The Long Fall

43

A sober-minded Katrina apologized to Twill and

Mardi. She told them that she’d had a hard day and was getting too upset over little things.

“You are welcome to stay for a day or so,” she said to the girl.

Shelly was so happy that she kissed her new friend on the cheek.

“Can she stay in my room, Mama?”

“Of course.”

Twill was looking at me but I managed to keep my eyes on Katrina.

Later on, after the dishes were done, I told Twill about Katrina wanting me to bunk with him.

“Why’d you get on her like that, Pops?” was his reply.

“Because when you looked in my eye I saw that there was something wrong,” I said. “I knew that you had a good reason for bringing Mardi here and so I talked your mother into it.”

For a moment Twill’s eyes tightened, but then he broke into a smile.

“You all right, Mr. McGill.”

I don’t think I will ever receive higher praise.

LATER ON I went down to Twill’s room. He was sitting at his desk, dressed only in dark-blue boxers while surfing the Net for arcane bits of information. When I walked in he signed off and stood up. There was a sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of his queen-sized bed.Þ€…

“I got the floor,” he said.

The sleeping bag was state-of-the-art. The top was dull-green nylon stuffed with goose down, and the bottom was a cushion of a slightly darker hue. There was even a two-ply netting for the face, to keep out mosquitoes while allowing the sleeper to breathe comfortably.

I had given up asking Twill where he got things like that or what he used them for. When he was younger I tried reasoning with him. From the age of five he’d countered my efforts with that winning smile, along with his patented perplexed stare. As the years progressed I tried rewards, punishments, even a child psychiatrist. The presents he shared with his siblings. The punishments he bore without tears or anger. It’s anyone’s guess what the therapist thought. She was an honest woman named Powell; after seventeen sessions she called it quits.

Nothing could deter Twill from the trouble he was drawn to. But he had a cockeyed code of honor, too. Even as a child he never stole from or hurt family or friends. After the age of eleven, when he’d gained a measure of mobility, this truce spread out to include our neighbors. Smiles and schemes came to him as naturally as breath. I couldn’t stop him from being what he was. My only job was to keep him alive and free long enough to become a man.

“SO?” I SAID a few minutes after we were both in our beddings and the lights were out.

It was a very comfortable bed. The thread count of Twill’s bright-yellow sheets was at least twelve hundred.

“So what, Dad?”

“What kind of trouble are you in, son?”

“It’s not like that, Pop,” he said softly. “Mardi and me just friends. She needed to get away, and I knew Shell would be good to her. There’s no problem.”

“You’re wrong about that, Twill,” I said. “The problem is that among your peers you are the best, by far. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there that are better than you. What I’m saying is that you’ve got to rely on somebody, sometime.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” his voice came from out of the darkness, dripping with innocence.

“Tell me why you feel that you have to protect Mardi.”

“I’m just doin’ her a favor, Pops. That’s all.”

I hadn’t expected him to tell me anything. This charade of a conversation was designed to get him to believe that I was suspicious about the girl so that later on, when I took action, he wouldn’t suspect that I had his primary e-mail address tapped.

THERE WAS FIRE all around me. My clothes were smoldering and I could hardly catch a breath because I was running hardã€s runnin and inhaling smoke. I ran down a long metal corridor until coming to a huge iron door. I took off my burning jacket, wrapped my hands with it, and tried to turn the knob . . . but it wouldn’t give. I slammed into the door with my shoulder but it was locked. I turned to see which other way I could run but Timothy Moore was standing there, blocking the way. He was holding a long-barreled pistol, pointing it at my forehead.

In that moment, time came to a complete stop. I was looking into the killer’s dark eyes for an answer.

Why did you make me sign over the money? Why do you want me dead? I wanted to ask, but the act of bringing the questions to my lips started time moving again, and then he fired.

I sat up in the posh bedding, gasping for air. My heart was beating like a pneumatic hammer. It took more than a minute for me to catch my breath.

I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the bed. Twill was sound asleep in his portable body bag. He’d unzippered the face net and the front was open down to his waist. I could just make out the peaceful face of his repose.

I MADE MY way to the small dining table off of Katrina’s near-professional kitchen. I brought my jacket with me, but search as I might I couldn’t find the cigarettes. Then I remembered that I had quit again and so went to the cupboard for the bottle of brandy Katrina kept there.

Three shots later I calmed down enough so that my pulse was near normal and my mind was working in a fairly linear fashion. Timothy Moore, no matter how good his story was, didn’t make sense. The dominoes were just too perfect. There was a slim chance that he was on the up-and-up, but I’d have been a fool to play it like that.

I took out my personal cell phone and entered the code “666.” And even though it was 3:17 in the morning, he answered on the first ring.

“LT?”

“Hush.”

“What do you need?”

“Some assistance.”

“When and where?”

THERE WAS NO going to sleep for hours after that dream.

I went to the dining room and reflected on the wilderness of my mind.

I had always been the runt since as far back as I can remember. After the age of twelve I was fatherless and poor for real—not for the Movement. My mother died when I had just turned fourteen. She just gave up. I never blamed her, though. I was alone in the world and rarely took a backward step in the ring of life. I was what Gordo called a banger. I moved forward, took my lumps, and gave just as good. If a bigger kid picked on me he better know how many teeth he could afford to lose. Anã€rd to lod if the principal or some foster parent thought that I was there to take orders—they learned.

I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever truly frightened me. Hush is at the top of that list.

As far as I know I’m one of only three people who know his real name, and I would never say it out loud, much less write it down.

For nearly two decades he was the man the professionals went to when they wanted somebody dead. He would kill anyone, anywhere. If you needed it to look like an accident, there was a heart attack or a car accident in the offing. If the body needed to disappear, it would never be found. He was so good that even the head men of foreign mobs thought twice before uttering his code name—and no one ever refused to pay.

Few people had ever seen him for who and what he was. When he showed up as a delivery boy or trash collector, all and sundry were unimpressed. He was a pale white guy, five-ten with close-cut brown hair. He was powerful but not particularly well built. The only thing that marked him was a deep voice that rumbled rather than spoke.

He could kill an armed man with only a mouthful of water.

No one wanted to hear that Hush was after them. He was the walking, breathing personification of pancreatic cancer.

When people found out that Hush was after them, their reactions were many but predictable. Some ran. Others bought life insurance and settled up their affairs. A few went to the police and sought witness protection, but in the end they all died. I know this because I know Hush.

People responded in all kinds of ways when they were tipped to Hush’s intentions, but of them Carter Brown of East New York was unique. When Carter heard that his uptown rival had paid a hundred large for Hush’s services, he laughed. He was the one man who wasn’t afraid of the excellent assassin. He wasn’t afraid because he knew about the hit man’s Achilles’ heel: a young black woman named Tamara and a toddler that was Hush’s child.

It had taken at least twenty-five moving pieces for Hush to get in touch with me. The meet was set for one of those big glass-and-chrome salad bars in midtown Manhattan at 2:15, when the lunch crowd was winnowing down but still pretty busy. He was seated at a table for two by a window looking out on Forty-eighth Street.

I knew he was the killer when I looked into his eyes.

He laid out the whole problem right there in the open, with a hundred masticating clerks and secretaries jabbering around us about their bosses and sex lives and children.

Tamara and the boy, Thackery, had been kidnapped and Brown was demanding the execution of his rival.

It was hard for me to concentrate at first. After all, in my profession, Hush was like royalty.

“ã€ont sizeSo?” he said after explaining his dilemma.

“Why not just kill Big Joe?” I asked, pretending that there was some equality between us.

“I would if I felt that Brown would keep his word. But he knows that I have to kill him for doing what he’s done. He has to get rid of me, and then who would protect my family?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“How much?”

“On the house.”

That set the killer three inches back in his seat.

“Why?”

“Professional courtesy,” I said and then I stood up on legs that have had easier times in the ring, sparring with heavyweights.

IT TOOK ONLY five hours for me to locate and liberate Tamara and Thackery. Carter could hide them from white eyes but it was easy for me to see beyond his blind of race. I called a guy I knew, the brother of one of Carter’s ex-girlfriends. He told me of a safe house that Carter kept for “visiting dignitaries” like Colombian drug lords and Russian mobsters, Chinese slavers and Mexican cartel bosses who dealt in protection rackets for a broad spectrum of illegal labor.

I didn’t feel guilty about betraying a brother. He had kidnapped a black woman and her child, after all. And Carter was a very bad man, worse than I ever was, so I didn’t mind taking his living shields away.

Carter disappeared that very evening and Hush took his services off the market. He got a job working for an elite limo service and now chauffeurs around high-profile clients who might need protecting.

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