Walter Mosley - A Little Yellow Dog

I didn’t think that he’d ever locate Bartlett. If I’d read the man right he was too smart to stay in L.A. He was a black man who was implicated in the murder of other black people. There wouldn’t be any national manhunt. They’d wait for him to be arrested on some other charge and then hope that fingerprint checks would do their job. But Bartlett wasn’t the kind of crook who was arrested often, if ever. And even if he did get caught, he didn’t have anything on me. I was innocent of everything except the murders of Sallie Monroe and Raymond Alexander. One I regretted and the other haunted me.

The phone rang as Sanchez was leaving.

“Where’s my car, Easy?” John asked in my ear.

We drove around L.A. that evening picking up cars. We went up to the hill behind the Black Chantilly to retrieve Primo’s wild roadster. I paid Primo by letting him sell Mouse’s car off for parts. I retrieved the bookie boxes and dropped them off at the Chantilly. To Philly Stetz, but Rupert took them.

It was when we were headed over to Bonnie Shay’s block that John got serious with me.

“Easy, I thought you had got yourself out the street,” he said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“You know you can’t be livin’ like this, man. You too old for this shit. Things gettin’ serious in this town, Easy. People turnin’ mean. Even Mouse got hisself killed.”

“I know, John.” I said it so softly he might not have heard.

“Easy, you need a woman,” John said. “A woman who wants a home an’ ain’t gonna take no shit.”

Bonnie Shay came to my mind. She smiled and carried no weapons.

We picked up John’s car and drove back to his house, me in Alva’s Buick and him behind his own wheel. I knew that Alva had made some headway against me, because John didn’t invite me in.

“I’ll drive you home, Easy,” he said.

On the way I asked him about Grace.

“I did what I could, Easy. After a day and a half she called that white man and he came and got her. She said she was gonna try’n go straight.”

We drove almost the whole distance in silence.

Two blocks from my house he said, “You can’t be out here actin’ like you can do anything an’ get away wit’ it, Easy. You ain’t drinkin’, but you might as well be, the kinda life you live.”

Pharaoh greeted me with a snarl at the front door. The children were already asleep. I sat down in a chair with a glass of lemonade. The little yellow dog curled down, just out of reach, and bared his fangs. He’d tasted my blood and was hungry for more.

As the days passed I began to accept him as a part of my life; the dark, dangerous part that always threatened. As long as Pharaoh was around snarling and cursing I’d remember the kind of trouble that a man like me could find.

I only had two choices. One was straight whiskey. Instead, after nine days, I dialed a number.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Bonnie. It’s Easy.”

There was a long silence and then a cough.

“Hello.”

“I wanted to say hey,” I said. “I mean… I wanted to see you.”

“I’m sorry, Easy, but I’m leaving for Paris tonight.”

“For good?”

“No. Just for a few days. But I’m changing my home city back to Paris at the end of the month. I’ll still be working this route but I’ll be staying there.”

“Oh.”

“Well,” she said. “I’ve got to get ready.”

“Uh, yeah, but…”

“But what, Easy?”

“But I need to see you, Bonnie. I mean, I really do. I can talk to you and I need that, I mean I really need it.” I could only hope that she understood how hard it was for me to beg.

“Can you hold it for a few days?” Her voice was gentle.

“Yeah. I been holdin’ it seems like forever. A few more days won’t mean a thing.”

“I’ll be back Friday morning. You could call me then,” she said.

“What time?”

“Any time, Easy.”

“An’ we could talk?”

“Sure. If you think you can. I mean, seeing everything you know about me.”

“None of that matters, Bonnie. I trust you. I know you did what you had to do.”

Neither of us said a word for the next five minutes.

“I’d like to talk, Easy.”

“An’ we could get together too,” I said.

“Maybe.”

When I hung up I felt as if I was an astronaut who had completed his orbit of the earth and now I was pulled by some new gravity into a cold clean darkness.

Walter Mosleyis the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries, including national bestsellers Cinnamon Kiss, Little Scarlet, and Bad Boy Brawly Brown; the Fearless Jones series, including Fearless Jones and Fear Itself; the novels Blue Light and RL’s Dream; and two collections of stories featuring Socrates Fortlow, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and Walkin’ the Dog. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.