Then Dennis Ledeski watched as the knife slid deep into his intestines and came up in one long widening gash of red through his stomach and toward his heart.
2
It was six o’clock in the morning, and Tyrell Moss was feeling very disillusioned—years ago, when he had first decided to remake himself into a solid and respectable citizen, he had been sure that time and habit would make him feel that waking up early was perfectly natural and perfectly right. Instead, it got harder to do every year. At least twice a week he found himself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating escape to Mexico.
Today, Mexico did not seem like such a good idea, since the news last night had been full of demonstrations and labor strikes in Mexico City. He turned his mind to Cancun instead. Then he saw the Bible sitting on his bedside table and sighed. His one good parole officer had told him it wasn’t true. You never got to a place where you found waking up in the early morning easy and natural. Some people did, but they were born that way. They never felt good sleeping in until noon. The rest of the human race just learned to live with being tired, at least for a little while. Once you got the day started, you felt better. This was true. Tyrell had noticed it many times. He made himself sit up. Then he made himself get to his feet. Then he went down the hall to the bathroom and made the shower a little colder than he liked. That always got the day off to a good start.
He was back in his bedroom, mostly dressed except for his shirt, and paging through the Bible to the place where the reading was for the day, when he heard his doorbell ring. He looked at the reading. He preferred to read in the mornings. No matter how tired he was from getting up early, his mind was more likely to be clear then than it would be after sixteen hours in the store. The doorbell rang again and he put the book down, still open to Matthew 6.
He got up and went out into the living room, grabbing the clean shirt he had laid out for himself on the way. He went to the door and looked through the spyhole at whoever was ringing for him. It was a necessary precaution in this neighborhood, where what was ringing for you could be very bad news at any time of the day. Today, it was only Claretta Washington, dressed to the teeth in spite of the time of day and complete with matching hat. Tyrell suppressed, as mightily as he could, his instant speculation about the hat. What was it about church women, his mind wanted to know, that they always had hats to match any dresses that they wore? They had to have dozens of hats. And not any hats either. Not little baseball caps with team logos on them or water-proof rain hats or little scarves to tie under their chins. Oh, no. These were architectural hats. They built up from the base like skyscrapers. They sprouted wings. They competed for height with the Eiffel Tower. Claretta’s, this morning, was in the shape of Vesuvius in mideruption, complete with feathers.
He opened up. “Good morning, Claretta,” he said. “Is there something—”
“The store’s been broken into,” she said, cutting in on him. “At the back. The door was open. I saw it first thing when I went around to put out the garbage from the adoption run—”
“Claretta, for goodness sake. You shouldn’t be out collecting garbage for the adoption run. That’s what we have the boys for, the boys are supposed to—”
“It doesn’t matter what the boys are supposed to do,” Claretta said, “they don’t always do it, and sometimes the schedule isn’t enough. So I picked up some trash and I went around back to throw it out and your back door was standing open. Pretty much all the way. I think you’d better come.”
“All right,” Tyrell said. It was true. He’d better come. Break-ins were endemic in this area. There was nothing you could do about them but be as careful as it was possible to be and never leave money lying around. He went back into the bedroom and got his shoes. Claretta came into the living room and sat down on the edge of the couch. He came out again and got his jacket from the back of the chair. “Did you see any damage? Was the window broken?”
“No,” Claretta said. “I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t go into the store. I left Mardella Ford and Rabiah Orwell out there to keep watch—”
“You had Mardella and Rabiah picking up trash with you?”
“You were the one who said we had to take responsibility for our own neighborhood,” Claretta said. “YDU were the one who said we couldn’t wait until the city got around to keeping us decent or we’d never be decent, never in a million years. You were the one who convinced us. Don’t squawk about it now.”