Vengeance (10 page)

Chapter 11

Casey’s Lexus was a smooth ride. I hadn’t heard a word about him having a job, but he had a beeper, a car that I could only imagine being able to afford, and slick clothes. If he wasn’t dealing drugs, I figured he was pimping. He turned the hip hop music off either to be polite or because he really only played it to turn heads.

“So you’re a college man,” Casey said. “Sorry. Grad school man. I took a few classes out at Kirkwood, myself.”

“Oh yeah?”

He was trying to put us on even footing. I hesitated contributing to his comparison because if I started talking about grad school I’d probably end up drawing distinctions that would be counter-productive.

“Total waste of money,” he said. “They were trying to teach me the same stuff I decided not to learn for free in high school. English one-oh-one, American history, algebra. The classes weren't hard. But in my second semester, I had an economics class. That's what I was thinking about majoring in. Become a big entrepreneur, you know? The American dream. Around here... shit. So at the end of the semester, we take our final exam, but the professor doesn't let us go as we finish. He waits until everyone is done and has handed in their papers. He pushes a button on a boom box and we all listen to 'Money for Nothing' by the Dire Straits. You know how it goes, right?”

“Yeah. 'Money for nothing and the chicks for free.'”

“That's it. So he plays that song. And it's even the extended version with the guitar at the end, so I don't mind. What's five more minutes in his class, anyway? He was a good professor and that song rocks. And I'm thinking he's giving us a light-hearted send-off with a cool old song. But when the song winds down, he stops the player and stares at us until we all realize he's going to say something and we pay him our attention. And he says that song was more important than the past sixteen weeks. Everything I taught you, he says, is trumped by that song. It takes more luck than brains. Nice hair, smiles, and physiques will take you farther than an education. It comes down to who you know, what you're willing to do for them, and what they'll do for you in return.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Pretty disheartening stuff. Over the summer I couldn't keep from thinking about it, and I decided not to go back for another year in the fall.”

A few blocks passed in silence. I wanted to encourage Casey to reconsider school. He was bright and he could go as far as his motivation could take him. But I got a look at his profile. He wasn't sitting there grinding that memory and his abandoned dream in his head. His face was as carefree as ever. That's when I remembered who I was talking to. Casey had always been full of shit, and he had learned to lie from the best. My dad being one of his foremost mentors. So I started to wonder whether any of that was true. Had he ever gone to college? Was there really an economics professor who played “Money for Nothing” and told his class they were wasting their time?

I couldn't call him on it. He'd deny it if he was lying. I'd be able to see through that, but he would never admit to lying. I decided to let it go. The truth of that matter had nothing to do with my life, after all.

We had gone a few blocks deep into a neighborhood off First Avenue. The bare branches of the oaks and elms lining either side of the street reached across the asphalt chasm to try to huddle with their kin, as if to keep warm until spring sun would comfort their arthritic sinews. There were quite a few cars parked on the street for the middle of the day. But that wasn’t unusual for that area. Some of the old neighborhoods hosted young couples with wife at home with newborns or toddlers. Some were populated mostly by retired folks who had lived in those houses before the neighborhoods were considered old. The young wife would have a dependable car for running errands. The retirees would have a simonized Caprice or Taurus. But looking at the cars along the street, I could see most of them were several years old, oxidized, and riddled with rust below the doors and over the tires. These were the cars of the unemployed and the part-time shift workers.

There was one car that stood out. A Cadillac El Dorado with windows tinted so dark you'd think the car was filled with used motor oil. That was the car of a certain kind of home-based entrepreneur. I knew it was where we would be stopping even before Casey swooped up to the curb.

I followed him across the street. I stayed a few paces behind him on the weathered sidewalk. The concrete squares had been shifted to different plateaus by decades of frost heave. Casey caught his toe on the edge of a slab a good inch and a half higher than the one in front of it.

“Damn it! I just got these shoes. Look at the toe now. Cheap ass sidewalk.”

His reaction seemed intense. Maybe he was anxious with the task at hand. He took a few more paces up the sidewalk then turned toward a pale yellow house with white trim. The trim was molting feathers of paint. The plate glass window panes shivered between ill-fitting wood frames that couldn't hope to keep out the cold. I knew those windows well from living in a dozen houses built before World War II.

“This is the place,” he said. “I know these guys, so just let me handle everything, OK?”

The house had been divided into several smaller units. Casey led me alongside the house to a door that was probably once used as quick access from the kitchen to the backyard. Two reflective stickers centered above the door read “A3.” He knocked a few short raps on the window glass, which triggered a volley of curses shouted between two men. After a few seconds, a murky silhouette approached the door window then pulled the thin curtain back far enough for one eye to peer outside.

“It's me, man. Casey. Open the fucking door. Shit's cold out here.”

The door was pulled back with a jerky motion due to a sagging hinge. Casey tried entering too hastily and ended up walking into the door as it paused, and pushed it inward himself.

“Watch the door, man!”

“Man, fix that fucking thing. Every time I come over here that shit's falling apart.”

“It's the landlord's job. I ain't fixin' his fuckin' door.”

“You never get tired of living with that door?”

“I hate the door. But it ain't my responsibility.”

“Next time I come over, I'm bringing some extra-long screws and I'm fixing your damn door.”

“Jesus, talk about the fucking door some more, already,” a female voice said. I was working my own way in as the man behind the door was trying to shut it.

“Hey, who the fuck is this, Casey?” the doorman asked as I tried to enter. He was a few inches shorter than me. He wore a knit cap with the top slouched over. Dreads sprouted down to frame a pudgy face. If his mass was good for anything, it was as a doorstop. He braced against the door, ready to plow me back outside if given the command. We were almost chest-to-chest, if not for the two inches of door between us.

“It's all right. He's with me.”

Furniture springs bemoaned someone heavy shifting their weight in an inner room. A moist heat rippled across my face as it escaped through the wedged-open door, laden with the musty reek of recently smoked pot and the stink of sweat and sex. It may have been my proximity to the doorman, whose face was glistening with an even coat of perspiration. He may have been working out before coming to the door, or it may have been warm enough in there to keep a person lightly sweating all day.

Casey had stepped around the corner to where the woman’s voice had originated.

“He's with you?” said a man in that other room. His voice was deep and I assumed it was his mass that the furniture lamented. “That makes it all right for some fucker I don't know to walk into my house? Who fucking said you can bring guests into my house, you fucking weasel?”

“Shit, Louis,” Casey said. “We're here on business. Need to make a little purchase. Would it be all right with you if my friend comes inside? All right? I brought him here to buy from you, and you won't let him come inside?”

Around the corner, Louis dispelled Casey's protests by exhaling a plume of disappointment that Casey was being so serious. “Pfshhhh!” Then he called, “Let the fucker in!”

With that, the doorman took one deep step back, leaving me to push the crippled door out of my way. Some doorman.

“See? All you got to do is ask, Weasel.”

“Don't call me that.”

“In my house. Call you what I want. You fucking weasel.”

I came around the corner to see Casey dwarfed by a black man wearing nothing but a pair of camouflage pants. His shoulders were round and immense and his stomach arched beyond his thick chest, but was not at all fat. He looked as if his muscles had once stretched his brown skin. Now he was looking soft, but still formidable. They were the only men in the room, so that had to be the body that belonged to the voice of Louis. His stare was so intent on Casey, anticipating some reaction, that he didn’t register my presence. Casey faced him with a rigid posture, almost as if he were an enlisted man at attention. Maybe it was my appearance or maybe Louis grew tired of trying to get Casey to play along, but he broke off the staring contest and punched Casey on the shoulder. “I'm just fucking with you, man. You bring me a lot of business. I appreciate you. All right?”

As Casey muttered an unconvincing response, Louis’ eyes had already fixed on my face. His stare delved into me as if trying to penetrate a cinder block. He was summoning forth an answer to a question he hadn't yet pronounced. Doorman’s weight closed in behind me. “I know you from somewhere,” Louis said.

“He’s never been around here,” Casey said. The four of us were within inches of each other, amplifying the tropical heat of the place.

“That's Aiden's little brother,” the woman’s voice said from behind him.

Louis and I may well have been mirror images, each wearing a look of abject confusion that contorted slightly as he assembled a mental puzzle, and each sensing the key piece was missing. I felt I should have known him just as he was plumbing my resemblance to Aiden. As he turned to face her, I stepped just to the side and peered around his shoulder. The woman was lying on a bed, smoking. There was a swirled mess of sheets and at least one blanket that her legs stuck into and her feet poked out of. She was wearing a wife beater and clearly nothing under it.

“Hey, Ethan!” she said, waving at me. “Been forever!”

I was about to tell her I had no idea who she was when something about her voice tripped an old memory. Gina. Gina... what was her last name?

“How you know this fucker,” Louis asked her.

“I popped his cherry!” Gina said, with a wicked twist in her delivery meant to embarrass me. I wasn't embarrassed, so much as ashamed. I would never have recognized her from her face. Her eyes were sunken and dark. Though she was only a year older than me, any stranger would have guessed she was in her late forties. Her lifestyle had taken its toll. You could read the whole saga with a single glance at those surroundings. It was like seeing an abused dog. But there was no one to call to have Gina taken to a shelter. She had chosen her master, and she was willing to stay in exchange for what he could deliver.

“You fucked this shit?” Louis said. His voice peaked with surprise. I didn't think it was mere shock at the coincidence of us both being with the same person. It sounded like genuine stupefaction that I had chosen Gina among all others to have sex with.

“Hey!” Gina said.

“Whatever. He's really Aiden's brother?” he asked Casey.

“Yeah, man.”

“Didn't know Aiden had a brother.”

“Ethan hasn't been in town for a while. Left as soon as he finished school.”

“See? That's why I should've stayed in school. Maybe I would've learned enough to know to stay clear of this fucking town.” Louis laughed at his own joke, but no one else joined in. “Listen, man, I heard what happened to your brother. It's rough, man.”

“Thanks.”

“So listen, Louis, we need something from the armoire.”

“The arm-or-y, mother fucker,” Doorman said.

“Your armory is in an armoire, all right? Whatever!”

And so it was. Louis led us through an old oak panel door into a bedroom with heavy blankets over the windows. He moved through the dark room until he reached the armoire. He opened it and twisted the in-line switch on a light hung from the inside top of the armoire to reveal a small cache of weapons hanging from hooks on a pegboard background. He had a small selection of revolvers and quite a few semi-automatic pistols. There were a few shotguns, but no rifles, which made sense. He wasn't outfitting deer hunters.

Louis took a step back and made a gesture with his arm as if he was a model on
The
Price
is
Right
saying, “Come look at this fine shit!”

Casey stepped forward and perused the guns. “These are nice, but what we need is something less lethal.”

“Less lethal? Why get a gun if you ain't gonna kill someone?”

“Not looking to kill today, man. We just need to put someone down so we can talk to him. Someone a little bigger than you. Don't you have a TASER?”

“Second drawer. Take your pick.”

Casey rummaged through the drawer. I stood back at the doorway. It felt like his show, and I wouldn't have known how to pick what I needed, anyway. Soon he grabbed one and told Louis the cost was coming out of what he owed him, which Louis reluctantly agreed to. “I could get good money for that.”