“I need to see that letter, Mr. Rawlins.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know you do.”
“Can you bring it to me?”
“No. No, sir. I’m scared. I’ve been tryin’ to call Faith, but she doesn’t answer. You know I think somethin’ might’a happened to her.”
“I need that information, Mr. Rawlins.”
“I could send it to you,” I said.
“No. Bring it to me today. We have to move on this quickly. There’s no time to wait for the post office.”
It was my turn to be silent.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Bunting said.
“Is there some kinda reward for this if I give it to you?”
“If the letter leads to an indictment, we can pay maybe five hundred,” he said.
“Dollars?”
“Yeah.”
“I know this house over near Sixty-fourth and Hooper.” I gave him the address while checking my watch for the time. It was 11:17 in the morning. “Meet me there at four. I can get there by then.”
He made sure of the address and then told me to be there or he’d have the police put out a warrant for my arrest.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “I sure will.”
I went back to my roof perch after that. While waiting, I thought about Bonnie in a distant, almost nostalgic way. So much had happened that I could hardly feel the broken heart. Bonnie would have understood what I was doing. She didn’t believe in sitting still when a crime had been committed. In some ways she was like Christmas.
At 12:11, Sammy Sansoam and Timothy Bunting pulled up in front of the abandoned house. Sammy slipped through the gate and went around the back while Tim loitered on the sidewalk for a minute or two. Then the colonel, or ex-colonel or whatever he was, wandered toward the front door. By the time he’d gotten there, Sammy appeared. They looked around and then disappeared into the house.
“MELVIN SUGGS.” He answered on the first ring.
“Hey.”
“Easy? What you got for me?”
“I got it on very good sources that somebody saw Pericles Tarr in the flesh. He’s holed up with a girl named Pretty Smart.”
“Where?”
“CAPTAIN RAUCHFORD.”
“He here. Right ovah there on Hooper an’ Sixty-four,” a deep voice from somewhere inside me rumbled. “It’s the little house on the big empty lot. They’s six of ’em in there. I heard my girlfriend talkin’ to ’em on the line.”
“Who is this?” Rauchford asked, and I hung up the phone in his ear.
THE BIGGEST MISTAKES run smooth and sure. The German army cut through Russia like a hot bayonet into a vat of butter. But they drowned in their own oily excrement.
I was having these thoughts when the first of the police cars arrived out there in front of Jewelle’s investment. Twenty cops deployed themselves while I aimed my gun. A crowd of bystanders was forming, but none of them were in the line of fire.
I pulled the trigger. The silent shot fired over the heads of the police. I had been a marksman during the war. I was sure that I’d hit the windowpane. I shot again and again, but nothing happened.
Captain Rauchford was preparing to use a megaphone to warn Mouse and his cohorts. The policemen had their rifles at the ready.
I fired again, and the front window of the small house shattered.
That was all Rauchford’s men needed. They opened fire. The bystanders reacted quickly, men ducking low and women screaming. Smoke began to rise from the phalanx of executioners. Children froze, watching while the policemen fired their weapons. They kept on shooting until the walls looked like a colander, until those same walls caved in and the roof collapsed, until the gas main was struck and flames leaped up from the ruins.
For five minutes, the policemen fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded again.
After Rauchford gave the cease-fire, I walked on my belly to the trapdoor and carried my air gun down the stairs and through the dark pathway to my car. I drove away without looking back. I wasn’t happy for the deaths I’d conjured, but I wasn’t feeling sad either.
When I got to my motel room, I called Lynne Hua’s apartment.
“Hello.”
“It’s Easy, Lynne.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Your voice,” she said. “You sound like a dead man.”
“Let me talk to Mouse.”
