“Yeah,” I said. “Fearless’ll do it. Fearless, not Paris. Not your nephew, who you dragged down in the trough with your son.”
Fearless reached down for the bag. Useless took it by the handle.
“Don’t cause a ruckus, Ulysses,” Fearless said.
“Do you have a car, Ulysses?” Three Hearts’s voice was stiff and angry.
“Yeah. Jerry Twist lent me his car.”
“Then let’s get out of here.”
“Two questions, Useless,” I said.
Hearts was about to protest my bastardization of her son’s name, but he put a hand on her shoulder.
“What, Paris?”
“Who killed Mad Anthony?”
Useless never could lie very well in the presence of his mother. She forgave him everything and loved him fiercely. Her passion made him honest, or somewhat so.
“He was tryin’ to kill me, Paris. I swear.”
“What about Hector?”
“Come on, baby, let’s go,” Angel said.
“I don’t know,” Useless said to me. “I shot Tony in a alley off’a Alameda. He would’a kilt me if I didn’t, but I don’t know about Hector.”
Our eyes were locked for a long minute. I believed him... but that didn’t make what he said the truth.
The three headed for the door. I followed them through the bookstore and out onto the porch. I don’t think I’d ever been angrier. All the trouble I’d gone through, and my aunt still treated me like a throwaway waxed paper milk carton.
“You welcome for our help finding your son,” I called after them. “Make sure you don’t call back any time soon.”
Three Hearts wheeled around and stared at me, her evil eye glowing in the night. But I didn’t care, not one bit. A man can only be pushed so far and then he has to stand up and say what he feels.
“She’ll cool down in the mornin’, Paris,” Fearless said at my back. “She’ll see that you did right by her with the dawn.”
“All I want is for them to leave me alone,” I said. “I’ve had enough. You hear me?”
Chapter 38
Back inside, Fearless picked up the suitcase that Useless had left in my kitchen.
“I’ll hold on to that,” I told him.
“You sure, man?”
“I wanna check it out.”
“Okay, Paris,” Fearless said. Then he chuckled. “You must be boilin’.”
“She drive me crazy, Fearless,” I said. “Here I done helped her do what she want, an’ she still wanna look at Useless like he the one did it all.”
“That’s her baby there,” Fearless said. “You cain’t do nuttin’ about that.”
“It’s not only that,” I said. “Sterling was workin’ for somebody, somebody he was scared of. That means the one who had Angel and Hearts kidnapped is still out there. That man’s a killer an’ he might be thinkin’ about us. And you know Useless not tellin’ us everything.”
Fearless stood there while I ranted and gulped tea. He leaned back against the counter, with moths darting through the darkness behind him. It’s not that he didn’t care about what I was saying. It’s just that there was nothing to do about it. Fearless lived a life filled with dangers. Walking down the street was a threat to him. But he just moved through it, living by a code that I doubt he’d have been able to articulate.
The phone rang about then.
It was after midnight.
“Hello?” I said, hoping that Three Hearts did not want to apologize.
“Paris,” he said in a low tone.
“Hold on.”
Fearless had followed me into the bookshop part of my home. I handed the phone to him. He muttered a word and then listened. After forty-five seconds or so he grunted and then hung up.
“You wanna go for a ride?” he asked me.
There was no doubt in my mind that Fearless meant to drive into trouble. Trouble was where he was coming from and it was most often his destination. But the alternative was to sit in my house alone with the fear of a killer who could take you out with a straightedge or a heart attack.
“Okay,” I said, and Fearless clapped my shoulder.
I was somewhat surprised that Fearless took us to Ha Tsu’s Good News. I almost asked if he was lost when we pulled to the curb a block down from the restaurant-pool hall. Maybe, I thought, the blows of Chapman Grey had loosened a connection in Fearless’s brain.
“Fearless?” I said, and then a brown shadow appeared next to the driver’s window. My shoulders rose, preparing for the shot I knew had to follow. My fingers gripped the door handle.
Then I saw that it was Whisper.
Fearless let down his window.
“Where is he?” Fearless asked.
“Right smack-dab across the street from Ha Tsu’s,” Whisper said. “Him and Rex Hathaway.”
“Why here?” I asked.
Whisper hadn’t noticed me. He glanced at Fearless, the question in his gaze.
“We on sumpin’ together,” Fearless said.
“Albert Rive been in town a week,” Whisper said to me. “I been lookin’ for him, but he got sneaky. Then somebody let ’im know that Fearless been seen at Good News.”
“I thought Al was after Milo,” I said.
“Yeah, but Fearless in the way. He must figure if he can take out the bodyguard, Milo be like a clam wit’ no shell.”
“Let’s go,” Fearless said.
“Hold up,” Whisper said. “Why don’t we have Paris here walk down the block just a minute before us? That way we see if he got somebody else there.”
“We could go find out that for ourselves,” Fearless said, defending me. “We don’t need him.”
Before Whisper could protest, I said, “No. I’ll do it.”
Whisper nodded. “Walk by across the street an’ keep on goin’. When you come to the end’a the block, we’ll make our move. Turn around quick an’ shout if you see something.”
I don’t know why I did it. I suppose my interpretation of Aristotle’s logic had something to do with it. It didn’t make sense for Albert Rive to shoot me when he was after Fearless. At worst he might accost me, ask me where my friend was. And before I could answer, Fearless would be on him.
But that wasn’t the real reason. I just needed to do something. I needed to move my legs to exercise my heart. I was in deep trouble and if I stopped moving I worried that the fear would overtake me and I’d be frozen like a child in the arms of a make-believe monster.
I walked down the block, feeling cool on my left side, the side that faced the hidden Albert and Rex. The bouncer, Harold Crier, was gone from his post. I glanced up at Jerry Twist’s windows. They were dark, but that didn’t mean anything.
I passed under the red lantern of the restaurant, across the street from the unseen killers, and into darkness. As night shadows fell on me, I thought of Tiny Bobchek’s corpse. The image upset my equilibrium. My toe kicked the concrete. At any other time I would have righted myself and kept on going, but in that sudden darkness, with the apparition of the man I had cuckolded in my mind, I tried too hard, lost my balance, and fell.
I looked back to see Fearless and Whisper running toward a recessed doorway. Then I saw a movement above. It was a window coming open just as Fearless approached the darkened entrance.
“Fearless!” I screamed. “Up above your head!”
My friend took flight without even a glance upward. A rifle appeared at the window. Whisper came into view and pressed himself against a wall. When the first shot came, I expected to see the nondescript detective crumple and fall, but instead the bullet ricocheted two feet from where I lay. I looked up at the window, trying to understand how the assassin’s shot could have been so far off. The next shot shattered a barbershop window next to my head, and I understood in a flash that Whisper had made himself invisible, and I, with my loud cry, was the only target in sight.