"Nigger shut up. Just shut up. Stop doing this to yourself, it's stupid. You don't think they would have caused more misery on their own if they'd stayed around? You can't bring them back, so just stick with your dream. Accept it as the worthwhile cost. It's the only way."
Head wagging with pity, Bobby Finley bent forward, reached under his seat, and yanked out a plastic cooler. Snowden made the oath watching him that if there some kind of burnt body part inside that he was going to start screaming, regardless of the consequence. "Peanut butter and jelly?" Bobby held out to him.
"Bobby, why in God's name do you have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sitting under this church bench?"
"Peanut butter and jelly just sits better. I tried using balogna, figured it has a lot of preservatives so it would stay good under there for a couple of days, right? Gave me the shits something fierce."
"You know what pisses me off the most about all this?" Snowden demanded.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Why would you be annoyed at all?"
"Because here I am basically agreeing with you about all the stuff you yourself are always going on about. I'm seeing you in pain and I'm telling you what you need to hear. I'm giving you an out, I'm repeating your schtick back to you and somehow you're still managing to sit there with that smug look on your face like I'm the idiot."
"I'm sorry that's how you feel." The way that peanut butter looked sticking to Bobby's mouth, the smacking noise it made as he talked, it wasn't helping Snowden's mood in any way.
"Those guys died and that sucks, but Harlem just got that much closer to being the promised land. Any means necessary,' right, like Malcolm X used to say."
"Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Turns out that's bullshit. Turns out the means just might be the most important part. You were right all along, Snowden. Belief isn't safe. Look man, that's really why I asked you here," Bobby said, swallowing the rest of his mouthful, wishing he'd brought some milk to go with it. "I've watched you almost a year now, and you don't believe in anything! Not in God, not in humanity! You have no higher cause than your own and yet you still manage to get out of bed every morning without losing it. You want to help me? Then tell me, Snowden, tell me how do you do it. How do you keep from being blinded by ideals?"
"Are you nuts? I want to be blinded! You're supposed to be guiding me, inspiring me with your faith! You were always the one who had the answers," Snowden tried to remind him.
"Yeah, and now my answer is you. Tell me, Snowden. I want to believe nothing, but I'm just not a natural so you're going to have to help me. Give me your secret," Bobby pleaded, but it was useless. His best chance at nihilism was already gaining momentum, moving physically and ideologically away from him.
CEDRIC SNOWDEN, WARRIOR IN BLACK
LESTER IN TWEED. Tweed jacket, tweed pants, tweed socks. Snowden couldn't believe that last bit existed, but there they were covering Lester's ankles with their jagged woolen lines. Far behind his desk, Lester sat with his legs crossed. The folders laid out as before, each glossy face staring up, pleading to be overlooked.
"Pick your poison. No, that's not right, should be, 'Pick their poison,' that'd be a bit more accurate, wouldn't it? This is your last mandatory extinction, so make it a good one!" Wendell, in the corner, seemed to appreciate his own tweed ensemble much less, wiggling his long body around in his vest in an attempt to break free from it. "OK, fine," Lester said to him, rising to help the dog remove it. "No accounting for taste."
Snowden was going to pick very carefully indeed. Snowden was going to make it a very good one. A lot of thinking, a lot of thinking had gone into this, and he told himself he would think his way out this time, that it was possible he could actually save a life besides his own and get through this. The problem with his last effort was obvious: Don't think small, don't think weak and scared. Think confident. Think secure. Don't think nonthreatening, think non-threatenable, somebody capable of hearing out a warning and not acting like a cornered animal. Someone who felt in charge, assured that the world moved forward solely because he willed it.
"Him," Snowden said, putting down the file.
"Him?" Lester saw who it was. He picked up the picture, looked at it again anyway. "You're joking, right? I mean, I just put him out there for contrast, to let you know the other guys were nothing. To be honest, I was thinking more along the line of Horus on that one. It's not an apartment, it's a townhouse — don't have keys for his place, and believe me it's a fortress. The guy's got more thugs coming in and out of there than you can count. I'd do it but I've had run-ins with him in the past, so that gives me motive. To be honest, I figured it would even take Horus a couple months to work the nerve up."
"I'm not joking. Him. I can do it," Snowden told Lester, pumping his chest with simulated confidence. "I'm a cold-blooded killer, aren't I? I'm the bastard responsible for the death of three mothers' sons. I'm going to do him and that's it."
Parson Boone knew someone was trying to kill him, he just didn't know who, how many, or for what reasons. He was pretty sure whatever those reasons were they were valid ones, he just didn't know which of the shit he'd sown in the world was coming back to haunt him. Parson Boone was sure someone was trying to kill him, or had been in the past, or would be in the future. It was just the kind of life he lived, so he took actions in accordance.
Parson Boone rarely went outside his 137th Street brownstone and even inside it never below his top-floor apartment. Boone allowed the people with a propensity for violence in his employ to live on the floors below, so anyone who wanted to get to him would first have to go through them. The top-floor apartment was completely soundproof and fortified with security cameras covering nearly every room in the house below. There were more locks on the door to the fourth floor than there were on the front one. Good locks, a quality job. Lester knew this because he knew the contractor who did it.
The most obvious way to break into the brownstone of Parson Boone was to come in through the abandoned shell it was connected to. Even Parson Boone knew that, that's why he'd personally seen to the cinder-blocking of all its doors and windows. To Snowden it looked like a tomb. Here is a Bunch of Crackheads Who Smoked Their Very Souls, the hieroglyphic graffiti seemed to say, Only a Damned Fool Would Enter. At this point in his life, Snowden was pretty sure he was a damn fool, and he had the key to the overlooked back basement grate so that's exactly what he set about doing. Horus was sent to the block in a van on the night determined, armed not just with a gun but a cell phone and a pair of binoculars to aim at Boone's windows. On first sighting he called Lester and it was time for Snowden to go in.
Lester wasn't stupid. He was homicidal, delusional, addicted, but Snowden couldn't really call him stupid. As they made their way through the ravaged remains of the abandoned building, flashlights the only thing saving them from being swallowed by the profound darkness, Snowden listened to him explain all of his research into the blueprints to come up with his strategy and recognized for the first time that Lester was actually very clever. That that's what had kept the Chupacabra from being caught all this time.
The only thing easy about doing this job was that it didn't have to look like an accident; in the case of Parson Boone, no one would have believed that anyway. Lester's was a finesse plan. Snowden was not surprised to learn that Cyrus Marks, being the belligerent, homicidal hedgehog he knew him to be, had imagined a much more violent, blunt assault to get rid of Parson Boone: Shove a pound of C4 explosives against the adjoining living room wall, walk through the burning hole, and shoot everything living. Apparently, Marks had envisioned this job as the men of the Second Chance Program's graduating project.