Cemetery Road (15 page)

Which gave us one more reason to believe the chloral hydrate had done its job. In evenings past, we’d always been able to catch an occasional flash of movement behind the apartment blinds when Dole and her friends were awake and ambulatory.

‘Let’s do this thing, then,’ I said.

We all got out of the car together, R.J. and I to start for the house, and O’ to go play lookout from inside his less conspicuous Camaro, which was parked on the other side of the street nearby.

‘You fools have got fifteen minutes, starting now,’ he said. ‘You’re not outta there in fifteen, I’m coming to get your asses.’

R.J.’s active role in the robbery was non-negotiable, because our plan had already called for him to spend hours in the Dodge alone and there was no way O’ and I could ask him to go on doing so. But who would enter the apartment with him had not been so easily decided. O’ and I were equally determined to be right on top of R.J. when the deal went down, close enough to prevent any high drama he might get it in his head to cause, and neither of us would settle for the position of a mere street observer without a fight.

‘You don’t know him like I do. You can’t control him like I can,’ O’ had said, outside of R.J.’s presence.

‘Maybe not. But I’m the one who wanted to do this thing, and I’m the one who’ll have to live with it if anything goes wrong.’

‘Ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong if you let me go in with him.’

In the end, unable to reach an agreement any other way, we drew straws to settle the matter, and I won out. Still, even now, O’ was hoping I’d change my mind.

‘You sure you wanna do this?’ he asked me one last time.

We both knew I wasn’t sure. I was scared and beleaguered by doubt, envisioning every possible misstep any one of us could take that could bring this night to a terrible end. But this was my show, a monster of my own creation, and I wasn’t going to stand off to one side while O’ and R.J. took the brunt of its considerable risks.

‘Doesn’t matter whether I’m sure or not,’ I said. ‘I’m going either way.’

With that, I walked off, not bothering to tell R.J. to follow. The clock was running now and I couldn’t put the next ten minutes behind me fast enough.

‘Yo, hold up!’ R.J. whispered.

He caught up to me quickly and the two of us marched in lockstep to the duplex’s driveway, time beginning to move with breakneck speed. Under a half-moon fighting to be seen past an endless parade of cloud cover, the entire street was deathly silent, save for two dogs barking in response to a bleating car alarm many blocks away. R.J. and I eased up the side of the house toward the backyard, barely glancing at the apartment’s windows as we went by. All was quiet and still within, but that hardly mattered at this point; nothing could stop the machine we had set into motion now.

We reached the apartment’s back door and I immediately went to work trying to breach it. Without asking for it, the job of opening locked doors for our crew had somewhere along the way fallen to me, and I’d learned to do it fairly well. A lock was just another mechanical device, after all, and finessing mechanical devices was my specialty, even back then. While my picking tools scratched away at the deadbolt’s tumblers like a mouse gnawing a hole in a wall, R.J. watched and listened intently for any sound of discovery on the other side of the wrought iron portal, his black .45 already in hand.

I popped the lock in just over a minute and eased the door open, its hinges issuing a tiny, unnerving squeak of complaint. R.J. pulled a nylon stocking over his head, and I did the same, then he nodded impatiently at the Beretta still jammed in the back pocket of my Levi’s:
Take it
. I shook the order off, entertaining the childish notion that I could guarantee not having to use it simply by leaving the weapon where it was, but R.J. wasn’t having it. He yanked the gun from my pocket himself and shoved it into my right hand.

This time, I didn’t complain.

It had been agreed that I would lead the way into the house, but R.J. started in without me. I put a hand out to grab him and turn him around, and even in the darkness of the porch, behind the nylon mesh of his mask, I could see the wild grin on his face.

In the five years I’d known him, I’d seen R.J. Burrow do damage to a lot of people. I’d seen him uproot teeth and break bones, snap limbs from their sockets and pound a man’s skull with his fists like a safe he was trying to crack barehanded. But I had never seen R.J. kill anyone, and I had always been of the belief that he couldn’t, that his capacity for violence flirted with that limit only to stop just short of it. Now I realized how little reason I had to believe such a thing. The man on that back porch with me seemed not only capable of murder, but braced for it, as if it were something he’d been waiting his whole life to experience.

Not for the first time over the last several days, I wondered if seeing Excel Rucker pay for his disrespect of Olivia Gardner could really be worth all this – and coming to the same, unrelenting conclusion, I pushed past R.J. into the dealer’s safe house to exact my revenge.

The utility pantry we stepped into was dark and tomb-like, as was the small, filthy kitchen beyond, but from somewhere in one of the lighted rooms past them both, the murmur of a television could be heard. We entered the kitchen and paused to listen for live voices, R.J. hovering close behind me; I turned to look at him, and he shook his head in reply:
Nothing
.

I crept to the open door leading to the dimly lit dining room and peered in. A man I recognized as one of Excel’s soldiers-in-residence sat at a garish, glass-topped table cluttered with newspaper, slumped over at the waist, his head turned sideways on the plate of Chinese food he’d been eating when he had apparently collapsed.

R.J. nudged my arm and nodded, confidence soaring, and moved past me and the dozing soldier to push farther into the apartment alone. He curled around the edge of the living room archway and, without warning, threw his gun hand up, as if about to fire into the room . . .

But he was only making ready for something that wasn’t there. Coming up behind him, I spied the figures of two more, seemingly unconscious people: Linda Dole, lying to one side on an old, tattered couch, her eyes closed and her mouth open, feet still grazing the floor; and the second soldier, the larger of the two, down on the living room carpet, drooling spit, limbs all akimbo. A small TV chattered and blinked from a faux-wood stand situated between them, and several open Jade Inn cartons littered their surroundings with noodles and fried rice.

R.J. showed me three fingers, satisfied, and the two of us turned simultaneously toward the hallway behind us, where the fourth and final member of Excel Rucker’s worker bees had to be waiting. Tired of taking R.J.’s lead, I moved first this time and, gesturing for him to stay put, edged into the black hallway toward the three doorways it opened on to. Two of the doors were closed and dark, but the first was standing open, leaking a pale, shimmering light into the hall. I slipped up to the door frame, the Beretta a heavy stone in my hand, and in the muted glow of an old table lamp, saw a disheveled bedroom in which Linda Dole’s overweight partner lay asleep on a single bed against one wall. He was on his back atop the unmade bed, fully clothed and snoring soundly. One leg was hanging over the side of the mattress, his left arm thrown over his eyes.

I looked back over my shoulder at R.J. and nodded an all-clear.

He came up beside me, took a brief look at the man in the bedroom himself, then whispered, ‘OK. You stay out here and keep an eye on everybody, and I’ll go find the goods.’

That hadn’t been the plan, and he knew it, but I didn’t argue with him. I could see it was an improvisation worth trying. R.J. couldn’t do much damage looking for the drugs and money, but left in charge of watching Excel’s people, there was no telling how he might react – or overreact – to one of them showing signs of life.

I watched him gingerly open the next door down the hall and quickly close it again, no doubt finding a bathroom on the other side. He moved on to the door at the end of the hall, threw this one open like a DEA agent making a bust and, when nothing happened, reached in to turn on the lights. I couldn’t see much of the room from where I was standing, but it looked like a second bedroom, larger than the first. R.J. disappeared inside for several seconds, then stepped out again to report his findings.

‘We got it,’ he said, too excited now to bother with keeping his voice down.

He went back into the room to secure the take and, resisting the temptation to follow, I returned to my business as guard dog. I gave Linda Dole’s partner one more glance, saw he hadn’t moved an inch since the last time I’d seen him, and went back out to the front of the apartment to check on the others. All three seemed just as frozen in time as their friend in the bedroom.

I took a position in the living room, just outside the hallway, where I could see Linda Dole and the two soldiers, and the doorway to the front bedroom. It was the closest I could come to having a clear view of all four of Excel’s people at once. I checked my watch and saw that R.J. and I had been in the apartment for fourteen minutes now. O’ would be crashing the party any second if we didn’t get the hell out.

I was about to go move R.J. along when the man in the dining room let out a small groan. The sound brought my heart to a stop. I forced myself to approach the table where he sat to get a closer look, gathering my nerve for what I might have to do should he begin to stir in earnest . . . but he didn’t. He never moved, and he never made another sound. He just continued to sit there, slumped over the table, breathing with the ragged rhythm of a man far closer to death than consciousness.

As I stood there watching him, fear abating, my gaze drifted aimlessly across the layers of newspaper scattered across the tabletop around his head. I hadn’t seen a newspaper in days. The only news I’d had any interest in had been relative to this apartment and the people in it, and all the curiosity I normally had about the world had been shoved to one side. Without thinking, I lifted the stocking up over my eyes and stuck a hand out to sift through several sections of the
Los Angeles Times
, perusing headlines and photographs, skimming over the details of the previous night’s Lakers game and the latest incredible performance by the team’s rookie point guard, a kid named Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson. In moving things around, I unearthed something on the table I hadn’t noticed before: a half-eaten hamburger and an empty French fries bag, the latter bearing the unmistakable double-arches of the McDonald’s logo.

I understood the implications of my discovery immediately.

I opened my mouth to call out to R.J., body poised to turn and go get him, and felt something hard and cold nose into the back of my neck. I didn’t have to see him to know the man standing behind me was the fat one I’d last seen asleep in the front bedroom, or that the object he had pointed at the top of my spine was a gun.

‘Put it down, motherfucka,’ R.J. said.

I dared a sideways glance, even as Linda Dole’s lover did the same. Standing in the living room, R.J. had the Colt pointed directly at the fat man’s head.

‘I ain’t gonna say it twice, all right?’

Sweat was sluicing off my back like rainwater down a drainpipe, but Excel Rucker’s man had it even worse; the stench he was giving off was overpowering. Still, he kept the gun pressed against my neck. Not because he wasn’t terrified, but because he hadn’t yet decided which was the lesser of two evils: having R.J. kill him now, or waiting for Rucker to do it later.

I thought about what I would do in his place, and lost all hope.

He finally made up his mind, and the revolver dropped first to his side, then out of his hand and down to the floor.

‘Shit,’ he said, his voice breaking.

I started to pick up his gun, but R.J. stopped me cold. ‘Cover your face, nigga!’

He was right. I’d forgotten the nylon stocking I’d lifted up and away from my eyes in order to scan the newspaper, and I’d almost made the unforgivable mistake of showing the other man my face. I jerked the stocking back down over my chin, burning with embarrassment, and snatched his gun up off the floor before shoving it into the front of my pants.

The fat man started to weep. Tears slid down both sides of his face, and his body shook like a wind-up toy. ‘We can make a deal,’ he said to me. ‘You ain’t gotta do this.’

‘Shut up,’ I told him.

He caught the finality in my voice and set himself to scream, but I slammed a fist across his jaw before R.J. could move in to save me the trouble. The big man fell like a stone, eyes rolling up in his head, and for a while I stood over his unconscious form, unappeased, face warm with rage and vision blurred.

‘He’s out,’ R.J. said, putting a vise-grip on my shoulder. ‘Leave ’im be and let’s get the fuck outta here.’

Only now did I see the heavy bundle in his hand, a baby blue bed sheet tied into a makeshift, bulging sack.

‘Is that—?’

‘Yeah. Let’s go!’

We ran out the same way we’d come in, both of us laughing like idiots, and almost didn’t see O’ in the driveway, coming the other way with his own head sheathed in nylon, until we’d trampled him underfoot.

‘Hey, what—’

We didn’t stop. We just sped right past, saying nothing, taking it for granted the man we thought of as our leader would show the good sense to follow soon enough.

SIXTEEN

W
hat I had told O’ about my dietary limitations at R.J.’s funeral a week ago had been true. I couldn’t eat the way I used to. High blood pressure had trimmed all the fat and most of the flavor from my daily menu years ago, so that things like sausages and buttered bread were former delicacies of choice I could now only look upon from afar. I’ve learned to live with the constant deprivation, but there are times I want to break a chair over a waiter’s head just to feel a little better about it.