Mouse winked at me then. We were both in our mid-forties but he didn’t look thirty. His smile was as innocent as Eve’s come-on in the Garden of Eden.
“I’m sorry,” I said. A tear did escape my eye. “I really am.”
Mouse ignored the emotion I showed. “Anyway,” he said. “She don’t know that a man cain’t be worried ’bout every Tom, Dick, and Harry wanna do him some harm. There’s always somebody out to get ya. Always. You cain’t hide from it. Shit. At least we friends, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We sure are.”
Mouse focused those cloud-colored eyes on me. “Domaque’s in trouble again.”
“What about?”
“Ugly,” the dapper killer said. “Ugly brought him into this world and ugly gonna take him out.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Wrong with him? Don’t you remember?”
Domaque was Mama Jo’s son. He had the soul of an artist, the strength of a mule, and the looks of a fairy-tale ogre. His nasal passages didn’t work right and so his drooling mouth was always open. One eye was larger than the other and between his arms and legs no two of them were the same length. He had a curve in his spine that made him hunchbacked and, though he was very intelligent, he had the emotional makeup of a twelve-year-old.
“I mean, what trouble is he in?”
“They say he robbed a armored car on its way to the Bank of America in Santa Barbara.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you?”
That made Mouse laugh. But it wasn’t his debutante titter. It was a snort that was meant to be a warning. I had seen dogs run away from him when he’d made that sound.
He’d only been alive for ten minutes and I was already under threat.
“So what did happen?” I asked.
“Some white girl been hangin’ ’round, that’s what Jo says. She met Dom down at this cove where he went fishin’ and started sweet-talkin’ him. One day she disappears and the next thing they know the cops come up to Jo and Dom’s house.”
“They get him?”
“Naw. Jo got a false floor with a hole for Dom to hide under. She told them cops that Dom was down in Texas, that he’d been there for two weeks. They didn’t believe her. But they couldn’t find Dom neither.”
“Where is he now?”
“Compton. With Etta.”
“Etta’s here?”
“Yeah. After you two killed that white man she decided to come back. You gonna help me with Domaque, Easy? You know you owe me after all the shit I gone through.”
There it was, the offer of redemption. I could pay Mouse back for the guilt I’d taken on. I just nodded. What else could I do?
“YEAH, EASE,” Mouse opined as we drove south toward Compton. “You ain’t got no reason to feel guilty. The way I see it it helped me gettin’ shot and all.”
“Helped you how?”
“Well, you know I was so upset back then, wonderin’ if all the violence I lived through was wrong. But when Jo patched me up she said that I’m just a part of a big ole puzzle, a piece. I fit in where I go and I do what I do. She said that and it stuck with me. Now I’m just fine with who I am.”
Etta’s new house wasn’t as nice as the servants’ quarters of the mansion she lived in, in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was a small wooden cottage on a street of wooden cottages—all of them painted white. The only protection her little home had from harm was a wire fence that was twelve feet long and three-and-a-half feet high.
Mouse opened the gate and we scaled the three granite steps to the door. Before he could get his key into the lock it came open.
“Hey, Ray!” Domaque shouted. “Easy Rawlins!”
He was almost exactly the same as the last time I’d seen him, in the summer of 1939. Barrel-chested and lopsided, drooling and full of glee.
“I saw you comin’!”
“You don’t have to shout and spray like that, Dom,” Mouse said. “Damn.”
I offered my hand to Dom and he almost crushed it.
“Good to see you, Dom,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Wanna go fishin’ like we did back in Pariah?” he asked.
The outing came back to me with all the pain of those miserable days. I was coming down with a virus that nearly finished me. Mouse took Dom and me fishing with a pistol instead of a pole. He stunned the fish by shooting
