Black Hornet (7 page)

Then I said, “Thank you, Papa.”

Chapter Eight

I
STOPPED
BY
THE
APARTMENT
to pick up the .38 I carried sometimes back then, before I learned better. A manila envelope was stuffed halfway into the mailbox by my front door. Hosie Straughter’s name and address had been marked off and LEW scrawled above in what looked like crayon. Inside was a book,
The Stranger
, and a note in pencil on a piece of paper torn from a grocery sack.

Thanks again, Griffin. This is one of my

favorites—by way of appreciation. This

copy’s been mine a long time. Now it’s yours.

Since Claiborne was closest, I went there first. Not the smartest thing for a black man to do, start climbing around on roofs at 12:30 in the morning: I’ll give you that.

A fire escape began about eight feet up the back of the building, really little more than a steel ladder set sideways and bolted into the bricks. I jumped, caught a rung and scrambled up.

Business was still brisk at the Chick’n Shack half a block uptown. Mostly groups of three or four young men and singles coming home from work, from the look of it. A few cars, but most of them on foot.

Just downtown I could see the Holy Evangelical Church, a single-story brown-brick structure with a stubby spire of multicolored plastic squares and rectangles. The church’s windows were painted over black, as were those of Honest Abe’s pawnshop (yellow cinderblock) and Lucky Pierre’s FaSTop (bare cypress). This was back before the city had bars on every door and window.

Up here, you got a good view of the whole expanse, from Louisiana down at least to Terpsichore, just before the tangle of overpasses and dogleg streets leading into downtown New Orleans. It was the tallest building in the stretch; no one was going to spot you. Downtown buildings might as well be in another state. And you had a choice of flight paths: back down the fire escape or onto one of the adjoining roofs.

He’d chosen the spot carefully.

I squatted at the roof’s edge and sighted along an imaginary rifle. He’d have had the strap wound about his right arm for stability, maybe even a small folding tripod. High-resolution scope. Instead of tracking, he’d extrapolate the movement of his subject and sight in on where the subject
would
be, waiting for him to step into place. Hold his breath instinctively when that happened. Squeeze. Breathe out.

I caught the merest glimmer of what it must have been like, a momentary connection far more emotional than intellectual, then it was gone. So much for blinding insight, for sudden epiphanies that change your life.

Starting back down the fire escape, I heard voices below. Two men about my age stood by my car, one of those Galaxies with the bat-wing rear ends. The taller guy held a strip of flexible metal with a notch at the end. The shorter one held a brick. They were in conference.

“You gentlemen manage on your own, or you need help?”

“Keep on walking, man.” The tall one.

“None of
yo’
business.”

I shook my head sadly. “Unmistakable mark of the amateur. Never willing to take advantage of the resources available. Always has to do things the hard way.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll ama
yo’
teur.”

“Man, what the fuck you—”

He stopped because I’d stepped in and slammed my fist into his gut and he just couldn’t bring himself to go on. He went down instead. I grabbed the homemade Slim Jim as it went by and whacked it against the other one’s head. It made a singing sound. The short guy’s brick skidded into the street where a White Fleet Cab lurched over it. Something, possibly an elbow, cracked as he went down.

I transferred funds, a couple hundred, from their pockets to my wallet, then unlocked the Ford, got in and fired it up, heading for Jefferson Avenue.

Half the apartment complex there dated from the early fifties, textured stucco, French windows and medallions everywhere. The rest, a lower structure of interconnected wooden bungalowlike apartments, had been tacked on more recently: a kind of fanciful sidecar. All of it according to
The Times-Picayune
had been shut down for almost a year now. Funding had run out with renovation well under way. Balconies and entryways drooped in disrepair, bare two-by-fours showed in cavities where facades had been hammered partly through, piles of old lumber, flooring and plasterboard lay moldering in the yard and parking lot.

On the right, an empty double lot stretched to the street corner. The other side looked down on a row of shotgun cottages. Across the street a small park with swing sets and picnic tables fronted a wooden fence and a line of identical condos each painted a different pastel.

No easy access this time. I climbed a young elm and dropped onto a tarpaper roof awash in detritus. Beer bottles, scraps of roofing, remains of packing crates and take-out meals, bits of cast-off vegetation, clothing, cardboard, bits of cast-off lives. Near the back, however, in a kind of corridor formed by a sealed chimney and heating vent, all was in order. Against one end where these met, someone had propped a massive old door. Over it, a slab of plywood served as roof. Beneath were a legless chair, burned-down candles in coffee cans, scorched saucepans, a huddle of sheets and thin curtains torn into rags. A square of bricks stacked two deep, ash and chunks of wood burned to a weightless white heap within.

Nothing to connect it with the sniper, of course. The city was full of such desperate islands. Abandoned houses, boarded-up cafés and corner grocery stores, the culverts of open canals. Obviously the police didn’t think there was any direct connection. If they had, these things would have been carted off as evidence.

All the same, it definitely looked as though someone had been living here. And while I kept telling myself it could have been anyone, myself wasn’t paying much attention to me.

I climbed down a drainpipe at the building’s street-side corner, then sat in the car a while going over what I had learned.

The reason it took so long was that I hadn’t learned anything, so I just kept going over it all again and again. But when you’re stuck, it doesn’t much matter how hard you rev the engine and spin the wheels. You have to find something solid. A board, a branch. Jam it in there, hit the gas once more, and you’re moving.

Maybe myself had the board and was just keeping it out of sight.

In which case I couldn’t do much besides wait him out—so I might as well get on with business.

Having little inclination to revisit Dryades just yet, I drove down LaSalle to Loyola and headed on into downtown New Orleans. Parked in front of the telephone office on Poydras and walked up to Baronne. Not much traffic except for cabs. And while the Quarter would still be bustling, things
this
side of Canal were pretty much deserted. The few people I encountered strode purposefully along, staying well out on the sidewalk, keeping watch about them.

I looked up. Toward the top of a mock-gothic office building, The Stanhope, with brass-clad revolving door and tiled, bright lobby at street level. Toward the crest of an art deco hotel hashed (judging from signs on windows) into a copy shop, dance studio, commercial photographer, credit union, tailor. It had to be one of those two buildings. But after half an hour of searching I couldn’t find any way of getting up either of them.

I did find an unsuspected narrow alleyway running between buildings, like a chink in rock, toward Carondelet and the site of the second killing.

I was maybe halfway through when I heard a shot, a small-caliber pistol from the sound of it, ahead of me.

I inched out into halflight and stood there scarcely breathing. My own blood hammered at my ears.

Voices.

No: a single voice.

Too low, too far off, for me to make out what it was saying. In another alleyway like this one?

Then something moved, shadow settling back into shadow, across Carondelet, in a cleft between buildings. Nothing there when I watched now: had I really seen it? That was where the sound came from.

Courting shade and shadow myself, I eased into the street. A cab swung onto Carondelet a block away, headlights like two lances, a death ray, and I froze. This was how rabbits and deer felt. But almost immediately the cab turned off. I made it across unseen, and with my back pressed against brick beside the cul-de-sac could hear what was being said.

“Man just can’t keep to himself anymore, can’t be left alone. You’ve been on me for a while. And not because you
believe
in something. That would be all right. But it’s only because I’m a bootstrap you think you can use to pull yourself up. Now look: you’ve found me. Pure Borges. The hunter becomes prey. Poor great white hunter.”

Hands flat on the wall, I leaned to my right to peer cautiously around the corner. Remembering the periscope, a yellow cardboard tube with two cheap mirrors, I’d bought at Kress’s for ninety-nine cents when I was twelve. One man stood over another. This man, lean, dark, was talking. He held a small revolver loosely alongside one leg, in his left hand. The other man lay slumped against the wall, both hands pressed into his groin. A darkish patch of blood beneath him.

“We all know what’s right. Part of what we’re born with. Body goes against that, it only starts to destroy itself.”

The man slumped against the wall said something I couldn’t make out.

“I know,” the other one said, raising the gun. “I’m sorry. Never was any good with these things. I didn’t intend to hurt you, it should have been quick.”

Holding the .38 two-handed, I stepped into the mouth of the cul-de-sac.

“Don’t do it!” I said, just as someone behind me said, “What the fuck!”

Reflexively I turned. A middle-aged man stood there in the street holding a baseball bat.

“Don’t guess
you
were the guys called a cab, huh?”

I spun back around in time to see the shooter scrambling over a dumpster and through a delivery door behind it. I got off a couple of rounds before I even realized I was firing. One of them rang against the dumpster’s steel. The other hit the door just as it closed.

Then everything went black.

Someone stood over me. Something struck at my back, something thudded into a kidney, deflected off an elbow. Someone said “God-dam niggers … Used to be a fine city … Teach this one a lesson anyway.” I knew it was happening, but I didn’t feel the blows. I’d gone away. I was floating above it all, looking down.

Fragments drifted up to me.

It. Down. Now.

Can’t. A white man. Got to.

Don’t be. Deep. Enough.

A broad face loomed above mine. Curly dark-blond hair. Face ashine with sweat. I was pretty sure it was the guy who’d been slumped against the wall. I could smell garlic on his breath.

“Hang on,” he said. “You’re okay. There’s an ambulance on the way.”

“You the one’s been whacking at me?” I said.

“No. He’s taken care of.”

“Glad to hear it.
You
okay? Looked like a lot of blood.”

“I’m fine. And alive, thanks to you.”

“Things gonna get better soon.”

“We all hope so.”

“I mean it.” Darkness was closing on me, rushing in like water at the edge of the frame.

“We all mean it. Meanwhile, better let me have the gun.”

I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it.

“I’m a cop,” he said. “Don Walsh.”

And the water closed over me.

Chapter Nine

I
N
M
AY
OF
1967,
ON
A
DRY
, lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, .45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.

Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”

The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.

The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention,
people’s
attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse
but
armed self-defense.