Shella (18 page)

I tried to think about it. The chocolate bar, when I was a kid. How it felt when I broke Duke’s face open with that sock full of batteries. Swinging that sock, I knew if I didn’t finish him I’d be gone. There’d be nothing left of me, I’d just disappear. Like every part of my body was in my arm
… it felt like a feather when I moved it, but it weighed a ton when it came down. Little explosions in my head, like light bulbs breaking. Pop. Pop. Pop. A thousand of them.

They still go off in my head when I work. But only a couple of them now.

I tried to think about what Shella said that time. But all I could think about was that she went to Rose’s trial. Said goodbye to her before she went down.

The phone rang in the morning. I picked it up, didn’t say anything.

“I’m on my way up.” The Indian’s voice.

The front door to the apartment opened. The Indian stepped in, a key in his hand. We sat down in the front room.

“What do you want to know?” he asked me.

“Just where it is.”

“The work?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not that simple.
You’re
not that simple. You think that crazy little man in that high office can’t make somebody dead if he wants them gone? He’s a rogue. Some kind of genius, I guess. I don’t know the name of the agency he plays for. Every time I have to meet him, he’s in a different place. Always with his machines, like a guy with bad kidneys—he has to be hooked up every day or he dies. One of our brothers is in the basement at Marion. You know what that is?”

I nodded to tell him I did. Marion’s the max-max federal
joint, the hardest one they have. And the basement is for the men who are monsters even in there.

“He can fix it. Get our brother out of there. He can’t spring him free, not put him on the street. But he can get him transferred to another place. Where we can work something out later.”

“What did he do, your brother?”

“What he did was, he took the weight. They got him down as a big-time serial killer. Ten, twelve bodies, all over the country. They dropped him for one. Cold and clean, no way around it. It was a setup. He came out of the room holding an empty shotgun. They let him do the work, then they took him. The crazy man sent for him—he had his machines hooked up right inside the jail where they were holding him. He told our brother he knew about the tribe, made him an offer. Our brother, he pleaded guilty to all the hits we did going back a few years. The cops cleared the books, the heat’s off us. And our brother’s down for forever.”

“And he springs him for what?”

“For finding you, which we did. For bringing you to him. Which we did. And for you doing that piece of work.”

“He’ll do it?”

“Sure. He knows about our tribe. He knows me. But he doesn’t know all of us. He goes back on it, any of it, we’ll take him out. Whatever it costs. He knows that much about us, about our honor.”

He saw me looking at him. Shook his head, lit a cigarette.

“That’s our legend, that’s who we are. When we say we’ll do something, that’s what you get. Or we die. Any one of us gives his word, he has to do it or die. And if he dies, the word goes to the next one. If we all die, the legend
still lives. We’re not cheats, or liars. We’re not thieves. We’re assassins.”

“I …”

“Assassins, my friend. Hunters, feeding our families. Only we hunt humans, not animals. We were driven off our land. Some of us imitated the conquerors. Some of us turned to liquor. But the warriors among us, they have always stood in the mountains, watching the white man’s fires. We are their children. You can hire us, but you can’t own us.”

“How many men …?”

He waved his hand, like a mosquito was near his face. “Men? It’s all of us. Our women are more dangerous than we are. They do our work too. And we raise our children to follow.”

“Kids?”

“The white man raises his children to rule. We raise ours to hunt.”

“Why don’t you just do it yourselves? What the man wants?”

“We can’t get close enough to the target. And we never could.”

I lit a smoke of my own. He wasn’t saying anything now, waiting on me.

“Your brother, the one who’s in prison?”

“Yes?”

“You send him letters and stuff? Go to see him on visiting day?”

He nodded his head. Slow, the way you talk to a dope. So he’ll understand. “Sure,” he said.

He took a picture out of his bag. A black-and-white photograph. A man, maybe fifty years old. He had a round, fat face, short blond hair. More pictures. A mug shot, front and side. The man was smiling in the mug shot—I never saw that before. Close-up pictures of his arms. Tattoo of an eagle. The eagle was holding a black man in his claws. On the other arm was a hangman’s noose. The words Aryan Justice were underneath it. Another picture: the man was standing in front of a crowd, waving his arms. Some of the crowd had shaved heads, some had real long hair, mustaches. They all had weapons: rifles, pistols. The Indian turned the picture over. On the back: 7/5/39, 6′1″, 235, blond/blue.

“That’s him,” the Indian said.

“It don’t seem so hard to me,” I told the Indian. “This guy, he speaks in front of crowds and all.”

“He doesn’t go on the street. Doesn’t go out at all. He lives inside a compound … like a fort, understand? The only way to get inside, you have to be one of them.”

“So why can’t you …?”

“You have to be white to be one of them.”

“Don’t they have …? I mean, the crazy man, he has guys work for him.”

“Undercovers? Forget it. They could never get inside. This guy, he’s the boss of a crew. And they’ve got an acid test. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“Like an initiation. Something you got to do before you even get to meet the man.”

“What’s the test?”

“You got to kill a black man. See? That’s why they can’t go inside. He’s got too many buffers, too many layers. By the time you get inside, you’re already outside, see? Outside the world.”

“How do you know all this?”

“The crazy man explained it to me. See, sometimes, one of the followers, he turns. Rolls over. He gets dropped for something, he makes a deal. So we know how they work. Anyway, the crazy man tried it. Tried to put someone inside. Set up a phony hit on paper, made this black guy disappear, like the undercover killed him. Turned out that wasn’t the test … you got to do a kill right in front of them. So they can see it. This guy, he thought he was inside, but he was in the ground.”

“They killed him?”

“That’s what the crazy man says. Says he can’t prove it either. They never even found the body. Now the head man, he’s more careful than he ever was. They’ll never make a case against him.”

“So the crazy man, he wants …”

“Revenge. He lost a man, he has to make it right. It’s not like for us, not like loyalty. It’s like … I can’t explain it, it’s like someone fucked with his machines or something. He was telling me about it, he kept saying he just needed a better plan, that’s all. Just a better plan.”

“And that’s me?”

“That’s all of us. You’re just the end-piece.”

“He could find my Shella?”

“Dead or alive, my friend. Guaranteed.”

“If she was … dead, how would I know it was really her that died? He just made
me
dead, on paper, right? Couldn’t he do it for her?”

“Yeah. We thought of that. So we told him, she turns up dead, he’ll have to prove it. She’s been busted, they probably have her prints. Or a picture. Something. He said, you wanted it, he could find some of her relatives, prove it to you that way. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“You know any of her relatives? You’d know them if you meet them?”

“Yeah. I’ll do it. But if Shella turns up dead, tell him I want to meet her father. I’ll know him.”

“It’s a deal,” the Indian said.

I’m not like Shella. Sometimes, when we had to stay in a room for a few days, she would get all jumpy. Make up excuses why she needed to go out. Try on different outfits, do her hair different ways, take a dozen showers. There was nothing she wanted to watch on television—once she smacked the set so hard she broke it.

If I didn’t have to work, maybe I’d never go out.

The Indian told me he’d need some time to scope things out, find the best way to get me inside, close to the man I had to fix.

I waited for the Indian to come back.

He came one morning, told me we were going to take a ride. It was a big car. I sat in the back seat with the Indian. There were two more of them in the front.

We drove for a while. The signs kept saying North. Different routes. The Indians didn’t say much. Even when they did, I couldn’t understand most of it. They were speaking English and all, but the words were funny.

The roads got smaller and smaller. Concrete to blacktop to dirt. We turned onto a little path. The car had to go slow. There was a big house and a barn. A couple of dogs ran out to meet the car. They didn’t bark or anything, just watched.

We drove into the barn. Everybody got out. The two in the front seat went off.

“There’s a bathroom over there,” the Indian pointed for me. I didn’t have to use it, but I figured this was something he was telling me, so I went in. When I came out, a few of them were standing around.