“Hold it tight,” I told him.
“I can’t,” he cried.
“You don’t and you’ll keep on bleedin’,” I said. “An’ you know there’s only so much you got to give.”
Milo grabbed the bandage, and I went to Fearless. He was holding a handkerchief on the wound of his left hand and searching the floor with his eyes.
“Damn!” Fearless cursed. “Damn!”
“What, man? What!” I cried.
“My goddamned baby finger,” Fearless said. “Muthahfuckah shot it off!”
“We got to go, man!”
“Not without my finger.”
“What?”
Fearless grabbed my shirt with his good hand and pulled me up close. “Wake up, Paris. That finger got my fingerprint on it.”
I took a deep breath, and in that forced semblance of calm I said, “You get Milo to the bottom of the stairs. I’ll find the finger and be down in a minute.”
Milo yelled in pain when Fearless helped him to his feet. They struggled over the four dead men, climbed through the door, and went shuffling and groaning down the hall.
I turned on the overhead light and searched the bloody scene. I looked all over the floor, under the desk, and even under the four corpses. I was in a kind of shock, sifting around. I got lost there among the dead. At one point I sat down on the floor next to Tricks. He had collapsed into a seated position, looking like a puppet waiting for someone to pull his string. I looked at him, wondering who he was and what had brought him to this final moment. Then I thought that if I was lucky, I’d read about it in tomorrow’s evening edition; if not, I’d find out at my trial.
Down on the floor, next to the man’s knee, was a finger, a curved little digit with a wad of bulging red flesh pressing out where the knuckle should have been. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I got to my feet. I retrieved my discarded pistol and headed for the stairs.
As I walked from the room, Tricks fell over on his side.
34
I JOINED Fearless and Milo, who were hunkered down by the side door. Being the only man not wounded, I was elected to get the car. I drove up to the sidewalk, and Fearless hustled Milo out and into the backseat. They both laid low back there while I drove down the fairly empty streets.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. There I was, a black man driving down the streets of white Los Angeles with no reason that a cop could imagine — except mischief. And what could I say if he pulled us over and found two wounded men in the backseat?
“Fearless.”
“Yeah, Paris?”
“You still got that gun?”
“Naw, man. I wiped it off and dropped it next to the big white dude while you was workin’ on Milo’s arm.”
That was one thing at least. My pistol hadn’t even been fired.
Maybe, if we got away, the cops wouldn’t suspect that there had been others in the room.
“Take Hauser down to Olympic and hang a right,” Milo said. “Take it to Sierra Bonita and go all the way south down to three blocks past Venice. It’s the only two-story house on the block.”
I KNOCKED ON the front door. After a few seconds Loretta Kuroko said, “Who is it?”
“It’s Paris, Lo. Me and Milo and Fearless.”
The door opened. Loretta was wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe. Beyond her were two small Japanese, a man and a woman, huddled together.
“What happened?”
I told her about the wounds but not how they were inflicted. She had me drive through the driveway and into the backyard. From there we went through the back door and into the kitchen. Loretta’s parents didn’t speak any English, but they showed surprisingly little fear of blood and gunshot wounds or desperate men in the middle of the night. Both Fearless and Milo were washed up and bandaged within a quarter of an hour. Milo, who knew enough Japanese to say may I and thank you, made his bed on Loretta’s couch.
Fearless and I said our thank-you’s and left. I dropped Fearless off at Dorthea’s and then drove over to our apartment at Fontanelle’s court, where I slept fitfully until late the next morning.
When I got up, I knew what I had to do.
So, dressed in the same funky clothes, I drove over to an alley off Slauson and climbed the back stairs to the third floor.
Theodore Wally’s door was unlocked, but that didn’t matter much because you can’t steal from a dead man.
The bullet wound had been fatal but not immediately so. He had been cleaned off and bandaged and put into the ratty sofa’s foldout bed. The covers were pulled up to his chin. His skin was still warm.
There was a bloodstain in the middle of the floor. That’s where they shot him and left him to die. I sat on the side of the bed and lowered my face into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that.
When I felt a gentle breeze on my skin I looked up, and Love was standing there. She wore a yellow dress with low-heeled orange shoes. Her pocketbook was black though. The fact that she hadn’t color-coordinated her bag was the only clue that she was pressured or rushed.
“I’m surprised you came back,” I said.
“I’m surprised you did too.” She closed the door, and when she turned back, there was a small pistol in her hand.
“Wally tell you that we were here ’fore you killed him?”
“I was hiding behind the sofa,” she said. “When you almost beat him to death.”
“I smelled your perfume,” I said. “But I mistook it for roses at first. And I had the club in my hand, but I didn’t kill him.”
“Neither did I.”
“Then who?”
“Leon,” she said with distaste. “Leon or his friend Tricks. I don’t know which one because they were both here together.”
“So why are you still breathing?”
“I wasn’t here. I came in after they had shot him.” Her sorrow seemed sincere. “He went to meet them, to make a deal about the bond. I guess they followed him after they met, and they left him for dead.”
“How’d you hook up wit’ Wally?” I asked.
“I was looking for you like I said before, and I remembered him from the day he helped you. I saw his profile, and you told me that he worked at the store. He was all sad. I talked to him a little bit, he was nice. Then, when I went out to look for you, Leon grabbed me.”
“Then you were with me and Fearless and then with Latham,” I said. “So how’d Wally fit in all that?”
“I wanted to find you again,” she said. “I thought Theodore could help me, but he was so upset when I went to the store that I offered to take him out for a coffee. He decided right then to quit his job. He wrote a note, and we went off together. He was very sad about what he did to you. I gave him a shoulder to cry on and offered to help him.”
“Some help,” I said.
“I tried to save him.”
“A doctor would have been better.”
“He didn’t want a doctor,” she said. “He wanted the money from the bond and the police would have messed all that up.”
I grunted, and Elana looked away. She wanted the money so bad that she had a dead man begging for it.
“You gonna shoot me?” I asked.
“Only if you want me to,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“Why don’t you join me, Paris? We could make this money together. We could split it,” she smiled, “or share.”
“I don’t know if I like the odds.”
“What odds?”
“I was sitting outside of the motel when Latham and Brother Grove got laid low. I saw you driving in the opposite direction.”