I looked at the man again. There was something open and encouraging about his face. That added to the spreading warmth and goodwill of the wine almost tripped me. Faith Laneer’s death wanted to come out of my mouth. It wanted to beg for her life, to represent her to some higher authority. I wanted to confess to my failure to protect her.
I wanted my mother.
“How much of that wine you got, Jones?”
“Four bottles. But I need to save ’em. I’m what they call wine rich but coin poor.”
I lay on my back in the cold sand and dug a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. I handed the currency to him and he gave me two of his bottles.
We downed my two quarts and then started on his, drinking far into the night. I spent the time avoiding what I wanted to say, what I needed to say. I talked about Raymond without mentioning his name, and Etta and Jackson and Jesus and my mother.
Jones told me that he’d never got living the straight life right.
“Oh, I could get a job all right,” he said. “Go to work a week, maybe two. But then I’d sleep in late one day, get chewed out by the boss, get drunk that night, and miss a whole day or two. Once I met this girl and went up with her to Portland. I was in love until one day I woke up and realized I didn’t know who she was. I guess I lost track of time, ’cause when I got back home there was somebody else livin’ in my apartment. I just couldn’t stay straight no matter what I did. I went to church. They sent me to a psychiatrist. She gave me these drugs.”
“Did that help?” I asked, just to stay on the ride.
“I kept a job for three months, but every day I woke up and looked in the mirror wonderin’ who it was in there.”
Jones just wanted to talk.
When we got near the end of the last bottle of wine, I could really feel it. My fingertips and lips were numb, and the sound of the waves managed, at least partially, to cover the memory of Faith’s death mask.
When a strip of orange appeared over the city, I got down on my side and closed my eyes. I can’t remember if Jones was still talking. Once he started he just kept on going, telling his whole life, skipping backward and forward. He talked about his mother in North Dakota and then his grandmother in Miami. He had a son, I seem to remember . . . Noah. But like everything else in Jones’s life, the boy got lost on the way to the next tale.
43
When I woke up, the sun was bright on the box where I slept. I remembered being cold, but now I was sweating under the gaze of Sol. I sat up with the memory becoming real pain in my head.
Jones was gone. There was nothing left of him in the shelter, not even the empty wine bottles. For a moment I thought my only problem was that I’d gotten drunk for the first time in a decade. But then Faith came back to me, and her death clenched my heart. I rolled to my feet on a wave of nausea and started walking.
THERE WERE NO POLICE cars swarming around Faith Laneer’s address, not yet. They wouldn’t find her for days. By that time it would all be over.
I pointed my car for Compton and stepped on the gas.
Ten blocks away, I stopped at a gas station restroom to urinate, throw up, and wash my face. I stayed in that small blue room for a long while, letting the cold water run over my hands and thinking. I wanted out of that room, out of my thoughts. But there was no outside for me.
THE ADDRESS PERICLES TARR had given me for Mouse was on Compton. I parked right out front and tore from my car as if it were a prison and I was making a break. I stormed up to the front door, no longer worried about what Mouse would think. I needed him now. I needed him to help me kill Sammy Sansoam.
I knocked on the door loudly, muttering to myself about murder and revenge. When my knock wasn’t answered, I banged louder.
I was about to knock a third time when the door opened wide.
And there he was: the man I was looking for. Six foot four with the shoulders of a giant. He had medium brown skin, unsettling light brown eyes, and a white scar on the upper portion of his left cheek.
“Easy?” he said.
“Christmas?” I was completely thrown off by the appearance of my other quarry. “What are you doin’ here?”
“Come on in,” he said, while looking around to make sure there were no other surprises.
I did as he bade me, entering a room that seemed to be a perfect, almost nude, cube. There were two metal folding chairs and a cardboard box for a table on the far corner of the bare pine floor. No paintings on the walls or shelves or even a TV. There was a radio. Aretha Franklin was wailing away at a low volume.
“How’d you find me, Easy?” Christmas asked.
“I didn’t.”
“No? Then what are you doing here?”
“Mouse,” I said.
And like magic, my friend came out of a doorway to the right. In his left hand he was holding his famous .41- caliber pistol.
“Easy,” he said.
“Raymond?”
“I thought you said you was lookin’ for me,” he said, responding to the surprise in my tone.
