Violent Spring (Deluxe Edition) by Gary Phillips

Author:Gary Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

TWELVE

Monk came to, rolled onto his side and vomited.

The head was not meant to be socked. It upset your thinking after a while, as Muhammad Ali and countless fighters of lesser stature could attest to.

When you were unconscious you didn’t cough, and your breathing slowed. The light stage, as it was euphemistically referred to, was a temporary concussion, with the more pernicious state being a coma. And even if you should awake—and Monk was painfully aware that he was conscious—there might be disorientation, dizziness, loss of memory and continued vomiting.

The sudden rush of night air into his lungs caused Monk’s chest to ache and the food he’d had earlier to collect in his throat. Fighting down the bile, it suddenly came to Monk where to find Dexter Grant. It’s funny how your brain works after being slapped upside the head unconscious. What the beeps meant had come to him as he drifted somewhere between the purple sleep and the harsh awakening. Maybe there was some kind of drop-off point. Get hit in the head every now and then, and it cleared up the tangled morass. But get knocked once too often, and your thought processes became mush.

Sure.

Monk got to one knee, braced by his elbow on the raised wall that bordered the landing. He looked out onto the street and instantly went down behind the wall. A Manhattan Beach patrol car was parked in the street. Two muscular cops, standing under a street lamp, were talking with a woman in a designer sweat suit in front of a house trimmed in green.

Sitting with his back against the wall, Monk stared at the closed door to Samuels’s apartment. He looked up and was thankful that the porch light wasn’t on. He felt a second grip of nausea, and it made him act. There would be way too much explaining to do if the cops caught him dazed and armed on a porch in the middle of the night. And just where was his gun?

Monk looked to his left onto the enclosed end of the porch. There was a pile of old newspapers, a lawn chair with several busted plastic straps, a squat hibachi and two potted plants. Monk crawled over to the area. Searching between the plants, hidden in deep shadow, was his automatic. He sniffed it and could tell it’d been fired recently. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger, but otherwise why had the woman called the cops?

Monk crawled back toward the front end of the porch. He peered around the corner of the wall and watched the two cops walking along the sidewalk, coming toward the apartment complex.

One of them was using a flashlight, but neither seemed to be in any hurry. That meant the woman must have heard the gunshots but had not seen the tussle up on the porch, and wasn’t sure where the shot had originated. But Monk couldn’t rely on luck to keep him safe.

He twisted his body in the direction of the door and pushed on it with his outstretched hand.

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