I looked back to see Fearless and Whisper running toward a recessed doorway. Then I saw a movement above. It was a window coming open just as Fearless approached the darkened entrance.
“Fearless!” I screamed. “Up above your head!”
My friend took flight without even a glance upward. A rifle appeared at the window. Whisper came into view and pressed himself against a wall. When the first shot came, I expected to see the nondescript detective crumple and fall, but instead the bullet ricocheted two feet from where I lay. I looked up at the window, trying to understand how the assassin’s shot could have been so far off. The next shot shattered a barbershop window next to my head, and I understood in a flash that Whisper 249
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had made himself invisible, and I, with my loud cry, was the only target in sight.
Instead of running, I looked for Whisper. He was gone.
A series of shots exploded inside the assassins’ hiding place across the street from Good News. I could see them glimmer weakly through the windows.
I got myself to a standing position and staggered away, around the corner. There I leaned against a wall, breathing as if I had just run a mile.
More gunshots.
A siren sounded somewhere.
The sirens continued. I moved down the street and into an alley. I crouched behind a group of metal cans.
“What’s happenin’?” someone hissed, and I almost leaped up.
Behind me on a ledge big enough to hold him was a man who’d made his bed there. He was black and dressed in nighttime grays. There was hair all over his face and a frightened glint in his eyes.
The sirens were getting louder.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was walkin’ down the street an’ all of a sudden there was shots.”
Three police cars careened down the street I had run from.
“Who was it?” the alley dweller asked.
“Loud and Dangerous,” I said.
My new friend and I waited a while. There were no more shots. After a few minutes there was shouting: military-like orders were being given. At that point I got up and walked down toward the hubbub — just a neighborhood resident wondering what was going on.
There were at least a dozen people in front of Good News, 250
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gaping at the commotion across the street. Smaller groups of Watts’s denizens appeared on stoops and in the street.
The police were taking five men from the building, all of them in handcuffs. Whisper and Fearless were among the prisoners. They’d be arrested, but that was all right; both men were certified to take in bail jumpers.
I saw Albert Rive, his brawny body sagging under the beating that Fearless had surely given him. The other men, except for Fearless and Whisper, also seemed a little worse for wear.
The moon hung at the end of the street. Under its constant stare a paddy wagon came, gathered my friends and their quarry, and took them someplace where Milo could go and set things straight.
“Hey, Paris,” a man said from behind me. His hand on my shoulder weighed as much as a Christmas ham.
“Jerry.”
“Wasn’t that Fearless in there with them?”
“Was it?”
“That why you boys hangin’ out around here?” he asked.
“Layin’ for Al Rive?”
“Did Lionel Sterling call you, Jerry?” I asked.
That slapped the smug certainty off the amphibian’s face.
“Yeah,” he breathed.
“He tell you to tell Useless to call him?”
“If that’s what Ulysses say, then maybe so.”
“You know a man named Hector LaTiara?”
“Never heard of him.”
“What about —”
“I have to go in now, Paris,” he said. “You got what you 251
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wanted. The next time I see ya, yo’ mouth bettah be filled with Ha Tsu’s noodles.”
Jerry turned his back on me and walked up the stairs to Good News.
I rummaged through my pockets, looking for Mum’s phone number. When I found it I felt as though I had located something precious, like a doctor’s prescription for a whole life’s worth of pain.
