All I Did Was Shoot My Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

on, Mr. Charles,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be the reason you got that sugar knocked off your rind.”

    He looked me directly in the eye and nodded, took in the cops as if to say that he saw what had happened here, and then backed away.

    As I watched him go I saw Charlene coming down the escalator. She had in her hand a bottle of what looked like Coke Zero.

    “ What are you doing here?” a tall milk chocolate–colored cop was asking.

    “Came to meet the nine forty-seven bus in from Albion. It didn’t get in till almost ten though.”

    “ What for?” his partner asked. That cop was white, a bit shorter, and broad of shoulders and chest.

    “Somebody told me that women coming in from the prison are open to persuasion . . . if you know what I mean.”

    “You don’t seem to have that sort of company,” the lady policeman commented.

    “I was misinformed.”

    “ What are you doing here?” the black cop asked.

    “Talking to you, my friend.”

    “I’m not your friend.”

    “No,” I agreed.

    “ What do you have in your pockets?” the white cop bid.

    “ Whatever the Constitution says I can carry.”

    “This isn’t a game.” The white cop had brown hair and eyes the same hue but a little darker. He had a stripe on his shoulder and three freckles over his left cheek.

    I turned to my left and walked away. That was the only option I had outside of assault.

    They could have come after me.

    They didn’t though.

    I wondered why.

    6

    I WAS USED to being stopped by the police. My face and name were well known among the law enforcement crowd. They suspected me of everything from contract murder to armed robbery, from kidnapping to white slavery. I had been rousted, arrested, and thrown before more courts than Sweet Lemon Charles knew existed.

    Before last year I had my own private cop—Carson Kitteridge. He dropped in on me once a month or so and made sly innuendos. If anyone would ever cause my downfall, it was Carson. But he had stopped contacting me, and police all over the city, even though they still gave me a hard time, seemed to be holding back.

    I didn’t know what had happened or why, but I had decided to accept it as a temporary gift from the Patron Saint of Thieves, whoever he or she was.

    MORE IMPORTANT to me, as I ambled up Tenth Avenue, was Lemon Charles. He had taken the life of a habitual criminal and turned it around, if only for a brief span of time. He wrote poetry, dealt in it, slept with a poet at night, and was asked politely to leave by cops that saw him as a tourist guide rather than a petty con.

    This was cause for hope.

    I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. Maybe I could become a poet or a fifth-grade math teacher . . . This notion tickled me. The humor caught me by surprise and I laughed so hard that two young women, who were walking in the opposite direction, actually veered out into the street to avoid me. I felt bad about it. I wanted to apologize to them for the outburst. But just the idea of apologizing for my humor sent me on another jag of hilarity.

    Finally I went out into the street myself and hailed a yellow cab. The avenues were not safe for young women and poets—not while a laughing hyena like me was on the prowl.

    I HAD THE CAB bring me to my building on the Upper West Side, not a block away from Riverside Drive. Parked out front was a small U-Haul truck. The man sitting in the driver’s seat was a murderer and I was his only friend.

    I walked up to the street-side car window, intending to greet Hush, but he was in the middle of a sentence.

    “. . . I don’t think that it matters what you do,” he was saying. “I mean, it matters, but it’s more the way you do it and your attention to detail . . .”

    “Hey, man,” I said. It wouldn’t do to eavesdrop on Hush for too long. He was a stickler for his privacy.

    “Leonid,” he said.

    I moved around to see that he was