Wolf Hour

2 Cross Hairs, October 2016

The height gave perspective. For a while I could be a dispassionate observer, or at least pretend I was. Pass what I felt to be an objective judgement on society, human beings and their lives down there. I’d been sitting at that sixth-floor window since seven o’clock looking down on that antheap. At the people emerging from the doors of the apartments of the Jordan projects. It was Tuesday morning. Eleven minutes past eight. I saw cars that pulled away from the kerbside, and the parking lots behind the blocks. The white smoke from the exhausts. Yellow school buses, picking up kids — bars on the windows, like mobile jails, like some kind of prelude to the lives that lay ahead of them. Other buses that ferried people to work. Some to the factories, most to the service industries, at the bottom level. But here at the Jordan projects there were plenty of people who didn’t have school or a job to go to, and a lot of them were still in bed. Some lay staring up at the ceiling, having lost any of the hope that came with the country’s first black president eight years ago but who, in three months’ time, would be leaving the White House, along with everything else in the removal van. So they lay there and tried to come up with an answer to the question that never really went away: Why? Why get up?

One of those who had found a reason emerged from the door now. An interesting feature at Jordan was the way the entrances opened inward, not outward. People said it was because it was harder to break in with the crack protected by the frame, and because in Jordan you were in more danger of being killed during a break-in than you were of being burnt to death inside your apartment, even though Jordan had, statistically, more arson attacks than anywhere else in all Minneapolis.

Thirteen past eight. A pale autumn sun struggled to penetrate the morning haze. I put my eye to the gunsight and adjusted the cross hairs until they focused on the door to Block 3. Yesterday he emerged from that door at exactly 08.16. Yesterday was Monday, today was Tuesday; people are creatures of habit and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t be heading out to work at about the same time today. And yet, I’d been sitting there since seven o’clock. After all, he was self-employed, so maybe he gave himself a bit of a lie-in on Mondays, but left home earlier on every other weekday.

I rubbed my hands together. There was a frost last night and a cold wind blew in between the drapes. I had taped them to the glass, so they wouldn’t blow about and disturb my aim. I had seen the pushers take their places on the street corners, seen the first deals made. Most of the customers were black, a few Latinos, but a few cars pulled up with white hands sticking out the windows. Quarter past eight. I inhaled the harsh odour of cooking oil, garlic and cigarette smoke. I’d scrubbed this one-room apartment for the last time, but the stink from that old wallpaper was still there. It’ll still be there when they pull this block down in a little while.

Sixteen past eight. My thighs had started to ache. I squatted back on my heels again to relieve them. The position was not optimal. I knelt on the couch, which I had pulled over to the window. I leaned the barrel against a chair back. A distance of 330 yards. A little further than ideal, particularly with those gusts of wind. Just one shot to the head and get it over with would be best. But that was too risky, I could miss and spoil the whole thing. So the plan was first a shot to the chest, to bring him down, then reload and give him the kill-shot. The rifle was an M24. I’d bought it six days ago for nineteen hundred dollars. Obviously, I didn’t buy it from a gun store, I bought it from a local dealer who used front men, mostly junkies with no criminal record who needed money quick. The dealer sent them into some ‘easy’ gun store, some place where the owner didn’t ask a lot of questions, even though the whole business reeked of a front man, he just checked the application up against the register, and then calmly sold twenty potential murder weapons to some dope fiend who didn’t know one end of a gun from the other. The dealer paid the junkie at most twenty dollars for each weapon, then sold them on for one and a half times the price in the store. His name was Dante, a fat peacock of a man, born and raised in the country outside Minneapolis but he dressed like an Italian, ate Italian and talked with a fake Italian accent. And, of course, cheated like an Italian in the business he ran out of a garage just two blocks away from here. His customers were all people with criminal records. Not small-time crooks who sent their girlfriends into the gun store or walked in themselves carrying a fake ID, but people who were willing to pay that little bit extra for a professional service. Pay in the certain knowledge that if they lost the weapon at a crime scene there was no way the police were going to be able to trace the gun back to them.

Dante paid little attention to his weight and his health, but he made up for it with the care he took with his appearance. His hair and beard looked as though they’d been trimmed with nail cutters, and his clothes always matched. And he loved gold. He had gold in his eyebrows, gold in his ears, gold around his neck. And — not least — gold in his teeth.

Those gold teeth of his were the first thing I noticed that day I went to his garage. They blinged wetly at me as he told me he hoped I was going deer hunting and the gun he was selling me wouldn’t turn up at some crime scene, because this particular weapon he had bought himself, he hadn’t used a front for it.

‘I’m just saying, you don’t have to tell me, amigo.’

He didn’t really have to say that as I hadn’t spoken a word since entering the garage. Anyway, what could I have said? That he was the one I was going to be hunting? That he was standing there and selling me the very weapon that was going to be used to kill him? He was alone at the time, but even so I was careful not to remove my sunglasses or pull back the top of the hoodie I was wearing. I just nodded, pointed to the one I wanted — the rifle plus two hand grenades — counted out the money and when he dug out the holster that came with the gun I wrapped it up myself in bubble wrap and put it down beside the telescopic sights and the two hand grenades. He had stared at my hands. Stared and stared at my hands. Maybe he was noting the pentagram on my wrist. Maybe he’d mentioned it to someone. Didn’t really matter. No more than that goodbye he had called after me in what he probably thought was a passable Spanish accent — Hasta la vista. ‘See you later.’

He had no idea how right he would be.

The street door opened.

Dante.

He stepped out and stopped. Just like he did yesterday morning, he looked right and then left. He hit his bunched right fist into the palm of his left hand. As though every day was a fight. As though a man had a choice each day, to head right or left. How naive we are.

His car — a Maserati — was in the parking lot behind the block. It wasn’t exactly brand new, but all the same, it was a little miracle a car like that was allowed to stand untouched in a neighbourhood like Jordan. The explanation was pretty straightforward: the car was protected by his gangland customers, and everybody in Jordan knew it.

I focused the cross hairs on his chest. I had worked out the distance and the angle and adjusted the sights down, since he would be so far below me. I held my breath, tried to exert an even pressure on the trigger but knew that my pulse was faster than it ought to be. The trigger moved. Kept moving. But the shot didn’t come. My pulse raced. I tried to tell myself not to be impatient, not to think that, in one more second, he would move on and the target would be much harder to hit. Don’t jerk. Just a steady, even pressure.

The man down below shivered inside his coat. He blew into his cupped hands. Like a gambler blowing on dice.

He turned right.

In that same instant the rifle jerked. I must have been holding it firmly because he never left my sight. I saw him stiffen, as though he suddenly realised he’d forgotten something. From inside the long coat something or other dropped to the sidewalk. The first association I got was when Monica and I were standing in the bathroom when her waters broke, splashing against the tiles, and the pair of us almost fainted, terrified and happy, terrified and happy.

It was blood. Dante fell. Backward, into the door. It swung open and inward. He lay there in the darkness of the hallway with his feet sticking out in the daylight. There were no screams, no shouts, no running footsteps, no slamming of doors from down there. Only the steady, uninterrupted rumble of the morning rush hour from the highway just beyond. And then, suddenly, hip hop music. Somebody still lying in bed had got up and opened the window to see what was happening.

I felt myself start to tremble, felt nauseous, made myself think of Monica and the children. Think hard about them, as I loaded another shell. Took aim. Eye up against the telescopic sights. Saw him lying there, motionless, and thought how expensive his shoes looked. That it would be a while before the police showed up here in Jordan and that in the meantime maybe someone would steal those shoes. I got something in my eye and had to blink it away. When I looked down again I saw the shoes moving. Someone down in the darkened hallway was dragging him inside to safety. I was about to pull the trigger again but the thought of shooting a neighbour who was only doing what any decent human being ought to do made me pause a moment. And by the time I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway because no one — absolutely no one — is wholly innocent, the door had swung shut.

I stood up and had to steady myself against the kitchen counter because my foot had gone to sleep. Wrapped the gun inside the bubble wrap. Wiped the counter, the arm of the couch, the back of the chair. Then I went into the bathroom and I put on my gear. Plucked an unruly strand of hair from one eyebrow and held it between two fingers before placing it on my tongue and swallowing. It stuck in my throat, like it didn’t want to go down. I put on my sunglasses and zipped up the hoodie. Shrugged on the rucksack with all my stuff inside, grabbed the flowerpot with the yucca plant, took a last glance around the apartment then let myself out.

I took the stairs up two floors to Mrs White. Knocked on the door. Heard the shuffling of slippers inside. They stopped, everything went quiet. I guess she was looking at me through the fisheye lens. Then the door opened. I’d never asked, of course, but Mrs White had to be at least eighty years old. A sweet, grey-haired old black lady who smelled of something that wasn’t exactly apricot jelly or honey but something in between.

‘Tomás,’ she said. ‘Well now, it’s been a long time since I last saw you. Did you hear that bang too?’

Without a word I handed her the yucca plant.

‘For me?’ She smiled in slight surprise.

I nodded.

She put her head on one side. ‘Is there something wrong, Tomás? You look so... dead. Is it the cat? You miss it, don’t you? Did he say when he would be finished? You know, you have to be patient.’

I nodded again. Then I turned and walked away. Heard that she didn’t close the door but stood there, watching me walk away. Something on her mind. Maybe she was thinking, maybe she felt it deep in her bones, that it was the last time she would ever see me.

The elevator took me down, down, down.

Outside the air was clear and the morning haze lifting. The sun was going to win through today. I walked at a steady pace, heading downtown.

It took me forty minutes.

Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring. There were skyscrapers and bridges, but no Empire State Building or Golden Gate, and if you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests. OK, so if he knew a little bit more then maybe he would know that the city has the largest connected network of skyways in the US. On the way to the intersection at Nicollet Mall and 9th Street I passed beneath one of them, a glass-and-metal bridge that linked shopping malls and office complexes, a place where people gathered to seek shelter when the temperature dropped to below zero in the winter or rose into the nineties in the summer.

I entered the little pet store. A customer was being served. Sounded like he wanted a bigger cage for his rabbit. Sometimes you still overhear something that restores your faith in human nature. I stood in front of one of the aquariums and when the assistant came over to me I pointed to one of the little fishes swimming about inside and said, that’s the one I want.

‘Dwarf pufferfish,’ he said as he scooped up the green fish in a little hand net. ‘A good aquarium fish, but not for the beginner. The water quality must always be tip-top.’

‘I know,’ I said.

He slipped it into a plastic bag full of water and tied it closed. ‘Mind your cat doesn’t eat it. And don’t eat it yourself. It’s a hundred times more poisonous than—’

‘I know. You take cash?’

Then I was back out in the street again.

A black-and-white car came cruising in my direction. On the door was the MPD emblem and motto — To protect with courage, to serve with compassion. Maybe they got some kind of feeling about me, the policemen sitting behind those darkened windows. But they wouldn’t stop me. After all the criticism in the media for the unmotivated and ethnically biased cases of stop-and-search, MPD police chiefs had announced a change of policy, and from now on, gut feeling was no longer a valid reason for stopping a man like me.

The car passed, but I knew they’d seen me. Same way as I knew I’d been picked up by all the surveillance cameras along Nicollet Mall and 9th Street, more of them around here than anywhere else in town.

And one other thing I knew.

I knew I was dead.