The Turnaround

Twenty-Seven

Charles Baker read the letter he held in his hand. It was a good one. He hadn’t addressed it to anyone in particular for security reasons, but it definitely was convincing. Baker had mentioned family several times in the space of two paragraphs. Not saying what he would do to them if he did not receive the money, but getting his message across nonetheless. Implying that the consequences would affect the Pappas family if he, Charles Baker, were to be ignored.

Baker had heard many times that “family was everything.” He supposed that it could be true. Of course, it had been his personal experience that family, and loyalty in general, meant nothing.

Baker had no knowledge of his natural father. His mother, Carlotta, a brown-liquor alcoholic, had been a less than nurturing presence in his life. She had inherited her house, a two-bedroom structure of fallen wood shingles and exposed tar paper heated by an old woodstove. The roof leaked, and when windows got broke they stayed broke.

One time Ernest Monroe had come over with his sons, James and Raymond, and they had fixed the windows, using putty and little bits of metal that Mr. Monroe called glazier points, trying to teach Charles something. But Charles did not want to learn. The Monroe family thought they were doing something Christian, coming to his mother’s house to fix the windows for free, but they were just trying to feel good about themselves, helping out the disadvantaged folks in the neighborhood, doing the work of God and all that. Charles never did like that family anyway. The boys showing off, handing their father his tools and shit, his putty knife and those stupid little points. The father with his job working on buses, wearing a uniform like it meant something, when he wasn’t much more than a grease monkey. Charles didn’t like them coming around to his house, acting superior. Seeing that shithole where he stayed at and feeling sorry for him. He didn’t need their sympathy.

Charles had no father, but he had men around the house. One in particular, Eddie Offutt, who claimed he worked construction but slept off his hangovers till noontime. Offutt had been around for most of Baker’s childhood. He liked to look at Charles across the dinner table with wet and knowing eyes. Charles Baker had listened to him and his mother laugh and drink at night, and he’d listened to them argue, and he heard the slaps across the face and his mother’s sobbing, and he heard them fucking in his mother’s bed. Sometimes Eddie Offutt would come into Charles’s room at night and talk to him real soft with that smell of liquor on his breath, and he’d touch Charles’s privates with his rough hands and put hisself into Charles’s mouth. Telling Charles that it was all right but that others might not understand. Telling Charles that if he told, word would get out to the other boys in the neighborhood. Later on those same nights, Charles would lie on his mattress, listening to the dogs barking in the nearby yards, watching the black shadows of the tree branches, like claws trying to gain purchase on his bedroom walls. Charles’s hands balled tight, dirt tracks on his face, as he thought, Why was I not born in that house down the road with the fresh paint? Why don’t I know the names of tools, the parts under the hoods of cars, the names of those players on the basketball teams? Why can’t I be hugged by a man who loves me instead of touched by one like this?

It wasn’t just Offutt. Friends betrayed him, too. Larry Wilson had been his running partner when they were kids, his true boy. But Larry went into the air force while Charles was doing his first stay in prison, and by the time Charles had got out, Larry was working for the park service as some kind of ranger in West Virginia. Years later, when Larry Wilson was visiting Heathrow as a middle-aged man, he bum-rushed his family into their car when he saw Charles walking down the block. So went Larry. As for the Monroe brothers, shit, he’d stood tall and gone to jail behind them. Now they were turning their backs on him. Loyalty and friendship meant nothing to them. They didn’t mean dick to Charles, either.

No matter. The second half of his life was going to be different. He’d be coming into money shortly. He had plans.

There was the sound of keys jingling outside the apartment’s front door. Then a rap on the door: knock pause knock pause knock.

It wasn’t the code.

Charles Baker got up out of his seat and walked back to the bedroom, to where Cody kept his gun.

Lex Proctor stood in the stairwell of the second floor, listening. He had knocked on the door in the manner that the white boy had said to do, and heard no response, only the scraping of a chair and footsteps.

Proctor reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled free a. 38 with electrical tape wrapped around its grip. He fitted the key to the lock, turned it, and stepped inside. He closed the door with his back, keeping his eyes ahead. He looked around the living room and the kitchen. No one was in sight. But he knew that the old man was here.

There was a hall. Proctor went along it with care.

He was pleasantly aware of the knife hanging in a holster under his shirt and against his back. He had paid dearly for it, and it was his prize possession. The blade was over twelve inches long and carried upon it the etching of a bird. Its five-inch handle was lacquered wood. Its pommel plate was thick and made of silver. It was a dagger, and it was weighted for throwing. It was not a hunting knife but a knife for closein fighting. It was designed for the purpose of combat and killing men. One could stab with it or slash with it, as with a sword. The deep gash marks it left, due to its weight, mystified forensics units. One look at it panicked opponents. This was no bullshit Rambo knife. It was called an Arkansas toothpick, and it was a murder tool.

Proctor passed an open bathroom door and saw nothing. He continued down the hall, came to a closed door at the end of it, tried the handle, and found it locked. He knocked on the door and heard that it was hollow, then he stepped back, put his shoulder down, and charged forward.

Charles Baker stood by the dresser, staring stupidly at a drawer holding boxer shorts and nothing else. Cody had got rid of his gun.

At least the white boy had tried to warn him by giving out the wrong code. Baker guessed that Cody had been murdered. Whoever had done the boy was now coming to kill him. Baker could hear footsteps in the hall.

He looked at the window. It was only a second-story drop to the alley. But the window had bars on it. No gun and no means of escape. A lifetime of fuckup and here he was. If Baker were the type to find humor in such things, he might have laughed.

There was a knock on the door. Baker turned to face it.

The door crashed open. A man stumbled into the room and stood straight. He was large and looked agile despite his weight. He held a gun loosely at his side.

“Who sent you?” said Baker.

The man said nothing.

“Say your name,” said Baker, but the man merely shook his head.

Baker reached into the pocket of his black slacks and pulled his switch knife with the imitation-pearl handle. He pushed the button, and the blade sprang out of the hilt.

“You gonna do that thing from there?” said Baker. “Or are you gonna be a motherfuckin man and come here? ”

Lex Proctor smiled. His teeth looked plastic and gray. He dropped the revolver back into his jacket pocket, reached behind him under his shirt, and pulled his long knife from its holster. Baker’s eyes went wide. Instinctively, he raised his forearm to cover his face.

Proctor crossed the room very quickly. He brought the knife down like a sword, and its blade cut deeply into Baker’s wrist. Baker dropped the switchblade, his arm useless, his hand swinging as if hinged. For a moment, Proctor studied his prey. He grunted as he swung the blade into Baker’s neck. It cleaved flesh, muscle, and artery, and Proctor stepped into a crimson spray as he hacked at Baker again. He turned the hilt in his hand to alter his grip for power, and as Baker slumped against the wall, Proctor hammered the knife into his chest and twisted it in his heart. He stabbed like a blind butcher, diligently and repeatedly, long after the light had left Baker’s eyes. Baker dropped to the wood floor.

Proctor stepped back to get his breath. The effort had tired him. He reholstered the knife and walked from the room. Leaving the apartment after checking the stairwell through the cracked-open door, he paused once more at the entranceway to ensure that he would not be seen.

He crossed the short yard fronting the apartment house and got into the passenger side of the idling Magnum. Proctor peeled off his gloves and tossed them on the floorboard of the hack.

Elijah Morgan examined his partner. Proctor’s shirt and jacket were slick with blood.

“Ain’t you a mess,” said Morgan.

“Man said to make it personal.”

They drove out of town, finding a radio station they liked halfway up 295.