Shetani's Sister

by Iceberg Slim

  “How far do you have to go to cop?”

  She got to her feet. “Not far, at the end of the block. Gotta go!”

  He followed her to the door and opened it. “Can you get me some clean works?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I got an outfit stashed that I used to use to bang coke before I started to smoke crack. Bye!”

  He shut the door and sat down in the chair near the window. He chewed his fingernails to the quicks and waited for an hour, with churning guts, for Mavis’s father to come home. Finally, he saw an elderly man in work clothes park a jalopy and carry two armloads of groceries into the house next door.

  Shetani slipped off his dripping-wet shirt. He stared out at the street, bent double by racking cramps. Finally, Mavis left the house and went down the street. Negatives ached his head. What if she ripped him off and got in the wind? What if she got busted after she copped? What if she couldn’t score for smack in a market dominated by cocaine?

  At last, he saw her coming down the sidewalk. He got up and flung open the front door. She didn’t come up Maggie’s walk! He stood at the open door, stunned with frustration. He heard the jangle of a phone. A moment later, Maggie said from the bedroom, “Pick up the phone. It’s Mavis.”

  He went to the phone on an end table beside the sofa. He fell onto it. “What’s happenin’, Baby Sis?” he blurted out breathlessly.

  She whispered, “I can’t bring it to you, because my dad would see me from his bedroom window and he’s still awake. I’ve stashed the package at the end of Maggie’s backyard, in a tin can under the apple tree. Oh, by the way, I copped the connection’s last twenty-five-dollar bag. I put in an order for a gram that I can cop early tomorrow night.” She hung up.

  He went into Maggie’s room and listened to her snoring for a moment. He examined two barred windows to see if the bars had a swing-out release lever, in case of fire. They didn’t. To play safe, he took the skeleton key from the lock and carefully shut the door. He locked her in and hastened to cop the stash. He came back and shot up half of the brown Mexican heroin. It was nothing compared to China white, but at least it blunted the edge of pain in his gut. He decided to leave Maggie locked in. He stretched out on the sofa to get some much-needed rest.

  —

  At noon, Rucker was driving toward South Central in an old nondescript brown van with heavily tinted windows that he had borrowed from a car-dealer friend of his in Hollywood. He thought about One Pocket Stiles’s long criminal career and his wizardry at pool. He drove down South Figueroa Street. He spotted Stiles’s classic ’36 Packard parked in front of his poolroom. Rucker parked the van behind it. He tucked a prop briefcase under an arm before he went into the crowded poolroom. It vibrated with the profane shuck and jive of hustlers, clowns, and bums.

  A lid of utter silence slammed down. His alien presence magnetized all eyes, except those of Pocket, who was bent across a front table, executing a three-cushion bank of the last ball on the table. He glanced at Rucker and put his cue stick on the table.

  “Well, if it ain’t my old fire-insurance man,” he exclaimed, as he pumped Rucker’s hand.

  Rucker smiled, and the shuck and jive resumed. “Hello, Mr. Stiles. Since I was in the neighborhood, I dropped in to say hello and pitch some life insurance.”

  A dwarfish stakes holder gave string bean Stiles a small bundle of bills. Stiles tipped him a bill and led Rucker to the sidewalk. “Let’s go upstairs and talk,” Stiles said as he unlocked the door.

  They went up a stairway to the second floor, over the poolroom. They entered a beautifully furnished living room. Rucker was flabbergasted to see the transformation. The formal nocturnal dive had disappeared, with its jukebox, the garish montage of painted nudes on the wall, the cracked mirrored bar, and the craps table surrounded by mangy overstuffed chairs and ragged couches.

  They sat down on an elegant white silk sofa. “Mr. Rucker, it’s sure great to see you,” Pocket said as he crossed his pipe-stem legs. “But what happened to your face? You been roustin’ wildcats?”

  Rucker laughed and stroked a bandage on his cheek. “No. I fell on my face, cold-sober, after I got nicked in the back of my head…You haven’t read or heard about my trouble with a psycho in Hollywood?”

  Stiles said softly, with a beatific expression on his face, “I stopped reading downer newspapers and watching corrupt TV except for religious stuff on cable. I closed my after-hours joint, and I’m gonna close the poolroom the first of the year and start my own ministry downstairs. I found Christ!”

  Rucker was speechless.

  “Mr. Rucker, I see you’re surprised like my kinfolks and everybody. I’m seventy-five, and I’ve been a thief, dope dealer, pimp, stickup man, and dope fiend, but I’ve been purified with the Holy Ghost and the fire. What can I do for you?”

  Rucker found his voice. “I’m on the trail of the nut that shot me. Tell me everything you know about Tank Settles and his present activities.”

  Stiles’s long, wolfish black face hardened. “Did he shoot you?”

  Rucker shook his head.

  “Then you’re not out to arrest him by yourself?”

  Rucker said, “No. I need his help.”

  Stiles continued, “You would need a SWAT team to arrest him now. Snot-nosed punk grew up to be a stone killer. He and his gangsters control and rule this whole section where we are. A couple of his killer punks were in the poolroom when you showed. One of ’em I had to hire as a security guard. Settles has a mob of crack dealers. He’s a dope king who gets around in a red Mercedes. I’ve heard that he’s got a machine gun stashed in a secret compartment under the front floorboards of his car. Decent people are terrorized and jailed in their homes by Tank and his gangsters.”

  Rucker was thoughtful for a moment before he asked, “Where does he field his crack dealers?”

  Stiles waved a bony hand toward upper South Figueroa. “In the Forties on Fig, where the ho’s work at night.”

  Rucker stood. “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

  Stiles stood and flashed a galaxy of gold teeth. He shook his bald pate frenetically. His blue suit shimmered in the sunlight like a silk shroud on his skeletal frame. “The Lord will reward me, Mr. Rucker,” he said as he led Rucker to the door. “Don’t try to talk to Tank by yourself, Mr. Rucker. He hates cops, and he’s as treacherous as a rattler with the flu,” he warned as Rucker walked toward the stairway.

  Rucker threw up a hand to acknowledge the caution as he started down the stairs.

  At that moment, Shetani awakened to Maggie pounding for release on her bedroom door. He got up and unlocked the door.

  “I’m a human being that goes to the bathroom, Mr. Spires. Don’t you never lock me up again,” she hollered as she lumbered past him for the bathroom.

  The doorbell sounded. Shetani, with gun in hand, peeped through the front curtains to see a fat black man bulging a faded blue uniform with CHRISTIAN TV AND SALES stenciled on the front of the shirt.

  Shetani went to the bathroom door and knocked. “Miss Maggie, the TV man is at the door.”

  Maggie screamed at the top of her voice. “Ain’t you got no sense, nigger? I’m tryin’ to relieve myself. Give him two hundred dollars, like you promised, and tell him to take the TV you messed up with him.”

  Shetani concealed his gun and went to open the front door. He made the transaction without any sign from Mr. Owens that he had been recognized.

  Maggie flushed the toilet and washed her hands. She took an identical skeleton key to the one for her bedroom door from a linen drawer and dropped it into her bosom. She joined him on the sofa in the living room and smiled to see the sharp picture on the pre-owned color TV.

  At dusk, Rucker spotted Tank’s gaudy Mercedes and tailed it to a block in the upper Forties on Figueroa Street. Rucker parked his van diagonally across the wide street from the target vehicle. The van’s heavily tinted windows made Rucker’s white face and even his black-clad form virtually invisible to the constant foot traffic
past his spy post.

  Through powerful binoculars, he watched a succession of young Black Elite Gang members with their gang insignia, fake or real diamonds glittering on their earlobes, get into the Mercedes. Rucker was puzzled to see each of them elevate his knees. They would get out of Tank’s machine after a moment and take up positions from one end of the block to the other.

  A half-hour later, they started to deal crack to the drivers of a stream of cars. Shortly, the salesmen returned to the Mercedes to get a fresh supply of merchandise.

  Suddenly Rucker’s eyes widened at a phenomenon. Tiny spots of light flashed through the entire block. Instantly the dealers faded away into bars, alleyways, and parked cars as a police car entered the block.

  Rucker zeroed in on the sources of the flashes. He saw that the signal sentries were young boys and girls, none older than ten, with small pencil-shaped flashlights. He watched the phalanx of dealers resume business immediately when the police car had moved through the block.

  Rucker reasoned that Tank’s stash of merchandise was with the machine gun, probably in the secret compartment that One Pocket Stiles had mentioned. Rucker deduced that the momentary elevation of dealers’ knees indicated the secret compartment was located beneath the floorboards on the front passenger side of the Mercedes.

  Rucker’s binoculars snared the figure of a medium-built black male without the Black Elite jewel in his earlobe, passing something and receiving what was apparently money from a motorist at the end of the block adjacent to the dealers’ block of operation. Instantly the lookout sentries flashed the presence of the interloper throughout the block.

  Rucker watched Tank blink the Mercedes headlights several times. A trio of husky Black Elites sitting in a station wagon parked in front of the Mercedes torpedoed away and attacked the astonished interloper with blackjacks, fists, and feet until he lay bloody and unconscious. The trio dragged him into an alley and drove the station wagon back to its post in front of the Mercedes.

  Rucker checked his gun before he stepped out of the van. He carried the briefcase containing Shetani’s mug prints as he jaywalked toward the Mercedes. He would try to discover the crack stash as leverage if Tank stonewalled and refused to help him locate Shetani. He quickened his step as he reached the pavement at the rear of the Mercedes.

  Passersby gawked at him as he flung open the door of the Mercedes and slid in beside Tank.

  “Say, motherfucker! What’s going down?” Tank screamed as his right hand streaked for his waistband.

  “Don’t move! I’m Sergeant Russell Rucker of the LAPD, and I’m going to talk to you. That’s what’s going down,” Rucker said meanly as he rammed his gun against Tank’s side.

  Tank studied Rucker’s bandaged face for a long moment before he laughed too loudly. “Hey, I think I know you, man.”

  Rucker took Tank’s gun from his waistband and dropped it into his own pocket. “Yeah, you know me. I saved your jive ass several years ago, when a gang of stompers were about to beat the shit out of you or waste you. You owe me, Idus, and I’m here to collect.” Rucker took his gun from Tank’s side and placed it on the seat, between his legs. Tank pulled an obese roll of cash from a trouser pocket. “Sure, Officer, what do you want?”

  Rucker’s mouth curled. “I don’t take money from fuckin’ criminals. I want you to help me find Albert Spires.”

  There was utter silence. Tank’s garage-door shoulders jerked rigid, and his brutish black face became an anguished mask of outrage. “Man, you ain’t Rucker. You a alien from outer space if you think I would fuck up a brother for the poleece. Hey, I don’t really owe you shit, since, at the time you raised them niggers off my ass, my mama Mamie and other taxpaying citizens was paying your salary to protect me from bodily harm.”

  Tank’s trio of bashers left the station wagon and walked toward the passenger side of the Mercedes. Rucker whispered harshly, “I’ll blow you away first and a couple of them before I go.” Rucker stuck his gun into his waistband. One of the trio stuck his head inside on Rucker’s side.

  “You all right, bro?” he said as he glared at Rucker.

  Tank replied, “Yeah. I’m cool.” The trio returned to the station wagon. Then Rucker said calmly, “If you don’t help me find Spires, I’ll take leave and rent a room on this side of town. I’ll hound you and harass you and your dealers out of business. Well?”

  Tank’s massive frame quivered with rage. He reached for the Mercedes’s light switch. Rucker slammed the barrel of his gun against the back of Tank’s hand. “Hey, man, you gonna pay for this rough shit,” Tank warned as he squeezed the wounded member. His eyes were maroon pits of menace.

  “You’re on paper, asshole, and it’s against the law to threaten a police officer. Say you’re sorry,” Rucker demanded as he poked the snout of the gun into Tank’s side again.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, but I’ll never help you cross the brother into the gas chamber,” Tank said firmly.

  Rucker, the former auto-theft and chop-shop ace investigator, studied the Mercedes’s dashboard for an extra control knob or switch that would access the secret compartment that he felt was beneath his feet. He extended a hand and let his fingers toy across the dashboard to get Tank’s reaction.

  “Hey, man, you ain’t got no right to fuck with my machine without a search warrant.”

  Rucker smiled. “Yeah, I know. And you know that a recent parolee with a two-carat diamond on his ear and the bread to buy a new Mercedes is in big trouble if his parole officer finds out.”

  Tank sneered, “Hey, man, this ride and this diamond was copped in my mama’s name. I don’t own shit. Now, why don’t you split and let the poleece find the brother if they can.”

  Rucker’s probing fingers moved beneath the dash. He flipped a switch and felt instant pressure beneath the soles of his shoes. He jabbed the gun in his left hand against Tank’s heart. He raised his feet and saw the shag-covered lid of the compartment open upward. He leaned and pulled two garbage bags from the hole with his right hand. He dumped a machine gun from one bag and many vials of crack from the other onto the seat between them.

  “You’re going back to Q for parole violation, slick ass, and another bit on top of it, if you don’t help me find Spires.”

  Tank stared at his beloved machine gun and the small fortune in crack. He mumbled, “I can beat possession of crack on illegal search and seizure. I ain’t got but fourteen months to serve out on parole paper. I can breeze through a chickenshit bit like—”

  Rucker cut him off: “Don’t bullshit me. You would be a basket case in thirty days with no Mercedes, no crack to smoke, no fine pussy to bang. Possession of the machine gun, which you can’t beat, will get you a nickel, and maybe a dime in the joint, with your rap sheet. Gimme a fast yes or no to my proposition. I’m in a hurry.”

  Tank fidgeted and writhed on the seat.

  “Come on. If you’ve got a brain, your answer has to be yes,” Rucker prodded harshly.

  “I’m in if I get all my merchandise back, and my piece and the machine gun.”

  Rucker laughed in his face. “It’s against my principles as a police officer to return deadly weapons and narcotics to criminals. I can only offer you a pass for the weapon and dope, and freedom from my personal harassment, after I get Spires.”

  Tank nodded. “You win,” he said in a tiny shaking voice.

  Rucker moved his face close to Tank’s. “Don’t try to con me, Idus. I want all-out, fast cooperation from you. I’m giving you a stack of Spires’s mug shots. I want you to make sure that every one of your gang members and their broads knows what he looks like. You got thirty-six hours to find him before I get itchy to make this evidence known to the proper authorities. I’ll bust you and adjust the report time frame of my confiscation of the machine gun and drugs to the moment that I bust you. I’m giving you my home phone number, where you can call me around the clock, to tip me, and only me, to Spires’s hideout. Understand?”

  Tank said meekly, “Yeah
. You sure a cold-blooded dude.”

  Rucker said, “Thanks for that. By the way, you called me a motherfucker when I got in. Say you’re sorry.”

  Tank’s heavy eyebrows took flight. He gnawed at his bottom lip under Rucker’s relentless cold blue eyes. “I’m sorry, old man.” Tank sighed. “It’s gonna be tough to get my homeboys to work real hard to find a brother for the poleece.”

  At that instant, Rucker’s consuming drive to get Shetani forced him to drop all scruples and con Tank. “Not if you let them in on something confidential I know. Spires has been secretly indicted by a grand jury as an accomplice of the South Side Slayer in several of the eighteen murders of women in South Central. Tell your homeboys it’s necessary to find Spires to get rid of the heat on your turf, and so the police can pressure Spires to get the identity of the South Side Slayer. Everybody in South Central wants the killer caught before he kills again.”

  Tank murmured, “That might work.”

  A county ambulance wailed by, carrying the battered crack-dealer interloper.

  Rucker handed Tank his card and left the Mercedes, carrying the garbage-bagged contraband. He collapsed in the van from the high-voltage tension and his weakened condition. Finally, he summoned the strength to drive toward Hollywood.

  At that moment, Tank blinked his headlights for his three enforcers to join him in the Mercedes. Rucker had left Tank shaken and in a very paranoid condition. He was a street prince, with bookoo long green and his pick of a multitude of choice foxes. He was living fast and high, and for the first time in his life he felt important and powerful. A recurring vision of his cell in San Quentin rattled his nerves. He looked in the rearview mirror at Rucker’s van in the distance. Should he send the enforcers to hit Rucker, to escape his trap and recover his guns and crack. Then he thought that it would be wiser to find Spires and avoid Rucker’s threat to send him back to Q.

  He decided against risking the gas chamber as enforcers piled into the Mercedes. He said solemnly, “That white dude was a cop on my payroll. He lays inside info on me on what’s coming down in Black Town. The South Side Slayer had a buddy with him when he iced several black ladies. That crazy mass murderer’s name is Spires, the one that’s got the poleece ripping and runnin’ and fuckin’ with people over here. My poleece errand boy hipped me that Spires has been secretly indicted for the murders he committed with his buddy, the South Side Slayer. The cop said the poleece is gonna up the heat until Spires is busted. Now, we ain’t got nothin’ in common with no crazy square-ass nigger who kills black sisters. Right?”