Love and Other Wounds by Jordan Harper Page B

break for it when I hear Birdie and his men coming back. Dance hall garbage from the car stereo gives them away. I think quick, stuff Little Bird’s hat with newspaper like it’s full of dreads. They left Little Bird holding a MAC-10. I check it. Locked and loaded. I step to the midnight air just as the yardies roll up. In the dark they just see the Rasta shape standing in the doorway, not my liver skin.
    I light them up. Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. I don’t run. In this part of Brooklyn, cops wouldn’t check out a mushroom cloud. I come up slow, covering them—if one of them is playing dead, that’d be some funny shit. Pot smoke snakes out the bullet holes—the yardies went out so high they might not know they’re dead yet. I jerk open the door. The dome light shines through a film of blood and brains onto three dead yardies. Three. No Birdie.
    Well, fuck that shit, I think, I’ll see that nigga another day, and I start to break out—and then stop.
    If you can’t catch Quaco, you catch his shirt. When they find the bodies of Kody, Dap, and Skinny back there in the tub, not cut up, and my body nowhere to be found, Birdie can do the math. He knows me. He’ll figure me for a playacting motherfucker who rose from the dead to cap his brother.
    I wanted to know who Quaco was, and now he’s me. I’m him. And if Birdie can’t catch me, he catch my shirt. Auntie Ruth, my cousin Kianna, friends from grade school I don’t even remember. Birdie will kill them all now that I’ve smoked Little Bird.
    I can’t have it. Maybe Devin can live with his shit spilling all over the damn place, but not me. I’ll chew on this MAC before I let that happen. And I realize that maybe that’s my only choice. Leave myself just one more body in this big pile that’s growing bigger by the minute. Better that than what happens if Birdie finds out I’m alive.
    If they find the other three bodies. But if I make Skinny and the boys disappear the way Birdie wanted us to be gone, Birdie won’t have a fucking clue what happened, and he sure won’t figure I raised up from the dead. Let him put Little Bird on Devin. That’s where it belongs in the first place. Make it look like they caught me, and they won’t have to look to catch my shirt. If I do what I’m thinking I have to do, it means that I play dead for real. This life would be as over as if I’d caught one back in that bathroom. It means being a ghost. I already feel like one.
    I reach past the dead yardie driver and pop the trunk to get the machete. Turns out Birdie was being poetic with that word. It’s a chainsaw back there. I pick it up and head to the house. I hate to think about what I’m going back in there to do. But shit, they’re all dead in that bathtub anyhow. They won’t ever know what I’m going to do to them. They won’t feel a thing. And now Skinny gets to save my sorry-ass life one more time.

RED HAIR AND BLACK LEATHER
    She had an ass like a heart turned upside down and torn in half, and that’s what you call foreshadowing, friend. It was a slow Wednesday afternoon at the bar and in walks this gal, red hair pouring over her shoulders, wearing a wifebeater and black leather pants. And all of the sudden the Cards game on the teevee didn’t seem so interesting.
    â€œNice place.”
    She pulled herself onto a stool in front of me, thumping a big leather purse onto the stool next to her. Strictly speaking, what she said was a lie. Jackie Blue’s isn’t much to look at, brick and linoleum, bars on the only window up front, old neon signs on the wall. But still it sounded like she meant it. She had asouthern lilt, not that twang that you get around here, and it made whatever she said sound like sunshine and kittens.
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œIt yours?”
    â€œIndeed it is.”
    â€œWell, I guess that makes you Jackie Blue, am I