Cemetery Road (23 page)

‘You the niggas jacked my house?’ Rucker asked in disbelief. I eyed him in my rear-view mirror, watched as surprise gave way to crazed fury.

We had just eased on to the Harbor Freeway, heading north toward the 5. I’d broached the subject of gas but he wasn’t having any; we were going to make it to Simi on what I had in the tank or stall somewhere en route, where I would die shortly thereafter. Traffic was relatively light just a few minutes shy of ten p.m., but I had the Fairmont doing a steady sixty-five, more than fast enough to kill us both if Rucker forgot where we were and caused me to lose control of the vehicle.

He jumped forward on his seat and pressed the nose of the gun into the side of my head, thumbing the trigger back so that I couldn’t miss the heavy click it made. ‘I ought’a blow your ass away right now,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t for you, I would’a paid that motherfucka and got Sienna back a long time ago!’

‘We know that. That’s why we’re taking what we boosted to McDonald now, to see if he’ll take it in trade for your daughter. Assuming . . .’

I thought better of completing the thought.

‘You’re full’a shit,’ Rucker said, pushing the revolver’s muzzle deeper into my scalp.

‘It’s the truth. We know where he’s hiding, we were on our way out there when you found me.’

He had far more reasons to doubt such a ridiculous claim than to believe it, but he opted to do the latter if only because it offered him something the alternative didn’t: an excuse to go on hoping for a miracle. His little girl was still alive, and there was still a chance he could find her and bring her home safe to her mother. To think otherwise, even for a minute, was to surrender completely to the madness that was already overtaking him.

He asked me where we were going and I told him. Naturally, he wanted to know everything else: our names, where we lived and – most especially – how we’d worked the Inglewood safe house job. I kept my answers as short and uninformative as possible, and lied where I dared. Looking ahead to a future that at the moment seemed dubious at best, if my friends and I were lucky enough to survive the night, the less Excel Rucker knew about us, the better off we’d be.

We rode in silence for a long time, my passenger’s ragged breathing the only reminder of his company. Eyes wild, body motionless, he looked straight ahead through the windshield of the car like a wax figure that could do nothing else.

‘You look familiar,’ he said suddenly.

I pretended not to hear.

‘Where I know you from?’

‘Nowhere,’ I said.

‘Bullshit. I seen you somewhere before.’ He thought about it. ‘You hang at the Silver Fox?’

‘No.’

‘You ain’t never been to the Silver Fox?’

‘No.’ I’d heard of the club, but I’d never been there.

Rucker grew quiet again.

‘It was a party, then.’ A pause. ‘Over at Charlene Litton’s place, or Little Joe’s.’

I turned my eyes away from the mirror, seeking to hide them from his view.

‘That’s it. Little Joe’s.’

Little Joe Brown was a well-known business manager for a number of local music acts who threw parties at his home in Ladera Heights that rivaled anything Hollywood could come up with. I never came as an invited guest, but vouched for by one musician acquaintance or another I’d managed to squeeze through the door of a Little Joe house party more than a few times over the years.

‘You know Little Joe?’ Excel asked me.

‘Yeah, I know him.’

‘So why you wanna lie to me, nigga?’

‘You asked where you know me from. Not where you might’ve seen me before.’

‘That right?’ He edged up on the seat again, poked the barrel of the gun into my chin beneath my right ear. ‘You wanna say that again?’

‘You’re gonna shoot me, shoot me,’ I said, wanting to put an end to all his questions about Little Joe Brown at any cost. ‘This is your show. But if you want me to take you to your little girl, leave me the fuck alone and let me drive, all right?’

It was a bluff, and a weak one, but he knew I was right: If he killed me now, whatever chance he had of finding his daughter alive in Simi Valley would be gone. And yet he was conflicted; he wanted to kill me desperately. He didn’t move for a long minute, breathing fumes and fire into my ear, until reason finally washed over him and he found the willpower to withdraw, kicking the back of my seat with a foot as he did so, just to let me know how close I’d come.

That was the end of all conversation for the duration of our trip, my gas gauge flirting with empty but, by the endless grace of God, never actually finding it. The Simi Valley Freeway, years away from serving a greater purpose than connecting Los Angeles county to a burgeoning cow-town, was as lonely as an abandoned child at this hour. Little in the way of light disturbed the black landscape to either side of the car, and in our stifling isolation my mind filled with jumbled thoughts about how things were likely to play out upon our arrival. If O’ and R.J. hadn’t already grown tired of waiting for me and had barged into the house alone, how would they react to the sight of my escort, herding me out of my own car at gunpoint? O’ at least could be counted on to maintain some level of cool, but R.J. could not; it would not have been unlike him to start an all-out firefight right there on the street, Sienna Jackson be damned.

The directions R.J. had given me led us six blocks north of the freeway at the Tapo Canyon off-ramp to a little strip of asphalt labeled Adams Road. Denied the extravagances of sidewalks or street lamps, it was lightly sprinkled with single-story ranch homes that all seemed to be cut from the same sad and dilapidated cloth. Redwood siding rotted away while red brick crumbled and tiles leapt from rooftops like rats from a capsized ship. Everywhere, grass had turned brown and died, leaving the surrounding earth to return to its natural state of sagebrush and dust.

And this was what some white folks were fleeing the city to buy, just to put some distance between themselves and people like me.

The house we were looking for was pretty much as R.J. had described it. The ragged smile of a wagon wheel full of broken spokes stood against the dark front facade, and the path to the porch was littered with junk: an old manual lawnmower with rusted blades, an overturned wheelbarrow on a flat tire, a shopping cart that would never find its proper home again. A single wooden chair stood watch on the covered porch, a throw pillow spewing white stuffing on to its seat. There were no lights in any of its windows visible from the street.

As we approached, we passed R.J.’s Dodge, parked in the center of the large space between this house and its nearest neighbor.

The car was empty.

‘Fuck,’ I said, pulling over.

Alert and focused now, Excel asked, ‘This it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So where the fuck are your two bitches?’

‘I don’t know. That’s their ride behind us. They might’ve gone in without me.’

And thinking about it, I could almost follow their reasoning. The last time I’d entered a stranger’s house with R.J., I’d nearly gotten the both of us killed.

‘Then I guess we better go in too,’ Rucker said, opening his door.

We stepped out into the street together, the dealer taking great care to keep me aware of the revolver in his hand. ‘You only alive right now ’cause I need you,’ he said as we eased toward the house together. ‘But you fuck up just once, your ass is wasted. You understand that, nigga?’

I nodded my head.

It was cold as hell and neither of us was dressed for it, adding to the misery of the long walk up the side of the house. I couldn’t think straight. My mind kept skipping from one fear to the next, each more terrifying than the one preceding it. The house was empty. The child was dead. O’ and R.J. had blundered into an ambush and gotten themselves killed along with the girl. No matter what scenario I envisioned, they all amounted to the same thing.

Cemetery road.

We inched up the driveway to the back of the house and on the way spotted an open window, its screen removed and braced against the wall below it. Neither of my friends was as good with locks as I, so this would have been their chosen way of gaining entry. O’ would have been smart enough not to risk the racket of both of them climbing through a window, however; one of them would have gone in first and then unlocked a door for the other. This was proven out when I led Rucker around to the backyard and found a patio door someone had slid wide open and left that way.

Excel and I passed through the door into the house’s living room, still looking for our first glimpse of light. Even in the dark, we could see that the place was a mess. Clothes and scraps of old meals were scattered everywhere, and what furniture there was was scarred and tattered, like remnants of a house fire that had fallen off a garbage truck on its way to the city dump. The room smelled of liquor and crack cocaine, and evidence of both sat upon the cracked-mirror top of a low coffee table.

Rucker put a hand in my back, ordering me to push further into the house.

We reached a hallway beyond the kitchen and stopped cold at its mouth: there was a light on in an open doorway at the end and we could hear voices coming from that direction, too faint to follow but impossible to miss. The man with the gun behind me gave me another nudge and I started forward again, my legs heavy, my throat dry. It took an eternity to travel all of twenty feet, O’s voice becoming more distinct with my every step.

‘Where is she?’ I heard him ask with some impatience.

When Excel and I finally made it to the open door, we found ourselves peering into the master bedroom, where by the meager illumination of a night table lamp, O’ and R.J. stood talking to a heavy-set blonde woman in pastel sweats whom they had obviously just rousted from bed.

My friends spun on their heels at the sight of us, startled, but Rucker put his gun up under my chin before either could fire his own and snapped, ‘Do it and this motherfucka loses his goddamn head! Go on!’

O’ and R.J. froze.

‘Drop the pieces and kick ‘em over here to me. Hurry the fuck up!’

They both obeyed, first O’, then with somewhat greater reluctance, R.J. He was trembling with rage, but his withering gaze was directed solely at me. ‘What the hell’s
he
doin’ here?’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Rucker told him. ‘Ain’t nobody askin’ the questions around here but me.’

He shoved me into the room to give himself space to operate and hunkered down to retrieve the two handguns on the floor, shoving them both into the waistband of his pants without ever taking his eyes off of any of the four people in front of him.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Where the hell’s my little girl?’

‘We were just asking
her
that question,’ O’ said, gesturing toward the blonde.

Clearly as confused as she was terrified, she had the face of a wide-mouth bass and the body of a dancer who’d forgotten how to put down her fork. Her yellow hair ran down to her shoulders, stringy and lifeless, and her eyes were two tired, watery slugs of blue swimming in shadow.

‘Who’re you?’ Rucker asked, taking a step closer to get a better look at her.

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, whimpering.

‘I asked who the fuck you are!’

‘She’s McDonald’s woman,’ O’ said. ‘This is her place.’

‘So where’s Sienna? Where the fuck is Paris?’

‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, desperate to convince him, ‘they were here when I came to bed! I’ve been asleep—’

Excel closed on her in an instant and struck her across the jaw with the weapon in his hand, hard. She stumbled backward, slammed off an oak wood dresser behind her and, with an inadvertent swipe of one hand, took most of the knick-knacks and toiletries sitting atop it with her on her way down to the floor.

‘
Where is she?
’ the dealer asked her again, livid now.

‘She was in the back bedroom!’ the blonde cried, spitting blood. ‘Please don’t hit me anymore!’

Rucker turned to me, hissed, ‘Go get her.’

But before I could take a step, O’ said, ‘She isn’t there. I’ve already looked, she’s not in the house.’

And now the woman’s sobs overpowered her. She scurried backward into a corner, cowering like a frightened child, and buried her face deep in both hands. ‘It wasn’t me. I never touched her, I swear!’

Rucker towered over her. ‘What?’

‘She wouldn’t stop crying. I told him to leave her alone, but . . . He wouldn’t listen. He just kept hitting her and hitting her!’

Time ground to a sudden halt in the room. I felt my heart constrict and my stomach grow hard and cold.

‘Aw, Jesus,’ R.J. said.

Excel reached down with his free hand to grab a handful of the woman’s hair, snatching her back to her feet. ‘
What the fuck you tryin’ to say?
’

She threw her arms up to defend her face, body convulsing with hysteria, cried, ‘I think he killed her!’

Incredibly, Excel had no immediate response to this. As the blonde peered at him through the space between her arms, waiting for him to begin raining blows down upon her head, he just glowered back at her, stunning us all with a restraint no man in his position should have had any earthly right to possess.

Relieved, McDonald’s woman began to cry uncontrollably again. ‘He said if she died, he was gonna take her out and bury her somewhere where nobody’d ever find her. That must be where—’

She never got the next word out. Excel shot her in the left eye without warning, then shot her again in the throat after her body had collapsed at his feet. The expression on his face – like that of a psychotic little boy twisting the head off a thrashing hen – is something I will remember until the day I die.

Had my life at that moment depended solely upon my own capacity for self-preservation, I would have surely lost it in the next. My legs were dead, my feet rooted to the floor, and my mind was a blank and ineffectual slate. Fear was my only functioning process. Even O’ seemed powerless to move.