Magic City Blues, page 20
There was movement to my left, and I turned in time to see the other man from last night—was he Righty or Lefty?—slip toward the stairwell on the far side of the parking garage. I walked that way, and the slow clop of my cowboy boots echoed against the waist-high concrete wall surrounding us.
He was thirty or forty yards ahead of me, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurry. Something about the showdown on this rooftop felt inevitable. He reached the stairwell, hit the safety bar on the door, and staggered back. It was locked. He scrabbled at it, trying to find a way through, but it kept on being locked. His fingers scrambled for purchase as he panicked, and my lips split into a wide grin and I came on, drawing nearer with every step. The stairwell seemed to be his last hope. He turned toward me, put his back against the door, and sagged a little. I stopped about twenty feet away from him, the gun still dangling from my hand. I didn’t lift it. Not yet.
“Leave me alone, man,” he gasped. His chest was heaving, and I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or exertion, or some combination of the two. I didn’t respond, either. I just stood there with the gun in my hand, thinking, trying to figure out what to do.
“Somebody will see,” he said and waved a hand at the John Hand Building behind me. “You can’t do this.”
If somebody was watching us, they were probably already on the phone to the police. I was very aware that eleven floors above us, Becks Towson’s right hand was probably meeting with Carlton Doyle. But would they look down? If they did, could they do anything about me?
Answers: 1) Unlikely; and 2) No.
Momentum combined with a rage I didn’t know I’d held—rage at being put into this position, rage at Doyle, rage at Thomas, rage at even D’Agostino—made me feel invincible and carried me forward.
I raised the gun, aimed it center mass. He raised his hands in supplication, a prayer to ward off bullets. My knuckle was white on the trigger from the strain of trying not to shoot him. He and his buddy would have ended me the night before, and they would have done it today if I hadn’t been armed. Every reasonable fiber of my being wanted to get him now before he could get me.
Instead I kept the gun steady on him.
“You want to live?” I asked, and he nodded his head up and down fast, uncontrollable, like a bobble head doll. “Tell me what the hell is going on with Thomas and Doyle.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“That’s too bad.” I cocked the hammer on the revolver. I didn’t need to, because the .38 was double-action and would fire when I squeezed the trigger, but as a dramatic device it worked really well.. The sound was loud in the still Sunday air.
“Wait,” he moaned. “Please, man, come on. He’ll kill me.”
“Him later or me now.”
“Fuck, please.”
“I’ve been walking around the last week not knowing what the hell is going on,” I said. “You know something, you tell me. You don’t know anything, you might as well lie down and die right here.”
“Okay, okay. They’re cutting the old man out,” he said. “Becks has got old and slow, man. The money’s drying up. World’s changing, and Thomas is taking over. He’s doing a deal with Doyle so everybody can make some money.”
I grunted.
It made a kind of sense.
“So Becks didn’t greenlight me,” I said, and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy was shaking his head.
“Naw, he said let you honkies kill each other, we pick up the pieces.”
I rolled my shoulders a little. I was tired of holding the gun extended at shoulder height. I lowered it a little, still gripping it tightly.
“Does Becks know any of this?”
“What you think, man? Becks been around a long time. He run numbers and whores in this city before I was born. He got eyes and ears everywhere. That’s why Thomas keeps things on the downlow, don’t want the man to get any ideas, you know?”
Becks Towson had been a kingpin in Birmingham for a long time, that was for sure. And he didn’t get to the top by being a nice guy, either. I was pretty sure that Thomas wasn’t the first usurper to try to occupy the throne. The difference was that Thomas was still alive. But if Becks knew, that could change some things. And it could throw a wrench into whatever plans Carlton Doyle was making.
Dreadlock boy shoved himself off the door, standing up to full height. I hadn’t put a bullet in him yet. Maybe he was thinking that I wouldn’t. But there wasn’t enough room between us now for him to be making sudden movements like that. I pointed the gun at him again.
“You got another blade on you?”
He hesitated, then gave a little tilt of his head in acquiescence. Of course he did.
“Take it out,” I said. “Toss it over the side.”
“Sure, dude, whatever you say.” He put his hand in his front pocket and came out with a gravity knife. Before I could react, it clicked open and he used the door to the stairwell for leverage, pushing off and accelerating toward me in a long dive. One hand held the knife, the other reached for my shirtfront. If I had let him get his hands on me, it would have been all over but the shoutin’, as my Granny used to say.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, I struck him across the temple with the butt of the gun, keeping pressure off of the trigger, and he went down. My cupped hand had partially cushioned the blow, so it didn’t knock him out. He staggered down onto all fours with the knife still in his hands. I stomped the knife with my hard-soled cowboy boots and got some fingers in the process. I heard them snap, and I’m not gonna lie: it felt good.
I put the gun back into the holster at the small of my back. I didn’t want any more gunfire if I could help it.
He was game, give him that. He doddered up to his feet, lunging for me again, and I kicked him in the kneecap. His leg buckled, made him lurch to one side. I used his momentum to slip behind him and grab him by the thick mane of dreadlocks and the waistband of his pants. I took four running, lunging steps and heaved him over the waist-high wall of the parking deck down to the pavement eight stories below.
I heard him when he hit the pavement. I made a face, but by that time I had already turned away. I hustled back down the ramp toward the Mustang. There were a couple of thick, ropy dreads clinging to my fingers, and I tore them away, shoving them into the first trash can I saw. A floor below, I stepped over his partner’s corpse and into the driver’s seat of the car. I didn’t look at him. Thankfully I could avoid the body as I pulled out of the parking space. Then it was down, down, down to street level and out the parking deck.
I drove south on I-65 driving through Homewood and Hoover, taking the exit for Pelham and Helena. The whole way, I drove the speed limit and kept a weather eye out for any cops. Hoover is infested with them, and they’re the kind of boys in blue who will cite you for damn near anything. I took a state road into Helena and then drove onto Morgan Road, following it up toward I-459, which would eventually lead me back into east Birmingham or over to Tuscaloosa in the West, in case I ever wanted to go back there again.
There’s a little creek that runs through Helena. It’s deep enough that even in a drought, it never completely dries. The bottom is sandy and dark, maybe twelve or fifteen feet down. A long time ago, I used to kayak the river. I found the turnout still located where it always was, and spun the steering wheel hard. The Mustang was the only car there. The parking area was shaded by a small copse of hardwoods. In a few months the weather would turn the leaves gold and red and brown. But right now the leaves were lush and the grass was thick. I walked out to the creek, kicking my booted feet through the tall grass and stayed alert for snakes. The water in the creek bed was deep brown and moving slowly. Eventually it would tie in somewhere with the Black Warrior, but I couldn’t quite remember where. Nearby, a woodpecker hammered his head into a tree, and I thought I must know how he felt. There were other birds chirping, while flies and mosquitos and noseeums flitted around my head, hoping to take a bite out of me.
I took the gun out from behind my belt, shucked the spent brass out of the cylinder, and tossed the gun into the middle of the creek, where the water was deepest. I’d stick the brass into a garbage can at a convenience store. No muss, no fuss.
Then I breathed the soft, warm air for a few minutes, letting the proximity of the water and the wildlife calm my chattering brain. In a little while, I went back to the Mustang, knocked the mud from my boots, got in, and drove toward I-459. When faced with the choice, I always drove back toward Birmingham.
When I stopped to gas up and get rid of the brass from the .38, I dragged my wallet from my back pocket and pulled out the business card Becks Towson had given me. There was no name, just a number. And it was a number I didn’t want to call from my own phone. So I wasted a little time finding a working pay phone—there’s one near the 16th Street Baptist Church, for the record—and pumped a couple of quarters into the coin slot. Then I dialed the number Becks had given me. When he answered, I told him that I had news he needed to hear.
“What makes you think I want to listen to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said into the sticky, hot receiver. “I know you’re getting old, Becks, but I thought you wanted to stay alive for a little while longer.”
“You threatening me?”
“You know I’m not,” I said. “But there’s someone gunning for your seat. You know the only way that happens is if you fall down first.
He was silent for a moment, and I watched the cars on 16th Street pass by while he thought.
“Where you at,” he said. I told him.
“You know where Eagles Restaurant is?” I did, and said so. He grunted into the phone, in satisfaction or pain I couldn’t tell. “Come alone.”
“I be there in half an hour.”
And he was.
Thirty
Eagles Restaurant is a low-slung, narrow building, gray-painted cinderblock with a somewhat darker shingled roof. Inside, there’s a long steam table filled with soul food and a special that changes daily. On the opposite wall is a row of comfortably sprung vinyl booths. It’s dark, but clean, and the food is the best-kept secret in Birmingham.
Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like eating. When I opened the door, the aroma of slow-cooked oxtail and fried okra hit me, and my stomach turned. I kept thinking about the men I’d killed, kept seeing the first one fall bonelessly to the concrete floor. The .38 had made a small hole going in. The exit wound? I couldn’t have covered that with my hand. I didn’t want to think about the blood on the ground, and I definitely didn’t want to think about the other guy, probably concussed—certainly wobbly on his feet—rushing headlong toward the sidewalk some eighty feet below us.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, and cast a glance along the steam table. There was Salisbury steak in gravy, oxtails, catfish, mashed potatoes, cornbread, okra … any other day, I would have grabbed one of the lunchroom-style platters and lined up for a heaping plate.
Not today.
Today I was lucky to keep the bile down. My saliva glands were working overtime, and I swallowed a couple of times, nearly gagging. I didn’t want to eat, didn’t even want to think about eating. I waved off the counterman who had stepped forward to fill my nonexistent plate. Instead I looked around and found Becks Towson at the back booth, tucked into a plate piled high with oxtails and okra. There was no one with him. No bodyguards, no hangers-on. His hair was white and sparse, his mustache neat, his cheeks clean-shaven. There was a small scar from the corner of his jaw to halfway across his throat where someone or something had cut him a long time ago. Whoever—or whatever—had tried to slit Becks’s throat hadn’t finished the job. The old man was still here and still dangerous.
I sat down across from him. He sucked the marrow from one of the oxtails and I nearly gagged at the sound. But I didn’t. I tried to make my mind go somewhere else, somewhere away from the two men dead at the parking deck, away from the bodies of Martin James and his secretary, away from the corpse of Britt Parker. So many people dead. And for what? All so Carlton Doyle could get a little richer, a little more powerful.
Becks wiped long, slim fingers onto a white paper napkin, then patted the corners of his mouth. He seemed in no hurry.
“Get you some food,” he said. “I can wait.”
I shook my head.
“Not hungry. I know some things you probably should.”
Becks grunted. He didn’t say anything, though, just went back to eating.
“You’ve lost control,” I said. “You don’t know it yet, but there’s a coup in the works. You’re not the most dangerous man on the block anymore, Becks.”
He lifted his dark brown eyes from his plate and stared at me intently.
“Is that right?”
I looked around us.
There was no one else in the restaurant, just the lone worker behind the counter: a tall, rangy black man with a gleaming shaved head and a sharply defined goatee. His hands hung below the counter, out of sight.
“You know about it,” I said.
Becks smiled a small, self-satisfied smile and nodded his head.
“I know somebody’s been nibbling at the edges,” he said. “But they always are. You don’t get to be a man like me and know when something’s coming. I can feel it. I just can’t see it yet.”
“You know where Thomas is right now?”
Becks thought for a moment, relaxing back into the vinyl booth as if he owned the place. Hell, he probably did.
“At church with his mama,” he said finally. “Sunday’s his day off, and he go with her every week since he got outta Bibb Correctional.”
I shook my head.
“I saw him an hour and a half ago going into Carlton Doyle’s building.”
Becks was too world-weary to act shocked, but I could feel the news hit home. From what I had seen, Thomas was more than just payroll help. Becks ate some okra, chewing thoughtfully.
“What’s he want with Doyle?” He asked, but I could tell he was talking to himself. “Kid got two skills: giving head and killing people. Doyle don’t want him for blowjobs.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really know much about Becks other than the fact that he was considered just about the most dangerous man in the state. Becks came up in the sixties, when being black and gay were two strikes against him already, even in the hateful businesses that he ran. But Becks never let it stop him from carving out a kingdom of crime in Birmingham. If you wanted horse or weed or a woman in a dozen neighborhoods in Birmingham, Becks Towson was the one behind the action. He’d taken two falls, including one for manslaughter. But it had been years since Becks had even been arrested. He had learned since those early days, and he put layers between himself and the street crime his lieutenants ran.
Layers like Thomas.
“He tried for me last night,” I said.
Becks carefully looked me up and down.
“It looks like he missed.”
“He sent two hitters to my room,” I said, and described what had happened the night before. “I managed to get away.”
“That sound like Bloomfield and Weddle,” Becks said. “You won’t have to worry about them anymore.”
“I know,” I said, and told him the rest. While I told it, Becks resumed lunch. He had cleaned his plate by the time I was done and signaled to the counterman for some dessert.
“No wonder you don’t wanna eat,” Becks said. He paused as his dessert was delivered: pecan pie with a white perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Becks picked up a fork and dug in. “First time you killed somebody?”
I shook my head.
The first time had been in the war, looking over the barrel of my M4 carbine and watching the Taliban sons-of-bitches trying to sneak forward in the sand. I had flicked the selector from single-shot to three-round bursts. And then I’d fired. I could still see that man, the first one I’d ever killed, jerk as the bullets hit him. He didn’t scream. Just laid down and died.
Afterward, once the fighting was over, I had thrown up. I hadn’t wanted to eat anything then, either, but an old infantry sergeant handed me an MRE and told me to open it. I did, and was suddenly ravenous. I ate everything and wanted more. It took me a long time to realize that in the act of eating I had simply been affirming that I was still alive.
Becks pushed aside his finished plate and steepled his fingers underneath his chin.
“So now tell me: what do you want?”
I thought about it for a moment, rubbing my hands over the stubble on my face. I was going to have to shave soon or grow a full beard.
“You threatened Abby,” I said. “That’s why Doyle hired me in the first place, right?”
Becks didn’t say anything. It was as good as an admission.
“You were putting pressure on him to give you a piece of Carraway, right?”
Again, Becks stayed silent. I didn’t blame him. What if I were wearing a wire? But his silence still spoke volumes. If I had been wrong, he would have denied it.
“Thomas going to Carlton changes the game, doesn’t it?”
Becks’s eyes crinkled a little. That was the closest he came to a smile.
“We're getting to it now,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea that Thomas isn’t going to be a factor much longer.”
“Could be,” Becks said. “He’s young to be retired. But it happens.”
I nodded.
“What if I told you that Carlton Doyle isn’t going to be a factor much longer either?”
Becks smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger.
“That … would make for some interesting developments.”
“Abby wouldn’t be a danger to you,” I said.
Becks nodded. He didn’t say anything. I waited and let the silence sprawl out between us, but Becks never rose to the bait. Finally, I got tired of waiting.
“I need to know if you would be a danger to her,” I said. “Or me.”
