Free The Wave by Walter Mosley

minutes before answering. “Bobby was a wild man. He carried a straight razor in his pocket and sometimes a gun. He was working as a janitor at the hospital where Uncle Mortie had gone for open-heart surgery. He was nice to me, and after Mortie got better, Bobby called one day. He said that he was in the neighborhood and wanted to drop by. For some reason, I just couldn’t say no.”
    “He was so wild that you thought he might just have run away one day?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I was so sad, and your father was very kind to me.” My mother had a broken look. “Now I suppose that was all guilt. But I’m sure those pictures cut him way down deep.”
    “Why didn’t you and Dad break up?”
    “We loved each other in our own way,” she said. “And . . .
    and . . . there was you and Angie. Our problems didn’t have to be yours, too.”
    I took the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nella’s house right after I decided to tell my mother about the crime. I told Nella that she could have three thousand just to hold on to it for me.
    “I’ll hold
all
of it,” Nella told me. “I only take what money I have earned.”
    I don’t know why I took the money. Maybe I was afraid the police would have kept it, or maybe I thought that seeing the money Bobby Bliss agreed to take would break my mother’s heart. But looking back on it, I guess it was because I was so broke, and in some way it felt like a gift from my father to keep me from sinking too low.
    Except for the past mayhem, things weren’t too bad. GT was gone. The world was looking better. I had a line of gold-and-green celadon-glazed mugs thrown on the wheel and then altered to look something like fat Chinese ducks. I’d thrown and fired over six hundred mugs and planned to sell them at the street fair for twelve dollars each. It wasn’t a lot of money, after expenses, but at least it was a start.
    I visited Angie a little more often, and about every other night I spent wining and dining the lovely Ms. Bombury with money I’d stolen from a murdered man’s grave.

16
    The phone rang at two-thirty the morning before the crafts sale. I was up wrapping and boxing mugs for the show. The bell at that hour gave me a chill. As the days had gone by, I’d begun to be afraid of GT. He was obviously crazy; mentally unstable and physically very strong—a bad combination. He had information about me and my family that I’d never suspected. And even though I knew he couldn’t have had anything to do with Bobby Bliss’s death, I still associated him with that violent act.
    I let the phone go to the answering machine so as not to have to speak if it was GT on the line.
    “Errol, this is Lon. If you’re there, pick up.”
    There was noise in the background that made it plain my sister’s husband wasn’t calling from their home.
    “What is it, Lon?”
    “It’s Anj. She’s real sick.”
    “Where are you?”
    “At the hospital. Temple. They admitted her through the emergency room.”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    By the time I got to the admissions desk of the emergency room, it was almost three-thirty. Lon was nodding in a chair between a nauseated-looking woman and a man with a bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his forearm.
    “She got these terrible pains and started bleeding,” Lon said. “I brought her here, and they took her right in. The doctors haven’t said a thing.”
    “What are they doing for her?” I asked.
    “I think they’re operating. That’s what the nurse said.”
    “When did she start bleeding?”
    “It started about nine. I brought her in because we thought it might be some kind of rough labor or something, but they said that the bleeding was bad.”
    Lon was tall and prematurely gray. He had a young face, though, and an athletic physique. We never liked each other much. It didn’t have anything to do with race or even with my sister. We were just very different people. But he was my brother-in-law, so I treated him as well as I