Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

  “All right, Nate,” Deuce said.

  “Bring the bud next time.”

  He hung up.

  10

  My eyes snapped open. I cringed. Shuddered under the weight of my hangover, looming over me like a bad spirit in a horror movie.

  Deuce’s door was closed. I pressed one ear against it and listened. No snoring. Deuce could normally down a whole forest of trees with the buzzsaw in his sinus passages, but tonight, there was nothing.

  That’s because he’s not in there, you idiot.

  I wandered through the house, feeling the chill of the fall air pucker my skin. This wasn’t quite the buddy cop experience I thought it would be. Deuce had withdrawn into himself. We needed to stick together, but Deuce was off playing private eye, leaving me no choice but to do that myself.

  It was mornings like this I wished for dreams of the dead. Unsettling and horrific as they were, they provided me with guidance. Even when I struggled to interpret, I could count on the fact that I had leads, even if I didn’t really know what they were.

  And no Deuce. Not even an absence that let me know where he was. Keys by the door. Mud-caked boots on the front porch. Car in the driveway.

  The sun wasn’t even up.

  But he wasn’t home. That much I did know.

  I went back inside, put on some basketball shorts from Deuce’s collection, cinched them tight with the white drawstring, and tossed on a tee and some shorts before heading out into the morning, which had turned a light blue with the false dawn.

  At first I walked, incapable of getting beyond a quick-footed shuffle. Sooner or later, however, I was able to make some progress, and I stretched out my lungs in that way only running can. Of course, it hurt like three hells, but the pain of running and sweating canceled out the skull-throbbing headache of a hangover.

  I struggled through a couple of miles of JINO — Jogging In Name Only — before I was given a reprieve.

  The burner rang and saved me the embarrassment of trying to keep up this charade. I was so happy to be done with my non-workout here, I answered without checking the screen. “Yup.”

  “Yeah, you the man interrupted that game over in RFK Park, off Ionia?”

  He clipped his words, so it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but I got the gist.

  I got right to the point. “I’m trying to hunt down a guy.”

  “Rich D ain’t on the map right now,” he said.

  “All right, let me back up. First, what should I call you.”

  “Nothing, man. I’m not getting put on blast for this. I’m the only motherfucker took up your crazy-ass?”

  I shifted the phone to my other ear.

  “All right. I get it,” he said. “D is who you want to talk to, but he ain’t an easy dude to locate.”

  “So, Nothingman. Whereabouts should I look for our man D?”

  “Irony is, you weren’t that far off. Go north, homie. Find an abandoned bait store with a red gun painted on the side of the building. Letters BR spray painted on the side.”

  “Black Reapers.”

  “Exactly. But D ain’t a Reaper himself. He’s a hanger-on, shit stuck to the bottom of their shoes.”

  “But he’s not made.”

  “Shit no. He’s a coward, white boy. He’d rather look like he’s hard and get the benefits. He’s twisted up with some ghetto-ass women. Gets some trim out of it, but he don’t do dirt.”

  “Does he get protection?”

  “He gets little perks, but right now he’s hiding out. After your boy Taj got popped, he became a semi-permanent underground dweller. Like, a mole person.”

  “Why is that?”

  A shrug. “Heard he was involved in some work with the Reapers went south on him. Could be bullshit. Could be that he did something to get himself killed, and he’s fighting off the inevitable.”

  “I see.”

  “Course, there’s an internal struggle going on with the Reapers right now. Two niggas fighting over direction.”

  “And what are the directions?”

  “Drugs and guns. Or people.”

  “People?”

  “You know. Running bitches to and from hotel rooms.”

  “So, prostitution.”

  “More than that. Selling pussy is easy. That shit sells itself. But it’s like houses. There’s only so many people want houses, and only so many houses for people to buy with good credit.”

  “So they’re lowering their standards?”

  “No, they’re taking women and selling them off.”

  “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  “They turn these women out. Easy enough. When they get tired or old or to fucked up, they get shipped off. Somewhere the standards aren’t as high as here.”

  “And I bet there’s a vice-versa to it, as well.”

  “Bingo, homie. They get a shipment of girls don’t speak-a-the-English too bueno, and they have to turn tricks to stay afloat. It’s brilliant.”

  “It’s sick.”

  “It’s the way things are.”

  “Any word on where Rich D is?”

  “Projects. I’ll give you some places to check out, but no guarantees. Doesn’t mean I’m running you on.”

  “Understood. Is he still in the music industry?”

  “I wouldn’t call what he does an ‘industry.’ He’s made some records, and he’s made some money, but he’s no Jay-Z. He’s convinced this is some conspiracy.”

  “He might not be wrong.”

  “But he’s not right, either. It’s not — okay, whatever. But if you want to find Dietrich, you’re going to have to post some collateral. He’s going to want something out of you. Always does. He don’t do nothing for free.”

  “I’ve got nothing to give him.”

  “You’ve got a gun. You’ve got nothing to lose. He’ll call you on that, and he won’t let you pass without you using that, either. He’s a hood rat, but he’s not dumb. Expect to pay more than you receive, when you get mixed up with that nigga.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  He sighed.

  “Million dollar question,” he responded. “Try this chicken place, been in business forever down on Atlantic. He used to take his homies there when they was recording. Somebody there might know his whereabouts.”

  I showed myself around the Pollo Capitan. It felt weird asking for a black man in a fried chicken joint, something out of a racist pamphlet, but these were the facts, so I had to follow them where they took me.

  At first, I got nothing but blank stares from the staff, but I saw one kid’s eyes dart around when he saw me asking about a man named Dietrich. He was in a hairnet and paper hat. Young kid, teenager. Big, worried eyes and the beginnings of a pubescent mustache.

  I tried to play it cool, but he was out the back door before I could make my way out the restaurant. I’m slow and broken, mostly used up, but I don’t give up easily, and eventually I caught the kid two blocks down.

  “Why were you running?” I asked, panting.

  “It was my lunch break,” he said.

  “Dietrich,” I said. “You know where he is. Tell me.”

  “Man, I ain’t telling you shit.”

  He didn’t know I wouldn’t hit a teenage kid, but I had to get information, so I pressed one forearm against his Adam’s apple until he talked.

  “Place right around the corner,” he said, finally. “His brother used to live there. Got killed, and D took it over. They use it to record music, shoot videos. Say there’s some freaky shit happening there, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like filming fuck tapes. They post that shit to the internet and get paid beaucoup for it. He’s not just into music. Whatever makes him money. That’s what he’s into.”

  “Did you know a kid named Taj?”

  “Taj dead.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Knew of him.”

  The kid untucked his shirt and led me a few blocks to a sq
uat brick house. Unassuming place. Not what you’d expect from a wannabe music-porn mogul.

  I bid the young guy farewell and made my way up to the front porch.

  Inside, I heard the indistinct noise of machine gunfire playing over a set of hyper-loud speakers. I let myself in and was face-to-face with a half-naked bull of a man. He was holding a PlayStation controller, his thumbs moving deftly over the gamepad. Before him sat a plate stacked high with food: pork chops, mac n cheese, and butter beans topped with heaping amounts of gravy. There might have even been some mashed potatoes under there, but I didn’t see them.

  “The fuck’re you?” he asked, setting down the controller and picking up one of the inch thick pieces of meat, dipping it into the brownish sauce before gnawing at a hunk near the bone. He paid no attention, instead focusing intently on his food.

  “Looking for Dietrich,” I said. “Somebody told me he might be here.”

  “Dietrich,” the guy said, revealing a mouth of gold teeth, “he don’t come around here no more.”

  He tossed the pork chop on the plate. Sucked his teeth, picked between them with the edge of one nail. Once he was done with the process, he leaned back on the couch, picked up a PlayStation controller. “You can dig through his shit back there, but he’s been gone a week.”

  “Any idea where he might be?”

  “Stuck under them funky-ass magazines he be reading,” he said.

  “Listen, Hoss. You want to play the shithead card, go right ahead.”

  “I told you what I know, man. You can take it, leave it, but either way, you need to get the fuck out.”

  Same old, same old, I thought. You see it in every investigation.

  “I got it on good authority you roll tight with Dietrich, and if you don’t want me flipping your card, you’d best give me something other than the runaround.”

  “I busted honkeys like you in the clink. Big, meat-eating motherfuckers. Tatted up bikers, inked with iron crosses. Dropped ‘em like sacks of gorilla shit. Makes you think I won’t do the same to a berry like you?”

  “Not a cop.”

  He sucked his teeth, freeing up more pork. “Even better,” he said.

  I pulled a sap I had in my pocket and whacked the big son-of-a-bitch across the base of his skull, just as he jumped from the seat. Made a sound like somebody smacking a stick against a hanging rug.

  Didn’t take him down. Didn’t even seem to hurt him.

  I was ready for this possibility, though. I had two rolls of quarters. Snatched them out of my pockets just as the big man staggered for me. I put my left fist in his temple, and the right in his jaw. He dropped to one knee.

  He bowled forward from there, driving toward me like a mad bull. I tried to swing on him, but it was no use.

  Arms like gunny sacks full of iron wrapped around me. The dude picked me up and drove me through a table, landing on top of me with all of his weight and then some.

  I didn’t think this happened in reality, but I had little time to contemplate it, because he was getting up, pinning my arms under his knees so he could pummel me to death. I twisted just as he brought himself up, and I managed to slip free of his grasp.

  Pulling myself free was like swimming out of an undertow. He had his own gravitational pull, and I was getting drawn inexplicably into it, despite my best efforts to drag out of it.

  “Let him the fuck go,” the voice said. “Might as well talk to him, since he made it here.”

  “Dietrich?” I asked, panting.

  “Call me D,” he said. “Come one. Let’s go back and get this over with.”

  He smiled, regarding me with some familiarity. “You Rolson, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to arrange my shirt. “How’d you know that?”

  “Come on, man. That’s some basic shit. How come you ain’t flanked by brothers?”

  “I think I do all right,” I said. “That pork chop-eating beast you got up front is an anomaly.”

  “You saying you can handle most folks?”

  “It’s not an exaggeration.”

  “Check out the tough guy right here,” he said. “All right. Get your white ass back to my recording space.”

  He led me past two bedrooms that had been converted into home recording studios. The one on the left was outfitted with a console full of knobs and switches, the backdrop a glass encasement. At the center was a microphone covered by a pop filter and other electrical nonsense.

  The other studio was similarly equipped, save for the row of guitars along one wall. I also thought I saw the edge of a drum set in there, as well.

  He beckoned me into one of the smaller spaces and pressed the spacebar on a laptop that looked like a spaceship. What erupted from the speakers was your common, everyday bitches-and-bank-accounts backbeat filler, with a wispy-voiced MC on lead vocals. Sounded like he couldn’t have been out of high school, and yet he was rapping about really quite intricate aspects of weed and cocaine distribution. Oblique references to casual murder, and D seemed most pleased with those lines, beaming as they poured from the speakers.

  “Them’s my favorite studios,” he said. “Not the only ones, mind you, but the ones I enjoy recording in the most. I only let the real talent step up in the booths in there. Most of the fake-ass niggas in this hood don’t know to hold a mic, let alone own one, know what I’m saying.”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  “You listen to much hip-hop, McKane?”

  “Not much,” I said. “I know the ones most people could name. Tupac. Jay-Z. The white one named after candy.”

  “You ain’t quite the whitest motherfucker I know, but you’re pretty close.”

  “You get me started on Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins, I could talk your ears off.”

  “I don’t even know who them niggas is,” he responded, “so I’m-a have to take your word on that. Keep on coming.”

  He led me to the back room, which itself was an actual bedroom. Only, not. There was a bed, elaborately decorated, against the far wall. Two cameras mounted on tripods pointed unsettlingly down at the bedspread. Other video and audio equipment covered the floor, and a distinct smell, a smell of too much air freshener, filled the room.

  He sat behind a small desk and leaned back, kicking his feet up and steepling his fingers across his chest. “This room serves a double purpose right now,” he said. “I’m still in a transitional phase, but when you’re a self-made businessman, you’re always in a transitional phase, am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong,” I said.

  “You ever get the feeling everything is connected, man?”

  I considered it. “Not particularly, but I heard you do.”

  He smiled, nodded. “I do, and something tells me you will, too, once this is all said and done.”

  “How so?”

  “Because everything is connected.”

  “I heard you were into some conspiracy theories.”

  “This is reality,” he replied. “Have you ever heard of the MK Ultra program?”

  I leaned back, got comfortable. Rested one ankle on my other knee. “CIA mind control program, wasn’t it?”

  “Not was, is. No past tense in this, man.” He straightened up, energized. “Listen, you ever feel like you don’t have control over your own mind?”

  I kept my cool. “What do you mean?”

  He pointed at me. “Exactly. If you don’t know, that’s a sign you’ve been involved in some high-level mind control shit. Like, the CIA has spent fifty years trying to brainwash the public at large, and they’ve finally succeeded. You know how I know?”

  “I’m dying to figure this out.”

  “The election of the first black president.”

  “Come on, man.”

  “I’m serious, white boy. You think the American people — the majority of whom contribute to the continuing white supremacy keeping black men and women down — would ever, in a million years, elect a black man with the middle name Hus
sein?”

  He seemed to spit this last word.

  “No,” he said. “And that tells me one thing.”

  “That the idea of an international organization yanking at the puppet strings is insane?”

  The smile widened. “Don’t patronize me. I get it. People don’t want to recognize the truth. They don’t want to accept they don’t have any control over their own lives. Everything we experience, everything we decide, was decided long ago. The CIA has spent decades manipulating the very idea of free will, and any thought we think we have is actually—”

  He seemed to catch himself, and he stopped talking mid-thought. He smoothed out the sleeves on his shirt and stretched his arms out. By the time his gaze returned to me, he looked like another person altogether.

  This is his human mask, I thought.

  “So,” he said, “seems like you busted up in this place to do more than just hassle my main man Mookie up front, so out with it.”

  “You know me, know who I am somehow, so I figure you’d be keen on why I’m here.”

  He sat up, pulled his feet off the table. “

  “I’ve been learning a little bit with respect to how the illegal trades operate down here.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Up in Georgia, the criminals deal in simple things. Dirty things, but simple ones. They make speed and moonshine, sell a bit of weed or maybe even cocaine. We got some women don’t always go home for free, but it’s not widespread, you know?”

  “And down here?”

  “Down here, anything goes.”

  “There’s a whole lot of difference between women going out and making some extra cash by fucking — consensually, I might add — to a man or another woman on camera. They get paid. Everything’s above board. They get paid a decent wage, where hours are concerned. You can’t go and be a fry cook at Mickey D’s for that. Bet them hoes selling their asses out on the corner don’t make what my women make, when they decide — they decide — to employ themselves with me. The set’s clean here. It’s not Warner Bros., but I wash the fucking sheets. You can go over there and smell it, I bet you don’t smell even the hint of the kinds of things that go on on top of them.”