Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“There. Hotel rooms, beach houses, rectory couches, and back-alley slums.” There was distaste on her lips but not shame, not humiliation.

“So you seduced them?” I asked, as if my tongue were a scalpel and her dignity a malignant tumor that had to be excised.

“If you had been there you would see it differently,” Angel said in an even voice. “Their blood was boiling from the minute they saw me. Ullie told me that this was how we could save my family. I would have done a lot worse for them.”

She’d beaten me. Three Hearts was now holding the girl’s hands. Fearless sat there, his posture in the stoic demeanor of respect.

I turned my back against the door. I was falling into a stupor. Soon sleep would come and take me, just as one day Death would come knocking on my door.

“Paris,” Fearless said, and I opened my eyes.

“What?”

“Cops.”

I turned and looked out the back window. The flashing blue and red lights caused a chemical reaction in my brain. I don’t know the names of the particular ingredients, but three seconds after I was awakened I was also as sober as a judge.

“I’m pullin’ ovah,” Fearless said. “Get ready.”

My sobriety turned into a microscopic lens then. Fearless saying to get ready meant that he was prepared to go to war.

“Fearless,” I said as he pulled to the curb.

“What?”

“We don’t need to fight here.”

“We got to get to Ulysses, man. These cops in the way.”

The squad car pulled up behind us. They shone a bright white light from their car into ours.

“There’s no reason to hurt anybody, Fearless. We’ll get out of this.”

A young white man was coming up to the driver’s window. He was wearing a policeman’s uniform and trained to enforce a certain kind of law; he was arrogant and sure of himself, but he didn’t know that if I didn’t talk just right he was about to be killed.

“I got it, Fearless. I got it, man.”

The tension went out of my friend.

The police hadn’t made it to the door yet. Fearless was rolling down his window in expectation. But my mind was back down the road we had just traveled. Three Hearts had thought she knew Angel from the first moment she laid eyes on her. She could see something in her the way I saw things in Fearless. Maybe, I thought, maybe Hearts knew something I did not; maybe Angel was not misnamed; maybe I was just blind to her, as many and most were to my friend.

“Step out of the car,” a voice said. There was no “please” at the end of his request.

Under the high beams of their car we stood with our hands on the roof of mine. The women were on one side, while Fearless and I faced them.

“Paris Minton?” one white cop asked my friend.

“I’m Minton,” I said.

While the other cop frisked Fearless, my inquisitor patted me down with one hand.

“We’re going to have to bring you down to the station,” the cop was telling me.

“Gun,” the cop searching Fearless said.

“Paris,” Fearless said to me.

“You shut up,” his cop complained.

“Don’t worry, Fearless,” I said. “We’ll pull out of this.”

“Okay,” he said, as my cop snapped the first manacle of the handcuffs on me.

Three Hearts had left her gun-laden purse in the car and was holding her wallet in her hand. The police checked out the ladies’ IDs and told them that they had to bring Fearless and me down to the station for questioning.

“What for?” Three Hearts asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” one of them said. “We had his license plate number and name in our hot file. We’re just following orders.”

They pressed Fearless and me into the backseat of their prowl car. I remember, as our captors pulled from the curb, seeing Three Hearts in the front passenger’s seat and Angel behind the wheel of my junk heap. I wondered, as we drove off one way and the women headed in another, if I would see both of them alive again.

Sometimes jail isn’t such a bad thing. I mean, you’re locked down and treated as a threat and a danger, but if you don’t have anywhere to go and freedom contains threats that incarceration does not, then a free meal, a locked metal door, and a hard cot will do.

Fearless and I were searched and thrown into a big cell that had a maximum capacity of twelve. There were fifteen men already in there when we arrived.

Some guy, I don’t even remember who, said something he thought was dangerous when we walked in.

With a smile Fearless told the man, “Come on ovah here an’ let’s get this ovah wit’.” The man could hear the threat in Fearless’s bored tone. He stayed where he was, and from then on nobody bothered us. Two men even vacated their bunks so that we would have a place to rest our weary bones.

Fearless was a paradox in my life. In that cell he was my savior. Just hearing his few words and seeing the steel in his bearing, men stepped back from him and anyone with him.

But when we were back on the streets, Fearless would drag me into danger no matter which way he went.

That’s why I was happy to be locked up. The bars protected me. The lack of windows meant that nobody could spy on me. I wanted to stay there for a week, maybe two, until Useless and Angel and Three Hearts were far away and forgotten. But I knew that Fearless was too responsible for that. He used his one phone call to reach Milo. All he got was the answering service. I wasn’t even going to use my call, but Fearless convinced me to phone Mona and tell her to keep on Milo.

“You need a lawyer,” I said to my friend.

“Why?”

“Carrying a concealed weapon,” I suggested.

“I got a license,” he replied.

“Since when?”

“Since I been bodyguardin’ Milo. He got it for me.”

“Well,” I said, “we might as well get some sleep.”

“You sleep, Paris,” my friend said. “I’ll just sit up top an’ get the lay of the land.”

I was so far into that mess with Three Hearts that I was even dreaming about Useless.

“What the hell you want?” I asked my iniquitous cousin. We were sitting at a picnic table in a small park near Watts.

“Listen to me, Paris,” he whined. “I cain’t he’p it, brother. I love her.”

“So? Love her, then. That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me.”

“You got to find her, man. You got to bring her back.”

Useless was crying. I tried to remember him ever crying before.

“Paris.”

... Had he ever cried before? Had he shed tears?

“Wake up, man.”

I knew there was a commotion going on before I opened my eyes.

A large black man was saying something in a voice that rasped like a big handsaw on hard wood.

“... kick your ass, peckahwood,” he was saying.

There was a smallish white kid in front of him trying to stand up straight and retreat at the same time.

I immediately identified with the kid because I would have been in his position in that confrontation.

“Watch yourself, man,” Fearless whispered to me. “I’m’a go ovah there.”

Over there. The conflict was coming down two and a half steps from our bunk. Most of the men in the room were black. After that came three Mexicans and two other white guys. No one else in that cell was going to stand up for the white kid. No one else would have stood up for me.

“Kick his ass, Leo,” somebody said.

Leo socked the kid in the face, and I was amazed that the white boy didn’t go down. He leaned over like a reed in a windstorm and he began bleeding from a cut that opened over his eye. But the kid stood back up. Leo grinned. And then Fearless, the Lancelot of South L.A., stood between them. He put up his hands and shook his head, and the fight was over — just like that.