Pistol Poets

Zach flipped open his cell phone and thumbed the speed-dial. “This is Red. I need all the boys down here right now.”

Spoon kicked. The goon hanging tight. Blood from Spoon’s throat.

Zach wasn’t paying attention anymore. “Don’t waste my time asking why. Get the fuck down here and make sure everyone’s packing heat. We going to make an example.”

Spoon went slack, eyes wide. The body slumped to the car floor.

Zach folded the cell phone closed, looked at the body and the goon and the blood. “Goddammit. You got blood on the seat. Shit.”

The goon hung his head, looked sheepish.

Deke Stubbs had found a lot of names and a lot of secrets in Annie Walsh’s journal. Two names stood out. Moses Duncan and Timothy Lancaster. Annie had tried to be subtle in some of her journal entries, but it was obvious that Duncan was her connection. A good possibility.

Duncan wasn’t in the phone book, but Lancaster was. His apartment was close.

The two beers Stubbs had swilled at Friday’s put him in the mood for more. He stopped at a Quickie-Mart and bought a six-pack of Busch and a copy of Hustler. He drank one in the parking lot and flipped through the jack-off magazine. He was getting crazy horny again. Something happened to Stubbs when he saw skin. It made him desperate crazy. Maybe that’s why he was always forking over big bucks to get his rocks off.

He threw the magazine into the backseat before it made him too crazy. He flipped through Annie Walsh’s journal instead.

Apparently, Annie had boinked this Lancaster kid a month back as some sort of experiment. The journal said that Lancaster “intrigued” her.

A place to start. A thread.

Stubbs pulled out of the parking lot, tossed the empty beer can into the backseat. He opened another, slurped, held the can between his legs, and pointed the Dodge toward Lancaster’s apartment.

He was in no particular hurry. He was getting paid by the day.

twenty-four

Jenks scooted close to the little campfire DelPrego had built. They were deep in the strange woods, glowing eyes watching from the shadows. Jenks gritted his teeth against the wind that whistled through the branches.

“We can’t stay out here.” For the first time, DelPrego showed he was aware of the cold. “This fire ain’t enough. I can’t feel my damn fingers.” He blew on them, held them toward the fire. The wind stung his ears.

Jenks didn’t say anything. He was cold too, but didn’t know where to go. He couldn’t go back to his garage apartment, that was for damn sure.

“Let’s get my truck,” DelPrego said. “We could sneak back slow. Check it out. If we can get to the truck, we can go anywhere.”

“Shit on that idea. You don’t know Red Zach. I’d rather freeze than have my own balls fed to me.”

A long silence before DelPrego spoke. “What’s going on?”

Jenks looked at the fire, didn’t say anything.

“Sherman.” DelPrego raised his voice. “Who’s Jenks? He called you Jenks.”

“Never mind.”

“Fuck that. Talk to me. I killed-” DelPrego’s voice caught. He swallowed hard. “I bashed a man’s skull in with a golf club. I thought I was doing it to save a friend.” His voice shook, tight, nerves raw. “Now you goddamn tell me what’s going on right fucking now.”

Jenks opened his mouth, shut it again. He needed to gather himself.

“I’ll tell you, but you got to let me tell it all.”

“Fine.”

“You got to listen,” Jenks said. “You got to let me get it all out, try to understand where I’m coming from.”

“I said fine.”

Jenks let it all spill out, Spoon and the alley and Sherman Ellis. He told him about his crazy idea to steal Ellis’s life, slip into Eastern Oklahoma University, and write poetry. It had been his way out, his way to shed the ghetto and the drug trade and all the gangster bullshit. And he realized he was telling the story for himself too, trying to downplay his part in Ellis’s death. He needed to believe, even more than he needed to convince DelPrego, that what he had done was forgivable. Or at least understandable.

And by the end of Jenks’s story, the truth had shifted, taken on a new shade. He told DelPrego that his old life, his old patterns, the old ways had such deep hooks in him, that only a crazy plan could get him free. Sherman Ellis had lost his life, but Jenks could resurrect it again, make it work for good. Sherman Ellis’s death could save Harold Jenks.

Jenks’s story trickled out. He looked at DelPrego, but couldn’t see his expression in the dark. The fire had dwindled, the coals casting them in a dim, hellish orange. The silence stretched.

“Wayne?”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“I had to do what I had to-”

“Stop talking right now.”

Jenks started to bark at DelPrego. Fuck you, man. You don’t know what I had to live with. He clapped his mouth shut, saw the bulk clenched in DelPrego’s fist glinting orange and metallic in the light of the coals. It was the big automatic DelPrego had taken off Zach’s boy. The complexion of Jenks’s situation shifted uneasily. He was aware of the woods again. It would be a long time before a body was found out here. DelPrego wasn’t quite pointing the pistol at him, but Jenks kept his mouth shut.

“I’m going to tell you something,” DelPrego said at last. “I don’t know anything about your life. Maybe we had to kill that guy in the trailer or be killed ourselves.”

DelPrego’s voice tightened. “But you can’t steal education, man. It’s up here.” He tapped his head with the pistol barrel. “You can steal a car or a radio or a big-ass bag full of drugs, but you can’t steal an education.”

“I’m not hurting anybody.”

“Fuck you.” DelPrego stood, sudden, violent, knocking sticks into the fire and spreading the coals. Sparks. “You’re hurting me, man. Me. I worked my ass off for my college education. I pulled third shift as a security guard at a rendering plant, stayed up all night wired on coffee reading Milton and Shakespearean sonnets and smelling hog stink just so I could pay rent and buy books. My senior year, I slept more nights in the library than I did in my bed.”

He exhaled raggedly, sat down again hard. “Maybe my life wasn’t dangerous. Maybe my neighborhood wasn’t as tough, but I earned my education.” He tapped the side of his head again. “Everything in here belongs to me.”

DelPrego stood, shook the gun at Jenks. “This fucking thing is your way.” He turned, tossed the pistol into the woods.

Jenks felt hot in the face. DelPrego made him mad and guilty. “That’s right. You didn’t come from my neighborhood. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I’ll bet Sherman Ellis did.”

The words hit Jenks like a punch in the gut. DelPrego had said what Jenks secretly already knew deep in his heart. Sherman Ellis had earned his way. Sherman Ellis had worked for it. Jenks had tried to sneak in the back door.

Jenks wiped at his eyes. “Fucking campfire. Too much smoke.”

The fire’s orange glow faded.

“What’s your name?”