Gorman left the kitchen. Valdez watched Constantine toss the match. Through the white flames that flared across the screen, he saw Constantine’s back as he ran away, out of the frame, his long black hair flying wildly about his head.
Gorman came back to the kitchen wearing a jacket, handed both packed shoulder holsters to Valdez. Valdez slipped them on, drew his guns, checked them, reholstered them.
“Come on,” Valdez said.
They walked from the kitchen, out to the foyer. Grimes came from the office in his blazer and slacks, stood on the landing, leaned over the rail.
“What is it, Valdez?” Grimes said. “What’s the matter?”
“Something at the stable,” Valdez said. “We’ll take care of it.”
“The horse,” Grimes said.
“We’ll take care of it,” Valdez said, looking away from Grimes. He pulled on Gorman’s jacket.
Gorman and Valdez went out through the front door, ran to the Cadillac. Gorman got behind the wheel, cooked the ignition. He backed off the circular driveway, onto the grass, pulled down on the column arm, put it in drive. He clipped the bumper of the Olds 98 coming out of the turn. He gave the Cadillac gas.
“You and that fuckin’ glue,” Valdez said, pulling the rectangular gadget from the visor. “Stop the car.”
Gorman braked in the middle of the driveway. Valdez pointed the gadget out the window at the black iron doghouse. He hit the button, and the doghouse gate swung open.
“Move it,” Valdez said.
Gorman goosed the accelerator, caught rubber in the driveway, drove through the main gate. He turned left, fishtailed the Caddy onto the two-lane.
“What do you wanna do with the driver?” Gorman said, the dash lights giving a green cast to his gray complexion.
“Shoot him,” Valdez said. “When you see him, don’t say nothin’. Just shoot, hear? Keep shooting till there’s nothing left”
CONSTANTINE walked to the path cut in the woods behind the stable. The trees in front of him glowed orange, lit from the fire in the stable behind him. He turned once more before he entered the woods. The stable burned through now, and the Dodge burned as well; the stallion galloped in the field, alternately silhouetted and highlighted by flames. Constantine quickly entered the woods.
It was cooler in the woods, and the coolness felt good. He smelled the carbon on his clothing, the gasoline on his hands, the wet green of the forest. The residual light from the fire gave light to the path, the light dying as he walked. He had clocked the road distance from the house to the stable as a mile, but the road twisted. He was not sure how far he would have to walk to get to the house.
He heard the gas tank go in the Dodge, a muffled surge. The sounds of the fire faded; the woods grew darker, denser. He walked through some brambles, stopped, pulled thorns off his clothes. Moving away from the brambles, he slipped, slid down an embankment, knew he had gone off the path. He saw liquidy movement in the darkness, thought of snakes, panicked briefly, stood, breathed evenly, waited. The moon came from behind a wall of clouds, giving form to the woods. He stared at the ground, saw he was standing at the edge of a narrow creek, put his hand over his blood-gorged eye, stared ahead, saw space between the trees past the creek, saw yellow light beyond the trees. He walked through cold, shallow water, slipped and fell again on the other side of the creek. He got to his feet and headed toward the light.
Constantine found a path, followed it in the moonlight. The light from the house grew brighter, and the woods thinned out. Then he was standing at the tree line, on the edge of the grounds of the Grimes estate.
Constantine pulled the Colt from behind his back, put one in the chamber. He looked at the grounds, half lit by the yellow floodlights, half in shadow and darkness. Delia’s Mercedes was gone, as was the Caddy. Grimes’s black 98 remained, parked crookedly in the circular driveway. Constantine watched his breath, steady and visible in the light. He stepped out of the woods and walked towards the house.
Across the grounds, on the other side of the house, the black Doberman sprang from out of the shadows.
Constantine stood still, covered his bad eye, extended his gun hand, tried to focus. The Doberman sprinted, head up, pink gums and yellow teeth bared, all black-eyed rage. He moved toward Constantine, moved across the green of the lawn like a crazy shadow. Five feet shy of Constantine, he leapt.
Constantine shot the Doberman in the mouth. The dog yelped, flipped in the air, went down. Constantine put his boot to the Doberman’s neck, pinned it to the ground, put another bullet in its head.
Constantine stepped back and vomited in the grass. Empty now, he walked toward the house.
He heard a siren wailing at his back, far away. He gripped the .45 in his hand, flashed on his own image, standing in the road a few days back, his thumb out, his pack by his side. Constantine smiled as he looked at the house, smiled viciously, watched Grimes pace behind the lit square of office window. The Beat pounded white in Constantine’s head.
Constantine passed through the yellow floodlights, took the steps up to the door, went through the open door, stood in the marble foyer. He could hear Grimes’s shoes pacing the floor above, the tick of the clock from the library, the vague, feline call of the distant siren. Constantine headed for the stairs.
He took the bowed stairs, ran his hand along the cherry-wood banister as he ascended. He reached the landing, walked across it, went to the office door, turned the brass knob. Constantine entered the office, his gun down at his side.
Grimes stood at the window, looking out toward the woods.
The fire from beyond the woods reflected in the glass, as if a match had been struck to the window, in front of Grimes’s face. Grimes had combed his fine gray hair back; his posture was erect, the crease in his khaki slacks impeccable.
“You’ve done it now,” Grimes said quietly, as if to himself. “Haven’t you? The firemen will be coming, and then the police. I figure we’ve got five, maybe ten minutes.” Grimes stared out the window. “It’s over.”
“No,” Constantine said. “Not yet.”
Grimes stepped back from the window, looked at Constantine.
“You don’t look well, Constantine.”
“Valdez,” said Constantine.
“He’s brutal, isn’t he? But no brains. He should have done what I told him to do.”
“He didn’t.” Constantine touched his taped fingers to his face, wiped wet hair and mud away with a shaking hand. He pointed the Colt at Grimes, moved the barrel to the high-backed swivel chair behind the desk, moved it back at Grimes. “Sit down.”
Grimes took a seat. He fingered the mound of magnetic chips on the desk, pushed it away, reached into the cigar box.
“No,” said Constantine.
Grimes frowned, leaned back in the seat, studied Constantine.
“Delia’s gone,” Grimes said. “You want the money too, is that it?” Grimes opened his fist, pointed his fingers below the desk. “The rest of it’s here. Take it, if that’s what you want.”
Constantine shifted his feet. “This isn’t about money.”
Grimes shook his head. “Sentiment, then,” he said, with contempt.
Constantine’s voice shook. “You set up Polk today, didn’t you?”
Grimes looked towards the window. “Yes. He wouldn’t go away.”
“But I thought that’s what you wanted, Grimes. Everybody under you, on a string.”
Grimes looked back at Constantine, smiled weakly. “You know, don’t you? That’s what this is about.”
Constantine nodded. “The first time I looked at Delia, there was something in her eyes, something I recognized. I didn’t see it then, and I didn’t even see it at her mother’s apartment, when I saw the patch on her mother’s dresser. Twelve twenty-one.”
“Hill twelve twenty-one,” Grimes said, his eyes gone away. “A bunch of us in Company C who made it over that hill, we had those patches made. So we’d never forget. I carried that son of a bitch a
cross the reservoir, Constantine. Do you know that?”
Constantine stepped slowly to the desk. “You thought that what you did for Polk in Korea, that would make him in debt to you for the rest of his life. But Polk didn’t see it that way. When Delia’s mother died, you moved into the picture. You needed something on Polk, something big. Something that would bring him back.”
“That’s right.”
“Polk was Delia’s father. Wasn’t he, Grimes?”
“Yes,” Grimes said.
“After you fell in love with her,” Constantine said, “you didn’t want Polk around anymore. But he wouldn’t go away. That’s when you decided to get rid of him.”
“Yes.” Grimes sat back in the chair. “And he won, didn’t he? He beat us all. He dragged you into this, encouraged you to take her away. And it worked. It worked.”
Constantine heard tires squeal, heard the dull collision of metal against the brick pillars at the gate, heard the big GM engine as the Cadillac came down the drive.
“That would be Valdez,” Grimes said.
“I know it,” said Constantine.
Constantine raised the gun, shot Grimes twice in the chest. The slugs threw Grimes and the chair back against the wall. Grimes bucked violently, his hands bent at the wrists. He coughed once, tried to breathe, and then he was dead.
Constantine walked to the window, opened it. The Cadillac braked in the circular drive, skidded to a stop. Valdez and Gorman came out together, Valdez zigzagging combat-style in the yellow light, running across the asphalt, guns drawn, not looking up. Gorman ran straight, slow, his face stretched tight. Constantine squinted painfully, got Gorman in his sights.
Know how to use it, driver?
Constantine squeezed the trigger, saw smoke and cloth tear away from Gorman’s knee. Gorman slipped and fell, his automatic thrown to the side. Gorman cried out, reached for the gun, tried to move, could move only in a tight circle. Constantine blew a round into the asphalt, watched the asphalt spark. He aimed again, fired. Blood and smoke sprang from the skinny man’s chest.
Constantine heard Valdez yell his name, heard the heavy footsteps on marble as he charged the stairs. He knew Valdez would come in straight.
Constantine jerked his wrist, ejected the spent clip. He slapped the fresh clip into the Colt. He moved to the middle of the room, centered the gun on the door.
“Come on,” Constantine said.
The door swung open.
Constantine heard the shots as he saw the muzzle flash, saw the Mexican’s white shirt splash red from the fire of his own gun. Constantine felt the hot stings, like the bee stings from the pear tree in his backyard. He kept his finger on the trigger, squeezed it as his feet left the floor, hearing screams not his own, knowing then that he had killed the Mexican, knowing that the Mexican had killed him.
Constantine fell back, felt his face rip away, saw white, then the brilliant blue cloth of a housecoat. He heard a woman’s voice, heard the voice say his name. Black arms encircled him, covered him, closed his eyes.
And Constantine thought: So, this is how it is, at the end.
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Chapter
1
LORENZO Brown opened his eyes. He stared at the cracked plaster ceiling and cleared his head. He was not on a cot, but in a clean, full-sized bed. In an apartment with doors that opened and shut when he wanted them to. A place where he could walk free.
Lorenzo swung his feet over die side of the mattress. His dog, a medium-sized mix named Jasmine, rose up from her square of carpet remnant, stretched, and shook herself awake. She came to him, her nails clicking on die hardwood floor, and touched her nose to his knee. He rubbed behind her ears, stroked her neck, and patted her flanks.
Jasmine’s coat was cream-colored with tan and brown shotgunned across the fur. Lorenzo had saved her from the shelter on New York Avenue the night before her scheduled euthanasia. He had passed by scores of doomed animals every day, but had never taken one home. It was her eyes, he supposed, that had caused him to stop in front of her cage.
He tried not to think too hard on the ones he’d passed by. He couldn’t save them all. All he knew was that this was one good dog.
“Morning,” said Lorenzo. Jasmine looked at him with those beautiful, coffee-bean eyes. Seemed like she was smiling, too. The stand-up fan in the corner of the room blew warm air across them both.
The clock radio that had woken him played on. He kept its dial set on 95.5, WPGC. Huggy Lowdown, a comedian in street-fool character, was now talking with Donnie Simpson, the morning deejay, who’d been on the air in D.C. since Brown was a kid. It was their morning conversation, conducted by phone.
“Donnie?”
“Yes, Huggy?
“Donnie.”
“Yes, Huggy.”
“You know what time it is, don’t you?”
“I think so, Huggy.”
“It’s time to announce the Bama of the Week.”
The last word, reverberated in the studio, echoed in the room. Same back-and-forth every day. Huggy Lowdown could be flat-out funny, though. And when he spun music, Simpson tended to play old school, which Lorenzo preferred. Lorenzo couldn’t get behind that death romance thing anymore.
Lorenzo Brown peed and brushed his teeth. He swallowed two ibuprofens to fend off the headache he knew would come. He washed down a C and a multivitamin as well.
Still in his boxer shorts, he returned to his room, where he did stretching exercises and crunches on an inflatable camping mat he’d laid on the floor. He then worked out with forty-pound dumbbells in front of a wall mirror, pyramid sets that left a rope of vein popping out on each arm. He did some triceps curls as well. He finished with pull-ups on a bar he’d hung in the doorway, bending his legs at the knees to accommodate his tall frame.
Lorenzo no longer did push-ups. They reminded him unpleasantly of the five hundred push-ups he had done for eight years, every day, in his cell.
Rachel Lopez got up on one elbow, reached out for the snooze bar on her clock radio, and silenced the banter coming from the morning deejay and his provocateur partner. She let her head drop back on the pillow. Her stomach flipped and a dull ache came from behind her closed eyes.
This will be my morning: three aspirins, no breakfast. Coffee and a cigarette, then out the door. Today is a road day. Get up and do your job.
She opened her eyes and kicked weakly at the sheets, which smelled faintly of cheap male cologne. She got herself up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and turned the radio off. The clock radio, a graduation gift from her father, was a Sony Dream Machine, a simple white cube that looked ultramodern back in 1992.
“To wake you up for work now, little girl. No one is going to do that for you anymore. You’re going to need the alarm, the way you light the fire on both ends. But that won’t last too long. Your body will reject it. Too many late nights, you can’t mix them with work.”
I’m still mixing them, Popi. The bad Rachel and the good.
Rachel showered, shampooing her hair and thoroughly washing herself. In her bathrobe, at a table set by an open window, she had her coffee and smoked the day’s first cigarette. Afterward, she dressed in a loose, lightweight cotton shirt worn over relaxed jeans and sneakers. The clothing was utilitarian gear of the Gap school of conformity, the styles chosen to hide her shape. She put on no makeup and added no shine product to her shoulder-length black hair. She was not trying to look unattractive, she was simply aiming to discourage any sexual feelings on the part of the men and women she encountered every day.
At the front door of her apartment, she stopped and gathered her tools: several manila files, a clipboard holding pinks, field sheets used for notations, a couple of pens, her cell phone, her badge, and the keys to her car. She glanced in the mirror above the table and looked int
o her dark eyes.
Not bad, she thought. Even without the war paint, and with what I did to myself last night, I still look pretty good.
Lorenzo Brown ate a bowl of Cheerios while standing in his Pullman kitchen, then showered and changed into his uniform. Walking to the front door, he passed a worn sofa and armchair, and stopped to adjust his grandmother’s hope chest, centered behind the sofa’s back. The hope chest sat on an old, oval throw rug; beneath the rug was a rectangle that Lorenzo had cut out and replaced snugly in the hardwood floor.
At the apartment’s entrance, Lorenzo picked up a chain leash with a looped leather strap that hung on a nail he had driven into the wall. Jasmine heard the clatter of the chain and joined him at the door.
Lorenzo’s landlord, a man named Robie, who lived on the second and third floors of the row house where Lorenzo stayed, had left him a long plastic bag, the one the Post got delivered in, on the porch. As always, Robie had put the bag under half a brick so that it would not blow away. Lorenzo slipped the bag into his pocket and went down the concrete steps to the street. He and Jasmine walked east on Otis Place, up a grade, into the sun, along brick row houses with wooden porches fronted by columns; some of the homes painted and kept up nice, others in disrepair. Sturdy oak trees grew on the government strip along the curb.
Lorenzo went up the block, stopping at the short, rundown stretch of Sixth Street that was the cut-through from Otis to Newton, as Jasmine peed beside a tree. Down there at the corner of Newton and Sixth, where Nigel Johnson’s mother still stayed, Lorenzo could see a cluster of parked cars, late-model Lexus and BMW coupes and sedans, with a black Escalade, tricked out with spinners, in the mix. A couple of young men leaned against their rides. The Lexus, a black, GS430 with dual pipes and aftermarket rims, belonged to Nigel.
Lorenzo assumed that Nigel was in there behind that tinted glass, sitting at the wheel, talking on his Nextel. Few in Nigel’s profession had their troops up and on the street at this early hour, but that was Nigel through and through. He’d had that kind of ambition, and an almost blinding work ethic, since he was a kid. The two of them had run these Park View streets together, going back almost twenty-five years.
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