Raymond pulled out his large .41 caliber pistol.
“Put it away, Ray,” I said.
“I ain’t lettin’ them take me to jail, Easy.”
“Put it away, man,” I said again.
“I’m not goin’ to jail, man.”
But he put the pistol behind the seat and we all climbed out on the passenger’s side. I strode up to the cops before the others and put my hands in the air. The cops coming at us numbered four. They were all white men. They all had their pistols drawn.
In my left hand I held the letter given to me by Gerald Jordan.
“Before you make a mistake, officers,” I said. “Please read this letter.”
I hadn’t been pistol-whipped for quite some time.
The advance policeman struck me for no reason I could see. He didn’t know me. I hadn’t committed a crime as far as he knew. My hands were aloft and the only thing I held was a flimsy note. But he hit me so hard that he grunted.
I didn’t go down, though. And instead of striking back I held out the note.
“You better read this,” I said.
“Hold it, Billings,” another cop said.
Billings swung at me anyway but I bent my knees and lowered my arm so that the gun swung over my head. I tasted blood on the side of my mouth but all I was worried about was Raymond murdering those four cops.
The one who had told Billings to stop stood in front of me.
“What’s that you got there?” the cop asked.
“A letter about me and my friends,” I said, “from your boss.”
I didn’t expect it to work. But the officer read my letter while the rest of the cops braced Hauser and Raymond.
“Where’s the key to the back?” Billings was asking Hauser.
“Lost it,” the big redhead said.
By then my cop had read the letter.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you in a truck in the middle of the night,” he told me.
“Call up and find out,” I said.
He was brown-eyed and I would have said brawny if it wasn’t for Hauser. Sonny Liston would have looked scrawny in the presence of Raymond’s disgruntled partner.
I was trussed up in handcuffs and pressed against the side of the forty-foot trailer—next to my friends.
“Where’s the key?” a cop was yelling into Raymond’s ear.
“It ain’t mines to keep,” Raymond said. “And stop spittin’ on me.”
“Uncuff them,” the officer who took my official hall pass said.
“What?” Billings asked belligerently.
“Which word didn’t you understand?”
I could see the two cops got along about as well as Mouse and Hauser. But that meant nothing to me. My chains were released and three of the cops stood back. The leader, the one who read my note, came up to me then.
“Can I be of any assistance, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked.
It was worth the whole night just to see the look of wide-eyed shock enter Mouse’s face. In all the years I’d known him, since we were in our teens, I had never surprised my friend. He was a force of nature, the spawn of some nether god. There was nothing a mortal like me could do that would take him off guard.
But I did that night.
“As a matter of fact, yes, Officer,” I said. “Could you let your friends know that Mr. Alexander here and his friend Mr. Hauser will be doing work with me for the next few nights? I really wouldn’t want them to be bothered anymore.”
“You got it,” he said. He didn’t even sound angry. Gerald Jordan was not only the enemy of my people but, in some ways, more powerful than all of us put together.
17
How you do that, Easy?” Mouse asked when we were back on the road.
“Do what?” I asked innocently.
“You know what. Get them cops to treat you like you was the mayor or somethin’.”
“You don’t expect me to let up on all my secrets, do you, Ray?”
“Come on, man, what did that letter say?”
“It said, ‘Listen up, Mr. Policeman, that’s Easy Rawlins you talkin’ to.’ ”
“I never saw anything like that in my life,” Randolph Hauser said. “That cop called you mister and he didn’t even try to look in our truck.”
I didn’t respond to the compliment. I was just happy that Hauser’s estimation of Mouse and his value had risen.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER we reached another warehouse on Hart, not half a block from the ocean. Six or seven white men rushed out on the dock and started unloading. I had found out along the way that Hauser really didn’t have the key. He carried a set of open padlocks to secure the van, so if the police did stop him they couldn’t get into the truck without metal-cutting tools.
We went to the glass-walled warehouse to smoke and drink coffee while Hauser’s men worked.
“That was a good trick, Rawlins,” Hauser was saying. “How’d you do it?”
“Charm school,” I replied.
The giant looked hard at me for a moment and then he cracked a smile.
“You’re all right, son,” he said. “I guess Ray is better than I gave him credit for.”
“If you borrowed on me,” Mouse added, “you’d be a rich man.”
We all laughed and smoked for a while and then I wandered out toward the front of the warehouse so that Mouse and the big man could conclude their business.
As a rule I avoided Raymond’s illegal business. I knew he was a crook, but what could I do? He was like blood to me. And that night the rules as I had always known them had been suspended. Police opening fire on a house of worship, covering up information about a murder, and employing a black man to get them out of a jam. Our bigoted mayor was set to meet with Martin Luther King. I hadn’t even broken the law, telling those policemen that Raymond was working with me. So it didn’t disturb me standing in the thieves’ den. That was simply another step toward the other side of our liberation.
MOUSE JOINED ME outside the warehouse a few minutes past midnight. He still had that small duffel bag. He was smiling so I knew the money had worked out fine. Mouse only ever had two things on his mind: money and women. Revenge ran a distant third but still you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.
“Ready to go, Easy?”
“Go where?”
“To shake Nate Shelby outta his tree.”
His white teeth and gray eyes flashed in the night and a laugh came unbidden from deep in my chest.
THE MENLO JUNKYARD was dark, and so was every other house and business on the street. All except one. That was a house that had a double garage at the end of its driveway.
“You gotta dime, Ease?”
“For what?”
“I got to make a call.”
I gave my friend the ten-cent piece and he walked down to the corner where a working phone booth stood. I remember thinking that that had to be the only phone booth in Watts that had not been smashed by rampaging rioters.
Ray talked for a good five minutes. Every now and then I could hear his voice rise in a threatening tone.
“Here’s your dime,” he said, handing me the coin.
“I thought you needed it for the call.”
“I did. But the coin box is broke out so you get your money right back. I been callin’ people all over the country from the phones down here.”
He took a cigarette from his white coveralls pocket, lit up, and then leaned against the junkyard fence.
“What are we waitin’ for?” I asked when he lit a second smoke.
“Magic.”
“Come on, Ray. Who did you call?”
“What you had in that note you showed the cops?”
Mouse’s revenge ran a slow third but it always crossed the finish line.
I laughed and said, “Okay, Ray. I’ll wait for your magic trick.”
And so we stood there at 1:15, smoking cigarettes and watching the single lit window on the block. No one was out; not the army or the police force or people in the neighborhood. When we had stood around for about five minutes or so one of the doors to the garage came open and a car drove out. A red Galaxie 500. It came across the street and parked in front of us. The door opened and a big black man with a weathered, angry face got out.