First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [62]
Jack heard sirens on Kirby, heading straight for them.
With the BMW close enough to rear-end him, he suddenly veered to the left. The BMW jumped the curb, plowed over a lawn, through a low hedge of boxwood, veered out of sight around the side of the house just as a pair of ATF cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, tore up Osborne Drive, bracketing Jack's car.
NINETEEN
THE MAN we got t'see, he don't like people he don't know," Gus says. "Plus, he don't like whitey, so that makes two strikes against you."
"You want me to stay in the car?" Jack says.
Gus turns the wheel over, rolls slowly down T Street SE. "Huh. You stay in the car, the Marmoset he liable to come over, shoot you through the head. He don't ask me, should I do sumthin'. It don't smell kosher to him, he acts."
"What's a marmoset?" Jack asks.
"Some kinda monkey, I think, likes the treetops in forests, sumthin' like that, anyway."
"You ever see one? I mean a real marmoset."
"Me, no."
Gus's eyes are scanning the street. Jack can feel something in Gus condensing with concentration.
"When you think I got time t'go to the zoo?"
Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Gus pulls into the curb, turns off the engine.
"This here's Anacostia, no place fo' you, okay? So jes' keep close t' me, don't say a word, and do yo' thing, got me?"
"Gotcha," Jack says.
The Continental's enormous engine ticks over like a clock winding down. The heat of the early evening seeps in, begins to weigh on the air-conditioned air. Gus grunts, opens the driver's door.
They're on a street of narrow row houses sided with peeling wooden slats. Tiny overgrown front yards are divided by cyclone fencing. A huge German shepherd starts to bark, throwing itself against the fence as its jaws snap.
"Hey, Godzilla." Gus strolls over to the fence, Jack right behind him. "Marmoset's neighbor keeps Zilla half-starved so he'll go for anybody gets too close." Gus digs in his pocket, pulls out a handful of dog biscuits, launches them over the fence. "Can't stand to see a animal mistreated."
As Godzilla cracks down on the first biscuit, Gus and Jack approach the next house. "My father, he was a dogcatcher," Gus says. "Man, he hated his job—dealing with 'em alla time—the rabies, the mistreatment, he come up against it all."
Gus leads them up the steps of a house painted the color of the evening sky. It has neat white shutters and a roof without the tar paper patches of its neighbors.
"This it here." He raps on the door.
There's a short pause, then, "Come on in," a male voice calls.
The instant Gus opens the door, three gunshots ring out, and Gus throws Jack unceremoniously back out onto the stoop. Jack's ears ring, he can't hear a thing, but from his prone position he sees Gus pull a Magnum .357 from his jacket, bang open the door. He shouts something to Jack as he vanishes into the interior, but Jack can't hear what it is.
Jack pushes himself up and runs inside. As he passes the door, he sees three bullet holes ripped clear through the wood. It's strange to feel himself moving, but to hear nothing except the ringing in his ears, beneath which is a dead, all-encompassing silence. It's as if the world has been stuffed solid with cotton balls.
Sprinting after Gus, he finds himself in a dimly lit room, so cluttered with books, records, magazines, strewn clothes, hats, shoes, sneakers that it seems like a maze. The ceiling fixtures have been removed, leaving bare patches like the hide of a mangy dog. Instead, a multitude of lamps on tables, chairs, the floor provide weird colored light. It's a moment before Jack realizes that all the lampshades are draped with colored bits of fabric, dimming the illumination as well as dyeing it.
Across the room he sees Gus lumber back toward him from a butter-yellow kitchen. The Magnum is pointed at the floor. Gus says something to him, gesturing emphatically with his free hand, but Jack is still deaf from the aftermath of the gunshots, possibly in shock, and keeps on coming.
He sidesteps a precariously stacked pile of books, stumbles clumsily over