Blonde Faith

49

I drove down to the Sears, Roebuck and Company department store in East LA and bought a high-powered CO2 BB gun with three cartridges and a tube full of 6 mm shot. Then I drove down to Hooper and Sixty-fourth Street. Toward the corner of Sixty-fourth was a house that had gone vacant after the riots. It was a very small house on a huge lot. Maybe that’s why the windows weren’t broken, because you’d have to stand out in plain sight to lob a rock through the panes.

It had once been a bright yellow home, but the paint had worn away to gray mostly. There were only patches of color here and there. The lawn was both overgrown and dead.

There was a padlock on the front door. I pried that off and went inside. The house was empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t a stick of furniture or any carpeting, not one painting or even any lightbulbs. No one had been living there for some time.

The backyard was just as dead and empty as the front. There had been a garage in the far corner of the property, but it had collapsed on itself and was now just a jagged pile of timbers.

It was the perfect domicile for my purposes.

Across the street was another abandoned structure. This was a three-story tenement that had been condemned by the city. The opposite of the house I’d just visited, this building took up the whole lot. Behind it I found a dark concrete lane that led to an alley.

After all that research, I parked my car in the alley, made my way to the back door of the tenement, broke in, and climbed up to the tar-paper roof. It was dirty up there, littered with beer cans and empty condom foils. This was a nighttime recreation area for girls who shared a bedroom in their parents’ houses and young newlyweds off with their spouses’ friends because they realized too late that they had made a mistake.

I went to the front ledge of the building that looked down upon Jewelle’s real-estate investment. There I assembled my air gun and loaded in a CO2 cartridge. I shot a tin vent with a large lead bead. The concussion knocked the metal cylinder out of its moorings.

I put the air gun back in its case, pulled up the tar paper at the ledge, and placed the case underneath, there to wait for things to fall into place.

HALF A BLOCK AWAY, I stopped at a phone booth. I had three dimes in my pocket and I promised myself that before the day was done, I would have dropped them all.

I dialed the first number from a card in my wallet.

“Hello,” a man’s voice answered.

Curses rose to my lips, but I kept them down. Spite and hate and rage bubbled in my gut, but my voice was even. I wanted to use that calm tone to tell him what he was, but instead I said, “Colonel?”

“Who is this?”

“Easy Rawlins.”

“Mr. Rawlins. What can I do for you?”

“Colonel, I wasn’t completely honest with you when we met at my office.”

“No? What else do you know?”

“I, uh, I met with a woman named Laneer. She was married to Craig Laneer.”

“Yes?”

“Faith gave me a copy of the letter you say that Craig sent to you, only this letter here gives the proof that Sammy Sansoam and them were smuggling drugs.”

The silence on Bunting’s side of the line was delicious.

“I need to see that letter, Mr. Rawlins.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know you do.”

“Can you bring it to me?”

“No. No, sir. I’m scared. I’ve been tryin’ to call Faith, but she doesn’t answer. You know I think somethin’ might’a happened to her.”

“I need that information, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I could send it to you,” I said.

“No. Bring it to me today. We have to move on this quickly. There’s no time to wait for the post office.”

It was my turn to be silent.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Bunting said.

“Is there some kinda reward for this if I give it to you?”

“If the letter leads to an indictment, we can pay maybe five hundred,” he said.

“Dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“I know this house over near Sixty-fourth and Hooper.” I gave him the address while checking my watch for the time. It was 11:17 in the morning. “Meet me there at four. I can get there by then.”

He made sure of the address and then told me to be there or he’d have the police put out a warrant for my arrest.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I sure will.”

I went back to my roof perch after that. While waiting, I thought about Bonnie in a distant, almost nostalgic way. So much had happened that I could hardly feel the broken heart. Bonnie would have understood what I was doing. She didn’t believe in sitting still when a crime had been committed. In some ways she was like Christmas.

At 12:11, Sammy Sansoam and Timothy Bunting pulled up in front of the abandoned house. Sammy slipped through the gate and went around the back while Tim loitered on the sidewalk for a minute or two. Then the colonel, or ex-colonel or whatever he was, wandered toward the front door. By the time he’d gotten there, Sammy appeared. They looked around and then disappeared into the house.

“MELVIN SUGGS.” He answered on the first ring.

“Hey.”

“Easy? What you got for me?”

“I got it on very good sources that somebody saw Pericles Tarr in the flesh. He’s holed up with a girl named Pretty Smart.”

“Where?”

“CAPTAIN RAUCHFORD.”

“He here. Right ovah there on Hooper an’ Sixty-four,” a deep voice from somewhere inside me rumbled. “It’s the little house on the big empty lot. They’s six of ’em in there. I heard my girlfriend talkin’ to ’em on the line.”

“Who is this?” Rauchford asked, and I hung up the phone in his ear.

THE BIGGEST MISTAKES run smooth and sure. The German army cut through Russia like a hot bayonet into a vat of butter. But they drowned in their own oily excrement.

I was having these thoughts when the first of the police cars arrived out there in front of Jewelle’s investment. Twenty cops deployed themselves while I aimed my gun. A crowd of bystanders was forming, but none of them were in the line of fire.

I pulled the trigger. The silent shot fired over the heads of the police. I had been a marksman during the war. I was sure that I’d hit the windowpane. I shot again and again, but nothing happened.

Captain Rauchford was preparing to use a megaphone to warn Mouse and his cohorts. The policemen had their rifles at the ready.

I fired again, and the front window of the small house shattered.

That was all Rauchford’s men needed. They opened fire. The bystanders reacted quickly, men ducking low and women screaming. Smoke began to rise from the phalanx of executioners. Children froze, watching while the policemen fired their weapons. They kept on shooting until the walls looked like a colander, until those same walls caved in and the roof collapsed, until the gas main was struck and flames leaped up from the ruins.

For five minutes, the policemen fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded again.

After Rauchford gave the cease-fire, I walked on my belly to the trapdoor and carried my air gun down the stairs and through the dark pathway to my car. I drove away without looking back. I wasn’t happy for the deaths I’d conjured, but I wasn’t feeling sad either.

When I got to my motel room, I called Lynne Hua’s apartment.

“Hello.”

“It’s Easy, Lynne.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, why?”

“Your voice,” she said. “You sound like a dead man.”

“Let me talk to Mouse.”

“Hey, Ease,” Mouse said a moment later. “You wanna go take care’a that business now?”

“You already did,” I said.

“What?”

“Somebody told the cops you were at a house on Sixty-fourth. They findin’ out right now that it was those soldiers instead. Turn on the news. You’ll see.”