Nothing.
They’re better than that. Okay. Take hold of a small chair beside me. Throw it in. Clatters, bangs around. Falls and settles.
Still nothing.
I play a hunch. Step inside the doorway.
Conference room made up like it was a thug’s cathedral.
Graffiti murals tell the exploits of this rabble. Stations of the Thuggie. The door I step through leads into the empty space, twenty feet long and twelve feet wide. A door directly across from me all the way down, leads to the hallway and far, far away. Two windows to my right. Light left on. A small table in the center of the room. Bears a message for me.
The first mural starts to my left. They work down the wall towards the opposite wall, follow it to the right and come back up towards me. That first mural is a colorful piece showing the art’s central figure—I gather from the labels painted at his feet this is actually Thuggie—as he stands before a man on his knees. In Thuggie’s right hand is the man’s bleeding heart, torn from his chest. Must be a vivid and bullshit depiction of the guy he killed that Andre from the 39th Street Felons told me about.
The next shows Thuggie head and shoulders above a crowd of young men. His arms outstretched like he were a savior welcoming his flock. The neighborhood behind him cracked and disheveled. The third shows Thuggie sitting at a desk, piled high with money. Guns. Weed and white powder. Symbols of his greatness.
They go on all around the room. Artwork displaying Thuggie as half Messiah and half Scarface.
I walk over to the table. Six bottles of cheap swill rest on it. A note, poorly scribed in pen by someone who is functionally illiterate.
We commin for U
Have a dirnk on me
Kil the lites when U leive BITCH
THUGGIE
So, Candy Man squealed. I’ll go back and look for him but he’s gone. No doubt about it. This note says a few things. One, they don’t know who I am. They’re just trying to scare me off. They know what I can do, not the least of that is breaking their people. Making them talk. Two, they’re afraid of me. They knew I was going to show, and rather than face me, they scatter and leave a note. Pussies.
This isn’t even my brand. Turn off the lights when I leave. Please.
All six bottles get emptied along the floor and walls. I turn off the lights as I step out; touch my lighter to the alcohol trail I left into the hallway. A blue flame sparks to life; runs away from me down the hall like it owes me money. Into the cathedral.
Booze flames shoot up the walls like a reverse waterfall. Oranges and yellows snapping all around like they were little cavorting devils and I, Satan himself, just told them to make tonight count. The heat swims around, comes at me in waves. I start to hear little pops and cracks. Things are picking up.
Black boils where the reds once were. A cancer of infernos devouring the construction. I back up, making sure the paints on the walls blister and curl before I leave. Thuggie’s murals reduced to simmering splotches of running paint. Good enough. Just as the first panels of the suspended ceiling cave in, I turn around.
I go out the front door. Flames snapping and raging in the windows above me.
I turned out the lights all right, motherfuckers.
34
Saturday morning
“I’m looking for Joe Clarke,” I say, hating the smell of inside an old folks’ home.
Prunes and convalescents wheel about. Some skit-skat along, others hobble, one woman sits in her wheelchair, staring off into whatever great void she’s trying to go down, one hand listlessly fiddling with her catheter’s collection bag.
The double front doors behind me, sunlight pouring in like a great temptation to make a run for it. The front desk before me, one overweight caretaker plopped into her seat, her carrot-red hair dye job glowing about her scalp. Rather than get up to look for the man, she turns in her chair; a tremendous heave and shifting of all her rolls and bulges. Too much make-up, too little of anything else.
A stubby finger jabs at a man. “That’s old Joe,” she says. “You family?” she asks, out of breath from exerting herself by turning in a chair.
“I knew him from his days at the pawn shop,” I say. Step away.
“I didn’t know he worked at a pawn shop,” said with a fake chipper reserved for customer service jobs.
“Don’t care if you did,” I mumble, walk towards him. Joe Clarke is sitting on a bench, clearly visible through a glass side door. The door opens to a large, meandering court yard. Maybe it will smell better than the mélange of stale urine, antiseptic and unwashed-and-nearly-dead people in here.