“I don’t want to hear your confession,” said Muhammad. “I just wanted to know that the man we killed was the right one. Yes, you gonna, Daddy. We are going to make your death as painful as you made our lives. All we’ve had is time to think about how to do it, and now it’s time to put that knowledge to use.” Turning to Rimba, he said, “Tie off his arm.”
Rimba took a rag and tied it tightly around Bolt’s left arm. He pulled it until he saw Bolt’s palm go white.
Then Muhammad got on his knees next to his father. He put his mouth next to his ear and whispered to him the horror of what had happened to his children in the foster care and penal systems.
Boltman started to cry again as he heard stories of Akema’s sexual abuse for over a year, Rimba’s beating and torture at the hands of a sadistic couple, and Muhammad’s own beating by white supremacists in prison. With each terrible tale, Bolt grew weaker and weaker, and Muhammad could feel him accepting his fate.
“Each day,” said Muhammad, “we’re going to take part of you off, until there’s nothing left. We will take you apart until you die, then we will keep cutting you until there is nothing left but your evil-ass heart.”
Bolt started to say the Lord’s Prayer, closing his eyes to shut out his tormentors. For a second, Muhammad believed that his father was a changed man. The sincerity of the prayer was sweet and genuine, the words of a man with God in his heart. But whatever mercy Muhammad might have once had inside him was gone. He felt only the need to rid the world of this poisonous man and the pain he felt in his own heart.
Muhammad nodded to Rimba, who took Bolt’s arm with the tourniquet on it. Akema stopped her watch to see the spectacle. Rimba raised the big knife, his arm shaking with anger. Then he brought the blade down, cutting off his father’s hand.
Bolt’s scream was unearthly as the limb was lopped off. The brothers watched as Bolt writhed on the floor. Muhammad hugged Rimba, telling him that his blow was good.
“Men coming!” said Akema, looking out of the window. She saw Danny and Marshall running toward their home.
Without a word, the brothers armed themselves. Muhammad looked at his father on the floor. The blood had stopped flowing from his arm and he’d passed out from the pain.
Akema tied Bellva to a doorknob on a closet. She slapped her viciously across the face and was about to hit Bellva again when Muhammad grabbed his sister and pulled her out of the room.
Danny slid the small wooden box onto the front porch of the house. Then he and Marshall continued moving to the back of the home. The place was falling apart and someone had torn off the city sign condemning it. All that was left were the letters DEMNED. Danny thought of the word damned as he passed by.
Danny and Marshall arrived at the back door and found a panel of plywood that had been pulled back. They got on either side of the door and Danny ripped off the flimsy piece of wood. Then he pulled out his other gun and waited.
Suddenly, there was an explosion at the front of the place. Danny waited a few seconds then moved into the doorway, raising both weapons.
Danny entered a small pantry. When he got inside, he saw Akema Bady running out of the room to see what had blown up the front door.
Danny sensed someone to his right and swung the .45 out and fired. Danny felt Marshall move to his left behind him.
Danny’s first shot with the .45 missed Muhammad Bady, but forced him to move away into the kitchen. Danny fired the Glock and hit Muhammad in the arm.
Rimba tossed the machete at Marshall at the same time Marshall squeezed off a shot at him. Marshall leaned to one side as the blade flew by his head. His shot hit Rimba in the gut and Rimba fell to one knee.
Muhammad’s gun fired, and Danny heard the bullet go by his ear. Danny fired the .45 again and hit Muhammad in the chest, sending the man flying into the air. Muhammad’s gun flew out of his hand, but Danny couldn’t see where it went.
Danny jerked his head over to check on Marshall. He saw him moving in on Rimba, who was still on his knees.
“Don’t get close to him,” said Danny.
Marshall took a step back as Rimba pulled out another knife. He looked up at Marshall, then plunged his own knife into his heart, killing himself.
Danny ran by Rimba’s dead body into the other room. He entered and was backed out by a volley of gunfire. He had seen brief muzzle flashes from a corner.
Danny took only a second, knowing that if he waited a standoff would ensue. He ran back into the room and pumped several shots from both weapons toward the place where he had seen the muzzle flashes. The sound was deafening and he moved forward trying to see if the last Bady brother had been hit.
He found Akema in the corner, hit twice and not moving. He felt for a pulse. There was none. She was gone.
Danny heard a muffled cry. He turned and saw Bellva tied to a door across the room. She was half naked and crying.
Danny moved toward her when he heard a noise from behind him. He turned to see Muhammad crawling next to another man on the floor. Muhammad’s face had an expression of pain and determination. He crawled to the man on the floor, raised his bloodstained hands, and started to choke him. Wounded, Muhammad was very weak but he used every ounce of his strength to choke the fallen man.
Danny yelled for Muhammad to stop, but he could see that he was not going to. Danny ran over and pulled Muhammad off the other man. Muhammad grunted loudly then rolled over on his face and collapsed. He took in a couple of sharp breaths—then nothing.
Danny checked on Muhammad. He was dead. Danny looked at the fallen man and saw that it was Reverend Bolt. He was lying in a pool of blood. On Bolt’s arm was a dirty rag, which was tied off just above the elbow. Then Danny saw why. Bolt’s left hand had been cut off. Danny checked Bolt for signs of life. He felt a weak pulse.
“This one’s still with us, Marshall,” said Danny.
Marshall walked over and saw the man Danny referred to.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Marshall.
“We need to call an ambulance, right now.”
“I’m on it,” said Marshall.
Danny moved back over to Bellva as Marshall whipped out a cell phone. Bellva was tired, beaten, and scared, but she was in good shape compared to everyone else in the house. Danny quickly untied her.
“Good to see you again,” said Danny to Bellva. She smiled a little sick smile and wiped her eyes.
Danny helped her to her feet. Bellva stood on shaky kegs and tried to cover herself up.
“Can you make it?” asked Danny.
“Yes,” said Bellva. “Yes, I can.”
32
FRANKIE
Danny and Marshall watched as the attendant at the pet cemetery dug up John Baker’s dog, Frankie. The Rest-in-Pets Animal Cemetery was a dismal patch of land jammed in the back of what used to be a strip mall in Ferndale just outside of Detroit. Darkness was settling on the city, and the tiny headstones sprouted up around them like a miniature vision of some hellish dream.
Like most people, Danny thought of pets as kind of human, so this place, this ragged piece of land filled with the carcasses of once-loved family members, was very quietly giving him the creeps.
Danny had called in the cops and an ambulance for Reverend Bolt. How and why Bolt was there and had been mutilated was something that he did not know. They were all curious but Bolt was in no shape to talk yet.
The morgue’s meat wagon had come for the Bady brothers. They would not be talking at all.
Bellva had confessed to everything she knew. John Baker had stolen a lot of money along with Olittah Reese, who’d had a last-minute change of heart. When the heat was on, he buried it with his dead dog before he was killed.
The cemetery attendant, a young man named Wilson, dug up the grave of John Baker’s dead dog. Wilson told Danny that Mr. Baker had insisted on buying the casket himself and would not let him see what was inside it. By law he had to know, so after a little haggling, Baker had bribed him with a hundred buck
s to keep his mouth shut.
Wilson hit something solid and stopped shoveling. “That’s gotta be it,” he said. Wilson put down his spade and scooped away dirt with his hand, revealing a black metal casket. Lifting it up, he pushed it out of the hole.
Danny took over at this point. He forced open the lid and waited for the stench of the dog’s rotting corpse. Instead, he smelled nothing. Inside the coffin were two black vinyl bags. Danny opened the first one and saw it contained neatly bundled packets of bills.
“A buried treasure,” said Marshall. “This shit could only happen in Detroit.”
“You got that right,” said Danny. Danny opened the other bag and found Frankie’s carcass. He quickly zipped it closed.
Wilson sighed and whistled as he realized that he took a measly hundred to pass up a fortune. “There a finder’s fee or somethin’ for this?” he asked.
“No such luck,” said Danny. He lifted the bag with the money in it, then noticed that there was something else in the coffin. He removed several mini cassette tapes and a recorder with a tape inside. It also had a small microphone still plugged in. He stared at it, understanding that John Baker had hidden more than stolen money; he’d buried a secret with his beloved dog. Whatever was on these tapes had driven John Baker to extremes and perhaps caused his death.
“If you don’t play it, I sure as hell will,” said Marshall.
Danny searched the small machine for the play button.
“I should get one of these bundles of money,” said Wilson.
“There’s no reward,” said Marshall.
“There should be,” said Wilson. “That’s a lot of money for there not to be no reward. Maybe you fellas can fix it so’s I get hooked up with one.”
“We’ll do what we can, sir,” said Danny. He pressed the tape recorder’s play button and nothing happened. “Batteries are dead,” Danny said to Marshall.
Marshall couldn’t help but laugh a little as Danny fumbled with the tape machine. Danny saw Wilson run to his attendant’s cart, then come back with several small batteries in his hand. Wilson seemed as eager to know what was going on with the desecrated grave as Danny was.
Danny took the batteries and put several of them in the tape machine. He rewound the tape, then played it. Danny was mesmerized as he listened to the voice emanating from the tiny speaker. He popped in tape after tape until he got it all. When he was finished, he took a deep breath and looked up into the darkening sky. Now he knew everything.
33
HEART OF A PEOPLE
Virginia Stallworth breathed nervously as she finished practicing her speech for the third time. This was going to be a historic night in her life. It had been a long, hard, and dangerous road, but she’d stayed the course, and it was finally going to pay off. Even though someone had found out her secret and struck down her companions, she was safe and ready to take her place in history.
“…and when history is recounted, we will look back to see that this day was not the end of something,” she said to the mirror, “but the beginning of truth and prosperity for us all.” She smiled for an imaginary crowd. It was good, she thought, perfect.
Virginia was in her bedroom, waiting for the NOAA Premiere Night festivities to begin downtown. Though her speech wasn’t for some time, she was taking no chances. She’d come too far for that.
Her family waited downstairs, celebrating. But even they didn’t know what she was going to announce tonight. To meet her goal, no one could know what she was planning, not even her loved ones. The police detectives had discovered just one small part of what she was planning. The Castle. It was silly to resurrect the name, but it had served her purpose. Oscar had been angry as hell, but he didn’t know it went any farther than the Castle.
It had all started years ago, when the Japanese received reparations from President Reagan for their internment during World War II. That led black activists to ask for the same. The cry of “Where’s our money?” rose from the beleaguered face of black America. But the trillions it would have cost to repay blacks would have bankrupted and demoralized the country. Internal focus groups in the NOAA, liberal think tanks and other organizations went through the practicality of doing it. Each time they came to the same conclusion. There were too many people to ever find a control group small enough to make it feasible. Many people in America were mixed with African blood, and answers about who was black and related to slaves were cloudy due to racial mixing. Millions could claim protected status, swelling the numbers out of proportion and killing the effort.
The NOAA had had a bitter internal struggle about this for several years. Finally they’d decided to abandon the agenda for reparations. Virginia had been upset, but not because she believed in reparations. In fact, she’d opposed them, thinking it to be just another political handout leveraged by white guilt and black weakness. What upset her was that a small number of blacks within the group had determined the issue. They’d arbitrarily decided who was black and what that term meant. They called the shots for everyone and lumped the entire race into a single mind-set that they had predetermined.
Virginia realized that this was the case not only within the organization but within the race in general. The many were dictated to by the few and select. It perturbed her even more that this control group was comprised mostly of dark-skinned blacks who considered themselves to be the “real” voice of the people.
The black race had been saved by its elite class, she thought. From W. E. B. DuBois to the legions downtown waiting for her speech. And that savior class had always been racially mixed for the most part. They were the first doctors, teachers, professors, lawyers, and intelligentsia, the backbone of the race.
And for this they had gotten only grief. The notion that the color of a black person didn’t matter was repugnant to her. Color was everything in this country, and she was tired of being dragged down by those who didn’t see that, those who didn’t want to work, suffer, and strive for success.
So slowly, over time, she had sought out like-minded individuals within the NOAA, and found that her beliefs were echoed by a small, yet very powerful group of racially mixed blacks like herself.
Virginia had gotten them all together in a series of clandestine meetings and formulated a plan to give life to the reality of their ancestry and the necessity of their cause.
She was fighting with Hamilton Grace over leadership of the NOAA, but that was just a clever diversion, a ploy to put her in a leadership light. Her newly formed Castle group was going to be the real power.
Their agenda was to create a separate race within the black race in America, a new race of people who were multi-ethnic. She would split off all those of mixed blood and create an elite minority, one that would be fueled with money, power, and a single vision, her vision.
Her family was black, Irish, and Swedish. And yet, no one wanted to hear about those nonblack parts of her heritage. The idea that any black person with more than one race’s blood in his veins was something different was met with derision and anger. When she talked about it, the overwhelming attitude was, “Shut up, you’re black like the rest of us.” The bullshit theory of the black “dominant gene” had made everyone, black and white, just assume you were one thing, and that thing was wretched. But she did not buy that limitation. It was dehumanizing to be forced to forget vital parts of your heritage, and it was time for it to end.
The Bakers had thought her mad at first, but over time they began to see the possibilities. John’s Internet company would provide the money they needed and together they drafted the resolution she was going to read tonight at the meeting, one that would free her people from another generation of Jesus-and-corn-bread philosophy, liberal finger wagging, and the political begging of her organization.
The seeds for this change had always been there within the race, the silent, secret resentment based on color. She would lift it up, expose it in the light of day, and turn it into something good for all people. And her race, the new r
ace, would be strong and proud. It would accept no handouts, and thrive on hard work and the depth of heritage. In time they would be joined by mixed-raced Latinos, Asians, and others would fill the ranks of her group until they were no longer a minority but the one, true voice of America.
And it would all begin tonight. She smiled to herself. After she took the podium and told everyone of her plan, she and her followers would stage a walkout that would throw the organization into disarray and focus instant media attention on her. She saw herself on the Today show, Nightline, and Larry King Live, leading the crusade and opening the mind of America in the new millennium.
From there, she would get funding for her new organization, which she planned to call the MEPOA, or the Multi-Ethnic Persons of America. They would start chapters in each city where there was an NOAA base then seek out certification from all of the powers that be in this country.
It was time for this, she thought. Hundreds of years in the making, a new day had come. She’d barely been able to contain herself these last few weeks. She didn’t have time for her family, who had noticed the change in her, the nervousness and sleeplessness. They wrote it off to anxiety connected to the murders.
Virginia didn’t know who had killed the members of her secret committee in Detroit. This had frightened her beyond belief. First she thought that it was a disgruntled investor in New Nubia, but that didn’t make sense. Then she thought it was Hamilton Grace, but it was not his style. The one thing she did know was that John Baker had gotten cold feet about the Castle and her cause. He began to question what they were doing, threatening to stop the flow of money. But she’d countered with her own threats to expose his shady business dealings and he’d quieted down.
Still, that didn’t explain what was happening. With each death, she’d grown more afraid to continue her quest. But no great revolution came without a price. Dr. King, Gandhi, and JFK had all paid for their vision. She knew there might be dangers, but she was willing to face them.
Color of Justice Page 25
