He’d made mistakes. Done some jail time for small things, strong-arm robberies and the like. No prison time, though. And he hadn’t been caught for any of the homicides he’d done, grudge-type, passion-type, murder-for-hire shit, which could set you up for half a year. A couple of times he’d killed ’cause his blood had got up.

He thought about that last one. How he’d followed some cat out of a bar who’d said something smart to a woman Jones was with. How he’d taken a blade to this cat’s cheek in the alley behind a low-rise apartment building, one of those reurbanization projects, the fancy name the government gave to ghettos. Jones had cut him, and the man was bleeding through his fingers and had begun to beg: I ain’t mean nothin’, brother, and Please not today, Lord, all that. But Jones had already begun to feel that tick tick tick coursing through his veins, that thing that told him to kill. Jones stuck him right in his chest and twisted the blade before he withdrew it. Must have been the heart he hit, ’cause the blood was bright red and pumping out fast. There was a witness, a young dude, but Jones had fish-eyed the motherfucker as he walked away from the scene. He knew this dude would not come forward. Few in that neighborhood, especially if they were young, would talk to the police. Jones didn’t lose any sleep over it either way. He was thinking, Man shouldn’t have talked to my woman the way he did.

And then he started thinking, Where is that bitch with my drink?

Lula Bacon came into the living-room area with a glass in her hand, like God had answered his question. He took the glass from her and drank bourbon deep.

“Where you been?” said Jones, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Puttin’ him to sleep.”

She stood over him in a sleeveless shift, tapping her foot. She was wearing a pair of pumps with a little cloth bow on top of each one. He guessed he was supposed to notice her shoes.

“New kicks?” he said, giving her a little something, thanking her, in his way, for bringing him a drink.

“For Easter. But I wouldn’t mind wearing them out tonight.”

“Who’s gonna look after the kid?”

“My mother would.”

“Well, I ain’t goin’ no goddamn where but this chair. My cousin and his boy are comin’ over with some smoke, and I am going to get my head up right here.”

“We could go to Ed Murphy’s.”

“What, I hit the number and no one told me?”

“You just cheap.”

Jones liked Ed Murphy’s Supper Club, over on Georgia. The kitchen made a mean shrimp creole, and the bartenders poured with a heavy hand. He went there once in a while when he was looking for something fresh. But what was the use of taking a woman out and spending good money on her when he already had her ass for free, right here, twenty feet from the bedroom?

“You ain’t never want to go out,” said Lula.

“What, you still runnin’ your mouth?”

“Lazy motherfucker.”

“Shut up, girl.”

“Look -”

“I am warning you, either you shut that mouth of yours or, or…”

Lula put her hand on her hip. “Or what?”

“You keep talkin’, I’m gonna put a size ten and a half up in your ass.”

“Ten and a half?” she said, her eyes gone playful. “Now, you know you a ten. Why you men always tellin’ lies behind your shoe size?”

“If I’m lyin’, I’m lyin’ on the low side. You know that.”

Lula smiled.

Jones looked her over in that shift, cut up way above her knees. Nice legs, and they went up to an ass so good, made your friends jealous you’d gotten your hands around it first. Young girl, just past twenty. She hadn’t lost a goddamn bit of shape birthing that kid, either. Big brown eyes, too. Girl looked like Diana Ross, with titties.

Jones put his drink on the floor and opened his arms. “C’mere, girl.”

“You’re gonna wake the baby,” said Lula.

“You the one be makin’ all that noise.”

She chuckled, and he knew he was there.

“ Alvin?”

“What?”

“Can we go out?”

“We gonna have to see.”

“I got somethin’ you can see right here.”

“When?”

Lula lifted her shift up to her waist. She sauntered toward him. The front of her panties was dark where her sex had dampened. The sight of her black mound behind those white panties made him grow. He was a small man, so there was room for them both on the chair. She straddled him there and unzipped his slacks.

“Can we go out?” she said.

“Okay,” said Jones.

Jones thinking, After I get my nut, I’ll just tell her I had a change of mind.

KENNETH WILLIS HAD bought his Mercury, a green Monterey, because of its flat rear window. With this feature, the Monterey was like no other model on the street. Women, he believed, would like to sit beside a man who drove a car like that.

Lately, though, Willis was having a little trouble making the payments. He had a custodial position over at this elementary school off Kansas Avenue, but it was a low-pay job. Also, he and Alvin had not pulled off any side thing for a while. He needed money. He was counting on having some soon.

Kenneth Willis and Dennis Strange were driving south on 7th Street in the Monterey. Both were high from the marijuana they’d smoked, fifteen minutes earlier, in Willis’s shit-hole apartment on H. Dennis was dressed in clothes that were fashionable in ’66. His hair was ratty. He held a paperback copy of Dominated Man in his hand.

Willis was under the wheel, filling out the window frame with his big body, nodding along to the brand-new Percy Sledge, “Take Time to Know Her,” coming thin and crackly from the speaker mounted under the dash shelf.

“Percy be singin’ good right here,” said Willis. He had big shoulders and lean, muscular arms. He would have been handsome if not for his buckteeth.

“Any motherfucker sound good when you’re high,” said Dennis Strange.

Dennis preferred the new-sound thing coming up, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, and them. He dug the way those cats looked, like they were gonna step out any way they wanted to and just didn’t give a fuck about what society thought. Percy Sledge? To Dennis he was one of those old-time, lantern-on-the-lawn Negroes, a prisoner to the record company. He dressed in tuxedos. He still wore pomade in his hair. But he wouldn’t mention that to his friend Kenneth. Willis wore pomade in his hair, too.

The street was crowded and alive. Families were out alongside hustlers and children playing ball. Women were gliding on the sidewalks, still in their Sunday dresses.

“Damn, baby,” said Willis, slowing the car and leaning his head out the window to talk to a girl who was making her way down the strip. “Why you gonna walk like that while I’m behind the wheel? You gonna make a man have an accident.”

“Don’t blame me if you can’t drive.” She was smiling some but kept up her pace and would not look his way.

“Wanna go for a ride?”

“Uh-uh.”

“What’s wrong, you got a George?”

“Ain’t none of your concern if I do.”

“Why you wanna be like that, girl?”

“Go ahead, slick,” she said, before turning down the cross street.

“One of them jaspers,” said Willis.

“If they don’t like you, they must be lesbians, huh?”

“Some bitches just don’t like men,” said Willis, shrugging.

“You gonna talk to them all, though. Find out which ones don’t and which ones do.”

“Somethin’ wrong with that?”

It wouldn’t help any for Dennis to tell Kenneth that there was. Kenneth, who he’d known since they were both in the reserves, was as pussy hungry as a man could be. He’d done some time on a statutory rape conviction, but even that lesson hadn’t thrown water on his fire. Dennis didn’t know how a man like him could get a job, not even a janitor’s job, around little kids. He wouldn’t let Kenneth around his own daughter, if he had one. He didn’t even want him near his mother, and she was over fifty years old.