Up the hill from the apartment was Meridian Park, with a fountain that dropped in a pretty series of steps down a long hill toward the south. Down the hill was Fourteenth Street, with some ordinary strip-shopping-center businesses-nail places, a pizza parlor, a diner, a branch bank, like that. There was enough automobile traffic that nobody gave us a second look as we made the pass at Carp’s place. The curbs were packed with cars, mostly old and beat-up. No sign of a Corolla.
From his bills, we knew Carp’s apartment was on the fifth floor, which, from the outside, appeared to be the top one. As we got to the bottom of the hill, at Fourteenth, an aging Ford Explorer started backing out of a parking spot across the street. I barged through oncoming traffic and grabbed the spot.
We were now two hundred feet from the apartment entrance, parked in front of a place called either Lost and Damaged Freight or Major Brand Overstocks, or both; I never figured it out. We sat and watched for a while, then started working on a New York Times crossword puzzle, hung up on an eight-letter word across the middle of the puzzle, the clue being, “Old grape’s reason for being?”
“Raison d’être?” LuEllen suggested. She took the words right out of my mouth.
“Eleven letters,” I said, counting them on my fingers. “Unless I’m spelling it wrong.”
“Look it up. Gotta be ‘raison’ something-or-other. The question mark in the clue means it’s a pun.”
“Ah, man.” But I got out the laptop and called up the Merriam-Webster. Eleven letters.
We were in the car for two hours, off and on, watching the sun go down, still working on the puzzle, hung up on the old grape. There was nothing going on in my brain that would answer that question, but I was still working on it when the streetlights came on.
“Better think about what we’re gonna do,” I said.
“Shush,” LuEllen said. “Look at these guys.”
Two guys were walking up the street toward Carp’s apartment. They were hard to make out in the fading light, but one was black, one white.
“The guys from Carp’s place, the mobile home?” I whispered, even though there was nobody around.
“I think so. They look right. They’re built right,” she said. “They must be tracking him, just like we are.” The two stood on the low stoop for a minute, looking at the street, then up at the face of the apartment. One was dressed in khaki slacks, a T-shirt, and a sport coat, the other in slacks and a golf shirt. They were not from the neighborhood.
“Cops of some kind?” I suggested, as they disappeared inside the building.
“Probably not exactly cops,” LuEllen said. “They’re not carrying guns, unless they’re those little ankle things. They don’t have all that shit clipped to their belts that cops have. No beepers, no cell phones, no cuffs, nothing to conceal it with.”
“So we know Carp’s place is hot. Somebody’s inside, probably the feds.”
“Probably. All they’d need is one guy inside, in the hallway or on the stairs on the way up, and we’d be toast.”
My eye was pulled to another too-fast movement in the direction of Meridian Park. “Uh-oh. Look at this, look at this,” I said. A bulky figure was jogging down the sidewalk. “That’s fuckin’ Carp,” I said.
“This guy’s a blond, a blond.” Floppy blond hair fell around the jogger’s rounded shoulders.
“I don’t care, that’s Carp,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s go where?” She caught my arm.
“Up the hill. See what happens. See what we can see.”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a tone of urgency, but I was out of the car, and heard her car door slam behind me as I crossed Fourteenth and headed into Clay Street, toward the apartment.
Up ahead, most of a block away, Carp dodged a car and ran up the steps into the building. I was moving that way and LuEllen called, “Kidd, slow down, slow down.”
I slowed. Slow is always best. “He didn’t have the laptop,” I said. “It’s either in his apartment or it’s in his car. If we can find the car, a red Corolla, it’s gotta be close.”
“But if it’s in the apartment, then somebody else is in on the deal. Maybe he’s still working with these guys. Maybe they were in New Orleans to meet him, and we chased him away before they could meet.”
She had my arm again, restraining me, just a bit of back pressure above the elbow. But I was moving along and we’d started up the hill when we heard the shots.
This was not a.22. This was three or four shots from something a lot bigger. We stopped, then LuEllen said, “Turn around, turn around,” and we turned around so we were facing back downhill. A black guy was sitting on a stoop at an apartment across the street, reading a newspaper, and when he heard the shots, stood up quickly and stepped inside his door.
“Keep walking, keep walking,” LuEllen said. We were walking downhill, looking over our shoulders, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk. Then the white guy we’d seen go inside the apartment, the white guy from the trailer, we thought, smashed through Carp’s apartment door, fell down the stoop, tried to get up, and fell down again, into the street, hurt bad.
Carp was through the door, on top of him with the gun. He fired a single shot into the white guy’s head, and the white guy went down like a pancake, flat on his face.
“Ah, Jesus,” I said, and LuEllen was chanting, “No, no, no,” and her fingernails dug into my forearm.
Carp ran up the hill toward the park, stuffing the gun in his pocket as he went.
Above us, on the second floor of Carp’s building, a woman threw open a window and began screaming, “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and I wondered why she didn’t call it herself, until it occurred to me that she didn’t have a phone. An old white man came out on the steps and pointed a shaky finger at the vanishing Carp. “There he goes. There he goes,” but there was nobody to look, and nobody to chase him.
“Don’t run,” LuEllen said. Her fingernails were digging into me now. Carp was gone. “Do not run. Just walk away. Just walk.”
“Who were those guys?” I wondered.
“I don’t know, but I bet Carp thought he knew. I bet he thought they were you and John.”
“You think?”
“A white guy and a black guy, coming on to him just like you came on to him in the trailer and at Rachel’s.”
“But he knows John’s shot.”
“He doesn’t know it. He knows he fired the pistol, but he was running before John went down.” We could hear sirens now, and LuEllen pushed me down to the corner. “The cops. Keep walking. They’ll want witnesses, and people saw us.”
WE CROSSED Fourteenth, got into my car, and carefully drove away, going north. A few blocks up, I turned over to Fifteenth and followed it down past Meridian Park. We could look down the hill toward Carp’s, where two white District squad cars were jamming up the street. No sign of an ambulance, although there were more sirens in the air.
LuEllen said, “If we keep doing this, I might have to go out for some Hamburger Helper.”
“Naw. C’mon, goddamnit.” Hamburger Helper was her euphemism for cocaine. She’d had her nose into the stuff since I’d known her, and I’d given up trying to wean her off of it. But I hate that shit. If American civilization falls, it’ll happen because of the drug monkey on our backs.
“Might need to,” she said.
“Then why don’t you go home,” I said. “Better to have you out of it than sticking that shit up your nose.”
“Really?”
“It’s gonna kill you,” I said, avoiding the question. I really wanted her to stick around.