Fear of the Dark

Chapter 46

Fate tried to save us. She brought us to the real estate office, but Thomas Benton Hoag wasn’t there.

The white man who was sitting at his desk wanted to speak to us because he was so angry.

“Do you know where Thomas is?” he demanded.

“We came here lookin’ for him,” I explained. “We thought he was here.”

“Three days ago he stopped coming,” the white man (I never got his name) said. “Just stopped coming. He has clients who have lost faith in this office. He has records that I can’t read. What the hell kinda business is that?”

“Maybe he’s dead,” Fearless said.

That caught the white man up short.

“What?”

“If you had a friend,” Fearless reasoned, “and all of a sudden he wasn’t at work, didn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t you be worried that somethin’ bad happened to him?”

“We went to his house,” the white man, who was fat and wore a blue-and-white pinstriped suit, said. “He wasn’t there.”

“Maybe he’s in a ditch,” Fearless suggested. “Have you called the police?”

“I, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You just thought that he was tryin’ to mess wit’ you. You thought that he was gonna give up his commission to get drunk or take a vacation for a few days.”

The fact that Thomas’s boss didn’t have an answer went way past racism. There was something wrong with the man. There he was working with someone who had committed all kinds of crimes and all he could think about was that he hadn’t come in to work. He was a fool in baseball stripes, nameless in my mind but as American as the hot dog.

“Where to?” Fearless asked when we were on the street again.

“Nadine’s,” I said on a sigh.

Fearless grinned and we were off.

On the ride I asked, “What can we do about this dude if we get him?”

“He probably run,” Fearless said. “I mean, that’s what a smart man’d do. All them dead men and his suitcase gone.”

“But what if he ain’t? What if he after Useless still?”

“Then we gots to stop him.”

I remembered Cleave’s hard words in the car on the way to Tiny’s burial. I knew what Fearless meant and I wasn’t sure that I could manage it. Killing was a hard business — not like selling books or finding money in a dead man’s car.

This last thought made me chuckle, but there was little humor in the sound.

“Try not to worry about it, Paris,” Fearless said. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

“But I got to be ready,” I said.

“Ain’t nobody evah ready, man. You could be layin’ up in some hospital bed dyin’, an’ somewhere yo’ boss fires you for not callin’ in. How you gonna be ready for that?”

Nadine Grant was hustling out her front door when we got there.

“I don’t have any more time to waste on you people, Paris,” she said, trying to move around us at the front gate. “I have to get to work.”

“Three Hearts in there?” I asked her.

“They moved,” she said with a voice that somehow reminded me of a hammer at work.

“Where to?”

“Four houses down,” she said. “The red place with the blue fence. It come open for rent and all of a sudden Hearts realized that she had three hundred dollars in her bag. Here she haven’t even paid me for a banana and now she payin’ rent for Useless and that nasty girl.”

Nadine hurried off to her car, talking to herself about my aunt and how she did her wrong.

I wanted to leave then. I had a deep conviction that Nadine was right, that my family was something to avoid.

“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. “Let’s get this ovah wit’.”

We walked down the street and up to the front door of the dark red house. There was a jack-in-the-box and a broomstick with a horse’s head in the yard. There were boxes with the name Georgia Arnold written on them on the small walled-in porch.

I knocked on the door, and after maybe a minute, Three Hearts answered.

“Hi, Paris, Fearless,” she said.

I should have known by the way she said my name first that something was wrong. As it was, I wondered why she was no longer angry with me for calling her boy Useless.

She led us through a kind of utility room into a larger space. I could see Angel sitting on a straight-back chair, and Three Hearts gasped as someone dragged her to the side.

Fearless and I came in to see Thomas Benton Hoag holding a small-caliber pistol to my auntie’s head. Next to him was Cousin Useless tied down in a chair.

“I’ll kill her and you too,” Hoag said. “Just gimme a reason.”

It seemed odd to me that his dialect had changed to street. But then I guessed that he was under pressure and the way he spoke now was his true self.

“What’s up, brothah?” Fearless asked.

“You don’t scare me, Fearless Jones,” Hoag said. “I want my mothahfuckin’ money an’ I want it now. I know you got Hector’s car outta the yard. I know what he had in the trunk.”

I glanced at Fearless. He was biding his time. I was sure that if Fearless could get to Hoag then there was nothing to fear. But there were eight long feet between my friend and that pistol. The time it would take to cross it was all the time you needed to die.

“How come you gave the suitcase to Useless?” I asked. Why not? It might buy us some time.

“He stole it from me,” Angel spoke up. “I was holding it for Tommy after, after what he did to Hector.”

“You don’t have to answer to this mothahfucker,” Hoag said, his handsome features warped by rage. “Now get up off my money or I shoot this here bastard first.”

Hoag moved his pistol to Useless’s temple, and Three Hearts cried, “No, Lord.”

I realized then that I was not truly superstitious because if I had been I would have been confident that my aunt’s evil eye would slay Hoag. But I was sure that Hoag would kill us all.

Fearless moved slightly, and Hoag brought up his pistol to point at his head. I could see that he had decided to kill Fearless. That was the smartest move. My friend was the only one in the room who posed a threat.

“Fearless took the money, Tommy,” I said. “He took it and hid it. If you kill him then it’s gone.”

“The bitch got a gun in her purse,” Angel said then. “I’ll get it and keep it on him.”

Hoag nodded and smiled at Fearless. My friend’s nostrils dilated maybe an eighth of an inch. I knew that was his recognition of a near-death experience.

Angel took out Three Hearts’s pistol and pointed it at Fearless. Hoag waited a second and then moved his gun so that it was pointing at the ceiling.

She must have been squeezing as she turned. The shot was perfect, hitting Thomas Benton Hoag in the center of his forehead. She kept on shooting, but he was already dead.

That was a moment of crystal clarity for me. I saw it all in less than a second. Angel was partners with Hoag, but then she fell in love with Useless. She was trying to get away, but Tommy ran her down. She convinced him that Useless was some kind of mastermind and told him that Fearless had the money.

It was all a ploy. She meant to kill him all along.

When the gun was empty Angel lowered it and her head.

“You got a phone in here?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Run outside and start screamin’,” I said. “And when the cops come, tell ’em he was your old boyfriend and that he wanted you back. Tell ’em that he was gonna rob you too.”

Three Hearts was trying to untie Useless, but I told her to stop.

“Tell ’em the knot was too much for you,” I said. “Him bein’ tied will be proof that Hoag was robbin’ you.”

That was it. Fearless and I were out the back and over the fence to the block behind. We heard Angel screaming from that far away.

We took a bus home. I left my car. It would wait for me.

I don’t know about Fearless, but I slept for twenty-four hours after that.