“So you fucked her twice.”
“Worry about where you were last night.”
“Did you fuck her more than two times?”
He ignored her.
She cursed him and moved from the bed, picked up her pants, come draining down her leg.
He said, “If this Gideon job doesn’t work for you, feel free to hop on a plane and leave Antigua.”
“What did you do for her in London?”
“Something that I decided did not require your assistance.”
“Was she in London?”
“She was not in London.”
“She hired you for a side job and you couldn’t tell me.”
“I could’ve told you, but I chose not to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t need you there to fuck it up.”
“I thought we were a team.”
“That was a business decision I made due to your tendency to make things difficult.”
“What did you do? What was it you did that didn’t require my assistance?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“And you fucked her.”
“I thought we had covered that.”
“I bet you’d love for me to leave you on this island with that paranoid, self-righteous bitch.”
“And if you stay, don’t fuck this one up like you did the last time.”
She went into the bathroom, slammed the wooden door.
“You never told me how you lost the target in London. What happened in ten seconds?”
“I didn’t fuck it up.”
“Like hell you didn’t. Just like you fucked up the job down here.”
“I did the goddamn job.”
“And you fucked it up.”
“By myself. I took care of it by myself.”
“Like you fuck everything else up.”
“I did the goddamn job without any fucking assistance whatsoever.”
“Five for one? I’d suggest you go get a job at Starbucks, but you’d probably fuck up a latte too.”
“I did the fucking job.”
“Three bullet holes are in you. That’s three fuckups you need to remember right there.”
The front door opened and slammed.
Now her world was silent.
Her heart raced; her hand trembled as much as her legs.
She sat on the shower floor, warm water raining on anger, nausea rising, come draining.
Twenty-one
the boxer
Vicious pounding
on the cheap hotel door woke me up with a start.
“Hello? Hello? Housekeeping. Hello?”
The door opened fast but was stopped by the chain. I had jumped up, was about to charge whoever came inside the room, my fists, knees, and elbows the only weapons I had on me at the moment.
“Housekeeping. You alive or dead? You hear me? You done overdosed? Hello?”
“I’m asleep.” I took a deep breath, collapsed back on the bed, cleared my throat, the room starting to spin because I had jumped up too fast, tried to shake off the meds, and yelled, “Come back later.”
The raspy-voiced woman at the door yelled back at me, “What time you checking out, mister?”
I struggled to find my voice. “Not checking out today.”
“Then you better go down to the office and tell them that.”
I coughed, every word sounding coarse. “Will do in a little while.”
“
Are you deaf?
I said you need to go down there
right now
. I’m not going to be cleaning up these
damn
rooms all day. I need you to get up and
go pay for the damn room
so I can make my rounds.”
My door slammed hard enough to boom like thunder. Curses sprinkled as her cart rumbled.
This was not the Four Seasons.
I swung around, put my feet on the floor. My movements remained laced with pain.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, just knew it wasn’t long enough.
More antibiotics were on the nightstand. Not a lot, enough for a day or so. There was water, Gatorade, fruit, and a few snacks. And there was B.C. Powder. Hawks had left a care package in the chair where she had been sitting. Wounds were starting to itch. That meant I was healing.
Got up. Drank water, looked over my care package. Hawks had left me oxycodone for pain, the antibiotic Flagyl for the infection, and Benadryl that could knock out my stuffiness and kill the itching.
Looked over my stitches again. Hawks had skills. Seemed like she’d been living on a battlefield.
Took my temp again. Down to 99.7. My body told me I needed some more meds.
I popped one of everything Hawks had left, then forced down a banana and an apple. I went to the window, pulled back the curtains. It was my first time looking out on the boulevard. Pawnshops. Chicken houses. Flea markets. Simply 6 Clothing. Laundromats. Package stores. McDonald’s. An area that had human trafficking and the prostitution of minors. R. Kelly-ville. Pedophile Alley.
Something told me to get out of there before trouble found me. I sat up, inhaled the staleness in this prison cell, stared at my clothes, listened to the rain, but that was about all I could do.
I used the bathroom again, took a quick shower; didn’t want to smell unfresh any longer.
I dried off, then kept that paper-thin towel wrapped around my waist while I changed my dressings. The pus from my infection didn’t look any better, but I wasn’t feeling as bad. Hands could open and close a little easier. Fighting did a lot of damage to the hands. I felt all of that destruction. Another NexTemp thermometer told me my fever was staying steady. My feet were holding me up and my wobble wasn’t as bad; didn’t feel like I was riding in a rowboat during a hurricane anymore.
My illness was heavy, had become chains around my torso and legs, weights on my arms.
Hard knocks were at my door again.
“I ain’t playing with you. Wake up and get your ass to the office and handle your business.”
Then she walked away, not waiting for an answer.
Despite my nose being less stuffy I smelled marijuana, meth, beer, and hard liquor tinting damp air that was filled with the sounds of crunk, hip-hop, R&B, and gospel music, all of those competing and annoying noises used to cover the nonstop moans from paid-for sex. I smelled the fucking, inhaled the stench of cheap perfumes. Another breath revealed odors rising from urine-stained sidewalks.
This stench took me back to the red-lit world I had grown up in.
I dialed Hawks’s number. She didn’t answer. Didn’t expect her to.
When her answering service kicked on I left a message. “Thanks. Take care of yourself.”
Then I hung up the phone. Hung up to the sound of pounding at the cheap wooden door.
“Last time. I ain’t playing with you, mister. Don’t make me knock again.”
It took a minute, but I washed my face, rinsed out my mouth, pulled on my clothes, made my way down to the front office to pay my bill, needed to do that so housekeeping wouldn’t put a hit out on me.
“Good afternoon, son,” the old man said as soon as I opened the door to the main office.
“Good afternoon.” I coughed, head still aching. “Nurse Ratched told me to pay my bill.”
“Who?”
“Housekeeping. The real nice one working my room on the second floor.”
“We don’t have any nice people in housekeeping.”
“Yeah. I noticed. She’s a pit bull on gunpowder.”
“Looks like one too, especially around the mouth.”
“I didn’t see her.”
“You didn’t miss nothing worth seeing.” He nodded. “Your friend called asking about you.”
Before I could ask what friend, the old man backtracked and introduced himself, extended his wrinkled, feeble hand and said he was Kagamaster, the manager at this no-star hotel, a place sitting on a road leading to a slow hell. He was an old man who shuffled along with the help of a coal-black cane, the keys on his right hip jingling as he moved. The right side of his face was slack, like he’d suffered a stroke, but his speech was clear. A little slow, but his words were as strong as James Earl Jones’s. A brown hearing aid was in his left ear. He’d been sitting down reading over a newspaper until I came in.
I asked, “Was it a woman?”
“Shhh. Lemme hear this part of the news. That twister done tore up everything.”
A small television was on in the back room. Heard the newscaster saying that while downtown was being dismantled by the winds, the Englewood Manor apartments in southwest Atlanta had flooded because a storm drain was clogged up with leaves; people had woken up in water up to their knees.
Kagamaster said, “Clogged storm drain. Ain’t that some mess?”
The newscaster was Jewell Stewark. I recognized her voice. Had a brief flashback.
I went back to the original conversation. “Was it a woman who called?”
The old man said, “Sure was. She said you were sick and called to check on you. Told me to tell you that. She didn’t leave no number or nothing.”
That meant Hawks had called since she left.
The room I was in cost thirty a day. I took out cash and paid for another twenty-four hours.
The old man looked down at the money. “What’s that, some Monopoly money?”
I looked at the money, adjusting my mind to where I was. I had given him British pounds. If he had known the difference he would have realized I was paying him twice what the room cost. I took the money back, found American money in my other pocket, paid him in the proper currency.
He put a copy of the
AJC
in front of me and said, “You see the paper this morning?”
“I haven’t seen anything but the inside of my eyelids.”
“Read this mess. Paul McCartney gotta give that heifer he married fifty million dollars. She only had one leg to stand on when she met him. Bet she didn’t have a bedpan to piss in when he met her.”
“It’s big news over in England.”
“Damn shame a man work hard for all those years and end up losing a chunk of money like that. Heifer being that greedy. They ain’t got but one kid. Don’t take that much nothing to raise no chirren.”
“And his baby mama deserves every penny.”
That voice came from the back, beyond a door behind Kagamaster.
“I don’t care how many legs she got, she deserves every penny.”
“She don’t have
legs
. She got
leg
. One
leg
.”
A young woman came out with a book in one hand, her other hand on her hip. Early twenties. She had on a sweater and tight jeans, a bandana on her head, all of her colors in reds and yellows and oranges. She was small up top, heavy on the bottom, with thick arms and a small head.
Kagamaster said, “Bunny, what I done told you about getting in grown men—”
“Where you from?” she asked me. “You talk like you’re from another country.”
“Bunny, didn’t you hear me and this young man having a conversation?”
“You get in a fight or something? You look tore up from the floor up.”
“Bunny, leave the man alone.”
I turned to Kagamaster and asked, “How far is Walgreens from here?”
“Walgreens? Right up that way toward the highway. By Run N’ Shoot, I think.”
I covered my mouth and coughed. “Can I walk there from here?”
Kagamaster said, “You not driving in this weather?”
“Walking.”
“Well, it’s about a thirty-minute walk from here. You gonna catch pneumonia. And if not pneumonia, in this area you might catch a bullet. Both’ll kill ya. Just one is faster than the other.”
I coughed again. “Can you call a taxi?”
“Let me look one up in the phone book. I got one or two circled already.”
“See if they have any bulletproof taxis.”
“I doubt it, but I’ll ask ’em.”
Bunny kept smiling at me while Kagamaster flipped through the yellow pages.
Kagamaster told her, “Ain’t you got something to do ’sides stare at this young man?”
Bunny winked at me, then disappeared into the back.
An Escalade pulled up out front. An older black man was behind the wheel.
His eyes met mine, his face made of stone. I tensed, glanced around for something that could serve as a weapon. Then a young girl jumped out on the passenger side, a girl who was no older than twenty, and she rushed through the rain, umbrella high over her reddish-blond and purple hair. She had on a dungaree miniskirt and thigh-high boots. She smiled at me and said hello when she came inside.
Kagamaster gave her a room key and two Trojans. She pocketed the rubbers and hurried back out. She hopped in the SUV with her ancient sponsor. She and the old man vanished in the rain. I’d grown up in a world decorated with red lights, had witnessed scenes like that since birth.
Kagamaster looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Yessir, they all gonna end up in West Hell.”
“I heard the tornado had the city shut down.”
“What that girl selling never shuts down. Sells in all kinds of weather, day or night.”
I thought about the pedophile I had dropped off somewhere between Birmingham and Atlanta. I looked at what was going on around me and thought about some of the things he had said.
Maybe there wasn’t a God.
At least not one who gave a shit about the world He had created.
Men who abandoned kids, maybe they were doing the same thing God had done.
I thought about that because Catherine had told me that my old man had abandoned me.
I didn’t know him, but in my mind he was still a god.
A god that had died when I was seven.
An orange cab pulled up.
I expected the driver to toot the horn, but he got out and jogged through the rain. He was big and it was like watching a mountain rush at us. He leaned to the side when he came through the door, leaned and ducked, like he was used to doorways being too small.
“Good morning, everybody,” he said. “I mean, good afternoon. After twelve now.”