tabletop, saying, “You can just leave it here.”
When the waitress had gone, I asked Faith, “Do you know how I can get in touch with Christmas?”
“No.”
“Can I do anything for you?”
“You could give me a ride to my apartment.”
“Aren’t you going back to work?”
“I told the manager that I was going to meet you, and he told me that I had to stay at my desk. So I quit. I would have done it soon anyway. It’s just too hard trying to pretend that everything’s fine.”
FAITH HAD a beachside courtyard apartment down in Venice. I walked her to the secluded entrance. She turned to me. It seemed that the easiest thing in the world at that moment would have been to throw that door open wide, carry her across the threshold, and make love until the sun set and then rose again. These thoughts seemed to be in both our minds as we stood there.
“Christmas didn’t tell you anything to do in case of emergency?” I asked.
“He gave me a number to call,” she said, and then she recited it.
“That’s my phone,” I said.
“Easy,” she said in mild surprise. “Short for Ezekiel.”
Damn.
“Will you call me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Will you come visit?”
“Definitely.”
24
I drove a long way with nothing but the notion of the Blonde Faith in my mind. She’d been blindsided by the power of her own commitment to life. Not only did she know what was right, she did something about it. And now her charity had betrayed her; her own husband had given her up to assassins.
I understood at last why Christmas had brought Easter to me. He also believed that the military men could get at Faith despite police protection. He was going after the men on his own, and judging by the body count, he was doing a good job.
I had solved the mystery. I knew the players, their reasons, and the danger they posed. The right choice now was to go home and be with my family. But the idea of home was like a coffin to me. Jesus and Benita would take care of the children, and I’d continue my investigations for no good reason except that it kept up my momentum.
But even at that fevered point in my life, I wasn’t so foolish as to believe that I could continue on my way without backup.
So I found myself driving to Watts and through Watts on the way to Compton, an ever-growing Negro enclave.
I kept going until I hit a street named Tucker and took that until a dead-end stand of overgrown avocados stopped me.
I parked half on asphalt and half on hard soil, got out, and pressed my way through dense leaves and thorny bushes until I came to a door that seemed more like a portal to another world than an entrance to a house. You couldn’t even see the home behind it, just trees and leaves, the dirt beneath your feet, and the hint of sky above.
It was like the house that Mama Jo had lived in in the swamplands outside of Pariah, Texas. I never knew how she found such a place in Southern California. It seemed as if she had conjured it out of her own knotty desires.
I was about to knock when the door came open. Tall and black-skinned, ageless, handsome, and bristling with power, Mama Jo smiled upon me. I suspected that she had some kind of alarm system like Christmas Black employed, but it could have been that she really was a witch who could sense when those she loved or danger approached.
“I been waitin’ for ya, Easy,” she said.
I wondered as to her meaning. Waiting for what of me?
We had made love once, more than two decades before, when I was nineteen and she was around forty. She was maybe an inch shorter; that and a few gray hairs were all that marked the passage of years.
“Jo.”
She put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into her witch’s den. The floor was swept earth. The walls were shelves lined with glass and crockery containing herbs and dried animal parts. The fireplace was actually a hearth where a small pig was roasting on a spit. Above the fireplace was a shelf that held the skulls of twelve armadillos, six on either side of a human skull, the keepsake that Jo kept of her son’s father — both named Domaque.
“How’s Dom?” I asked as I sat on the wooden bench at her big ebony wood table.
“On a commune up north.”
“A commune?”
