The cost of vengeance - [24]

I picked myself up off the floor and looked down at my chest. I could see the blood seeping through. I walked out in the hallway and Kevin opened up on me right away. I ducked back in the door and fired back blindly. I knew the house, so I knew unless he was goin’ out a window, he had to get by me, and that wasn’t happenin’. I put another clip in my gun and took out the other one. I moved back into the hallway blastin’ with both guns. Kevin ran back in the room and I went in after him. When I went in after him, he was tryin’ to get out of the window. He had one leg out when he saw me enter. He raised his weapon but I was faster. I hit Kevin with two shots: one to the chest and the other in his head.

I left the house thinkin’ that I had shut this down. I had killed Kevin, his boys, some chick named Kendra ’cause she couldn’t shot, and his grandmother. I really felt bad about killin’ her-but damn.

By the time I made it to my car, I was bleeding pretty badly. I needed a doctor and I wasn’t about to go back to the hospital. There was only one place I could go and I just hoped I remembered how to get there, and that I could trust them to keep their mouths shut. It was almost three in the morning when I rang the bell. When nobody answered, I rang it again. It took a while, but somebody finally came to the door. The porch light came on.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Rain Robinson. I need your help, Perry.”

The day before, Nick had taken me out there for his friend Perry and his wife Glenda, to change my dressing. He opened the door and took me into the examining room they had in their house. Perry was unbuttoning my blouse when Glenda walked in. “Am I interrupting?” Glenda said and smiled. “You were supposed to be in bed resting, young lady.” Glenda sat down on the examining table next to me.

“What have you been doing?” Perry said when he looked at my wound.

“I fell.”

“Right,” he said.

“I’ll take care of this, Perry. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

Perry shook his head and left the room.

“He’s always a grumpy-ass when he first wakes up,” Glenda said and got what she needed to take care of me. When she was done, I apologized for getting them up and thanked her for taking care of me. “This time you need to get to bed and stay there.”

“I will, I promise. But I need a big favor.”

“I think I just did you a big favor,” Glenda said. I liked her.

“Yeah, I know, but you could, you know, like keep this between the three of us. I mean like not tell Nick that I showed up here bleedin’ at three in the morning.”

“You’re secret is safe with me. And I’ll make sure Perry doesn’t say anything either.”

“Thank you,” I said and she walked me out. I drove home and went straight to bed.

When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, I called out for Nick, but he wasn’t there. With nothing else to do, I laid back down and turned on the TV. I channel surfed for a while and finally settled on the judge shows. My favorite was Divorce Court. I liked Lynn Toler, but thought that Madeline was better. Halfway through the show, Nick walked in. “How you feelin’?” he asked and sat down on the bed next to me.

“I’m a’ight,” I lied. I still felt kind of tired and my chest hurt.

“Good. Get dressed, we’re up,” Nick said and got up.

I reached for the gun I had under my pillow and got out of bed. “Where we goin’?”

“We’re goin’ to kill Ralph Watson.”

“That one of the niggas that robbed us?” I asked and got out of bed.

“Yeah. And hurry up before we miss him.”

Chapter Twelve

Kirk

I didn’t seem to be making any headway in this case. I really thought we were on to something when Sanchez and I rolled up on Leon Copeland at Nina Thomas’s apartment. But both of our sources have been telling us that Leon hasn’t been a player in this game in years. I really wasn’t all that surprised by that though. Leon and Mike Black were good friends those days, and he did seem to drop off the grid about the time that Black killed just about every other dealer in the area. Black made a deal with Chilly and setup what became know as the dead zone, where Black permitted nobody to sell drugs. Maybe Leon still respected the dead zone on the strength of his relationship with Black, so we had nothing. Then we caught a break.

I was at my desk, reviewing what little I had on the case, when an officer walked up. “Hey, Kirk, you know an asshole named Timothy Thompson?”

“I know a lot of assholes,” I said and keep reading my file.

“This one says he talked to you and Sanchez the other night.”

Now he had my attention. “What about him?”

“He got popped trying to sell to an undercover today. Instead of lawyerin’ up, he said he would only talk to you and Sanchez. You want to talk to him?”

“Shit, yeah.” I called Sanchez and told him to meet me down there.

When Sanchez got there, I filled him in and we went in. “I was startin’ to think y’all didn’t wanna talk to me,” Thompson said.

“What would make you think that?” Sanchez said and pulled up a chair next to him.

I grabbed a chair, pulled it up to his other side, and sat down. “We’re here; but now I wanna know what a small-timer like you could possibly wanna talk about?”