Fearless was moving from the first body and going to the second. I jumped out of the car.
“We got to go, man!” I shouted through a whisper.
The soldier ignored me. The second body was still moving. The first man, who was sprawled out on his belly, was Reverend Grove. His left temple was gone, and grim dark liquid had leaked out next to his amazed eye.
The other man was Latham. Fearless squatted down next to him. The wound in his chest looked bad even in that weak light. His breathing was labored and liquid. There was no mistaking his gurgling. The rest of his life would be measured in seconds.
He said something, and then he said something else that resembled the first sound but was even less comprehensible.
“Come on, man,” I said to Fearless.
Latham faded out then. I think that was the moment he died, but the final end might have come a moment or two later.
Fearless stood. He nodded and said, “There was somebody else.”
“What?”
“When I got here, there was somebody way up the alley — runnin’.”
“Come on, Fearless. We gotta get outta here.”
“What about the runner?”
I noticed a purse on the ground a few feet farther down the alley. Fearless saw it too.
As he went to pick it up, I said, “Probably some tramp didn’t wanna get his ass shot off.”
Fearless picked up the purse, and then we were both running for my car. I backed into the street and drove away from the motel. Through the rearview mirror I could see that there were people standing outside of the windowed office, talking and pointing toward my car.
After a block or two Fearless began laughing. He laughed full out.
“What’s wrong with you, fool?” I said, afraid that he had cracked under the strain.
“Nuthin’,” was all Fearless could say for a moment. He had to take a deep breath to keep the mirth down.
“Nuthin’? Have you gone crazy?”
“Naw, Paris. Naw, man. It’s you.”
“Me what?”
“You know I promised myself a long time ago that I wasn’t gonna put myself back in a war for nuthin’, not even America.”
“So?”
“This right here is war, baby,” he said, suddenly serious. “And where my own country couldn’t make me — you did.”
He made another short bark, but this time there was no humor behind it.
24
IT WASN’T UNTIL I was parking down the street from Arthur’s Pet Shop and Animal Grooming that my hands stopped shaking. The side door to Arthur’s led to three rooms that made up an after-hours club that a few dozen regulars kept in business. In order to get to Arthur’s you had to come in the back alley and park at least a block away. It wasn’t a party place or a music hall; there wasn’t any dance floor. All it was was a jukebox and Nathan Wellman, an insomniac tailor who ran the place to make a few extra dollars while having people to talk to between midnight and dawn.
Nathan brought two generous shots of whiskey to our table.
“You boys look serious,” Nathan said as a conversation opener.
“I need to use the phone, Nate,” I replied.
He gave me a sour look and went over to the mahogany bar, returning with a baseball bat that had a hole drilled in the handle. Through the hole was knotted a string that held a single brass key.
Nathan’s place was a dive. The wood floor wasn’t sealed or waxed, the walls were devoid of paint. The tables and chairs were mismatched and wobbly. But for all that it was primitive, Nathan’s had something that even the Waldorf Astoria in New York City couldn’t brag about; he had a telephone
