Part of Wooley felt bad when he saw the fat lady in the house dress appear on the stoop and knew she’d be walking right into the line of fire. But that small, remorseful bit of him was forgotten when his weed-addled brain moved on to its next bubble-moment and he was back on Papa House’s dime: a lean, mean killin’ machine.
So Wooley did just what Johnson told him, leaning right out the side window of the Sedan and squeezing the trigger of the Tommy gun with the muzzle low. It kicked and the gunfire made his ears ring and his teeth chattered and flossy tongues of flame spat from the muzzle in strobe-quick bursts. Above and behind him, he heard Johnson doing his part with a pair of Smith & Wesson six shooters, while next to Wooley, Tibbs made boom-chakka-boom music with his pump shotgun.
He sprayed the stoop and the brownstone and the barbershop with his Tommy; and Johnson took pot-shots at the numbers-runners, ventilating each in turn; and Tibbs provided the insurance, following Wooley’s lead spray and Johnson’s target practice with a carpet of buckshot.
The funny thing was that once he opened up, Wooley had no clue what was happening. The noise from the guns blew his hearing and the world was all bells; the muzzle flashes and gun smoke dropped an iridescent haze in front of him that he could barely see through; and the dust, mortar, and shattering glass from the brownstone and the barbershop clouded their targets. The only thing he saw clearly was a lunch pail that went flying upward, splaying its coins, bills, and numbers slips into the cold night air, so much expensive confetti.
Then the car lurched under him, their targets shrank behind, the cold wind kissed his face, and Wooley knew that Bedoux had his foot on the accelerator and their work was done. Away they went. Faintly, behind the alarm-clock ring in his ears, Wooley heard the fat lady screaming, voice echoing up and down the block.
So that was that. Wooley ducked back into the car.
XX
Beau thought he might be bleeding, but he’d just pissed himself. Strangely, he wasn’t embarrassed, just glad to be alive. He even welcomed the fat lady’s screams in his ringing ears—further proof that he was still breathing; still in the game.
Frupp lay folded backward through his shattered barbershop window, stitched up and down with the raspberry-jam pockmarks of bullet wounds. Chester had taken a belly-full of the Tommy slugs and a face-full of buckshot. A piece of his brain and skull stuck to the brick lintel above the barbershop door. Lester lay in a heap of coins, small bills, and pink bolito slips. He had a small pistol in his hand—a little .32 that Beau knew he always carried at the small of his back. The little revolver gleamed in the gun-smoked, lamp-lit haze.
When Beau saw the Model T speeding away down the block, heard its brakes squealing as it rounded the nearest corner and cut due south, he knew what he had to do. Those sons-of-bitches in that car made him piss himself! They weren’t gonna roll off without a little bit of lead lip from Beau Farnes!
So he snatched up Lester’s gun and took off running, cutting south through the nearest alleyway, hoping that he might get to 127th Street in time to catch them on their double-back. As he pounded down the dark alley, he heard the fat lady screaming, louder now, surprise and shock giving way to stark horror.
“My baby! My baby boy! Those bastards shot my baby boy!”
XX
They cut from 128th down to 127th and turned hard right again, Wooley sliding over against the rear door, thinking he might go spilling out into the night.
“Shoulda cut down farther,” Tibbs growled.
“I’m drivin’,” Bedoux snapped. “You shut your trap and—what the fuck?”
Wooley leaned forward, peering over Bedoux’s and Tibbs’s shoulders through the windscreen. It was the kid. He broke out of an alley, ran right into the street, raised a little .32 popgun and started squeezing off rounds. The first went wild. The second put a hole in the windscreen and Wooley heard it buzz by his left ear before punching out the back.
The kid didn’t have a mark on him. Impossible! He was standing right there with the others, and Wooley knew they’d all taken heat!
Bedoux hit the gas and the car lurched forward. Tibbs shoved three more rounds into his shotgun and jacked the first into the chamber.
Another round from the kid’s .32 punched through the windscreen, veering too close for comfort to Bedoux in the driver’s seat. Bedoux bent, and the car swerved.
Then something big and heavy bounced off the roof. The windshield shattered with the impact. With the wind in their faces, they were flying blind.
“Did you hit him?” Johnson brayed. “You hit that little bastard?”
Bedoux hit the brakes, the car careened sideways, and the whole rumbling mess screeched to a halt broadside in the middle of 127th Street. Wooley wondered what the hell Bedoux was doing, but before he could ask, Tibbs was out the passenger door, shotgun in hand, rounding the car.
“Wooley,” the elder gun barked, “get your skinny little ass out here and—Jesus Christ!”
Wooley did as he was told. He threw open the back door and leapt out with his Tommy gun, ready to follow Tibbs and finish the kid.
Wooley saw the kid. He was still alive, tumbled over in the gutter, neither broken nor bleeding.
They hadn’t hit him.
Tibbs wasn’t looking at the kid, though. He was looking at something standing right out in the middle of the street, and there was fear in his eyes.
Tibbs is afraid, Wooley thought. Tibbs ain’t afraid of no man.
So he followed Tibbs’s gaze and saw what had him so spooked.
Death stood in the middle of 127th Street. He had a gun in each hand.
The apparition conjured a whole slew of bedtime stories from the dusty bins of Wooley’s weed-addled brain. He was draped in a long overcoat and a coiled, serpentine scarf, both undulating and billowing in the night on a wind that wasn’t there. The coat was coal black and the scarf was the angry red of hot iron or an open wound.
Buried amid the coils of the scarf and the upturned collar of the coat was a broad face painted white in the semblance of a skull, framed by hoary, ropy dreadlocks and crowned with a black top hat. From the shadows under the hat brim, black eyes burned out at them, smoldering like banked coals.
Fuck me! Wooley thought. That’s Baron Samedi! The gravelord! The Cemetery Man!
Who called the Baron?
And who’s he come to collect?
Tibbs, who was born in Jamaica and should have known the Baron on sight and been terrified of him, didn’t seem fazed. He just hipped his scattergun and barked at the nasty apparition.
“You best be skinnin’ out, mister! Three seconds, and you’re goat meat!”
The Baron heard—Wooley saw the glint in his eyes that seemed to welcome the challenge, and the way his black-and-white painted lips seemed to sneer.
Tibbs opened fire.
The shotgun roared, ka-chacked, roared again. On Wooley’s right, Johnson popped off round after round from his six shooters, laughing as he did so. Wooley raised his Tommy to throw a burst, but in the breath it took to do so, he saw the Baron’s coat and scarf fan up before him. The slugs didn’t draw blood. It was like the coat and scarf threw up a screen of black-hot heat before him, and all the lead that came barreling his way hit that screen and veered aside and left him untouched. Wooley even saw the shots going wild, kicking up scraps of cement, sparking off lamp-posts, shattering windows and popping the tires of parked cars.
But not a single shot touched the Baron.
Wooley’s Tommy gun was heavy in his hands.
Tibbs kept firing, pumping, firing. When the scattergun was dry, he threw it down and went for the Webley he kept stashed in the shoulder holster under his coat.
That’s when the Baron raised his .45’s and opened up on them.
Wooley dove. The twin autos sounded like cannons and he heard the bullets whiz by above him; heard their hot lead punching ragged, wet holes through Johnson and Tibbs; felt their blood on his bent back and shoulders; sm
elled gun smoke and gore as the two of them hit the pavement on either side of him. Wooley raised his head. The Baron stalked nearer, smoking guns still high.
Before Wooley could cry surrender, he heard the driver’s door open and knew Bedoux was stepping out. The driver’s own .45 coughed, throwing round after round at the Baron in the center of the street.
But the Baron marched on, putting two slugs in Bedoux without breaking stride. Then he was looming over Wooley, holstering one pistol beneath his living coat, reaching down with his black-gloved hand to take Wooley by the collar and haul him up onto his feet. Wooley heard his own voice, high and reedy, pleading with the lord of all the dead and the keeper of their houses; felt the sting of tears in his eyes, and the ring of ruined hearing in his ears from all the gunfire, and smelled the blood of his companions and the smoky cigar stink that wafted off the Baron, and looked into his black, smoldering eyes and knew that if he stared into those eyes too long or too hard, they’d swallow his soul and make mince of it.
He realized his feet were off the ground. The Baron held him aloft with one fist, sneering behind his painted skull-face, and spoke with a voice that sounded like a wind moaning through a cane break.
“Listen,” the Baron said, and Wooley tried to listen, but his ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear a goddamn thing but his own heart thudding in his chest and the blood thumping in his temples.
“Can’t hear nothin’, baron, sir,” Wooley stammered, snot choking him, tears salty on his tongue, “shit, sir, I can’t hear nothin’...”
“Listen!” the Baron commanded, and suddenly Wooley heard it—the fat lady, a block or more away, screaming into the night, lamenting a lost child. The chill on her soul was clear as a song in his ears, ringing like a cold razor on a communion bell.
“We didn’t mean it!” Wooley spat. “Didn’t mean nothin’! We was just after the runners! Papa said they were too close to our turf! Said we had to put the fear’a God in ‘em!”
The Baron pulled him close and Wooley smelled sour rum and cigar smoke on his breath. “Well, now I’m puttin’ the fear’a God into you, Gordon Woolsey. You feel that?”
He knew his name! The Baron knew Wooley’s name! “Christ, sir, please,” he cried, “I’m beggin’ you... pleadin’... please, my mama...”
“Your mama’s ashamed you were ever born,” the Baron snarled, then threw Wooley down hard. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the click of the Baron’s pistol and felt the still-warm muzzle as it pressed against his forehead. Wooley closed his eyes and waited for the big bang and the bigger black that would follow.
“You’re a West Indy? One of Papa House’s boys?” the Baron asked.
Wooley nodded, but his voice was gone for good.
“If you can deliver a message, Wooley, you can walk away from this. Can you do that?”
Wooley nodded again.
“Tell Papa House that Harlem ain’t his battleground. Tell him if he wants to wage war on the Knights or the Mount Morris Boys or the Sugar Hill Gang or who the hell ever, he does it without a single drop of innocent blood being shed. He’s got one dead child on his hands now, and that’s enough to bring me down on him. If he lays off, mayhap we can keep the peace and this won’t have to get ugly... or personal. You remember all that, Wooley?”
Wooley nodded. “Yessir,” he managed to say. “Yessir, yessir, yessir, yes I can.”
He heard the mute click of the hammer being eased down on the shiny black Colt. “And one more thing,” the Baron added.
Wooley waited, but he wouldn’t raise his eyes.
“You don’t work for Papa House or any of the bankers anymore, you hear me? You’re turnin’ over a new leaf, Wooley, and you’re gonna make your mama proud.”
“What am I gonna do now?” Wooley managed to ask.
“Just do the right thing,” the Baron said, and suddenly the muzzle of the gun was gone and the Baron took a long step back, and Wooley felt warmer now that the shadow was off him.
“Beat feet, Wooley, before you forget what we talked about.”
Wooley rose and went lurching down the street, leaving the Baron far behind, never stopping, never looking back.
XX
Beau saw the whole thing. He saw the Baron leap off a ledge four stories above, bounce off the roof of the speeding car and land square and upright in the middle of the street; saw the stand-off and gunfight; saw the Baron offer cryptic counsel to the skinny young gunman and then send him running off down the street. Beau knew he should cut and run, lucky not to have taken a bullet or been run down, but it was all too strange, too wondrous, to just flee from.
But he regretted the decision to stay the moment the Baron turned and laid his brimstone gaze on Beau and marched toward him. Finally, Beau found his legs, turned tail, and ran back down the alley he’d used to cut down to 127th Street.
Just as he made the shadows, a huge, immovable wall of darkness melted out of the alleyway before him, and there was the Baron, blocking his path.
Beau tried to skid to a halt, but he ran right into the gravelord and felt the demon’s black grip on him. The Baron drew Beau into the shadows and lifted him off the ground.
“I didn’t do nothin’!” Beau managed. “Those sons-a-bitches sprayed the fuckin’ block! Killed Chester and Lester and Frupp and that fat lady’s kid! Lemme go, man! Lemme go!”
“You’re in over your head, Beau,” the Baron said, shaking him a little. “I know you think you’re on the road to bein’ a swell, maybe runnin’ a gin joint or bein’ a bolito boss for the Queen Bee one of these days, but I’m here to say it ain’t all wine and roses, and you’d do well to beat another path through those tangled woods right now.”
Beau stared, the gravelord’s eyes like open tombs. Still, he saw something like the ghost of concern in them.
“Looks like you took some of Frupp’s window in the spray. Deep cuts on your face and neck.”
“Who are you?” Beau dared.
“I’m the one who’s always watching,” the Baron said. “Remember that.”
He tossed Beau aside, and Beau landed hard amid a trio of trash bins.
“See a doctor about those cuts!” the Baron called, voice echoing through the alleyway. When Beau finally made his feet again and searched the alleyway, the Baron was gone.
XX
Wooley gave Papa House the message, just like the Baron told him. Though he knew that Papa wouldn’t be keen to hear it, he didn’t expect to get dangled upside down by his skinny legs above the muddy pit in the waterfront warehouse where Papa kept his pet alligator, Napoleon.
Still, there he was, Papa’s goons each holding a leg like a wishbone, all the blood rushing to his head. Below him, fat, green Napoleon grinning his reptilian grin, roaring his bull gator roar and snapping at intervals as his head dipped too close to his gaping jaws.
Papa stood on the wooden catwalk beside his goons, snarling in his Trinidadi clip, demanding answers that Wooley didn’t have. “Who the fuck was he, Wooley?” Papa growled.
“He didn’t say, Papa, I swear! I told you, his face was painted like a skull! Looked just like the Baron, Papa! Baron Samedi! From the island stories!”
“You expect me to believe that, you skinny little bastard? The Baron deigned to manifest on 127th Street just to smoke my boys and let your skinny ass go?”
“I was scared and he took pity, Papa! I was cryin’! I nearly pissed myself!”
He couldn’t see Papa, but he heard a smile in his voice. “Looks like you done it now, Wooley. Too bad. I thought you were braver than that.”
“Papa, please! I’s just givin’ the message the Baron gave me! Please, don’t drop me, please!”
“You say you think he took pity ‘cause you were a cryin’, blubberin’ mess, Wooley? That’s your opinion?”
“I don’t know,” Wooley said, choking on the snot that was creeping down the back of his inverted throat. “I don’t know, Papa, I’s just scared, that’s all. I ain?
??t never seen a man like that! Never looked into a pair of eyes like that!”
“Well, Wooley-boy,” Papa said, voice softening to a velvet purr. “Ain’t nothin’ to be scared of. Not anymore.”
Wooley looked up and caught a brief glimpse of Papa’s broad face; a face sometimes capable of the most radiant, assuring warmth, and alternately of the most terrible, unblinking cruelty. The cruelty of a dictator or a god, mad on his own power and might.
And presently, the face he looked into was the latter.
“Papa,” was all Wooley managed to say, then he felt the grip of Papa’s goons loose, and he fell, and he hit the mud and it was soft and damp and cool.
Then Napoleon closed his jaws on Wooley’s head, and Wooley couldn’t see anything at all.
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