Gun still out, the man started the ignition. Said nothing. With a herky-jerk of the steering wheel, he pulled out into the street and roared forward.
James sprinted after him and sent the bat directly into his left taillight, cracking it and spiraling chunks of plastic down the pavement. The van accelerated. James wanted to pursue but stopped, breathing hard. The license plate: FRTNLV. The hell was that?
He coughed, threw the bat on the lawn. Watched the van, now a block ahead—the vehicle’s working taillight a single red glare as the vehicle slowed to take a right turn. Then it was gone.
***
On one knock, Karen answered the door. Dwayne took her firmly by the arm.
“We need to get you out of here,” he said.
Color drained from her complexion. “What?”
“James Cannon. He’s dangerous. You need to get out of here for a while.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Listen,” Dwayne said, “he attacked my van. Broke the driver’s side window because he caught on to me. And a taillight.”
“Why can’t we call the cops on him?”
“I’d rather not deal with them,” Dwayne said. “For one thing my P.I. license is expired, and it’ll be his word that I was following him and that busting my window was a pre-emptive self-defense thing. I also pulled the gun on him. But we should move fast. Better for now to just get you out and lay low. You quit your job anyway, right?”
“What about Max?”
“What about him?”
“Give me time to think,” Karen said, “get my shit together and tell Max. See if he’ll come with us.”
***
III
Twenty minutes before the alarm, Max awoke. Close mournful wails. Sirens. Growing closer, exacerbating the battering ram behind both eyes. The pain spread to his temples. He relaxed his jaw, realizing that he’d been gritting his teeth in his sleep.
He sat up. Aches scrambled needle-footed down his spine. He either had slept wrong or had been thrashed about by one hell of a dream.
Rising noises outside. Somewhere in the street people were shouting, some voices worrisome, others weighted with imminent violence. A fire engine screamed in the distance. Glass shattered from hardly a block away.
Max went to the window and peered out, squinting against the glare of the sun. There was initially nothing too out of the ordinary. Two men hanging out on a brick storefront windowsill, picking at fast food wrappers. A kid running.
He looked southward.
Like some phantom addition to the skyline, a massive gray column of smoke rose through the buildings. First thought: a bomb had gone off. But there had been no explosion, none he’d heard. Max stared, mesmerized, caught in the stasis between revulsion and primal giddy awe.
More sirens erupted.
He tried to resurrect an old radio but found no new batteries. He didn’t want to go outside. The roads appeared relatively calm. Only a handful of cars and people trickling across the pavement. It was all related, though, the aches, the sirens, the shouts, the smoke, the quiet. Something was happening and something was wrong. Wrong enough that perhaps his body had registered it in his sleep, tensing painfully in preparation for whatever unwanted thing stirred now in the gut of the city.
His phone rang. He went to get it.
“Maximo.”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“I’m okay. What’s happened?”
“People are rioting because of the Rodney King trial. Cops got set free.”
Max wasn’t sure how to react.
Dwayne continued, “Most of the rioting is in South Central, but they say there’s some shit going down in your neck of the woods, too. Karen and I are coming over to get you.”
Because I’m the helpless person in grave danger. Thanks. But he couldn’t argue. He was. And who else did he know who had a car? His ticket out of here.
“Okay,” he said.
“On the way.”
He hung up. Suddenly, a crash down below. A scream—a woman’s. He listened to the commotion rolling and banging on the ground floor, echoing up the building. More glass shattered. Voices growing louder, layered, thundering the walls.
Max went to the door, checked the peephole, and saw his neighbor Renaldo standing in the hallway peering down over the railing. Slowly he pulled the door open and emerged beside him.
“Que paso?” said Renaldo. “Esta loco!”
Max said nothing.
“Tengo miedo. Oh, Dios—”
Down in the lobby moved three men in oversized clothes and ball caps. Two of them wielded metal baseball bats. There was a third, too, barely visible from where he stood but certainly the most animated. The man was just outside, flailing above something: a human form, a person lying prostrate, rumpled and bloodied on the sidewalk beneath a barrage of strikes from the third man’s bat. Beating him. Jesus. Max knew the victim. Gonzo. Jesus he’s beating him beating him to death—
Max scurried back into his room, shut the door. More clanging. More police sirens, close, then distant, distant, then close. He was drained of all else, reduced to some white yellowy adrenal core, a tattered rough-sketch of a person. Frantically, he searched for the gold cross but found it nowhere. How could it have disappeared like that?
Voices of the thugs drawing closer, pounding about, ascending the stairs. Outside, the hiccupping roar of a helicopter flying southbound. Others farther away. Some media, probably. Gnats, flies, celebrating a death-stench.
Max huddled on his mattress, stared at his pieces, the Wall, the sketchbooks.
More banging. Closer. Harsh rapping, the force of twenty concussions delivered on his neighbors’ walls and doors. Shouts. Spanish. Broken English. Baby crying and a kid crying.
Another bang, splintered wood and there was a scream—Ms. Feliz, Max surmised. A retired grade-school teacher, at least what she’d told him. What they were doing. What they were doing to her.
Stop it make it go away stop please fucking stop.
Yelling this time. His neighbor James Randolph, cussing, warning of police, of private firearms. Pattering of feet. Clang. Thud. The rap-a-rap-bang-bang of metal bats dragged across the railing bars. The sudden apocalyptic crash of a gunshot. Oh God I’m going to die. Get out of my house God get out of my fucking house.
