He floated above the mummy’s painted coffin shaped like some heavy metal singer laid out so that his whores could snort lines of coke off his body at his funeral.
No, those were flutes and—yes Celtic music, raising my half Wop half Mick spirit up out of damnation. I am floating. Does this mean I’m dead?
As an answer his glorious levitation on the banks of the Celtic Nile came to a rude end when some bird-headed god holding a hooped cross, stepped out of a pyramid like an alien baby popping out of a supporting actor’s gut as that slice of all slices, Sigourney Weaver, looked on in horror. The bird-headed god then tapped him between the eyes with the ivory cross, held by the hoop-ended top, and a shower of white sparks exploded.
The gravel and brick dust beneath his feet smelled like rat shit. The air had changed, gotten moister, as if August had fled just like that, leaving his fat ass sweating with a less viable excuse in mid September. He was in a back alley somewhere west of Howard Street by the sound of the light rail rocking along in the building-muted distance. The house at the end of the row was impeccably maintained, with the image of a mosque painted on the back of the brick face.
He, however, was standing behind the second house in, the back of which crumbled to the alley, the entire back yard having been filled with the collapsing brick that had walled the back of the ground floor. The underneath was gutted to the front wall, looking like some post apocalyptic cave. The back wall of the second story was half intact, with the back wall of the third story still maintained, making one wonder if the structure had been attacked with sledge hammer. It was in the early a.m.
“What the hell am I doing in this shit hole?”
From behind him, came the snarky voice of Jack Kersarge, the pretty, long-haired, twerp writer from the library, “We are waiting for your suspect to emerge from his ‘fortress of solitude.’ You know, Black Superman, the Nation of Islam vigilante who carved up those hoodrats and sent a messenger to hell in the mutilated form of that poor kid named Arbese Jackson.”
Barney Mancuso stood dumfounded as he turned to regard the weirdo civilian next to him. “What the hell are you doing here, shitbag?”
“Somebody has to help your deteriorating ass get to the bottom of this. Your pursuit of Black Superman is book-worthy—could get me published nationally.”
“Are you stupid, man?”
The skinny, Alice-Cooper looking freak then pointed to the back of the row home, and Barney’s trained eyes followed the quivering coward’s finger.
Emerging from the third story window like a great black cat, was the figure of a well-muscled but lean man dressed in black combat boots, black slacks, a black trench coat, and a black beret, nimbly bouncing down over the rubble, and walking past them like they were not even there, bricks crunching under his boot heels.
Barney immediately reached for his gun and began to move in for the arrest, but was restrained by a light hand, and calmed by a quirky voice, “I wouldn’t do that Barne.”
“What’s it to you, smartass?”
“Let’s just say I’m impersonating someone who cares.”
Barney shrugged the hand away and walked up on his suspect in a white hot rage, drawing his—no, his Glock was gone.
As he stopped to reach for his back-up .32 inside his jacket pocket, the big black man turned like a automaton of menace, and glared at him, with inhuman pinpoint eyes.
Barney’s sweating hand reached into the pocket and drew out an empty tequila bottle. Tossing that aside, he frantically reached in for his back-up piece as the big man closed in with one even, crunching stride.
Out came an empty bottle of Smirnoff.
“Shit!”
The man was now towering over his fat frumpy form, a big broad hand on Barney’s chest, his deep voice tolling like some wicked bell—No, like a freaking Insurance commercial—, “And so, White Devil, we meet.”
With those grinding words the big hand clenched into a fist and sunk a one-inch punch into Barney’s sagging gut, casting him into agony on his back, where he squirmed in utmost pain.
The sky went from sunlit gray to white-lit gay, with the worried face of Kersage looking down into his agony-scrunched mug, his light hand on Barney’s white smocked chest, yelling, “Nurse, nurse!”
That’s when Barney noticed the tubes coming out of him, the bullshit finger thing connected to a baby breather monitor, and not a soul in sight but this rotten writer faɡɡot, screaming like a woman for a nurse, as if anything short of a fifth of Makers Mark or a bullet in the brain was going to accomplish a thing!
