And there it was again: that moment of anticipation. That offer of something I wanted—and deserved too.
“No, baby. You take that money, pay your rent, buy some breakfast, and go out and find a good job. After you do all that and you been workin’ a month or two, if you still wanna see me ask Fearless for my number.”
She smiled and kissed me twice. The first kiss was a thank you, the second was a promise.
I drove off thinking that I had done the right thing for the first time since Fearless came banging on my door.
***
I GOT TO MY HOUSE at about one, still happy over those two wet kisses. I was still in a good position. Wexler thought I was working for him and Timmerman was in a hospital bed. Brown seemed to be on our side and Oscar wasn’t any threat. BB was in hiding somewhere, but he thought that I was on his side too. I parked in front of my place and skipped up the front stairs. In a week or two I’d begin to wonder if DeLois would ever call me. In a month I’d worry that she had moved on. But at least that one night I was a knight in shining armor and the princess had only me in her thoughts.
I opened the front door and received what seemed to be my nightly knock in the head. I fell to the floor and heard the door slam. A light came on simultaneously with the sudden deep ache in my head.
I turned on my back and looked up but all I could see for the moment was a looming shadow.
“Surprised to see me, nigger?” the shadow asked.
Nigger? Louis? I had a dozen one-word questions but neither my mind nor my ears were clear enough to provide an answer. The man lifted me by the lapels of my shirt. His breath was rank but unfamiliar. His skin, where it touched mine, was hot.
“Wake up!” he shouted.
The stinging slap across my cheek brought Theodore Timmerman’s face into clarity. He still wore the brown jacket he’d had on the first day he showed up at my door. But now he was wearing green trousers that didn’t cover his ankles. He had the beginnings of a beard around his chin. And his breath smelled like a disease.
“What you want, man?”
“Where’s the book?”
“Fearless got it.”
He slapped me again.
“You think you can fool me? Where is it, bastard?”
“Fearless got it. He does. I’m not lyin’.”
He threw me against the wall. My feet actually left the floor before I struck. I felt the pain in my lungs.
“Where is he?” Timmerman bellowed.
I gave up Ambrosia’s address without even a second’s hesitation. Everything I did for DeLois was washed away in one cowardly moment. Deep in my mind, though, I didn’t believe that Timmerman would ever get the upper hand on my friend.
Then he fell on me. His hands wrapped around my throat and my eyes felt as if they were going to pop out of my head. The pressure increased, and for the first time in the thirty years I had been alive fear left me. I was dying and there were no words to dissuade my killer. There was no Fearless Jones to break in at the last moment. There was nothing but death yawning out under me.
My ears were on fire and my heart was exploding. I started pounding with both of my fists at the point Fearless had tapped Theodore in the chest. There were bandages there now but I was striking him with strength I’d never known before or since. Timmerman released me and fell backwards. I went after him, hitting that bull’s eye again and again until finally I collapsed.
My foeman fell on top of me and I knew that I’d soon be dead. I struggled for a moment, trying to breathe, hurting from my throat. And then I faded into unconsciousness, knowing that I would never awaken again.
39
FEELING AS IF I HAD BEEN TRAMPLED by some prehistoric wooly rhino, I tried to look around. I couldn’t open my eyes all the way, and the light I managed to see was a dingy blue-brown glow. I could barely breathe, feeling as though there was a great stone on my chest. I tried to pry my eyes wider. The world was small and crazy. It was as if maybe a lead blanket had been draped over me and it was slowly pressing the life from my lungs.
Suddenly I came fully awake. I yelled and bucked, rolling the body from on top of me.
Theodore Timmerman, who probably never worked for an insurance company, was lying next to me on his back—wide-eyed and dead. I was on my side thinking about standing up but unable to make the right moves in order to achieve that goal. All I could do was lie there next to a dead man who had come close to killing me. My bones were jelly and my mind was a dull thud. All sensation had fled my body. Only breath remained. Sweet, sweet breath. Breath and death and every once in a while some sound like the house settling or the waterlike whoosh of a car passing down Jefferson.
There were also gurgling sounds emanating from within the corpse that lay mere inches from my ear. The body fluids settling down, headed back for the ground that they rose from. A motor started humming somewhere on the side of the building. A cat yowled and I felt a sharp pain in my left hand.
The fingernail of my ring finger was bleeding, half torn off in the struggle with the big white man. I concentrated on that pain, realizing somehow that if I didn’t I might lose consciousness again or I might even lose my senses completely and lie there until someone found me and called the police, who would then cart me off to prison.
I got up on one elbow, stayed there for what felt like a month, then I rocked up into a sitting position. I was moving fast by then. It took me no longer than five minutes to remember my legs and feet and the possibility of walking.
