Corey broke his paralysis and gave Leon an awkward brother man hug-one arm looped around the back, a solid pound on the shoulder blades with his fist. Leon smelled of nicotine, hair oil, and stale sweat.
I’ve gotta be dreaming, Corey thought. If so, someone please wake me up right this minute.
Stepping back, Leon looked down at Jada. She gazed up at him, squinting, partly from the sun’s glare, but mostly, Corey figured, from confusion. None of Corey and Simone’s friends looked or sounded remotely like Leon. He could only imagine the questions tumbling through her mind.
“Who’s this little munchkin here?” Leon asked.
“She’s my daughter,” Corey said.
“Hey, cutie.” Leon extended his hand toward Jada.
Jada regarded his large hand doubtfully, gaze traveling across his dirty fingernails and up the colorful tattoos that adorned his forearm.
Corey touched her shoulder. “Go wait in the car with your mother, Pumpkin. Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”
Nodding, Jada ambled across the parking lot, repeatedly glancing over her shoulder at them with a puzzled frown.
“Good-looking kid you got there,” Leon said.
“Thanks,” Corey said numbly. He cleared his throat, fighting to overcome a fuzzy sense of unreality. The last time he’d felt this disoriented, it was when he’d learned Grandma Louise had died of a heart attack.
But running into Leon after fifteen years, several hundred miles away from their hometown, had to be the coincidence to end all coincidences.
Leon looked much different than what Corey remembered. When Corey had last seen him, his head had been as hairless as a basketball, and he’d worn a goatee so meticulously trimmed it might have been drawn with a mechanical pencil. His complexion had been smooth, his eyes had been bright with wild, youthful exuberance, and he’d been a sharp dresser, known for sporting the latest fly clothes, the hottest new sneakers.
The Leon in front of him looked, in a word, tougher. There were crow’s-feet under his eyes, and a netting of heavy wrinkles across his forehead and cheeks gave his face the appearance of sun-weathered leather. Dark hollows ringed his sockets, as if he rarely slept. And those eyes of his, always fiercely intelligent, glinted with raw, kinetic energy, reflecting a personality far more dangerous than the young man Corey remembered-and that was saying a lot, because the Leon that Corey recalled was no one that you wanted to piss off.
Leon took a draw on his cigarette and appraised Corey from head to toe. “You’re looking good, too. How the hell you been? It’s been how long? Fifteen, sixteen years?”
“Something like that,” Corey said. “I’ve been. . I’ve been all right.”
“All right?” Leon snickered. “You look like life’s been treating you exceptionally well, I’d say. Pushing the new five series Beemer, got the cute kid, the no-doubt lovely wifey? Do you live in a white castle in the clouds, too? When did you strike the Faustian bargain?”
Leon let out a high-pitched giggle that sounded as if he’d inhaled a dose of helium. Same old Leon laugh-he sounded like an elf on crystal meth. For a long time, Corey had used to hear that grating laughter in his nightmares.
“A lot of things have changed since I left Detroit,” Corey said. He looked at Leon’s Ford truck, and wondered, automatically, where Leon had stolen it from. “How long have you been in town?”
“Not long at all, a few weeks, I’ve been living the knock-about life, you know, dashing from pillar to post, painting houses, doing odd handyman jobs here and there, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.” He dropped his cigarette on the ground and snuffed it out with his boot. “Need any painting done at your house, man? Seeing you here, all grown up and spit-shined and polished, I know you’ve gotta be living in a mansion somewhere, most definitely, a palace, dozens of rooms, and no doubt the old lady’s been on your back about repainting some of those rooms, a woman is never satisfied, ever, and what better way to get it done than to hire your old, trusty running partner from Motown to do the work? What do you say?”
Listening to Leon’s mercurial patter as sunshine burned into his skull, Corey began to feel a migraine headache coming on.
“Listen, ah, Leon, we don’t exactly need any painting done. . right now. . ”
“I’m only shittin’ you!” Laughing, Leon slapped his shoulder. “I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna be in town, anyway, it’s about time to blow this pop stand and hit the road like Willie Nelson, although, damn, I’ve gotta say, standing here enjoying a tete-a-tete with my homeboy from back in the day . . I might have to change my modus operandi and settle in for a spell.”
Heart knocking, Corey looked toward his car at the gas pump. He could see Simone and Jada watching them, curious about his prolonged interaction with a man they had never seen before.
He’d given them only sketchy details about the life he’d left behind in Detroit. They knew that he had no close family left there, that he’d moved to Atlanta sixteen years ago, shortly after Grandma Louise’s death. They knew that he’d never gone back to visit, on the claim that there was nothing there for him any more.
But they knew nothing whatsoever of Leon. They knew nothing about the past he shared with this man.
And he’d always wanted to keep it that way. There were certain forbidden boxes of memories that, over time, he had closed watertight by sheer force of will, and he’d dared not open them, for his family’s well-being-and his own.
But now Leon was here. Driving a new truck that had to be stolen. Probably in violation of parole for something or other. Maybe hiding a gun underneath his overalls.
Those hermetically sealed crates of memories were already starting to creak open.
Corey squinted, listening. He could barely understand what Leon was saying, and that brought back memories, too. Leon spoke in dizzying run-on sentences so generously peppered with idioms, foreign phrases, and archaic pop culture references that Corey had often found himself totally confused, and agreeing with whatever he said just to get him to shut up.
Leon said, “Have you been back to Motown, recently? I haven’t, I severed my ties with the Motor City a few years ago, cruised into that wild blue yonder and haven’t looked back, but the last time I was there the downtown scene was exploding with casinos, nouveau riche tourists crawling through like so many cockroaches through the projects, and I’m of half a mind to go back to get a piece of the action for myself, a fresh and lucrative new hustle of some kind, though at this point if I ventured back someone might declare me non compos mentis, I’ll think better of it and keep drinking the wanderlust Kool-Aid and seeing what life brings to my doorstep, that’s the way I live, you know, in the moment, right, remember, huh?”
“Yeah, sure,” Corey said. He made a dramatic show of checking his watch. “Listen, Leon, I’ve got to get going. We have an appointment.”
“All right, all right, all right.” Leon bobbed his head, dreadlocks swinging. “You have a business card? We should get together sometime, grab a Heineken or two, reminisce about how we use to rock and roll back in the day when we were strapping young bucks, yeah, give me your card, all right, all right.”
Without thinking, wanting only to get away, Corey pulled out his wallet and withdrew a card. Leon read it. His eyes got as big as billiard balls.
“Gates-Webb Security Services? You own a security company? You?” Leon laughed his frenetic giggle. “The irony, my man, the irony is too delicious, the irony is downright scrumptious.”
Corey felt blood rising in his face. “Good seeing you again, Leon.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Leon tucked the card into his pocket. “Yeah, yeah, it’s been real. We gotta get that beer sometime soon, don’t forget. We ran in to each other for a reason, there’s no such thing as coincidence, nope, fate’s slammed us together again and we definitely need to reconnect, uh-huh, all right.”