Deacon King Kong(101)

“I’ll clean up my end,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

Bunch rose. He moved to the window, speaking with his back to her. “This is the last time you and I do business,” he said. He glanced out the window and noticed a motorcycle puttering down the street, followed by a car, a GTO. But they were coming from the right, the safe side, in full view. Not down the side street, so they weren’t dangerous. Still, he wondered: had he seen them before? He decided to watch to see if they circled the block, then saw the motorcycle throw on a turn signal before reaching the corner, and the girl was talking again, so he turned away.

“Where’s my money?” she asked.

He nodded toward the dining room door. “Downstairs. At the back door, there’s a cabinet there.”

“Where’s the back door?”

“Do they call it a back door because it’s in the front?”

“Is it the basement back door, or the first-floor back door?”

That drew him from the front window. He marched to the dining room door and pointed down the stairs. They were on the second-floor landing. “Go all the way to the basement. Use the back basement door. Don’t go out the front basement door. Don’t go out the ground-floor front door. Go to the basement back door. Near that back door is a cabinet. Open the top drawer. There’s an envelope in there. It’s got half. And train fare.”

“All right.”

“We clear on who’s who?”

“Deems and the Deacon. And the other guy.”

“What other guy?”

“The old guy with the Deacon.”

“I didn’t say nothing about a third guy. I ain’t paying you for no third guy.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “He saw me.”

She slipped down the stairs quickly and deftly. Bunch found himself watching her back, feeling a little regretful. Those stairs were creaky and she slipped down like a ghost, silent and fast, barely making a sound. That girl, he thought, had skills. He decided to watch her out the back window to make sure no neighbors spotted her exiting the yard—he didn’t want her near him anymore. Then he remembered the car he’d seen through the front window and quickly stepped to it to check on the GTO. It was gone. It was safe.



* * *





At the basement back door, Haroldeen found the cabinet and removed the envelope. It was dark down there, so she held it to the sliver of light from a nearby small ground-level window to check its contents, then hastily stuck it in her jeans. From there, she removed her shoes, took the stairs two at a time up to the ground floor, unlocked the front door, then sprinted back to the basement, put on her shoes, exited through the back door, and stepped outside.

The yard was piled high with junk and trash and was full of weeds. She picked her way through it slowly, as if she weren’t certain where she was going, then looked up.

Sure enough, Bunch was watching her through the open second-floor window, glaring.

That was all she needed to see. She turned and ran toward the back gate, as fast as she could, leaping over the piles of junk that lay in the way, making toward the gate at top speed.

Up on the second floor, Bunch saw her sprinting for the gate and heard the thunder of footsteps on his stairwell at the same time, and a sudden dread seized his insides. He glanced in panic to the seat of the chair next to his, several long feet away, where his gun lay. He was still looking when the door burst open and Joe Peck charged in bearing a revolver, followed by two other men, one of them with a shotgun.

Just before she reached the gate and heard the boom of gunshots, Haroldeen heard yelling and thought she heard someone scream, “You fucking black bitch!”

But she wasn’t sure. She was out the back gate and gone.





23





LAST OCTOBERS



On his third day in the hospital, Deems awoke with his arm in a cast and the familiar painful buzzing in his ears that made his blood tingle and rush to his head. His hospital bed was tilted at a slight angle, which prevented him from rolling onto his left shoulder and further aggravating the injury. Not that he would. Every time he leaned in that direction the pain across his back and down his spine was so powerful he felt like throwing up, so lying on his right side was obligatory. But it meant he couldn’t turn away from any visitors that came. Not that many did other than the cops and Sister Gee and a couple of assorted “sisters” from Five Ends. He’d said nothing to them. Even Potts, the old-time cop he remembered who used to come by to watch him pitch baseball games from his squad car. He’d said nothing to Potts. Potts was okay, but at the end of the day, Potts was just a cop. Deems’s problem was bigger than cops and stupid Five Ends people. He’d been betrayed by somebody—probably Lightbulb, he guessed—and Beanie was dead.

He shifted slightly to lie on his back, moving slowly, then reached for the cup of water that the nurses kept beside his bed.

Instead of a cup, a hand caught his, and he glanced up and saw the wrinkled face of Sportcoat standing above him.

He almost didn’t recognize him for a moment. The old fool wasn’t wearing his usual ragged, ugly sport coat from some era gone past. The plaid green-and-white one—the one that the old drunk wore for special occasions and church—used to bring howls of laughter from Deems and his friends every time they saw Sportcoat proudly strut out of Building 9 wearing it. The plaid sport coat looked like a walking flag draped around the old fart. Instead, the old man wore the blue pants and blue shirt of a Housing Authority worker and a porkpie hat. Clutched in his right hand was a homemade doll of some kind, a hideous-looking thing the size of a small pillow, brown with knitting material for hair and buttons stitched across the fabric to create a face. In his other hand was a small paper bag.