“But what will you teach him?”
“The Iliad and the Odyssey, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island. Anything with a boat and a man in it. That’s what I’ll teach him first. And then I’ll take whatever math he’s got to know to make the boat and try and make sure he understands it. Work with what you have, that’s what I always did.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier if he just stayed in school?”
“No, baby. I mean, I understand what you sayin’, but what me and the boy got between us is hardscrabble road as far back as we can remember and as far up as we ever gonna go. If Jesus don’t trust you or like you, he won’t let you in. He sure as hell ain’t gonna learn from teachers he doesn’t respect. And anyway, while I been lookin’ around for Alva’s son I found out a couple’a things that helped me come to this decision.”
Bonnie was already convinced. I knew by the way she put her head on my shoulder. But she asked, “What’s that?”
“First it’s just Brawly himself. I haven’t seen the boy more than five minutes but I know from lookin’ that he’s a mess ’cause he didn’t have a mother or a father the way a boy needs to have parents. He was abandoned and then, when he was found, he was abused. He could have the best education in the world, but it wouldn’t help him. I knew that when I saw the diplomas on a killer cop’s wall. He got the education but he ain’t learned a goddamned thing.”
After Bonnie was asleep I got up and called Liselle Latour.
“Yeah?” she said in a sleepy voice.
“Hey, Liselle. It’s Easy.”
“What time is it?”
“’Bout ten-thirty,” I said. It was really ten to eleven. “I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but did Tina come back in?”
“They had her in jail.”
“Tell her that I’ma come by tomorrow morning, about eight-thirty. If she doesn’t wanna talk to me, maybe she should already be gone.”
“Okay,” Liselle said.
Her breath sounded as if she might have had a question, but I cut her off with thank-you and hung up the phone.
— 41 —
Tina was waiting for me at the door. I liked that. I’ve always been a punctual man. It was my army training. If a man said 7:59, you got there on time because by eight you might be dead.
When she opened the door I saw that she had a raised bruise on her right temple. There was a small scab at the center of the bump, surrounded by yellowish skin.
“Let’s get away from here,” she said to me at the doorstep.
“Where to?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said carelessly. “Down Central.”
We went to the car and drove off.
“How long have you been out?” she asked me.
“They let me go a few hours after they caught us,” I said. “How about you?”
“Just over a day. They had me in a cell with drunks and women livin’ on the street.”
“That’s where you got the knot on your head?”
Instinctively, Tina brought up her hand to cover the injury.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I got in a fight with a woman who got mad at me for not having a cigarette.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “They shouldn’ta done that to you.”
“How did you get out so fast?” Tina asked.
“I called the man city hall’s got on you. He sent word upstairs and they kicked me aloose.”
“So you were working with the men who arrested us?” she said, not so much accusing me as verifying what she’d already believed.
“No,” I replied. “The men who arrested you think that they’re the ones on you, but really it’s a secret squad, the one I told you about. They got a soldier been to Vietnam runnin’ it. They’re the ones you got to worry about. They tapped me because they think I’ll turn you over.”
“If that’s true, then why would you tell me?”
“Same reason I called Liselle last night,” I said. “Because I don’t wanna push you or trick you. You got enough people on your ass.”
“Who else?”
“Even though he’s dead, there’s Henry Strong. Whatever he was doin’, it might’a looked like it was for you but really it would’a led to your downfall. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that he was a stool for the cops. And then there’s the secret group he was workin’ with inside the First Men—”
“What secret group?” Tina asked. There was a deadness to the question, almost as if she didn’t care if I answered.
“Conrad, Brawly, and Strong are the only ones I’m sure were in it. And whatever they were planning to do, it has to do with them guns Brawly and Conrad were hiding at BobbiAnne’s.”
Christina Montes was quiet for a moment then. She gazed out of the passenger’s window at the stores on Central.
“They had me rent them a house,” Tina said.
“What?”
“Brawly and Conrad. They had me rent them a house on One thirty-six.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. Conrad gave me two hundred and fifty-five dollars.”
“That almost proves it,” I said.
“But you said that Henry was workin’ for the cops,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever they plannin’, I’m sure the police know their every move and that they plan to discredit your group.”
“I don’t believe it,” Tina said. “You should. I’m the only man tellin’ you the truth.”
“It’s too crazy. Why would they go to all that trouble?”
“To make it look like you’re crazy killer criminals. To have people, both black and white, happy when you get run down like dogs and thrown into prison for the rest of your lives.”
There I was, the conservative veteran explaining a campaign of subterfuge to a revolutionary.
“Where’s the house you rented at?” I asked.
“I...I don’t know if I should say.”
“What you should do,” I said, “is give me the address, pack up your boy Xavier, and haul outta town. Go to San Diego or ’Frisco. Anywhere but here.”
“You’re just trying to scare me.”
“Why’d you wait for me to come this morning, Tina?”
“Because...because you asked me to.”
“That means in some way you trust me, right? I mean, you trusted me to come. You trusted me not to bring the cops.”
“No,” she said, in a rather peculiar tone. I turned my head and saw that she had a small pistol pointed at the side of my chest.
“You plan to shoot me?” I asked her.
“You’re the one who’s been against us the whole time,” she said. “You killed Henry and probably Brawly’s father, too. Henry called me to ask me what you had said at the meeting, before the cops came. I told him that you’d talked to Clarissa and she gave me your number. When I was in jail I started thinkin’ about it. Henry was going to see you the night he was killed. That’s why I agreed to meet you.”
“To kill me?”
The fact that she didn’t answer caused sweat to sprout on my brow.
“What do you plan to do?” I asked her.
“Just drive.”
We were still headed south on Central, in the Sixties. I took a deep breath through my nose and gritted my teeth.
I had been in some tough situations in my life, with and without Mouse. And I knew that it wasn’t in the hardest moment that you were likely to lose your life. A small girl with a baby gun might not have frightened most men. But I realized that she could kill me or bring me to my death just as easily as the recently deposed champion, Sonny Liston, could knock my head off.
“So, you been a part of the secret group the whole time?” I asked.
“No, Conrad and them just told me when we got outta jail,” she said. “They told me about you. Conrad told me how you brought Henry out to Compton and shot him in the back of the head.”