A Better Goodbye by John Schulian Read Free Book Online

to let go of DuPree’s right shoulder.
    â€œYou don’t take your hand off me,” DuPree said, “I’m gonna give it back to you in pieces.”
    â€œYou can talk all you want on your way out the door,” the guy said.
    â€œMarty?”
    It was the blonde, trying to get the guy’s attention. She’d seen the change in DuPree, how he wasn’t the charmer who had sat down beside her any longer. Now he was what you never want to see step out of the shadows. But the guy was too wrapped up in his own drama to realize he had no chance against DuPree. None at all.
    â€œMarty!” The blonde was close to losing it.
    The guy turned to her, annoyed, and DuPree came off his stool, uncoiling like a rattler. He turned his left hand into a club that broke the grip on his shoulder, spun the guy a hundred and eighty degrees, and put him in a hammerlock so cruel it buckled his knees.
    DuPree leaned close and whispered, “My name ain’t LL Cool J, motherfucker.”
    The only response the guy could muster was the strangled sound of someone in severe pain. It fell to the blonde to say, “Don’t hurt him, please.” But that just pissed DuPree off more. And then he saw the guy looking desperately for his buddies.
    â€œAin’t nobody gonna help you, bitch,” DuPree said, grabbing the first finger he came to on the guy’s hand and twisting it like a swizzle stick. The guy tried not to scream, but people nearby still heard him. DuPree didn’t care about them. “Please,” the blonde said. DuPree didn’t care about her either.
    The guy was whimpering now, and there had to be bouncers on the way. Maybe the guy’s buddies were coming, too. DuPree looked the blonde up and down once more. “Damn, you are fine,” he said. Then he snapped the guy’s finger like a no. 2 pencil.
    The guy’s scream filled the air as DuPree shoved him to the floor face first and started toward the elevator. He had to wade through the gawkers who were already gathering. Those who saw what he’d done stepped out of his way. And all the while he kept telling himself to be cool. Just take his time. No need to run, no need to even walk fast. He was the king of the fucking jungle.

    A little before ten-thirty, as lights started to go out all along Hollyridge, DuPree pulled up beside the fence behind Chuck Berry’s old house and parked looking down the hill. The night was too dark and the shrubbery too thick for him to eyeball things, but he knew from the changes out front that there had been a lot of work done on the motherfucker. It needed some serious beautifying after the way the bands that rented it had trashed the place, thinking they were honoring old Chuck by living like pigs—empty bottles, dirty needles, and women’s stained drawers everywhere.
    White boys acting like that’s what it took to be black, DuPree thought. It hurt to contemplate the enormity of what they didn’t know. Of course, being partial to Nas’s bad-assed rap, DuPree might not have known either if the old man hadn’t told him. Not that the old man was tight with Chuck or anything, but he had been to parties here even before he signed with the Dodgers, just out of Fremont High and acting like there wasn’t any kind of shit he couldn’t get away with. Said he shared the first white woman he ever had with Chuck himself, a bad-talking blonde straight out of that old-time porn where hairy ofays never wore anything except black socks. Of course it could have been bullshit, too. DuPree’s old man threw bullshit around like he was running for president. But that had been his time back then, the fifties turning into the sixties, and Chuck Berry riding high before he took that underage Apache girl across a state line for what the law said was immoral purposes.
    Thinking about it made DuPree glad he wasn’t famous. Better to be a clean, well-dressed