Dirt Merchant

by T. Blake Braddy

  “If you want to make it out alive, maybe think of yourself. If the football player isn’t on your side, why protect him?”

  “I made a promise. I intend on keeping it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Tell me what else you know about Deuce.”

  “Deuce, right. That’s his name. Check it. He’s got his rifle on rock-and-roll, and people are starting to pay attention. He keeps fucking people up, and his doorstep will get more than darkened.”

  “He lost somebody.”

  “He’s going to lose a lot more. You know something? He keeps it up, people might start to make connections between him and the Reapers.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They got a YouTube channel. Always posting nonsense. Like, updates and shit. Nothing that could get them indicted. Just, you know, threats.”

  “They use his name in the, er, YouTube video?”

  He pulled out his phone and showed me the video. It portrayed a group of youths brandishing pistols and threatening to kill anybody who had the audacity to step into their neighborhood.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think that phone is amazing,” I said. “I can barely get mine to send a text message.”

  “Other than that?”

  “It’s a bunch of empty threats,” I said. “Might be they’re getting worried, but I doubt there’s anything either Deuce or I should be particularly concerned over.”

  “You say that now. Just wait until you’re the one nobody’s looking for, and then we’ll talk empty threats.”

  “Everything is empty,” I said, thinking I was profoundly stupid for saying that, but when Teek went away and I was left with my own thoughts, I found myself increasingly susceptible to that exact idea.

  In keeping with my mantra to leave no beer unturned, I met Reg at a bar at his behest. The way he sounded on the phone, I thought maybe he had something dire to confess. He was drunk and morose, and neither played well over the phone.

  It was the kind of self-loathing that ended with some kind of exceptional breakdown, and I thought maybe I was going to be on the receiving end of it. Reg did not strike me as the kind of person who could manage his affairs in the midst of an existential crisis. He was a haymaker of a decision maker, swinging wild, hoping to connect with anything he could get his hands on.

  But when he appeared, he was reserved, perhaps wary at having to be in my company without Deuce there as an intermediary.

  “Javvy,” he said, once he had settled in for his second drink. The first had gone by without much by way of comment.

  “It’s a real shame what happened to him,” I said. “Real fucking shame.”

  “Javvy knew the danger of his business,” Reg responded. “He lived that life. He was all about that life. It was what ended up costing him his life.”

  I considered that. “I think maybe we valued his life too little, and whatever price that was paid was too little.”

  It was true. Something I scarcely been able to articulate even to Deuce, but it was something I felt down in my bones. I had gone over the edge on plenty of things. Roughing up local monsters and thugs didn’t trouble me, but Javvy was a different beast. He was innocent in a way that made his death harder for me to take. The way he had been strung up, gutted, so carelessly made into a message for me and Deuce.

  “I know,” Reg said, “but with these niggas—”

  He stopped himself. Drank from his beer.

  “There I go again,” he said, at last. “Been trying to divest myself of this bizarre tendency to point the finger at my brothers, to categorize people into two groups — black people and niggas — but it slips. I, man, I don’t know. Javvy, he died like he lived.”

  “I’ve heard that too much in my life,” I said. “Said it plenty, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Doesn’t make it all right.”

  Reg shrugged, tilted his beer before drinking from it. “Doesn’t make it any less true, either.”

  “He’d be alive if it weren’t for us.”

  “Yeah, well. Conscience is a fucked up system of checks and balances on morality, right?”

  I couldn’t disagree. On the TV above us, two balding, goateed dicks in brown suits argued over college football. I watched that and snacked on bar peanuts for a while as I chewed over what positive outcome could be dragged from this mess.

  Nothing came to mind.

  Eventually, Reg said, “At least we’re on the right side of the fight, and I can rest easy with that. I might not always find the dividing line on my own, but I’m glad—”

  “Reg,” I said, without looking at him, “did you kill Javvy?”

  “What kind of fucked up shit is that?”

  There was a sharpness to his voice that was uncharacteristic in its defensiveness. I didn’t really think he had anything to do with Javvy’s death, but I couldn’t let this opportunity pass without voicing something making grooves in the back of my mind.

  He might not have been privy to Javvy’s murder, but there was something brewing in him that was changing him. Maybe he was on the verge of cracking up. Maybe it had already happened. But his behavior told me Deuce and I needed to start distancing ourselves from him.

  “I don’t know what is going on inside your head,” I said, “but it’s starting to spill out all over your face, and it doesn’t look good.”

  Reg straightened up. I kept talking.

  “In fact, it looks guilty. Looks bad. Looks…traitorous.”

  “You motherfucker.”

  “Don’t let it that interfere with our meeting, though,” I said. “You have a chance to right all of that. To put yourself back on the right side of that — what did you call it — dividing line?”

  We drank in silence, each of us contemplating the horrid circumstances which had befallen our mutual spy, Javvy. I sipped beer and chased it with a double shot of whiskey.

  I watched ESPN. I watched other people drink.

  Reg watched me.

  He guzzled his beer and ordered another.

  “You had something you wanted to tell me with respect to Deuce?”

  He took a good, long look at me before deciding, I guess, to carry on with what his original plan had been.

  “Cuz has been working overtime. I thought he was chasing his own tail, but he’s been working a whole new angle.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Two bangers died in a shootout with an out-of-towner. White dude. Greasy. Not the sort who usually waltzes into a situation like that.”

  “Seems this guy walked into a situation he wasn’t meant to. Gun out, yelling and screaming. The boys in black pulled his card right there. Shot him full of slugs and then dipped.”

  “But not before he popped two of them.”

  “Right. That’s the other part that was freaky. He was looking for a fight.”

  “Could be a drug deal. Guy works for somebody moving product. Steps into a situation, gets plugged full of holes. End of story.”

  “Could be, only that’s not what happened. This guy, he walks in, gun out, demanding to see cuz. When he doesn’t get the answer he wants, he starts pulling the trigger. Got two niggas before he goes down. Said it was bloody as fuck.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  “I don’t mean to sound like some kind of mystic, man, but it’s the streets. The streets got it right, and it’s being passed around like a joint.”

  “And how do you think this relates to your cousin?”

  “Don’t you listen? Haven’t you heard a word Deuce said on the subject of his past? You think some greased-up skidmark with an Italian last name is going to stumble into a gang neighborhood in Jax by some weird fucking chance?”

  “So this guy, he was on an under-the-table payroll?”

  “They identified him as one Malcolm ‘Mookie’ Acconci. Has a record as long as my dick, which is saying something. According to the details, he was a bagman for slimeballs down in Miam
i. Big outfit of gamblers and investment types with connections to the mob. Anyway, fucker has been in town for a few days, looking for cuz. Said he’s been asking around and somehow ended up at a Reapers party with a pistol out, and you know the rest.”

  It wasn’t just the fact that this guy stepped on a life sentence that bothered me. It was the fact that it was paired with some other happenings around town.

  If you weren’t following the same news items as I was, you might have missed the through line. Somebody was taking wannabe gangsters to the woodshed, leaving them broken, bloody, and scattered all across the city.

  I’d have paid money to know if any of them had ties to the same people we were tracking down. Problem was, Deuce wasn’t being communicative. Could be he wanted to prevent me and Reg from getting dragged into the more dangerous aspects of his personal investigation, but we had all been through the ringer before, so what was he hiding from us?

  Or was he just hiding out?

  It wasn’t out of the question. Deuce was possessed. He was possessed of this hatred from whoever killed his brother. He was possessed of a need to set his own life right.

  Perhaps he just needed to be alone when he Hulked out on ghost fumes.

  “Any blowback?” I asked.

  “Two cats got picked up. Both of them had weapons, like a couple of dumb shits. Guess what? The caliber of both weapons matches the slugs they pulled from our Italian friend.”

  “Bet that’s not all, judging by the way you’re smiling at me.”

  “That’s not all, my man. Turns out, one of them is the younger brother of our friend Rich D. He’s got two priors, so it looks like he might be taking a long walk down the dock this time.”

  “Heard anything from Rich D?”

  “He’s pissed. I don’t need a palm reader to figure that out. Don’t know he knows it’s Deuce’s doing, but there’s a chance that if I know, he knows, and that’s not good. He’s got enough money now to hire people to do his button work for him. I don’t think he’d hesitate in this situation.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  “Shoot.”

  “I know you done something fucked up. I don’t know what it is yet, but I know something’s happened, and I guess I just want you to know that.”

  He raised his glass, smiled sardonically, and kicked back his drink. “Here’s to mutually-assured destruction, then, because I don’t trust you farther than I could toss you.”

  After that, the night flowed like water.

  I drank Reginald under the table and then sent him home. I stayed far too late and killed off the better part of a bottle of Jack Daniels before staggering into the back of my “rental” and passing out. Kept the keys in my pocket and dozed off under a coat in the backseat.

  6

  The next morning at dawn, I shrugged off my drunk and drove perilously back home. Even a morning sun sent my head to throbbing, and I was getting to the point where I almost relished the shock.

  Almost.

  I found Deuce on the porch, feet kicked up on the railing. He looked relaxed, but his impassive demeanor concealed multitudes.

  “You all right, big guy?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Anything you want to get off your chest?”

  He shook his head.

  I sighed, scratched the back of my head. I glanced at Willie, who was digging around in the yard. Deuce’s mom had taken him up as her own personal cause, and something told me there would be an imminent transfer of ownership.

  He could do worse.

  He could be tied to me for the rest of his life.

  “All right,” I said finally, whistling for my scruffy dog to prance back into the house, “if you’re going to give me the shine on—”

  “The booster,” Deuce said.

  “The one you referenced before?”

  Deuce nodded. “He was just frogmarched out of his high-rise in connection with a Ponzi scheme involving some major investors in his firm.”

  “You have anything to do with that?”

  He smiled. It didn’t have anything to do with happiness, but it was good enough for me.

  I said, “Deuce, there’s going to be a lot of heat on you after the stunt with the Italian prick.”

  “Things are just starting, old friend. Once the dominos get knocking around, won’t be long before the whole table’s played out. We just have to stand nearby to make sure they fall in our favor.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way it works, big guy.”

  “How not?”

  “Word is, Rich D wants to nail your balls to lightpole. If we don’t get out of the public view, that might well happen, and I don’t know about you, but I’m awfully sensitive on the subject of everything below my waist.”

  “Rich D is a lap dog.”

  “Says you,” I responded. “That little ‘mix up’ you coordinated between the gamblers’ bagman and the Reapers sent shockwaves through the underworld. Your boy Rich D’s little brother got caught in the middle.”

  Deuce looked at me.

  “It’s a whole ‘nother set of dominos you didn’t mean to knock down, but here we are. The Reapers likely know it’s you, and they aren’t known for playing nice when it comes to turf.”

  “How did you get a handle on all of this?”

  “Reg. He says he’s been trying to get in your ear, but you’ve been playing hide-and-go-seek with yourself for the past two days. Tell me what’s going on, Deuce. Is this the last of it? Did you manage to get out of your debts?”

  “Them’s two different questions,” he said. “And the answer is, I hope so. Booster won’t be around for a bit, and so unless my debts get passed along, they’re null and void. The greased-up shitbag who got clipped was sent to close my blinds. All I did was send him to the wrong address at the wrong time. Person that he was, he thought he was just going to tapdance right in there and snuff me out. He got what was coming to him.”

  “That why you’ve been absent? Trying to set that up?”

  Deuce stared out at the neighborhood and let me think on that.

  Another thing Deuce didn’t reveal was that two men associated with the booster had been found shot to death in a black sedan just north of Jacksonville just a few days earlier. Somehow, the story had slipped through the cracks of my vigilance, and because the nation was dealing with more substantive tragedies, their deaths didn’t cause much of a stir.

  It had the whiff of random violence. Two men with some criminal ties ended up with bullets of a fairly generic origin in their skulls.

  No one cared.

  No one missed them.

  No one made a fuss, not even the cops.

  Had it been a tourist, something extreme might have taken place, but these two had been caught up in separate murder investigations tied to low-level racketeering. One of them, a greaseball with an Italian last name, spent enough time breaking kneecaps in Southern Florida that the BSI and the FDLE had a sheet on them.

  However, speculation had it that this guy, this booster from Athens, would be on the hook for the two deaths. Someone had embezzled from multiple places, and his hired thugs left a trail of blood and carnage behind them trying to silence the very people who had uncovered it. Seeing them on the wrong end of a toetag did nothing to spur a hardline investigation.

  Deuce himself brooded for days after that, but even despite my concern, I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question that needed asking. He either did it, or he didn’t. Either way, I wasn’t going to bring it up, unless my life depended on it.

  I had begun to find a bit of a rhythm. Eat a little. Drink a lot. Wake up and knock on some doors. Talk with people who seemed to vaguely remember Taj.

  Oh yeah, that nigga. He dead, ain’t he?

  I remember him from high school, but he isn’t around anymore, right?

  All these half-questions. Basic repudiations of reality, as though a tear in the fabric of this dimension had been opened up, swallowing Taj’
s life and times in a single gulp.

  Taj Gaines was a phantom. He was a saint. A fuck-up. A good-time kid. A thug. What wasn’t pure lies was so nondescript as to feel false. Someone had taken an eraser to the edges of his overall portrait. His yearbook picture was as often a generic shadow among smiling faces as it was his face, looking unmistakably like his older brother.

  What I learned wasn’t much, but it was hard-earned.

  In beating the pavement, I started to gain somewhat of a reputation. I was the crazy white boy stepping nonchalantly into gang territory. A few times I had to skate free of threats punctuated by the revelation of a gun on someone’s person, but those were rare.

  Most people, when it came down to it, thought it was fucked up that he died the way he did. They wanted to help but just didn’t know much. Or were afraid of those who knew plenty.

  And then there were the monsters popping up on the outskirts of Jacksonville, where the cops feared to tread. The violence that followed them. Women going missing. Gang members turning up shot full of holes. People beaten within inches of their lives.

  All of these events coinciding with the nocturnal activities of one Darron Gaines.

  Of course, I didn’t think Deuce was torturing women or jacking street hustlers.

  Some people I made contact with seemed to think it was a government organization. “Wouldn’t be the first time the feds got involved down here in Jacksonville to serve up hatred and strife,” one bespectacled young black man told me. He wasn’t affiliated, so far as I could tell, and his attitude toward me was one of bemused curiosity, rather than outright hostility.

  “All sorts of fucked up shit has run its course in Jacksonville, and if it’s coming back, I want to get my black ass out of here before it gets much worse.”

  When I happened upon the news that what connected many of these crimes was money, I took a more hardline stance on it.

  I couldn’t forget Deuce’s perpetual financial troubles. I edged up to the line of asking him if he broke people’s legs for cash but never did.

  For a man skating on thin ice, I sure could drop a lot of weight on the surface.