Free Black Water Rising by Attica Locke Page B

orders to come out with his hands up. The first flash of movement behind the shower curtain, they shot him thirteen times. He was only twenty years old. Now, eleven years later, Jay still sleeps with his .22 and car ries it into the bathroom with him. He also can’t take sudden noises and won’t sit with his back to the door, and several times a year, he catches himself, by rote, unscrewing the mouthpiece of his telephone, looking for bugs.
    Back in his bedroom, he returns the gun to its hiding place beneath his pillow and makes the bed by himself, a routine he and Bernie came up with in their first months of marriage. “I don’t like guns,” she’d said. “I don’t want to see a gun.” There’s an AM radio propped on the paint-chipped windowsill. It’s picking up bits and pieces of a local news show on 740. Jay dresses quickly, listening to a report about talks between the dockworkers and the shipping companies. As he slips on his shoes, he remembers his pledge to call the mayor.
    His clothes from last night are piled on a nearby chair, where he tossed them in the dark last night. On his way out, he scoops up the dirty, grass-stained clothes and rolls them into a tight ball, hiding the whole mess under his arm. When Bernie comes in from the kitchen, her robe open at her belly, she eyes the pile of laundry he’s got wadded under his arm. “What are you doing?”
    “Going to work,” he says simply, holding the soiled clothes as if they were an attaché case, a part of his usual uniform. He tries to pass her in the narrow doorway, but she does not move, block ing him with her belly, waiting for him to say a proper good-bye. When he bends down to kiss her on the cheek, Bernie screws up her nose, pulling away from him and wiping at the side of her face. She looks down at her fingertips, staring at a glob of brown jelly.
    “Are you wearing makeup?”
    “No,” he says, turning away from her. “Of course not.” Outside, beneath the carport, he tosses the dirty clothes into
    the back of his Buick, which, he notices, is still covered with the reddish dirt from the open field by the bayou, the location of a murder. He stops at a car wash on the way to his office. With two dollars’ worth of quarters, he washes the Buick twice, rinsing any trace of the crime scene from his car. He uses the soiled clothes from last night to dry the soapy water. Then he pitches them into the trash.
    He arrives at his office late, his suit damp and wrinkled from the car wash. Eddie Mae has a message from Charlie Luckman, saying he wants to meet for lunch. This is settlement talk for sure, Jay thinks. But the relief he feels about the possibility of a quick financial resolution to the case is tempered by the morning he’s had. He knows he’s being paranoid—chucking his clothes, washing his car—but he can’t seem to stop himself or calm his racing nerves. He goes into his office and shuts the door, lights a cigarette at his desk and picks up the phone.
    He starts with a guy named Tim.
    Tim was Jay’s client a few months back, the one with the out standing bill. Jimmy, Tim reminds Jay, was dating Tim’s sister. Fine, Jay says. He doesn’t care. He’s trying to get in touch with Jimmy’s cousin. It’s another half hour before he’s able to track down Jimmy, at a bar on Calumet. There’s loud music playing in the background, and it takes a while to make Jimmy understand who Jay is or why he’s calling. Jimmy, who frankly sounds drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, tells Jay he hasn’t seen his cousin in days.
    “You got a number for him, some way I can reach him?”
    “You might try his girl’s place,” Jimmy slurs. “He’s kind of in between digs right now.”
    “You have her phone number?” Jay asks.
    “Well, let me see if I can find it,” Jimmy says, as if he keeps a Rolodex right there on the bar top. “Here,” he says a moment later. “Try this one: 789-3123. Gal’s name is Stella.”
    “Thank you,”