King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 Page 4

  Lott trailed in Percy's wake, his head bobbing as he walked. His face only betrayed his thoughts if you knew what you were looking at. He studied the structure with an eye toward its integrity, possible ways it could be attacked, and escape routes. A quiet, pensive man with a restless heart, and who often let moments pass when asked a question, unafraid to allow an intimidating silence to build. Connected, instant and deep, King and Lott shared a strange kind of intimacy, a wary bond of old friends. Their shadows clashed against the wall like black swords.

  "What you listening to?" Lady G made room for Lott next to her. She thought him too much of a roughneck pretty boy, but she put fingers on his arm as he sat down, an innocent, friendly gesture. He hesitated, a slight hitch to his movement before he sat down. Part of her enjoyed the effect it had on him.

  "Going old school. Something King turned me on to."

  Lott pulled the earphones from his ears and plugged his iPod into a set of speakers he withdrew from his backpack. The gentle strains of the Impressions' "It's All Right" began.

  "Oh yeah." Lady G closed her eyes and gyrated to the building groove.

  "All right now." King joined them.

  Wayne took a seat around the makeshift table, then patted the spot next to him for Percy to join him. Wayne was always partial to Percy, reminding him of one of his brothers. Wayne carried around a silence with him. They all had pain in common, each of them with that bit of them which remained closed off. It reared itself, a creeping shadow, whenever the topic of brothers or family came up. A set jaw, clenched teeth, a determined silence. Resolute. Final. A pain unspoken.

  An awkward lumber into place, Percy glanced around with a huge grin – the joy of acceptance – on his face. He wished Rhianna were here to see this. He studied the others for a moment as if gathering the nerve to fall in with their swaying.

  Merle stood on the outside allowing them to take their seats. It wasn't his role to sit among them.

  Without comment or planning, everyone chimed in on the chorus. "It's all right to have a good time, cause it's all right." Looking around at each other, they burst into a fit of laughter. It was a perfect moment.

  "We a band of misfits," Lady G said.

  "Surely the flower of the ghetto," Merle said.

  "So what we doing here, King?" Wayne sniffed, though he otherwise ignored Merle.

  "It's kind of like a brain-storming session. Trying to figure out our next move." King rubbed the back of his head, letting the coarse stubble across his neck scrape his fingertips. The razor bumps read like Braille, but he was due to get his cut trimmed up. Lady G could handle the twists. "We need to go bigger."

  "Why us?" Lott asked.

  "Why not us? If everyone kept asking that question, nothing would ever get done. I want us to be about something. A mission. Be about granting mercy and stopping murders. Defending and honoring women rather than using and degrading them. I want to end the fighting. I want to quit letting our community poison itself."

  "You want to take the ghetto out of black folk," Wayne said.

  Everyone chuckled except King. He wore the pained expression of not being taken seriously. Maybe he did dream too large. The wasted lives of good people troubled him; even if that was the life they chose for themselves, he couldn't help but pity them. Good people. Drugs were here to stay. Like cigarettes and alcohol, it was only a matter of time before the government and laws made their peace with them. Until then, someone was going to service the demand. Which meant gangs were here to stay, too. These were times of crises and opportunity.

  "It's absurd to build a tower atop of two combating dragons. Such was Vortigern's error," Merle said.

  "We need to do more." If King heard the doomful note in Merle's prophecy, he ignored it. He wasn't quite in the mood to divine if Merle spat out gibberish or was obliquely providing one of his lessons. Either way, it was less trouble to simply move on. That was King's way.

  "We?" Wayne asked. "We been tearing around all over town. Feels like we the only firemen in a city full of brush fires."

  "Why do we do the work of the gendarmes?" Merle asked.

  "Ain't that why we pay their salaries? What's my tax dollars getting me?" Wayne asked.

  "Like you've ever paid taxes," Lott said.

  "To Caesar, render unto Caesar. And to all a good night," Merle said.

  "It's not enough." King raised his voice to cut through the burgeoning chaos. "I don't think we've made a bit of difference."

  "What do you want us to do?" Wayne asked. "Keep in mind, I'm on full-time with Outreach Inc. now. They got me going into schools, building relationships with kids, trying to get them on the right track. Lott here just got promoted at FedEx. Finally getting a decent shift. And Lady G is earning her GED and preparing for college."

  "I know. Damn it. It's just not enough."

  "Come on, King." Lady G took his hand. With her touch, he began to calm down. "Let's take a walk."

  Locked in dark thought, King believed dreams to be important. Merle more so. His dreams lingered with him, coming unbidden between moments. Snatches of images. Dragons took to the air against smoke-filled skies. Razed buildings. Cars on fire. Only the occasional person seen running. Like an owl on a field mouse, a dragon swooped down and gobbled them in a single swallow. Slick and coiled, serpents writhed, their bodies filling the streets, crushing everything in their path. Their sides bulged with digesting bodies. The grass slick with blood, men fought with futility, their hollowed faces tired of grieving. The dragons and serpents crowded the land and kept coming. Inexorable.

  It was why King rarely slept and drove himself and those around him so hard. Each day brought a new task. A new crew to get information on. A new openair market to disturb with his presence. A new head to bust if things got out of hand. Lott especially warmed to the task, loving to fight. Given a just cause, he perfectly rationalized his violence.

  Wayne, however, wanted no part of that; and the blind relish the two of them took to their operation, the more uncomfortable he became. They were an unchecked fire and inevitably, the wrong person would be caught up in it. King felt responsible, burdened, and now refused to hear advice. Not Wayne's. Not Merle's.

  "King is kind of closed off." Wayne watched King and Lady G skulk off. "I've known him longer than anyone. The man is a living wall." They were on the verge of something, something potentially transformative. Wayne sensed it and wanted to be a part of it, but hated the hound-dog way King sometimes carried himself. There was a fine line between being real and being seen as weak. And this was an inauspicious start to whatever it was King had planned.

  "Child of the morning, I have the same old wound," Merle said, "but I believe he is the right man."

  "Something made him hard. He guards himself and won't let anyone in. I know that I'm his boy and all, just like I know King is ride or die," Wayne absently brushed dirt from the table, not wanting to meet anyone's eyes. "Not to go all female or anything, but I have no emotional sense that King even cares about us."

  "It's not good for brothers to fight one another."

  The moody silence allowed King a retreat to his grim thoughts as he locked himself away in darkness. He grew sickened by his own rage. The hallway led from what was once the church foyer to what was once the nursery. Charted memory verses littered the wall. A pictogram of a white Noah on a huge boat, animals popping out from all over, sailed merrily across a sea of blue. Forty days and forty nights, God sent the waters to flood the earth to cleanse it of all unrighteousness. That was probably the only time the land knew peace. The kids sang a story about Noah collecting animals two by two. All King pictured was all the dead bodies the storm left in its wake.

  "What are you doing, King?" Lady G slipped her hand into his and rested her head on his shoulder.

  "You know what I'm doing. I'm trying to make a difference."

  "Right. All cause a raggedy homeless guy says you have a grand destiny. An important role to play."

  "We all do.
"

  "I know, baby. But…" Lady G took his delicate, knobbed hands and ran hers along them. "You all over the place. You run from this to that, no rhyme or reason, just always running. Just caught up in the idea of being important. You don't have a plan. You don't have an endgame. It's like as long as you keep moving, keep doing, that's enough for you. You don't see how lost you are."

  King only half-listened to what she said. He took comfort more in the idea of her. The warmth of her hand. The realness of her proximity. King saw himself taking shape in her eyes. She made him braver, more sure. Everything simply made sense when she was around. The two understood each other if neither knew why. Years of solitude made them secretive, selfprotected, with that closeted fear that the more they revealed about themselves, the more folks won't like them. Years of pain and scars haunted them. Maybe they simply recognized the reflections of their own haunted expressions in each other's eyes. All he knew was that she held his demons at bay. She was the light to his dark. When he gazed into her eyes, he saw the faithful and honorable man he wished to be. They worked. But he couldn't escape the feeling that they weren't real.

  "What do you suggest?" King asked.

  "When was the last time you spoke to Pastor Winburn?"

  The name caught him off guard. He couldn't even remember mentioning him to her. In a lot of ways, King was raised by Pastor Ecktor Winburn, the father he thought he wanted.

  "I ain't spoke to him in a minute," King said in halting measures.

  "Don't you think it's about time?"

  "Do you?" King asked.

  "I only want one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "For you to be true to yourself and come home safe."

  "Go on off to school." King squeezed her hand.

  "Bye, love." She raised their entwined hands and kissed them.

  "Bye, baby."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Detective Lee McCarrell scanned the periphery of the scene, not listening to anyone in particular: the chatter, the radio squawks, the idling engines, the occasional horn or siren blare dissolved into a susurrus of a crime scene symphony. Though he hadn't had a drop all shift, his mean, green eyes appeared liquorheavy. His protruding jaw dominated his profile followed by his high forehead. His long, slack hair threatened to bloom into a full-blown mullet, a hairstyle choice which did not combine well with his thin mustache, which made him look like he stepped right off a porn set.

  "You're up."

  "I know." As much as his last partner, Octavia Burke, put him off, better her patient brand of ballbusting than the too-eager grind of his latest one. Of course, bumping Octavia up to captain left a "brother" slot available which they quickly filled with one Cantrell Williams. African-American. Average height. Shaved bald. Clean-cut. Cigarette smoker, Kools his brand of choice. Leather hat. Leather trenchcoat. Young, smart, and arrogant – worse, he was good enough natural police to back up his arrogance. He handled each case as if it might serve as an opportunity for a grade promotion. The only things he lacked were people skills and experience. His "aggressive assertiveness" – evaluation speak for pushy – earned him a rep as a glory hound, a rep he did little to dispel. He doubleparked in front of the playground at the Phoenix Apartments, his face caught in the slightly haloed gleam in the emergency lights.

  "You ready to handle this on your own?" Lee turned off the ignition and let the engine cool for a minute.

  "Am I ready to go solo after being under your capable tutelage for a few cases? Yeah, I think I got this."

  "All you had to say was 'you're up'. Fuck me for caring."

  Moldy brown leaves puddled along the base of the black chain-link fence which ringed the outer boundaries of the apartments. Weeds and broken glass choked a sea of cracked pavement. Empty bottles of Colt 45 littered the dilapidated equipment that passed for a playground. Rust held the monkey bars together. The swings had been thrown over the top of the metal frame of the set, out of reach of any would-be user. The yellow school bus jungle gym had been tagged. RIP Alaina. RIP Conant. Nobody wanted to be here – not the police, not the media, not the paramedic, not the tenants – all equally prisoners in a cycle of well-meaning benevolence.

  "I take this seriously," Cantrell intoned a little too earnestly. Try as he did to keep an open mind about his partner, he recognized the half-a-cracker scent of festering resentment. "We speak for the dead. That's the job."

  "Screw this job. Screw the dead. Screw this neighborhood. You watch, no witnesses, nothing useful. We'll be lucky if we can even ID the vic. They don't care about these animals, even when they prey on them much less when they get killed."

  "Animals?" Cantrell arched an eyebrow.

  "You watch."

  Before he got out of the car, Cantrell muttered a prayer for the victims, the survivors, and their families. And then his partner. Though it was half-full and lukewarm, he gripped a Starbucks cup, toting it with the consciousness of an affectation.

  The city took on an entirely different pallor at night. Darkness had a way of enveloping any crime scene. No matter how many street lights, flashing lights of emergency services vehicles, the brightness of the moon, or lights from the surrounding buildings, shadows swam in deep pools around them. Where there was darkness, there was mystery. Lee studied the shadows, uncertain of the trick of the ambulance's lights on his eyes. Pairs of red dots glimmered at him. A half-dozen sets at least. Hate-tinged flecks glaring at him. He blinked. The dark remained a smooth velvet sea of ebony.

  Like red boxes in white trim, every bit like bricks in the wall of the Phoenix Apartments, three ambulances remained in front, without sound, with only their lights' intermittent flash acknowledging their presence. Police tape had been strung from tree to fence. Lee only grew irritated by the welling quiet he knew would soon settle on the gathering looky-loos. Full of sideways glances and growing stillness, as if a cloud of innocence descended on them with a spiritual anointing of silence.

  "I see angels. Snow angels." A homeless guy, in a tinfoil cap no less, waved his arms flapping in the snow only seen in his head.

  "I bet you do," a uniformed cop said as Lee and Cantrell approached the scene. "That kind of crazy had to be steeped in whiskey."

  The uniformed officer had that young cop look about him: thin, but muscular; dark sunglasses, and eager, with an arrogant bossiness to his manner. The rookie raised the tape to let them through. Cantrell ducked under. Shards of glass vials crunched underfoot. He paused to survey the remaining landscape.

  "I ain't ruining my new shoes stepping in that shit," Cantrell said.

  "You worried about this? Some of the shit you'll be walking through, you'll be begging for a scene this clean," Lee said.

  "We got a live one here," the uniformed officer said.

  "There was a survivor? He conscious?"

  "Uh, no. I meant it was a lively scene."

  "Look here, rook…" Lee rolled his eyes, the preamble tell to an apoplectic fit Cantrell usually found entertaining if not useful.

  "Why don't you stick to telling us what we got?" Cantrell cut him off and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. The red light bounced from their faces. The first body slumped against a wall. At first glance, he looked like a panhandler waiting for change. But his clothes were too new, clean-cut, fresh look. High forehead, eyes sunken in regret, thick-faced, heavy lips. Blood flared against his yellow vest.

  "Looks like multiple shooters. Don't know if these guys even got off a shot," Lee said.

  "Where are their guns?"

  "Exactly."

  "So, no guns recovered," Cantrell said.

  "Not even theirs?" Lee asked.

  "Someone needed souvenirs."

  "I doubt memories of spring break is what they have in mind." Annoyed by Cantrell's tight-assed fastidiousness, Lee strolled around the scene.

  The second body leaned out of the car, his blood mixed with a puddle that drained into the sewer. Thin, bright-eyed, the red lights caught in them making him appear possessed
. His white teeth spread in a harlequin sneer across his face.

  Lee leaned over the body. At first he thought the dead boy was Juneteenth Walker, would-be assailant of Green, the former muscle for the Night organization. He had the same semi-scowl, the same years of hurt worn into his skin, worn like an ill-fitting jacket off the rack from Good Will. The images hit him all at once. The blood. The bodies. The death. Lee pictured Green lumbering toward him, holding a severed head in his hand. Bullets flying. His thigh ached, his body remembering its violation. Noting the boy's ashy knuckles and a short bus necklace, he was certain of only one thing: this mutt didn't deserve a cop standing over him.