By the time I got back to my house, some of the swelling had gone down on my cheek. My right eye, however, was completely closed. I compelled my good eye to perform overtime duties watching for tails and carefully surveying the neighborhood for any cars or people I didn’t recognize.
I popped the cap on a Motor City Honey Porter dark ale, downed three ibuprophens with it and stood at my living room windows staring out at the quiet street. I hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Not since my trial. No, even longer—not since a woman I’d loved was gunned down in a goddamn convenience store.
Like someone lashed to the mast of a rudderless ghost ship, whipped by winds and a hard, cold rain from all directions.
“Fuck this,” I said to the empty street outside my windows.
I finished my beer, cleaned myself up and went to the local branch of my bank. A bank I’d hoped was at least modestly under its own control. When I returned, I walked across the street to the Rodriguez house and knocked on the door. The Rodriguez boy peered out from one of the living room windows. He saw me, grinned and waved. I heard his father sternly tell him to get away from the window.
The door opened and there stood Carlos Rodriguez, splattered with plaster and drywall mud, Louisville Slugger in hand.
“Yes?” he said.
“We need to talk, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said.
“About?”
“Taking control,” I said.
Reluctantly, he let me in.
His wife came in from the kitchen. It was cold in the house and they were all wearing winter coats.
“Mrs. Rodriguez,” I said, “would you mind taking your son to the kitchen?”
“Why?”
“Because I need an honest word with your husband and I mean not to offend you, your son or the home you’re trying hard to make here.”
She nodded and gestured for their son—Manolito—to come with her to the kitchen.
Once they were gone, Rodriguez took a tighter grip on the baseball bat’s handle and said, “What’s this about?”
“It’s about you and your family squatting here,” I said. “It’s about your wife and son being illegals. And it’s about you being man enough to accept help.” He stared at me for a hard minute. Then I held out an envelope.
Without taking the envelope, Rodriguez said, “What’s this?”
“This is what neighbors do,” I said.
Tentatively, he took the envelope and opened it. His eyes widened at the sight of the money inside.
“I’m an ex-cop,” I said. “I won the lottery. There should be enough to last you folks for a while. Buy some space heaters until we can figure out how to get the heat going. Food. Clothes maybe some toys and books for the boy. Something nice for your wife. And I’d like it if you, Jimmy Radmon—”
“The drug dealer kid?”
“He doesn’t deal anymore,” I said. “I’d like it if the three of us sat down and talked about what we can do with a couple other houses in the neighborhood. You and Jimmy would be working together. And I’d be the paymaster. We flip the houses, you and Jimmy get a cut. That is, if you’re good enough for the job.”
“Why—why would you do this?” Rodriquez said. I could see that his grip on the bat had loosened a bit and, imperceptible to most, his defensive stance had relaxed.
“Because I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t have control over your own life. And if you’re like me, you hate it and hate God for the corner you feel you’re backed into.”
Rodriguez looked at the money once again then back to me. “I’ll do this—for my son—”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Don’t lay this off on the kid. Do it for yourself to be the man your son already sees in you.” I paused and we looked at each other for a moment. Then I put my hand out and said, “Deal?”
Rodriguez’s strong, work-bitten hand gripped mine. “Gracias.”
I’d started to leave when Rodriguez added, “You don’t mind my asking, Señor Snow, but what happened to your face?”
I thought for a moment before saying, “Slipped on a bar of soap.”
Rodriguez nodded. I left and drove north to visit my parents.
The October day was bright and cold. The cemetery’s collection of old-growth oaks and dogwoods caught the light of an increasingly distant sun, their fall colors luminescent. I brought along a copy of Octavio Paz’s first poetry collection, Luna Silvestre.
I parked in the small circular drive near St. Ignatius Cemetery and walked uphill for a minute or two, turning right at the Kowalski family plot. My parents were buried beneath one of the taller oaks of the cemetery. The tree would soon shed its leaves, covering my parents beneath a red and gold patchwork quilt in preparation for a cold winter.
Small flags were stuck in the ground near the headstones: Near my mother’s grave there was an American flag and the flag of Mexico. Near my father’s grave was another American flag with the green, black and red broad-striped flag African-Americans had adopted as their own.
I smiled. I could guess who’d put them there—Big Jake the caretaker, whom I’d met on my last visit to the graves.
I sat with my back against the oak and stared at their headstones for a few minutes. I wondered if they could feel my presence. And I wondered what they might think seeing me with a swollen-shut eye and a badly bruised cheek, from a battle I’d brought on myself and had chosen to lose.
I did not look like the success they’d hoped for. The man whom they had worked so hard to raise to loftier heights: A social-worker fighting the good fight of the poor and disenfranchised. A lawyer raging against the machinery of exclusion, bigotry and hate. A teacher inspiring children to dream bigger and imagine the greater heights of their own potential.
Something.
Anything but an ex-cop with a couple bucks in his pocket and no family.
“We are defined by the people we lose . . .”
In the distance, I heard a riding mower giving the cemetery one of its last cuts before the grass slept and the snows came. If it was Big Jake I’d have to thank him for the tiny flags.
After reading two of Octavio Paz’s poems to the headstones, I sat wondering if the money I’d given Carlos Rodriguez was simply my way of saying goodbye. A way of defining myself to a stranger. Aside from the sounds of distant traffic and Big Jake grooming the rolling terrain, the cemetery was quiet.
Halfway through another poem—“Between Going and Coming”—I heard footsteps shifting fallen leaves.
I turned and looked, hoping it would be Big Jake. But no: it was the man calling himself Brewster.
I dropped the book, pulled out my Glock, cocked the hammer and came to a knee.
Brewster smiled and held up the palms of his hands.
“As good a place as any to drop you,” I said.
I quickly glanced around: twenty yards behind him in the eleven o’clock position was a man in a long, black trench coat. It wasn’t Brewster’s original thick-necked bodyguard who’d become so well-acquainted with my living room floor. His new companion was the wiry brown-haired security guard with wire rim glasses. The man I’d fought. Dax. His coat was open and his hand rested discreetly on what could have been a machine pistol. If he was as good with a gun as he was with martial arts, then equal and deadly forces were now in play.
Dax smiled at me. Nodded.
Where there was one bodyguard, there was likely another. By this time, I’d earned more than one thick-necked, mouth-breathing bodyguard.
“I’m only here to see if you’ve reconsidered my original offer,” Brewster said. “As they say in advertising, for a limited time only.”
“Turn around and get back in your car,” I said. “Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
Brewster was thirty feet away. I hated the thought of using headstones as cover. Seemed a sacrilege. But the dead didn’t care and headstones are just rocks.
“I have the money in the car.” Brewster gestured over the hill. “Of course, you realize my offers are on a sliding scale; we’ve deducted twenty percent from the original amount. A countdown of sorts.”
“A countdown,” I said. “To what?”
Brewster smiled and shrugged.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?” I stood from my kneeling position. Brewster’s smile slowly faded and he looked at me with hard dark eyes. The eyes of a shark, its nose sensing blood in the water. Perhaps his own. “This whole Titan deal is going south and you’re scared. Hell, I’d be scared too if I found myself in the cross hairs of an assassin.”
“Not unlike most of your black brethren,” Brewster said, cracks in his cool façade beginning to show, “you seem never to know when to shut up or walk away.”
“I take that as a compliment,” I said.
Brewster said nothing. His eyes cut to his left for a split second. The third man. Behind a dogwood. Hand on the stock of his gun. A machine pistol.
“Why’d you kill Eleanor Paget?” I said.
The question shocked and annoyed him. “She was a mean-spirited, selfish old bag who blustered and railed against the prevailing winds of change. But kill her? I had no interest in or incentive to kill a madwoman baying at the moon. What would my payout be? Perhaps one of the board members had her killed. Who knows? Who cares? Patience, persuasion and large amounts of cash are my weapons of choice, Mr. Snow.” Brewster’s easy-going grin was beginning to quiver at the edges.
“What about Atchison?” I said. “Did he kill her?”
“How should I know!” Brewster shouted, finally revealing his frustration.
“You control him,” I said. “It’s your business to know.”
I was starting to think Brewster might have made one too many deals with a few too many devils. And I was just a minor demon that had tipped already tenuously balanced scales.
Brewster took in a sharp breath of chilled air, then exhaled slowly. “He is an impetuous, solipsistic little prick, yes. But I believe he appreciates the forces he has aligned himself with. Such unsanctioned actions on his part would be dangerously inconsiderate of those forces.”
“This is holy ground,” a gruff voice boomed.
It was Big Jake, the groundskeeper, obscured by a tight grouping of three old-growth oaks on a slight rise behind and to my left. For a man in his late sixties, Big Jake moved with the agility and speed of a Big Ten college running back. Within a second or two he had the highly polished nickel-plated barrel of a large semi-automatic handgun to the temple of the second bodyguard. “Son, you got a choice: Put the gun down and embrace Jesus. Or get ready to suck the devil’s dick. Now, what’s it gonna be, boy?”
The man eased his machine pistol from beneath his Navy pea coat and let it drop to the ground.
“Praise Jesus,” Big Jake said before cracking the butt of his gun on the back of the man’s head. The bodyguard collapsed near a tombstone inscribed Beloved Son.
“Now I’d suggest y’all be on y’all’s way fort I call the po-lice,” Big Jake said, his gun level and steady on Dax. “Unless y’all want me to kill you dead right here, right now. And I can guaran-damn-tee ya: when I buries yo ass, it’ll be so deep you gonna have to look up to see hell.”
Brewster glared at Big Jake, then brought his eyes back to me. “Perhaps another time, Mr. Snow,” he said.
“This is my last offer to you, Brewster,” I said. “Come at me one more time and I will make you suffer before you die.”
Brewster turned away and began walking up the tree-and-headstone-covered incline. Dax closed his coat, showed the palms of his hands and began walking toward us to retrieve his co-worker sprawled on the cold ground unconscious.
“Leave him!” Brewster shouted.
Dax stopped, gave me an easy smile and said, “Be seein’ ya.”
He turned and walked away. Big Jake and I kept our guns leveled at the two retreating men. Without looking back at me, Brewster said loudly, “I assure you, Mr. Snow—my third offer will not be so generous.”
Big Jake and I watched them disappear over the knoll.
“Friends of yours?” Big Jake said.
“How’d you guess?” I said.
I looked at the piece Big Jake held in his thick hand—a renowned limited-edition gun.
“Desert Eagle?” I said admiringly.
Big Jake held up the weapon, gazing fondly at it. “Yessah, it is. First Gulf War. Given to me by General ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf hisself.” Big Jake tucked the gun back into its holster, sighed and said, “Lots of us in the sand.”
“Nine years in Iraq the second time and thirteen in Afghanistan. That’s a lot men in a lot of sand,” I said. “Thanks for the help, Big Jake.”
“Ah, hell, son,” Big Jake said, giving me a slap on the back. It hurt. “Didn’t really look like you needed no help. I’m pretty sure you coulda took them white boys.” He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and scowled at me. “Just don’t be makin’ it no habit bringin’ shit like that around here, you feel me?” He squinted, assessed my face and said, “Look like you already done had more than your fair share of shit for one day.”
I told Big Jake I’d take the machine pistol. I’m sure either the weapon or the man’s prints or both would prove useful to O’Donnell. I looked down at the unconscious man lying next to his machine pistol. “I’ll clean this up.”
“No,” Big Jake said. “My cemetery, my cleanup. Plus, I might just got something make this young man repent of his evil ways.”
“Should I ask?”
Big Jake winked at me. “No, but I’mo tell you anyways: Put him in a coffin with a pint of MD 20/20 for fourteen hours and pipe in some Winans praise music. That oughta tenderize his soul a bit.”
“Extraordinary rendition,” I said.