The operator: “Sir. I rang them again. All three. No one is answering, sir…Sir?”
East thanked the operator and hung up the phone. “What do you think that means? Nobody answering the line?”
“No idea,” Walter said. “Let’s chase that damn bike while we can.”
“Okay,” said East. “We’ll chase your damn bike.”
—
The bicyclist was still weaving along the north-south road into town, advancing crazily. His knees chopped sideways like wings. Twice as large as his tiny bike. Walter backed into a driveway fifty yards ahead of the wobbling bike and rolled down his window.
“Hey, my man,” he called. “Hey.”
The black bicyclist stopped and stood astride his bike like a gray scarecrow. His gray hat was tied down over his cheeks with flaps. His coat was grime-streaked — this wasn’t the first ride he’d had on the highway. In Los Angeles, East thought, this was a crazy man. Here and now, he envied the man’s outerwear.
“Where you headed?” said Walter, friendly.
The man gave a minimal shrug, more a pinch, and pointed ahead. “Going down here, boy.”
“Listen, man, we need somebody,” said Walter. “We need somebody black. We got to pick something up, man, and we need another man for it.”
“Somebody black?” the man said. “What you picking up? Like a sofa? At five in the morning?”
“We can pay you for your time,” Walter said. He showed a split of twenties out the window.
The man’s eyes dropped to the money, then came back up. “Good luck.” Flat.
“It’s nothing heavy. Just fifteen minutes. Take a ride with us.”
“Oh, no,” said the man on the bike. “No, no.” He dropped his weight back onto the seat.
East leaned over and showed his face out Walter’s window. “Hey. Check us out. We ain’t bad boys. We’ll give you a lift where you going.”
“I’m just going down here, son,” the man said, and he put feet to the pedals. As he passed the van, he spat.
Ty laughed. “He’s sure he’s gonna die in this van.”
Walter fished out the crumpled paper with the address. Now it was all they had.
—
Plain little bungalow the color of butter. East wanted no part of it. A street they’d never seen, a town they knew nothing about, a deal they didn’t even know if they could make. But now this house seemed locked around their necks. They sidled the van down the street, squared around a few blocks, tried to feel things out. Regular. Chain-link sectioning off almost every yard. Small boats rusting on trailers, a few lawns with newspapers waiting in blue plastic bags. A few dogs out early, testing the air. Trees unlike the trees in LA: these rooted hard, grew up tall, muscular, their bare limbs grabbing all the air in the world.
Nothing moving. For East it was strange, this looking, this studying a neighborhood again. The way he had at the old house. The dogs, the doors, the windows. Scanning the surroundings for eyes.
Walter stopped down the block, and they watched the yellow house. The whitish farmhouse next door to it had security bars on every window.
They’ll sell to anyone.
Improvising now. What choice did they have?
He turned around. “Ty. You see what we’re doing?”
“Do I see?” Ty said. “Am I stupid?”
Ever did anything like this again, he was getting his brother a secretary.
“Seems pretty straight,” Ty said. Surprising East.
“Two go in, one stays out?”
“Right.”
“So you got one gun,” Walter said. “What do we need?”
“Walt. You know anything about guns?”
“A little.”
“A better gun, then,” said Ty. “I got this little popgun I can hide behind my dick. We get something real. Two guns. One of you can hold this. East can. Plus points.”
Walter asked, “How much is that gonna cost?”
“Depends what the man charge,” said Ty. “Begging your pardon, but we got a seller’s market out here. Take all the money you got, try to bring some back.”
“So who’s going in?” Walter said.
East rubbed his eyes. Exhausted, he wanted no part of it. Fin had people who would work this, go in cool, shake hands like businessmen. Or there was Circo, who would go in with a gun in each hand and all the burners hot. He himself was a watchman. He could run a crew, keep them working all night. But walking in where people were ready to kill you was not his thing.
The feeling in his fingers had come back, and he rubbed them together, letting the skin heat.
“Well, Walt, my man,” said Ty drolly. “Who you want on the outside, if you have a problem, coming to save your ass? Me or him?”
“It’s you and me, man,” Walter said across the front seats.
East nodded and closed his eyes. Plan was broke, gang was broke, Ty trying him at every chance. Might as well go.
Ty kept on. “Glock or a Tec. Glock or a Tec be nice. If they got real guns. If it ain’t all duck-hunting shit. You got five hundred and some dollars. If you can’t get two guns that work, fuck it, we driving back to LA.” He laughed. “Now pull this up and park close. Right across the street. We doing business.”
—
The cold air braced East. He decided not to waste words. The yellow house’s door opened on a thick chain.
“We’re here to buy some guns.”
In the crack was a white face, beard, wire-rimmed glasses. “Show me money,” it said.
Walter made a motion at his hip. Same handful of twenties he’d offered the black man on the bike.
“You packing?” said the bearded man. “Because if you are, hand me what you have now. Change and keys too. And Phillip will come around and wand you.”
“We’re clean,” said East. “All right. But it’s cold out here.”
Around the corner of the house appeared a shamefaced man as skinny as a dog. He had a metal-detector paddle semiconcealed beneath his arm. It squelched as he jostled it. The man nodded uncomfortably before he climbed the stairs.
“You ready?” he said.
“That a metal detector?” said Walter.
“Yep.”
“I know you ain’t gonna scan us standing out here on your porch,” said Walter.
“Yep.”
They submitted to the nosing and grazing of the paddle. East wasn’t sure the skinny man was using it right. Skinny enough that his shoulder joints bulged at the seams of his shirt; his knuckles stood out like knots. Hard to say how old he was.
“All right,” the man Phillip said. “Now you may go in. But let me give you some advice. Okay? Don’t be arguing. The nice man wants to sell you what you need. But everyone else in the house wants you dead.”
Again the country manners, East thought. As if they’d come from a planet a million miles away.
“We just doing business,” Walter soothed him.
Phillip stared with the same red-bitten face. “Remember what I told you.” He nodded at the door, and they heard the chain come off. It opened, and Phillip led them in. Out of his collar curled the beginning of a tattoo, some ancient declaration.
They entered a parlor set with antique, dark furniture that was upholstered in pale peach. “Sit together there,” Phillip said, indicating a sofa, and he slipped through a doorway at the back of the room. The bearded man with glasses split off and crept up the stairway running up behind the front door. To its railing was lashed a thick, transparent slab two inches thick — just roped on haphazardly with yellow nylon cord.
“Bulletproof glass, that is,” Walter murmured.
East nodded.
Walter sat obediently, and East moved that way, but something over the sofa caught his eye. On the wall hung portraits, rectangular and oval, of tall, gaunt men with beards and white women with their hair in curls, or grandmothers with their last wisps. White faces, stolid expressions, their postures rigid in these antique frames. To East they were mesmerizing — the oldest pictures he’d ever seen. These strangers stood in poses that didn’t fit them, that family lined up unhappily in front of a house. Pioneer faces, dead now, but their eyes still blazing, vigilant, even in sepia. He felt drawn, felt them watching.