Soul Circus (32 page)

“There it is,” said Quinn, looking at the back of a house on the Yuma side. “I counted back from the corner. That’s the one, with the lights. I don’t see anyone, though.”

“Pizza boy said it was just McKinley and the girl, what he could make out. McKinley’s down on his big-ass haunches now, wolfin’ that pizza, I expect.”

“Be a good time to hit him.”

“I guess we better do that, then, before we change our minds.”

Strange turned onto the street at the head of the alley and parked behind Quinn’s Chevelle. Strange went over what they had already discussed.

“It’s not much of a plan,” said Quinn.

“Ain’t no plan at all,” said Strange. “I’m countin’ on that girl having the stones I think she does. I figure that McKinley’s partner has the boy, and she’s gonna be focusing on getting back with him. I know how much she loves her son.”

“What if it goes wrong?”

“One of us goes down, the other one’s got to get the girl out quick. Take her to her apartment and figure it out then.”

“You know he’s got a gun.” Quinn looked at Strange’s hip, where his knife was sheathed. “You gonna take him on with that?”

“I got somethin’ else for him, I get close enough. You remember his gun, too, Terry. Don’t stay back there too long and get your ass shot.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You got your cell?”

“In my pocket.”

Strange looked at Quinn’s bright, jacked-up eyes. “Look, man, you don’t have to do this. You don’t owe anybody anything.”

“When you side with a man, you stay with him,” said Quinn. “And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal. You’re finished.”

“Oh, shit,” said Strange with a low chuckle. “You are something.”

They shook hands. Quinn got out of the car and closed the door behind him. He bolted across the sidewalk, up a rise, and moved into the shadows between two duplexes farther down the block.

Strange got a coil of rope out of his trunk and patted his back pocket. He walked up toward the house.

HORACE McKinley was in the living room, eating a slice of pizza topped with hamburger and pepperoni, when he heard someone banging on the back door. His heart skipped as he swallowed what was in his mouth. Couldn’t be Mike; he always came in through the front. He dropped the slice into the open cardboard box at his feet. Neighborhood kids, most likely, pullin’ pranks and shit, like they liked to do.

“Don’t you move now,” said McKinley, standing out of his chair, talking to Devra, who was still against the wall, hugging her knees. “I’ll be right back.”

McKinley pulled the automatic from his waistband and racked the slide.

Devra watched him walk into what would be the dining room in a normal house. He went through an arched cutout there, barely fitting through it, and back into a hall. The hall led to the galley kitchen and the back door, she knew. When he got into the hall she heard him curse and then start to run, his heavy steps vibrating the wall at her back. And then she heard him opening the back door and yelling something out, his voice fading now ’cause he was outside.

Devra looked at the front door. Only thing stopping her was a dead-bolt latch and a chain. Thinking, If I am going to see my baby again, now is the time to try.

QUINN stood on the back porch, knocking on the window and its frame, talking to himself, saying, “Come on, fat man, come and get it,” and then smiling right into the man’s sweaty face as he turned sideways to get himself through an opening and appeared in the hall. Quinn heard his muffled curse as he raised the gun in his meatball hand. Quinn held his position and his smile, knowing he was firing up the fat man, watching him run straight toward him through the kitchen to the door.

Quinn turned and leaped off the porch. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the dirt as he made it to the chain-link fence that surrounded the patch of backyard. He put his hand on the rail of the fence and was over it clean as he heard the back door swing open. The fat man was yelling at him now, and Quinn ducked his head. He zigzagged combat style down the alley and heard the first shot, thinking, I am not hit, and he heard himself humming as the second shot sounded and a whistle of air passed his ears. And now he just hit it, dug deep for speed and ran straight. He came to the end of the alley where it dropped onto the street, cut left, and slowed to a jog. His short bark of laughter was all relief, a burst of pressure release with the knowledge that he had cheated death.

He looked back toward the alley, wondering if he had given Derek enough time.

IT was that white boy, Strange’s partner. Had to be.

McKinley slipped the Sig back inside his drawers. He rolled his shoulders and looked around. A light came on in one of the houses, and a dog, that rott two doors down, was barking fierce. Wasn’t but two shots. No one in this neighborhood was going to call the police ’cause of that. And if they did, wasn’t no police gonna bother to respond.

McKinley walked across the dirt, stepped up to the porch, and entered the house. He closed the door behind him, mumbling as he locked it. He heard himself wheezing and felt the sweat dripping down his back as he walked through the kitchen into the hall. He went by the arched cutout, not wanting to squeeze through it again, and straight into the living room, where Devra Stokes was standing, one hand kind of playing with the fingers of the other.

“I tell you to get up?” said McKinley, standing before her.

“Heard gunshots, is all.”

“Girl,
sit
your ass back down.”

He looked over the girl’s shoulder and saw the chain hanging free on the front door. He said, “What the
fuck
?” just as he felt the presence of someone behind him and turned.

What he saw in that last second was a man with size, and McKinley reached for his gun. He had his hand on the grip when something whipped up toward him fast, a blur of flat black. When the flat black thing hit him under the chin, the pain was cold electric and the room spun crazy. His feet weren’t holding him up, and he was floating, could almost see himself, like a balloon in one of those parades. The spinning room was the last thing he saw as his world shut down.

WHEN McKinley opened his eyes and his vision cleared, there were a couple of men in the room with the girl, all of them standing over him, talking about him like he wasn’t there. It was Strange and the white boy, the one he’d chased down the alley. McKinley burped and smelled the garlic and meat on his own breath.

“Look who woke up,” said Quinn.

“Told you he was all right,” said Strange.

McKinley was propped up against the plaster wall. His hands were together behind his back, and he moved to separate them. They were tied. He went to move his feet, and they were tied, too. McKinley turned his head to the side and spit out some blood. He rolled his tongue in his mouth. His teeth ached and one of the side ones he chewed with was loose. It was just kind of sitting in there, connected by threads. He could move it all around with his tongue.

Strange had fucked him up. That thing in his hand, looked like a sap, it must have been what he’d hit him with. He was slipping it into his back pocket now. And there was his own new Sig sticking out the waistband of the man’s pants. This man has no idea what I can do to him, thought McKinley. None. But the thinking made him tired, and he closed his eyes.

“He’s going out again,” said Quinn.

“He’s just resting,” said Strange.

“What now?”

“We make a trade.”

Strange took McKinley’s cell phone off his belt holster, getting down in front of him. He grabbed McKinley by the chin in the spot where he had laid the sap up into him. It opened McKinley’s eyes.

“That doesn’t smart too much, does it?” said Strange.

“Motherfucker,” said McKinley sloppily.

“Mind your language,” said Strange. “What’s your boy’s cell number?”

“His name is Mike,” said Devra, her arms crossed with her purse clutched tight, looking down hard at McKinley.

McKinley gave Strange the number and Strange had him repeat it, knowing it hurt McKinley to talk. He punched the number into the cell.

“He gets on the line,” said Strange, holding the phone to McKinley’s ear, “I want you to tell him to bring the boy here. Tell him the condition you’re in, and how important it is that he not even dream about doin’ anybody any violence. Because you will be the first one to suffer. Do you understand?”

McKinley nodded. He listened to the phone and said, “Mike ain’t pickin’ up.”

“Leave a message when it tells you to. We’ll try again.”

They did, with the same response. And tried again, ten minutes later. McKinley left his third message, and Strange stood.

“Get her out of here,” said Strange to Quinn. “Take her back to her apartment. I’ll be in contact with you by phone. We’ll meet up in a little while.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Talk to our friend here alone,” said Strange. “We got a few things to discuss in private.”

Devra Stokes spit on McKinley on her way out. Neither Strange nor Quinn moved to stop her.

AFTER Quinn and Devra left, Strange shut down most of the lights in the house and returned to the living room. On the floor was a lamp with no shade, holding a naked bulb, and he picked it up and carried it over to McKinley. He placed it beside him and left it on. The bulb threw off heat, and its glow highlighted the bullets of sweat on McKinley’s forehead and the tracks of it moving down his face.

Strange got back down on his haunches and pulled up McKinley’s wife-beater, exposing his chest and belly.

“What you doin’?”

Strange drew his Buck knife from its sheath. He held it upside down and pressed the heavy wood-and-bronze hilt against the blackened area of McKinley’s jawline. McKinley recoiled as if shocked.

“That hurts, I expect,” said Strange. He moved to press the spot again but did not make the contact. “What’s your partner Mike’s full name?”

“Montgomery.”

“And where’s he stay at?”

McKinley gave him the address. Strange asked him to repeat it so he could remember, and McKinley complied.

Strange rested one knee on McKinley’s thigh and put his weight there. He touched the edge of the blade to the area below the nipple of McKinley’s right breast.

“You got titties like a woman,” said Strange. “You know that?”

“Man, what the fuck you
doin’
?” said McKinley in a desperate way.

Strange moved the knife so that the blade now rested with its edge above the purple aureole of McKinley’s nipple.

“You put your hands on that girl, right about where I’m touchin’ this blade.
Didn’t
you, boy?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t
cut
her, man.”

“You like the way this feels,
Horace
?”

“Don’t.”

“You tellin’ me?”

“God
damn
, don’t be cuttin’ on me with that knife.”

“You gonna leave the girl alone, right?”

McKinley nodded.

“The boy, too.”

“Both of ’em, man.”

“ ’Cause I don’t want you gettin’ near her at all. Her or her son, you understand?”

“I hear you, Strange. We good, right?”

Blood splashed onto Strange’s hand as he sliced into McKinley’s flesh, sweeping the knife savagely across his breast.

McKinley bucked and screamed. The tendons stood out on his neck as he writhed from the pain. The scream became a sob that McKinley could not stop. Strange found it odd to hear a big man cry so free.

“Now we’re good,” said Strange, wiping the Buck off on McKinley’s shirt and sheathing it. “You just sit there and try to relax.”

STRANGE moved the lamp as close as it would get to McKinley. The heat from the bulb, he guessed, was now hot on his face. Strange then dragged a chair over and set it before the fat man. He had a seat.

McKinley had stopped sobbing. His breathing had subsided to a steady wheeze. The dirty flap of nipple, nearly severed and dangling off McKinley’s chest, had begun to turn from purple to black. The blood had stopped flowing from the cut Strange had made.

“What now?” said McKinley, elbowing the lamp away from him as best he could. “Ain’t you done enough?”

Strange drew the Sig from his waistband. He pointed it at McKinley’s face and moved his finger inside the trigger guard. McKinley’s lip trembled as he closed his eyes.

Strange lowered the gun. He turned it and released its magazine, letting it slide out into his palm. He checked to make sure a round had not been chambered.

“Just wanted you to experience what you put that girl through,” said Strange. “That kind of helplessness.”

“
Fuck
you, man.”

“I’ll just keep this.” Strange stood, the magazine in his hand. “You can have the rest.”

He dropped the body of the .45 onto McKinley’s lap. McKinley was cut, bleeding, and beaten. Worst of all, a piece of his manhood was forever gone. McKinley was past being frightened now. One eye twitched, and a thread of pink spittle dripped from his mouth.

“What makes me so different?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You out here trying to save Granville Oliver, and at the same time lookin’ to harm me? Shit, him and me, we’re damn near the same man. He ain’t no better or different than me. I
worked
for him when I was a kid.”

“I know it,” said Strange. He had been thinking the same thing himself, trying to separate it out in his mind.

“So why?”

“Cops, private cops, whatever, they got this saying, when one of y’all kills another one like you: It’s the cost of doing business. What it means is, you got your world you made, and we’re in it, too. And no one outside that world is gonna shed tears when you go. But it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t turn that violent shit on people you got no cause to fuck with.” Strange slipped the magazine into a pocket of his jeans. “You shouldn’t have done what you did to that girl.”

“What, you don’t think Granville’s ever done the same?”