He was rigid. With some effort, I pulled his leg aside, and the car slowed to a stop. I got out, went to the other side, and pushed him as far into the passenger seat as possible. Once he was safe enough, I sped away.
“Where do we go now?” I asked an unconscious Deuce. “This ain’t even my city, man.”
I drove north, away from the city. Part of me thought it was better that way. Head north and slip into Alabama, or pull a U-turn and go as far south as possible. Maybe disappear into the wilds of Miami, or further south in the Keys.
Then I ruminated over the pact. It wasn’t just about survival. It was a commitment to something. Family.
Deuce grunted, so I knew he was alive. The sun bled in bright orange smears across the sky.
I patted my oldest friend’s leg. “Rest up, buddy,” I said. “It’s getting real.”
Part V
1
Deuce had his moral clarity. I had my cloudy mind.
Still, it was impossible to be cloudy when you’re beating a gang member within an inch of his life. Ever since going under the surface, this was our way of passing the days.
This guy pimped girls. This guy cut guys up in clubs. This guy knew where bodies were hidden.
I got out of the car, closed the door behind me. Deuce tugged on a ski mask, and I followed suit. We crossed the neighbor’s yard, leaped a chain link fence.
Deuce and I yanked pieces, kept to the shadows. It was not quite midnight but would be fairly soon.
The house was a dark green, a single, bare bulb hanging from a chain on the front porch. All these unassuming houses containing monsters. An amazing thing to encounter.
We slipped through a window off the main hall. Deuce tipped his head toward his end of the house. I nodded and turned toward the front. I heard a TV blaring sound from a group of New Jersey douche bags arguing how how often they tan and go to the gym. It was distracting but manageable.
I checked a couple of rooms. I didn’t see anything worth noting.
I backed out of a dirty spare bedroom and ran smack dab into the gangbanger’s girlfriend.
Her eyes widened, but I didn’t give her a chance to scream. I spun her around and wrapped one arm around her as the other struggled to find her mouth.
She did not go silent, but she went nonetheless. When I got her out the back door and into the yard, I cocked the hammer on my weapon and kept her quiet with it.
She eyed the barrel and then flicked her eyes at me.
“Keep quiet,” I said.
She rolled her eyes.
I walked her to the bade her disappear for the evening. She huffed but ultimately slunk away, turning around once to check me out one last time.
I didn’t like the way she looked at me.
I watched her disappear behind the wheel of a dilapidated Audi before heading back inside.
Deuce was busily rearranging the dude’s face. I smelled blood. I heard the sickening pop of knuckle on flesh. Knuckle on bone. Deuce shook out the pain from each swing and continued on.
“Rolson,” he said between heavy breaths, “homeboy here said he was going to the club tonight. We’re going with him. We’re going to scope out the party scene. Ain’t we, Ricardo?”
“Man, fuck you homes,” he said. Ricard wiped a blood streak from the edge of his temple.
Deuce smiled. “First, we’re going to get you all cleaned up.”
Cut to the club. We had dragged Ricardo out of the house by force and subdued him in the car. With me driving and Deuce mollifying him in his own particular way, Ricardo played ball when it was required of him.
We reclined in a booth in the corner of a smoky, flashing room filled with clubgoers. They pulsed and trembled to the music like primitive religious converts awaiting a sunrise sacrifice.
I balanced my time between eyeing the crowd and downing half-pints of Red Bull and Jagermeister. It was a recent addition to my drinking repertoire, mostly because the combination of alcohol and caffeine set my brain on fire in a way similar to my ability to converse with the dead.
It was also deeply effective at getting me fucked up.
“Ricardo, anybody here we need to pull over to our table? Maybe have a round robin of speed dates? Huh? Anything?”
Ricardo stared into his drink, spinning the pint of dark liquid in front of him.
Deuce tried again. “Keep in mind: I’ve got a high caliber pistol aimed directly at your ribs. Even if you survived that first round, you’d be shitting into a bag for the rest of your life.”
Ricardo curled one lip. He knocked back his drink.
“I need another drink,” he said, and moved to get up.
Deuce stopped him. “Uh-unh,” he replied. “My buddy here can pick you something up. What you want? Same thing? Rol, get him whatever he wants. It’s on us.”
Ricardo sighed and took it. People wandered through the crowd and said hello but mostly kept to themselves when we were revealed to them. They could smell it on us, the vile stink of the gray area between right and wrong.
A dude in a bad suit appeared some time later. He made eye contact with our man Ricardo, started in our direction, but when he saw the two of us, he skirted in another direction.
“I got this,” I said, and followed the dude through the crowd and out into the parking lot.
By the time I reached the cool night air, I was alone save for a couple necking over by a Honda with a sky-high spoiler. I ducked around the corner and just missed having my throat slit by a knife big as my arm. It whiffed the air just in front of me, and I raised the pistol, yelling whatever nonsense revealed itself to me.
The guy leaped back and then lunged forward. I managed to get out of the way, but the knife gouged a gigantic hole in my t-shirt.
He was a light-skinned Hispanic guy with a wisp of a mustache. He wore slate gray cowboy boots and designer jeans. He was all affectation, fully aware of something his more traditional counterparts did out of earnestness and tradition.
“Puto,” he yelled, edging toward me with his buck knife outstretched.
“Take another step,” I said, “and I empty this clip into your chest.”
He stopped, smiled, and completely disobeyed. I watched him as he moved and searched my thoughts frantically for what I should do.
There were witnesses. There were hundreds of people inside. There was no way I would get out of this. My only chance was to put him down with a single shot to the knee.
I snapped the pistol down and readied myself to pull the trigger, when a bright red flash swelled in front of my eyes.
My legs tried to abandon me. I slipped. I stumbled. I blinked to keep the world in front of me, instead of slipping off to a thick, black darkness.
Someone had slugged me across the back of my head. The guy with the knife smiled more broadly, stepped forward to gut me with the knife.
I thought of dead men. Leland Brickmeyer. Jeffrey. Emmitt and Winston and all the people in the church, too. I thought of Limba Fitz, and my heart surged. My fear of him, even after his death, kept me upright.
Barely.
Just as I was about to be taken down, a form rocketed into view, knocking the knife-wielding thug out of view.
I turned, vision blurring, and aimed at the figure behind me. He’d raised a pipe for one more chance at bludgeoning me to death. I fired into the shadow but missed. The figure turned and fled back down the alley behind the club.
My blurry vision saved his life.
Meanwhile, Deuce was beating the ever-loving shit out of the guy with the knife. I mean, it was brutal. I managed to claw his hand away but fell down in the process. My head was spinning. My head was swollen. I thought for a good minute I would yark.
I swam through gravel to get back to my feet. Deuce had his victim in an intense discussion over where and how we could get in touch with people who procure human beings as a source of income.
“I will beat you until your brains leak out in front of this cheap excuse for a club,” he w
as saying, “unless you tell me someone connected to Hector Dominguez.”
“I don’t know no Hector, man,” the other guy warbled. He sounded blitzed.
“Deuce,” I began, but Deuce wouldn’t let him go. He had that gravelly edge to his voice I normally associated with the Red-Eyed Stranger.
People had begun to peek out the door of the club, and a few had even begun to yell. I half expected Deuce to turn and fire into the crowd of people, but he didn’t. He just kept his focus tied to his new “friend.”
“Buddy, you tell me where and when this goes down, or who might be in charge of it, or I string you up by your cojones. You hear me?”
Of late, we had been employing an old tactic of wedging the barrel of a 9 mil between the teeth of a dude to get specific info from him. Deuce didn’t do that tonight, but then again he didn’t have to. The guy talked in choppy sentences about his allegiances.
“Never worked for…for…Hector…Set a friend up…He sent girls…”
“Who’s the friend?”
This guy gulped.
Deuce leaned in close, said, “Don’t make me feed pieces of you to the gators. I got friends and enemies never been heard from again.”
He gulped again, drooled on himself. He was on the verge of going out.
“A name, fool.”
“Othello,” he said, at last. “Othello Dufour.”
Bingo.
“Your friend Ricardo know Othello?”
He nodded.
“He able to corroborate it?”
The guy stared.
“Connect it. Can he connect it? Can he tell us definitively what happened?”
He nodded.
Deuce, who had been holding him by his collar, dropped him.
He stood up, waved the gun at the gathering crowd. “Any of you call the cops?”
A line of shaking heads. “What happened ‘tween y’all is y’all’s business.”
A whole club full of onlookers, and not a single snitch. I didn’t see Ricardo, so I imagined him long, long gone.
Our next target was one Othello Dufour.
During this purge of information, during this crusade we had managed to undertake, I came to land on a specific idea that I couldn’t quite let go.
At one point, I just had to let it all out.
“Your cousin,” I said finally. “Reg, he’s — I think he’s bad news.”
“You’re telling me, friend,” Deuce said. “He’s got a side deal with the truth, and it’s not one that’s paying dividends for us.”
“Why are you letting him lead us around, then?”
“I think he’s trying to atone,” Deuce said. “He’s done something abhorrent, but I’m hoping he’ll find the, you know, the right path and all that.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Deuce regarded his pistol with eventuality.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said.
“I’ve done plenty I didn’t want to since coming to Jacksonville, Rol,” he said. “It’s been one long string of shitty decisions, and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon. You think we’re any closer to the end than we were when we ducked out of Savannah?”
I weighed what he was saying. “We’re close to your brother’s killer.”
“That don’t have anything to do with it being over.”
“Doesn’t seem like it’ll ever be over. It’ll just go on and on, until all of us are dead or cut out of the picture.”
“Huh,” he said.
“You all right with that?”
He shrugged. “Man with no purpose doesn’t have a good reason to live. Seems like I lost mine along the way, around the time that goddamned Laveau boy turned up in the gin joint by your house.”
“I see what you mean.”
“And you don’t feel the same way?”
I considered it. “My life was given more meaning by stepping in a pile of Brickmeyer shit,” I said.
“You’ve got a damn sight better view of things than I do,” he said.
“Something happened. The world shifted around me, or I shifted in it, and it was like everybody else stood still. I got ahead somehow.”
Deuce was balling and unballing one fist, watching himself as if an alien were inside his body. “I got this…thing, where sometimes I’m underwater. Not literally, yo, but all my senses are encased in glass, and I can’t see or hear what I’m supposed to. I dream about…crazy things. Them crazy motherfuckers in the swamp still come to see me.”
“What do they say?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s like they’re waiting, just waiting. I can see them in the distance, hanging out in my periphery. Know what I mean?”
I nodded. “What do you think they’re waiting for?”
“I think we both know, and I don’t want to name it. I feel like if I name it, it’ll happen sooner.”
Fair.
“How come it doesn’t drive you crazy?” he asked.
“Maybe I was never that centered to begin with,” I said. I quoted an old Waylon Jennings song. He nodded and stared off into the distance, as if he understood exactly what was on my mind.
“Deuce,” I said, “what’s really eating you? I know the horror movie playing out inside you is unimaginable, but I dealt with it nearly a year, so don’t hesitate to ask.”
He wrestled with it. Deuce was the kind of guy who physically struggled with emotional issues. “The dreams,” he said, “they don’t end. They take me off to places I’d rather forget.”
“If it could be controlled, you’d be able to cut all your unwanted memories.”
“That what you did?”
“I don’t know what I did,” I said. “Sometimes it all comes back to me, and I wish it wouldn’t.”
“The most persistent dream,” he said, “involves the league. I’m back in the Superdome. I’m playing defensive end. There’s a crowd, capacity crowd, and they’re all cheering me, specifically. I can feel their eyes. I know exactly what’s in their minds and their hearts. It’s not the Super Bowl, but it might as well be. The crowd’s so loud, it’s rocking the stadium, and the game’s on the line.”
“I bet that dream’s that’s too strange to you,” I said.
“Dreams I used to have revolved around a single feeling, that sense of loss. You get so used to playing ball, the fear of getting tapped on the shoulder, told it’s time for you to go, always hung over your head. That was hard, but I could deal.”
“And the new ones?”
“I don't know, man,” he said. He searched his fingertips for an answer.
I sipped at a beer that was warmer than it was bad.
“I mean, you know how you loved Van? I know you do; it’s not a trick question. Football was my Van. I loved that sport like people love their wives. I spent all my best years on the field, and like everybody else, the sport was done with me before I was done with it. That’s something people have a hard time dealing with. Me, I thought I was fine. I used to have The Dream, and it was easy for me to call up some of the old homeboys and discuss it. That made it go away.”
“But these dreams?”
“Dreams, I can handle. It’s the way I wake up. Sometimes, it’s where I wake up.”
He continued. “Sometimes I wake up soaked through with sweat. I open my eyes, thinking I’m in bed, but sometimes I’m not even lying down. I wake up, and I’ve been sleepwalking. But this is not like any sleepwalking I’ve heard of.”
He paused, chewed one fingernail. “You ever heard of CTE, Rol?”
“Sure. Brain disease football players get. Makes them irrational.”
“Right on. And I’m reaching the age where, if it’s got me, it’s got me. This otherworldly shit, it’s latched onto my brain where it’s injured, and it’s just grinding me down to nothing. Does that make any sense at all?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Me, when I had it the worst, it was when I was drinking.”
“Was drinking?”
“Wel
l, when it was most powerful, I was drinking my ass off.”
“Like in the Boogie House.”
I nodded. “Jeffrey Brickmeyer, he would have ended us all, but for something that happened there. I’d started to bottom out. Something tells me, if I hadn’t been getting blitzed in the lead-up to that, I might not have walked out of there.”
“Well, you didn’t, because I carried your ass out, but I see your meaning.”
“So,” I said, “maybe it’s not anything to do with drinking in general. Maybe it’s a person-by-person thing. Football, then, might be your thing.”
“So how do I get rid of it? Do I go and try out for the Falcons?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“I bet I could make the practice squad, even as busted up as I am right now. Shot full of holes, and I think I could still hang. Nine and seven last year, so maybe last year’s squad. 2010 might be the Falcons’ year. Don’t know. We’ll see.”
“I think your playing days are well behind you, old man,” I said.
He elicited a knowing smile, but I didn’t quite know how to take it, so I let it lie.
Thing was, I knew Deuce. Knew he was in the throes of some horrific battle. I wished I could get more out of him, but it wasn’t his habit to tell all his business.
But there was a secret. He was raising Hell all over Jacksonville, but that wasn’t it. There was something else, and it was eating away at him.
It wasn’t the drinking.
That was my thing.
Something told me, though, he knew what his particular ability was, and if he wasn’t revealing it to me, it must have been plenty fucked up.
“Maybe it’s not something we can get rid of,” I said, and when I didn’t receive a response, I left him alone.
He’d drifted off, I could tell, and so I let him unwind his chain a little bit. Might do him some good to let his mind wander. I had no idea he’d been so tightly wound. No idea at all.
He wasn’t supposed to be hiding out, but when we found him, he was hanging out in a place full of vagabonds and loners. Tip of a tip of a tip had led us here — my anonymous contact from the Reapers had contacted me — and Deuce wasted no time with pleasantries. He kicked open the door, snatched Reginald off his barstool, and dragged the poor bastard out to the car in broad daylight.
Dirt Merchant Page 38
