“Hey,” said the killer, finally breaking the ice, “you look familiar.” He paused, waited for a response. When Grimes did not reply, he continued. “Do I look familiar to you?”
Grimes remained silent.
“No?” the killer said. “I musta made a mistake.” The killer laughed. “I know what it is! Ever see that Eddie Murphy movie… um… Harlem Nights, yeah. Redd Foxx had on big, thick Coke-bottle glasses like yours, made his eyes look all big and shit, like he was wearin’ magnifyin’ glasses. Yeah, that’s it, you probably just reminded me of him.”
Grimes remained silent.
“Say,” the killer continued, “just how good can you see with eyes that bad? I’ll bet you be makin’ mistakes all the time, don’t you? Wavin’ at people across the street, then be like, ‘Oh, shit, that ain’t whoever.’ Yeah, must be hard recognizin’ people with eyes as bad as you got.”
Grimes remained silent.
“You kinda old to be readin’ comic books, ain’t you?” the killer asked. “What, you twenty-one, twenty-two? Sheeit, I gave up readin’ them joints when I was a little kid.” He snickered.
Grimes remained silent. The killer turned his attention to the comic book.
“You know,” the killer mused, “funny thing about heroes, ’specially comic book superheroes, none of ’em wear glasses. Take Superman here. His disguise, his costum, is Clark Kent, all mild-mannered and shit, wearin’ eyeglasses, ’cause Superman, he know that people who wear eyeglasses all weak and geeky and shit, so nobody will mistake him for a hero. So he can have some peace, un’erstand? ’Cause otherwise, people would bug his ass to death! ‘Superman, get my cat out the tree.’ ‘Superman, tow my car to the shop.’ Yeah, it just be Superman do this and Superman do that, all the goddamn time!”
The killer stared directly into Grimes’s magnified eyes and continued: “But the point I was tryin’ to make is, heroes don’t wear them shits. The eyes is the windows to the souclass="underline" weak eyes, weak soul. People who wear ’em is just plain weak. It’s a fact. But when it’s time to go to work, Superman snatch off them horn-rims and that Brooks Brothers and show off his Krypton clothes. ‘This is a job for Superman!’ Right? Voice get deep and everything.” The killer paused for a moment to let his point sink in, and then made his message plain. “Thinking your weak ass can take down a super villain could get you and other people you care about in some serious trouble and cause you some real heartache. Don’t make no mistake, Rodney, don’t try to be no hero. Heroes don’t wear glasses.”
Certain his point had been made, the killer put the comic book back on the rack, glared at Rodney Grimes a few long moments for good measure, and then turned and leisurely walked away.
Finally, after having been paralyzed like a deer caught in the headlights of a semi, Grimes returned the Spider-Man to the rack and, on unsteady legs, exited the newsstand.
He fretted and racked his brain, trying to fathom, How did the killer find out who I am? How did he find me?
The thought occurred to him that the killer might still be around, lying in wait to… to do what? Knife him and leave him bleeding on the floor? Gun him down in the parking lot? He looked around, trying to make sure he was not in immediate danger, but he was sure that his nervousness betrayed him.
Warily, his mind reeling, he walked to the escalator leading to the second level of the mall, wondering if being a good man was worth it.
When he got to his car in the front parking lot of Iverson Mall, he found a folded piece of paper under the left windshield wiper of Sweet Georgia Brown, his mint-condition 1970 metal-flake candy-apple-red, black-ragtop-with-black-leather interior Volkswagen Karman Ghia Coupe, which he had painstakingly refurbished personally over the last two years. Her personalized D.C. license tags read, GEORGIA
What with him attending Howard U on a full scholarship as a civil engineering major and only working part-time at various jobs — busboy, waiter, photo technician at Moto-Foto — restoring her had by no means been an easy task, but it had been worth it. Often women mistook it for a Porsche. Incredible! Yeah, Sweet Georgia Brown drew women’s attention that men like him could not otherwise draw, and that was priceless.
Rodney Grimes’s anxiety heightened when he opened the note and read it. The message, which was handwritten in a childlike scrawl, said: Heros don’t wear glasses.
Heros — the ignorant bastard couldn’t even spell heroes Under different circumstances, Rodney would have found this amusing, but nothing was funny about the situation. This was the killer’s subtle way of telling him that he knew not only who he was, but what car he drove. It was a good bet that he knew where he lived, too.
Grimes refolded the note and put it in his shirt pocket. He walked around the car, giving it a once-over to determine if any damage had been done. Satisfied that his sweetheart was still in great condition, he disarmed the alarm system and unlocked her, climbed in, started her up, and headed off.
The drive home to his tenth-floor apartment at the Wingate House East apartment complex on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in far Southwest Washington was no joy-ride. Rodney couldn’t shake the fear and a sense of impending doom he had not felt in years, not since he was in the seventh grade at Hart Junior High School.
When he’d attended Hart, he had been beaten and robbed on a daily basis, by people like the killer, until he fought back one day and maced a thug in the face when he’d attempted to rob him. That had been his last day, since to remain would have meant certain death. His mother had used her cunning by giving her sister’s apartment in a housing project on M Street, S.W. as his home address so that he could attend a school in another part of town, Jefferson Junior High. It had been smooth sailing from there and he had stopped living in fear. Until now.
But what he had experienced at Hart was nothing compared to the terror the killer instilled in him now. The killer had threatened not only him, but also “other people” Rodney cared about, and his concern for the safety of his friends and family was what really terrified him. His actions could cause them harm… but could he live with the consequences of inaction, of not cooperating with the authorities and letting the killer go unpunished? In fact, what would stop the killer from doing him and those he cared about harm once the danger of arrest and prosecution had passed? If something bad happened to April Knight, he’d never forgive himself.
As he parked his sweetie in the front parking lot of Wingate House East, Rodney Grimes could not shake the belief that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
Detective John Mayfield had seen better days, both careerwise and in his private life. His early years as a homicide detective had been good days. His closure rate was high, the envy of his peers, in fact. His late wife had always been in his corner, even though most homicide detectives’ marriages end in divorce. Understandable. Police work, with its constant shift changes, makes cultivating any meaningful relationship difficult, but this type of assignment, which requires a round-the-clock commitment, makes it virtually impossible. Few people can accept being married to a ghost. But his dear Katherine had put up with it and hung in there. She had deserved better than dying by the hands of a lowlife during a street robbery gone bad. The fact that her murder remained unsolved was a festering wound. To him, every murderer he brought to justice was Katherine’s killer, but the wound would never heal, he knew.