“Yeah.”
“Why?” There was pain in Milo’s voice.
“I don’t know, but if I don’t do somethin’ soon, they might burn me down too.”
“Shit, Paris. What did you do?”
I pondered his question. I had asked it a hundred times of Fearless Jones. I couldn’t believe the trouble he’d get into and all he would say is,
“I’on’t know, man. Maybe God looked down and saw all the shit I done got away wit’ an’ decided to mete out my punishment just when things started to get good.”
“Amen,” Milo said. “Amen to that.” He shook his head and smiled, then he looked at his watch. “It’s too late to get him out today. I’ll drop by the courthouse on my way home and make the arrangements, but we have to go get him tomorrow mornin’. Where you gonna sleep tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Loretta,” Milo called across the room.
“Yes, Mr. Sweet?” she replied.
“Pull out the cot. Paris is gonna be our watchdog tonight.”
“Yes sir.”
AT FIVE-THIRTY, when Milo and Loretta went home, I started going through the phone books of L.A., looking for Love. I found four listings. I called the numbers, asking for Elana, but of the two that were still connected there was no clue. The two that had been disconnected were an Alvin Love in Santa Monica, which I doubted would be fruitful, and an E. E. Love on Twenty-eighth Street.
I lay back and read the newspaper after exhausting the phone book. Then I had a notion. In the phone book there was only one Tannenbaum. The first name was David, not Sol, but his address in East Los Angeles was the same one Elana had given to me the day before, on Hazzard. We’d been headed to his house when Leon and his friend tried to run us down. I considered dialing the number, but then I held back. One thing I was sure of: surviving Leon Douglas was going to take more subtlety than a call announcing how smart I was.
I turned out the lights at about nine. Milo’s canvas cot was no more than a stretcher held aloft by crossed sticks of oak at either end. I lay there, the wounded soldier, the man who never asked for war and wouldn’t benefit from its outcome.
Up until that moment I had been going on reflex: running and hiding. But on that stretcher, in that coffin- shaped room, with only the occasional squawk of a dreaming hen to break the silence, I decided what I needed and what I had to do. It didn’t matter that I was small and weak or even that I begged for my life when that man was slapping me. None of that mattered because that bookstore was what made me somebody rather than just anybody. Burning down my store was just the same as shooting me, and somebody would have to make restitution for that crime.
LORETTA WAS in at eight o’clock exactly. I made coffee for her in the little kitchenette that they had built in the closet.
“Nine years with Mr. Sweet and he never even bought me a coffee,” she said, smiling at me.
I had put away the folding cot under the kitchenette counter and returned all of the phone books. Loretta went to her desk and started working immediately. I sat at Milo’s desk, thinking how lucky I was to have friends.
Milo shamed me with his generosity. Here I was trying to bail Fearless out of jail, but there was no kindness to it. I needed his protection and peculiar kind of smarts.
Fearless wasn’t a bright man, at least not in straightforward thinking. He only read at a sixth-grade level even though he had finished high school. A child could beat him at checkers two times out of three. But Fearless could survive in the harshest environments. He could tell you if a man was going to pull out a gun or cry. You could fool Fearless Jones sometimes, but he always seemed to make the right choices when the chips were down. And he had eyes in the back of his head.
But the best thing about Fearless was the attribute he was named for; he didn’t fear anything, not death or pain or any kind of passion. That’s why women loved him unconditionally. Because he wasn’t afraid of their fire.
MILO CAME IN at ten-thirty, but he didn’t even sit down.
“Messages?” he asked Loretta.
“Nothing to look at,” she said without looking up.
“Come on, Paris,” Milo said.
