BooksBarbecue
Back Dead of Winter Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42

In the kitchen I grabbed the bottle of Old Forester bourbon whiskey from a lower cabinet. There was a sticky note on the bottle, and in Tatina’s handwriting it read, “A glass. Not a bottle.” Instead of a tumbler, I grabbed an eight-ounce water glass and filled it halfway.

A glass.

Not a bottle.

28

28

“You remind me of me,” Apollonius “Brutus” Jefferies said upon seeing me walk into his downtown fitness club. “A long time and three bullets ago.”

“Nice to see you, too, old man,” I said. I was wearing my exclusive Club Brutus sweats and Club Brutus–branded Nikes. The shoes fit fine. The sweats bagged on me a bit more than they should have.

Brutus and I clasped hands and gently bumped shoulders.

“Came to see you in the hospital,” Brutus said as we walked to his office. “You was out like a light.”

“So that’s where that rusty precinct boxing medal came from.” I laughed.

“Middleweight match I had with your daddy back in the day,” Brutus said. “Went a straight ten, both of us wobbling around the ring with double vision, busted lips and aching ribs. I won, but it sure as heck didn’t feel like it. That man had some mean Alabama timber rattler in him.”

After the glass door to his office closed behind us, he handed me a smoothie—lemongrass, whey protein, banana, blueberries, Vitamin-E oil and coconut oil—and invited me to sit. I did. The walk had winded me.

“Whatchu done got yourself into, youngblood?” Brutus said.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Aw, don’t BS me, son,” Brutus said. “I didn’t get to be a sixty-five-year-old Black man in the United States of Lynchin’ Black Folk by not knowin’ what BS smelled like from a hundred miles away. Now tell me what’s goin’ on and why I got four of my members ready to lock ’n’ load for you, or you can pick yo sickly butt up and walk on outta here last time right now.”

“Four members?” I said.

“Two confidential,” Brutus said. “One’s a cop, other works at City Hall’s as far as I’ll go. The third one is K—and K don’t have a mean, violent or vindictive bone in his ripped-and-shredded body. Yeah, August! Even K’s ready to tear the planet a new one if it would lead to who messed you up!”

K was one of Detroit’s many assorted strays I’d picked up over the past few years. A gentle giant of a man I’d, purely by happenstance, forced to quit two really bad security jobs—one at a crooked bank, the other at a ramshackle strip club that smelled like salmonella and unflushed toilets. I’d recommended him to Brutus as a weight trainer. Last thing in the world I wanted was to be the cause of him leaving that job.