“Kind of help you give to them blues players,” he said, ignoring me. “Them jobs you do that JoJo always talkin’ ’bout.”
“Royalty recovery?”
Malcolm spoke up in a cloud of smoke: “Finding people.”
I began to remove the screws from the old pump and looked at Malcolm. I still remembered when he was a nappy-haired kid who shagged balls at training camp for our kickers. Now he was a hardened man. I noticed a bulge in the right side of his denim coat.
“Who do you need found?”
“A man who conned my boy out of 500 grand,” Teddy said. “Goddamn, it’s hot in here.”
“Sorry, man,” I said. “Sounds like you need more help than me.”
“You the best I got.”
“We’ll talk.”
“There ain’t time.”
“Why?”
Malcolm looked at his brother and put a hand on his shoulder before walking back to his Hummer with an exaggerated limp.
“Some Angola-hard punk gave me twenty-four, brother,” Teddy said. “I only got twenty-one hours of my life left.”
3
After Teddy dropped the news, we decided there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time for soul food at Dunbar’s. So when we watched Malcolm head back out to the studio, I pulled on my walking boots and a clean T-shirt, closed down the garage, and we rolled down Freret and headed up to Claiborne in Teddy’s electric-blue Bentley. I cracked the window, lit a Marlboro, and sank into the rabbit fur while he leaned back into the driver’s seat and steered with two fingers. A sad smile crossed his face as we moved from the million-dollar mansions off St. Charles to candy-colored shotguns and onto a street populated with pawnshops, check-cashing businesses, and EZ credit signs. Neon and billboards. Broken bottles lay in gullies and yellowed newspapers twirled across vacant lots.
The air felt warm against my face, heavy bass vibrating my back and legs, when we rolled low under the giant oaks that shrouded the corners around the Magnolia projects. The trees’ roots were exposed, rotted, and dry near portions of the housing projects that had been plowed under. Their tenants now living in Section 8 housing in New Orleans East.