"Your hole card is a low card, motherfucker." The Prophet's voice, low and strong for such a tiny man. "I see your pistol and raise you one double-barreled scattergun."
"Toss it on the seat," I told him. "Don't be stupid."
"Where's Belle? I came to see Belle."
"You'll see her. I promise."
His pistol made a soft plop on the front seat. The Mole opened his door. The man got out, the Prof's shotgun covering him. I walked around to his side of the car. "Let's go," I told him, my voice quiet.
We walked through the junkyard until we came to a clearing. "Have a seat," I said, pointing toward a cut-down oil drum. Taking a seat myself, lighting a smoke.
He sat down, reaching out a large hand to snatch at the pack of smokes I tossed over to him.
"What now?"
"We wait," I said.
Terry stepped into the clearing. A slightly built boy wearing a set of dirty coveralls. "That him?" he asked.
I nodded. The kid lit a smoke for himself, watching the man. The dog pack watched too. With the same eyes.
The Mole stumbled up next to me, the Prof at his side. The little man supported himself on a cane, the scattergun in his other hand.
"Pansy!" I called out. She lumbered out of the darkness, a Neapolitan mastiff, a hundred and forty pounds of power. Her black fur gleamed blue in the faint light, cold gray eyes sweeping the area. She walked toward the tall man, a steamroller looking at fresh-poured tar.
"Jump!" I snapped at her. She hit the ground, her eyes pinning the man where he sat.
I looked around one more time. All Belle's family was in that junkyard. All that was left, except for Michelle. And she'd already done her part.
The Prophet handed me a pistol. "Here's the sign- now's the time." I stood up.
"They got the death penalty in Florida?" I asked the man.
"You know they do."
"They got it for incest?"
His eyes flickered. He knew. "Where's Belle? Let me talk to her!"
"Too late for that. She's gone. In the same ground you're standing on."
"I never did nothin' to you…"
"Yeah, you did. I don't have a speech for you. You're dead."
"I got people know where I am."
The Prophet smiled at him. "Motherfucker, you don't even know where you are."
"You want the kid to see this?" I asked the Mole.
Light played on the thick lenses of his glasses. "He watched her die."
I cocked the pistol.
He kept his voice low. Reasonable. "Look, if I owe, I can pay. I'm a man who pays his debts."
"You couldn't pay the interest on this one," I told him.
"Hey! I got money, I can…"
"I'm not the Parole Board," I said. The pistol cracked. He jerked backwards off the oil drum. I fired twice more, watching his body jump as each bullet went home.
The Prophet hobbled over to him. The shotgun spoke. Again.
I looked at the body for a dead minute.
We bowed our heads.
Pansy howled at the dark sky, grief and hate in one voice. The pack went silent, hearing her voice.
I didn't feel a thing.
AFTER THE COPS took Belle off the count, I thought about dying too. Thought about it a lot. The Prophet told me the truth.
"If there's something out there past this junkyard, she'll be waiting for you, brother."
"And if there's not?"
"Then what's your hurry?"
"I feel dead inside me," I told the little man with the hustler's soul and the lion's heart. The man who helped raise me inside the walls. Everyone called him the Prof. I thought it was short for Professor- he knew and he taught. But Prophet was the true root. A man who sees the truth sees the future. He showed me both- showed me how to be a man.
Or whatever it is that I am.
"You know what to do with it," he told me.
I knew. Survive is what I knew. What I know. The only tune I know how to play.
Down here, we have rules. We made them ourselves. Feeling dead inside me- that was a feeling. It wouldn't bring Belle back to me- wouldn't get me closer. But making somebody dead…that was a debt.
Belle's father. The maggot who made her older sister into her mother. He loaded her genetic dice. She never had a chance. Her mother died so she could run, and she ran until she died.
I was holding her in my arms when she went, torn to pieces by bullets she took for me. She looked it in the eye when it came for her.
4
BELLE DIED in the spring. I went cold through the summer. Waiting.
Her father was in a prison in Florida, finishing up a manslaughter bit. I did some checking- learned they'd cut him loose in late October.
Michelle wrote the letter, copying Belle's handwriting from a poem the big girl once tried to write.
If her father had any family left to spend Thanksgiving with, there'd be an empty chair at the table.
But the cold was still in me.
5
I SLIPPED MY PLYMOUTH through Chinatown, heading for Mama's. The car didn't feel the same since Belle left. I couldn't make it sing the way she could. Her Camaro was cut up into a thousand pieces in the Mole's junkyard. Her body was in the ground. She left her clothes at my office, her life savings stashed in the hiding place in my garage. I burned the clothes. Kept the money. Like she would have wanted.
It was the fourth day I'd made the run past Mama's, checking the dragon tapestries in the window. One red, one white, one blue. Mama's a patriot. But not a citizen. None of us are.
The blue tapestry had been up for days. Cops. The newspapers said the porno theater had been blown up by some extremist group. The searchers found enough evidence to drop Salvatore Lucastro- drop him hard. His snuff-film business was as dead as the little girls he made into movie stars. Sally Lou was looking at a bunch of life sentences, running wild. Some flowers can only grow in the dark. The local badges had a bad attitude. They weren't surprised that the federales snatched the evidence. They knew Sally Lou's ass was going to be RICO'd. Continuing Criminal Enterprise. But there was supposed to be something left for them. A couple of bodies. I left pieces of one all over a construction site in Times Square. Took the other one with me to the junkyard. Put it through the recycling program: it turns freaks into dog shit.
That was months ago. By now, the cops knew they'd never find the bodies. But they knew where to find me.
It played the same way it had for the last few dead months. The cops would come around, ask their questions, make their threats, go away.
When they got tired of sending around the hard boys, they sent McGowan.
"I thought we had a deal," he said, his cop's eyes sad and hard at the same time. A good trick. Pimps can do it too. He and his partner, Morales, they had let me run a massage parlor in Times Square with police cover. The perfect bait for a maggot who took his pleasure in women's pain. Blood-orgasms. I was supposed to leave them something when I cleared out, but I took it with me. And left it in a junkyard.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yeah you do. You think you walk away from this, you're wrong. I don't give a good goddamn about another collar. You know that. But you're on the list now. I don't know how you made the shooter disappear, but they found pieces of that karate freak all over the lot."
The karate freak who'd crippled the Prophet to send me a message.
"What karate freak?" I asked him.
"You want to play it that way?"
"I'm not playing."
"Not anymore you're not," he said, getting up to leave.