The big black guy who answered the door was familiar to me from Coalition HQ. This imposing figure was Terrell, who with his associate, Deon, did more than just help chauffeur and bodyguard the Reverend — they also played cards and listened to soul music in the back room. Good gig.
Terrell had a head the size of a gallon paint can, only more rounded, with hair cut close to the scalp; he sported a Rosie Greer goatee. He wore the standard black undertaker suit with a dark blue tie, his expression narrow-eyed and glowering, but that was misleading. Really he was a pussycat. A pussycat with a .45 automatic under his arm.
“Jackie boy,” he said in a friendly growl, the corners of the wide mouth turning up slightly. “I hear you gonna run interference for brother Deon and me, that it?”
“More like quarterback,” I said.
He smirked and let me in. “Careful you don’t get rushed.”
The vestibule opened onto an area with a hardwood floor shared by a staircase and a hallway back to the kitchen. Open doors were on my either side, study and dining room, plaster walls a pale green, woodwork handsome and dark. This house had been built a long time ago, early in this century, by fine craftsmen for somebody with dough.
Terrell abandoned me to go into the dining room, where his “brother” Deon was waiting. I didn’t know whether Deon was really his brother or just a brother in the other sense.
In the medium-sized study, the Reverend — in rolled-up shirtsleeves and black-framed glasses — sat at an ancient walnut desk with a dark leather top, writing in longhand on bond paper. Wadded-up balls of the stuff surrounded a wastebasket nearby. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves bore books, not fancy leather-bound stuff for show, but hardcovers and paperbacks of assorted vintage with a worn look, somewhat haphazardly stacked. A working office. He did not acknowledge my presence. That was nothing new — the best I’d ever got from him at HQ was a nod.
The somewhat formal dining room, with china cabinet and sideboard, was set up for Terrell and Deon, who were not sleep-in help — like me, they were here for security concerns born out of André’s passing. Him, and the dead Nazi who turned up in a church parking lot.
That I got rid of both those pricks would have come as quite a shock to Terrell and Deon, and the Reverend, too. But not as big a one as the noise suppressor tucked down in my left windbreaker pocket.
Is that a silencer or are you just glad to see me?
The two massive men were playing gin rummy at one end of the long dining-room table; Deon, a little bigger than Terrell, modest Afro, no beard, was keeping score. Mid-table like a centerpiece, sat a small portable TV with rabbit ears with an extension cord trailing off; right now Laugh-In was on, Arte Johnson in a German army helmet saying, “Very interesting... but stupid.”
Without looking at me, Deon asked, “You eat?”
“Now and then.”
“Smart-ass white boy,” Deon said, but he was smiling. Also a pussycat. Also packing a .45, which was obvious because his black suitcoat was hung over the back of his chair, the shoulder-holstered weapon out in the open.
Terrell said, “Colonel Sanders in the kitchen.”
“No shit?” I said. “This I got to see.”
As I went back to the kitchen, I heard Deon say, “Smart-ass white boy” again.
About a third of the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket was gone, but I found a breast. Original recipe, which is my preference. I held it with a napkin, having been raised well, and checked the refrigerator for something to drink — fucking Budweiser again and, damn it, Pepsi. Some days you can’t win. I took a can of the pop anyway.
I went back to the dining room, standing just inside the open double-doorway, nibbling my chicken, occasionally sipping the Pepsi.
I said, “Don’t you fellas know eating chicken is a racist stereotype?”
“What you eating?” Deon asked, writing down the latest scores.
“Well, you have a point. But I prefer Popeye’s.”
“Naw, you fool, that’s spinach.”
“No, really. Few months ago, I ate at one in New Orleans. You wait. You’ll be lining up.” I had another bite of chicken, the batter better than the banter. “I’m gonna take a stroll around the house, get the layout down. Mrs. Lloyd gone for the night?”
Both men nodded, looking at their cards.
“No children at home?”
“Children, boy and girl, growed and gone,” Terrell said. He looked up and smiled, showing off his one gold tooth. Funny how a face that has a natural glower can brighten like that. “Take your tour and come back, Jackie boy. Three of us, we can play some poker.”
“Poker? Well, all right, but could one of you nice men teach me the rules? And I’m afraid I don’t have any change. Can we play for dollars?”
Deon said, “Oh, I gonna watch his ass when he deal the cards.”
I went upstairs. Master bedroom, good-size bathroom, guest room, bedroom with school sports trophies, another with blue ribbons for instrumental music (flute). College graduation photos framed on a dresser in each.
Downstairs, in addition to the dining room and study and another bath, a TV room was off the kitchen, a mud room off that. The basement wasn’t finished, though the washer and dryer were down there, and furnace of course, tool bench, storage boxes, windows too small to crawl in. A fairly typical middle-class, maybe upper-middle-class home. Nothing to indicate a nationally prominent figure lived here.
From a strategic standpoint, the only ways in were the front and back doors. With the exception of the windows off the front porch, the others were too high up on the house to be a threat.
I returned to the dining room and said, “I’m gonna pass on the poker, fellas. One of us ought to be watching that back door.”
They looked at each other like my proposed tactic was Einstein revealing E=mc2. Well, they were bodyguards, not Special Forces.
“Good idea, Jackie boy,” Terrell said. “You do that little thing.”
I said sure and was heading out when Deon advised, “Make sure that back door locked up tight!”
“Good place to start,” I said.
If you’re wondering, the back door was already locked, or anyway the one onto the mud room was — the kitchen door had no lock. Not that I was expecting anybody to come in any door. After all, the fox was already in the henhouse. And I was the fox.
Wasn’t like Delmont was about to come charging in to carry out his contract. Even if he were alive, he’d wait for the Saturday rally, to give his racist client more bang for the buck. And here I sat, at the target’s kitchen table, my nine millimeter in my pants, having another cold breast of original-recipe chicken, getting by on Pepsi, marveling at how easy they were making it for me.
Just screw on the silencer, take out the card-playing bodyguards — two nine-millimeter hiccups should do it — and then swing around and pop the Reverend at his desk, and beat it out the back door and around to the Impala and gone. Take maybe forty-five seconds. About as hard as reaching in the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket for another piece.
Which I did.
The only tricky thing was that several staffers at Coalition HQ, including Jackson and Ruth, knew I was going to the Ville to help babysit the Reverend this evening. That meant going in tomorrow with a story — how I’d arrived and found everybody already tragically dead — or splitting the scene post-hit tonight, and taking my chances.
The former meant getting looked at by the cops a lot harder than I had been this afternoon. The latter meant holing up in my A-frame up north in the cold waiting for the heat to subside. Yes, they’d have police sketches, but nothing else, and if these looks of mine were any more average, I’d forget who that was in the mirror when I shaved mornings.