“We need to find Black,” Miles said with a reluctantly straight face. “We must find him.”
“I’m not standin’ in your way, brother.”
“How did you locate this apartment?”
“Tooms had been here,” I said.
“Then why didn’t she come here herself?”
“She told me she had only been to his place once, at night. The only thing she remembered was that there was a building across the street with a giant tire on the roof. The minute she said that, I knew the address.”
“So why not just tell her that?” Miles asked.
“You see, man,” I replied airily, “you a niggah like me, but you been in the army too long. They buy your clothes, your food, give you a bed, a car, and a gun. You think you all bad ’cause you in the biggest gang in the world, so you don’t understand when a man be runnin’ aftah a dollar.
“If I had just said to Ginny that I knew where the address was, she’d’a parted with twenty dollars, not three hundred. You got to milk a client just like you would a cow. Ain’t no PX with bottles’a cream out here, just us workin’ niggahs is all.”
If I tied it any tighter someone might have strangled on that lie. My only problem was keeping the smug satisfaction off my face so that Clarence wouldn’t know how good I thought I was.
“Stand down,” Miles said to his men.
The MPs relaxed and took a step back.
“What have you found here, Mr. Rawlins?”
“A cleaner house than I could imagine and one busted picture frame.”
“What was in that?”
“Nuthin’.”
I couldn’t have looked into a woman’s eyes as deeply as Miles stared into mine — not without passion growing out of it.
“We need to find Christmas Black,” he said with a smirk.
“You said that.”
For a minute there the four men in that room might have been manikins we were so still.
“Are you committed to this woman?”
“I ain’t give her no ring or nuthin’.”
“Will you take on the job of finding Christmas Black for the United States government?” he asked.
Life doesn’t travel in a straight line like we think it does. I was positive that these men were the reason Christmas had left his adopted daughter with me. My intention was to lead them on in hopes of finding out what had happened to my friend. But my mind took that information and imagined me coming home over a year ago and telling Bonnie about my adventure. She had been the first person I could share my thoughts with.
The pain that came with the reverie almost sank me. I couldn’t speak because I knew the sob in my chest would come out with whatever words I spoke.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Miles prodded.
I held on to my silence ten seconds more and then said, “You got anything against Miss Tooms gettin’ a line on him?”
“Do you care?”
“I like it when people tell their friends that I did the job they paid me for, yeah.”
“No problem,” the black captain said. “Matter of fact, I’d like to meet this Ginny Tooms.”
“How come?”
“Maybe she knows something about what Black’s been doing.”
“Stickin’ his black dick in her white underage sister is what,” I said, and Miles actually laughed.
“I’ll give you seventy-five dollars,” he said, “as a retainer.”
“You’ll give me three hundred dollars for a week’s worth of lookin’,” I said. “That’s my fee. That’s what everybody else pays. Uncle Sam ain’t no exception.”
“You already been paid for this.”
“Three hunnert dollars or you an’ General King could go jump in a lake.”
I was absolutely sure that Clarence Miles had murdered men with that mirthless grin on his face. He reached into his back pocket and came out with a large secretary-type wallet. He counted out three crisp new one- hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. It was then I knew that whatever he was into, it was illegal.
Honest government men on official business wouldn’t hand out hundred-dollar bills. Since the day it was founded, the army hadn’t given out that high a denomination without a raft of accompanying paperwork.
I took the money, though, and put it in the pocket with the picture of the woman I had christened Ginny Tooms.
“How do I get in touch?” I asked my bent employer.
