CHAPTER SEVEN THE RECKONING
Curtis Hargrove was a coward. I have said this.
I will say it again, because it is what made everything else possible.
A brave man would have stood. A brave man would have fought.
A brave man would have died on his feet with his gun in his hand and a curse on his lips.
The story would have ended in a parking lot with a second body.
The Boulevard would have had two funerals instead of one.
The money would have stayed where it was.
Wanda would have lost the house. The children would have grown up the way the children of the Boulevard grow up, which is to say, hard, and the cycle would have turned, and turned, and turned.
But Curtis was a coward, and a coward, when the dead come, does the one thing the dead need him to do, which is to break, and to break in a way that is useful, and Curtis broke, and the breaking of Curtis was the last piece.
I did not go to Curtis the way I went to the others.
Curtis had killed, but Curtis had not killed me, and the dead are particular about who they visit and why.
I went to Curtis because Curtis was the one who had built the second half of the machine that had killed me, and the machine had to be taken apart, and the man who built half of it had to take it apart, and I was going to make him take it apart with his own hands.
Curtis was in his mother’s kitchen at two in the morning on the eighth night.
His mother was asleep in the back bedroom.
Curtis had a gun on the table and a bottle of whiskey beside it and he was drinking the way a man drinks when the drinking is not for pleasure but for the putting of a wall between himself and what he cannot face, and the wall was not working, and the whiskey was not working, and the gun was not working, because what Curtis could not face was already in the room.
I let him see me. I let him see me the way the living see the dead, fully, in the fluorescent light of his mother’s kitchen, and I let him see what the bullet had done to me, the hole below the collarbone and the way the light had gone out behind my eyes, and I let him see it because Curtis needed to understand, in his body and not just his head, that the man he had helped kill was in the room, and that the room was the only room left, and that there was no other room.
Curtis shot me. He put three bullets into the kitchen wall behind me, because you cannot shoot the dead, and the bullets went through and into the plaster and Curtis was on his feet and the gun was empty and I was still there and Curtis, who had run from nothing in his life except his own conscience, ran from that.
I did not chase. I did not need to chase.
I put myself inside his head, the way I had put myself inside the others, and I stayed.
I stayed while he ran out of his mother’s house in his socks.
I stayed while he got in his car and drove.
I stayed while he drove east on the Boulevard with the windows down because the inside of the car had become the inside of the parking lot, the fluorescent light and the sound of glass and the smell of the Cheetos on the concrete, and Curtis could not get away from the parking lot because the parking lot was inside his head now and I was inside his head and I was the parking lot.
Curtis drove to the QuikTrip. He did not mean to.
His hands drove him there the way a man’s hands will take him to the place where his life broke, because the body knows even when the mind has stopped knowing.
He pulled into the parking lot at the same entrance where the Jackals’ car had pulled in a week before.
He got out of the car. He was in his socks. His gun was in the car. He was alone.
The parking lot was empty. The QuikTrip was open.
Devon, the kid from behind the counter, was inside, and Devon saw Curtis standing in the parking lot in his socks and Devon, who had been having nightmares about a man and a bag of Cheetos for a week, picked up the phone and called the police, because Devon had had enough, and the police came, and the police found Curtis Hargrove standing in the parking lot where he had helped kill a man, weeping, in his socks, in the fluorescent light.
Curtis talked. Curtis told the police everything.
He told them about the Jackals and about the Saints and about the houses and about the girls and about the money.
He told them about the detective named Royce who had been on the take for years.
He told them about the shooting in the parking lot and about the man he had not meant to kill, the man who had been carrying Cheetos for his son.
The police wrote it all down. Curtis, who had never told the truth in his life, told the truth for the first and last time, because the truth was the only currency that would make me leave, and I left, because Curtis had given me the one payment I had come for, which was not his death, which was his confession.
The confession was what cleared my name, because a man who confesses to the killing of another man has, in the confessing, said that the other man was not the killer.
The rumor that I had been in the life died in the parking lot where the life had killed me.
The city paper, which had printed the eight words that had dirtied my name, printed, on the ninth morning, a retraction and a story with the headline ACTIVIST’S KILLERS CONFESS.
Wanda cut that headline out of the paper and she framed it, and she hung it in the kitchen where I had eaten pancakes the morning I told her I was going to clean up the Boulevard.
The headline hung in the kitchen. The kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was mine again.
Curtis did not go to jail that night. Curtis went to a hospital, because a man whose mind has been lived in by the dead is a man whose mind is not entirely his own anymore, and the hospital kept him, and the things Curtis had said in the parking lot were enough to open the case that Royce had closed, and the case stayed open this time, because the men who had been paid to close it were about to find out that the dead do not forget a gold watch or a fishing cabin or a file marked NO LEADS.
Royce was arrested on the tenth day. Not by the Boulevard.
By his own. What Curtis had said, and what the men in the precinct had confessed, and what was found in the empty houses, all of it pointed at Royce.
The department, which had tolerated Royce because Royce kept the numbers down on the Boulevard, could not tolerate him now that the Boulevard had cleaned itself and Royce was the one with the dirt on his hands.
They found the gold watch and the fishing cabin and the file with my name on it with the words NO LEADS, COMMUNITY UNCOOPERATIVE.
The community, which had been uncooperative with Royce because Royce had been the man the community needed to be uncooperative with, was suddenly, finally, cooperative.
The cooperation was a flood. Royce drowned in it.
The gold watch was taken off his wrist as a badge is stripped from a man who has failed it.
Royce went into a room and the door closed, and the door stayed closed.
Royce, who had believed he owned the game, learned that the game had been owned all along by the Boulevard.
The Boulevard had only been waiting for a man willing to be its hand.
The man had been me. I had been dead. And the dead, it turned out, were enough.