Fire Lake (10 page)

"Fire Lake?" I said.

"It's a private joke," Karen said. "A
song Lonnie liked. He thought it summed up his life. Going off to
Fire Lake meant taking a gamble, having the guts to tell society to
go fuck itself, and daring to live your dream. It was also his
buzzword for shooting up. Going off to Fire Lake."

"Maybe this time he got there," I said
grimly.

I told Karen that I was going back to the Delores to
get some fresh clothes and that I'd pick her up at her room around
two-thirty. Then we'd go look up some of Lonnie's old friends.

"I don't want to sound like an alarmist," I
said, "but do me a favor and stay in your room until I come
back. Okay?"

She laughed nervously. "Okay."

I hung up the phone and walked out of the lobby into
the cold, brilliant December afternoon. It was Saturday, which meant
the streets were crowded. Since it had been raining for better than
three days, they were especially crowded. And that made it next to
impossible for me to pick up anyone who was on my tail.

I walked down Fifth, past a couple of black street
vendors who had set up stands on the curbside. One of them was
selling T-shirts and sunglasses from a folding table. The other was
hawking paste jewelry, decals, and knives from a wheeled cart.

"For your lady," the one with the jewelry
said, holding out a pair of blue glass earrings.

I shook my head and he shrugged good-naturedly,
dropping the earrings back into his cart. He was a middle-aged black
with processed hair, a pencil mustache, and a thin, pockmarked
face, glazed like marzipan.

I glanced back at the vendors when I reached Plum
Street. The one hawking the jewelry was wheeling his cart east on
Fifth, toward the square. For a second, I felt like following him. It
was paranoia, and I knew it. But just to be sure, I watched him until
he'd walked past the Clarion lobby and was well on his way toward
Walnut.

When the vendor had drifted out of sight, I walked
straight down Plum to the garage where I'd left the car. The
pedestrian traffic thinned out as I neared Fourth Street, and by the
time I reached the garage, there were only a couple of other people
on the sidewalk--a smart-looking woman in a fur coat and a teenage
kid in a parka and a Cougars cap. I figured I was safe.

It was twenty degrees colder in the shade of the
garage than it had been in the brilliant sunlight. I pulled my
topcoat tightly around me and started down an oil-stained ramp to the
basement floor. "There was a chilled-looking attendant, bundled
in sweaters and coats, sitting in a booth beside the ramp. He had a
tiny TV set up on the counter in front of him and a glowing space
heater hung on the wall behind; but he still didn't look at home. I
waved at him, as I started down the ramp. He nodded in an unfriendly
way, as if he didn't like being disturbed; but I'd just wanted him to
notice me.

The Pinto was still covered with ice on the hood and
back windows. I should have cleaned them off, but all I wanted to do
was get inside the car and get out of the garage. Claude Jenkins's
murder had unnerved me a lot more than I'd let on to Karen. Drug
dealers scared me. It wasn't 1970 anymore, when every doper had known
every other doper on the block. like Karen had said. Drugs were a
multi-billion-dollar business--the biggest business in the country.
And although every business had its rules, this one was less
predictable than most. "There were always strange little eddies,
little pockets of weirdness, in the mainstream. Even in my sedate
town, people ended up nastily dead because of smack or coke or both.
It happened every day. I just didn't run into it every day, like I
had with Claude.

After a couple of misfires, I managed to start up the
Pinto and nurse it, coughing and sputtering, up the exit ramp, past
the surly attendant, and out onto Third Street. Once inside the car
and on the move, I felt safe again.

I felt fine all the way out Gilbert to Reading. But
when I got to the shadows of the McMillan overpass--about a block
from the Delores--I started to get antsy again. I pulled into the
Delores's parking lot and stared nervously at the tall red-brick
walls of the apartment house.

"For chrissake," I said to myself. "It's
your home."

I was acting like a wimp and I knew it. Slapping
myself on the thigh, I got out of the car and walked quickly up the
stairs. The courtyard was still frozen in ice. Rivulets of it ran
from the eaves down the sides of the building, like glass ivy. I
knocked an icicle off a dogwood branch and walked briskly into the
lobby. I went up the stairs and down the hallway to my apartment.

No problem, I told myself. No problem at all.

I'd just put my keys in the lock when someone opened
my apartment door and said,

"Come on in."
 

15

No problem at all, I said acidly, and stared through
the half-open door.

There was a young black man, no more than twenty
years old, sitting on the easy chair and smiling at me with every
tooth in his mouth. My first impulse was to reach for my gun in its
holster. But the door was angled in front of me, and I couldn't see
all the way into the room. Whoever had opened the door was still
standing behind it, in the kitchen. And for all I knew there were
several others in the bedroom. Under the circumstances, pulling my
gun was likely to get me killed.

I glanced quickly down the hall, toward the landing.
Another black man--tall and heavyset--had come down the stairs from
the floor above me and stationed himself at the end of the hall. He
had one hand buried in his long-skirted overcoat. It looked like he
was concealing a sawed-off shotgun under the coat.

This is crazy, I said to myself. But that didn't make
the man with the shotgun disappear.

"Ain'chu gonna come in, homes?" the black
kid sitting in the easy chair called out again, in a scatty,
high-pitched voice.

"Do I have a choice?" I said to him.

He grinned. "We all got choices, bro'."

I pushed the door fully open and walked into the
room. Another black man stepped out from the kitchen. He was a huge
kid, with a drooping lip and a nose like a wad of bubblegum stuck
under a desk. He was wearing a stocking cap on his bullet head and a
stained cord sweater that hung in tiers, like layers of fat, above
greasy, pinstripe gaberdine pants.

I looked at the one sitting on the pieced-together
easy chair. He was small, thin, and brindled brown. He was wearing a
camel's-hair overcoat and a white plantation hat, crooked rakishly
above his forehead. I couldn't see all of his face, because of the
hat and because of the wraparound sunglasses he had on his nose. He
wore his hair in oiled ringlets, with a milk mustache and a cute
little spit curl right in the center of his forehead--like Prince. He
even spoke with a touch of a lisp, just like Prince. He had big
yellow teeth and red, receding gums that made his smile a lot less
sexy than he thought. It wasn't until I got close to him that I
realized there was a gold Star of David, with a little diamond in its
center, embossed on one of his incisors. The kid stank of sweat and
of something else--something like decay.

"Where's your partner, huh?" he said in his
cheerful, lisping voice. "Where you got him stashed?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I
said.

"Chill, man," he said merrily. "That's
cool. We don't care about him. We just want our goods back, dig?"

"What goods?" I said.

The kid rattled with laughter, like a shaken gourd.
"Hear what the dude say, Maurice?" he said to his Fat
Albert friend.

"Bet," Maurice grunted.

Maurice stared at me in what I assumed was supposed
to be a menacing way. I knew I was in trouble, but I had a problem
dealing with this eighties version of Cosby's kids. They just didn't
look old enough or tough enough to be as dangerous as they pretended
to be. Prince and Fat Albert.

"We want the lady back, jack," the kid in
the chair said, and then smiled again, as if he'd been amused by his
own rhyme.

"Cocaine?" I said.

"Bet," the kid said lazily. "Your
partner be fucking with the man. Don't nobody fuck the man."

"My partner?" I said, starting to
understand. "You mean Lonnie?"

"Who the fuck you think we're talking 'bout,
homes?" the kid said drily.

"Look," I said, "I don't know where
Lonnie is and I don't know anything about cocaine. You've already
searched the apartment, so you know it's not here."

"Yeah, but we ain't searched you, yet, bro',"
the kid said with a grin. He glanced at Maurice, who took a step
toward me.

All of a sudden it didn't seem like a Saturday
morning serial anymore. I reached inside my coat for the Gold Cup.
But before I could pull it out, I felt someone press something cold
and hard against the back of my head. It was the guy from the
stairway. The guy with the shotgun. I left the automatic in its
holster and pulled my hand out of my coat slowly, raising it,
palm-up, to show them that I was clean.

The kid tut-tutted me with his lips and waved a
warning finger. "Don't be uncool," he said. He snapped up
out of the chair, as if he was hinged at his middle like a knife.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out an ivory-handled razor.

Sweet Christ, I said to myself.

"You gonna do some cuttin', Bo?" Maurice
said, with a booming laugh that made him cough. The man with the
shotgun laughed too. Maurice cleared his throat and spat phlegm on
the floor.

I thought of the sock in Claude Jenkins's smiling
face.

Bo took off his sunglasses and came right up to me,
moving his head in jerky little turns, like a parrot, as he stared
furiouslv into my face. He had a mad, drugged-out look in his
bloodshot eyes. He kept hefting the razor in his hand, as if it were
a bag of shot.

"Yeah," he said, still staring at me. "I
might do me some cuttin'." He glanced at Maurice. "Take him
on back to the shitter. We'll do him in the tub."

"Gonna clean up his act," Maurice said with
another booming laugh.

Maurice pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket,
twirled it around to make a gag, and started toward me, snapping the
handkerchief between his hands. Bo backed away to give Maurice room.
I knew that as soon as Maurice gagged and tied me, it was all over.
It was probably all over anyway. But I'd be damned if I was going to
end up like Claude Jenkins, with my own flesh hanging around my waist
like a tattered shirt.

I didn't really have time to think about it. The
shotgun was propped against the back of my skull, like the headrest
of a barber's chair. If the guy behind me pulled the trigger, I'd
lose my head. But, at that moment, it seemed like a better way to go
than watching myself being cut to ribbons by a cokedout kid.

I let out a scream--as loud as I've ever screamed in
my life. At the same time, I dropped into a crouch and threw myself
backward into the man with the shotgun, driving him through the open
apartment door into the hall and slamming him against the corridor
wall. The shotgun went off above my head, deafening me with its
enormous blast and tearing a gaping hole in the hall ceiling.

The guy with the shotgun and I danced against the
wall for a split second, then our feet got tangled and he fell
backward to the floor. I fell backward, too, landing on top of him.

He groaned and shouted, "Get off me,
motherfucker!" I could feel him trying to work the shotgun loose
underneath me.

Pinning the guy with my body and jabbing him with my
left elbow, I clawed for my pistol with my right hand. By then, doors
had begun to open up and down the hall.

In a Rash, Bo and Maurice came barreling out into the
hall. Grabbing the front of my shirt in one huge hand, Maurice pulled
me off his partner and tossed me against the opposite wall. The Gold
Cup skittered out of my grasp. Bo kicked it down the hall and swung
his right arm at me. I could see the razor blade glittering in his
palm. I threw my right arm up to block him. Our wrists hit hard, and
the razor went flying out of his hand. It stuck in the plaster wall
with a twang, like a thrown knife. Giving me a ferocious look, Bo
kicked me in the leg with his pointed boots. I groaned and he kicked
me again.

"C'mon, Bo," Maurice said with a wild look,
and started running up the hall. The guy with the shotgun had already
disappeared.

I could hear police sirens in the distance.

Bo pointed a finger at me and shrieked, "You
mine, motherfucker! You all mine!"

Glancing up the hall at where Maurice was already
bobbing down the stairwell, he took off like a bird dog. His hat flew
off his head, skittering around on the tiled landing and finally
rolling to a stop against the stair post.

I stared down the hall at his hat. A large chunk of
plaster fell from the ceiling with a thump, landing just beyond my
outstretched legs and covering me with dust. It was a good thing
it had missed me, because I didn't think I could have moved if a
truck had been bearing down on me. I'd used up every bit of energy in
my body. I sat there, pouring sweat, my chest heaving, my lungs on
fire, the plaster dust swirling around me like a mist. One of my
neighbors opened his door and stepped out into the hall.