“Save him this one time and I will be a better mother from now on. I swear.”

She was looking me in the eye. There was no carelessness there. So I dropped the bloody shirt and took the cash. Six hundred dollars. All brand-new bills.

After counting I looked back up into eyes that encompassed a vast plain of darkness. I expected to see stars if I looked too long, and so I said, “Okay, I give.”

“You’ll help him?”

“I’ll look into what did and did not happen. In the meantime you should burn this shirt.”

11

11

It was twilight when I rounded the corner from the back of Lola’s apartment complex. My Rolls was still there but a police car had pulled up behind it. I almost turned around to see if maybe there was some fence I could jump over. I did not come from the kind of background where you willingly walked up to cops obviously wondering about you.

“A black man could get shot for sneezin’ too hard,” my aunt, who was not my aunt, Hattie used to say.

“Uh-huh,” her mother, my great-not-aunt Ball, would always echo. “They shoot first and aks questions after.”

But I was a property owner, an independent businessman, and I hadn’t committed any kind of serious crime in months. So I walked up to that Rolls-Royce as if it was what I did every day.

I had unlocked the door and cracked the handle before the officers exited their prowl car, hands on the butts of their pistols. They had a whole raft of questions, needing me to prove my identity and ownership in triplicate. The question-and-answer period lasted maybe twenty-five minutes, but it’s all been said before so I won’t go through it again right now. They didn’t arrest me so I drove far enough east that only the car was an anomaly, not the driver.

John’s bar was housed on the third floor of a nondescript building at 114th and Central. Most of the rest of the businesses on that block were still boarded up and charred from the riots four years before. One store had a hand-painted sign that read MICHELLE’S HAIR AND NAILS. It seemed to be open for business. There was another place with no sign but it had been freshly painted and gussied up some. Passing by in my noteworthy vehicle I caught a glimpse of what might have been a barber’s chair at the back of the outer room.

Driving around to the alley that ran behind the new generation of black businesses, I parked the bright yellow car in John’s garage. From there I ascended the rear stairway and pressed a black button next to the double-thick, triple-locked rear door. Nine minutes passed before I was identified through some method I couldn’t define and the door came open.