Suddenly I remembered Minor.
“Fearless! Watch out!” I yelled.
I stumbled up on top of the desk and then fell right on the corpse of the traitor. The shot from Tricks’s gun had found the mark.
“Shit!” Fearless shouted.
“I’m dyin’,” Milo moaned.
Both men were bleeding — Fearless from his left hand and Milo from his upper arm. I went to Milo and pulled off his jacket, then I ripped the shirt off his back. I wadded the shirt up and pressed it against the wound.
“Hold it tight,” I told him.
“I can’t,” he cried.
“You don’t and you’ll keep on bleedin’,” I said. “An’ you know there’s only so much you got to give.”
Milo grabbed the bandage, and I went to Fearless. He was holding a handkerchief on the wound of his left hand and searching the floor with his eyes.
“Damn!” Fearless cursed. “Damn!”
“What, man? What!” I cried.
“My goddamned baby finger,” Fearless said. “Muthahfuckah shot it off!”
“We got to go, man!”
“Not without my finger.”
“What?”
Fearless grabbed my shirt with his good hand and pulled me up close. “Wake up, Paris. That finger got my fingerprint on it.”
I took a deep breath, and in that forced semblance of calm I said, “You get Milo to the bottom of the stairs. I’ll find the finger and be down in a minute.”
Milo yelled in pain when Fearless helped him to his feet. They struggled over the four dead men, climbed through the door, and went shuffling and groaning down the hall.
I turned on the overhead light and searched the bloody scene. I looked all over the floor, under the desk, and even under the four corpses. I was in a kind of shock, sifting around. I got lost there among the dead. At one point I sat down on the floor next to Tricks. He had collapsed into a seated position, looking like a puppet waiting for someone to pull his string. I looked at him, wondering who he was and what had brought him to this final moment. Then I thought that if I was lucky, I’d read about it in tomorrow’s evening edition; if not, I’d find out at my trial.
Down on the floor, next to the man’s knee, was a finger, a curved little digit with a wad of bulging red flesh pressing out where the knuckle should have been. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I got to my feet. I retrieved my discarded pistol and headed for the stairs.
As I walked from the room, Tricks fell over on his side.
34
I JOINED Fearless and Milo, who were hunkered down by the side door. Being the only man not wounded, I was elected to get the car. I drove up to the sidewalk, and Fearless hustled Milo out and into the backseat. They both laid low back there while I drove down the fairly empty streets.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. There I was, a black man driving down the streets of white Los Angeles with no reason that a cop could imagine — except mischief. And what could I say if he pulled us over and found two wounded men in the backseat?
“Fearless.”
