Known to Evil

45

Twenty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh was my fiefdom that day.

I found a small cardboard box and a shattered ink pen. On a scrap of stiff white paper I scrawled the word Homeless and squatted down next to a small alleyway between Patrick's car and John Prince's front door.

Whenever somebody passed I muttered "Sir, please," or "Please help, ma'am." My voice warbled and my outstretched hand shook.

After half an hour I was nearly lost to the role. Every fifth or sixth person, it seemed, dropped something into my box. It was cold that day and so the shiver came naturally to my voice. The pain I felt from losing Aura informed my pleas. Even the money added to my fabricated despair. That was the water that the Hard-Hearted Hannah of song poured on a drowning man.

The hours went by and I brayed like an abandoned baby donkey left alone in the world by the harsh circumstances of life. Until…

"Who the fuck you think you is, mothahfuckah?"

It was a white guy backed up by a black man, both in clothes the same vintage as my own. They were quite a bit younger than they looked and still they looked younger than I was.

The white one was speaking and I didn't need any deductive skills to uncover his motives. I had cleared upward of eighty-five dollars in the few hours that I'd been begging, and that piece of real estate was obviously their territory.

My knees hurt as I stood up. You could hear the joints cracking.

The men were tall for mendicants, around six foot each. I looked at them, knowing that I should have just given up their piece of my action to keep things running smoothly.

But if I had ever in my life been able to make sensible choices like that I wouldn't have been on that street, in my marriage, under the scrutiny of New York's finest, or in any other way known to evil.

"Y'all two mothahfuckahs better step the hell back," the man I was playing said.

The white guy (who had Mediterranean blue eyes) took half a step forward before seeing the knife with the brass-knuckled handle in my right fist. No one but those two could see it thanks to the barrier of my stinking coat.

Oh shit, said the faces of both men.

"You best to step back or die right here," I said. "I'ma be around for a day or two and then I'll be movin' on. I can leave you bleedin' or I can leave you whole."

The white man took a step back, bumping into his friend. They knew better than to make some parting threat. I was obviously deranged and their luck was not yet a certainty.

A shiver went through my body and I sat back down, realizing, or maybe re-realizing, that I was my own worst enemy. The rage in me couldn't be tamped down for long.

AT ABOUT TWO IN the afternoon I put a Bluetooth bud in my right ear and diddled the cell phone in my pocket. After negotiating an invisible obstacle course of codes I arrived at a single message at the nonexistent Miller Hotel.

"Mr. Oure?" a young woman's pleasant but sad voice asked. "Hi. I think this is your room. This is Angelique Lear. I don't remember you but I know, I knew, your niece. If you call the same number you called yesterday after eight tonight I'll tell you what I can."

It was the first time I'd heard my client's voice. She chose her words carefully but it was obvious that she wanted to offer some kind of closure to her friend's kin.

I was liking her all the more, which was good, because my street role was difficult. The air was cold and my joints were rusty.

FOR THE NEXT FIVE hours I bleated and begged, stood up to stamp my feet now and again, and kept an eye on the two street entrepreneurs that I had humiliated.

They passed by every hour or so, keeping their distance but studying me still and all. I had made a mistake alienating them but that water had passed under the bridge and flowed out to sea hours before.

I wasn't worried about my newfound antagonists. The trouble I had was in the nature of any through street: Angie could come from either direction. If she came from the west, I was between her and Patrick. If she came from the east, she had to pass him before she passed me. My little piece of turf, I decided, was too far away from Patrick's car-and so I started talking to myself.

"Goddamn mothahfuckahs!" I shouted, leaping up from the wall as if it were alive and my enemy. I kicked my box, scattering change and dollar bills over my little piece of turf. I kicked it again and followed it.

"Oh no," I promised. "You two ain't gonna get me. Shit. I will break y'all necks."

I hunkered down against a wall not seven feet from Patrick's car. The driver's seat was by the curb, so I had my hat pulled down, my coat collar pulled up, and kept my head bowed as I called out curses to imagined foes.

This was the test.

If Patrick was just on a fact-finding mission he would ignore me. But if he was there to kill my soft-spoken client, then my presence would prove unacceptable.

"People sittin' in they mothahfuckin' cars spyin' on us," I said to two passing teenagers, pointing at Patrick. "They got spies all ovah the city tryin' to bring us down."

I was hoping that by calling attention to him, I would force Patrick to retreat and reconsider his plan. The last thing he wanted was people looking at his car-or his face.

The boys laughed at me and passed on.

Patrick looked into the driver's-side mirror. There he must have seen the slender young woman bopping along, grooving on the invisible music of life.

"Miss," I said when she was within earshot. "Miss, let me ask you something."

"What's that, father?" the brown-skinned girl asked. She wore brightly striped hose that shot up under a brown leather skirt. Her sweater was Afghan and the voluminous multicolored hat I thought was probably the repository for long dreadlocks.

"What you think a white man be doin' just sittin' in his car lookin' at a man like me?"

I pointed at Patrick and the child turned to look.

He did a masterful job of turning his head just enough not to seem obvious but at the same time obscuring his features.

"Do you need something, father?" the girl asked.

Her eyes were an unsettling golden brown. I felt their scrutiny and was suddenly ashamed for pulling her into my deadly game.

"I'm all right," I said in my normal voice. "You just go on and I'll make my way to shelter."

She leaned over and touched the foul-smelling homeless man's cheek, reminding me exactly why I was trying to find the off-ramp to redemption from the dark highway I was on.

When the flower child was fifty feet away I saw Patrick checking his rearview mirror again. There was no one at that moment coming down our side of the block.

When I heard the snick of his car door I knew one thing for sure-that Angie was very important to Patrick and that he meant to kill her as soon as she came within range.

This one possibility was why I had contacted Diego.

This fact also meant that my life was soon to be threatened by a man that even Hush had respect for.

I raised my left hand to the ski-mask hat that I was wearing. I had gotten the hat from Twill when he was planning to use it for cover when assassinating Mardi's father. I foiled that attempt, but liked the hat. Now it was my good-luck charm.

I pulled the mask over my face and rose to my feet at the same time. I was almost to his door when dumpy little Patrick surged from behind the steering wheel with disheartening speed.

There was something in his right hand.

I had something in my right, too.

He came up fast. My boxer's training made my body sway to the right. As I swung the brass knuckles of my killing knife I felt the searing hot pain of his blade in my left triceps. He made ready to attack again but my first blow had slowed him. The second chopping punch knocked him back into the open door of his Dodge.

His head was on the passenger's seat and his feet were tangled on the driver's side. I could feel warm blood trickling down the baby finger of my left hand, but before I saw to my own health I leaned in and hit Patrick one more time.

That pudgy little guy had come closer to killing me than anyone ever had. Four inches and he would have had my heart on a skewer.

I shoved him into the car, jumped in behind, closed the door, and secured his wrists behind him and his ankles together with police-grade plastic ties that I always carry on serious cases.

It was only after putting electrical tape over his mouth and shoving his unconscious body into the backseat that I pulled off my coat, sweater, and shirt to check out the wound.

Another thing I carry around when I'm doing fieldwork is a first-aid kit.

The cut was deep but the bleeding was only moderate. I slapped two broad cloth bandages over the wound. Patrick had left the keys in the ignition. I drove to a comparatively desolate block near the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of the Convention Center. There I stopped to put pressure on the wound until the bleeding stopped-or at least slowed. That took about twenty minutes.

I slumped down then, exhausted from the survival mode I'd been in.

When the head popped up in the backseat, I sat up, too. Without thinking I threw a deadly straight right hand, knocking Patrick at least into unconsciousness.

After four more minutes had passed I used my newfound energy to drive some blocks to the north, where I knew there was street parking and a few pay phones.