Harlan's Race

could. Mech was with this bearded guy on an aisle near an exit. They were talking. Then the bearded guy left. Mech had a clear shot down the aisle, about 40 yards, to Billy’s head. A shooter and his spotter. I can feel it.”
    “Convenient of Mech to get arrested,” said John. “Yeah,” Chino agreed. “I can’t believe he thought he was going to retreat from that position. Maybe he wanted to be caught, so he could make a statement.”
    “So you’re saying the spotter got away in the confusion,” said John.
    ‘Yeah,” said Chino. “He let his buddy eat it. Weird.” “Did the police get the gun?” I asked.
    “It’s a custom .22 rifle disguised as a crutch,” said Harry. “Slick little job. The round was probably a .22 Magnum.” That slaughter smell surged in my memory, and I retched.
    Harry lit a cigarette, adding to the blue reek in the room. My non-smoker eyes were burning.
    “Well,” said Chino, “if they don’t catch this second guy, he’s still a possible threat.”
    Meaning the next target could be me.
    “Are the police looking for him?” said Marian.
    “Oh, they say they’re checking all leads. The usual shit,” said Harry.
    “If I was him,” Chino added quietly, exhaling, “I’d try again.”
    Harry, Bruce, Marian and John left. Vince and Chino stayed, staring out the window. Suddenly I remembered my bloody clothes, and headed for the closet again. Steeling myself, I moved the velvet suit aside and grabbed clean clothes. Just then, a hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up into Chino’s eyes — into his combat stare.
    While other young gay men were dancing their brains out in discos, and fucking their brains out in bed, Chino was isolated from them behind a wall of blood. He’d come back from the carnage with only one overriding passion — caring for his own, and making sure they stayed alive. A few years ago “his own” were his men in the jungle. Now his own were us. Coming out had estranged him from his Chicano familia, so we were all he had. Billy wasn’t just a “client” — Chino had adopted him with a family fierceness that surprised us. “Harlan,” said Chino hoarsely.
    ‘Yeah?”
    “I... feel like there was something we could have done. I’ve been over it a million times in my mind already. But I don’t know what it is. Except not let Billy run.”
    His light-gray eyes held mine — strange eye-color in a Chicano. For a moment, their expression was strangely young, vulnerable. One of his own, someone under his protection, had just been murdered. He was devastated.
    “You guys are not to blame,” I said in a stifled voice. “We all knew there was a risk. Billy knew.”
    “Sure, Harlan,” Vince said harshly from the other side of the room. “Turn the other cheek.”
    Vince stood with feet braced, his long, uncombed hair wild around his face. His own love and protectiveness for Billy, a more sexual kind, now exploded in resentment.
    “Let’s face it,” he provoked us. “The two nelly Lt. Calleys here ... they fucked up.”
    For a moment, it seemed like Chino had spun on his heel toward Vince in one deadly blur. Harry had told me how Chino shot on pure instinct. As a sniper, he could set up a hit with silent speed. Chino never talked about his skills, or showed them off. I’d seen his lonely figure in a gay bar there in Montreal, watchful, protective, standing by the smoky dance floor with that lethal move trapped inside him like a scorpion in amber, while Billy and Vince and a hundred other young men were boogying down, deep in their own kind of shooting.
    But I must have dreamed the move, with my exhausted eyes open. Chino just stood there with his brown fists clenched.
    Then he relaxed his hands. “Hey, sister,” he said pleasantly, “you spit a brick that big, it might fall on your nelly toe.”
    Rage at Vince’s lack of sensitivity ripped through me.
    “Kid,” I said to him, “you don’t have anything to say to these two guys. They risk their asses for you, too.”
    Vince turned on his heel, and walked out of the room.
    “Well,” Chino said to me, “you’ll need our help through the trial. Personally ... I’m yours for as long as you want me.”
    I was shucking my trousers. A little blood, now dry and black, had soaked through onto my boxer shorts. Shocked, I stared down at it. An old part of my mind screamed that I had done wrong to love Billy, that his blood was on me forever.
    Chino stared at my shorts too. He’d seen miles