitter till I knew for sure that they were serious,” the young burglar said. “You know it’s a death sentence to do that.”

“Didn’t you realize that people in Jones’s army knew where you were?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “but nobody ever told about it before. You know Jones didn’t want us gettin’ high or hookin’ up away from the places he controlled. We liked to keep places like that a secret.”

“But didn’t you know he was after you?” Liza asked.

“Yeah but I just thought it might’a just been for a beat-down like. I didn’t know he wanted to kill me.”

“But he didn’t kill you,” Twill observed. “Why not?”

This question raised Hush’s attention.

Tamara returned with a silver tray holding our tea and cookies.

“I don’t know,” the orphan named Fortune said. “I mean that’s what the four usually do.”

“What do you mean—the four?” Hush asked.

Fortune’s first response was a worried expression. He avoided Hush’s stare and did not speak.

“It’s okay, Fortune,” Twill said. “He already sent
’
em after you. As far as Jones is concerned you’re already dead.”

“I’m not supposed to say,” Fortune said to Hush. “Jones got these rough dudes, four of
’
em, and their job is to handle problems. If they don’t get the job done then he sends Marcia and Deck, and sometimes this dude named Thune. They got guns.”

“And they kill children?” Hush asked.

“If they do sumpin’ bad enough.”

“You’re bleeding,” Liza said.

There was a trickle of blood coming from Fortune’s mouth. He must have bit the cut worrying about telling strangers Jones’s secrets.

“Come on,” Tamara said, “let’s go clean you up.”

She and Liza helped Fortune up from his yellow chair and guided him out. I looked at the fabric but didn’t see any specks of blood.

“He’s got a concussion all right,” Hush said. “I’ll get a doctor I know to come look at him.”

“Thanks,” Twill said.

“You sure know how to get in trouble, young man,” Hush told my son.

“I get it from my pops.”

“You mind if we leave the lovebirds here a few days?” I asked.

“T loves Liza,” Hush allowed. “So I’m sure she’ll be happy. The kid looks street but he’ll be okay too. This Jones sounds like a motherfucker.”

Twill nodded and I said, “Yeah.”

“Where to now?” Twill asked when we were on the street again.

“Let’s walk a ways,” I suggested.

We headed north on Fifth Avenue, each of us a little stiff from the construction site rumble.

“Thanks a lot, Pops,” Twill said as we were crossing Sixteenth Street. “You know I should’a been more careful before jumpin’ into this shit.”

“The one thing you learn in the ring,” I said. “If you climb through them ropes trouble will find you.”

“Yeah. Ole Jones will have two hundred people on the street lookin’ for me.”

“And you will be at Uncle Gordo’s helping him and Sophie get ready for their wedding.”

“Who’s Sophie? I thought he was marrying Elsa?”

“Another of his ring lessons,” I said. “Sometimes you got to change it up.”

“What about Mardi and her sister?” my son asked, accepting change faster than I was ever able to.

“I gave her a few days off. You think Fortune told anybody where Liza found you?”

“Never think,” Twill said, repeating my words to him.
A detective never thinks, he knows.

“Give her a call,” I said. “Gordo got eight bedrooms in that rabbit warren on the top floor.”

An hour later my son and I were sitting at the cramped dinette table off of Gordo’s kitchen, on the fifteenth floor of the building he owned. With us was Sophie—a short and slight woman with big eyes, a patient demeanor, and skin the color of some dark pears. Iran Shelfly was there. He’d lost his shot at contention in Philly and had the black eye to prove it. Gordo was leaning back in his chair. He was a veteran of the Human Wars, having survived everything from Jim Crow to Willie Pep to cancer.

“Damn, LT,” he was saying, “you look worse than Eye-ran here and he went up against a top-twenty middleweight.”

There was a bump on top of my head and a swelling where I got sucker punched on the cheek. My eyes were probably bloodshot from too much liquor, too much sex, and very little rest.

“It’s been a good week,” I said.

Gordo chuckled.

“It’s good to see you again, Sophie,” I said. “Must be thirty years.”

“I’m surprised you’re still alive, Leonid.”

Remembering that Sophie was an incurable truth teller, I said to Gordo, “If you guys take Twill, Mardi, and her sister for the next few days it will be good for all concerned.”

“And how do you see that?” Gordo argued. He liked sparring in and out of the ring.

“Mardi is the most organized woman I’ve ever met,” Twill said. “If you need a sharp eye planning this wedding then you should probably pay her to come.”

“Twill has spoken,” Gordo intoned.

“Iran, I need you to keep watch on them,” I interjected. “They shouldn’t be down in the gym at all until after it’s closed, and the doors need to stay locked.”

“You got it, LT.”

Iran loved me because I’m the one that got him straight after he got out of prison—of course he didn’t know that I had framed him to get the conviction in the first place.

“As long as we’re all here,” Sophie said to Gordo, “you should tell them.”

“What?” I asked.

“I had a will drawn up leaving everything to Sophie. But she said she didn’t like that, that she wasn’t marryin’ me to become my heir. So we compromised that everything can be hers but that you are the executor. You dole out the cash and cover the bills for the first seven years.”

“And what if somebody shoots me in the back?” I thought this was a valid question.

Gordo did too because he said, “If you aren’t able then the job goes to Twill.”

“Me?” Twill said.

“Yeah, man,” Gordo said. “You the best of all of us.”

Twill stared at the unsung master trainer a moment and then nodded.

“Okay, man,” he said. “We all know you gonna live to two hundred anyways.”

I hung around for an hour or so until a limo from Hush’s fleet delivered Mardi and her sister Marlene to Gordo’s. After that, Gordo walked me down the fourteen flights to the first floor.

“Must be some serious trouble you got everybody hidin’,” the man I considered my true father said.

“Yeah, yeah. But now everybody’s in place and I can take care of other business.”

“What other business?”

“I got to see a woman in Boston about a killing or two in New York.”