Instead of running, I looked for Whisper. He was gone.
A series of shots exploded inside the assassins’ hiding place across the street from Good News. I could see them glimmer weakly through the windows.
I got myself to a standing position and staggered away, around the corner. There I leaned against a wall, breathing as if I had just run a mile.
More gunshots.
A siren sounded somewhere.
The sirens continued. I moved down the street and into an alley. I crouched behind a group of metal cans.
“What’s happenin’?” someone hissed, and I almost leaped up.
Behind me on a ledge big enough to hold him was a man who’d made his bed there. He was black and dressed in nighttime grays. There was hair all over his face and a frightened glint in his eyes.
The sirens were getting louder.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was walkin’ down the street an’ all of a sudden there was shots.”
Three police cars careened down the street I had run from.
“Who was it?” the alley dweller asked.
“Loud and Dangerous,” I said.
My new friend and I waited a while. There were no more shots. After a few minutes there was shouting: military-like orders were being given. At that point I got up and walked down toward the hubbub — just a neighborhood resident wondering what was going on.
There were at least a dozen people in front of Good News, gaping at the commotion across the street. Smaller groups of Watts’s denizens appeared on stoops and in the street.
The police were taking five men from the building, all of them in handcuffs. Whisper and Fearless were among the prisoners. They’d be arrested, but that was all right; both men were certified to take in bail jumpers.
I saw Albert Rive, his brawny body sagging under the beating that Fearless had surely given him. The other men, except for Fearless and Whisper, also seemed a little worse for wear.
The moon hung at the end of the street. Under its constant stare a paddy wagon came, gathered my friends and their quarry, and took them someplace where Milo could go and set things straight.
“Hey, Paris,” a man said from behind me. His hand on my shoulder weighed as much as a Christmas ham.
“Jerry.”
“Wasn’t that Fearless in there with them?”
“Was it?”
“That why you boys hangin’ out around here?” he asked. “Layin’ for Al Rive?”
“Did Lionel Sterling call you, Jerry?” I asked.
That slapped the smug certainty off the amphibian’s face.
“Yeah,” he breathed.
“He tell you to tell Useless to call him?”
“If that’s what Ulysses say, then maybe so.”
“You know a man named Hector LaTiara?”
“Never heard of him.”
“What about—”
“I have to go in now, Paris,” he said. “You got what you wanted. The next time I see ya, yo’ mouth bettah be filled with Ha Tsu’s noodles.”
Jerry turned his back on me and walked up the stairs to Good News.
I rummaged through my pockets, looking for Mum’s phone number. When I found it I felt as though I had located something precious, like a doctor’s prescription for a whole life’s worth of pain.
Chapter 39
She brought my jasmine tea to the bed. The night before she had bathed me and loved me and even sung a Chinese lullaby while I drifted off to sleep in her arms. But Mum’s greatest gift to me was that cup of fragrant tea. I sat up, realizing that her bed was positioned to receive the morning sun through a high window on the far wall.
Even in that overbuilt part of town you could hear birds chirping. I took a deep breath and a sip; Mum kissed me and said, “Your mustache tickle.”
“I’ll cut it off.”
“No. I like it when a man tickle me.”
It was a moment that I never wanted to end. We made love again, but the seconds were ticking at the back of my mind while she laughed at my mustache against her thighs.
She asked me if I had really read The Odyssey. I recited the first book, translated by Samuel Butler. I’d memorized those lines after I’d read that many Europeans in the old days had committed hundreds, even thousands of poems to memory and then recited them on many occasions.
But even Homer couldn’t save me that morning.
I kissed the young waitress good-bye and walked out into the sultry morning — two parts serenity and three parts terror.
“Good morning, Paris,” Loretta Kuroko said with a humorous and playful suspicion in her eye.
I felt guilty under that gaze.
“Paris,” Milo shouted. “I hear I owe you a favor, boy.”
“You get Fearless outta jail, Miles?” I asked the bail bondsman.
“Come on over here an’ sit with me,” he said.
I turned to Loretta.
“Why are you looking at me?” she asked.
“Can I go?”
Her smile lost its insinuation, and we were friends again. She nodded graciously, and I went to Milo’s spindly visitor’s chair, my favorite piece of furniture in the whole wide world, and sat down hard.
“I need information, Mr. Sweet.”
“Shoot.”
I wasn’t ready yet. I had relied on the habit Milo had of resisting sharing what he knew. He usually got coy and then cagey before getting up off of information. And so, because he hadn’t, I took on his evasive role.
“Where’s Fearless?” I asked.
“That’s what you wanna know?”
“That’s the first thing.”
“He went off wit’ that girlfriend Mona. She was already at the police station when I got there at two.”
“Who was the third man?” I asked then. “The one with the rifle.”
“Steven Borell,” Milo said. “I don’t know how Al Rive managed to fool him into that.”
“Rive is in jail?” I asked, just to make sure.
“For a long time,” Milo promised.
“You know a big ugly brother with a scar run up the center’a his face?”
“That’s the information?” Milo asked.
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“Milo, I got problems. You know that. I helped Whisper and Fearless with your mess, now please just tell me who he is.”
“Lonnie Mannheim,” Milo said.
“Mannheim?”
“Yeah. I guess the Germans had slaves too.”
“Does he have a gang?”
“Uh-huh. Sure do,” Milo said. “Bobo and Gregory Handsome. Two Arkansas brothers who need to go home. All of ’em have worked for me at one time or another.”
“Trackin’ down bail jumpers?”
“That and other things.”
“You know where I can find them?” I asked.
“Why would you want to?”
“Because Lonnie an’ them know somebody don’t like me,” I said as clearly and candidly as I could. “Because I got to find him.”
“If Lonnie only the door to the problem, then you in trouble deep, Paris.”
“That’s no news to me.”
Milo frowned. He wasn’t the kind of friend that would put his neck on the line for me. But he did care in his way. He didn’t want to think that I’d come to harm. And if the worst happened, he’d put on a good dark suit and come to my funeral. He might even send some lilies — if he could deduct them from his taxes.
“I don’t know where they are,” he told me. “When we did business together they were mostly legal. But nowadays I hear they break legs and worse for people don’t like to hear bones snappin’ and men breathin’ their last.”
That was Milo at his friendliest. He was trying to tell me to find another way in, to avoid men I couldn’t stand up to. And I appreciated his concern, such as it was.