Run

by Douglas E. Winter

  Jinx doesn’t answer. He makes that Chevy something leap lanes; the guy must be doing eighty and I’m not sure I like the feeling. Just what we need are some Jersey jackboots busting our chops for speeding.

  Hey, man, I tell him. Ease back. I only want to get some aspirin.

  You hurtin? Shit, man, you shouldn’t be hurtin. You a bad man. A big bad man. One of the hitters that did the Reverend Gideon Parks.

  I told you. I told you, pal. And I ain’t gonna tell you again. I didn’t shoot the guy.

  Naw, he says to me. Naw, you didn’t shoot. You just watched. Is that what you’re tellin me? You just watched the parade passin by.

  Hey, I say to him. Doesn’t much matter what I say, does it?

  Wrong, he says, and then he adds: As rain.

  I mean, the guy’s dead. Does anything else matter?

  Fuck, yeah, he says to me. Man was dead already. Don’t you think he knew that? Don’t you think he knew he was walkin round with the crosshairs on his head? Don’t you think he knew the time was gonna come? Shit.

  What matters, Jinx says, and here comes that word again, is the truth. What people know, what people remember. The time came for him, maybe sooner than he thought, but who knows, maybe later. So the Reverend Parks gets a memorial service, he gets all sorts of speeches, he gets some schools and streets named after him, maybe he even gets a day named after him. But he’s gone, the man is gone, and pretty soon people remember what they been told to remember bout him, and they don’t remember what he did and they sure don’t remember what he stood for. We got our martyrs, man. We got a few too many of em. What we’re missin is the message. We’re good at that, rememberin the man and forgettin the message. Forgettin the truth. You know what I’m sayin?

  Right about now I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything. I’m just listening and thinking this one through.

  Meantime, Jinx says, they got the perfect patsies, don’t they? Bunch of no-good gangstas. Gun-totin pushermen. Worst kind of niggas. Probly say it was rap music made em do it. So hey, Burdon Lane, what do you say? Was it rap music up there? Is that what it was, made things so crazy?

  He reaches over and stabs at the radio, gets static, punches at buttons and gets a Country and Western tune, punches again and gets the voice, that voice, the serious voice of death and disaster, the one they must teach in Newscasting 101, the voice that’s saying: Blah blah Gideon Parks blah. Blah blah blah shot blah blah dead. Blah statement blah blah White House blah the President blah blah blah blah blah this tragic blah blah blah civil rights leader blah blah life cut short blah blah blah warring street gangs blah U Street Crew blah blah blah 9 Bravos blah blah methamphetamine blah blah explosion blah blah blah blah still at large—

  How do they know all that shit already? Jinx says to me. U Street? The Bravos? And what’s with this … meth lab?

  I know what he’s thinking. The Feds tried that one at Waco. I remember passing the hotel room with Toons and Fryer and those satchels. Looked like Semtex to me. And it sure felt like it. The shit just keeps getting deeper. Then:

  Still at large? Jinx says to me.

  Yeah, I tell him, as the newscast cycles through sound bites of shock and disbelief and sorrow before getting back to the blah blahs.

  A little something to keep the boys in blue busy, I tell him. Then I tell him more than I ought to tell him, but I want to remind the guy why he needs to keep me alive. They wasted the Bravo ringleader, I tell him. That Daddy Big guy. They killed him, hell, they killed them all, but they dragged his body out, probably planning to dump him somewhere deep. Nobody’s gonna find him, but a lot of folks with badges are gonna waste a lot of time looking. And hey, it’s gonna make for a lot of search warrants in Harlem and the Ville, maybe even in D.C.

  He’s letting that one simmer and the whole thing is a beauty, it’s a piece of work, because he’s right, they’ve got the perfect patsies, they’re dealers and they’re thugs and they’re killers and they’re black. And best of all, they’re dead. Very, very dead. Talk about tidy.

  Jinx punches the buttons on the radio again and there’s no one talking, there’s just music thrown like a stone in my vast sea and I look at him but he can’t know, he doesn’t know, he can’t possibly know I opened my eyes to take a peek and I reach for the POWER button to find that I was by the sea and turn the damn thing off.

  Here’s what we’re gonna do, I tell him. Take the next exit. You decide which way you want to go, west or east. You got even odds; maybe you’ll guess right. If you don’t, well, maybe I’ll tell you, maybe not. Whichever way we go, I’m gonna start telling you to take turns. Maybe they’ll take us where we’re going, maybe not.

  You scared of somethin? he says.

  No, I tell him. It’s just a good day for a drive. You take care of your business, which is driving the car, and I’ll take care of mine.

  So we take the next exit and we go right and then we go right again, and I tell him to take a left and we take a left and we go for a while before I tell him to take another left and after enough of this wandering around south Jersey, we get to what looks like the middle of nowhere, which is where it is, and I tell him to stop the car and get it over onto the shoulder of the road.

  Time to walk, I tell him, and he’s no dummy, he knows we’re not going to drive right up to the place. So he’s out of the Chevy something and he keys the trunk and takes out my duffel bag and he says:

  Lead on.

  But I ain’t going nowhere, which is what I tell him. Not yet.

  I nod to my duffel bag and I tell him: Hey. You know what that Bible guy said about walking through that valley? The one with the shadow of death? The guy who was fearing no evil?

  Yeah, Jinx says to me. I know him. Book of Psalms.

  Well, that guy, he was carrying a Glock. Two of them, in fact. So what do you say? If you find what you’re looking for out there, you’re gonna need the help.

  Doubt it, he says. And there ain’t nothin in the King James version bout Glocks. But maybe in the King Jinx version—

  He reaches into the duffel, slips out the first of my pistols, hands it to me, then gives me the second one.

  While I’m popping and checking the magazines, he says:

  How do I know you ain’t gonna find a time to pull one of those things and blast me?

  You don’t, I tell him. And you know what? That’s the sort of thing that makes life so interesting.

  rendezvous

  So we diddybop through the trees, staying low, and there’s my new pal Jinx doing the bob-and-weave and I know for a fact, looking at him move, that he’s been in both kinds of jungles: the grey and the green. Moves like a cat. No doubt bites like one, too.

  He’s got that Ruger revolver, carries it out and down, finger off the trigger and pointing down the barrel. Definitely a professional.

  I’ve got the duffel bag looped over my shoulder and the Glocks parked back in my holsters. Jinx follows my lead but keeps a good interval, about ten yards behind me. Sooner or later he takes my cue and slides behind a tree trunk as the foliage starts to clear. Checks his pistol and brings it up to his shoulder, at the ready.

  Stay loose, man, I tell him—and maybe myself. Just stay loose.

  I nod ahead to what we can see of the warehouse, the first in a series of low-slung two-story jobs that are owned by Vanegar Chemical Supply, and I know nothing about the company but I know a lot about the line of automobiles parked on the far side of the warehouse next to a concrete viaduct. I’ve driven a few of those cars in my time.

  There’s two ways we can do this thing, I say to Jinx: My way or the wrong way. So stay close. And whatever you do, don’t shoot until I say to shoot.

  Without another word we work the tree line to the cover closest to the warehouse, a swatch of brush that’s nearly man height. I look at Jinx and he shrugs, nothing doing, so I take a peek. What I count is about a hundred yards of grass and weeds between us and the building. We’ve got pistols. Maybe they
can do it in the movies—shit, they can do anything in the movies—but there’s no way we can use handguns across that kind of distance and have a prayer of hitting anything but empty space.

  Check out the windows, I tell him. The backside of the warehouse is dressed in cheap aluminum siding, with a pair of windows and a fire door at its midpoint. If someone’s there, we’re seen as soon as we break cover; if not, maybe it’s a way inside. Sunlight is on the glass, so it’s one big guess about whether anyone’s at home.

  My guess is no, and Jinx’s must be the same, because when I step through the brush he steps out from the tree line like he’s joining me on a picnic. There’s nothing doing, nothing at all but sunshine and blue skies, and I’m thinking we should skirt the right side of the warehouse, use the trash Dumpster there for cover, but I’m also thinking it’s quiet. Just like they say in the movies: too quiet.

  I’m about to wave Jinx my way when I hear the kiss of tires on blacktop and I make a break for the warehouse but I’m not going to make it so I drop into the grass and hope. Jinx is younger and he’s faster and he hustles up and flattens into the aluminum siding of the warehouse just as the car rolls past the Dumpster and into view, and it’s a Crown Vic, civilian colors but as obvious as month-old meat: It looks and smells bad. Cops.

  I put my finger to my lips for Jinx and he nods and holds, and when I look again, the Crown Vic has cruised past the Dumpster and out of sight.

  I make my way to the Dumpster, settle back against the warm metal, and say to Jinx: Coming your way. Check out the tires.

  He eases over to the far corner of the warehouse, peeks around, and tells me: Radials.

  They got whitewalls?

  White as snow, he tells me.

  Not the locals, then. State troopers, I tell him. Or Feds. How about the haircuts?

  Not too short, not too long, he tells me.

  Six’ll get you ten they’re Feds, I tell him. Then I tell myself: Which means something’s funky as a monkey.

  Damn, he says to me.

  Damn right, I tell him. You don’t need no Psychic Hotline for this one. They’re looking for us. Or should I say me. Or—

  I don’t even want to go down that road. That one is marked with a red sign.

  Jinx says: We got to get our asses out of here.

  Yeah.

  Now.

  No, I tell him. Not now. Not yet. Right now we wait. Something is fucked up here.

  He’s got something to say but he’s not saying it, and I lean around the corner of the Dumpster and we both watch the cop car and it’s turning away, it’s heading north along the access road and it’s accelerating and we wait and we wait and then there’s just dust and it’s gone.

  I walk out to the access road, read the tire marks, they run right past the parking lot, and I try to think this one through. We got blues at the rendezvous. So maybe CK and the boys didn’t make it out of that building. Maybe somebody got caught. Or killed. Or … maybe CK wasn’t being stupid or arrogant when he gave me this spot, maybe he told me because it’s a setup.

  Maybe maybe maybe.

  But maybe doesn’t explain one car and two cops, or what happens when I follow that access road into the parking lot. When I look around and see nothing, the kind of nothing that is everything.

  They ain’t here, Burdon Lane.

  No, I tell him.

  What I see is something I haven’t seen for a lot of years. Many, many years, but never too many years to make me forget. It’s not the kind of thing you’re ever likely to forget, unless you were lucky and got yourself a head wound.

  I’m standing in the middle of an alien footprint, a place of bent and flattened grass and scattered pebbles, an awkward circle pressed down from the sky, and my gut takes a very bad dip.

  They were here, I tell him, and in my mind I see Renny, yeah, I see Renny Two Hand, and he’s parking the Oldsmobile in the lot at the side of the warehouse, where a fleet of indiscriminate cars wait for their turn on the road or for scrap. He drove the Oldsmobile down from the Warwick Hotel, he’s a good soldier and he’s done exactly what I told him, he’s parking the Oldsmobile over there in that line of forgotten cars, and that’s where I walk. And it’s there; Christ, the car is there.

  Ain’t nobody here, Jinx calls after me, but he’s wrong. There’s someone, oh, yes, there’s someone. Because there’s the Oldsmobile, third car in a row of the kinds of cars you see and you don’t see, parked next to you at the shopping mall, invisible cars for invisible men, and Renny backs the Oldsmobile into that space and he waits, he waits there for me, and he watches the clock as it winds its way toward one, and he waits there. For me. And that’s when it happens, sometime before one, because he’s a good soldier, he would not have waited past one, that’s when the helicopter floats down from the sky, that’s when Renny Two Hand sits up behind the wheel and watches the shadow coming out of the sun, and that smile comes onto his face, that smile, yeah, that’s the one. Renny, I want to call to him, just as Jinx sees what I’ve seen, and that’s when little pinks of pebbles and dust start spraying onto the hood and then the windshield of the Oldsmobile, and over the wild whoosh of the rotors comes a cough cough cough and Renny Two Hand jerks back in his seat, I’m looking at it now, I’m fucking seeing it, the driver’s door is open and I’m looking at the driver’s seat and I can see, through the punctured windshield, the graffiti of blood, the spray-painted alphabet of death, and Renny tries to slide from the car but he falls to his knees; his right palm leaves its print in red, right there, on the blacktop. He looks away from the men with guns closing in on him. No, he says. The color is draining from his face, running onto the blacktop, the dirt. No. His mouth bends and he calls my name, and that’s when he stands and that’s when—

  I push the driver’s door closed, and what’s left of the glass of its window shatters. The Oldsmobile’s got so many holes it’s Swiss metal and the blacktop beside it is still wet and the wet trail leads to a hurricane fence and through a tear in the fence and then down the slope of the concrete viaduct and into a low gully. I follow the blood to the place. That’s where he laid down and died.

  I stand there for a while looking at him. Renny Two Hand. Reynolds James. Then Jinx says to my back:

  Maybe I believe you now. Maybe you didn’t kill nobody.

  I didn’t kill Gideon Parks, I tell him. But I killed two guys. My guys. At least they used to be mine.

  He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look anything but sad. Strangely sad.

  I look over my shoulder, toward the east, toward the ocean. There’s something out there, isn’t there? Something just beyond sight. Something that would show me what this means.

  Jinx says what I’m thinking:

  We need to get little. We need to get out of here.

  Yeah, I tell him. But I can’t leave him like that.

  Ain’t nothin you can do, man. He’s dead.

  I know he’s dead. But I can’t leave him like that. They can’t find him like … that.

  Like what? Time is tickin, Burdon Lane.

  Time is ticking. But time isn’t the only thing in this world. Standing in that gully, the dust or my allergies acting up maybe, stinging my eyes, I remember the funniest of things. I remember Renny talking to me this morning, telling me something about ordering a pizza. And I remember him saying something else, something about—

  How’d he get this far? Jinx says.

  They let him. Look. And I show him.

  The first shots took his shoulders, arms, put him down but not out. No way he could shoot. About the only thing he could do was crawl.

  They probably wanted to have a talk, I tell him, all the while wondering what he could have told them.

  I point at his chest. When they were done talking, somebody double-tapped him, right in the heart. Looks to me like it was somebody with something heavy. Like a .44 Magnum.

  Renny’s face is calm. His eyes are closed, not tight but soft. Like he’s asleep. But nothing is go
ing to wake Renny up. I try to forget the wounds, the blood. I keep my eyes on that face and I start doing what needs to be done.

  I take the cellular phone from his belt, hook it onto mine. Renny’s jacket is bunched underneath him and I tug it straight, reach into the hollow of his back. It’s a wet mess. He’s not wearing a vest, as if that would have mattered. I find the holster and I find that wicked Colt Python. It’s cold. He never had the chance to use it. Never fired at another man in his life, so far as I know.

  Somebody sure fired at him. Two somebodies, from the looks of it. Renny must have taken eight hits. And that’s before the .44 Magnum.

  I take his right hand, bend his fingers back to take the pistol grip, and something falls out of his palm. A bullet. It’s a shiny nine-millimeter. I want to wonder what Renny’s doing with a nine-millimeter round in his hand at the moment of his dying. His Python’s a .357. I mean, the guy’s always starting something but never getting it done. But I wonder more about what’s going to happen if I don’t get busy and haul ass out of here. So I stick the bullet in my suit pocket and get back to getting busy.

  I fit the Python into his right hand, put his fingers around the grip. Tuck his index finger into the trigger guard. At least now he’s a gunman.

  I wipe my hands on his suit coat and I’m trying to leave him when I hear Jinx’s voice coming down at me:

  Want me to say a few words over him?

  No, I tell him. This is not your business.

  Bullshit, he says. This is everbody’s business.

  I look down at Renny Two Hand in that gully. I look down at him for the last time and I bow my head like a preacher man and I say the only words over him that anybody needs to hear:

  They’re dead, Renny.

  Every last one of them is dead.

  diner

  So they got out of the hotel, got out of the fire, got away from the law, got away from the city, and then they got Renny dead.

  This is no surprise. CK had more than a plan. This thing was thought straight through and out the other side. Shoot, shoot, and scoot. Maybe they went down a laundry chute, something as simple as that. Or a service elevator, a set of stairs hidden at the back of the building. Maybe it was something more complicated. Maybe they just sprouted wings and flew out of that hotel like birds.