boy came into the house. All he said was that Sammy Blue was waiting outside the gate. Sammy didn’t want to buy anything; he just wanted to talk to me about something.
Sammy Blue knew I sold drugs, but that was all he knew. He didn’t have a clue about the real work I did, or who I did it for. There was no way for him to have known I was just about ready to get out of the drug business. I’d only sold the drugs when I had no other way to get the money I needed for my plan. But, now that I did, drug dealing was too much risk for too little gain.
But I knew what Sammy Blue did for his money—there weren’t too many around here that didn’t. So, before I went outside, I put my pistol under the blanket I always kept over my lap.
Tory-boy saw me do that. He knew what it meant. When he came with me to the gate, he wasn’t just pushing my wheelchair. The dogs were quiet, but they glared at Sammy Blue hard enough to burn holes through him.
I met Sammy Blue at the gate. I ignored the hand he offered me to shake. I wasn’t inviting him to pass through, and he wasn’t crazy enough to push the gate open without permission. There were a lot of rumors about what would happen to anyone who put their hands on that heavy wrought iron without getting the okay from me first. Every one of them true.
“Esau, I drove over here—”
“The dogs aren’t for sale,” I cut him off. “And they’re not going in one of your matches, either.”
“You haven’t heard my offer,” he said, smiling like the two-faced, forked-tongue snake that he was.
“You don’t have any offer to make me. Those are Tory-boy’s dogs. He doesn’t want them sold. He doesn’t want them hurt. He doesn’t want to breed them to anything of yours. What my brother wants is for his dogs to stay here. With him.”
“Come on, Esau. You’re the one in charge here. What’s it matter what that—?”
I couldn’t let him finish that sentence. Whatever Sammy Blue had intended on saying died in his throat when he heard the sound of the hammer being pulled back. Maybe I didn’t have legs that worked, but my arms and hands are potent weapons. They got built up from all the years of them doing the work they had to do—before Tory-boy came along, and even more later, from taking care of him. Then it was those exercises, all those weights Tory-boy did with me every day. That’s how I taught him to count, and now it was a habit. One he cherished.
I held that Colt Python .357 in my left hand. It stayed as cold and steady as the steel it was made from.
“Don’t say another word,” I told Sammy Blue. “And don’t come back. I so much as see you around here, you’re dead where you stand.”
Later, I explained to Tory-boy that Sammy Blue hadn’t followed the rules about the drugs we sold, so I had run him off.
Tory-boy knew I could do that—he’d seen it for himself enough times, even if he couldn’t understand how I did it—so I didn’t have to explain things any deeper than I had.
If I’d’ve told my baby brother what Sammy Blue had wanted to do with his dogs, Tory-boy would’ve walked through the gate, pulled Sammy Blue apart, and tossed the pieces back over the fence. That way, we wouldn’t have to bother with burying him.
I couldn’t have allowed that. Sammy Blue had too many cop friends—he couldn’t have stayed in business otherwise. Like I said, the dogfighting was no secret. Sammy Blue’s operation generated cash that went straight to the Law—it was such small potatoes that neither of the two mobs that ran things around here was tapping it for a cut.
n fact, that was the biggest problem with the cops around this way—they weren’t as picky as the gang bosses. “Small-time greedy” is how we say it.
One day, the light started flashing in the house. Tory-boy went outside to check for money in the mailbox. But when he came back, I could see he was troubled.
“There’s a man out there, Esau. A man in a suit.”
“Did he say anything?” I knew Tory-boy could repeat things word for word, provided they weren’t too long, or hadn’t been said too long ago.
“He said: ‘Would you ask Mr. Till if I could have a few minutes of his time?’ ”
I knew when Tory-boy spoke like that, slow and careful, each word separate, he was as accurate as any tape recorder.
It was good that it had been such a nice warm day. Tory-boy had the dogs trained to let someone through the gate if he told them to. That way I could use the side yard for any conversations I might want to have.
But there wasn’t any way the dogs would let a stranger into our house. It was their house, too. That’s where they slept. If a leaf fell off a tree in the night, they’d all jump up. No barking, but I could tell by their cocked ears and the fur on their backs that they were ready.
I met the man outside, in the spot that got the most sun. In the nice weather, me and Tory-boy kept a little table and a couple of chairs out there. He especially loved it when it was just the two of us.
If you were to drive by, you’d just see two men, sitting back and sipping some lemonade while they talked. From that perspective, we both looked like a couple of pals shooting the breeze. Maybe that’s what he liked the best of all.
But that day, Tory-boy stayed over with the dogs. He was always protecting me. If he saw anything bad happen, I knew he’d rush that man in the suit like a charging bull. I also knew the dogs would get to that man faster than Tory-boy ever could.
And that the sight of a gun pointed their way wouldn’t have meant a thing to any of them.
So the man could … Well, he could do just about anything he wanted to me. But he’d never leave our property alive, and he looked smart enough to know that.
He had real manners on him, too. Before he took the seat across from me, he said, “My name is R. T. Speck, Mr. Till. I’m a police officer.” If standing with his back to Tory-boy and the dogs caused him any worry, he didn’t show it.
He held out his hand, and we shook.
“Please have a seat, sir,” I told him.
That “sir” wasn’t politeness—it was to tell him that I wasn’t going to be telling him anything else.
“Would you happen to know a young man by the name of Lonnie Manes, Mr. Till?”
“No, sir,” I said. It was the truth.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “We caught this boy—Lonnie Manes, I’m talking about now—we caught him breaking into Henderson’s.”
Henderson’s was what folks called the pharmacy, after the man who’d started it, a long time ago. His name wasn’t on the door anymore—the pharmacy had been taken over by one of those big chains a while back—but it was still “Henderson’s” to us.
“That boy is about as stupid as they come. If there’s one place in town that has top-quality security, it’d be Henderson’s. They’ve even got a central-station alarm in there.”
I stayed quiet, but I was secretly proud that this cop showed me respect by not explaining what kind of alarm that was.
“He was after the drugs, of course,” the cop said, like saying water is wet. “We caught him walking out the back door with a whole sackful of stuff.”
I didn’t say anything, but I used my body position to tell him to go on talking. He hadn’t driven all the way out here to give me a news report.
“I’m sure you know how police work is done, Mr. Till. I—” He stopped in his tracks, realizing he’d stepped over a line, but he covered up quick: “I mean, from television and all.”
I nodded. Even smiled just a little, letting him know I wasn’t offended.
“We told Lonnie that he’d been carrying enough drugs in that sack to send him down to the penitentiary for the rest of his natural life. Before we were even finished telling him that, he was telling us about everything he could think of. Everything that might make us go easier on him, I mean.”
I just watched the man. The sunlight was strong on his face, and I could see he was older than I’d first thought. I could see right through his eyes, all the way into his brain. My silence was bothering him, so he was considering. Thinking about what to do next.
“You mind?” he said, holding up a pack of cigarettes.
