However, when I found myself alone in gang territory, I questioned just what in the hell I was supposed to be doing.
My half-assed door-to-door led me to a basketball court where some twentysomethings fought the cold by engaging in a violent game of three-on-three.
One of the youths saw me as I approached and made a high-pitched whoop-whoop to warn the others. The game stopped mid-dribble, and its participants regarded me with contempt. Men slid packages into their pockets and slipped between adjacent buildings. Those who remained grew instantly suspicious.
Nothing I didn’t expect.
The guy who stepped out of the crowd was tall, muscular. Wore a burgundy muscle shirt and long basketball shorts. Lean face. Heavy jaw. Intense eyes.
“Know anything about a murder happened here week or so ago?”
“Lot of murders happen around here.”
“A specific murder.”
A general look of bemused astonishment pervaded the group. “The fuck you think we’d tell you that for, honky?”
“Looking for a man named Rich D. Maybe just D. Think his real name is Dietrich.”
“You looking in the wrong fucking place, homes.”
“Wish I had a picture,” I said. “Guess I forgot how to do this sort of thing.”
“Don’t need a picture.”
“You need one thing,” I said.
He waited.
“You need me to get the hell out of here. Right?”
A slight nod.
“I’ll do that, so long as you give me something to go on..”
“Ain’t no snitches here. They don’t last long in this neighborhood, mane.”
I smiled.
“Rich D. Where’s he hiding out?”
“I don’t even know who you talking about. Red, you know what the fuck he talking about?”
“Ain’t got no clue.”
Basketball in hand. Turning it over and over.
“Shouldn’t you have a black sponsor out here? You know, conjure up a little bit of credibility. You’ve got some balls, stepping up and just flat-out asking us where Rich D is.”
I smirked. “Thought you didn’t know him.”
“I heard you say his name.”
“So maybe you can ask all your teammates there for a little bit of help. An assist, maybe.”
Bounce bounce. Basketball on blacktop, just audible over the sound of an iPod speaker blasting hip-hop music.
He looked around at his compatriots and wiped sweat from his forehead. “You must be out your goddamned mind,” he said.
“Maybe a little,” I said. “It doesn’t negate the fact that I need help. You like having the Reapers handle their business in your neighborhood?”
No reaction. I looked from person to person.
“How many of you have lost a brother, sister, cousin, parent to those assholes?”
“The fuck you know about Reapers, homes?”
“I know they sell drugs. I know they get young men put in boxes six feet south. I know they treat this area like a personal ATM.”
Bounce. Bounce. No reaction. Some of the dudes who had fled when I’d first arrived returned, cautiously eyeing the train wreck of a conversation between me and this guy.
“You got thirty seconds to have your happy ass across that street, unless you want to find out what them hot boys back there got strapped to their waists.”
I backed away. “All right,” I said. “I’m gone. Be out of your sight in a few seconds.”
I plucked a slip of paper with my burner number scribbled on it from a pocket — slowly — and placed it underneath a half-empty can of Rock Star. They regarded it with disdain.
I said, “Anybody wants to help me, call that number. It’s burner. I’m not a cop. I’m not going to snitch anybody out. We’ve got a score to settle with some people. They had a hand in some nasty business, and the deceased deserve a chance for retribution.”
“Thing about the dead, homes, is there ain’t no retribution. Once you dead, it’s all done.”
“I’d like to see that through on my own, see what comes of trying. Nobody should be denied the attempt a good shot at justice.”
9
I found a watering hole where cops dared not tread and collapsed into a seat at the bar. The place was dim and smelly. My kind of bar. Other than the crack of pool balls and semi-regular clink of glasses, the place was mostly quiet. Felt like a purgatorial version of a bar. Long-faced regulars chugging house beer and well drinks looking tortured, somehow, as if they’d been held here forever.
The blue-and-yellow neon of a long-forgotten Corona sign gave everyone in the joint a corpse-like quality, the living embodiment of lost hope. Their faces, hollowed out by drugs and loss and despair, stared off into other lives lived, ones that did not end with them sitting in this exact spot at this exact moment. This was a bar of multiple universes, all operating at the same time. A great number of these people had given up on looking for the answer to life. They spent most of their remaining time mulling over the question of What could have been?
Guy who looked like a carbon copy of Javvy sidled up next to me. I clinked glasses with him — caught him off-guard — and nodded. “You come to give me warning, I s’pose,” I said.
Had to be Javvy’s twin, though he seemed to take up more space. An electric energy radiated from him. Felt ten degrees hotter just being in his vicinity. He was covered, head to toe, in tattoos, colorful swatches of designs warning anyone who crossed his path to watch the fuck out. His eyes were blank and birdlike, and he moved with quick, decisive actions, as though everything he did were somehow pre-ordained.
“You got that right, cabron,” he said. Clapped his shot glass on the bar and tossed back what smelled like a putrid version of tequila. Chased it with a tall neck bud, pursing his lips to clip down on his reaction.
“Not brushed up on my Spanish, but something tells me I should take offense to that.”
He shrugged. “You don’t strike me as sensitive.”
“Javvy send you?” I asked. “He afraid to beg off of his duty?”
“My brother, he don’t have the cojones to do his own work.”
“That word I do know.”
“He says you’re starting shit with the thugged-out mayates in north Jax. He says you and your NFL culero done fucked up big time, and it’s going to get us all in deep shit, if we don’t calm you the fuck down.”
“Your brother’s got plenty to say for a tweak-head.”
“No tiene dos dedos de frente.”
I shrugged. “Got me there.”
“I said, basically, he doesn’t know shit. He’s a fuck-up, for sure, but when our mother slipped on the banana peel that was cancer, I promised her I would take care of him, even if he were a dumbass. So, you see, you’ve put me in a bizarre spot here.”
“Not that I don’t appreciate these little Spanish lessons,” I said, “I’m always up for learning. But if you’re not going to help me get closer to finding Taj Gaines’s killer, then you’re wasting my time. I’ve got a bit of a limited time frame here.”
“Might be even less than you think,” he responded.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“You walk around with your cock swinging out in front of you like that, somebody might get the bright idea to go and chop it short.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen this time around. These black sons-of-bitches ‘round here will give you no quarter, my friend. They’re loco as the day is long, and they’ll pin your ass to your armpit.”
“I see. And you came to warn me?”
“I came to tell you to stay away from my pendejo brother. He’s stupid, and he’s got a big mouth. His only saving grace is grace itself. He’s got all the luck in the world, and it’s made the difference in how our lives turned out.”
“Your brother’s a drug addict.”
“But he’s a free man. Me, I’ve gone up twice on as
sault and battery charges. One weapons charge. I’m a felon. I get caught again, they’ll string me up from the nearest palm tree, no doubt. Javvy, he’s as blessed as anybody in our family, and he’s got shit for brains. My mother, she was good, and she loved him, but even she was into la vida. I got brothers and sisters all over this state, all by different men. It’s like he’s my only link to this world, man. Everything else is garbage. So as long as he’s alive, I’m tethered to this world, know what I mean?”
I nodded. “I’m not trying to get him killed.”
“He’s easily” — and at this, he waved his hand around — “led astray, you know? He don’t know no better. Long as there’s a hit in it for him, he’s down for the count. I’m just waiting for him to not get back up. So I’m telling you, leave him be.”
“Seems like he’s on a sinking ship.”
“But it’s his ship. He don’t need you circling the bow, tossing in lead weights and shit.”
“I see what you mean.”
He downed another shot of rancid tequila, turned the glass upside down. “If it ain’t that hard for me to find you, you’ve got to bet your last goddamned dollar the mayates in the Black Reapers can find you. No doubt. No questions. No problema.”
I turned the conversation back to a topic I thought might benefit me. “You could let your brother make his own decisions,” I said. “He doesn’t think his actions have consequences that come back on him, he won’t ever change.”
“When Javvy is left to make his own decisions, he don’t make good ones. That’s the point, ese. He’s thick in the head. Always has been. You want to be helpful in this situation, you leave him alone. Let him circle the drain like he was before all of this. Eventually, he’ll hit bottom and start over from there.”
“Seems like he’s already hit bottom.”
The brother slid a wad of bills from his pocket, tossed a twenty on the bar. “Next drink’s on me. Consider this a payoff, a bribe, what have you. Just be out his fucking way from here on in. Feel me?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He staggered out of the bar and disappeared into the shining sun, which glinted off the hoods of cars and refracted in a thousand different directions. I followed him out into the cool air, smelling heavily of grease from a nearby chicken stand, and shucked my collar up to my ears. I got into the car that was not mine and drove mindlessly around for a while, hoping for a lightning strike of an event to pull me into its storm.
What I didn’t know was that I wouldn’t have to wait that long.
Deuce sent me for his cousin, who hadn’t answered his phone in two days.
Reg was crashing with a skinny girl sporting track marks on her forearms. She had the cautious, heavy-lidded look of the perpetually victimized.
“What you want?” she said between the door and the jamb, the chain splitting her face in two. She said the last of the words like won’t. She was Deep South, through and through, her accent a lead weight anchoring her to about a fifty mile radius in Middle Georgia.
“Reg here?”
She regarded me dubiously but closed the door and unchained it. I stepped into a messy little apartment with decades-old appliances and grimy, filmed-over windows. Broken toys and empty bottles of beer littered the floor.
“He in the back,” the girl said, slouching onto a nearby chair. She kicked her feet up and crossed her legs over one of the chair’s arms. She was clad in pink boy shorts and a tank that barely covered her breasts, which pressed braless against the seams.
She packed a bowl into a single hitter and lit up, turning her attention to a group of people arguing viciously on TV. Her eyes never left the screen, even as the smoke rose from her lips and surrounded her, a filthy halo.
I took her disinterest as a cue and slunk toward the back bedroom.
The smell hit me halfway. Reginald lay in a splash of vomit. Face down. Shirt off. He was moaning into the mattress but otherwise looked like a corpse of indeterminate shape. I leaned over him, shook one shoulder, and then took a seat on a recliner draped with laundry. He pressed a hand to one eye.
“I fucked up,” he said.
“It’s only been a few days.”
He winced, stared, made the face of a man attempting to save dignity. “It ain’t the phone I fucked up with,” he said.
“Well, then, what is it? You went on the wagon and stepped off?”
“Ain’t like that, either.”
I could see this going anywhere but up. “We’ve been tracking the Reapers,” I said. “We could use you to help us navigate it, though, since we’re flying blind.”
He somehow managed to sit up. The stench coming off him could have curled a pig’s ear, but he didn’t seem to mind, so I held my breath. He lingered there, putting on his best thinking face, which no more worked for him than if he were to put on a coat and tails.
“Listen,” he said. “I was supposed to meet up with Taj the night he went missing.”
“What do you know?”
“I know he left the house at nine, supposed to be going to Escape.”
I made a mental note. “For what?”
“Don’t know. Dealing. Doing the dirt. Maybe something darker.”
“But you don’t know if he ended up going there?”
He shook his head. “We texted, called back and forth. He was supposed to go do…whatever, and then we was going to hit up the club together.”
“But he never showed?”
“No.”
“Why the hold-up?”
“Taj was dead, man. Seemed pretty obvious who killed him. Why complicate things?”
“Anyone else to verify your story?”
“You don’t believe me, homes?”
“Case like this, I don’t believe an uncorroborated story.”
“But this isn’t a case. You’re not a cop. You’re no better off than the ganged-up hoods you’re chasing.”
“That said, I think it’d be better if I got some more details. Right now, all I’ve got is a blurry night, a night without facts. It’s a big, blank spot, and I can’t piece it together without some information. Did he go to the club? Did he not? Did he drop off some drugs? What. Happened?”
“When he was texting with me, he told me he was headed off with some of his boys to make a drop.”
“Drugs?”
“That was his deal, so I’d assume so. Line gets blurry when it comes to that, because the brothers he hung out with was also associates, if you know what I mean.”
“Any names?”
“I didn’t truck with any of them niggas, man,” he said.
“What happened to banishing the n-word?”
“Them muh’fuckas deserve it,” he responded. “You check his FaceBook page, his Twitter account, you might be able to come up with something.”
I felt my face grow hot. Old man that I was, I didn’t even think about digging into what he might be doing online. Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely sure what a Twitter account was or how it was different from a FaceBook.
Reginald stumbled off to his bathroom to relieve himself of a few drinks, and I fiddled with my rudimentary phone to pull up Taj’s FaceBook profile.
“I can’t find a Taj Gaines on FaceBook.”
“You spell it right?”
I spelled it out for him, and he said, “Oh, shit, that’s right. He ain’t his name on FaceBook.”
“How in the hell am I supposed to find him, then?”
“Try ‘Taj Boyee, with a y and two es.”
“Found him.”
Profile picture portrayed a confident late twenties kid with a glint in his eye. Even from the self-shot photograph, him standing in a mirror, smiling and revealing his abs, it was apparent he thought he was going somewhere. Self-assuredness on display. He was a miniature version of his older brother, light-skinned and less sharply distinct.
I clicked through a few things, waiting for the internet to catch up, but didn’t see anything of help. His profile was surprisingly private,
and so all I got was a few public photos and posts, not one of which helped me in the slightest. I tried to go through his list of friends, but even that was private. The ‘Add Friend’ button taunted me from the top of the screen.
On a whim, I clicked it. I was redirected to a page that asked me to sign up for a FaceBook account. I didn’t even have an email, let alone one I’d want to use to sign up for a service like this. Being a wanted man, probably wouldn’t be a good idea, either, for me to step into a public light. Instead, I put the phone away and listened to a distant thud of bass from a nearby apartment.
Reginald emerged unsteadily from the bathroom, one hand over his forehead. “This one’s gonna hurt,” he said. “Already does.”
He sat down, pulled a bong from out of nowhere, and retrieved a baggie from his pocket.
“The weed’ll mellow out my drunk,” he said, as if by explanation, and started packing a bowl. He sparked up, the room filling with a spicy aroma, like incense gone way wrong, and blew a silvery rope of smoke into the air above us. “You find anything in homeboy’s profile?”
I shook my head. “I found his FaceBook but didn’t see anything about a Twitter on there.”
Reginald laughed in that way only people getting lifted on good pot really can. Even I was beginning to feel a little lightheaded. He said, “Man, don’t you know shit about the internet?”
“Different generation, homeboy,” I said, and that made him laugh even harder.
“Here, give me a minute.” He pulled a phone twice the size of mine from his pocket and clicked through a few things, fingers moving deftly across the screen. “He’s got a Twitter account, but he posts mostly about random shit.”
“No surprise there,” I said. “Why would he get on there and announce he was making a drug deal?”
Reginald shrugged, his attention focused on the blue light.
“Here we go,” he said. “We’re friends on FaceBook. Same thing on here. He’s posting about some of the shit he’s doing, but nothing too scandalous. Photos from a club.”
“Which one?”
“Can’t tell. Maybe Club Opium. Looks like it.”
Dirt Merchant Page 20