Chapter Four

The cuts were jagged around the edges and time consuming to stitch up. I watched her closely, her every move, her hair, the way her hands moved, her delicate fingers inside the latex gloves, the gold ring on her finger. We’d been together six months, and she’d still not taken it off.

She didn’t look me in the eye the entire time. I knew what she wanted to ask. But it was still too soon to see each other. Too dangerous. Too much at stake, other lives besides our own to consider. I had to be absolutely sure it had been a robbery surveillance for the kid, that the cops I’d seen for the last two weeks out in front of the liquor store weren’t really out following me. Hunting me. I needed to make sure the kid robbing the store wasn’t collateral damage who’d just wandered into the wrong place while the team was watching me.

“Cho fired me.”

She stopped, looked up, “Ah, Bruno, now what are we going to do? You didn’t make a lot of money but you needed the job to keep—” Again, she looked around at the closed door. “—to keep that punk Ben Drury off our backs. And the money. We need every penny.”

“Ben’s not that bad a guy.”

I leaned forward and gently bumped her forehead with mine, “I told you I got the money thing handled.”

The corner of her lip came up in a snarl. She pointed a latex-gloved finger brown with Betadine antiseptic. “You promised. No more stealing. We’re hurting enough people with what we got going on.”

“I can’t come over tonight.” We’d planned to meet, the first time in two weeks because of the surveillance.

She stepped back, mouth open.

I hated to hurt her even a little bit. She was everything that was right in my life. I wished every day I had met her years before. But back then she’d have taken one good look at what I was at the time and run away screaming.

“You said it was all right. You said not five minutes ago that they were looking for a robber. You said—”

I held my hand up. “There’s too much at stake to be careless. One, maybe two more days, and I’ll be absolutely sure.”

“You think that’s fair to me? You think that’s fair to the children?”

“One more day’s not going to matter.”

“To them it will. You don’t remember what it’s like being their age.”

She went back to work on my hand, shaking her head in disgust. After a couple of minutes of thinking about it she said, “I know it’s not right but—” Her brown eyes were vulnerable and the most beautiful I had ever seen. With my other hand I gently pulled her into me and kissed her long and hard, a kiss I wanted to go on forever. She kissed back, the heat rising between us. I’d missed her so. In a way, I wished I had not set in motion the events that now threatened to overrun us both. Only, I realized a long time ago this had been what I was put here for, what I was made for. Fait accompli.

At 117th Street I stopped under a streetlight and looked around. Nothing moved. It was too early in the morning. I stepped out of the yellow halo into the shadows and waited twenty minutes. Nothing. I walked across the street on a diagonal over to an ancient pepper tree to check, the way I always did every time I came home. The way my night had gone, I knew it was going to be bad before I looked. Lately, things had been going too well.

The empty Gatorade bottle stuck up in the Y of the thick boughs, the red-labeled punch flavor signified an emergency. The last five days the tree cradled the green-labeled bottle, and meant, “Situation still okay.” Yellow meant hurry. Red meant emergency. I’d half expected the yellow, but the red scared the hell out of me. It made me want to run full-out until I got there.

Shit.

What else could go wrong?

I suppressed the dangerous urge to throw caution to the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and started the long tedious process of bob-and-weave to make sure my tail remained clean. In and out of side yards, into backyards, cutting across streets, stopping, waiting, and listening, a different path each and every time. There wasn’t much time. It would be dawn soon. I cut it short, shorter than I should have risked.

In the last backyard, just north of 133rd, I moved quietly along the familiar path.

I saw the glow of his eyes moving fast right at me. I was downwind. He hadn’t caught my scent. “Junior, wait, wait, it’s me. Junior!” He skidded on all fours in the dirt.

“Keyrist, dog.” He snuffled and jumped with his huge paws up to my chest. I’d almost been eaten by my own dog. I gave him as much love as the little time I had left allowed. I hadn’t planned on coming, so I didn’t have his treat. He didn’t seem to mind. He was in it for the lovin’. He was a good friend with a big heart, as long as you were on the good-guys team. I shoved him off and moved to the back door. Just in the few months I’d been coming, I knew every inch of the place, and still the porch wouldn’t let me by without a creak.

I turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. My heart skipped a beat. Damn, he knew better than that.

The stuffy air inside the small lath-and-plaster house smelled of bacon grease, okra, and greens. It sparked a nostalgic moment that took me back many years and made me wish I was back there, away from all the pressure, these problems. The feeling hadn’t happened in a long time. The shooting of the kid at the liquor store, the sudden realization of being old and helpless was what set me off.

The dim orange-yellow glow from the living room lamp filtered into the kitchen on the floor. I eased the door closed. The house was absolutely quiet, minus the snore. I stopped and opened the refrigerator. The bright light near blinded me. Just as I thought, they were out of milk and low on just about everything else. I was a fool. The old man had begun to panic. I couldn’t blame him.

I peeked around the corner. He sat in his easy chair his head back, his mouth open, gums exposed. His teeth were on the end table next to him as he quietly snored. His short-cut afro was cotton white. I carefully put my hand on it and remembered a time when it was jet black and glistened, a time when he was built like a world-class boxer and wasn’t afraid to keep the neighborhood safe from the thugs. Feeble now, and too old to care about anything but the two small children asleep on his lap and the others, two over on the couch in a makeshift bed and three more on the floor with pillows and blankets. Dad slept too soundly to be an effective night watchman. I felt bad that he was left with the job of caring for the children. I felt even worse about what I had to do to him in a couple of weeks. He knew the plan. He was unafraid to be alone looking into the backside of forever. My old man never complained, never.

Because of the situation, he wasn’t allowed to leave the house and had to pay the neighbor kid to buy the groceries. Had to pay him extra so the neighbor kid wasn’t inclined to talk and ruin the good thing we had going. The cover we wanted people to believe—crazy old man living by himself, a recluse who doesn’t want to venture out into the real world—so far it had worked fine. It just cost double for the food and supplies.

The kids looked as if they’d grown in the two weeks I’d been away. The responsibility of their safety caught me up short. How could I keep them safe? Who was I to think I was better than the county system? Was I doing the right thing here?

Of course, I was. Each one of these kids had been returned, by a judge no less, to an abusive home. Returned to parents who only wanted custody to keep the welfare checks coming. Some people were just plain wired wrong, mentally and emotionally. They did not consider kids to be living, breathing human beings. Children were disposable, even their own. Of course, I reassured myself, the kids were better off with Marie and me.

The kids needed to be in their beds in the bedroom. Dad was a soft touch and had let them stay up late watching TV and he’d fallen asleep with the rest of them. One at a time, I picked up the Bixlers, Ricky and Toby, two black boys, six and seven respectively, and carried them to their bedroom. They’d been taken into custody after their mom’s boyfriend’s PCP lab caught fire in their apartment. They hadn’t escaped unscathed. Their arms, legs, and backs rippled with scar tissue. They’d spent two months in the burn unit and were then dumped right back with the same mother who still lived with the same boyfriend, now out on bail.