CHAPTER FIVE THE LEDGER
By the sixth day I had what I needed. The crews were broken.
The houses were empty. The runners were scattering.
The men who were left were the ones at the top, and the ones at the top were the ones with the money, and the money was what I had come for, because Wanda could not eat my anger and my children could not go to college on my memory and the Boulevard could not be rebuilt on a dead man’s good intentions.
The dead man’s good intentions had to be turned into dollars, and the dollars were sitting in the hands of the men who had turned the Boulevard into what it was, and I was going to take those dollars, and I was going to give them to the people they had been stolen from.
Darnell Mayfield was in his house. It was a house on a street off Glenwood that did not look like much from the outside, because Darnell was the kind of man who kept his money where people could not see it.
The outside was plain. The inside had a safe in the closet of the back bedroom, and the safe had a hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash and a deed to a rental property in Decatur and two handguns with the serial numbers filed off.
Darnell had earned every dollar in that safe, and none of it was earned, and I was going to take all of it, and I was going to do it without lifting a finger, because Darnell was going to give it to me.
I came to Darnell at night. Darnell was not a man who scared easy.
Darnell had killed at sixteen and had slept fine.
Darnell had ordered things done to men that would keep a normal person awake for a lifetime and Darnell had slept fine.
So I did not come to Darnell the way I came to Quincy.
Quincy was a boy. Darnell was a man, and a man who has done what Darnell has done has built a wall inside himself, and the way past a wall is not over it or around it.
The way past a wall is to make the man realize the wall is inside his own head, and that what is behind the wall is not gone, it is waiting, and it has been waiting, and now it has company.
I did not appear to Darnell. I let the house do it.
I let the walls breathe. I let the floor remember the men who had been taken out of that house in bags.
Darnell had been careful. He had not killed in his own house often.
But once was enough, because once leaves a mark, and a mark on a house is a mark that does not wash out.
The man’s name had been Lionel. Lionel had been a Saint who had tried to start his own crew, and Darnell had brought him to the back bedroom and had explained, with a length of pipe, that the Boulevard only had room for one crew on the Saints’ side, and Lionel had understood, and Lionel had stopped understanding, and Lionel had been put in the ground in the woods south of the city, and the house had kept the memory of Lionel in the boards of the back bedroom floor, and I woke it up.
Darnell was in the back bedroom counting money when the floor began to breathe.
He felt it before he saw it. The boards under his feet grew warm.
Then they grew wet. Then the wet was red.
The red was the color of what had come out of Lionel.
The boards began to rise and fall, the way a chest rises and falls.
Darnell looked down and the floor was breathing.
Darnell, who had not moved from a room in twenty years of the life, stood up and moved to the other side of the room. The breathing followed him.
Then I spoke. I put my words inside his head the way I had put them inside Quincy’s, but harder, because Darnell was a harder man and the words needed to be the kind that a man like Darnell cannot refuse.
You know my name, Darnell.
He did. He had known it the moment the paper told him a man had died in the parking lot.
He had not given the order. But he had built the world in which the order did not need to be given, and the man who builds the world is responsible for the world, and Darnell knew this, the way a man knows a thing he has been not-knowing, and the not-knowing was over.
I showed Darnell the ledger. Not a real ledger.
The ledger of what he had done, what he had allowed, what he had profited from.
I showed him the column at the bottom where the total was.
The total was a number of lives that a man cannot carry.
I showed him that the column was not finished, and that the only thing that would finish it was a payment.
The payment was the money in the safe, the house in Decatur, the guns, and all of it, every dollar, going to the place I named, which was the box on the Boulevard.
From the box to the house where Wanda lived.
From the house to the children. From the children to the future.
Darnell said no. Of course he said no. A man does not hand over a hundred and forty thousand dollars and a house because a floor is breathing. A man says no. A man reaches for his gun. Darnell reached for the gun on the table.
I let him pick it up. I let him point it at the floor, at the walls, at the breathing, at the presence in the room he could not see.
And then I let him feel Lionel. Not the memory.
The feeling. The length of pipe. The dark.
The understanding. I let him feel it for what felt like an hour, and then I stopped, and I let him breathe, and I told him it would come back, and that it would come back every night, and that it would never stop, and that the only thing that would make it stop was the box, and the box was on the Boulevard, and the box was waiting.
Darnell Mayfield, who had not cried since he was a child, sat on the floor of his back bedroom and cried, and the floor breathed under him, and he cried, and he cried.
In the morning, Darnell went to the post office on the Boulevard.
He mailed, in a box, one hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash.
In an envelope, the deed to the house in Decatur, signed over to a name I had given him, which was the name of a trust I had told Wanda’s father about in a dream the night before.
The dead can visit dreams. Wanda’s father was a man who listened to his dreams. He went to a lawyer that week, because a dead son-in-law appearing in a dream and telling him to set up a trust for his grandchildren is the kind of thing a man does not ignore, not when his daughter has been weeping for a month.
The trust was set up. The box at the post office was addressed to the trust. The trust was for the children of Darius and Wanda Calloway.
Darnell was not the only one. I went to the men under Curtis the same day.
The Jackals’ money was in a storage unit on the south side, kept by a man named Antoine who had already turned himself in, which meant the unit was unguarded.
I went to the two lieutenants who knew the code.
I showed them what I had shown Darnell. One of them, a man named Big Carl, went to the unit that night and loaded everything into a van.
He drove it to the post office and mailed it, every dollar, to the box.
Big Carl had a daughter. Big Carl had seen what had happened to Cisco.
Big Carl had decided that his daughter was worth more than Curtis Hargrove. Big Carl was right.
By the end of the sixth day, the box on the Boulevard had received, in cash and deeds and one storage unit full of furniture and electronics that the Jackals had stolen over the years, a total that would have taken Wanda forty years to earn at the hospital billing office.
None of it was hers yet. None of it was legal yet.
But it was sitting in a post office on the Boulevard, and the postmaster, a woman named Miss Doreen who had known my mother, was the kind of woman who saw a box addressed to the Darius Calloway Children’s Trust and understood, in the way that women on the Boulevard understand things, that something was being set right, and Miss Doreen set the boxes aside and she did not ask questions, because the questions would have answers she did not need, and the answers were none of the police’s business, and Miss Doreen had lived on the Boulevard long enough to know which side of the law was the right side, and the right side was the side of the dead man and his children.
The money was moving. The crews were gone.
And Curtis Hargrove, who did not know yet that his money was gone and his men were gone and his houses were empty, was about to find out that the night he had shot into a parking lot full of the living, he had also shot into a parking lot that contained something the living do not shoot, and that the something was awake now, and that it was coming for the last man on the list.