Cemetery Road (26 page)

‘Bullshit. For all we know, she’s been dead since the day McDonald snatched her. That ain’t on us, that’s on him.’ When I shook my head at the vacuity of his argument, he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and, snarling into my face, said, ‘Besides, nigga, you’re the last one who ought’a be cryin’ about what we’ve “done”, seein’ as how this whole thing was your goddamn idea in the first place. Or have you forgotten that?’

I broke his grip and threw him off me, wanting to do more to shut him up but knowing I had no right.

‘What’s done is done,’ O’ said. ‘It all turned to shit and, yeah, I feel bad about it, but there isn’t anything for us to do now except chill and wait for McDonald to take all the heat.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ I said.

‘He’s right,’ R.J. agreed.

‘We’ve got a man over there who might be dead tomorrow. But even if he pulls through, and McDonald does take all the heat, how the hell are we supposed to go on hanging together without somebody finally doing the math and connecting us to the robbery?’

‘They won’t,’ O’ said. ‘Not if we play this thing the same way we’ve played every other job we ever pulled.’

‘Except we’ve never had a job go this wrong before. Until tonight, we’d never hurt anybody, and that’s all changed now. This is a whole new ball game, O’. We’ve killed one man and caused the death of at least two other people, including a little girl.’

‘We didn’t
touch
that little girl.’

‘Playing it smart and keeping a low profile isn’t going to cut it this time. We aren’t just thieves anymore, brother. If you haven’t figured that out yet, there’s no point in my even talking to you.’

‘All right. So what do you suggest? How do we make things right?’

I looked over at R.J., apologizing for what I knew he would take harder than any of us. ‘We’ve gotta go our separate ways. All three of us. After this thing winds down, assuming it ever does, we can’t ever be seen together again.’

‘Say what?’ R.J. said, breaking into a coughing jag.

O’ started to chuckle. ‘That’s wack.’

‘It’s not wack,’ I said. ‘It’s the way it’s gotta be. What we did tonight isn’t going to go away just because we don’t get hemmed up for it. Whether we get busted or not, we’re gonna carry this shit around for the rest of our lives, and it’s only gonna be that much harder to live with if we go on kicking it with each other.’

R.J. shook his head. ‘Naw . . .’

‘We’re a team, Handy. We’ve always been a team,’ O’ said.

‘Word. You brothers have been like family to me, and I’m not ever gonna forget it,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that every time I look at you after tonight, and every time you look at me, we’re all gonna be thinking about the same thing.’ I glanced over at R.J. again. ‘Aren’t we?’

The look on his face said he knew I spoke the truth, but he wasn’t up to admitting it. ‘It don’t matter,’ he said, eyes finally beginning to flicker from exhaustion. ‘What O’ said . . . is for real. We’re a team, Handy. Without you niggas . . . I ain’t got
nobody
.’

And that was also true; we were all the poor bastard had. But my sympathies for him were not going to be enough to change my mind. Though it would be tough on all of us, separation –
permanent
separation – was the only way I could see us surviving the long-term nightmare we had bought for ourselves.

‘I don’t like it any better than you do,’ I said. ‘But this is it. We either split up right now, for good, or we’re fucked. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now, but somewhere down the road. It’s inevitable.’

‘Ain’t nothin’ inevitable,’ O’ said, still unconvinced. He was in that zone of his in which nothing you said to him was going to penetrate his intransigence.

‘You brothers can do what you wanna do. Me, I’m gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know yet. Maybe Cleveland or somewhere down in Minnesota. It’s gonna take me a while to decide.’

‘Uh-huh. And let me guess: You’re gonna need a little taste of Excel’s dope for extra seed money.’

‘I don’t want anything that belonged to Excel. We’re gonna flush that coke just like we planned. Only thing different now is, we’re gonna burn the cash, too.’

He grinned at me like I was a circus clown who’d just challenged him to a fight. ‘Say again?’

‘You heard me. We’re gonna burn it. I don’t want a dime of that bread, and neither do you. It’s blood money.’

He shook his head, tickled, said, ‘R.J., are you listenin’ to this fool? Can you believe this shit?’

But R.J.
wasn’t
listening. He had dozed off, head cocked to one side, mouth open wide like a hatchling waiting to be fed.

‘We’re gonna have to watch him carefully,’ I told O’. ‘Make sure he doesn’t slip into a coma or something.’

‘Only person in a coma around here is you, Handy, if you think I’m gonna set fire to my share of a hundred and forty Gs.’

I glared at him, then moved over to the couch to check on R.J. He was sweating like a fat man in a sauna and his temperature felt a little higher to me than normal, but his breathing was even and his bandages gave no indication that his bleeding had started up again.

‘And what do you think he’s gonna say about it?’ I asked O’.

‘I suspect he’ll side with you for a change. Hard as homeboy is in some ways, he’s a soft-hearted fool in others. But I don’t give a shit. This ain’t no democracy, Handy, it don’t matter if the vote’s two or a thousand to one. I’m not burnin’ up forty-five grand just ’cause you and R.J. ain’t got the stomach to spend it.’

‘And you do?’

‘Goddamn right I do.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘You don’t. You’ve got a conscience, same as us, and makin’ a profit off that little girl’s death would haunt you till the day you died.’

I’d finally said something he couldn’t dismiss out of hand.

‘We’ve got to walk away, and we’ve got to walk away clean,’ I said. ‘All three of us, together, the same way we’ve always done everything.’

I had him thinking now. He made no sound, but you could look in his eyes and see his mind working away behind them just the same.

‘I don’t know, Handy,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe there’s somethin’ we can work out . . .’ He tipped his head in the direction of R.J. ‘. . . just you and me.’

He waited for me to catch his drift. It wasn’t hard.

‘I don’t think so, O’,’ I said.

Three weeks later, we all stood around an old black barbecue drum in O’s mother’s garage and watched a pile of green paper burn down to nothing. R.J. had been against the idea initially, but as his injuries healed and his will grew stronger, so too did his guilt over the death of Sienna Jackson and his need to wash his hands of it. As for O’, all his talk about my opinion and R.J.’s holding no sway over him eventually dwindled down to nothing, R.J. having threatened to stick a foot up his ass if he continued to bitch about having to relinquish his share of Excel Rucker’s 140 grand.

Convincing both men that we needed to split up for good, on the other hand, continued to be a hard sell for me right up until the morning we actually did, two days after we put a match to the dead dealer’s money and flushed all his coke down the commode. My friends thought severing ties was an overreaction. Everything we were reading and hearing about the Paris McDonald murder investigation seemed to suggest it was going to begin and end with McDonald, just as O’ had planned. Why throw away four years of friendship with men I had loved like brothers when, by all indications, we were in the clear?

‘Because I want to
stay
in the clear,’ I said.

Whether or not R.J. and O’ ever completely bought into that argument, they ended up agreeing to terminate our limited partnership. For R.J., our every minute together had become a constant reminder of the nightmare he wanted desperately to put behind him, and O’ simply grew tired of trying to hold something together I was bound and determined to dismantle. By the time we all met that cold February morning in Leimert Village Park to say our final goodbyes, each of us was quietly resigned to a future that did not include the other two.

Unlike O’ and R.J., I wasn’t going to test my commitment to our dissolution agreement by remaining in Los Angeles. I needed more distance from what we had done, and from things I had done without them, than the mere length of a freeway could provide. So I had decided to run off to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, because I’d heard more good things than bad about that part of the country, and because that was as far as I thought my old Ford could carry me. I loaded the car up like a four-wheeled pack mule, bid my brother Chance a brief and somewhat cruel farewell, and then met R.J. and O’ at the park, not even bothering to kill the Fairmont’s engine.

‘You’re really goin’, huh?’ R.J. asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said, shaking first his hand, then O’s. ‘Any need to go over the deal again? Or do we all have it down?’

‘No more contact after this. We get it, Handy,’ O’ said.

‘Guess that’s it then.’

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and neither could they. O’ was having enough trouble just standing there without throwing a punch at somebody. I turned to get in the car.

Just before I could jump in, O’ called out, ‘You know it didn’t have to be like this, Handy. Running scared is for babies and old women.’

For years afterward, I would wonder why I didn’t answer him. He was out of line, and his final words to me should have been better chosen. But I let them pass without comment, just sat down in my car, pulled the driver’s side door closed behind me and drove away.

I couldn’t get to St Paul, Minnesota, fast enough.

TWENTY-FOUR

A
ll throughout my flight from LA to Crescent City, I kept wanting to glance over my shoulder, certain that somebody seated behind me on the plane was eventually going to flash a badge and place me under arrest. It was a crazy thought, of course, but when you kill a man one day and ignore a police order not to travel the next, paranoia is both the fair and natural price of the ticket.

I would have avoided the trip given an alternative. I had no desire to test the patience of the law, and was not anxious to confront the man I was coming here to see. But I had run from Paris McDonald long enough. He was waiting for me now, Toni Burrow having moved my pending visitation request forward by lending it the authority of her private investigator’s license, and I could think of no one other than McDonald who might have the answers to the few open questions that remained about R.J.’s murder.

Situated just over twenty miles south of the Oregon border, Crescent City was a picturesque little jewel on the California coast that hardly resembled a fitting home for a state penitentiary. From the airport, where the Pacific spread out to the west like a sun-dappled sheet of blue ice, to the peaceful, bucolic heart of downtown, the prison city was a visual salve for the soul, as far removed from the bleak world inhabited by the convicts at Pelican Bay as heaven itself. And yet, as I soaked it all in from the back seat of a taxi early on a bright, clear Thursday morning, I could see nothing but a beautiful, ornate gateway to my doom. Even the trees standing along both sides of the highway leading out to the prison struck me as ominous, emerald sentries someone had placed there solely to ensure my arrival.

Based upon everything I had read about the man in recent years, McDonald was no longer the short-tempered, brutal thug I remembered. At some point during his incarceration, he had turned his life over to Jesus Christ and declared himself born again, taking his redemption so far as to become an ordained minister. If the reporters who wrote about him were in the habit of portraying him accurately, he was something just short of a harmless, soft-spoken teddy bear now, quick to warm up to strangers and next to impossible to ruffle. I had never heard him speak, but as in the letter he had written to R.J., whenever he was quoted directly, he sounded surprisingly articulate and kind.

Still, he scared the hell out of me.

I had been rehearsing what I would say to him for years and yet, even as my taxi pulled up to the prison’s outer gates, I had no idea where to start. My friends and I had framed this man for two murders he did not commit, and arguably, by way of our interference in Excel Rucker’s affairs, positioned him to commit a third. How could I look the man in the eye, let alone ask for his help in putting R.J.’s murder to rest?

Security check-in was just a blur to me; I answered questions and filled out paperwork without conscious thought. My head cleared only after I’d taken my seat in the visitation room of the PBSP Security Housing Unit and McDonald entered the cubicle opposite me. Wearing the same full-length, long-sleeved white jumper as the other inmates here, he sat down on the other side of the glass and nodded in greeting, smiling as if he were certain that only good things could possibly come from my visit. His body had gone soft since the last time I saw him, and his hair had turned to a mere wisp of white fuzz growing on the back and both sides of his head, but in size and overall mass, he was still an imposing giant worthy of the nickname ‘the Tower’.

He picked up his telephone handset and waited for me to do the same.

‘Errol White?’

I nodded. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’

‘Not a problem. My door is always open – so to speak.’ He grinned, casting a sideways glance at one of the guards stationed nearby. Then he added: ‘Especially for friends of Brother Burrow.’

‘Excuse me?’

Both my visitation request, and the follow-up telephone call Toni Burrow had made to the Department of Corrections to try and move it along, had indicated I was a freelance reporter seeking an interview for a profile piece, that was all.

‘I’ve become a very popular man up here at the Bay,’ McDonald said. ‘Seems like I meet a new reporter wantin’ to write about me every week. So I kind’a know one when I see one now. And you?’ He shook his head.