• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 433 0

with him. The next question was the location of his gun, for I had no doubt that he was armed. Williams was big and strong and nasty enough to be able to coerce just about anyone into his van without a firearm, but if he came out with the end of the barrel at Vivian’s back, then it would be a very delicate situation indeed. If that were the case, I’d have to be close enough to surprise him. I thought through it in fast forward. He’d see the broken window. That would distract him for sure. He’d have to open the door for Vivian, then for himself. The van would not start. He would have to open the hood. He might be suspicious, but he would still have to open the hood, and that’s when I would take him. Knowing that, I also knew where I would wait.

I pranced up a few cars south of where Williams’s van was parked and squatted down by someone’s rear fender, hoping nobody would spot me. But I wouldn’t have to wait for long, because a moment later Williams came through the front door—I let out my breath. He was alone. The choice I had to make swelled up inside my chest like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. Kill him now and have one less enemy at my back or let it wait for another time. The first choice made sense. From this range I couldn’t miss. Could I get away with it? Maybe. Probably. People got dead in Miami all the time. Get rid of the gun. Would I be a suspect? Maybe. Probably. Motive? What motive? Nobody knew about our intimate interlude on the high seas. After all, he had tried to kill me. Even the score. Wipe that smirk off his face now and forever.

Still, it was no easy thing to kill a man.

Not by accident, at least. Then the old video started, and I couldn’t stop the tape. Going up the stairwell in the Fredrick Douglass projects. The heart’s steady beating, a reminder that you at least are still alive. It sets the pace of your slow, cautious ascent up the stairs. Then the glint of metal in the almost dark and both of you firing your guns simultaneously as though in a semiautomatic dream, and for the rest of your life the burning question of every day, of every stray waking moment: What if you had waited a second longer?

Then I heard the wail of sirens far in the distance, heading away from me. The video blurred before fading completely.

As I crouched there behind the car, waiting, it came to me that the time was not yet now. Williams and I were on a collision course. Of that much I was certain. But not now. It was too soon. Or maybe I was just scared. It didn’t matter. I felt the relief of knowing that the time had not yet come.

I heard Williams’s muffled curse when he spotted the broken window, heard him curse again—this time more loudly—when the engine wouldn’t start. Crouched in the darkness, I smiled like a fiend. I peeked up over the trunk of my perch when I heard the hood of his van open. After a second or two, he slammed it shut and cursed again. He looked around suspiciously for a moment, but there was nothing else he could do. I thought I heard him talking on a cell phone. Then he cursed yet again and started walking east toward Washington Avenue. He would be heading for Embers. I waited for him to turn the corner, then sprinted back to the car.

I made a U-turn and went north on Michigan. At the park I turned left and drove the few blocks east toward the neon playground over on Washington Avenue. I got lucky and found a parking spot right in front of an all-night grocery store, then walked the half block to the main drag, already bustling with the crowds from across the causeway, the traffic not moving and the humid air smelling like a Chinese restaurant. I had the gun under my shirt like a deadly invitation.

There are certain places on this earth that seem to rise up full-blown like Venus flytraps out of nowhere, cafés or nightclubs that flourish and prosper where other endeavors have failed and vanished almost as soon as they opened their doors. I had seen it happen in South Beach a dozen times in the years I’d been in Miami. Embers was in the first category. Nick, Matson, and a few silent partners