Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life (6 page)

Too bad that one of the
Sisters
later took up with a pretty but bent young brother named Filo Drammon. Filo was stealing from a warehouse he worked for in Massachusetts. He’d take a couple of handfuls of computer chips that were in transit, throw them into his pockets, and drive them down to Florida once a month where some enterprising offspring of ex-Sandinistas would smuggle the government-controlled technology down to Cuba.

That made Filo’s crime interstate and international, and so when the search of the innocent woman’s home turned up a diary that mentioned a current day FBI agent, our supervisor, Mason Daub was notified.

In the beginning, Ron Tremont also despised Anna. He had changed his perspective but, for reasons of job security, had not shared this new opinion with his white compatriots. So when Daub approached him, he pulled out a file that a previous supervisor had him compile, implicating Daub in some fairly innocent prostitution ring run by his brother. Daub just passed along money and phone numbers, but it was enough for the main office to send him into early retirement—if they ever found out.

Ron, with my voice, explained all this to Anna.

“So, so you’re some other guy with Ron’s brain?” she asked.

“I wish that was the only voice in my head,” I, Jack Strong, said. “There are a couple of dozen names I could tell you and many more that I haven’t figured out yet. Men and women, and I think there’s a wolf in there, too. I could lift the old 327-pound Ron Tremont over my head and throw him across the room. I can speak more languages than a professional translator could recognize. And there’s that black van following me wherever I go.”

“So you got me mixed up in some kind of science fiction movie?”

“Just like if Corman and Romero went to bed and had the same dream.”

“Ron said that he weighed 290.”

“He lied.”

Anna laughed and I knew we had a deal.

“What do you want me to do, Jack?”

“Not Ron?”

“No. Ron is just a foot soldier in this army.”

I smiled and unraveled a plan that some strategic command at the back of my mind had been hatching while the woman in me made love to Rosetta Jeanette Lawson in the guise of a man.

Rosetta and I picked up her car parked down the block from Tyson’s pub and drove to Phoenix the very next morning. We got a room in a hotel down the street from
Phoenix National Trust.

There was love in the room, great quantities of it. That passion wasn’t between us but inside each of us. We could have been entire galaxies passing through each other without touching but still luxuriating in the bath of gravities.

When the landline in the hotel rang, I was on my back feeling as if I was just a solitary man who had just made love for the first time in the history of my race.

“Hello?”

“They just landed at the airport,” Anna said in my ear.

I was looking out of the window at the black van parked across the street.

“Let’s hit it.”

Phoenix National Trust was housed in a large commercial office building, on the first floor. There were two doors through which you could enter, or exit the bank. Lance Richards had chosen this configuration on purpose—always wanting a back-door chance.

There was also a fancy safe-deposit box system. When applying for admission to your box, you were brought first to a room where you sat and waited while the officer in charge checked your papers. So when Rosetta came in as Lana Santini, I knew that she would be cosseted away, hidden from general sight.

She went in at two fifteen, and I waited in a coffee shop inside the office building, across the entrance hall from the bank.

At two fifty, Rosetta’s cell phone vibrated in my pocket. The text message:
two blocks away.

Anna had contacted the LVPD and got them to have one of their snitches call Siggy Petron’s lawyer and tell him that I had surfaced in Phoenix at the National Trust. The snitch said that I had promised to pay off some old debts and pay my way out of the country with money I took from that bank.

I left the coffee shop and took a walk around the block so that when I walked into the front doorway of the bank, Siggy and three of his trusted lieutenants were watching me from a blue Olds across the street.

I walked up to the safe-deposit desk and said to the lovely and stern Miss Andrews, who was seated there, “My partner, Ms. Santini, is already here I believe.”

“Mr. Richards?” she asked.

“The same.”

I had altered my license also, and Miss Andrews, with her copper hair and slightly upturned nose, studied the forged document perfunctorily.

“You haven’t been to the bank in some years,” she said.

“Out of the country on business.”

“That’s what Ms. Santini told us. I hope we’ll be seeing more of you in the future.”

“Most definitely.”

Rosetta/Lana and I were shown to our box where we used our keys to unlock the metal rod holding the long metallic unit in place. We were then ushered to a private room that had a gray metal table and white wood chairs. I opened the long lid of the tray to reveal sixty bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each of which represented ten thousand dollars.

“Oh my God,” Rosetta said. “That’s a lot more than fifty thousand.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You take ten stacks and put ’em in your purse.”

“Then what?”

“Go out to your car and drive back home.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t think you’ll be seeing me again, Rose.”

The look of pain on her face sent a tremor of emotion through the souls that comprised me. I felt everything from empathy to disgust. But none of that mattered.

“Make something of your life out of that money and think about me when your kid is laughing,” I said.

Rosetta was about to complain or maybe express love, but she’d lived long enough to take what she could and leave the rest. She moved an inch toward me then took her part of the loot, put it in her purse, and walked out quickly.

I was able to get eight bundles in my pockets without them bulging too much. Then I put the rest in an empty satchel I’d brought. Along with the loot Lance had stolen, he had a note that Siggy had carelessly left for his accountant Bernard Lime. The note read:
Take this money and put it in the hopper.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

Half an hour after Rosetta had gone, I called her cell phone. She answered and told me that she was on her way out of town. I took that as my cue to walk out of the bank with the satchel dangling from my left hand.

Siggy, surrounded by his three guardians confronted me half a block away. I tried to look nervous.

“Hey, Lance,” he said. “What you got in the bag?” There was a big grin on his face.

“You need a whole troop just to ask me that, Sig?” He hated to be called Sig.

“I learned from Sammy, Kraut, and Trapas not to underestimate you, Lancey.”

I handed Siggy the bag and, like a fool, he took it from me.

“We’re going to take a drive,” he managed to say before we were inundated with federal, state, and local law enforcement.

There must have been twenty or more officers of law on us. They grabbed Siggy and his men and clapped steel bracelets on them. They left me alone. I was the informant. I had the protection of the FBI. I also had eighty thousand dollars in my pockets, and the only man in the world who would want my face dead was under indictment from the law and a death sentence from the big boss Ira Toneman.

Anna would have to do some fancy footwork to convince her superiors that she hadn’t left the reservation, but I knew that she’d land on her feet.

At the Phoenix airport the next morning, I was stopped at the metal detector and set aside for special TSA handling. They found a metal aberration in my left forearm.

“What’s this?” the woman agent asked. She was black and handsome the way women can be handsome. The women in me responded to her like iron dust to a magnetic wand in a child’s toy.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“Has your arm been operated on?”

“No.”

“Well, sir,” she said gently, “if you can’t explain, we can’t let you through.”

“I understand,” I said.

I took a cab back to the city and rented a room in the Stay-the-Night Motel. There was a hardware store on the corner. I bought a sharp ceramic knife and a camper’s first-aid kit.

Using my doctor’s skills, I slit open the underside of my left forearm careful not to sever any arteries or main veins. The little unit was embedded in muscle, but I pulled it out without too much discomfort. Using the fingers of my left hand as an anchor, I was able to sew the wound up. The bleeding was minimal. I had performed the operation in the bathtub so afterward I could wash most of the red away. I bandaged the arm and placed the transmitter in the overhead light fixture.

From the alleyway outside, I could see the black van. If I was right, it wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

At first, I didn’t know why I had decided to hitchhike to L.A. Actually, I didn’t know why I was going to L.A. at all. But out on the highway, seventeen miles from the Phoenix border, Aldus Ray made his way into my consciousness. Aldus was a hitchhiking serial killer who thought he was a carjacker with bad luck. He was hungry for another victim after twelve years being dead. I was going to have to push the single-minded murderer down and then strip him of his compulsion before figuring out which of my many souls had unfinished business in the City of Angels.

About the Author

Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is the author of the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, as well as numerous other works, from literary fiction and science fiction to a young adult novel and political monographs. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
and the
Nation
, among other publications. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA