Every Man a King

18

Walking down the sweltering streets of Buckhead, I felt exposed to attack. This wasn’t paranoia. Ingram could very well have called an assassin to follow me, to shoot me or run me down as I waited for red to turn to green. Maybe the message he left, hold my next two, was code for get ready for a kill.

My tongue was dry despite the humidity. My feet felt as if they might tangle up from the simple act of walking.

As disturbing as my situation was, it was not unfamiliar. I’d spent a good deal of my work life conniving against the machine. I could have, I should have, said no to Roger Ferris. When Monica came to me crying about Tesserat, I should have told her to call Art Tomey and mention my name — period.

There were other jobs, other ways to pay the rent. Aja was right about that.

So, turning on the residential block where I’d parked my rental car, I accepted that there was no one to blame but myself.

The forest-green Kia Rio was parked at the far end of the block, under, of all things, a peach tree. I was half the way there when I realized that there was a man seated behind the steering wheel. I couldn’t make out his features but he was either Black or deeply tanned.

I stopped and considered running while feeling around for the pistol.

Neither response made sense, so I straightened my shoulders and forged on.

Eight steps along I saw that it was Rags sitting in the car.

“Hey, Joe,” a man said from a step or two off to my right.

I flinched before recognizing Gladstone Palmer.

“You scared the shit out of me, man.”

“We were waiting for you to come,” he said, ignoring my flightiness. “It was a good idea your cousin had to put that tracker in your car.”

“Why?”

“Right this way.”

Glad walked up to my car and peeked through an open window into the cramped back seat. There was something there under a large black plastic tarp. Rags turned to wave at me and then pulled the edge of the cover up, revealing the face of a very dark-skinned Black man. The tops of the definitely dead man’s cheekbones had equivalent horizontal scars on them. His left eye was open and sightless.

Rags covered the corpse over again.

“You should get in,” Glad said to me.

A little stunned at the sudden bewildering spectacle of death, I did as my old boss suggested. Glad closed the passenger’s door behind me and then immediately walked away down the street.

“I got an Airbnb on the outskirts of Smyrna,” Rags said as he ignited the engine and pulled from the curb. “A house with an attached garage kinda half in the country, you know.”

“I thought you were staying at Ingram’s hotel.”

“I am,” he said, giving a smirk. “It’s just the kind of work I do often needs a pressure valve.”

“Like when you suddenly find a dead man in the back seat?”

“Me and your friend set up a camera in his car and parked it across the street from this one. When I saw Fayez—”

“You know this guy?”

“Knew him back when I was a merc in Southeast Asia. He was the deadliest motherfucker I’d ever seen. One time I saw him kill four out of five men using stealth and a homemade machete. So, when I saw him climb into the back seat of your car I knew that Ingram was serious.”

“He just climbed in?”

“Jacked the lock like a pro, slipped in the back, and disappeared. We came at him from both sides. I knocked on the window and when he rose up with a Glock in hand Glad shot him from the opposite side.”

“That shattered the window?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t anybody call it in?”

“Silencer.”

“Whose?”

“Gladstone shot him but I gave him the gun.”

“You run around with a silencer for reconnaissance and backup?”

“Zyron International,” he said, as if those two words were the Eleventh Commandment.

Making it to the highway and then toward the suburb, I was on high alert. What if we got stopped? How do you explain a dead man with a bullet in the back of his head?

“What happened to the fifth man?” I asked the question as a distraction.

“Fayez knew how to put pain to work. He bled the soldier till he gave up the information we needed.”

“Then he killed him?” Some distraction.

“I stopped doing that kind of work.”

It took less than an hour to get to the house my cousin had rented. The garage was big enough for two cars the size of mine. Gladstone was already there. He’d made us lime rickeys in tall frosted glasses that were designed for that libation.

“How the fuck Rags get you to shoot a man in broad daylight in Georgia?” I asked Glad.

“Well,” he said, grinning. “If I’m gonna do somethin’ like that, it should be down south, don’t ya think?”

“I think it’s murder.”

“He was hiding in the back seat and had a gun in his hand. I am a cop, you know.”

“You need to get out of Georgia,” Rags said to me. “And wherever you go, it should not be New York. You say Aja and Grandma B are with Ferris?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I can go check out the security and either stay there with ’em or take ’em someplace else.”

“Uh-huh. What about Fayez?”

“Who?” Gladstone asked.

“We’ll stay here and dissolve his contract.”

“Who’s this Fayez?” Gladstone asked again.

While Rags explained, I wondered what I could do. I had to go back to New York, had to.

“Joe,” Glad said.

“What?”

“What you gonna do?”

“Rags is right. I shouldn’t go home, but I have business there. I’ll make sure our family is safe and keep a very low profile.”

The handsome Irishman looked at me, still grinning.

“What’s funny?”

“Some people have heart attacks,” he said. “They get cancer or too drunk and fall down the stairs. All kindsa ways a man could get killed. But you, Joe, you walk through a fucking minefield with blinders on and never even step on a pile of shit.”

“I got a gig in Munich in three days,” Rags said. “I’ll leave you my number but that’s still twenty-four hours away.”

“I can’t be doin’ this shit in my own backyard,” Glad added.

“That’s okay. Both’a you boys have done enough.”

In the taxi to the airport I made the reservation from yet another of my burners. After that I made another call.

“Who’s this?” Melquarth said over the line. I was at the departure gate, drinking coffee.

“It’s me, Mel.”

“Wow.”

“Wow what?”

“You sound like what the crime writers call hard-pressed.”

“The guy I went to meet tried to have me killed. At least I think he did.”

I explained the situation, naming names.

“Now I have to work both jobs without pissing people off so bad that they want me dead after.”

“That’s the trick,” my murderous friend agreed. “Give me the flight number and I’ll try to put something together.”

“Hi,” she said.

She had the aisle and I was next to the window. The seat between us was empty. The plane was taxiing for takeoff and I was looking out through a foot square of reinforced glass, feeling very much out of my depth.

“Hey,” I replied, wondering if my tone revealed the pressure.

My row mate was a Black woman ten or fifteen years older than I. Her skin was oxidized gold and there were freckles — a whole field of them — across her cheeks. Gray and brown hairs curled together easily on her head and the clip-on earrings she wore were crystal and sterling silver.

“Do you mind if I move next to you?” She was already unbuckling the seat belt.

“They’ll probably yell at you.”

Smiling, the older woman heaved up and landed in the next seat.

“Please remain in your seats,” a voice said over the speaker. “We can’t take off until everyone is seated with their seat belts fastened.”

My temporary friend was already buckling up.

“I know I shouldn’t do this but...”

A flight attendant stalked down the aisle, stopping at our row. She had soft red hair and angry blue eyes.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” said the woman who was now settled next to me. “I had to say something to my, my cousin here.”

After looking to see that the seat belt was buckled, the flight attendant shook her head and smiled.

When she walked back toward the bulkhead my neighbor asked, “Would you mind holding my hand?”

For only a second I wondered if this seemingly kindly, late-middle-aged Negro woman doubled as an assassin in Zyron International’s high marshal system.

But that was paranoia.

“Sure,” I said, holding my left palm up.

Her hand was sweating, but that didn’t bother me. It was my job to help clients. She was just another in a lifelong list.

“Joe Oliver,” I said.

“Gillian Haft.”

“You not used to flying, Gillian?”

The elder considered the question with gravitas. She seemed to be grilling herself with silent inquiries.

Finally she said, “Last week a young man named Tito called me from Atlanta. He said that my niece, Omolara, had a heart attack...”

“How old is your niece?”

“Only twenty-nine and she’s always been so healthy. Anyway, I dawdled for a day before I bought my ticket, and by the time I got there she was already dead. Already dead.”

Ms. Haft’s hand clamped down on mine, allowing me to feel the pain she was going through.

“That’s hard on the heart.” It was a term my grandmother often used.

Gillian looked up at me, a sheet of tears covering the freckled cheeks under her eyes.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “My sister died and I’m the only one Omo had.”

“That’s what hurts so much. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you could have done. You’re no doctor. And I bet you she was unconscious from the time of the attack until the moment she passed.”

“You think so?”

“And she had that young man...”

“Tito. He was there for her. She wasn’t alone.”

When the plane lifted up in the air Gillian’s grip lightened. For the next hour or so we talked about her younger sibling and niece, how the sisters were raised in Ohio but came to New York to be models. That didn’t work out but they had good lives.

I picked up my baggage at the carousel and walked toward the outer doors.

Melquarth was standing there wearing a black suit and a limo driver’s cap. He was holding up an iPad with the name Redbird emblazoned on it. He stepped forward adroitly, grabbed my bag, and said, “Right this way, sir.”

He had a black stretch limo in the parking area and even tried to get me to sit in back.

“Naw, man,” I told him and then went around to the passenger’s door of the front seat.

After we’d cleared the parking area I asked, “What’s with all the dress-up, Mel?”

“Doin’ what the situation calls for.”

“I just said wow. How much can you read into that?”

“I got a call from a man named Ingram yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“What did Mr. Ingram have to say?”

“He told me he had a call from a cat named Rembert Cormody.”

“What did the high marshal want?”

“What’s a high marshal?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“He asked me if I vouched for you.”

“And?”

“I told him to keep his fuckin’ nose outta my business.”

“Maybe not the most friendly reply,” I speculated.

“Maybe not. But right after you and I spoke I called a cracker I know down in Florida. Asked him to go up and take a look at your boy. By the time he got there word was Ingram was gone.”

“What you mean, gone?”

“Either buried in Georgia clay or sipping mimosas on foreign soil.”

“Huh,” I grunted with maybe a little too much emphasis.

“You don’t need to get all flustered, man. If your beef was with Ingram and Ingram has been removed, then there might be some wiggle room to deal in.”

“Like in playin’ poker with the devil?”

“No,” Melquarth said optimistically. “He called the killer on you without thinking it through. You proved too much for him and they sent Ingram away.”

“I can’t count on that,” I said. “I need to find a place I can work from and to set up a meeting with Roger Ferris.”

“You also need a bodyguard.”

“Hey, man, I’m not no Whitney Houston here.”

“Maybe not, but I got one for you anyway.”