Slow Motion Riot (31 page)

"So did I tell you about the
one we had today?"

"No," says Andrea.
"What was it?"

"Another informant... Snake
Man. We came to his apartment at noon and he was already drunk and slithering
around on the floor in a trail of his own slime. He's only got one leg, I
think. Bill was the one who wanted to call him Snake Man..."

We're sitting at the bar at a
high-priced midtown hotel waiting for her parents to arrive. In the background,
there's a murmur of low-key conversation and a Cole Porter song playing on the piano.

"Oh, why don't you just give
up?" Andrea says.

I look in the mirror behind the
counter. My hair's falling all over my forehead. I try to sweep it back, so
I'll look presentable. My nose is still a little sore and one of my eyelids is
sagging. As I close in on thirty, I'm starting to look more and more like my
father. In the rest of the reflection, I see the bottles lit from behind and
the way Andrea is looking at me. I hope we can get home early and make love
tonight. Those have been the only times lately that I've felt anything at all.
She runs her fingers up and down my arm and smiles at me. The piano player
segues nicely into "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me."

Maybe I could enjoy moments like
this a little more if I wasn't thinking about Darryl King all the time.

"I think we're getting
closer," I say.

She looks askance and smooths her
black silk dress. "Snake Man," she says as if the very thought of him
makes her unhappy.

"That's my guy."

"You know you're starting to
get a little weird yourself, Baum."

The bartender, wearing a starched
white shirt and a black bow tie, asks me if I need another beer and I nod.

"Isn't it up to the cops to
find Darryl?" she asks.

"Yeah, but I was the one who
put all the work into the case."

She gives me an exasperated look
but then decides not to pursue it. Just as well. It's too hard to explain to
anybody. I notice a gold-plated cigarette lighter has been left on the counter.
I flip the top and light my cigarette with the open flame. When Andrea looks
away again, I drop it into my pocket.

"So what're you doing at
work?" I ask her between drags.

"Nothing." She curls her
fingers around a wineglass. "Just filing V.O.P. papers, talking to people.
You know, finishing things off."

"That's right, you're going
back to school... In a couple of weeks, right?"

"So that's another reason you
oughta spend a little more time back at the office."

The bartender brings me a mug of
beer and I drink about half of it on the first gulp. Across the room, the piano
player is finishing the Duke Ellington song and going into the old Beatles'
song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da [Life Goes On]." I wonder if he knows
"Helter-Skelter." It might clear the bar, but it would make a lot
more sense to me after the last few weeks.

That starts me thinking about the
things that've been going on in the field lately, and as I'm sitting here, I
find I just have to let out a little bit of steam. "I know you think it's
stupid with Snake Man and all, but we are getting closer to Darryl," I say
abruptly. "The informant who we're going to see tomorrow sounds
dynamite."

"Oh, did you speak to
him?"

"No, Angel did. We're seeing
the guy in the morning at the Charles J. Stone Houses over by the river. Angel
said the guy sounded great... when you could understand what he was saying. He
had some kind of speech impediment, I think."

"And what makes this one so
wonderful? Is he into oat bran or cactuses or something? You've talked to every
other freak in the city. What's this one's specialty?"

"I don't know." I hear
myself sounding grumpy and defensive about our little tipster. "This guy
says he's actually seen Darryl and talked to him lately."

"Oh how interesting," she
replies with a sardonic edge. "And what's been on Darryl's mind
lately?"

"The guy says Darryl's been
talking about his probation officer a lot..."

She laughs a little incredulously.
"It's a good thing this doesn't feed into your vanity or anything,"
she says.

"Go ahead," I tell her,
noticing I have a little grit on one of my contact lenses. "Act like it's
a joke. I don't know why I bothered to tell you."

"Well, I don't think it's a
joke," Andrea says with a sigh. "I think it's dangerous and I don't
understand why you won't just let it drop."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

I look down the length of the bar
and see a couple of older women on the way in, both wearing a lot of jewelry
and makeup. "You wouldn't understand," I say, keeping my voice low.

"Try me."

"I don't know." For the
first time in weeks, I start reaching down into myself and trying to figure out
what's there. "It's like Darryl and I have this thing going on between us.
And it's been going on all summer long."

"What's been going on all
summer?"

I put the cigarette down and just
watch it smolder for a while. "You know," I say, "before I met
Darryl, I never used to get scared... I'm not talking about physical fear. I
mean, scared because I used to be so sure I was doing the right thing with my
life. But I don't feel that way anymore. I look around and I see everyone who I
tried to help is going right down the drain like we never met. And that scares
me."

"But there's only so much you
can do for people, Baum," Andrea says, shaking her head. "You said so
yourself. You can't expect them to change just because you want them to
..."

"I know," I say, putting
out the cigarette and gulping down my beer. "But what I worry about is
what it's doing up here."

I put my finger up to my temple,
like I'm pointing a gun at it. So much confusion whirling around up there. I
try to douse it with the rest of my beer. Andrea's giving me the kind of look a
security guard would give a suspicious package left alone at an airport.

"It's like... I'm turning hard
inside," I tell her. "You know? I get so angry with them." I
shake my fist in frustration.

I know people on the nearby
barstools are turning to look at me, but I'm on a roll now and I can't stop.
"I don't wanna be like that," I say. "But I'm in the middle of
all this shit and what it's doing is changing me. You know? I went in there to
change them and instead they're changing me."

She looks over my shoulder at a
large well-dressed black man and a slim blond woman in a bolero jacket coming
into the bar.

"I wanna tell you
something," I say softly, staring straight ahead at my empty beer mug.
"The other day, I went to see one of my old people. Charlie Simms, the one
I told you about. And he starts saying this shit about Darryl and Jews and
black people. And I don't know what happened... I just snapped."

"It's all right," she
says, touching my cheek and looking back at the black man and the white woman
who've stopped to talk to somebody at one of the nearby tables.

"It wasn't all right," I
say, hitting the counter with my fist.

"I started yelling at him. He
yelled back at me and we got into it... And the things I was saying to
him..." I just stop short of telling her I almost called him nigger.
"I mean, I really lost control there for a minute. I mean, I slammed him
against the wall. I wanted to fuck him up. You know? I really wanted to hurt
him ... That's what was in my mind."

I sit back on the stool and shake
my head. Andrea is looking bewildered, as if to say, where did all of this come
from? I'm not sure myself.

"It's just these...bad
thoughts," I tell her a little more calmly. "It's like I've been on
this weird trip with Darryl. And I just want it to be over. I wanna settle
things between him and me so I'll know where I am. And that way I can go on with
the rest of my life."

She holds my hand, but I don't
quite feel it. Mentally I'm in another place.

"Well," Andrea says,
looking sympathetic and a little overwhelmed at the same time, "it
certainly sounds like you need to get your shit together."

"Yeah, I suppose one way or
the other, either Darryl or me will wind up getting our fucking head blown off
and that'll be the end of it."

I feel a heavy hand on my shoulder
and I almost jump off the stool. The black man and the white woman are standing
behind me, giving me knowing smiles.

"Steven," Andrea says.
"I want you to meet my parents."

"Sometime she just sleep for
hour and hours," Alisha Watkins said, looking down at her two-month-old
baby. "I think she never wake up. But then like other time... she just cry
and cry, like she crazy or something..."

"Maybe she's sick,"
Darryl King's mother said indifferently.

They were standing by the kitchen
sink, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee cups full of Bacardi. It was just
after eleven at the Charles J. Stone Houses. Darryl, Aaron, and Bobby were
sitting at the dining room table, passing around a 9 mm and a Clock machine
pistol. The two women were watching them carefully through the window-sized
opening in the wall.

"Nobody else shoots Mr.
Bomb," Darryl was saying once more. "That's my job."

Darryl's mother looked out at him
and shook her head. "That's all he talk about now," she told Alisha
in a hushed voice. " 'When are we gonna shoot 'im? How we gonna shoot
'im?'"

"He just concerned, that's
all," said Alisha, who had her hair cut in a bowl shape and wore long
eyelashes. "He just gotta lot of concern on his mind."

In the other room, Bobby pulled the
cartridge out of the Glock and dropped it on the table.

"Don't you scratch that table,
Bobby," Darryl's mother shouted from the kitchen. "You don't live
here."

She took another sip of Bacardi and
turned back to her son's girlfriend and the baby. "I just want for him to
be happy, you know what I'm saying?" she told Alisha. "But sometime,
I think he get so concerned he gonna go and shoot me."

"Darryl wouldn't do
that," Alisha said, rocking the baby in her arms. "He got a good
heart."

"Well, I know that," his
mother said a little resentfully. "I just worry sometimes."

The air was getting dense and humid
now, like a thunderstorm was about to break out. In the other room, Darryl was
still talking to the others like he expected the probation officer just to show
up on his doorstep. Bobby and Aaron were playing along with him so he wouldn't
get mad again.

Two flies chased each other around
a light fixture and the television showed people throwing a parade for a famous
mobster who'd just been acquitted of trying to have a man killed. There were
fireworks and champagne everywhere.

"Living large," said
Bobby.

In the kitchen, Alisha was gently
wiping the baby's head with a damp cloth. The child was still sleeping, but
both her tiny fists were balled up like she was in a rage. "You think she
look like Darryl?" Alisha asked.

Darryl's mother pursed her lips and
looked down at her granddaughter. "She have his mouth," she said.

"Well, I hope she don't have
his temper."

"That's for sure,"
Darryl's mother told her.

Alisha put the baby down on the
table and saw it was time to change the diaper again. "I wanna raise my
baby to be more like calm," she said, reaching for a tissue.

"Yeah, I wished I'd have done
that too," Darryl's mother said, like it was something she'd just thought
of. She drank the rest of her Bacardi and poured herself another one.

In the other room, they were almost
finished loading the weapons and Darryl was saying that everyone in the
organization should show up at the apartment tomorrow morning for a business
meeting and strategy session.

"Nine-thirty," Darryl
said.

"Why you put it so
early?" Bobby complained. "I wanna sleep."

"So go to sleep early
tonight," Darryl said. "You got a job now."

In the kitchen, Darryl's mother
rolled up the sleeves of her yellow blouse she'd taken from the previous
tenants' closet and looked over at her son's girlfriend.

"Well, I ain't gonna be around
tomorrow," said Alisha Watkins as she got through putting on the new
diaper and throwing away the old one. "I gotta take the baby to the
hospital. The doctor say maybe she sick because I smoked crack when I was
pregnant."

"So she's addicted?" Darryl's
mother asked.

"Yeah, I guess," Alisha
said. "I just hope my social worker don't find out. Then I will never hear
the end of it."

For most of the night, I sit up in
bed, studying Andrea's sleeping profile in the moonlight.

I can scarcely believe the symmetry
of her features or the softness of her skin as she lies there next to me. I can
feel the warmth from her body even when she's a few inches away. She tucks an
arm under my side and rolls toward me with a slumbering sigh. Her cheek rests on
my thigh, and her hair spills out across the bedspread. A garbage truck calls
out in the night, but otherwise there's silence outside.

For a moment, I feel absolutely
still inside. I never want to move again. I want to stay here in the sanctuary
of this bed forever, feeling safe and protected, with Andrea by my side. Darryl
King, Richard Silver, and the rest of the outside world can go to hell.

Andrea moans again and hugs my leg.
I touch her face lightly with my fingertips. I still don't completely understand
why she came home with me after the horrible things I said tonight, but somehow
she's forgiven me.

I try thinking about what it would
be like to live quietly with her. I imagine a parallel life, a route that I
didn't take. One in which I somehow manage to get into the right school and get
a good job. In which I marry Andrea and provide her with a home with a backyard
and a car and kayaking vacations and anything else she wants. In which I come
home from work before six every night and never lose sleep worrying about
anybody else's problems besides my own or my children's. A family man.

It's probably a longer life than
the one I'm living now, and certainly a happier one. I wonder if it's too late
to call Richard Silver. What he's offering me can make all that real. So that I
never have to go out and face the Darryl Kings of the world again.

But I don't reach for the phone,
and as the clock near my bed flicks past 3:30 I start to get an uneasy sense of
anticipation. Like a boxer the night before a fight or a soldier before a
battle. The informant says Darryl's been talking about his probation officer.
Angel says he believes the guy. We're getting closer to Darryl. I know it. It
won't be long now. I feel like I'm standing on a precipice, looking down.

I start to get scared again and I
tell myself it's not too late to pull back. I can try calling in sick and
staying in bed with Andrea all day. We can lie there in the morning sunlight,
giggling, making love, and planning a new life together while somebody else
goes looking for Darryl King. But the more I think about it, the more
impractical the plan seems. Even if I could convince Andrea to stay here, I
know I'd feel guilty and ashamed if I didn't go with Bill and the others to
find the informant. I started the Darryl King case and I need to have a part in
ending it.

After that, I promise myself, I'll
think about making a new life for Andrea and me. If she'll have me.

As the sky slowly lightens and
birds begin to sing, my decision becomes clear. I have to go. I lean down and
kiss Andrea's lips. Her breath is heavy and sweet and she sleepily puts her
arms around me.

"Is it time already?" she
murmurs.