The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Gar Anthony Haywood The First Rule Is FROM Black Noir

“Why you always hatin’ on the man like that?” Caprice asked, sounding like her feelings were hurt. “What’d he ever do to you?”

“He ain’t done nothin’ to me. But he ain’t done nothin’ for me, neither,” C.C. said. “He ain’t done nothin’ for nobody, ’cept his-self.”

Caprice thought about arguing with him, but she could see just from the way he was stretched out all over the couch, Seven-and-Seven held loosely in his left hand, feet dangling over the side, that her man was in one of his moods again. Say one word too many running contrary to his opinion now and your ass could wind up in the emergency room, trying to tell the doctors where it hurt through a mouth full of broken teeth.

She didn’t understand C.C.’s problem with Miracle Miles and she never would. Wasn’t Miracle on the television right now, four years after retiring from a decade-long, championship-studded career in professional basketball, bragging on the latest big shopping center he was helping to put up in the ‘hood? Wasn’t Miracle — smart, funny, and fine as a black man could ever be — what “giving back to the community” was all about?

Not in C.C.’s mind, he wasn’t. C.C. could see Miracle for what he really was and had always been, just an overhyped baller with a shuck-and-jive grin white folks couldn’t get enough of. From his earliest playing days in high school, they’d given him a fancy nickname and treated him like a superstar, paving the road with gold for him, first in college and then in the pros, just because he could dribble the rock between his legs and shoot a mini-mini-skyhook. But underneath all the bullshit he wasn’t nothin’ but a lucky punk, always in the right place at the right time to get paid. C.C. knew this for a fact because he’d seen the nigga long before all the hype set in, when Miracle was just a mediocre, sixteen-year-old point guard out of Princeton Heights High in Oakland named Stegman Miles.

He had game, yeah, but he wasn’t all that. C.C. was the one who was all that. C.C. was running point for Jefferson back in those days, and there wasn’t anything Stegman Miles could do that C.C. couldn’t do better. C.C. could penetrate, dish, and shoot, from damn near anywhere on the court, and if he had to he could throw a little defense down on a fool too. Miles got more attention because he played what the reporters liked to call a more “disciplined” game, creating fewer turnovers while hitting the boards with greater intensity, but there was no doubt in C.C.’s mind he was the better player. He made All-City three years in a row and led Jefferson to the State Finals twice, and the second time around he got his chance to show folks who the real “miracle” man was. Jefferson and Princeton Heights went head-to-head and C.C. took Miles apart, outscoring him 32–18. Despite Miles’s fourteen assists and nine rebounds, Jefferson won the game, and anybody who’d watched it would have had to see that Stegman Miles wasn’t half the baller C.C. Cooper was.

Which C.C. would have gone on to prove, in both college and the pros, over and over again, had he not gotten himself shot, three weeks into his senior year at Jeff. He’d made a dumb mistake, let his boys talk him into trying to jack a Mexican ice cream vendor who, it turned out, liked to keep a nine on a shelf right beneath the service window of his truck, and that was the end of C.C.’s career. The bullet hit him just below his right kneecap and blew his leg up, left just enough muscle and bone behind for the doctors to sew back together.

Becoming a pro baller was the only ambition C.C. had ever known, and once it went away, so did any effort he might have made to stay out of trouble with the law. He’d always had an appreciation for the thug life and probably would have continued down that road no matter what; some things, even money couldn’t change. But it seemed to C.C. that a nigga with a limp who barely qualified for a job busing dishes had no other choice but to be a gangster. You wanted to survive, to enjoy even the smallest taste of the good life, you had to lake what the world didn’t give you. So that’s what C.C. did, finding only fleeting relief from his constant pain and outrage in boning, getting high, and scoring a few dollars here and there by committing petty crimes.

Meanwhile, Miracle Miles was becoming an American sports icon, collecting diamond-studded championship rings and million-dollar endorsement checks the way C.C. collected court appearances. He was flashy, he was upbeat, and he was a winner, just the kind of harmless black man white folks loved to idolize. As the years went by, C.C. watched him grow bigger and bigger, fame and bank account inflating in tandem like goddamn blimps threatening to black out the sky, and smoldered with resentment. It should have been him. Everything Miracle had should have belonged to C.C.

He had hoped it would all end when Miracle’s playing days were over, that in retirement the nigga would blow all his bank and dwindle down to a fat, forgotten has-been, just as so many exathletes had before him. But to C.C.’s amazement, only the reverse occurred. Rather than kick back and party when he quit the game, Miracle simply moved on to a new one: big business. He took the money he made in ball and invested it in real estate, showing more smarts for retail development than he had for basketball, and hell if the punk didn’t become phatter than ever. Now he was getting paid not to shoot the rock and smile on billboards, but to write books and give lectures, teach Fortune 50 °CEOs how to do on Wall Street what he used to do on the court.

C.C.’s mother, the crazy bitch, had even bought him one of Miracle’s books as a birthday present last month, thinking it would inspire him to get a job and straighten up. The Miracle Rule Book the shit was called; How to Win in Business Without Having to Foul. C.C. would have died laughing if he hadn’t been so pissed. He threw the book across the living room after unwrapping it and didn’t look at it again for four days. Then he picked it up, took it out to the back yard to trash it, and started reading it instead. He could read when he wanted to, he wasn’t as illiterate as people thought, and now he wanted to. In spite of his hatred for the man, he was curious: was there really anything Miracles Miles could tell him about making coin he didn’t already know?

In the end, the answer was no. It was the same old shit C.C. had heard a million times before, you gotta spend money to make money, study the market, timing is everything, yadda-yadda-yadda. And of course, it was all delivered as one big basketball metaphor, Miracle offering the reader his own personal “rules of the game” as if putting mini-mall development deals together and makin’ a nolook pass on the fast break were one and the same fucking thing. C.C. got as far as Chapter Three, then slammed the book shut and tossed it under his bed like a dirty sock, never to be thought of again.

Until moments like this one, anyway, when Miracle Miles was in the news again and there was no place on Earth a nigga could go to avoid hearin’ about it. Here he was on ESPN — ESPN! — breaking ground at the site of his latest inner-city L.A. shopping center project, flashing teeth at the camera like a goddamn car salesman. Yeah, he was bringing name-brand retail stores to the community, but it wasn’t the community he was thinkin’ about. It was all the duckets he was gonna make in the process, same as always. Why was C.C. the only person in the world who could see through this fool?

“I’m gonna go over to Lottie’s,” Caprice said, getting up from her chair in the apartment’s little dining room.

“Nah,” C.C. said, still watching the television.

“What you mean, ‘nah’?”

“I mean you ain’t goin’. Soon as this is over, we gonna get busy.”

Caprice sighed and sat back down, too experienced in the ways of her man to argue with him. “Why don’t you turn it off now, then? You hate Miracle so bad, why you wanna keep watchin’ it?”

“‘Cause it’s givin’ me an idea.”

“What—”

“Shut up and get your ass to the bedroom,” C.C. said, reaching for the remote to kill the TV. Behind him, Caprice stood up and left the room, sulking in well-advised silence. She didn’t need to know nothin’ yet, but when he was ready, C.C. would tell the bitch what he was thinkin’.

She wouldn’t like it, bein’ a Miracle Miles fan and all, but she was gonna help him fuck the nigga up all the same.

The first thing Jerry Dunston did upon hearing that Butterby’s was about to go into business with Miracle Miles was buy a basketball. It was the first one he’d ever owned and would almost certainly be the last. Jerry hated sports in general, and basketball in particular; any game overpopulated by dope-smoking, tattoo-wearing, inarticulate black guys who made more money in an hour than Jerry made in a month was not his idea of entertainment.

Butterby’s was one of the largest restaurant chains in the western United States and Jerry was their rising star, a franchise salesman only three years out of Stanford whose gift for gab seemed to be adaptable to any need. Nobody could fake interest in something he actually found thoroughly irrelevant or, worse, most suitable for morons, better than he. Jerry would walk into a conference room, chat like a giddy authority on whatever subject was most likely to be near and dear to a client’s heart, and then walk out again, usually with the mesmerized client’s money and misplaced affection firmly in hand. If a viper could change colors like a chameleon, his manager Lou Merrill was fond of saying, that would be Jerry.

But feigning common interests with prospective clients and business partners was not Jerry Dunston’s only patented sales tactic. He also played some tricks of the trade that Lou would not have found quite so amusing, as sensitive to outdated matters of ethics as the old fool was. For one thing, Jerry liked to tweak spreadsheets to exaggerate both Butterby’s sales figures and the demographic breakdown of its customer base, the latter to better meet a client’s likely priorities. If, for example, a client was looking for Butterby’s to appeal to a younger crowd, Jerry would fudge the numbers to lend that appearance. Further, he had learned to commit the fraud in such a way that, if caught, he could write the discrepancy off as a software glitch, an innocent mistake that could easily be corrected by pulling the offending report again. It was risky, but almost always worthwhile, and he reserved its use in any case for those clients he had judged to be either too green or too dense to catch on.

In his earliest dealings with Miracle Miles’s people, Jerry had run this numbers game, confident that they wouldn’t know the difference. Harvard-educated or no, they were underlings to a former jock, a man to whom Butterby’s was only giving the time of day because of the incredible name recognition he’d created by doing spectacular things with a basketball over a twelve-year career. How sophisticated could they really be? And as for Miles himself, he was smart, sure; he had to be to have come this far in the dog-eat-dog commercial real estate game. But this idea some people had that he was a genius, a natural-born businessman with a mind on a par with those of all but a few Fortune 50 °CEOs, was a crock. Miles was a likable college dropout with deep pockets and fortuitous instincts, nothing more and nothing less.

In any case, it was Miles’s practice to let his people do all the heavy lifting, only inserting himself into negotiations when it was time to parry over the small details. Hence, following months of discussion, and weeks after a tentative agreement between Butter-by’s and Miraculous Enterprises, Inc., had been reached to bring Miracle Miles-branded Butterby’s restaurants to various inner-city locations on the West Coast, Jerry was going to meet the man himself for the first time today. His fellows at Butterby’s were beside themselves with excitement, but Jerry couldn’t care less; were it his decision to make, he wouldn’t be doing business with Miles at all.

So what if Miles needed partnerships with franchises like Butterby’s to get retail centers built in underserved urban areas? Butterby’s was in business to make money, not revitalize the ghetto.

Still, a sale was a sale, and it was incumbent upon Jerry now to close this one with a bang. Asking Miles to autograph a basketball just before the meeting commenced was his idea of kissing the man’s ass to maximum effect. He could have just bought a cheap rubber job at a local sporting goods store for fifteen bucks, but what he did instead was go online to drop $400 on an official game ball Miles had already signed. It wasn’t enough for Jerry to appear to be a casual fan; he wanted Miles to think he was a fanatical one.

And hell if Miles didn’t grin like a fool when Jerry popped the question in the Butterby’s conference room, thrusting the ball and a Sharpie toward him. These jocks ate up public adulation the same way they snorted cocaine, Jerry thought; getting on their good side was as easy as teaching a smart dog to sit. Lou Merrill and Dan Kuramura, the other Butterby’s execs in the room, looked on almost incredulously, having never seen Jerry exhibit the slightest interest in basketball before, but neither man said a word.

“I feel silly as hell doing this,” Jerry said, gushing, “but I can’t help it. If you could write something personally to me on this, Miracle, I’d really appreciate it.”

Miles laughed, genuinely amused, and took the ball. “No problem. What’s your name?”

“Jerry Dunston,” Arvin Petrie said. A young, no-nonsense black man with the pinched, narrow face of a prosecuting attorney, Petrie was the Miraculous Enterprises exec with whom Jerry had been negotiating up to now.

Miles gave Petrie a look and raised an eyebrow. “This is our boy Jerry?”

Petrie nodded.

“Well, damn,” Miles said, turning his famous megawatt smile upon Jerry again. “This will really be my pleasure.”

Jerry didn’t understand what he meant, but he didn’t bother asking him to explain; if for some reason Petrie had been talking Jerry up earlier, that was all to the better. He watched Miles use the Sharpie to scrawl something unintelligible on the basketball, just above his signature, then took it back when it was offered.

““Y-F-W-T-W-N’? What’s that mean?” Jerry asked, curious.

But before Miles could answer, Petrie said, “I think we’d better get started,” directing the comment at Lou Merrill, and Jerry’s manager agreed with a nod.

They all took their seats at the conference table and got down to business. For nearly an hour, nothing seemed amiss, all the conversation following the predictable formalities of a major deal closing. But then the moment came to ink the contracts and things took an unexpected turn. Petrie intercepted the paperwork as Lou Merrill tried to pass it over to Miles, the expression on his face reaching even greater depths of solemnity, and said, “There’s just one small amendment that’ll need to be made here before Mr. Miles signs off.”

Lou couldn’t believe he was hearing right. He looked first to Miles for help, then to Jerry, but the former was unresponsive and the latter could only shrug.

“I don’t understand.”

Off a nod from Miles, Petrie produced a folder from his briefcase and slid it across the table toward the Butterby’s VP.

“Back in my playing days,” Miles said, “I learned to do something that I’ve carried over to my business practice. Before every road game in the playoffs, I’d dribble a ball all around the court, looking for dead spots in the floor. ‘Cause if you hit one during a crucial part of the game, if could really mess you up, create a turnover you couldn’t recover from.” He turned to look directly at Jerry. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid you’ve got a dead spot on your floor.”

Lou Merrill opened the folder Petrie had passed him and began scanning the pages within, his face growing more grim by the minute.

“What’s going on?”Jerry asked, annoyed.

“I’m sure you must be wondering how my people got hold of deal memos that could only have come from Mr. Dunston’s computer,” Miles said to Lou, ignoring Jerry’s question completely. “But all I’ll say in response to that is that we have our resources, and what they were in this case should be irrelevant to you. The only thing you should really care about is what those memos prove about Mr. Dunston’s apparent reluctance to treat all your clients and partners equally, and what Butterby’s stands to lose if you allow him to continue working for you.”

“I said, what the hell is going on?” Jerry asked again, leaping to his feet now. His shirt collar was soaked through with sweat.

Looking like a widower at his wife’s funeral, Lou slid the folder of documents off to one side to let Dan Kuramura look them over and said to Jerry, “He’s right. You’ve been juicing our numbers.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

Jerry reached across the table to snatch the documents out of Kuramura’s grasp and started examining them himself. It was impossible, but he recognized them immediately, and all at once, the blood pounding through his head grew still.

“These are fakes,” he said feebly. “There’s no way—”

“We can’t tell you who you can or cannot employ, of course,” Petrie said, and Jerry looked over to see that both he and Miles were on their feet now, essentially calling the meeting to a close, “but we can take Mr. Miles’s offer to partner with you off the table if Mr. Dunston is still drawing a Butterby’s paycheck by the end of business day this Friday. It’s entirely up to you.”

And without another word, he and Miles started for the door.

On their way out, Miles peeled off to approach Jerry, who like a whipped dog involuntarily withdrew, not at all sure the man was above putting his fist through Jerry’s face.

“You fucked with the wrong nigga,” Miles whispered in his ear, winking. Then he flashed a particularly wicked version of his trademark smile and led Petrie out.

Hours later, sitting in a Butterby’s executive office he could no longer call his own, Jerry was wondering how much of his $400 he could get back for the worthless basketball Miles had inscribed with the letters “YFWTWN” when the acronym suddenly made sense. Whether or not a “genius” lurked behind the House Negro effervescence of Miracle Miles, Jerry still couldn’t say, but he knew for certain now that a killer most certainly did.

“I don’t wanna do this,” Caprice said again, for what had to be the ten-thousandth time, and C.C. had to give the girl props for courage, because the last time she’d said it, he’d almost taken her fool head off.

“I’m gonna tell you one last time: ain’t nobody gonna hurt ‘im,” C.C. said.

“If somethin’ goes wrong—”

“Ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong. Long as you do exactly what I tol’ you, ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong.”

Caprice didn’t say anything more, but the pitiful look on her face said it was going to take an act of God to convince her. C.C. was planning to rob Miracle Miles at gunpoint tonight outside a Hollywood bookstore, using Caprice as bait, and even a high school dropout like Caprice knew how often things like that ended up with somebody getting killed.

Still, help C.C. she would because the alternative was to get beat so bad she’d probably wish she were dead herself. Her role in the plan as C.C. described it was fairly simple. Miracle never went anywhere alone, C.C. said; a bodyguard and a driver, at least, always accompanied Miracle to such events. The bodyguard would follow Miracle inside and stay with him during the signing, but the driver would likely stay out in the parking lot with the car. Caprice’s job was to distract the driver just long enough for C.C. to slip inside the car only moments before Miracle was about to return to it. C.C. would quickly relieve the surprised fool of his cash on hand and jet, neither Miracle’s driver nor his bodyguard wanting to try fucking with a man with a gun fn the close confines of a limo. And Caprice? By the time the police or anybody else put her and C.C. together, he said, they’d both be long gone.

During the drive out to Hollywood, spilling all out of her best black dress like a whore with a rent bill due, Caprice practiced her controlled breathing and asked God to watch over them both.

C.C. was usually late for everything but this time they were early, arriving at the store over an hour before Miles was scheduled to start signing books. Still, a crowd was already forming inside and Caprice could feel her stomach lurching around like a bouncing waterbed.

“Why we gotta get here so early?”

“‘Cause I wanna see who the nigga has with ‘im and where his car’s gonna be.”

“But what’re we supposed to do ‘til he’s ready to leave?”

“Same thing everybody else’ll be doin’. Lookin’ at books.”

“We’re goin’ inside?”

C.C. glared at her. “I shouldn’t have’ta explain my reasonin’ to you, Caprice. And if I didn’t need you lookin’ good tonight, I’d slap you in your mouth just for askin’ me to. We’re goin’ inside ‘cause we gotta know when he’s gettin’ ready to come out, remember? This thing’s gotta be timed just right or it won’t work. All right? You understand now?”

She did, but she didn’t like it. The whole thing was beginning to sound crazier and crazier to her.

Caprice entered the store a few minutes later, alone, as C.C. stayed outside to wait for Miles to show. She had almost a half-hour to kill, a packed house filling the space around her at an alarming rate, and she could only feign interest in books whose titles she could barely read for so long. She became increasingly certain that one of the staff, a middle-aged white man with the face and form of a scarecrow, was watching her intently, his right hand at the ready to grab the phone and call for security. She was about to flee, desperate for C.C.’s assurances that her fears were all in her head, when the celebrity they’d all been waiting for finally appeared.

Caprice heard a murmur from the crowd build to a dull roar and when she turned around, there he was, Miracle himself, walking through the door like a king entering his throne room. He was bigger than she could have ever imagined, towering over everyone as he slowly made his way to the table piled high with books that awaited him in the back, and his broad-shouldered, pale yellow suit fit his chiseled body with mouth-watering precision. He was smiling, of course, turning this way and that so that no one went untouched by his good cheer, and he even bumped fists with a few lucky people in the crowd.

Swooning, Caprice put a hand out to the wall beside her to keep herself from fainting.

Miracle finally reached his place at the table and sat down, and only then did Caprice notice that, just as C.C. had predicted, he wasn’t alone. A brother as big and impenetrable as a cinder-block wall had come in with him, his face a humorless etching in stone. Standing now at Miracle’s left shoulder as Miracle chatted up the store’s manager, the big man stared straight ahead and crossed his hands in front of him, waiting for a reason to defend his employer to the death.

The sight of this giant brought Caprice back to reality with a thud and, remembering why she was here, she glanced over her shoulder to find C.C. standing at the tail end of the crowd, just inside the door. He smiled as if to say all was well and then gave his head an almost imperceptible shake, warning her off any further eye contact. Caprice turned back around, heart in her throat, and pretended to listen as the impish blond bookstore manager introduced Miracle Miles to his audience.

When she was done, the room erupted in applause and Miles began to talk about his book, selling it the way he sold everything else, with large doses of homespun charm and self-effacing humor. Any other time, Caprice would have been enthralled, but not tonight; tonight she was busy trying to keep her dinner from climbing back up into her throat. She liked this man. She admired this man. He was a hero to her, just as he was to thousands of other people, black and white. But in less than an hour’s time, if she valued her life, she was going to help C.C. jack him for all the money on his person.

Or worse.

It was the “or worse” part that Caprice ultimately couldn’t stop worrying over, because nothing ever came easy to Curtis “C.C.” Charles and she couldn’t imagine why this wack scheme of his should be any different. If it blew up in his face and Miles got killed somehow, Caprice knew she’d never be able to live with the guilt. She’d done a lot of fucked-up things in her life, to be sure, but she wasn’t a bad person. Asking her to help him commit a crime that could wind up being the murder of a great man like Miracle Miles was more than C.C. had a right to do. No matter how much she loved him, and God knew she did love his pitiful ass, Caprice didn’t owe C.C. as much as all this.

Emboldened by some power she didn’t understand, she turned around and started to march out of the store.

Miles was still speaking but heads turned toward her all the same, so conspicuous was her desperation to depart. She didn’t have to look at him to know that C.C. was staring daggers at her. Nonetheless, she kept her head down and kept moving, not stopping until the inevitable happened.

“Where the fuck you think you’re goin’?” C.C. hissed at her under his breath, his right hand like a vise on her arm. Only the handful of people in their vicinity were paying them any attention so far, but if C.C. started to lose it, the star of this show would immediately cease to be Miracle Miles.

“I can’t do it. Lemme go,” Caprice said, pleading with him.

“You’re gonna do it or I’m gonna kill you. Understand? You’re dead.”

For all his past crimes against her, he had never actually threatened her life before, and the precedent caused her to groan out loud, heartbroken. The pitiful sound again made her the central focus of the house, and this time the people eyeing her included Miles himself.

“You all right back there?”

C.C.’s hand fell away from Caprice’s arm and he stepped back, leaving Caprice to answer the question for herself.

She turned and, somehow finding the will to smile, said, “Oh, yeah. I just need a little air, is all.”

Before C.C. could stop her, she pushed past him to rush out the door.

He stood there for a brief moment, absorbing the singular gaze of what had to be over 150 people, Miracle Miles being the most openly analytical, and then shrugged, like this kind of innocent shit happened between he and his woman all the time.

“I better go check on her,” he said, before slinking out the door like a tired old man.

C.C. thought sure Caprice was gone, but she was outside in the parking lot, shivering with fear and cold when he came around the corner to look for her.

Both of his hands were balled into fists, he didn’t have enough self-control to prevent that, but he was strong enough to keep them at his sides as he closed on her.

“Please, C.C. Don’t make me,” she pleaded.

“You got one more chance.” He gave her a brief glimpse of the revolver under the tail of his shirt, shoved down into the waistband of his pants. “I hear another word of argument out of your ass and I’ll whack you right now, I ain’t playin’.”

“But he seen us together now! How—”

“So he seen us. So what? Don’t nobody in that store know either one of us. Even if they know we’re together now, it ain’t gonna help ’em find us after we jet, is it? Huh?”

He’d already thought it all through, just in the short space of time between Caprice’s exit from the store and this moment, and he had convinced himself it was true. It would have been better if no one had paid either one of them any mind, especially Miracle Miles, but C.C. could still jack Miles as planned without getting busted because he remained as anonymous as ever. The last time he and Miles had met was sixteen years ago. So what if Miles had seen his face?

“That’s the nigga’s car right there,” C.C. said, nodding his head at a long white Lincoln limousine sitting in the middle of the bookstore’s parking lot. “His driver’s inside, listenin’ to music, I think. You go on over there and start workin’ his ass while I go back in the store and wait for Miles to finish.

“When I come back out here, I want that ride open and that driver off in a corner somewheres, I don’t care how you get ‘im there. You got that?”

Caprice hesitated, riding the last of her courage to its very end, and then silently nodded her head.

Bored damn near to tears, C.C. listened to Miracle Miles read from the book C.C.’s mother had given him for his birthday for fifteen minutes, once again standing at the front of the store close to the door, and almost gave it up. What a game Miles was running on these fools. He had a rule for this and a rule for that, do’s and don’ts that were supposed to turn losers into winners every time, and it was all bullshit. Every word. Miracle Miles was a baller, nothing more and nothing less, and what he had to teach anybody about getting ahead in life wasn’t worth the paper his “expert” advice was written on.

C.C. was so disgusted by Miles and the gullibility of his enraptured audience, he hadn’t noticed that Miles’s bodyguard was no longer standing at his elbow until somebody behind him said, “Come on outside with me, nigga,” blowing the words into his right ear like a breathless lover.

The security man was pressed up against C.C.’s back, holding a nine down low where only C.C. could see it.

“And we don’t want no drama, do we?”

C.C. thought about drawing his own piece, taking his chances in an all-out shoot-out, innocent bystanders be damned, but this was a short-lived temptation. Bad-ass gangsta that he was, C.C. discovered with some embarrassment that he wasn’t quite ready to die.

The bodyguard guided him out, no one taking notice of them, and used the nine to steer him over to the white limo idling in the parking lot. C.C. looked around for some sign of Caprice, but she was nowhere in sight. Neither was she in the car when the bodyguard opened the back door for him and said, “Get in.”

C.C. did as he was told and the man with the gun eased in after him, taking a seat across from C.C. before closing the door behind them. Over the bodyguard’s right shoulder, on the other side of a smoked glass partition, C.C. could see Miles’s driver sitting behind the limo’s wheel. Alone.

“If you’re lookin’ for your girl, we sent her home,” Miles’s boy said, proving himself fully capable of smiling when the mood moved him. He held out an open palm, careful to keep the semiautomatic in his other hand trained on C.C.’s chest. “Let’s have the piece. Careful.”

C.C. gave him his revolver, too stunned and disoriented now to do anything else. What the hell was happening?

He got his answer a few minutes later when Miles joined them in the car, looking as happy and imperturbable as ever. He sat down next to his bodyguard, tapped on the glass behind his head, and the limo began to move.

“What the fuck’s goin’ on?” C.C. asked, unable to keep his growing sense of panic from creeping into his voice.

Miles just grinned at him. “Come on, C.C. Don’t play dumb. You was gettin’ ready to fuck me up, same as you did in the State Finals back in ‘93. Ain’t that right?”

C.C.’s jaw dropped. Miles knew who he was. How in the hell was that possible?

Miles took C.C.’s revolver from his bodyguard and rolled it around in his hands, looking it over with some amusement. “You were bad news then, and you look like bad news now. Wasn’t hard to guess you hadn’t come out here to get a book signed.”

“Look here...” C.C. said, trying to generate something, anything, that sounded like a fully grown man’s courage in the face of certain danger.

“I know what you think. Miracle Miles ain’t nothin’ but a pretty face. I punked ‘im once, ought’a be easy to punk again, right?” He shook his head, and suddenly the expression on the man’s face was very un-Miracle-like. “Uh-uh. I grew up on the street, same as you, brother. Only worse. Princeton Heights, Oakland, Cali, baddest fuckin’ hood on the face of the earth. I could’a never got out’a there alive if I wasn’t harder than any gangsta you’ll ever know. You’d read my book, you would’ve understood that.”

Fuck your book, C.C. thought to himself, but he didn’t say it out loud because something had changed in Miles he didn’t like. Something that made him genuinely afraid that the mistake he’d made tonight might cost him something more than another meaningless stretch in the pen.

“What you want me to do with him?” his bodyguard asked Miles.

“You? Nothin’,” Miles said. And then he looked over at C.C. again, still flipping C.C.’s revolver around in both of his hands. “I got this one.”

The following night, lying dead in a vacant field out in the wastelands of Sunland, months before his body was discovered and his murder written off as the inevitable result of a life misspent on crime, C.C. wasn’t around to sit in on Miracle Miles’s next book signing. And that was a shame. Because, if he had been, he might have heard something that would have explained how he had come to meet his cruel fate, and how the total sum of two pages in a book had probably made the difference between his meeting and avoiding it.

Finding it somehow fitting, Miles on this night regaled his adoring fans with a sampling from Chapter Three of The Miracle Rule Book, unwittingly choosing to start reading less than a hundred words from the spot where C.C., too overcome by jealousy and hatred for his old high school nemesis to go on, had chosen to stop.

‘“Rule number four,”‘ Miracle read, “‘is “Never forget a beat-down.” The conventional wisdom says when you suffer a significant loss, you should put everything about it behind you and move on. But I don’t agree. I think it’s just as important to remember a crushing defeat as it is a huge victory, because you can use the pain of the former as motivation to succeed for the rest of your life. This is why I’ve always made it a point to remember everything about a major loss, including the names and faces of the people responsible for it. They may not know it, but I’ve had my revenge against them a thousand times over the years, even if it was only in my mind.’”

And to punctuate his point, Miles did what everyone here had hoped to see him do more than anything else in the world: laugh.