had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.
Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”
Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.
Fearless said, “Dog.”
There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.
He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light- colored jacket, blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.
I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.
I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.
“The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.
“Say what?”
“When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious business.”
With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding fear.
Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from a wound in the left side of his chest.
We didn’t split up in the super’s pad. I went with Fearless into the kitchen. I forced my eyes to look everywhere, but they didn’t see much. I had forgotten that I was looking for Elana Love.
A doorway from the kitchen led to the bedroom. There was nothing there except a bloody towel in the middle of an unmade bed.
“Let’s get outta here, man,” I whispered to Fearless.
He nodded sagely, and we went back the way we came.
I expected to see the corpse, but not standing up in front of me.
He still looked dead, and that scared me more than his size. I don’t think he expected someone to come out of the kitchen. Maybe he was going for some water to replace all the blood he’d lost.
“Hold it, man,” Fearless said.
The corpse swung his heavy fist, but Fearless leaned back and then pushed the man with the flat of his hand. A variation on that dance step happened again and again. The dead man kept swinging, and Fearless kept pushing off of him as gently as possible.
“You gonna hurt yourself, man,” Fearless kept saying. “Stop it.”
And he was right too. The man could only swing with his right. He was holding his left hand at a high point on the left side of his chest to keep the blood in. That tactic was not working. The blood cascaded through his fingers, and as the life fluid went, the one-handed fighter started flagging. He wound down like a child’s toy until he was on his knees. Finally he lunged with a roundhouse right that would have clocked Fearless on his left hip if he hadn’t stepped out of the way. The man fell on his face and went back to mimicking the dead.
Fearless quickly turned him over and applied pressure to the wound.
Twice in one day. I should have been at the racetrack. Luck that consistent needed a horse to bet on.
Fearless removed Till’s jacket, T-shirt, and a blood-soaked bandage. He then fashioned a new dressing from the sheet I got off the unkempt bed.
“Let’s get outta here,” I said when he was done.
