Million Dollar Baby (29 page)

Emil clutched his cracked ribs, winced with every breath. “C’mon man, this gettin messy, let’s forget it.”

“Fuck messy. The bitch owe me too much, and she know me too much.”

“Shit yeah,” said Fridge, drawing his Beretta. “Bitch got a die she holdin back on our money, man!”

Fridge pushed the no-sale key on the register with the muzzle of his gun, and the empty cash drawer sprung open.

Seeing it, Air Jordan hit the señora in the head twice with the Walther, knocking her down. “Where my six hundred dollar?” He jerked her to her feet again and pulled her close so he could see her eyes when he shot her. He shoved the short, stainless steel barrel into her mouth.

Before Air Jordan could pull the trigger, Cannonball shuffled through the door. Air Jordan whirled, aiming the Walther at Cannonball’s face. The señora gave no hint that she knew the shabby old man.

Air Jordan continued to shout, veins bulging in his dreadful face, crack cocaine toasting his brain. “Who you, muthuhfucka?, whatchu doin in here?”

“Oh, no, Lord have mercy, put that down, don’t shoot! I not doin nothin brothuh man, I jus’ a hongry ol’ nigga come in a res’, get me a fish taco.”

“You get you black ass tore up you come flat-footin in like that!” shouted Air Jordan. “What the fuck you want?”

“Fish, dass it,” said Cannonball. He stepped from one foot to the other, like the floor was hot. “But now I don’t want nothin, no suh, I be gone!”

“Who you wit?”

“I all alone, jus’ one po’ old man not lookin fo’ no trouble.” Cannonball took his cap off, held it to his chest to cover any part of Lena that might be bulging. Still stepping, he turned the cap by its leather band in supplication. “You got no trouble wit me, man, I so po I don’t shit.”

“What these changes you be takin me through, fool?” said Air Jordan, his voice going into falsetto. “All peoples gotta shit!”

“Dass right, boss man, but I don’t get a eat much, dass all I sayin. It all right I go now?”

“Hell, no, it ain’t all right. What you see when you come in here?”

“Nothin, man, forget dat, I got me dis bad eye here, see?, so I don’t never know what I see.”

“You goin a see what I’ma do a this bitch, so you know what I do a you funky old ass you start flappin you lips.”

“Yeah, right, you da man. I don’t be talkin a nobody, no suh, like I say, man, I don’t even shit.”

“Man,” said Fridge, his brain as toasted as Air Jordan’s, “you sure you don’t shit?”

“Only when I has to.”

Cannonball had done his job, got all four gangbangers looking at him instead of at the door. But he hadn’t expected that Fridge and Air Jordan would have needed guns to handle the señora. He hoped Mac would stay out so maybe they could take Air Jordan some other way, but the bell for the fight had rung, and he knew better.

Outside, Mac had come along the rear of the building and was watching from the shadows. One of the señora’s eyes was swollen shut, and blood trickled down from her hair. Air Jordan and Fridge were waving their weapons as if they were directing a movie. Mac knew that if he went in firing, no matter how good he was, he’d be up against two dope-heads with drawn weapons, one of them still aimed at Cannonball.

There is a saying in the sweet science, that game of lies, You box a puncher and you punch a boxer. It wasn’t much to go on, but Mac had to get the señora and Cannonball safely out of the Acapulco. So he decided to box, to stick and move, to take Air Jordan into the later rounds—to mind-fuck. As far as Mac was concerned, what happened to him no longer mattered, so he slipped the Glock next to his belly, and with his hands held high, he calmly walked through the door.

“Look who here!” said Air Jordan. “It Peter fuckin Rabbit!”

Fridge aimed his .40-caliber at Mac, while Shareef did the same with his .357. Air Jordan checked outside and, satisfied that Mac was alone, came back in smiling.

“Where you car?”

“Took a cab. Was on my way over to Puddin’s house when I saw you boys inside. You know about Puddin, right?”

“Us boys, huh? Took a taxi, huh?”

Mac could see that Air Jordan didn’t know whether to believe him. Mac could also see the damage Puddin had done to Air Jordan and the others, see the splashes of dried blood on their baggy pants, the spots on their new white shoes.

Air Jordan said, “What the taxi-company phone number?”

“No idea. I forgot to get gas, what with all that’s been going on, and I ran out. I hailed a cruising cab.”

“Jive ass, ain’t no cabs cruisin these parts, you think I a fool?”

“I was in Beverly Hills.”

“Beverly Hill, huh? Yeah, that make sense, uppity old cracker like you in the land a Lojack and Jew-boys in ponytails.”

Cannonball tried for a better angle, began to shuffle to the door. “Maybe I jus’ go on over Odessa Johnson’s You Buy We Fry fo’ my fish.”

“You ain’t go in shit, nigga,” said Air Jordan. “You know this here pig?”

“Nooo, suh, uh-uh, I don’t know no white folk.”

“You sure, old man?”

“Where I live, how I’ma know white folks, sheeuh, man? I jus’ a po’ old nigga wit trouble my own, uh-uh, I jus’ come in for my wife Lena, take a little somethin home.”

“Sit down,” said Air Jordan. “I want you to see this pig die squealin.”

“It best you don’t be killin no white folk, no suh.”

“You don’t hear him dissin me?”

“No, I don’t hear nothin, and I don’t see nothin, dass me.”

“Let him go,” said Mac. “And the lady, too. I’m the one you want, right?”

“All I know about you is we go in a fry some snake and you the snake,
boy.”

“Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t.” Mac grinned at him, upped the stakes again. “Either way, Puddin kicked the shit out of all four of you punks, right?”

“I say scatter all of ’em, Jor, shit,” said Fridge. “Do it now before some Mexes come through the door nex.”

Air Jordan glowered at Mac. “You just like that Puddin Pye punk, right?, you in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ain’t that right, Fridge?, he in the wrong goddamn place at the wrong goddamn time.”

“Bad luck what it is,” said Fridge, starting to laugh, “but if these muhfuhs don’t have bad luck, they won’t have no luck at all.”

He and Air Jordan slapped hands.

Mac said, “Looks to me like you’re the one with no luck.”

Air Jordan laughed, the hard cackle coming from high in his throat. “Listen at this.”

“I’m serious,” Mac said. “Just think, when you clown me, you could be clowning someone in your family.”

Emil stifled a laugh, the pain in his ribs cutting through him. Air Jordan stared him down. Turning back to Mac, he placed Puddin’s cellular phone on the table for Mac to see.

“You sure you want a be talkin this family shit wit me, honky muthuh fucka?”

“Hey, talk bad all you want about honkies,” said Mac. “But when you talk bad about this honky, don’t forget that you could be talkin bad to your own daddy, ain’t that right? Yeah, I think I remember your mama, two-dollar ho, a colored bitch, right?, ugly, same as you.”

Air Jordan moved the Walther slowly from his right hand to his left, then pulled the sword from his cane. “I’ma send you a hell the way I send you little chickenshit Olympic.” Air Jordan spat in Mac’s face, then suddenly began to swing the sword like a saber, chopping chunks of meat from Mac’s face and arms when Mac tried to cover up. In the instant before Cannonball could draw Lena, the señora fired her
pistola
wildly at Air Jordan, missing with two rounds, but she blew his right ear off with the third. Fridge knocked the .44 from her hand to the floor. Just as Air Jordan stumbled and grabbed the right side of his head, Cannonball shot him twice in the groin, the .45 sending Air Jordan backward over a table and onto the floor, his gun lost under the furniture. Fridge shot the señora four times as she stooped for her gun, but before he could fire on Mac, Mac dropped him with three rounds to the chest, the pattern small as a woman’s hand. Emil tried to run, but Mac blew the back of his head off. Shareef blinked uncontrollably through the smoke and unholy noise and started aimlessly to pull the trigger of his Magnum. Five shots missed. Cannonball dropped to the floor. Shareef squeezed off the sixth round as Cannonball caught him in the stomach and chest with two more from Lena that blew out most of his back. Cannonball kept pulling the trigger until Lena was empty, but Shareef’s last round had caught Mac in the throat, the hollow point blowing away Mac’s left carotid artery and breaking his neck. Mac fell like a shot bird, but he lived long enough to watch his blood form into a pool around his face.

Cannonball was choking on the smoke. He was stunned from the noise and the violence, and his ears felt full of dirt. He flexed his jaw, but his ears continued to hum, and the wild mariachi music came through elongated, sounded bent as it bounced off the hard walls. He crawled over to Mac, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him, but his breath bubbled uselessly out of Mac’s torn windpipe. Cannonball closed Mac’s eyes, gently touching them with his fingertips. He did the same for the señora, who sat crumpled against a wall, her red mouth hanging open.

As Cannonball slumped in near-collapse, he heard something behind him, and gunless, he turned in panic. Air Jordan pulled a chair across himself as he tried to rise, then fell back. Cannonball scuttled back for Mac’s Glock.

Air Jordan went falsetto again, his voice a high whine. “You a crazy man you kill my dick it be shot clean off brothuhs ain’t suppose a scatter a brothuh you don’t know that?”

Cannonball said, “You ain’t my brothuh. You a wrinkle on Michael Jackson nasty white dick.”

“My color not my fault.”

“Nothin never you fault.”

“How could you do this a me, man?”

“It easy, nigga,” said Cannonball, his black eyes invisible against his black skin. “You burn down my church.”

Cannonball shot Air Jordan in the belly to make him scream. Then he shot him in the eye, the .45 taking most of his brain with it out the back of his skull.

Cannonball knew he had to quick get out of there, especially if someone had seen the shoot-out from the street and called the police. But first he collected his, Mac’s, and the señora’s guns and wrapped them in his jacket. Next, he covered his hand with a napkin and dialed 911. When the operator answered, he hung up and waited. The phone rang immediately, as Cannonball knew it would. He let it ring. A patrol car would be dispatched immediately. Cannonball knew he had two, maybe three minutes to disappear. He switched off the lights with his elbow, touched Mac one last time, and hurried to his truck. He was breathing deeply, but it didn’t feel like he was getting any air.

He drove carefully back to the gym. He wanted a taste of his Manisherry, but he was so tired that he fell across his cot and went to sleep with his clothes on. He woke three hours later gasping for air and terrified, and he couldn’t go back to sleep. He worried about Mac but was afraid to call and ask the police where he’d been taken. If they came around asking about Mac’s car, he’d tell them that Mac had hailed a passing cab the night before. He tried to go back to sleep several times, but every time he closed his eyes, he relived the gunfight, blamed himself for not going through the door with Lena singing fire and lead from the git. To keep his mind from more somersaults, he cleaned and oiled all the guns. He polished Lena until she glowed.

Before sunrise, he wrapped Lena, the Glock, and the
pistola
separately in old newspapers. He secured them with adhesive tape from one of the rolls he used to wrap hands. He placed the three guns in the small gear bag he used when he worked local fights. At six o’clock he drove to Los Angeles Harbor in San Pedro. He took one of the first of the streamlined boats to Catalina Island, which was twenty-six miles off the coast and separated from the mainland by one of the deepest channels in the world.

He had the jimjams bad. The ninety-foot boat was less than a quarter full, but he felt hemmed-in. He also felt himself getting hostile and wanting to fight when people looked at him, and immediately he realized that his blood-sugar level had dropped critically low. He bought orange juice and a chocolate donut from the coffee bar and downed them so quickly that all he tasted was the sweet.

When he leveled off, he left the cabin and went to the stern of the boat, which cruised at better than thirty knots. The water was just a few feet beyond his reach. A young couple wearing USC sweatsuits and hiking boots embraced in the wind. When the boy tried to kiss her, the girl said she was cold and wanted a cappuccino with a chocolate-almond biscotto.

Cannonball noticed that the water shifted from green to a deep blue, and he looked up. He could see the mainland behind him and Catalina beyond. When he decided he’d gone halfway, he checked the cabin and saw that the passengers were either standing at the coffee bar or looking out the windows toward the island. Satisfied no one was watching him, he returned to the stern. He lifted the sports bag and reached in. He dropped Mac’s gun into the water first, then the señora’s. Both went down with a trail of bubbles behind them and were gone from sight immediately, despite their white wrappings.

Lena was Cannonball’s baby, would be his last love, but he knew he had to let her go. He shook his head, then leaned over the rail as close to the water as he could. His fingers and toes were numb, and there was something wrong deep in his chest. His blue cap fell into the water, but he didn’t care.

He opened his hand and let Lena drop into the water as gently as he could. He watched the package sink, but as it disappeared down, he had the feeling he was looking up. He coughed a gagging cough, a heart cough.
How long?
Cannonball thought, remembering the words of Martin.

He felt his knees going, and he settled to the wet deck. Slouched on his side, short of breath, he began to whisper slowly.
“One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.”
At seven he reached up for the rail. He pulled hard.
“Seven. Eight.”

At the count of nine, Cannonball was on his feet.

“How long?” Cannonball said. “Not long.”