Free Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley Page B

over the loud barking in the backseat.
    “I told you already, the girl stole it.”
    “That was my gun she took from you?”
    “Yes.” I took the left onto Denker.
    “An’ now you want me to walk unarmed into the house of a friend of a ex-con nearly killed you yesterday?”
    “He don’t know me, Fearless. I’ll just walk in there an’ tell him I’m Leon’s friend.” Finding that phone number and fooling
     C.T. had given me a sense of control.
    “What if he was the one sittin’ next to Leon when he was chasin’ yo’ ass down the street?”
    “Shit.” My fingers went suddenly cold.
    “That’s okay, man. I’ll go in first. But you owe me a pistol.”
    THE ADDRESS C.T. had given us was a court of apartments at the corner of Horn. We left the dog in the car. The super’s apartment was
     listed under the name of Conrad Benjamin Till. Whoever designed the court must have been a fan of Minos’s maze. After every
     two doorways there was another turn. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.
    Most of the apartments were dark, as the next day was a workday. We went past a pair of teenagers having some kinda sex behind
     a skimpy rosebush. I don’t know if they saw us, but they sure didn’t stop.
    NO ONE ANSWERED when we rang Conrad’s bell. No one called out when we knocked. Fearless had brought Layla’s tire iron in lieu of a pistol
     and used it on the door. The sound of that doorjamb being wrenched open by that twelve-pound tire ironwas frightening; loud and whining with reports like small-caliber gunshots now and then. I looked around to see if anyone
     had turned on their lights; no one had, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t been heard or seen.
    Fearless went in first, but I was right on his heels, running my hands along the wall. I didn’t find a light switch, but Fearless
     snagged the overhead cord and said, “I got it.”
    Yellow light flooded the small sitting room as I was closing the front door.
    Fearless said, “Dog.”
    There on a low, modern couch sat a fresh corpse.
    He probably had been darker before all the blood drained out, but he’d always be a light-skinned Negro with brown freckles
     across his wide nose. His face seemed to belong on a fat man, but he was of normal build. He wore a light-colored jacket,
     blood-soaked T-shirt, and threadbare jeans. Till must’ve died right after we got off the phone.
    I was looking at the dead man, but my mind was working overtime trying to believe that he wasn’t there. I’d happened upon
     dead bodies before in my life: three children in a car wreck outside of Turner, Texas, the body of a sailor I saw on the shore
     at the Gulf of Mexico, and there’s been a murdered body or two on the street. I once saw the victims of a double lynching
     hung from an ancient live oak not two miles from my mother’s home. I’ve seen a good many deaths, but none of them, with the
     exception of those cops that Fearless killed, had anything to do with me.
    I had sought out Conrad Till. And if I wasn’t careful I’d end up just like him.
    “The first one’s always hard,” Fearless said.
    “Say what?”
    “When me and my squad’d go out in Germany it was always the first man get killed get to us,” he said in an impossibly calm
     voice. “Didn’t matter if it was one’a us or one’a them. It’s just that first dead man that reminds you that this is serious
     business.”
    With that Fearless moved to inspect the room. I moved too, his nonchalant bravery having turned my terror into mere heart-pounding
     fear.
    Till’s tan jacket had as much wet blood on it as dry. There was a lot of blood, down on his blue jeans and coagulated in the
     spaces between the fingers of his left hand. There was also a burned-out cigarette between those fingers. It was as if he’d
     been sitting there listening to music but then all of a sudden broke out in an attack of bleeding. The blood had come from
     a wound in the left side of his chest.
    We didn’t