Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

I made a mental note of the place.

  “Other than that,” Reg continued, “not much. He’s not making announcements of his plans on social media. He does talk about getting smoked out, but that’s nothing new.”

  “When’s his last post?”

  “Two days before he went missing.”

  “What does it say?”

  “‘Bout to tear up this Whopper, mane.’ Then there’s a bunch of exclamation points. Does that help you any?”

  “Lets me know he doesn’t have good taste in burgers.”

  “Man, the fuck you talking about? Whoppers are flame-grilled goodness.”

  “No accounting for taste,” I replied. “What about his friends? See anyone needs to be checked out?”

  He put the phone down, ran his fingers over his eyes. Blew out a deep breath. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m feeling like dog shit. Wish I could take a nap.”

  “Got the spins?”

  “Like a bad fair ride.”

  “Huh. Well, time is the best medicine. Maybe some coffee and Pedialyte, too.”

  “Hard to believe he’s gone,” Reg said, picking the phone back up, peering into the depths of the screen’s light. “He was a trip. Like Darron, you know, he’s different. Deuce is quiet, thoughtful. Ghetto philosopher and shit. He wasn’t prone to wilding out like the rest of us. But Taj, he was always a good time. Probably what got him caught up. He must’ve thought, ‘Won’t happen to me. Can’t happen to me.’ He amazed the rest of us. Managed to get away with so much when he was younger. Jumping off roofs. Breaking into houses. I mean, like, when we was little kids, he would do it. Not to steal anything, but because he thought it was fun. He’d skulk around the neighborhoods, looking for an open window. His goal was to make it through an entire house without being caught. He’d touch stuff, rearrange stuff, maybe turn something upside down. Didn’t even think about fingerprints. But he never got caught. Never got arrested, I mean. One time, this old man walked into the hallway, just as Taj was slipping out, and he pulled out a nine, waving it around and threatening to shoot. Taj kept cool, talked the old man out of killing him. We was all outside listening, hoping like hell we wouldn’t have to call an ambulance. After that, we thought he’d slow down, but he didn’t. Just kept on right at it. Crazy motherfucker, he was.”

  I let him bask in the memories of his youth. He was several years older than Taj, so he must have been in his late teens or early twenties when he watched his cousin break into houses. Seemed strange, but Reginald wore it well. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for him.

  “Any luck on finding some leads on the friends?” I asked, after a while.

  He shook his head. “Mostly people we went to school with. Some of them are folks he probably knew up in Georgia, but there ain’t no ‘G’ filter on this site, man.”

  “Make it a hell of a lot easier,” I said.

  “Oh, here we go,” he said. “Here’s somebody. Nate Winstead. Kid used to cop pills from the B&E guys. Convince homeless folks to steal prescriptions and sell them to college kids wanting to get blitzed on that Oxy.”

  Reginald passed the phone to me and went about blazing up again.

  The picture was unassuming. Black kid, backwards cap, glasses. Smirk. Not much information on the profile. He liked a rapper named Kid Cudi a whole lot.

  I scrolled through the profile until I found a picture of him and Taj. Standing with two girls in low-cut dresses outside a club. The photo was packed with people in the background.

  “What’s this?” I asked, passing the phone back to him.

  “See, right, that’s Club Opium.”

  “Why are they outside?”

  He smirked. “You are a white dude. That’s the pre-party. People go to the club, but they don’t go right in. Drinks in there be expensive. They get crunk in the parking lot, get high, get drunk, whatever, and then they step inside for the night. It’s how they do there.”

  “Will you take me?”

  He laughed. A caught off-guard kind of laugh. “I don’t know what you think’s going to happen.”

  “Because I’m white?”

  “You ain’t just white, Rolson McKane, you’re glowing. Forty-year-old white dude shows up with a brother like me, and they going to think I’m snitching people out. Ain’t going to happen. No way. Uh-unh.”

  “Please?”

  “When you put it like that…”

  He sparked the lighter and hit the bong again. Smoke held in his chest, he smiled and let it roll out of his mouth, pulling it back into his nostrils. Leaned back in his chair. Turned on a nearby stereo. The smooth beat of a rap group from Atlanta even I had heard of thumped through the speakers.

  Finally, Reg turned his attention back to me. “All right, Rolson,” he said. “I’ll take you and Deuce. I can play that off, since y’all’s homies from way back in the day. People might buy that. But don’t expect to go in there and start grilling people the way you do. This won’t be an open interrogation.”

  “I won’t.”

  “It’s, like, well, an anthropological experiment. You’re just going to see what goes on. Maybe you see somebody you can focus in on, but you can’t expect to play it like five-oh. You feel me? That’s a promise I need you to make for me.”

  “I feel you,” I said.

  He laughed, holding one hand against his mouth. “And don’t ever say that again.”

  “I stay down here long enough, maybe it will,” I responded.

  “Never,” he said, turning to another song and sliding the bong out of the way. “You want a hit? I know hooch is your drug, but it might help you to get blitzed out a little bit.”

  “I’ve been high before,” I said. “Doesn’t sit well with me. I get paranoid.”

  “Big surprise there.”

  “Hey, Rol,” Reginald said. “You don’t mind keeping my ramblings between just us, do you?”

  “Can’t make any promises.”

  “You a snitch, Rolson?”

  I let that comment slide, though I thought about pistol-whipping him.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m not trying to give you the shine-on, but my allegiances are clear. I’m in league with you because Deuce is. The moment you step out of line, you get tossed to the side.”

  “Uh huh,” he replied.

  “It’s not a difficult point to understand. I appreciate you coming to me, but it makes me worry about why you couldn’t take this to Deuce.”

  “He knows me.”

  “You think you’re the first whiny alcoholic I’ve ever dealt with? You think I’m going to take pity on you because you’re all fucked up, or fucked up in the head? Think again.”

  “I got connections.”

  “If you’re withholding, stop it right now. We need all the information we can get.”

  “Well—”

  “If it’s a threat, you better sleep with one eye open. I’ve got no time for this nonsense.”

  “It ain’t that way, man. I’m just…not sure how to keep going.”

  “Put down the bottle, and put on your big boy pants. This is more than a game.”

  He smiled sardonically. “Pot, meet kettle.”

  I nodded. Fair enough.

  “Get your shit together. I can’t have you go sideways on us. It’ll get one of us killed, and just between you and me, I hope it’s not me or Deuce.”

  I left him there amidst his weed smoke and bad mojo. I was afraid of how his bad vibes might rub off.

  The parking lot of Club Opium teemed with people, cars, booze, and music. Marijuana smoke drifted in and out of the air, depending on the direction of the wind. A line of people led down one length of the warehouse-sized building, but the party appeared to be taking place outside rather than in.

  I dressed the part of an outsider and kept close to Deuce and Reg as they mingled in the crowd, asking around for our unwitting contact.

  Finally, we were directed to a row of cars, and the young man from the FaceBook photograph appeared as if
by divine intervention. He actually walked through a cloud of smoke toward us.

  Nate Winstead was short, light-skinned, wearing both a red cap and a red shirt, baggy shorts and dreds. Reg seemed to catch him off-guard, at first, but once they shook hands, all appeared copacetic.

  “Reg, sorry to hear about your cuz, man. He was good people. And you his brother, right? Deuce, the NFL baller and shit? That you?”

  Deuce nodded. “How’d you know Taj?”

  “That was my boy, man. He — hold up. We can’t be talking about this shit out in public. Y’all mind following me?”

  A collective shrug, and then we were on our way. We took to a side corner of the club, where the beat from the inside speakers was audible and not much else.

  As soon as he was satisfied with our location, our boy Nate started talking. He said, “I don’t mean to start right off with some unsettling shit, but you know your boy was into some heavy business, don’t you?”

  “That’s what we heard,” Deuce said.

  “He wanted to play the bad boy,” Nate said.

  “This is old shit,” Deuce said. “What can you tell us hasn’t been on the streets already?”

  “Damn, nigga — listen, your little brother was muling drugs for the kingpins in the Reapers, aight? He didn’t sell it himself, but he was getting paid for running it between vendors and shit. They’d give him a name and and address and a package and then send him on his way. He’d sweat it out, ride the high of it, you know, a couple kilos of this or that in his car. Drop it off, deck the money in his car, and drive back with that shit.”

  “And how do you know this?” Deuce asked.

  “Because he used to come over to my house afterward. Shaking. Sweating through his clothes and shit. It’d take him at least two blunts to calm down.”

  Deuce leaned against a Civic sporting a gargantuan spoiler. “Did he mention anybody wanting—”

  “To kill him? Naw, nothing like that.”

  “Anything else? Anybody who might be looking for him?”

  “His phone was always blowing up. He used to crave attention. Must be something related to growing up in a house with a pro ball player. But he didn’t seem to like it once he had it. ‘Grass is always greener’ and shit.”

  “Ever catch a name on the phone? Any names jump out?”

  He thought for a minute and shook his head, the dreds bopping him in the face. “Nope. Just always talking, like, ‘Man, these muh-fuckas is always on my back.’ That kind of deal. But he kept to the code.”

  Deuce rolled his eyes. “Street code,” sometimes called the “snitch code” or just “the code.”

  Deuce said, “You and Taj was tight?”

  “Thick as thieves.”

  “Then you’ve got to give me something here, brother. It ain’t going to help our cause if our only lead is ‘Well, he was into some heavy shit, but I can’t tell you anything else.’ Give us something to work with. You want to see the people did this to him go away, don’t you?”

  “Hell yeah I do.”

  “Then help us out. Please, man. This is my brother we’re talking about. He didn’t do anything to hurt anybody. He was confused and working the system, but he didn’t mean anybody harm.”

  “Shit, man, you tugging on a brother’s heart strings. Okay, man. All right.”

  “All right,” Deuce said. “Shoot.”

  Nate took a seat on a nearby Camaro and sparked up a blunt. He said, “Toward the end, he started to get real stressed out. I mean, beyond what he was like whenever he started working with the Reapers. This was, like, months before he was clipped. He’d come over just drenched in sweat. Looking ahead. Fists clenched up. He had this smell, too, man. Like, I’ve never been in the life or anything, but he smelled like, I don’t know, dead bodies.”

  “But you don’t know what he was into?”

  “By then, it definitely wasn’t just weed or coke, shit like that. He had been promoted or demoted or something, because the work he was into was harder, more soul-crushing.”

  “What else are the Reapers into, besides drugs?”

  “Guns. Dog fights. People.”

  Deuce perked up at this. “People?”

  “They don’t have a slave trade, but what they’re working with is more than just turning bitches out for profit. They’re dealing in people wholesale. This isn’t pimping in the traditional sense. The girls they got going in and out of the business, they aren’t just gang bitches, neither. They’re scared, young, some of them foreign.”

  “And you think Taj might have been involved with that aspect of it?”

  “By the end, I was convinced. He wasn’t having any fun by then. The fun had worn off. Guess I tried to convince myself he was having a good time, but he wasn’t. Maybe he never had fun, and I ignored the warnings.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and Nate looked at me. It was the first time I’d spoken since the outset of the conversation, so it was almost like I had been invisible up to that point.

  “Anyway, he was struggling, and he’d let little things slip, but he never talked outright about what he was doing. We’d be sitting on the couch, playing some XBox, and he’d just come out with some dark quotations or something. Talk about how fucked up humanity was, shit like that. Me, I’d get him so high he’d stop talking that way, but that look stayed with him. I had an uncle went to Vietnam, and they called that look a thousand yard stare. By the time somebody pulled his card, he had that look.”

  The rest of the evening was destroyed by a fight that broke out in a far corner of the parking lot. A guy ripped his shirt off and popped two dudes in the jaw. When they dropped, he stood over them and yelled, “Now, who wants to fuck with Hotlanta Diggs?”

  Other guys pulled weapons and fired up in the air. We fled the scene as the cops made their way into the parking lot, and I was left repeating the words and phrases yelled out as the crowd descended into chaos. They were all swirling in my head.

  Deuce and I were sitting on the front porch two days later when Nate Winstead called. Deuce put the phone on the table separating us, pressed the speaker button, and leaned back in his chair.

  Nate said, “I been mulling over our conversation the other night. I remembered something specific to do with Taj’s last few months.”

  Deuce: “And?”

  “Okay, so, you remember how I said Taj was going dark in the last few weeks? Well, he mentioned a girl once, just once.”

  “He not do that often?”

  “I mean, me and Taj used to vibe on Rihanna, Beyonce, shit like that, but we never sat around and talked girls, you know?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was in the atmosphere by this point, and back then, I thought he was just high in general, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, but in retrospect, I think maybe he might have been trying to lay down something I didn’t pick up. He said, ‘She don’t make enough sense of what she does to keep her safe.’”

  “Makes absolutely no sense to me,” I said.

  “I told you: I was high, man,” Nate replied. “Being vague comes with the whole deal. Sometimes I describe what colors would taste like; doesn’t mean there’s any understandable logic to any of it.”

  “You think he was referring to Tyra?” Deuce asked.

  “Deuce, my brother, them two had — what do you call it — a ‘volatile relationship.’ He was in the quicksand over her. What details you have on them?”

  “I know they went out for a few years, that they broke it off some time ago.”

  “Aw, man, that’s just the cover story. The real details is in the liner notes, know what I’m saying? Taj, he loved her, and vice versa. But something happened to put them on the rocks, and he didn’t much open up when it came down to it, but word was, she had some skeletons of her own he had trouble accepting.”

  “You think she could have gotten him crossed?”

  A pause on the other end of the line. “Could be. Tyra used to chill with a dude name of Big Money
.”

  “Big Money?” I asked.

  “Big Money. Street name. I think the nigga’s real name is Thomas or Malcom or some shit. That’s why he goes by Big Money. Anyway, I seen him and Tyra together a few times. You want to follow that, you can, but it’s going to be dangerous.”

  “What is his deal?”

  “Thug with a rap sheet filled with everything but the shit he’s actually done. He’s got a few bodies on him, but the police have only been able to tie him to a few B&Es. He runs the trade north of 20th, right around the interstate. He’s not a cold-hearted killer, but he’s got one hell of a temper. He got shorted on some shipment of bathtub crank and had his boys open the supplier’s face with box cutters. Took off his nose and popped out one of his eyes.”

  “Good place to look, it seems,” Deuce said.

  “If you want, man,” Nate replied. He sounded dubious. “I don’t know. He might have had something to do with it, but he’s a wolf in G’s clothing. You fuck with that bull, you’ll get the horns, for real.”

  “Do you know Tyra? Will she talk about this Money dude?” I asked.

  “She keeps her cards close to the chest. She’ll be just as likely to give you a run-around as tell you the truth.”

  “Briefly.”

  “She might already have you caught up, then. Be careful, because if she thinks you’re tiptoeing through the tulips, she’ll cut you off at the knees.”

  “She sounds like she wants to help,” I said.

  “Good luck with that, holmes. She ain’t the victim she plays, and if you fall for that, then you’ll be the next one. Me, I’m staying on the other side of the firing line. Y’all all have at it.”

  “Then where do we look?”

  “You might be on the right track with Big Money. He’s an underpass troll, so look around the major interstates and bridges. He’s got a crew with him at all times, so don’t expect to be able to just step to that man like he owes y’all something.”

  “What else you got?”

  “You heard it. That’s the entirety of my inventory. You want something else, you’re going to have to get me lifted. It’s like playing pool. You learn how to play pool drunk, the only way you need to play it is with a little buzz. Maybe my memory works the same way.”