Fire Lake by Jonathan Valin Page A

antsy again. I pulled into the
Delores's parking lot and stared nervously at the tall red-brick
walls of the apartment house.
    "For chrissake," I said to myself. "It's
your home."
    I was acting like a wimp and I knew it. Slapping
myself on the thigh, I got out of the car and walked quickly up the
stairs. The courtyard was still frozen in ice. Rivulets of it ran
from the eaves down the sides of the building, like glass ivy. I
knocked an icicle off a dogwood branch and walked briskly into the
lobby. I went up the stairs and down the hallway to my apartment.
    No problem, I told myself. No problem at all.
    I'd just put my keys in the lock when someone opened
my apartment door and said,
    "Come on in."
 
    15
    No problem at all, I said acidly, and stared through
the half-open door.
    There was a young black man, no more than twenty
years old, sitting on the easy chair and smiling at me with every
tooth in his mouth. My first impulse was to reach for my gun in its
holster. But the door was angled in front of me, and I couldn't see
all the way into the room. Whoever had opened the door was still
standing behind it, in the kitchen. And for all I knew there were
several others in the bedroom. Under the circumstances, pulling my
gun was likely to get me killed.
    I glanced quickly down the hall, toward the landing.
Another black man--tall and heavyset--had come down the stairs from
the floor above me and stationed himself at the end of the hall. He
had one hand buried in his long-skirted overcoat. It looked like he
was concealing a sawed-off shotgun under the coat.
    This is crazy, I said to myself. But that didn't make
the man with the shotgun disappear.
    "Ain'chu gonna come in, homes?" the black
kid sitting in the easy chair called out again, in a scatty,
high-pitched voice.
    "Do I have a choice?" I said to him.
    He grinned. "We all got choices, bro'."
    I pushed the door fully open and walked into the
room. Another black man stepped out from the kitchen. He was a huge
kid, with a drooping lip and a nose like a wad of bubblegum stuck
under a desk. He was wearing a stocking cap on his bullet head and a
stained cord sweater that hung in tiers, like layers of fat, above
greasy, pinstripe gaberdine pants.
    I looked at the one sitting on the pieced-together
easy chair. He was small, thin, and brindled brown. He was wearing a
camel's-hair overcoat and a white plantation hat, crooked rakishly
above his forehead. I couldn't see all of his face, because of the
hat and because of the wraparound sunglasses he had on his nose. He
wore his hair in oiled ringlets, with a milk mustache and a cute
little spit curl right in the center of his forehead--like Prince. He
even spoke with a touch of a lisp, just like Prince. He had big
yellow teeth and red, receding gums that made his smile a lot less
sexy than he thought. It wasn't until I got close to him that I
realized there was a gold Star of David, with a little diamond in its
center, embossed on one of his incisors. The kid stank of sweat and
of something else--something like decay.
    "Where's your partner, huh?" he said in his
cheerful, lisping voice. "Where you got him stashed?"
    "I don't know what you're talking about," I
said.
    "Chill, man," he said merrily. "That's
cool. We don't care about him. We just want our goods back, dig?"
    "What goods?" I said.
    The kid rattled with laughter, like a shaken gourd.
"Hear what the dude say, Maurice?" he said to his Fat
Albert friend.
    "Bet," Maurice grunted.
    Maurice stared at me in what I assumed was supposed
to be a menacing way. I knew I was in trouble, but I had a problem
dealing with this eighties version of Cosby's kids. They just didn't
look old enough or tough enough to be as dangerous as they pretended
to be. Prince and Fat Albert.
    "We want the lady back, jack," the kid in
the chair said, and then smiled again, as if he'd been amused by his
own rhyme.
    "Cocaine?" I said.
    "Bet," the kid said lazily. "Your
partner be fucking with the man. Don't nobody