Fear of the Dark

Chapter 38

Back inside, Fearless picked up the suitcase that Useless had left in my kitchen.

“I’ll hold on to that,” I told him.

“You sure, man?”

“I wanna check it out.”

“Okay, Paris,” Fearless said. Then he chuckled. “You must be boilin’.”

“She drive me crazy, Fearless,” I said. “Here I done helped her do what she want, an’ she still wanna look at Useless like he the one did it all.”

“That’s her baby there,” Fearless said. “You cain’t do nuttin’ about that.”

“It’s not only that,” I said. “Sterling was workin’ for somebody, somebody he was scared of. That means the one who had Angel and Hearts kidnapped is still out there. That man’s a killer an’ he might be thinkin’ about us. And you know Useless not tellin’ us everything.”

Fearless stood there while I ranted and gulped tea. He leaned back against the counter, with moths darting through the darkness behind him. It’s not that he didn’t care about what I was saying. It’s just that there was nothing to do about it. Fearless lived a life filled with dangers. Walking down the street was a threat to him. But he just moved through it, living by a code that I doubt he’d have been able to articulate.

The phone rang about then.

It was after midnight.

“Hello?” I said, hoping that Three Hearts did not want to apologize.

“Paris,” he said in a low tone.

“Hold on.”

Fearless had followed me into the bookshop part of my home. I handed the phone to him. He muttered a word and then listened. After forty-five seconds or so he grunted and then hung up.

“You wanna go for a ride?” he asked me.

There was no doubt in my mind that Fearless meant to drive into trouble. Trouble was where he was coming from and it was most often his destination. But the alternative was to sit in my house alone with the fear of a killer who could take you out with a straightedge or a heart attack.

“Okay,” I said, and Fearless clapped my shoulder.

I was somewhat surprised that Fearless took us to Ha Tsu’s Good News. I almost asked if he was lost when we pulled to the curb a block down from the restaurant-pool hall. Maybe, I thought, the blows of Chapman Grey had loosened a connection in Fearless’s brain.

“Fearless?” I said, and then a brown shadow appeared next to the driver’s window. My shoulders rose, preparing for the shot I knew had to follow. My fingers gripped the door handle.

Then I saw that it was Whisper.

Fearless let down his window.

“Where is he?” Fearless asked.

“Right smack-dab across the street from Ha Tsu’s,” Whisper said. “Him and Rex Hathaway.”

“Why here?” I asked.

Whisper hadn’t noticed me. He glanced at Fearless, the question in his gaze.

“We on sumpin’ together,” Fearless said.

“Albert Rive been in town a week,” Whisper said to me. “I been lookin’ for him, but he got sneaky. Then somebody let ’im know that Fearless been seen at Good News.”

“I thought Al was after Milo,” I said.

“Yeah, but Fearless in the way. He must figure if he can take out the bodyguard, Milo be like a clam wit’ no shell.”

“Let’s go,” Fearless said.

“Hold up,” Whisper said. “Why don’t we have Paris here walk down the block just a minute before us? That way we see if he got somebody else there.”

“We could go find out that for ourselves,” Fearless said, defending me. “We don’t need him.”

Before Whisper could protest, I said, “No. I’ll do it.”

Whisper nodded. “Walk by across the street an’ keep on goin’. When you come to the end’a the block, we’ll make our move. Turn around quick an’ shout if you see something.”

I don’t know why I did it. I suppose my interpretation of Aristotle’s logic had something to do with it. It didn’t make sense for Albert Rive to shoot me when he was after Fearless. At worst he might accost me, ask me where my friend was. And before I could answer, Fearless would be on him.

But that wasn’t the real reason. I just needed to do something. I needed to move my legs to exercise my heart. I was in deep trouble and if I stopped moving I worried that the fear would overtake me and I’d be frozen like a child in the arms of a make-believe monster.

I walked down the block, feeling cool on my left side, the side that faced the hidden Albert and Rex. The bouncer, Harold Crier, was gone from his post. I glanced up at Jerry Twist’s windows. They were dark, but that didn’t mean anything.

I passed under the red lantern of the restaurant, across the street from the unseen killers, and into darkness. As night shadows fell on me, I thought of Tiny Bobchek’s corpse. The image upset my equilibrium. My toe kicked the concrete. At any other time I would have righted myself and kept on going, but in that sudden darkness, with the apparition of the man I had cuckolded in my mind, I tried too hard, lost my balance, and fell.

I looked back to see Fearless and Whisper running toward a recessed doorway. Then I saw a movement above. It was a window coming open just as Fearless approached the darkened entrance.

“Fearless!” I screamed. “Up above your head!”

My friend took flight without even a glance upward. A rifle appeared at the window. Whisper came into view and pressed himself against a wall. When the first shot came, I expected to see the nondescript detective crumple and fall, but instead the bullet ricocheted two feet from where I lay. I looked up at the window, trying to understand how the assassin’s shot could have been so far off. The next shot shattered a barbershop window next to my head, and I understood in a flash that Whisper had made himself invisible, and I, with my loud cry, was the only target in sight.

Instead of running, I looked for Whisper. He was gone.

A series of shots exploded inside the assassins’ hiding place across the street from Good News. I could see them glimmer weakly through the windows.

I got myself to a standing position and staggered away, around the corner. There I leaned against a wall, breathing as if I had just run a mile.

More gunshots.

A siren sounded somewhere.

The sirens continued. I moved down the street and into an alley. I crouched behind a group of metal cans.

“What’s happenin’?” someone hissed, and I almost leaped up.

Behind me on a ledge big enough to hold him was a man who’d made his bed there. He was black and dressed in nighttime grays. There was hair all over his face and a frightened glint in his eyes.

The sirens were getting louder.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was walkin’ down the street an’ all of a sudden there was shots.”

Three police cars careened down the street I had run from.

“Who was it?” the alley dweller asked.

“Loud and Dangerous,” I said.

My new friend and I waited a while. There were no more shots. After a few minutes there was shouting: military-like orders were being given. At that point I got up and walked down toward the hubbub — just a neighborhood resident wondering what was going on.

There were at least a dozen people in front of Good News, gaping at the commotion across the street. Smaller groups of Watts’s denizens appeared on stoops and in the street.

The police were taking five men from the building, all of them in handcuffs. Whisper and Fearless were among the prisoners. They’d be arrested, but that was all right; both men were certified to take in bail jumpers.

I saw Albert Rive, his brawny body sagging under the beating that Fearless had surely given him. The other men, except for Fearless and Whisper, also seemed a little worse for wear.

The moon hung at the end of the street. Under its constant stare a paddy wagon came, gathered my friends and their quarry, and took them someplace where Milo could go and set things straight.

“Hey, Paris,” a man said from behind me. His hand on my shoulder weighed as much as a Christmas ham.

“Jerry.”

“Wasn’t that Fearless in there with them?”

“Was it?”

“That why you boys hangin’ out around here?” he asked. “Layin’ for Al Rive?”

“Did Lionel Sterling call you, Jerry?” I asked.

That slapped the smug certainty off the amphibian’s face.

“Yeah,” he breathed.

“He tell you to tell Useless to call him?”

“If that’s what Ulysses say, then maybe so.”

“You know a man named Hector LaTiara?”

“Never heard of him.”

“What about—”

“I have to go in now, Paris,” he said. “You got what you wanted. The next time I see ya, yo’ mouth bettah be filled with Ha Tsu’s noodles.”

Jerry turned his back on me and walked up the stairs to Good News.

I rummaged through my pockets, looking for Mum’s phone number. When I found it I felt as though I had located something precious, like a doctor’s prescription for a whole life’s worth of pain.