John Gilstrap - Nathan’s Run

They sat quietly for a while until Mr. Slater spoke. “Well?” he rasped.

“Well, what, Mr. Slater?” Though he had earned the right, Sammy felt awkward launching right into an I-told-you-so.

“You called this meeting, Sammy. I presume you want to discuss Lyle again.”

Sammy cleared his throat. Even after as long as they’d known each other, it was still difficult to tell the old man that he’d fucked up. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. We’ve got to stop him, Mr. Slater.”

Mr. Slater nodded. “You mean rein him in?”

Was it possible he didn’t see the obvious? “No, sir. I mean… more than that. He’s killed two cops now. The prison guard was bad enough, but cops. Jesus. When word leaks out, everything we’ve built will come down around our ears. It’s not worth it, sir. Pointer has to be sacrificed?’

Mr. Slater formed a steeple with his fingers and pressed them against his lips. “Suppose word doesn’t leak out? We have many secrets, Sammy. Not all of them leak out.”

“We’ve never had a secret like this, Mr. Slater. In all the years, we’ve only had to whack one cop, and that was because he was playing both ends. We did the cops a favor, and even they knew it. But this shit’s out of control. Son of a bitch is killing every-fucking-body. It’s nuts.”

The old man considered Sammy’s words. “And what about the money? Do we just forget about the money?”

Sammy’s mouth struggled for better words for a while, but then he gave up and shrugged. “yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we forget about the money, just like you told Pointer the other day. We make that Mark Bailey asshole go away, and we write off the five hundred grand to bad business.”

Mr. Slater inhaled noisily and let it go with considerable effort. The air made a growling sound as it rumbled through his emphysemic lungs. “Five hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, Sammy?”

“Yes, it is. And let’s not forget who pitched this crazy plan in the first place.”

“Ah, yes. Lyle again.”

“And this business of killing a kid for money…”

Mr. Slater silenced him with a wave. “You’ve made your point, Sammy.”

“Yes, sir.” Sammy broke eye contact and stared at his own foot, where it rested leisurely against the opposite knee. As Mr. Slater worked his way through the problem, only the rattling of his breathing pierced the silence.

At length, Mr. Slater spoke. “We must do what must be done. But I want some dignity for Lyle. He’s served well:’

“Yes, sir?’ Sammy agreed.

“He’ll call this morning. I want to speak with him when he does.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sammy read his boss’s body language and rose to leave, glancing at the old man one last time to check his mood. How ancient Slater looked, every year and every decision having carved a crease into his yellow-gray flesh. His boss would be gone soon, and there’d be no one to take his place. The punks would inherit the streets. That would be a tragic day, Sammy thought.

Billy Alexander was the only kid in Mrs. Lippincott’s fourth-grade class who hated summer vacation. For all he knew, he was the only kid in the world who preferred school to time off. He talked about his feelings one time to an older kid who lived down the hall, a white dude, but the reaction he got convinced him that it was best to keep such thoughts to himself.

At school, there was always something good to eat, and there were friends to play with and air conditioning to dry up the sweat. Billy’s apartment, on the other hand, was a sweatbox, stuck on the side of the building where breezes rarely stirred. When his mom was home—she worked all the time—she’d pick up some groceries and maybe even cook a real dinner. Most of the time, though, he’d be stuck picking through whatever was left in the cupboards. This morning, he’d boiled himself some macaroni for breakfast. It would have tasted better with some tomato sauce or some butter, but hey, you had to make do with what you had.

The very worst part, though, was the loneliness. At ten, Billy was the youngest kid in his building by about six years, and the only one who wasn’t a doper or a crackhead. The people who lived in his neighborhood scared the hell out of him. Fights and shootings were the routine. Billy couldn’t remember a weekend when there weren’t cop cars or ambulances out front.

In the two years that they’d been living in the Vista Plains Apartments, he’d been nearly shot twice, beaten up five times, robbed of every dime he’d ever put into his pocket, and was even tossed down the fire escape stairs once. That one required a trip to the hospital in an ambulance, and got him six stitches in his forehead. Eight months later, his mom had yet to notice the scar.

Billy knew that his life sucked, and he figured that sooner or later he was going to become a loser just like all the others, but for the time being, he liked to pretend that maybe it would be different for him. If he actually learned all that crap they were teaching him in school, and if he just stayed away from the other kids from his neighborhood, maybe, just maybe, he could be different. Black folks had done it before. Colin Powell had done it, and Colin Powell was his hero.

So summertime was something he had to endure. He had his books and he had his television, and it wasn’t like he was starving to death or anything. Most important, he had his best friend Barney, a golden retriever-and-god-knows-what-else mix that Billy had found in an alley, trying to make a meal out of a tipped-over trash can. For both boy and dog, it had been love at first sight, and they’d been inseparable for nearly three months now. Billy noticed with some interest that even people who had no respect for a kid showed respect to a kid with a big dog.

At the moment, Billy was doing the one chore that he hated above all others: taking the trash downstairs. The basement of his apartment building was a dark, damp, stinky place where people who had no homes would go to camp out, or shoot up, or sometimes die. He’d never seen anything particularly scary down there himself, but he’d heard stories.

As always, he let Barney go down first, to flush out whatever bad guys might be lurking. Dutifully, the beast trotted on down, then paused at the bottom, staring back up at his master. The stupid, expectant look on the dog’s face made Billy laugh.

“You haven’t figured out that you’re the bait, have you boy?” Billy said as he negotiated the stairs. Barney’s wagging tail was unbalancing the dog’s back end, causing him to do a silly little dance with his hind legs just to keep from falling over.

Billy wasted no time doing his duty. Lifting the lid of the galvanized trash can with his left hand, he slung the three plastic trash bags—they’d been grocery bags in their past lives—into the opening.

He’d just turned to go back up the stairs when he heard it. Some boxes in the corner moved. Barney heard it, too. The dog braced his legs and lowered his head, the fur along his spine rising like porcupine quills. The ferocious noise that issued from the dog’s throat was unlike anything Billy had ever heard.

“W-who’s there?” Billy called out to the shadows near the furnace. Barney seemed confused, not knowing whether to attack or to stay back and defend his master.

“W-whoever you are, you better come out before my dog kills you.” Despite the fear in his belly, Billy’s voice carried the firm conviction of one who was stating the obvious.

First one, and then two- and then three-at-a-time, boxes and trash bags fell away from the stack in the corner and tumbled to the floor. Like peeling away a banana, the falling boxes revealed a terrified white boy, who slowly rose to his feet, his hands outstretched in front of him to ward off Barney’s threatening moves.