I slid down from the seat and onto the hard, dry ground.
I could see her above me, gun in her hand, pointing it at me. I tried reaching up to the door handle. Then something slammed into my chest and this time I heard the pop of the gun against the rushing of cars above us.
I couldn’t breathe. My mouth worked but nothing came.
She leaned over me.
She kissed me then. The last one.
You ever think about the last kiss you’ll get? Who will give it to you? If perhaps it’s someone like Valerie out there waiting to do it?
Maybe there are worse things than that.
“I’m sorry, Karl. You don’t have to worry now.”
I tried to speak, spitting blood at her instead.
The train’s whistle brought me back.
Valerie was gone.
So was the Impala.
I could see the ribbon of the overpass above me. It seemed so high. I’d never noticed that before. How high above Grand the interstate was. I couldn’t hear the cars on it anymore. They had all gone away.
Everyone had gone away.
I’d reviewed the pictures of Valerie enough. I was tired of it all. There was just the last one of her left anyway.
I could see the moon between the lanes above me. Just a fingernail, really, that was all.
Paint it red and claw my fucking heart out.
The train off Grand cried out again. Maybe it was heading west. It didn’t matter. I would be riding that whistle into the black, bringing that last picture of Valerie along with me.
BLAZIN’ ON BROADWAY
BY GARY PHILLIPS
South Phoenix
Somebody Told Me” by the Killers pumped from the overhead speakers as Ivan Monk entered the busy fitness club. The facility took up the fourth floor of a new high-rise offering a pool, sauna, and a large expanse of machines and free weights.
Passing by the spin class, he heard the instructor joke into her hands-free set, “My friend told me, looking at the mess of clothes on my bed, ‘Girl, you need to get you some new gear.’” The woman, a bronze-hued Latina in a form-fitting outfit, laughed gleefully. She would have been at home on the cover of Maxim. “And I realize that light blue sports bras against dark skin can be distracting, but I can get them three for a good price at Big 5. I guess I kind of had it hanging out in some of my outfits, but you know, really, I hadn’t noticed.” She chuckled again.
Monk noticed. Every man in the class and a couple of the women noticed too. He regretted he couldn’t linger and hear more about her choice of workout clothes. He asked a trainer, “Excuse me, where can I find Nazeen Loveless?” The guy pointed a veined finger at a door, and continued his count as a sweating hausfrau completed a series of crunches.
Monk went to the door and knocked lightly. Built into the nearby wall was an aquaterrarium—half gravel and the other side a miniature pond. Various plants he didn’t recognize pop-ulated the tank, as did several reptiles. A dark green toad sat on a rock, croaking and glaring at him between blinks. Monk glared back.
“Come in,” a throaty voice announced.
He entered and shook the proffered hand. From his research Monk knew that Nazeen Loveless was past fifty, but she was still a striking woman with a toned body encased in a silk shirt tucked into a mid-length skirt with a slit. A heavy silver bracelet slid up and down her right wrist.
“So, old Ardmore sent you out here,” she said affectionately. She sat back down and he took a seat opposite. Behind her a window overlooked the morphing landscape of Phoenix’s south side.
“He’s putting out this compilation CD package, as he told you, and asked me to run down some leads to make sure everything was cool rights-wise.”
The handsome woman tilted her head, her chandelier earrings tinkling. “And you’re Ardmore’s coproducer?”
“I’ve got a private ticket,” he said.
“Pardon?”
Monk explained he made his living as a PI. “Ardmore asked me to do his legwork because we’ve known each other awhile and—”
“Antony never did like lawyers,” she finished.
He nodded agreement and removed a PDA from the inner pocket of his sport coat. It was hot as a mother outside but he’d put the jacket on in the comfort of the air-conditioned building to look professional.
“There’s a couple of people Ardmore hoped you could help me locate.”
“It’s been a long time,” Loveless said.
“I know,” he said sympathetically. “When I was a teenager, I remember KDAY playing the hell out of ‘Blazin’ on Broadway.’ I still have the LP it was on, Double-Barreled Funk.”
“You weren’t into disco then?”
“I got into my share of clubs with my fake ID, sitting around playing Pong and backgammon,” he admitted, “learning the Hustle and trying not to sweat all over some girl. But I have to credit my sister Odessa with being the keeper of the flame when it came to R&B and Soul. She predicted disco would die, though not the numbers like what Hayzell and the Sugar Kings performed.”
Loveless seemed distracted for a moment, then asked, “Who are the ones you’re trying to find?”
He consulted his handheld’s screen. He’d initially argued strenuously with his old lady about how his steno pad was trustworthy, how words on paper had proven satisfactory for hundreds of years. But she’d prevailed.
“Believe me, you’ll get hooked,” Superior Court Judge Jill Kodama had said. Damned if he now didn’t find his Crack-Berry indispensable.
“How about Minnie Thaxton?” Monk asked. “Also, what about Burris Parchman?” He looked up expectantly.
“When Ardmore called last week I figured Minnie’d be one of the people you’d want to talk to. In fact, her set’s closing tonight at the Raven’s Mill. I can call over there to let her know you’ll be coming.”
“Thanks.” He noted this using his stylus. “And Parch-man?”
She folded her arms, shaking her head, a morose cast to her features. “You know he was a slave to that ’caine.”
“Ardmore understood he’d been clean and sober,” Monk suggested.
“Last I knew, and this was maybe ’97 or ’98, he was back in Baltimore living in a shelter. But,” and she held her hands apart, “that’s the last I heard.”
Parchman had been a session man, keyboardist and organist on several later Hayzell and the Sugar Kings numbers. It was believed that Parchman had come up with an instrumental called “Do Your Thing” on one of the tracks. There had been several conflicting publishing credits for the tune and Monk hoped to settle the matter. But Parchman was most known as the man who’d killed Hayzell Mumford, the Sugar Kings’ lead singer.
“Well, I’ll talk with Minnie and see how that goes.”
“She’s going to like you,” Loveless observed. “She must be pushing back seventy, hard, but she appreciates her some younger sturdy mens, as she would say.”
“I ain’t that young no more,” Monk averred.
Her eyes brightened. “You’re upright and got those shoulders. That’s good enough.”
They both chuckled and he asked, “Is there anyone else around from then who I should talk to? I believe Hayzell’s mother is alive.”
She bristled. “You said you only wanted the ones who wrote some of the numbers.”
Monk hunched a shoulder. “I like to be thorough.”
“You’re nosy,” she declared.
He grinned, hoping to defuse the tension. “That too.”
“What is it that you’re really after?” she hissed, an edge in her voice. “About how Hayzell was killed over drugs?”