Your Corner Dark

by Desmond Hall

  “They’re using a back road up the mountain to surprise you from the rear.” It was Bradford. He went on, “But I left two men on the road with your lookout in case they come up that way.”

  Frankie scanned Bradford’s jeep. A laptop, a radar gun, and some kind of silver box sat inside. He leaned in for a closer look. He knew Bradford had surveillance equipment, but he didn’t know he had a Stingray! He’d read about them in a magazine blog; they were like mobile cell phone towers that could intercept phone messages.

  “Don’t touch that,” Bradford barked, noticing. Frankie took a step back.

  “How you want to play it?” Joe asked.

  “Where are your people and how many are there?” Bradford asked back.

  Joe swept his arm from Frankie’s shack clear across the other end of camp. “I couldn’t get the whole posse here so quick, but we have eighteen men and women all across the back of the mountain. We anticipated the same strategy.”

  Joe’s eyes were long, for sure, Frankie thought. He suddenly felt desperate to know where Big Pelton, Marshal, Greg, and the others were. This shoot-out was going to be bad—he could sense it.

  Bradford was telling Joe, Jenny, and Ice Box to come with him. To Frankie, he said, “You stay here to watch the flank, just in case.”

  Frankie had the bizarre feeling that he was in some action-adventure film from twenty years ago. They were just going to sit and wait for Taqwan’s gang to attack? It seemed so… third world. Frankie pointed to the Stingray. “Why don’t you use that?”

  Bradford’s eyes flashed. “What do you know ’bout that?”

  “Franklyn is a smart boy,” Aunt Jenny said, quick. “What you thinkin’, Franklyn?”

  Frankie cleared his throat, nervous. “It’s like, well, the cell phone towers that T-Mobile or Digicel use.”

  “That little thing?” Ice Box frowned, peering over Frankie’s shoulder.

  “Yeh, mon. Cell phones are always reaching out for a signal. Stingray frequencies are even more powerful than cell phone towers. It’s got GPS, so”—he glanced uneasily at Bradford—“the police, for instance, can use it to monitor when cell phones enter the area. From there, it’s just like tracking people on Google Earth.”

  Bradford was gaping at him. “That’s confidential property, right there. And it can’t do fuck if no one’s here to operate it.”

  “Confidential?” Joe jeered. “The youth know everything ’bout it. Everything ’pon the Internet now.”

  Bradford gestured toward the gully. “All those trees, Taqwan’s people can hide anywhere. Some might already be down there.”

  Joe shook his head hard, dreads swaying. “No, mon. My people sweep di area already. Taqwan no come yet.”

  Bradford looked back and forth between the Stingray and Frankie. “My man who works it took a bullet in the shoulder last night….”

  “Franklyn, you know how to work it?”

  Now it was Frankie’s turn to hesitate. He tried to picture the article he’d read. The writing came back to him—whole paragraphs in their entirety. It was how his brain worked. “Yeah, I can try.”

  Joe frowned. “Try or do it?”

  The vein on the side of Frankie’s head throbbed. He’d never operated a Stingray before. But he answered, “I can do it.”

  Bradford narrowed his eyes. “Okay, when you see new positions appear on the Stingray, assume them to be Taqwan’s people.” He pointed to Joe and Jenny. “Now, you have their numbers?”

  Frankie nodded.

  “Good. You effing call and let them know the positions.” To Joe and Jenny, he said, “I’ll position you two on different sides of the mountain with my men. You let them know where Taqwan’s people are coming from. We want coordinated discharge. You copy?”

  Joe’s nostrils flared. “Yeh, mon, yeh, mon.”

  “One last thing.” Bradford eyed Frankie. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  * * *

  In the shotgun seat of the jeep, Frankie quickly figured out how to activate the Stingray and, moments later, got it running. It was pretty straightforward, just like the article had said.

  With the laptop beside the tracking device, he ran the Stingray signal to Google Earth. Man, it was even easier than downloading Instagram! First the mountaintop appeared on the screen, and then a slew of dots. Frankie immediately recognized that they represented everyone stationed in the gully. A quick count gave him twenty-one. Frankie knew there were more, but some might not have brought phones, or had turned them off. So it had to be twenty-one posse members or police, since Joe had said they’d swept the mountainside for Taqwan’s men already.

  It was crazy that such a powerful device could be so easy to use. The police had a huge technological advantage. Why didn’t they use it more? Or maybe they did, and no one realized it. Frankie still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a setup. But it couldn’t be—Bradford wouldn’t have let things progress this far if it was: he would have sprung his ambush already. Frankie told himself he was becoming paranoid, seeing betrayal around every corner. Then again, maybe that was a good thing for a gangster to be?

  He was baking sitting in that jeep. Sweat burned his eyes, and he repeatedly wiped it away. He had to keep his focus on the phone, the laptop, and the Stingray—constantly checking the current list of phone numbers, seeing if a new one appeared. A dot that represented Joe was on one side of the mountain with half his posse and four from Bradford’s team. Aunt Jenny was a dot on the other side, stationed with Bradford and everybody else. Frankie sat up with a start and checked his phone for battery life. How could he have forgotten? A little more than half. How messed up would it be if he couldn’t call Joe or Aunt Jenny? He couldn’t screw this up.

  Periodically he looked up from the screen to scope out the road, then the bush, in case he or the Stingray had missed something. The quiet was getting to him—he could hear his own pulse in his head. Thoughts of Leah, his father, his mother, Winston, kept trying to push through. Just focus, he told himself again and again.

  Every minute felt like an hour, and his brain wouldn’t stop rehashing details. Bradford had to have a spy in Taqwan’s posse to know this attack was coming. Or maybe Denetria had a double agent reporting back to her? Damn, Frankie hoped this wasn’t a setup. And damn, he wanted out so bad. Did this count as a mission? Focus!

  Leaves rustled. He grabbed his Glock and immediately dropped it—it was searing hot from the sun. Gripping it again, he started to wonder if the heat could make it automatically fire. Focus! A chipmunk scampered across the circular driveway. What a fool—freaking out about a rodent. He put the gun back on the seat.

  Waiting was a brain fuck.

  Then he did a double take. A new cell phone number appeared on the Stingray. A nanosecond later two others blinked on. Frankie’s eyes bugged, waiting for the corresponding dots to plot themselves. Finally they began to display. The signals were coming from the main road, down the mountain. He fumbled with the phone, misdialed the first time, then tried again. “Cricket! They’re coming up the road!”

  “How many?”

  “One car, I think.” Then two more numbers appeared. That made six. “Two cars, two, I think it’s two.” Frankie could hear Cricket repeating what he said to the men Bradford had left with him—Bradford knew his shit.

  Then five more numbers appeared, and four more on top of that. It was nine new numbers in total. But they were nowhere near where Cricket was stationed. What? Leaning closer, Frankie stared at the map. The new dots plotted out in the gully near Joe’s location. Damn! They were attacking from two sides: the road where Cricket was and the gully. He had to call Joe. “Cricket, I gotta go.”

  Every muscle tense, Frankie watched the dots move in unison up the mountainside, toward Joe’s position. He wanted to give exact coordinates, so, lips quivering, he punched in, trying to get closer, trying to get a street-level view on the map. But he could only get an overhead angle, about a hundred feet from the ground. Shit! This area wa
s probably too remote a location for street view. He couldn’t wait any longer. He tapped in his uncle’s number.

  “Franklyn?” Joe answered. “What you got?”

  “They’re coming your way.”

  “Where?”

  It came to him: he knew how to be exact. He put his thumb over the camp, knowing it was about a mile and a half wide.

  “Franklyn!”

  “Hold on, Uncle.” Quickly, using his thumb as a map scale, he figured that Taqwan’s people were about two hundred yards away from Joe. Then—what?—all the new dots disappeared off the computer screen. Vanished! Was it a glitch? Had he messed up? Face burning, Frankie grabbed the Stingray with both hands and forced himself to stay calm even though he wanted to shake it, throw it out the window. The phone numbers still showed on the Stingray. There was still a chance to figure this out.

  “Franklyn! What the hell?”

  His mouth went dry. He was failing. “Hold on, Uncle.”

  They couldn’t have just disappeared. Had Taqwan’s people suddenly turned off their phones? He desperately searched the tracking device. Next to the numbers were the frequencies. Most were 4G, some LTE. And next to the frequencies was the option to redirect. That didn’t make sense. He closed his eyes. Think. Think. He had studied systems; they were inner directed. The purpose of this device was to track. Redirect might mean following on another frequency, a lower one, maybe 2G. But if he hit redirect, he might lose all the numbers.

  “Franklyn!”

  He had to risk it. He clicked redirect. The numbers on the Stingray showed that they were now on a lower frequency. They were all 2G. He looked at the laptop. Still no dots on the overlay.

  “Franklyn!”

  “One second, Uncle!”

  Then points started to pop up on Google Earth again. Five. Then seven. Taqwan’s men had moved in—maybe even in firing range! “Uncle, them coming your way, at least seven of them. Looks like they’re on the path near the old well.”

  “Yeh, mon.” Joe hung up.

  Almost immediately, a barrage of shots echoed in the distance, then went silent. It sounded like they had come from farther down the road. Had those two cars gotten by Cricket and Bradford’s men? Frankie clutched his gun just as, from the right, a dozen rounds cracked the silence. Joe and his team should have gotten the first strike. More shots. The firefight was on. Frankie prayed he had read the Stingray correctly.

  He felt like a big fat target sitting there in the middle of the empty camp. He slid out of the jeep, ducked behind the open door, checked the brush—nothing. There were popping noises—sounded like handguns—but he couldn’t tell how far away. He risked looking back inside at the Stingray. No new dots. Frankie turned to the road—nothing. The staccato tek tek tek of machine-gun fire broke out. He couldn’t tell from which side of the mountain—their echo reverberated. The volley lasted much longer than the first. He forced himself to breathe.

  “See him there!” came a voice. It sounded like Big Pelton’s, but Frankie couldn’t be sure. He squatted fast, looked through the crawl space under the shacks, scanned the bush. A flash of bright green. He gripped his gun. A teenager wearing a green baseball cap turned backward ran up the slope past a cabin and into the encampment. Frankie recognized him from his father’s funeral. He was one of the kids in Taqwan’s posse, and he was now creeping along the shacks toward Frankie. The kid suddenly stopped to look back toward the bush when he caught sight of Frankie. He started to lift his handgun, about to shoot.

  Without a breath of hesitation, Frankie pulled the trigger of his own gun and kept shooting. The kid crumpled to the ground, screaming once.

  His arm started to shake, his vision going watery, his stomach rolling. No! He was not going to let himself think about what he had just done. He waited for a movement or another sound, for reinforcements to come in. He glanced back at the Stingray. Nothing. He listened for car engines. Nothing. So, lowering his gun, Frankie cautiously walked toward the boy. Tek tek tek. Machine-gun fire broke out from right behind him. Frankie spun around, too surprised to even lift his weapon. A portly boy, three sweatbands on his arm, collapsed facedown on the ground in front of Joe’s shack, a nine-millimeter dropping from his hand. He could have shot Frankie in the back!

  As the boy fell, Frankie spied a second person—a masked man in a black tee and jeans, his M16 still aimed in Frankie’s direction. Frankie knew immediately who it was. Bradford could shoot Frankie right now. And there was nothing Frankie could do about it.

  Branches snapped and they both turned. From the side, Marshal galloped into the camp. “We got Taqwan! And them running away!” He waved to Frankie. “Come, Frankie. You have to come!” Marshal looked crazed.

  Bradford lowered his gun, gazed at Frankie for a moment, then jogged back toward the mountainside. Marshal had probably just saved Frankie’s life.

  Frankie looked one last time at the boy he’d shot, still and silent, then tore after Marshal into the bush, skidding down the mountainside, weaving around trees and bushes.

  “How much farther?” he panted.

  “Come,” Marshal huffed.

  They pushed past a thick ficus, and there was Aunt Jenny, on her knees, her gun at her side, hunched over a body lying on the dirt. Blow Up stood next to her, tears streaking his cheeks.

  The amber work boots caked with dirt, the long legs, and the splayed dreads. This was why Marshal had come to get him. Frankie stepped forward, as if floating, no sensation in his legs at all.

  He laid a hand on Aunt Jenny’s shoulder. She was heaving. But Frankie didn’t feel that pain. He wasn’t holding back tears. His father had always urged him to fight them, but this time there were none to fight. He didn’t feel much of anything, in fact. Had he lost so much already that he had nothing left for Joe? He became aware of the quiet. The sound of the bird calls. A breeze shaking the leaves.

  Aunt Jenny forced herself up. “Bumboclot!” She wiped her eyes. “We’ll come back for him later. Let’s make sure we got all of them.” She reached down for her gun and strode away, Blow Up beside her, their bodies thrashing through the bush.

  Marshal smacked Frankie’s shoulder. “C’mon, mon,” he muttered, wandering off after Blow Up.

  Frankie looked down once more. Joe hadn’t believed in an afterlife. But Frankie wanted to believe there was a place—somehow—a place where his uncle’s soul might find his father’s. Joe didn’t believe, but that didn’t mean he was right. His father did. And if his father was right, maybe it could happen? Maybe?

  Forty-Nine

  it was near midnight, and Frankie, bone-tired, stood in the middle of the encampment with the rest of the posse. They’d all survived except for his uncle. Joe was gone, but he stalked around in Frankie’s thoughts, maybe everyone else’s too.

  Mesmerized, he stood listening to the crickets and the beeps of a garbage truck backing into the circular driveway. It had just come back from the Riverton Waste Disposal Site, just outside Kingston. It seemed like it was empty now, but earlier in the evening, Frankie and the others had packed the truck with seventeen of Taqwan’s men, along with Taqwan himself. Ice Box and Buck-Buck had awarded themselves the honor of being unofficial pallbearers to the only type of funeral Taqwan would receive.

  The truck, one that Joe had commissioned to pick up garbage in Troy and towns all over the mountainside, squealed to a halt next to the two bodies that lay on the ground. They were wrapped head to toe, in white crocus bags. The same type that the posse used to store the ash that fertilized the ganja plants. Frankie thought that was appropriate because his uncle was wrapped in one of those bags. In a lot of ways he was as much a gardener as he was a posse don, maybe more so.

  Frankie gazed at the bag next to his uncle’s. The kid Frankie shot might be inside, but Frankie didn’t want to know for sure. If it was possible, he was going to forget that he had ever pulled the trigger. It was self-defense. It was self-defense.

  The three garbagemen said not a word—they just we
nt to work. They got their arms under one of the bags, lifted it, and swung it into the back of the truck.

  Frankie, Marshal, Greg, and Big Pelton gathered around the remaining body. Frankie’s stomach started churning, churning. He looked over at Aunt Jenny, Buck-Buck, and Ice Box, all standing side by side, several feet away. They all appeared to be gutted. Jenny nodded quickly, seemingly still sure about burning Joe’s body along with the rest. Rastas didn’t have funerals.

  Frankie scanned the bag. Something was wrong. He squatted and lay his hands on where the bag was duct-taped together, where the legs, already rigid from rigor mortis, would be. He slid his hands over what should have been the kneecaps and realized the problem. The body was upside down. “Turn it over,” he said. It somehow seemed disrespectful to carry the bag that way.

  “No make no difference.” Big Pelton’s voice was muffled under his shirt. “Rastas no believe in this.”

  “Turn it over.” Frankie felt his temper rising. Big Pelton and the others got their hands under Joe’s body and gently turned it, carrying it faceup to the back of the truck, where they lifted it in.

  One of the garbagemen slammed the steel gate shut. He latched it, and moments later, the truck rambled off down the dirt road.

  Pelton stood nodding, nodding. Cricket and Blow Up, shirts still tied over their noses and mouths, still wearing rubber gloves, began throwing ash and lye on the ground where the bodies had lain.

  “Cricket, me hear you shoot up one of Taqwan’s cars, mon,” Big Pelton said, as proud as if Cricket had run a sprint for the Jamaican team and won.

  “Yeh, mon, hear you shoot good today too.” Cricket fist-pumped, puffs of ash spilling from his fists.

  “Yeh, mon.” Big Pelton fist-pumped in response, then turned to Frankie. “You shoot any today?”

  Frankie startled. He considered Big Pelton’s question. Had he shot any today? “No, mon. Nobody.”