Walter Mosley - The Long Fall

In that moment, time came to a complete stop. I was looking into the killer’s dark eyes for an answer.

Why did you make me sign over the money? Why do you want me dead? I wanted to ask, but the act of bringing the questions to my lips started time moving again, and then he fired.

I sat up in the posh bedding, gasping for air. My heart was beating like a pneumatic hammer. It took more than a minute for me to catch my breath.

I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the bed. Twill was sound asleep in his portable body bag. He’d unzippered the face net and the front was open down to his waist. I could just make out the peaceful face of his repose.

I MADE MY way to the small dining table off of Katrina’s near-professional kitchen. I brought my jacket with me, but search as I might I couldn’t find the cigarettes. Then I remembered that I had quit again and so went to the cupboard for the bottle of brandy Katrina kept there.

Three shots later I calmed down enough so that my pulse was near normal and my mind was working in a fairly linear fashion. Timothy Moore, no matter how good his story was, didn’t make sense. The dominoes were just too perfect. There was a slim chance that he was on the up-and-up, but I’d have been a fool to play it like that.

I took out my personal cell phone and entered the code “666.” And even though it was 3:17 in the morning, he answered on the first ring.

“LT?”

“Hush.”

“What do you need?”

“Some assistance.”

“When and where?”

THERE WAS NO going to sleep for hours after that dream.

I went to the dining room and reflected on the wilderness of my mind.

I had always been the runt since as far back as I can remember. After the age of twelve I was fatherless and poor for real—not for the Movement. My mother died when I had just turned fourteen. She just gave up. I never blamed her, though. I was alone in the world and rarely took a backward step in the ring of life. I was what Gordo called a banger. I moved forward, took my lumps, and gave just as good. If a bigger kid picked on me he better know how many teeth he could afford to lose. Anã€rd to lod if the principal or some foster parent thought that I was there to take orders—they learned.

I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever truly frightened me. Hush is at the top of that list.

As far as I know I’m one of only three people who know his real name, and I would never say it out loud, much less write it down.

For nearly two decades he was the man the professionals went to when they wanted somebody dead. He would kill anyone, anywhere. If you needed it to look like an accident, there was a heart attack or a car accident in the offing. If the body needed to disappear, it would never be found. He was so good that even the head men of foreign mobs thought twice before uttering his code name—and no one ever refused to pay.

Few people had ever seen him for who and what he was. When he showed up as a delivery boy or trash collector, all and sundry were unimpressed. He was a pale white guy, five-ten with close-cut brown hair. He was powerful but not particularly well built. The only thing that marked him was a deep voice that rumbled rather than spoke.

He could kill an armed man with only a mouthful of water.

No one wanted to hear that Hush was after them. He was the walking, breathing personification of pancreatic cancer.

When people found out that Hush was after them, their reactions were many but predictable. Some ran. Others bought life insurance and settled up their affairs. A few went to the police and sought witness protection, but in the end they all died. I know this because I know Hush.

People responded in all kinds of ways when they were tipped to Hush’s intentions, but of them Carter Brown of East New York was unique. When Carter heard that his uptown rival had paid a hundred large for Hush’s services, he laughed. He was the one man who wasn’t afraid of the excellent assassin. He wasn’t afraid because he knew about the hit man’s Achilles’ heel: a young black woman named Tamara and a toddler that was Hush’s child.

It had taken at least twenty-five moving pieces for Hush to get in touch with me. The meet was set for one of those big glass-and-chrome salad bars in midtown Manhattan at 2:15, when the lunch crowd was winnowing down but still pretty busy. He was seated at a table for two by a window looking out on Forty-eighth Street.

I knew he was the killer when I looked into his eyes.

He laid out the whole problem right there in the open, with a hundred masticating clerks and secretaries jabbering around us about their bosses and sex lives and children.

Tamara and the boy, Thackery, had been kidnapped and Brown was demanding the execution of his rival.

It was hard for me to concentrate at first. After all, in my profession, Hush was like royalty.

“ã€ont sizeSo?” he said after explaining his dilemma.

“Why not just kill Big Joe?” I asked, pretending that there was some equality between us.

“I would if I felt that Brown would keep his word. But he knows that I have to kill him for doing what he’s done. He has to get rid of me, and then who would protect my family?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“How much?”

“On the house.”

That set the killer three inches back in his seat.

“Why?”

“Professional courtesy,” I said and then I stood up on legs that have had easier times in the ring, sparring with heavyweights.

IT TOOK ONLY five hours for me to locate and liberate Tamara and Thackery. Carter could hide them from white eyes but it was easy for me to see beyond his blind of race. I called a guy I knew, the brother of one of Carter’s ex-girlfriends. He told me of a safe house that Carter kept for “visiting dignitaries” like Colombian drug lords and Russian mobsters, Chinese slavers and Mexican cartel bosses who dealt in protection rackets for a broad spectrum of illegal labor.

I didn’t feel guilty about betraying a brother. He had kidnapped a black woman and her child, after all. And Carter was a very bad man, worse than I ever was, so I didn’t mind taking his living shields away.

Carter disappeared that very evening and Hush took his services off the market. He got a job working for an elite limo service and now chauffeurs around high-profile clients who might need protecting.

Ê€„

44

Icrawled back into my son’s bed at dawn and fell into a deep sleep with no fires or hidden assassins dogging my dreams. When I finally awoke it was a little after nine and the house was empty. I walked through the prewar rooms but no one was there. The kids were in summer school and Katrina was at the gym.

I went to work.

In a little cubbyhole that Twill had cut along the baseboard at the back of his closet I found a .22 pistol in a slightly battered cherry-wood box. The gun was unloaded, but there was a box of ammunition next to it. I considered confiscating the piece but thought better of it. Twill was too cunning for that to stop him for long, and, anyway, I had more than a week before he planned to commit his capital crime.

I MET HUSH in the gentrified meatpacking district just south of Fourteenth Street at 10:45. He usually drove the company Rolls but that day he was behind the wheel of a standard black Lincoln sedan. No need to call attenti怅on to ourselves when there might be mischief afoot.

I climbed in the backseat and he glanced up in the rearview mirror and into my eyes. I don’t know what he was looking for but he seemed satisfied.

“What’s the plan?” he asked.

“Moore says that the blackmailer wants him to bring the money to room C on the third floor at ten tonight. I want to bug the place and see what there is to be seen before that time.”