And Sometimes I Wonder About You

30

The construction site was on Rector Street not far from Trinity Place. It was a half-block lot surrounded by a high pine-board wall. On one side there was a slender corridor that separated the site from the brown brick wall of its neighbor. Twill led me down there about thirty feet or so until we came to a jury-rigged door that had been secured by a padlock threaded through the raised eyes of two metal slats. I say “had been” because the slats had been ripped free and the door hung open.

“I thought you said he had a key,” I said.

“He does.”

I took out my.38 and Twill pushed the door open.

We entered a long pine passageway that ended at another door with the lock ripped off. The inner sanctum of the building was a broad concrete floor with the seventeen-story metal frame of the would-be office building hovering above us like the reconstructed bones of some long-extinct dinosaur.

There was a chill in the air that I hadn’t felt outside.

“This way,” Twill whispered.

On the southeast side of the site stood a box tent made of heavy brown canvas. Its door was just a slit that flapped around a bit.

“There a guard in there?” I asked my son.

“No. I mean if there was somebody he would have found out about the locks, right?”

I was about to say that maybe a guard had come and ripped off the locks but just then five men came through the slit in the canvas tent, disproving my unspoken speculation.

Five men, all of them under the age of twenty-five. Four were what must have passed for muscle in Jones’s army, and one, bleeding from the mouth and nearly unconscious, was being held up by the arms between the two largest volunteer soldiers.

We were, all seven of us, surprised.

There was no more than a few feet between us.

“Stop right there,” I said, expecting my words to become their actions because of the gun in my hand — but I was wrong.

The men holding the prisoner dropped him and lunged at me, completely ignoring the potential for death. There was a split second for me to choose — death or bruises.

My greatest weakness is that I’m not afraid of a fight and I am always confident that I will emerge the victor. The guy on the left was a light brown hue, like some chicken eggs. He reached me first. Flipping on the safety with my thumb, I slammed him in the temple and then moved to the far side of his falling body to block his compatriot while I shoved the pistol in my right-front pants pocket.

My second challenger cut a second off the time it took to reach me by leaping over his fallen comrade; too bad that this opened him up to a straight left to the jaw. He fell also.

I heard a scream of agony and turned to see that Twill had buried a medium-sized hunting knife into one of his opponents’ left foot. The young man looked to be a mixture of Asian and Polynesian genes. He fell on his butt grabbing at the haft of the knife. Before I could help Twill with his other challenger I felt a blow to my right cheekbone.

The light brown guy I had felled with my gun was up again like some tireless zombie in a B movie. He threw another punch that I was able to avoid. I hit him six times to the body and he went down. But it was like a tag-team match because his partner, who was white, jumped at me again. I blocked his blows and hit him with my best.

He went down as his partner staggered to his feet.

“Stay down,” I told him.

He threw himself at me but I sidestepped, allowing him to crash into a steel girder.

Twill was on the move. The guy left standing was black and wiry but he wasn’t trained. Twill had been working out in Gordo’s Gym beside me from the age of eight. He knew how to bob and weave. He knew how to hit, too.

Looking back at my enemies I saw that the light brown guy was unconscious. He was beefy and had thrown his full weight at me. When flesh and bone hits tempered steel there’s no instant recovery.

The white member of the Rainbow Coalition of Street Fighters was still coming though. I sidestepped once and he failed to grab me. I sidestepped again and the frustration began to show in his face. Now I was looking at my opponent and at Twill and his man beyond. The Far Eastern soldier was still trying to staunch the bleeding from his foot. He’d taken off his shoe and sock and was holding the injured appendage with both hands like a yogi attempting some advanced blood-asana.

I took a deep breath and for the first time the white attacker stopped, looking for a way past my fists. That was okay by me, I could use the breather. But then Twill’s guy got in a lucky punch, hitting Twill in the gut, which lowered him to one knee. The black attacker was closing in and my common sense diminished with each inch. But then the man who was being dragged from the tent leapt on the attacker’s back and Twill picked up a chunk of brick and hit the guy multiple times to the rib cage.

I smiled broadly at the outcome, and this confused my enemy. He turned to see if something was coming up behind him and I took the opportunity to land a haymaker on the side of his jaw. The jaw was definitely broken and the man was surely out.

I was breathing hard and so was my son. Two of the four we fought were unconscious and the other two couldn’t get to their feet. Twill was supporting the prisoner and smiling at me.

“You okay?” I asked my son.

“Just fine, Pop.”

I took a handkerchief from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to the kid we’d saved. He pressed the cloth to his mouth, pulled it away to see his blood, and then pressed his mouth again.

“Fortune?” I asked.

He nodded.

“We better get out of here,” Twill said.

The three of us walked and staggered through rush-hour foot traffic across to the E train station. Fortune had cleaned up his face pretty much and the bleeding had stopped. Like his four assailants he wore blue jeans, knockoff cross-trainers, and a black T-shirt. He was what people descended from the colonized world called white, and quite beautiful: full lips, blue eyes, and tawny hair that formed into ringlets. He might have been a minor god from a Mediterranean pantheon come to Earth to see what the big deal was about love and death.

“Why didn’t they kill you, man?” Twill asked as we waited by the southmost stairwell for a train to come.

“I don’t know,” the slightly woozy godling replied.

“Why would they?” I asked.

“When Jones sends bodies after you he expects bodies in return,” Fortune said, mouthing a homily probably repeated a dozen times a day by the Jones acolytes. “When they busted in on me I expected ’em to cut my throat.”

The train came and we got into a car that had only a few straphangers headed uptown at that time of morning.

I appreciated the sharp pain in my cheekbone. It was like a Zen bell ringing in the darkness of deep meditation. This clarion note obliterated the passion unleashed by Marella, leaving my mind open and free.

“Those boys are gonna report to Jones,” I said.

“Yeah,” Twill agreed.

“Maybe we can leave Fortune off here at Hush’s place.”

“What about me?” Twill asked.

“No,” I said. “I want you somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“For easy access.” I didn’t want Twill around Hush too much or for very long. Both my friend and son were psychopaths and sociopaths. Together they might create something that I couldn’t protect Twill from.

“Who’s Hush?” Fortune asked.