“He come here so I can kill him. Old business.”
Burn believed him. For some reason this seemed a perfectly rational and satisfactory explanation. But the question of his son’s whereabouts remained. And the man who held the answer had justhurled himself out of a closed window.
Burn ran toward the door.
Benny Mongrel looked down into the eyes of Fingers Morkel and realized that a great tiredness had enveloped him. It was all he could do to hold the knife in his hand. But he knew, one last time, that there was something he must do.
He took Fingers by the chin and, with the precision of an executioner, lifted his head to bare the neck and sent the blade across the throat.
“Benny Mongrel say goodnight,” he said, and let Fingers slump to the floor.
Then he relaxed his hand and felt the knife slip from his grasp, and, perfectly weighted instrument that it was, it landed blade first in the wooden floor and quivered for a time before, at last, it was still.
By then Benny Mongrel had left the room.
CHAPTER 30
The fat man flew out the window, a trail of blood and glass in his wake, and landed heavily on the sand. As he lay on his back, his great naked chest heaving, the blanket floated down and covered him like a shroud.
People in the street and the adjoining apartments, drawn by the all-too-familiar chatter of small arms, paused when they saw the man plunge. There was a collective gasp when the blanket moved and he sat up. He hauled himself to his feet, and the blanket fell away.
A sharp pair of eyes recognized him beneath the gore, and his name was whispered.
“It’s Gatsby.”
Wheezing, bleeding, and foaming, the fat cop took off down Tulip Street as if he were being pursued by the devil, massive legs pumping.
The cry grew louder. “It’s Gatsby!”
A small boy rolling a bald tire fell in behind Gatsby, following him up the road as women in curlers, hanging over fences, put their gossip on pause as this demonic vision crossed their view.
Farther down Tulip Street, Donovan September lay under a car, parked halfway up on the sidewalk. He was adjusting the exhaust mount, while two of his friends passed him tools and offered advice. He put out his hand for a screwdriver, and it wasn’t forthcoming.
Then he heard one of his friends say, “Jesus, Donovan, you better come look at this.”
Donovan slid out from under the car. As he stood, he wiped the sweat away from his eyes with the back of his hand, not believing what he was seeing. Gatsby, the cop who had put his little brother in the ground, was running up the road, half naked, bleeding. People were trailing in his wake like pilot fish feeding off a harpooned whale.
Donovan picked up a hammer from the hood of the car and stepped out into Gatsby’s path. The fat man didn’t see him, ran straight on. Donovan had to sidestep, or the mountain of fat would have rolled right over him. Donovan stuck out a leg and Gatsby stumbled, teetered for a moment, then toppled like a great beast to the sand.
Donovan stver the felled man, the hammer in his hand. He looked around at the gathering crowd of his neighbors and heard their voice as one. “Do it, Donovan.”
He raised the hammer high and brought it down on the fat cop’s head.
Carmen Fortune walked back from the taxi toward her apartment, still feeling a buzz even though she knew the tik rush was waning. She knew, also, that she was going to have to face the mess in her bedroom. But she had done good. For once she had done the right thing.
After she had smashed the Virgin on Uncle Fatty’s head, she had grabbed the boy, Matt, pulled one of Sheldon’s T-shirts over his head, and run with him. She had not stopped to think until she was in a minibus taxi, the blond kid on her lap, watching the streets of Paradise Park slide past her.
The kid was still groggy from the Mogadon, which was a godsend. She hoped that he would have no memory of what Uncle Fatty had tried to do to him. She knew only too well how those memories burned into your consciousness like a hot wire into flesh.
She ignored the stares and whispers of the other passengers. She knew how it looked, a beat-up colored chickie, blood on her T-shirt, with a white kid.
Fuck them.
She stroked the boy’s hair, and he lifted his face, trying to focus on her. Then his eyes closed again. Sheldon’s T-shirt was too small for him, and it was unwashed, but at least it was better than the pj top with Uncle Fatty’s brains all over it.
She knew she had killed the old man, had felt his head all spongy and soft under the Virgin Mary. Served the bastard right. While she was beating him she had flashed back to memories of her own childhood, and there were moments when, what with the tik and all her rage, she wasn’t sure if she was hammering Uncle Fatty or her own sick fuck of a father.
The taxi slammed to a stop, and passengers fought their way off, while others clambered in. She grabbed the boy and pushed her way out, past the leering sliding-door operator.
“I see where he got his blue eyes,” he said, laughing at her bruises.
She didn’t waste her breath on him, just slung Matt over her shoulder and crossed to the community center. The kid weighed her down. He had big bones, the little bugger.
She pushed through the smear of depressed humanity patiently waiting for nursing sisters and social workers and government grants, until she came to the door of Belinda Titus’s office.
She banged once on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Belinda Titus sat at her desk, fastidiously applying lipstick while she admired herself in a compact mirror. Her freshly painted lips parted like a hooker’s thighs when she saw Carmen.
“I beg your pardon, but you can’t just march in here!” Belinda Titus, indignant, twisted the lipstick back into itself like she was twisting Carmen’s neck.
“I just did,” Carmen said, dumping the boy on the chair facing the social worker.
“What is this?” Belinda Titus demanded. “Who is this chil?”
“His name is Matt. He’s American. I think he was kidnapped.” Carmen was on her way out. She stopped as she opened the door. “By the way,” she said, rubbing a finger across her mouth, “you got lipstick on your teeth.”
She had slammed the door and walked back through the downtrodden and the oppressed, and she had felt better than she had in a long time. She knew it wouldn’t last, but what the fuck, she’d enjoy it while it did.
Then, as she came into Tulip Street, she heard the crowd before she saw them. A low animal roar of bloodlust. Carmen pushed her way through the mob and saw a bloody shape lying in the dust. It took her a few moments to recognize Gatsby. Donovan September was hitting him with a hammer, and some of the other boys and men were putting the boot in. The crowd was roaring its approval, calling for revenge.
Carmen, not able to drag her eyes away, was having serious reality issues. At last she convinced herself that what she was seeing was real, not some tik hallucination, and she heard her voice joining in, calling for the blood of the fat boer.
Burn sprinted up the street in time to see the mob form around Barnard and envelop him. Burn dived in, shoved bodies aside, his white skin and American voice surprising people out of his way.
“Stop! Don’t kill him!”
The boy with the hammer looked up for a moment, paused. Then he went back to his work, smashing Barnard’s head open like a Halloween pumpkin.
Burn tried to level the Mossberg at the boy, but hands in the crowd, like tendrils, took the gun from him. He was jostled, sworn at, and he felt a fist connect with his jaw. Then a rock hit him above the left ear and he dropped to the ground. The crowd became a single organism that lifted him off his feet and moved him to its perimeter,
