The gun had slowly disengaged itself from his face, and Louis had left him without another word, but Jackie knew that he owed him a debt for his life. In time Jackie learned more about him, and the stories he had heard started to make sense. After some years Louis returned to him, now changed somehow, and gave Jackie O his name, and asked him to look out for a young woman with a soft Southern accent and a growing love for the needle.

And Jackie had done his best for her. He tried to encourage her to seek another path as she drifted from pimp to pimp. He helped Louis to trace her on those repeated occasions when he was determined to force her to seek help. He intervened with others where necessary, reminding those who had her in their charge that she was different, that questions would be asked if she was harmed. Yet it was an unsatisfactory arrangement, and he had seen the pain in the younger man’s face as this woman who was blood to him was passed from man to man, and died a little in every hand. Slowly, Jackie began to care less about her, as she started to care less about herself. Now she was gone, and her failed guardian was seeking a reckoning with those responsible.

“She was G-Mack’s girl,” said Jackie O. “I tried talking to him, but he don’t listen to no old men. I got girls of my own to look out for. I couldn’t be watching her all the time.”

Louis sat down on a chair opposite the couch. The gun remained pointing at Jackie O. It made Jackie O nervous. Louis was calm. The anger had disappeared as suddenly as it had manifested itself, and that made Jackie more afraid than ever. At least anger and rage were human emotions. What he was witnessing now was a man disengaging from all such feelings as he prepared to visit harm on another.

“Now, I got a problem with what you just told me,” said Louis. “First of all, you said ‘was,’ as in she ‘was’ G-Mack’s girl. That’s the past tense, and it has a ring of permanence about it that I don’t like. Second, last I heard she was with Free Billy. You were supposed to tell me if that situation changed.”

“Free Billy died,” said Jackie O. “You weren’t around. His girls were divided up.”

“Did you take any of them?”

“One, yeah. She was Asian. I knew she’d bring in good money.”

“But not Alice.”

Jackie O realized his mistake.

“I had too many girls already.”

“But not so many that you couldn’t find room for the Asian.”

“She was special, man.”

Louis leaned forward slightly.

“Alice was special too. To me.”

“Don’t you think I know that? But I told you, a long time ago, that I wouldn’t take her. I wasn’t going to have you look in my eyes and see the man who was handing her over to others. I made that clear to you.”

Louis’s eyes flickered.

“You did.”

“I thought she’d be okay with G-Mack, honest, man,” said Jackie O. “He’s starting out. He wants to make his rep. I heard nothing bad about him, so I had no reason to be concerned for her. He didn’t want to hear anything from me, but that don’t make him no different from any of the other young bloods.”

Slowly, Jackie O was beginning to recover his courage. This wasn’t right. This was his place, and he was being disrespected, and over something that wasn’t his concern. Jackie O had been in the game too long to take this kind of shit, even from a man like Louis.

“Anyway, the fuck you blaming me for? She wasn’t my concern. She was yours. You wanted someone to look out for her all the time, then that someone should have been you.”

The words came out in such a rush that, once he had started speaking, Jackie O found himself unable to stop. The accusation now lay between the two men, and Jackie O didn’t know if it was going to just disappear or explode in his face. In the end, it did neither. Louis flinched, and Jackie O saw the guilt wash like rain across his face.

“I tried,” he said softly.

Jackie O nodded and looked to the floor. He had seen the woman return to the streets after each intervention by the man before him. She had checked out of public hospitals and virtually escaped from private clinics. Once, on the last occasion when Louis had tried to take her back, she pulled a blade on him. After that Louis had asked Jackie O to continue doing what he could for her, except there wasn’t much that Jackie O could do, because this woman was sliding, and sliding fast. Maybe there were better men than Free Billy for her to be with, but Free Billy wasn’t the kind of man who gave up his property easily. He’d received a warning through Jackie O about what would happen to him if he didn’t do right by Alice, but it wasn’t like they were man and wife and Louis was the father of the bride. This was a pimp and one of his whores we were talking about. Even with the best will in the world-and Free Billy was a long way from having any kind of goodwill-there was a limit to the amount that a pimp could, or would, do for a woman who was forced to make her money from whoring. Then Free Billy died, and Alice ended up with G-Mack. Jackie O knew that he should have taken her into his stable, but he just didn’t want her, even aside from anything else he had told Louis. She was trouble, and in daylight she was soon going to look like the walking dead because of all the shit she was pouring into her system. Jackie O didn’t hold with junkies in his stable. They were unpredictable, and they spread disease. Jackie O always tried to make sure that his girls practiced safe sex, didn’t matter how much the john offered for something extra. A woman like Alice, well, hell, there was no predicting what she might do if the need was on her. Other pimps weren’t as particular as Jackie O. They didn’t have any social conscience. Like he said, he’d figured she’d be okay with G-Mack, except it turned out that G-Mack wasn’t smart enough to do the right thing.

Jackie O had survived for a long time in his chosen profession. He grew up on these streets, and he was a wild young man in those days. He stole, sold weed, boosted cars. There wasn’t much that Jackie O wouldn’t do to turn a buck, although he always drew the line at inflicting harm on his victims. He carried a gun then, but he never had call to use it. Most of the time, those he stole from never even saw his face, because he kept contact to a minimum. Now junkies busted into people’s cribs while they were asleep, and when those folks woke up they usually weren’t best pleased to see some wired-up brother trying to steal their DVD player, and a confrontation ensued more often than not. People got hurt when there was no necessity for it, and Jackie O didn’t hold with that kind of behavior.

Jackie O had entered into pimping kind of accidentally. Turned out he was a pimp without even knowing it, on account of the first woman that he fell for in a serious way. He was down on his luck when he met her, due to some no-account Negroes who had ripped him off on a supply buy that would have kept him in weed for the rest of the year. This left him with some serious cash flow problems, and he found himself out on the street once he’d used up all the favors he could call in. In the end, there was barely a couch in the neighborhood that he hadn’t called his bed at some point. Then he met a woman in a basement bar, and one thing led to another, the way it sometimes will between a man and a woman. She was older than he by five years, and she gave him a bed for one night, then a second, then a third. She told him she had a job that kept her out late, but it wasn’t until the fourth night that he saw her getting ready for the streets, and he figured out what that job might be. But he stayed with her while he waited for his situation to improve, and some nights he would accompany her as she made her way to the little warren of streets upon which she plied her trade, discreetly following her and the johns to vacant lots just to make sure that no harm came to her, in return for which she would give him ten bucks. Once, on a rainy Thursday night, he heard her cry out from the cab of a delivery truck, and he came running to find the guy had slapped her over some imagined slight. Jackie O took care of him, catching him by surprise and hitting him over the back of the head with a blackjack that he kept in his coat pocket for just such an eventuality. After that, he became her shadow, and pretty soon he became the shadow for a bunch of other women too.