Read Online Black Betty by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online Page B

go in that half-doze, my heart wended its way back to that alley behind John’s.
    It was quiet with Bruno slumped against the butcher’s door. Blood dripped down his chest and he made a gurgling sound. A bubble of blood kept bulging and receding from his nostril. Blood seeped across the alley toward my bare feet. I didn’t want to get blood on my feet; didn’t want a dead man’s blood on me.
    Then there was Mouse again. He walked right in the blood and stooped over to see Bruno up close. He listened to the ragged breath for a moment, then pulled his long pistol out of the front of his pants and leveled it at Bruno’s eye. It was the same way he killed Joppy Shag all those years ago.
    The shot exploded and I jumped awake. Across the street the glass doors of the bus station swung open and Raymond “Mouse” Alexander walked out in the same silver suit and gray shoes he wore while killing Bruno Ingram. His shirt was a deep smoky color, his hat was short in the brim. Most men do a jolt up in prison and when they come out they’re behind the times. But not Mouse. His tastes were so impeccable that he would have looked good after fifty years in jail.
    The only thing different from the night he laid Bruno down that I could see from across the street was a pencil-thin mustache that Mouse sometimes grew and sometimes cut off.
    “Hey!” I waved through the window.
    He carried a drab green bag down at his side. It was almost empty. You don’t collect many keepsakes in prison—at least not the kind you can carry around in a bag.
    He jumped into the passenger’s seat all excited. “Easy, lemme have your gun.”
    “What?”
    “Couple’a motherfuckers on that bus wanna get the news. They was laughin’ at me, Easy.”
    Any other man, even the craziest killer, I could have talked sense to. I could have said that there were policemen in the station, that they’d throw him back into prison. But not Mouse. He was like an ancient pagan needing to celebrate and anoint his freedom with blood.
    “Sorry, man,” I said, thinking about the shotgun in my trunk. “I didn’t bring nuthin’.”
    “You go around wit’ no gun?”
    “What I need a gun for?”
    “S’pose you gotta kill somebody, that’s why.”
    I used the pause to turn the ignition and take off.
    We’d been driving for a few minutes before either of us spoke again.
    “How you doin’, Raymond?” I asked lamely.
    “How you think? They got me locked up in a pen like a pig wit’ a whole buncha other pigs. Make me wear that shit. Make me eat shit. An’ every motherfuckah there think he could mess wit’ me ’cause I’m little.”
    I imagined the hard lessons brought about by that mistake. Mouse wasn’t a large man. I could have picked him up and thrown him across a room. But he was a killer. If he had any chance to put out your eye or sever a tendon, he did it.
     
     
    HE TOLD ME ONCE that a white sheriff in west Texas had taken him in for vagrancy.
    “You hear that shit?” Mouse said. “Vagrancy! I told him I was lookin’ for a job!”
    But the sheriff took Mouse to jail and chained his hands behind his back. That night, when they were alone, the sheriff came into the cell.
    “He was gonna kill me,” Mouse said. “Go upside my head an’ get me up an’ hit me again. I knew I had ta do sumpin’, so when he hit me one time I pretend like I’m out.…” Mouse closed his eyes as in a swoon and fell forward on the street corner where he was telling his tale. I grabbed him almost like an embrace and he bit me! Bit me right on the big muscle of my shoulder.
    Mouse threw his arms around my neck and chortled in my ear, “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. That’s just what he did, man. Stooped down a little an’ grab me. It’s what you call a reflex. But I didn’t bite his arm. Uh-uh.” Mouse showed me his big teeth. “I clamped down on his windpipe an’ I didn’t pull back until my teefs was touchin’.”
    Mouse ripped out the sheriff’s throat and then