Soul Siren Read Online Free Page B

What am I doing here? I’m making mistakes. I know enough not to touch the dead body at my feet, but I still make fatal errors.
    It is someone else who did this, not you. That’s what you have to tell yourself. Emotional detachment. You’re going to find what you came for and go, because that’s what you do. You’re Michelle, and you clean up the messes. You’re loyal.
    I go through a mental checklist of what I’ve touched without gloves, still dithering whether to leave them be since I’m a regular visitor here, or to wipe them clean. I opt for wiping them, erasing my presence here tonight. I will be careful, I will be so careful.
    And as I rifle anxiously through the drawers wearing my latex surgical gloves, a onetime friend cold at my feet behind the couch, I curse under my breath and chant that I did it for you, Erica, I did it all for you….

Beginnings
    I
t was ironic
that Easy Carson, projecting all his gangsta rap executive bluster and never dreaming of backing it up, became a target for Jamal Knight. Because Knight was
the real deal
. As much effort as Easy put into his bad boy front Knight dedicated to his own illusion of respectability. He had a handsome square face of pecan colour and light brown eyes, a thick moustache above his ready smile of caps, and he favoured Hugo Boss suits. I have been told that he owned nice cars but made sure that he never drove himself—not because he wanted to push an image with a chauffeur but to avoid any police harassment. He didn’t like being pulled over. If he had to be ordered out of the car, he would suffer it in the role of a passenger. If cops were going to dream up a BS charge then it could stick to someone else’s licence and not his own.
    Jamal Knight was actually a mere two inches taller than me and not a muscular guy, but he exuded violence in a way that Carson’s bulk never could. I was told that he attacked people who wronged him like a rabid dog. The person who told me this walks with a metal crutch and moves in a limping palsy gait, suffering permanent neurological damage. He had made the mistake of trying to attack Knight with a beer bottle over a gang slur.
    “Man smiles a lot,” says another former associate. “When he stops smiling, someone will bleed.” Knight had taken over whole blocks with the old stand-by of the protection racket. When a storeowner lay with his face on his floor tiles and his arm pinned behind his back, Knight often informed him, “Look, even if we kill you, man, you’re still going to have to pay.”
    And Easy Roller Records owned recording studios in Jamal Knight’s Brooklyn neighbourhood.
    While Easy couldn’t relate to women and had trouble asking them out, Jamal thought he was smooth, Brooklyn’s new improved Samuel L. Jackson, taking his dates to the Rainbow Room and then up to the Empire State Building roof. Erica told me that she did find Knight attractive, even clever and fun to talk to. He told funny self-deprecating stories, accidentally locking himself out of his house (when, of course, he was never alone) or having to endure brothers who were dull tourists from Georgia on a flight home. But she had also heard the anecdotes of his real business, and they repelled her. “I don’t want to go out with some criminal,” she said.
    Still, she found herself in a long conversation with him in Easy’s nightclub when the place was hopping. Erica said that Jamal managed to cast doubt on his reputation by pretending he didn’t know about it, that he must be a victim of nasty gossip. I saw him lead her towards the cloakroom, and Erica says that in the darkness, they began kissing, that Knight was a good kisser, stroking her chin and not rushing things. But he thought he didn’t have to.
    “We should get back,” said Erica.
    “Oh, come on,” Knight told her with a laugh, “I’m not settling for just
that
.”
    Erica pulled back, and Jamal Knight’s face was still trying to be smugly charming.
    “Why