Known to Evil by Walter Mosley Page A

and then decided I might catch him, or shoot him in the back, if he tried. He glanced at Lorna, hoping that she just wanted to see his sweat, not his blood.
    "Have a seat, Mr. Tandy," I said. "They serve a good water here."
    The cell phone vibrated in my pocket but I ignored the request.
    "You're here for a lesson, Mr. McGill?"
    A door closed and Shad looked up quickly. Lorna had gone and shut us in on the roof. There was no one else there.
    When he turned his attention back to me I was staring daggers.
    "You owe a lot of money, son," I said.
    "I got it. I got the whole twenty-five hundred. He, he, he said I had to the end of the week. Mr. Meeks said I had till Friday."
    My gaze didn't waver.
    "I don't have the money on me," he said. "It's in a safe deposit box. But I can get it."
    I looked so deathly certain to the tennis pro he must've thought that I was planning to push him off the roof.
    "Where is Angelique Lear?" I asked.
    Shad's tanned white skin went suddenly pale. His fear deepened with a sense of the unknown.
    "I don't understand," he said.
    "Angelique. I want to know where she is."
    "But, but . . ."
    He leaped from his chair. I lunged, too, hitting him on the cheekbone with a schoolbook right-hand lead. Shad fell and stood . . . then fell again. It was the kind of punch that catches up with you as the moments click by.
    Shad was on his back with his hands up over his face.
    "I don't understand," he said. "I already told Grant. That's where I got the money to pay Meeks."
    "Mr. Meeks," I reminded.
    Shad's lips trembled.
    The phone vibrated in my pocket.
    "What did you tell Grant?"
    "That, that, that Angie had broken up with me a few weeks ago. . . . But then she called me the other night to borrow some money. She said that she was at her friend Wanda's house."
    It bothered me that this coward would call Angelique by the nickname I decided on.
    "Stand up," I said.
    He did so.
    I knocked him down again.
    "Do you know what happened at Wanda's place?" I asked the bleeding young man.
    "No. What happened?"
    I answered him with threatening silence.
    "Angie had been moving around a lot," Shad whined, "and Grant said that he had the answer to a scholarship she'd applied for. I didn't see anything wrong with that."
    "Did you call her to tell her that he was coming?"
    "He said that he wanted it to be a surprise."
    "Stand up."
    "No."
    "Where is this Grant?"
    Shad tried to crawl away on his back, looking very much like the worm he was.
    "I can get down on my knees to beat you, boy."
    "He met me here. Paid for a lesson, just like you did, only he had the right clothes. After the lesson he bought me a drink and asked about Angie."
    "Didn't that make you suspicious?"
    "I needed the money. He said it had to do with a grant. That wasn't unusual. Angie was always getting grants and stipends. She's the luckiest person I know."
    "What did he look like?"
    "Bald, white, maybe forty."
    "What was his first name?"
    "I don't know. Maybe Grant was his first name."
    I could have broken his jaw with a well-placed kick. I certainly wanted to.
    "Have you heard from Angelique since last night?"
    "No. No."
    "If you do," I said, "and you tell anyone--anyone--I will come back here and throw your sorry ass off the roof. Do you understand me?"
    Shad nodded, sniffling some of the blood back up into his nostrils.

18
    L orna was waiting on the other side of the door.
    "Do I have to call an ambulance or something?" the sweet young thing asked.
    "He can walk and talk all right," I said. "He might need an ice pack and a towel."
    "Let his mother give him that," she said.

    ON THE STREET I looked at the fancy phone that my self-titled telephonic and computer personal assistant (TCPA), Zephyra Ximenez, had provided me with. Breland Lewis had called four times.
    I went into a chain coffee shop and ordered herbal tea. I needed something calming so that the violence coursing through me didn't overtake my good sense. Six sips after sitting at a small round table I