Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

He let go of my leg, but I grabbed his forearms in a hopeless attempt to keep him alive. But the blackmailer was dying, and nothing I could do would keep him from that fate.

When he’d fallen down on his back, Fearless touched his throat and put an ear against his mouth.

“Dead,” my friend said. Then he looked up at me. “Damn, Paris.”

“What? You think I knew somethin’ like this was gonna happen?”

“You the one brought us here, man,” he said.

“He killed himself,” I said. “He was scared because’a what he did.”

“Are we standin’ ovah a dead white man in Beverly Hills?” he asked me.

“He died of a heart attack or somethin’ like that. We didn’t kill him.”

Fearless just shook his head.

“Damn,” he said again.

There was over forty thousand dollars laid out on a bed in one of the house’s smaller bedrooms. I looked at it, counted it, placed it in a pillowcase, and put it down.

There was no other indication of Sterling’s criminal activity in the house. We left him where he had fallen in the foyer. If we were lucky, a housecleaner or relative would find him and that would be it — Death due to heart attack, the coroner’s report would read.

“Should we take the money?” I asked my friend.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” he said. “Maybe we could find somebody he robbed an’ pay ’em back.”

We watched the street until no one was out and no car was coming and then made our escape.

While driving toward Pasadena we had the following conversation:

“You really blame me for this?” I asked.

“I don’t think you knew what was gonna happen,” he said. “I don’t think you wanted him to die. But it’s just the way you go about things, man. You too much. You too hard.”

“Hard? Me? Man, I couldn’t beat up two outta three high school kids.”

“Not hard fists, Paris. It’s your mind. You treat people like they was books, man. You just open ’em up and start goin’. But really you should come up slow an’ check it out first.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had the feeling that he was telling me the truth, that I was at least partly the cause of Sterling’s death. But what could I do about it? He was the criminal. Wasn’t he?

It was evening before we arrived at 1329 Hugo Place. The address sounded as if it belonged on a small house like Sterling’s cottage. But this was a mansion. There was an eight-foot salmon pink adobe wall around the property and wrought-iron gates blocking pedestrian and vehicular passage.

There was a button for a buzzer to the right of the gateway.

“Okay, Fearless,” I said. “What do you say? Do we knock or not?”

“They got your people in there, man,” Fearless said. Then he tried the pedestrian gate — it wasn’t locked.

A hundred feet from the entrance stood the house.

It was a big house, three floors in places. There were no lights on, no cars in the driveway.

My heart was pounding like John Henry’s hammer, and I worried about a heart attack. Maybe I’d die like Sterling had, from fear. Even Fearless couldn’t protect me from my own heart.

The moon was bright enough to light our way and expose us to invisible assassins. Every footstep we took on the gravel path was like a giant maraca announcing us to our enemies.

“There’s a way round back,” Fearless hissed.

I went with him from the lunar shade of a large stand of bird-of-paradise to the shadow of the house.

Behind the house stood a smaller, two-story building. There was a faint light coming from a few of its many windows.

We made our way to the front door, which was locked, and then around the sides, looking into windows as we went.

There was one window near the ground that was to the basement. There was a slightly stronger light coming from there. I peered into that portal, down into a room that was at least twenty feet below. There I beheld Three Hearts and Angel sitting across from each other at a wooden table. The room they were in was small and, I thought, probably locked.

I went to get Fearless. When he saw them he said, “I don’t think there’s anybody else here, Paris. Let’s just break a windah an’ get them.”

“You got your gun?”

“Do a robin have wings?”

The window didn’t look large enough, so we broke down a door at the back of the extra house.

We came in through a kitchen. The house was dark, and we left it like that, making our way, trying doors as we went.

“Paris,” Fearless said after pushing open a door.

Just hearing my name caused a pain in my chest.

“What?” I cried.

“It’s some steps leadin’ down.”

I wanted to run away. I would have run if I was alone. The thought occurred to me that we could have called the cops and given them the address on Hugo. We could have told them that there were women trapped in the basement.

There were tears on my face and the wide-eyed corpse of Lionel Sterling in my mind. I had forty thousand dollars in the trunk, but what difference did that make when my chest was about to explode?

“Come on, man,” Fearless said. “Let’s get this ovah wit’.”

A light snapped on and I gasped, falling to one knee. I knew someone was about to open fire on us. I closed my eyes to pray.

“Paris,” Fearless said.

When I opened my eyes I realized that he had turned on the basement light.

He took a step down on the pine plank staircase. Every step he took sighed like a crying woman. I came after, unable to keep my hands from shaking.

After thirty-seven cries downward we reached a concrete floor. Fearless found another light switch and flipped it. There was nothing in the ten-by-ten room except a sturdy and unpainted wooden door.

“Hearts!” Fearless yelled at the door.

“Fearless? Is that you, baby?” she cried.

Maybe I would have been relieved to hear her voice, but I was trying to hold down the fright Fearless had given me when he shouted. The darkness had brought me back to my own basement and the corpse I’d sat with down there. Fearless could have turned on a dozen lights and it still wouldn’t have been enough for me.

“Hold on, Hearts,” Fearless called. “We’ll get you out. I just gotta jimmy this lock here.”

It was a serious padlock held down by brass fittings that a jailer would have been proud of.

“I cain’t pull off the lock wit’ my hands, Paris,” my friend told me. “I gotta go upstairs an’ find sumpin’ to pry it with.”

I clamped my teeth shut so that I wouldn’t beg him to stay. I nodded, hoping that he didn’t see my fear.

Fearless patted my shoulder and made his way back up the stairs. I leaned against the door and slid down into a crouch.

“Fearless?” Three Hearts called. “Are you still there?”

“It’s me, Auntie,” I said, my voice a little high.

“Paris. How did you find us?”

The words jumbled in my mind as I tried to find an answer. We found a man who had been destroyed. We killed a man. We found some money. We buried a guy in a strawberry field.

I got dizzy and nauseous.

“Paris,” Three Hearts cried. “Paris.”

“I’m here, Auntie. Fearless is gettin’ somethin’ t’break the lock wit’.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Up.”

“In the house?”

“Yeah.”

“Them men still up there?”

I expected to hear gunshots at that moment. Never in my life had I been more sure of a premonition. It came to me all of a sudden. The kidnappers were all asleep. They had slept through us breaking in but now they heard Fearless.

I stood up but went no further. Any moment the gunfire would begin. They might get the drop on Fearless, but then again he was the army assassin. But even if he killed them, the gunfire would bring the cops and we’d all be arrested and convicted for a dozen crimes.