Fifty-three
Theo understood, but he knew he could never explain it to Jack. It was Jack who’d told him about the meeting at the restaurant, and Jack was cool in Theo’s book, but a Yale-educated lawyer whose daddy was once a governor couldn’t even begin to understand why Tatum wouldn’t give a DNA sample. Didn’t matter how cool Jack was. Only Theo could understand, but that didn’t mean he agreed with the decision. He’d even called Tatum himself, which got him exactly nowhere.
“This could prove you innocent. Don’t you see that, man?”
“I’m not givin’ no DNA.”
“But this shit works. A DNA test is what got me off death row.”
“You didn’t have no choice, Theo. You was already on death row.”
“And that’s where they wants to put you, too. Take the test.”
“No.”
“Shee-it, Tatum, why the hell not? We was out fishing all night. You’re innocent. I knows you’re innocent.”
“Then stop askin’ me to take the fucking test.”
The conversation could have lasted another thirty years, and Theo would have been no closer to convincing him. When Tatum had made up his mind, there was no changing it. He’d been that way all his life. But maybe this time he was right. If Jack Swyteck couldn’t understand it, well, that’s the way it breaks, buddy. If Theo didn’t want to accept it, hey, that’s your choice, bro’. People didn’t think of Tatum Knight as a man of principle, but nobody knew him the way Theo did. And Theo knew exactly what was going on in his head. Two black guys, brothers-not soul brothers or gang brothers or You-Can-Share-My-Needle-for-a-Taste-of-Crystal-Meth brothers-but real brothers, brothers from the same womb, born of the same crackhead mother who’d gone out one night and gotten her throat slit by some asshole who didn’t think her blow job was worth the ten dollars. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t have the same father (and they probably did, because they looked so much alike), but either way they’d never know who the hell he was. An alibi from these dead-end kids from Liberty City wasn’t good enough for Detective Rick Larsen and his lynch mob. They needed DNA-ironclad, scientific proof-positive of innocence, or his alibi didn’t mean shit. Well, fuck them, was all Tatum was saying. All of them.
Theo could understand that. At least he wanted to understand. It wasn’t easy to stand by and watch his brother pass up a golden opportunity to prove himself innocent, clear his name, get the bloodhounds on somebody else’s trail. Not after losing four years on death row for someone else’s crime. It took balls to stand up to a homicide detective that way, to look the demon in the eye and say, “You want me? Come get me.” Theo admired that in his brother. Actually, they were a lot alike in that respect. The Knight brothers were never the ones to back down from anyone or anything, never afraid to butt heads with their worst nightmares. With one exception. There was one demon Theo had never confronted. He’d never gone back to that all-night convenience store where he’d found that clerk in a puddle of blood.
’Bout damn time you did.
Theo remembered the way. He drove the exact route they’d taken that night, last night it seemed, or was it a million years ago?
It was nine o’clock in the evening, much earlier than his disastrous visit at 4 A.M., just as dark but much more traffic. The street was freshly paved, and there was a new median down the middle. Public works had planted a few palm trees to pretty-up the neighborhood, not the towering and beautiful royal palms or the Canary Island date palms you saw on wide boulevards cutting through tony Coral Gables, just the straggly, brown variety that got planted for no other reason than to shut people up whenever they bitched and moaned about the lack of green space in their neighborhood. So after all these years, they finally got the weed palms, sickly looking trees plucked from somewhere in the Everglades, one or two puny fronds reaching aimlessly for the sky like Alfalfa’s haircut, their trunks propped up by two-by-fours and covered top to bottom with gang graffiti, clearly some bureau crat’s idea of landscaping.
Theo turned at the traffic light. The pool hall was gone, the whole building boarded up and scorched around the edges, the fire probably caused by a careless cigarette or more likely the owner’s dumb-ass refusal to make good on a gambling debt. The gas station was still on the corner, but the new self-serve pumps looked like something out of The Jetsons compared to the old equipment Theo remembered. And Theo did remember. He’d forgotten nothing, having gone over that night many times in his mind while lying alone on a prison bunk. But just the thought of actually retracing his steps had his heart pounding.
He parked the car and switched off the radio. The music had been playing loudly that night, as he recalled, until they parked behind the convenience store, where Lionel, the gang leader, gave him his instructions and started the initiation.
“You want to be a Grove Lord or don’t you?”
“Shit, yeah.”
“You got five minutes to prove it. Then I’m gone, wit or wit’out you.”
Theo got out of the car and shut the door, his head clear of alcohol this time yet clouded with so many memories, so many doubts.
Loose gravel on the pavement crunched beneath his feet as he started down the alley. He was approaching the store from the back, just as he had before. It was a solitary journey, the passageway narrow and dark, brightened only by the streetlight at the front entrance. He’d sprinted up this alley the last time, but tonight he walked, absorbing the details. The dirty bricks on the walls on either side of him, the cracks in the pavement beneath his feet, the sound of the traffic somewhere ahead of him. He reached the sidewalk and turned left, toward the entrance to Shelby’s, except that it wasn’t called Shelby’s anymore. The sign on the door said MORTON’S MARKET. Theo had heard that old man Shelby had sold it. He couldn’t take it anymore, his business off badly from all the talk on the street about that poor nineteen-year-old kid who got beat to death by that black piece of shit from Liberty City and his pocket-size crowbar.
“Got a buck, bro’?” asked the homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk outside the entrance.
“Get you on the way out,” said Theo, and then he stopped at the glass doors. He remembered the butterflies in his stomach the last time he’d come here, how relieved he was to see no one inside the store, the cash register unattended. It was a little different at this hour, two customers inside that he could count, the clerk seated at the counter and watching ESPN on the little television. But everything else looked virtually identical, the aisles configured the same way, the same beige tile floors, the beer and snack foods stacked the same way near the entrance. It may have been called Morton’s Market, but he was going back to Shelby’s.
He pushed the door open and walked inside.
The clerk glanced over his shoulder, checked him out, then turned his attention back to the television. Theo walked around the stack of newspapers and the barrel of iced-down singles. The clerk didn’t give him a second look. Theo Knight, former death row inmate, had just walked into the store, and the kid didn’t seem to care. Did he know what had happened here? Had anyone told him?
Have you been in that stockroom?
Theo stopped and looked down the hall, his gaze carrying him all the way back to that first sight of blood, the bright crimson trail that he’d followed like a fool, followed all the way to Florida State Prison and four years of near misses with the electric chair.
The front door opened. Theo turned, the clerk’s head jerked. Two teenage boys walked in. Both were black. Both wore baggy pants, Miami Hurricane football jerseys, thick gold chains, and black knit caps, which seemed to have replaced the backward baseball caps of Theo’s era, even in the tropical climates. They walked with the typical gang swagger, something that never seemed to change from one generation to the next. This time, the clerk looked nervous. The boys separated. One went down the far aisle, the other took the near aisle. Up and down they walked, as if casing the place, biding their time until the customers had the good sense to leave them alone with the clerk and the cash drawer.