Warpath

“Where is their territory?”

“All over. They got ’hood off of Pinnacle Avenue all the way over to the piers.”

One minute.

“Whatever you do,” he says, “stay away from the corner of Baltimore and Forty-second. They own that.”

“Why?”

“It’s a four way stop. Everybody knows not to stop there. Just run the sign. If you stop, they have a car that comes outta nowhere. Blocks the road so you can’t go. A dude comes to the window and jacks your shit. Try walkin’ home in that ’hood. You wind up in the bay.”

He starts to walk towards the rail. I call after him: “Baltimore and Forty-second?”

He barely looks over his shoulder and says, “Yeah.”

Looks like I’ll get carjacked in the very near future.

20

I call Graham, no answer.

All right. Molly then.

“Hello, Richard,” she says, and I can hear the weariness in her voice. Normally her voice is bright, bordering on a little too loud, like that person in a restaurant who tries too hard to be heard over the low-level din. But not now. She’s soft. Spent.

“Hey, Molly. I called Graham. No answer.”

“He’s sleeping. The doctor prescribed something to help.”

I rub my face, inhale and exhale through my nose. On Molly’s end I must sound like a snorting racehorse. “It’d be hard. I know I don’t like it and they’re not my grandparents.”

“You’re his best friend,” Molly says, consoling me for something I haven’t said yet.

So I say it now. “Willibald is my fault.”

“No.”

I nod. “Yes. Yes he is.” Something else I don’t want to say. “And Graham knows it.”

“Richard, it’s hard enough around here without you calling up to take ownership of all our problems.” Molly is louder now. She starts crying. “When Graham needs somebody he calls you, most times before he calls me. And as a wife I’m not down with that but I so put up with it. I know what you mean to him. I put up with it because of what you mean to me. So don’t start.”

I want to tell her they must have been watching the obituaries until they saw Eudora’s. The newspapers splashed her everywhere, and from there it’s one plus one to find the funeral. I want to tell her when she and Graham and Willibald got into that stretched limo, that nine hundred foot black sign rolling down the road proudly displaying the grieving family, they must have been followed. And they were followed right back to the first crime scene. I want to say they did it because they wanted retaliation for my bullets at Moss’s house.

But instead I just say, “I’m sorry. I won’t start. How is Graham?”

“Oh, Richard,” Molly says, quietly sobbing. “He’s sleeping.”

21

2138 hours

I keep a storage unit.

Not under my name, of course. There are too many illegal guns inside it for me to do that. I really don’t do much else besides visit it two or three times a year. I pay in cash at the beginning of the year for the next twelve months. The storage company is both low rent and a shitty employer. Turnover there must be worse than an in-patient, budget psychiatric care facility. There’s only so much shit one can take when one is being paid minimum wage to babysit adults who either scream constantly, live outside of reality or do nothing but drool and break incontinence records the globe over. My friend Jeremiah Cross knows a thing or two about that.

Suffice it to say I have never seen the same employee twice. As far as I know they could be pocketing my cash. But as long as they write me down as PAID I don’t care.

Every now and then criminals have a good idea, and they do this once in a while. I’ve seen dudes use them as a meth-cooking house, someplace to stash stolen goods until they cool down. Clevenger told me about a killer who kept two bodies in an unplugged deep freezer inside a unit half the size of mine. The number of MacGyvers out there who just put the focus on the wrong thing...