Blonde Faith

43

When I woke up, the sun was bright on the box where I slept. I remembered being cold, but now I was sweating under the gaze of Sol. I sat up with the memory becoming real pain in my head.

Jones was gone. There was nothing left of him in the shelter, not even the empty wine bottles. For a moment I thought my only problem was that I’d gotten drunk for the first time in a decade. But then Faith came back to me, and her death clenched my heart. I rolled to my feet on a wave of nausea and started walking.

THERE WERE NO POLICE cars swarming around Faith Laneer’s address, not yet. They wouldn’t find her for days. By that time it would all be over.

I pointed my car for Compton and stepped on the gas.

Ten blocks away, I stopped at a gas station restroom to urinate, throw up, and wash my face. I stayed in that small blue room for a long while, letting the cold water run over my hands and thinking. I wanted out of that room, out of my thoughts. But there was no outside for me.

THE ADDRESS PERICLES TARR had given me for Mouse was on Compton. I parked right out front and tore from my car as if it were a prison and I was making a break. I stormed up to the front door, no longer worried about what Mouse would think. I needed him now. I needed him to help me kill Sammy Sansoam.

I knocked on the door loudly, muttering to myself about murder and revenge. When my knock wasn’t answered, I banged louder.

I was about to knock a third time when the door opened wide.

And there he was: the man I was looking for. Six foot four with the shoulders of a giant. He had medium brown skin, unsettling light brown eyes, and a white scar on the upper portion of his left cheek.

“Easy?” he said.

“Christmas?” I was completely thrown off by the appearance of my other quarry. “What are you doin’ here?”

“Come on in,” he said, while looking around to make sure there were no other surprises.

I did as he bade me, entering a room that seemed to be a perfect, almost nude, cube. There were two metal folding chairs and a cardboard box for a table on the far corner of the bare pine floor. No paintings on the walls or shelves or even a TV. There was a radio. Aretha Franklin was wailing away at a low volume.

“How’d you find me, Easy?” Christmas asked.

“I didn’t.”

“No? Then what are you doing here?”

“Mouse,” I said.

And like magic, my friend came out of a doorway to the right. In his left hand he was holding his famous .41-caliber pistol.

“Easy,” he said.

“Raymond?”

“I thought you said you was lookin’ for me,” he said, responding to the surprise in my tone.

“I’m, I’m lookin’ for both’a ya’ll,” I said, my language devolving all the way back to my childhood, “but not in the same place.”

Mouse’s smile broadened, while Christmas’s eyes got tight. At least they were reacting according to their natures.

“You been drinkin’, Easy?” Mouse asked.

“How’s Easter Dawn?” Christmas wanted to know.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Down at Jackson Blue’s house with Feather and Jesus and them.”

“I left her with you,” the ex–Green Beret said. In any other state of mind I would have been worried about the threat in his voice.

“Yeah. Yes, you did. You left her with me with not even a note. Not even one word to tell her why you brought her there. Here I am with a child worried about her father, and he don’t have the decency to let on what he’s up to or when he’ll be back.”

The muscle in Black’s shoulders and back was so dense that it looked like a pack he toted. This mass increased with his anger, but I didn’t care.

“I told you he was gonna do sumpin’, Chris,” Mouse said. “Easy ain’t no pussy-ass soldier gonna wait for your orders.”

“Are you here for Mouse or for me?” Christmas asked.

“Faith Laneer is dead,” I said, answering all questions he might have had.

“Dead how?”

“Slaughtered like a hog in her own living room by a man named Sammy Sansoam.”

I hadn’t known Christmas for long, but our relationship had been consecrated in blood, my blood. So I knew him on a very intimate level. He had never shown a moment of weakness or uncertainty in the time I had known him, and I was pretty sure that he rarely radiated anything but strength.

But when he heard how Faith had died, he went to one of the chairs and sat down. It was an eloquent, soldierly sign of surrender.

“But you here for me, not him,” Mouse said.

“I was lookin’ for you ’cause of Pericles Tarr,” I said. “Etta wanted me to find you because the cops think you killed Tarr.”

“Killed him? I freed him and then made him rich. I’m his goddamned Abraham Lincoln. Forty thousand acres and a whole herd’a mules.”

“Yeah. I found that out and told Etta, but then this thing with Sansoam happened and I wanted you to come help me take care of it.”

The gleam in Raymond’s eye almost made me smile. He recognized the murder in my soul like a long-lost brother.

“You wanna kill the mothahfuckah,” he stated.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

And that was it. As far as Mouse was concerned, we were ready to roll. For a man to die somewhere, all I had to do was ask.

“How you get messed up with Sansoam?” Christmas asked. His voice was low and empty.

I told him about my meeting with the soldiers at his house and about the break-in at mine. Then I related my last sighting of Sammy, driving away from Faith’s home.

“How could a man do somethin’ like that to that beautiful young woman?” Raymond asked.

I hadn’t wondered about Raymond getting together with Christmas to take care of the soldiers on his trail. They were friends and they were remorseless killers; the combination spoke for itself. What bothered me was that question, though. Killing had taken an odd turn in Raymond’s mind. Would he understand killing an ugly woman or an old one? And then I wondered . . .

“How would Sammy know where Faith was?”

Christmas looked up.

“I mean,” I continued, “Mouse wouldn’t let out a secret if you cut off his arm. He wouldn’t tell anybody and neither would you, Chris. And I know you put her somewhere where nobody could have trailed her. So it had to be somethin’ Sammy came upon.”

“I left a brochure under one of the table legs. . . .”

“No. I found that,” I said. “That’s how I got to Faith in the first place. No one else saw it, and you killed those men came in on you.”

A crease appeared in Black’s forehead. His light brown eyes shone like those of any man or animal surprised in leisure.

“She had a child,” he said. “A boy.”

It bothered me that Faith hadn’t told me about her child. I didn’t know why.

“Where?” I asked.

“Child didn’t tell this man Sammy where she was,” Raymond said reasonably. He wanted to get on the road to killing.

“Hope,” Christmas said. “Hope Neverman. She lives in Pasadena.”