“What kinda things you do?”
“Just get cigarettes an’ shit. Nuthin’ heavy. Nuthin’ could put me in jail.”
“Anybody know more about his powder business?”
Tony glowered again.
I took two twenties from my pocket.
His eyes almost closed. “A guy named Billy B,” he mumbled. “Billy B and Sallie Monroe.”
“Oh,” I said. The last piece of the puzzle was a soft lead bullet aimed at my gut. I thought about the dapper little butcher and craved his blood.
“That enough to get you up offa that forty dollars?” Tony wanted to know.
“This Billy B,” I asked. “He a little dude with a big head, gold-colored kinda Negro?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “All’a that. Light, little, an’ big-headed. That’s Billy B.”
CHAPTER 37
MOUSE WAS HIGH ON WHISKEY and so I drove him home. He let me take his car, saying that he could work out rides with Etta.
Bonnie and the kids were asleep when I got home. Pharaoh growled in the shadows.
I pulled out the drawer next to the kitchen sink and put it on the floor. I reached in under the ledge and came out with my .38 and a box of shells.
The gun needed cleaning but all I had was time. I wasn’t going to sleep. There were gangsters out there in the shadows whispering my name. There were cops hoping that my body broke before my spirit did. My life had gone to pieces and none of it was my fault.
It was the dog’s fault. That’s what I told myself.
But by then I knew that it wasn’t true. I’d dug this hole two years before. It was just a little unfinished business that I had to clean up.
“Easy.” Bonnie Shay was standing at the kitchen door. If she saw the gun on the table she didn’t act like it.
“What?”
“Was I telling the truth?”
“Huh?”
“Did you find the hot-water bottle?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I smiled. “Yeah, I did.”
“Did you leave it there?”
“No, Bonnie. I’ma need it to get them gangsters an’ cops offa us.”
Bonnie’s face smiled. It wasn’t just her mouth but also her eyes and cheeks and the angle of her head to her shoulder.
“Come to bed,” she said.
“Come again?”
Her smile was a long-ago memory of good things.
“Not that,” she said. “But you need some sleep. Come lie down with me. Let me hold you.”
“Bonnie,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Do you know a man called Bill Bartlett?”
“William. Yes. He used to work at Sojourner Truth. I met him after that, though, at a party that Idabell gave. By that time he was working on the supply truck that brought Holland his daily papers.”
“He still work a paper route?”
“No, I don’t think so. He quit about the same time that Holland did. Ida told me that he became a cook.”
SHE HELPED ME OFF with my clothes and almost guided me into the bed. She pressed her warm body against me from behind and placed her hand on my bare chest—over my heart.
“Your heart’s beating,” she whispered.
“An’ yours isn’t?”
“Shh.”
The warmth of her body through that thin slip was what was missing in my life. A woman who took charge of herself and her needs. A woman who could hold my desire without fear or anger.
“You know,” I said.
“Hm?”
“I’d like to turn around here.”
