Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

My second challenger cut a second off the time it took to reach me by leaping over his fallen comrade; too bad that this opened him up to a straight left to the jaw. He fell also.

I heard a scream of agony and turned to see that Twill had buried a medium-sized hunting knife into one of his opponents’ left foot. The young man looked to be a mixture of Asian and Polynesian genes. He fell on his butt grabbing at the haft of the knife. Before I could help Twill with his other challenger I felt a blow to my right cheekbone.

The light brown guy I had felled with my gun was up again like some tireless zombie in a B movie. He threw another punch that I was able to avoid. I hit him six times to the body and he went down. But it was like a tag-team match because his partner, who was white, jumped at me again. I blocked his blows and hit him with my best.

He went down as his partner staggered to his feet.

“Stay down,” I told him.

He threw himself at me but I sidestepped, allowing him to crash into a steel girder.

Twill was on the move. The guy left standing was black and wiry but he wasn’t trained. Twill had been working out in Gordo’s Gym beside me from the age of eight. He knew how to bob and weave. He knew how to hit, too.

Looking back at my enemies I saw that the light brown guy was unconscious. He was beefy and had thrown his full weight at me. When flesh and bone hits tempered steel there’s no instant recovery.

The white member of the Rainbow Coalition of Street Fighters was still coming though. I sidestepped once and he failed to grab me. I sidestepped again and the frustration began to show in his face. Now I was looking at my opponent and at Twill and his man beyond. The Far Eastern soldier was still trying to staunch the bleeding from his foot. He’d taken off his shoe and sock and was holding the injured appendage with both hands like a yogi attempting some advanced blood-asana.

I took a deep breath and for the first time the white attacker stopped, looking for a way past my fists. That was okay by me, I could use the breather. But then Twill’s guy got in a lucky punch, hitting Twill in the gut, which lowered him to one knee. The black attacker was closing in and my common sense diminished with each inch. But then the man who was being dragged from the tent leapt on the attacker’s back and Twill picked up a chunk of brick and hit the guy multiple times to the rib cage.

I smiled broadly at the outcome, and this confused my enemy. He turned to see if something was coming up behind him and I took the opportunity to land a haymaker on the side of his jaw. The jaw was definitely broken and the man was surely out.

I was breathing hard and so was my son. Two of the four we fought were unconscious and the other two couldn’t get to their feet. Twill was supporting the prisoner and smiling at me.

“You okay?” I asked my son.

“Just fine, Pop.”

I took a handkerchief from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to the kid we’d saved. He pressed the cloth to his mouth, pulled it away to see his blood, and then pressed his mouth again.

“Fortune?” I asked.

He nodded.

“We better get out of here,” Twill said.

The three of us walked and staggered through rush-hour foot traffic across to the E train station. Fortune had cleaned up his face pretty much and the bleeding had stopped. Like his four assailants he wore blue jeans, knockoff cross-trainers, and a black T-shirt. He was what people descended from the colonized world called white, and quite beautiful: full lips, blue eyes, and tawny hair that formed into ringlets. He might have been a minor god from a Mediterranean pantheon come to Earth to see what the big deal was about love and death.

“Why didn’t they kill you, man?” Twill asked as we waited by the southmost stairwell for a train to come.

“I don’t know,” the slightly woozy godling replied.

“Why would they?” I asked.

“When Jones sends bodies after you he expects bodies in return,” Fortune said, mouthing a homily probably repeated a dozen times a day by the Jones acolytes. “When they busted in on me I expected ’em to cut my throat.”

The train came and we got into a car that had only a few straphangers headed uptown at that time of morning.

I appreciated the sharp pain in my cheekbone. It was like a Zen bell ringing in the darkness of deep meditation. This clarion note obliterated the passion unleashed by Marella, leaving my mind open and free.

“Those boys are gonna report to Jones,” I said.

“Yeah,” Twill agreed.

“Maybe we can leave Fortune off here at Hush’s place.”

“What about me?” Twill asked.

“No,” I said. “I want you somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“For easy access.” I didn’t want Twill around Hush too much or for very long. Both my friend and son were psychopaths and sociopaths. Together they might create something that I couldn’t protect Twill from.

“Who’s Hush?” Fortune asked.

We called Hush while walking from the West Fourth Street station. He was waiting for us at the door when we got there.

“Come on in,” the killer said, ushering us into the posh entrance hall of his old-time Greenwich Village mansion.

Waiting for us in the octagonal room was Tamara, Hush’s wife. She was a black woman with a plain face but with spirit so powerful that it seemed to add a dimension to her visage; next to her stood Liza Downburton wearing a pale blue kimono that she must have borrowed from the lady of the house.

“Fortune,” Liza cried, and she ran to the pretty young man, caressing him, kissing his face. “What happened to you?”

I had never seen the young burglar except with the bulges and bruises on his face, so he looked normal to me.

“He sent the four after me.”

“And you fought them?”

“More like they took turns fightin’ my head. Twill and his father come to save me.”

“The two-man cavalry,” Hush said softly.

“Come on in the living room,” Tamara said. She’d put a hand on my forearm because she had a soft spot for me since I’d saved her life and her son’s.

“Where’s Thackery?” I asked as we moved from the red tiling of entrance hall to the oak floor of the living room.

“At the French school,” Hush and Tamara said together.

There were eight bright yellow padded chairs set in an oval around a pink marble table of the same shape. Everyone but Tamara took a seat. Liza pushed her chair closer to Fortune so that they could hold hands.

“I’ll go get us some ice tea and biscuits,” Tamara said.

“Don’t put ice in Fortune’s,” Liza said. “He’s got sensitive teeth.”

The two women glanced at each other and I saw a connection.

Hush saw it too. He didn’t look bothered, but anyone knowing Hush didn’t want his attention on them for any reason.

“What happened?” Liza asked again.

Twill gave the explanations with a word or two interjected here and there by Fortune.

For his part Fortune had gone to ground under the construction site. The entrance was hidden by the brown canvas tent.

“I didn’t wanna dig out the transmitter till I knew for sure that they were serious,” the young burglar said. “You know it’s a death sentence to do that.”

“Didn’t you realize that people in Jones’s army knew where you were?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “but nobody ever told about it before. You know Jones didn’t want us gettin’ high or hookin’ up away from the places he controlled. We liked to keep places like that a secret.”

“But didn’t you know he was after you?” Liza asked.

“Yeah but I just thought it might’a just been for a beat-down like. I didn’t know he wanted to kill me.”