out what to do next. Call me, hear?”
BUT LADUKE DIDN’T CALL. I waited, did some push-ups, worked my abs, and then took a shower. I dried off and put some Husker Du on the platter, then a Nation of Ulysses, and turned the volume way up. When the music stopped, I left a second message for LaDuke and sat around for another hour. Then I got my ten-speed out and rode it a hard eight miles, came back to the apartment, and took another shower. I dropped a frozen dinner in the oven, ate half of it, threw the rest away. I made a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette and smoked the cigarette out on my stoop. By then, it was evening.
I dres sed in a black T-shirt and jeans, put an old pair of Docs on my feet, laced them tightly. I went into my bedroom and opened the bottom dresser drawer, looking for my gun. The gun was gone; I had dumped it in the trunk of LaDuke’s Ford after the warehouse job. I thought about my homemade sap and a couple of knives I had collected, but I left them alone. I went back out to the living room, looked through the screen door. The night had come fully now, the moths tripping out in the light of the stoop. My cat came from the kitchen and brushed against my shin. I picked up the phone and dialed LaDuke.
“Jack,” I said, speaking to the dead-air whir of his machine, “I’m going down there, to the warehouse. “It’s…” I looked at my watch, “It’s nine-forty-five. I’ve got to go down there, man. I’ve gotta see what’s going on.”
I stood there, listening to the quiet of my apartment and the rainlike hiss of the tape. My heart skipped and my hand tightened on the receiver.
“LaDuke!” I shouted. “Where the fuck are you, man?”
TWENTY-THREE
I started the Dodge and headed downtown. On North Capitol, between Florida and New York avenues, the people of the neighborhood were out, sitting on trash cans and stoops, their movements slow and deliberate. Later, passing through the Hill, the sidewalks were empty, the residents cocooned in their air-conditioned homes. Then in Southeast, by the projects, the people were outdoors again, shouting and laughing, the drumbeat of bass and the sputter of engines and the smell of reefer and tobacco smoke heavy in the air.
I turned onto Half and drove into a darkened landscape of line and shadow, animation fading to architecture. And then it was only me, winding the car around short, unlit streets, past parked trucks and fenced warehouses and silos, to the intersection of Potomac and Half.
I pulled behind a Dumpster and killed the engine. There was the tick of the engine, no other sound. A rat ran from beneath the Dumpster and scurried under the fence of an empty lot. I lit a cigarette, hit it deep. I had a look around.
The knock-over warehouse sat still and abandoned, no cars in the lot, a police tape, wilted and fallen, formed around the concrete stoop.
Across the street, near the steel door of the second warehouse, two LIGHTING AND EQUIPMENT vans and the Buick Le Sabre were parked behind a fence topped with barbed wire.
I looked up at the east face of the building: A fire escape led to a second-story sash window. Behind the window, a pale yellow light glowed faintly from the depths of a hall. I dragged on my cigarette. Ten minutes later, I lit another. Through the second-story window, a shadow passed along the wall. The shadow disintegrated, and then it was just the pale yellow light.
I pitched my cigarette and stepped out of my car. I crossed the street.
Putting my fingers through the fence, I climbed it, then got over the double row of barbs without a stick. I swung to the other side of the fence, got halfway down its face, and dropped to the pavement in a crouch. My palms were damp; I rubbed them dry on the side of my jeans. Staying in the crouch, I moved across the lot to the bricks of the building.
I touched the wall, put myself flat up against it. My heart pumped against the bricks. I could hear it in my chest, and the sound of my breathing, heavy and strained. Sweat burned my eyes and dripped down my back. I blinked the burn out of my eyes. I waited for everything to slow down.
The air moved in back of me as I stepped away from the wall. I started to turn around, stopped when something cool and metallic pressed against the soft spot behind my ear. Then the click of a hammer and the hammer locking down.
“Don’t shoot me,” I said.
Coley’s voice: “You came back. Damn, you know? I was hoping you would.”
“You don’t have to shoot me,” I said.
“You’ll live a little longer,” he said, “if you keep your mouth shut. You’d like to live a little while longer, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Coley pushed the muzzle in on my skin. “You alone?”
I nodded.
“Walk to the door,” Coley said.
He kept the gun against my head, put his hand on my shoulder, and pushed me along the wall to the steel door at the wall’s end. I looked up, saw the window at the top of the fire escape, saw that it was open-the only way out, if I got the chance. Then we were at the end of the wall.
Coley reached over my shoulder and knocked on the door.
“Listen to this,” he said with a chuckle. “My redneck friend Sweet, he’s gotten all jumpy and shit since you and your pretty sidekick fucked up his face.”
Sweet’s voice came from behind the door. “Yeah?”
“It’s Coley, man. Lemme in.”
“Prove it,” Sweet said.
“I’ll prove it all over your narrow ass. Open this motherfucker up. Right now.”
I stood there, staring at the door, unable to raise spit, not wanting the door to open.
“Open it, Sweet,” said Coley. “I got someone here you been wantin’ to see.”
The door opened. Coley pushed between my shoulder blades, and then we were inside. Sweet closed the door, slid a bolt and dropped it, and grinned. He turned the key on the lock and slipped the key in his pocket.
“My, my,” he said. The bruised side of his face had gone to purple and one eye drooped where the socket had caved. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt tucked into jeans. The knife-in-skull tattoo contracted on his tightly muscled, drug-thin forearm as he reached behind his back. He pulled his gun and lightly touched the barrel to my cheek. The gun was a. 22.
“My, my,” he said again.
“Let’s take him upstairs,” Coley said.
Sweet stroked at the hairs of his billy-goat beard. “Right.”
I walked between them down a hall that was empty, then into a large room crowded with garden tools and machinery. In the center of the room was an oak table and some chairs, where several men were seated. I could see a scale on the table, amid many bottles of beer, but I didn’t linger on the setup, and I didn’t look any of the men in the eye. Coley kept walking, and I stayed behind him. Once in a while, Sweet prodded me on the neck with the muzk wbut zle of the. 22, and when he did it, a couple of the men at the table laughed. One of them made a joke at Sweet’s expense, then all of them laughed at once, and Sweet prodded me harder and with more malice.
Coley cut left at an open set of stairs. I followed, relieved to be going out of the large room. We took the stairs, which were wooden and did not turn, up to the second floor, through an open frame, Sweet’s footsteps close behind me. Then we turned into another hall with offices of some kind on either side, the offices windowed in corrugated glass. Through one open door, I saw an old printing press, and I noticed that the outside windows had been bricked up. The hallway of corrugated glass ended and the room widened, shelved floor to ceiling, with paints, thinners, glass jars, brushes, and rags on the shelves. Then there was a bathroom, its outside window bricked up, and then an open door, where Coley turned and stepped inside. I followed, noticing before I did the window leading to the fire escape at the end of the hall. Sweet came into the room behind me and shut the door.
“Keep your gun on him,” Sweet said.
“Yes, sir,” Coley said, amused.
