“Yeah.”
“You got some money in there?”
“What you gettin’ at?”
“You might even have a Bank Americard, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“One day all your money gonna be in this language here.” He waved the manual again. “One day I’ma push a button and all the millionaires’ chips gonna fall inta my wagon.”
Jackson grinned from ear to ear. I wanted to slap him, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Here he was the smartest man you could imagine, and all he could think about was theft.
“Roke Williams,” I said.
“Niggah was born in the alley and he gonna die in one too. Right down there offa Alameda.”
“Who runs him?”
“Was a dude named Pirelli, but he got circulatory problems.”
“Heart attack?”
“Kinda like. A bullet through the heart. Now it’s a man named Haas. He’s a slick bita business run his people outta the Exchequer on Melrose.”
“How about a man named Lund?”
Jackson squinted and brought his long thumbs together. “No. Don’t know no Lund. What’s this all about, Easy?”
I told Jackson about the smoke bomb and Cousin.
When I finished he said, “So? What do you care about all that, man? It ain’t your house.”
“It’s my job.”
“Your job is to make sure that the toilets don’t smell and that the trash cans is emptied. You not no bomb squad.”
I remember trying to dismiss Jackson’s argument as some kind of cowardly advice, but even then there was a grain of truth that made it through.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it now.”
“You better bring some backup you wanna tango with Haas.”
That reminded me of Mouse. He had been my backup since I was a teenager in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Mouse was crazy, but he was always on my side.
“I got a call this mornin’, Jackson. It was a woman with a deep bass voice—”
“She ask you about Mouse?”
“How you know that?”
“She called me too. Three days ago. Said she was lookin’ for Raymond.”
“What you say?”
Jackson became wary again. He scratched the back of his neck with his left hand and looked off to his left. When he saw that there was no escape route, he turned back to me. “I don’t want no trouble now, Easy.”
“Trouble’s over, man. Mouse is dead.”
“Like you once told me: you don’t know that.”
“I saw him. He wasn’t breathin’ and his eyes were wide. That bullet opened him up like a busted pinata.”
“But you didn’t go to no funeral.”
“Etta carried the body outta the hospital. You know how much she loved him. She probably put him in the ground herself.”
Jackson wrung his hands.
“What did you tell that woman?” I asked.
“Nuthin’. I didn’t tell her a thing.”
“Okay,” I said. “What didn’t you say?”
“You cain’t tell nobody I told, Easy.”
“Fine.”
“A girl named Etheline, Etheline Teaman.”
“What about her?”
“I met her a few weeks back and we started talkin’ shit. I told her ’bout some’a the crazy stuff Mouse done did. You know, just talkin’ jive. She told me that just before she left Richmond she met a gray-eyed, light-skinned brother named Ray. She said he got in a fight one night, and even though he was small, he put down this big dude with a chair, a bottle, and his knee. She didn’t even know Mouse, man. She only moved here from Richmond six months ago.”
