Wrecked

by Joe Ide

  “How do we get through the bars?” Grace said.

  “We don’t,” Isaiah said. “If they hit the dead bolt hard enough, it’ll rip right out of the doorframe.”

  Deronda and Dodson got in position with the ram. Isaiah had duct-taped the tongue of a sneaker over the business end. It would mitigate the noise but only a little. There was a moment of tense quiet, the teammates looking at each other. Do or die.

  “You ready?” Dodson said.

  “Fuck yeah I’m ready,” Deronda said fiercely. Her game face was frightening. “Let’s knock this muthafucka down.”

  They swung the ram, getting their rhythm, Deronda generating more speed than Isaiah could have if he was fit. Dodson said, “One…two…THREE!” There was a loud crash, the forty thousand pounds of force ripping the Medeco right off the wooden frame. There were grins of relief and elation. Isaiah raised his hand for quiet. They listened. Loud noises weren’t uncommon in the hood; sirens, screams, fights, gunshots. Most were ignored unless they didn’t stop. Who wants to stick their nose in somebody else’s mess when you’ve got messes of your own? Isaiah nodded and they went inside.

  Deronda’s sister, Kalista, hadn’t been out on the town since she’d started working at the food truck. It felt good to be at a club, dressed up slinky, swiggin’ back Seven and Sevens and playing lookie-loo with the bruthas. What’s Cecil doing in here? This ain’t no place to recapture your youth. You better go home and watch The Price Is Right. Oh no, don’t be lookin’ at me, you popeyed muthafucka. My shit ain’t even in your hemisphere. Wait a minute, wait a minute, this brutha here look just like Denzel. Look at him, tryin’ to check me out on the hush-hush. Don’t be so shy, baby. Come on over here and buy Kalista a drink.

  She glanced over at Junior in the roped-off VIP area. That’s some daffy shit right there. Since when is a drug dealer a very important person? Da-yem, he’s ugly. I seen better faces in a fish tank. Is that Michael Stokely? Why that nigga ain’t dead or locked up is a muthafuckin’ mystery—ohh shit. Here come Denzel! Yeah, baby, get your fine self over here. You and me is gonna party.

  Isaiah and the others froze when they saw Junior’s decor. Deronda said, “It’s something, ain’t it?”

  “Jesus,” Grace said. “What’s with all the zebra skins?”

  Everyone dispersed to their assignments. Isaiah toured the house, getting the feel of the place, imagining himself as Junior with some cash to hide. He would have to visit his money frequently so Isaiah checked the carpet for worn spots in unusual places. He examined the edges and corners to see if any had been lifted. Nothing. He decided to focus on the rooms with hard floors.

  The laundry room first. The washer and dryer were too obvious but he looked them over anyway. There was dust on the dryer control panel. The washer was open, a few clothes and a bath towel in the drum. Something under them? No. Anyplace else? No. There were no hollow spots in the walls or removable floor tiles.

  He checked on Deronda and Grace and gave them instructions. Move the bureau. Check the underside of that table. Take the trash out of that wastebasket. Behind the mirror. That plant is artificial. See what’s under it. He didn’t need to tell Dodson anything. Dodson was a former drug dealer and had hidden more dope than Scarface. Isaiah moved Deronda to the living room, and she went to work slashing the couch to pieces with the box cutter. “Where’s your money, Junior? You can’t hide it from Deronda. She can smell money, she can feel money, she can—”

  “Be quiet,” Isaiah said. He was getting more and more anxious. If Junior hid his money somewhere else they were screwed. He eyed the drug paraphernalia on the coffee table. Rolling papers, a couple of bongs, baggies of weed, and a platinum lighter with Junior’s initials engraved on it. Isaiah pocketed the lighter.

  Denzel’s real name was Robert, which Kalista preferred over those ghetto names. Her friend Jamonica had named her son Tylenol, a migraine of a child if there ever was one. Kalista had to admit, Robert had some savvy; not pushy, asking her about herself, not counting the drinks he was buying and paying for them with an American Express Gold Card. They danced a couple of times. He had below-average moves but at least he didn’t do anything embarrassing like moonwalk or spin around on his head. At the moment, they were standing at the bar. He was leaning in close, whispering something about the curve of her neck, his warm breath sending jingle bells through her body. She was about to take this juicy brutha back to the crib when she glanced over his shoulder and sucked in a sharp breath. Junior and his crew were gone. “Oh shit.”

  “What?” Robert said.

  “Stay right there, baby. I’ll be back before you know it.” Kalista hurried through the crowd, panic like acid reflux welling up in her throat. A huge security man stood at the entrance to the VIP area.

  “Did Junior leave?” she asked him.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When?”

  “A while ago. He got a phone call and busted on outta here. From the look on his face I’d say somebody’s gonna get the hell beat out of ’em.”

  Isaiah searched the bathroom. He went through the drawers, the toilet tank, under the sink, the ceiling, the floor, the plumbing fixtures, and the drains. He flinched when he saw the dildo. There were two stacks of clean towels on a shelf wrapped in blue paper. Nothing in those either. Frustrated, he returned to the living room. Deronda was still slashing at things, stuffing spilling out of the furniture and floating around the room. He stood there visualizing everything he’d seen like a reel of microfiche, reexamining each frame for discrepancies. When he got to the laundry room he paused. The dryer had dust on the control panel. It hadn’t been used, but there were clothes and a bath towel in the washing machine. Why use the washer and not the dryer? And why wash a towel when you had them delivered by a laundry service wrapped in blue paper? His phone buzzed. A text: JUNIOR’S ON HIS WAY!! A car came roaring up. The doors burst open and four homicidal brothers got out.

  “Oh my muthafuckin’ God,” Deronda said. Isaiah darted into the hallway and shouted in a stage whisper, “Dodson, Grace, let’s go! Junior’s here!” They went out the back and raced across the yard, Deronda muttering Oh shit oh shit oh shit, Dodson helping Isaiah along. There was something tricky about that washing machine, he thought.

  “Dodson, drive,” Isaiah said as they clambered in. “Where’s Grace?”

  “I don’t know,” Deronda said.

  “I thought she was with you,” Dodson said.

  Isaiah nearly lurched out of his seat. “You mean she’s still in there?”

  Junior’s neighbor had called him when she saw the gleam of a flashlight in his bedroom window. Junior and the crew came busting through the front door, guns drawn, halting when they saw the wreckage. “Oh shit!” Junior said. “My domicile has been exfoliated! Excavate the premises!” The fellas looked at him. “Search the goddamn house!” The fellas ran off in different directions. Junior sprinted straight to the laundry room.

  Grace didn’t know Isaiah had already searched the laundry room, and she hadn’t heard him because the door was closed. She was feeling through the stacks of towels when she heard a man yelling and what sounded like the marines storm-trooping through the house. She looked around. There was no place to hide.

  Junior yanked the laundry room door open, saying, “If my assets have been diversified I will coagulate every nigga in the neighborhood!” He couldn’t remember being this outraged since that bitch Deronda almost tore his nuts off. He went directly to the washing machine. He lifted the spindle and the whole barrel came out with it. Underneath was an Adidas bag. He unzipped it and rifled through the bundles of bills, counting it out loud. All sixty-seven grand was still there. “See there,” he said, pleased with himself. “This is the aftermath of deliberating with my mentality.”

  When Grace was ten years old, she had participated in an extracurricular program called Odyssey of the Arts. The students wrote poetry, performed scenes from Duck Soup, painted their dreams, sculpted their nightmares, and
did a form of dance called Expressive Movement that combined ballet, jazz, Hula-Hoops, and gymnastics. Grace was a standout, cavorting about in pink spandex, doing the splits and twisting her body parts into curlicues, the other kids jealous because she was naturally flexible—which came in handy as she contorted herself into the dryer moments before Junior arrived, babbling some kind of nonsense about coagulating niggas. She was curled up like a fetus in a metal womb, the door open slightly but enough for him to see her if he looked. Would he look? She was relieved when he went straight to the washer. She could hear him lifting the lid and something else that clanked and made him grunt. Then he unzipped a bag. He babbled some more craziness about deliberating with his mentality, then the sounds went in reverse and he closed the lid. Grace’s back was killing her, her neck was cramping up. Leave, Junior! Leave already! But he didn’t. Instead, he made a call.

  “What do you mean who is this?” he said. “Are you disqualified from deencryptin’ your caller ID? What do I want? I want you to dispatch yourself to my constabulary on the double. I need you to deodorize my ambiance. What do I mean? I mean get your fat ass over here and clean my goddamn house! Oh, you will if you ever want to ingest my weed again—and bring Laeesha with you.”

  Junior left, but two girls were coming over to clean the house, which would no doubt include the laundry room.

  Grace called. “Are you all right?” Isaiah said.

  “I’m in the laundry room,” she whispered. “I think the money’s in the washing machine.”

  “Don’t worry about the money. Stay quiet. I’ll get you out of there in a couple of minutes.” Isaiah ended the call.

  “Did you just say don’t worry about it?” Dodson said. “I need that money, Isaiah.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Then why’d you tell her that?” Deronda said.

  “If they hear her and go in, they’ll kill her. Do you want that on your heads?”

  “Forget it, you’re right,” Dodson said. Deronda looked like it was a fifty-fifty call.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Talk to Junior.”

  “Talk to Junior? How? You got a translator that speaks gibberish?”

  Junior looked him up and down when he came to the door. “And who might you be?”

  “Isaiah Quintabe.”

  “That name has no validation with me.”

  “They call me IQ.”

  “Your initials don’t clarify your job description.”

  “Your neighbor said you got robbed,” Isaiah said. “I thought I could help.”

  “Junior DeWitt don’t need no help. Now I suggest you exit my domicile while you still have the capacity to relocate your ass on outta here.”

  Michael Stokely appeared. “I heard of him. He’s some kinda private detective. He helped out my homeboy Cheesy.”

  Isaiah entered the living room he’d been standing in a few minutes ago, the group eyeing him skeptically. “I’ll look around first. Do you mind if I do this alone? I don’t want the crime scene contaminated.”

  “If you’re wasting my time your oblivion is irrefutable,” Junior said. “And we might kill your ass too.”

  Isaiah wandered from room to room, not really looking at anything, pleased that it had worked out this way. It made things a lot easier. He texted Grace Get out now, and he heard her go out the back door. He returned to the living room.

  “Did you discover anything irrelevant?” Junior said.

  Isaiah paused a moment, blinked. “As a matter of fact I did.” He took two items out of his pocket and handed them to Junior. “Do you recognize these?”

  “No, I’ve never perceived them in my entire life-span.”

  “Well, they were in your house.”

  Grace drove away from Junior’s, Deronda seated next to her with the Adidas bag on her lap, Dodson and Isaiah in the back. Deronda unzipped the bag and looked inside. “Check this out. Must be a million dollars in here.” She tipped it back so Dodson could see it.

  He took a quick glance. “I’d say that’s sixty, seventy thousand, around in there. I hope that’s enough to make Chester happy.”

  “Grace?” Deronda said. “I’m sorry for what I said. You stuck your neck out for us and I owe you big-time.”

  “No you don’t,” Grace said with a soft smile.

  “You sure we gotta give all the money to Chester?” Deronda said. “How would he know if some of this fell out the car?”

  “Can’t be too much or he’ll know,” Dodson said. “How much you think, Isaiah?”

  “When are you supposed to pay him?”

  “Tomorrow. We could stall him.”

  “Then do that. Let’s wait for a bit. See what comes up.”

  When they arrived back at Shop ’n Save, Deronda gave Grace a hug. “Thank you, baby. You ever need something you let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “Talk to me for a minute, Isaiah,” Dodson said. Isaiah walked him to his car. “This shit ain’t over,” Dodson said. “Even if we pay Chester he’ll be back for more.” He read Isaiah’s look. “You got a plan, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure it’ll work.”

  “I gotta get home. We’ll talk about it, okay? How you doin’ with Grace?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get used to it,” Dodson said. “I been with Cherise for a while now, and she surprises me every day. I’ll see you later—partner.”

  Two a.m. Isaiah peeked through the blinds and saw Grace in her dirty clothes, putting her toolbox into the GTI. He was resentful. All he’d done for her and she couldn’t let him in on it? He’d had enough. He was going to go out there and demand to know what was going on. He was putting on his hoodie when Grace came in.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “I want you to come with me.”

  Neither of them said a word on the drive over. They got out of the car and she held his hand as they walked toward the garage. He felt like he was about to open Tutankhamen’s tomb or get a first look at the Holy Grail.

  “I guess you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing,” she said.

  “A little,” he said with a quick shrug.

  She opened the door and turned on the light. There was the car with a cover over it, the one he’d seen before. “I’ve been working on it a long time,” she said. “I’ve got things left to do but it’s mostly there. Want to take off the cover?”

  He went to the front of the car and pulled the cover toward him, slowly, enjoying the drama, Grace rigid with anticipation. It felt like there should be a soundtrack. The cover slid over the roof, down the windshield, over the hood, puddling on the floor. He recognized the car. A ’68 Mustang GT, racing green with black wheels. It was beautiful but it didn’t answer any questions. He walked around it, examining every part carefully. If the body had been restored you couldn’t tell. Seamless surface, perfect paint. Every inch of chrome gleaming, every detail of the interior showroom-new. The car looked familiar but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “Where have I seen this before?” he said.

  “It’s the Mustang Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt.”

  “You mean the actual car? Couldn’t be.”

  “Everybody thought there were two of them,” Grace said, “but there were really three. They needed one for the scenes, one as a spare, and one for rehearsal. A collector has the first one, Fox Studio is restoring the second, and this is the rehearsal car. They crashed it before shooting started.”

  “How do you know it’s the real thing?” he said.

  “Fox. Their name is on the registration.” The car suddenly seemed bigger and brighter. “Nobody knew it would be valuable so it was sold for parts.”

  “How did you find it?” he said.

  “I didn’t. Dad did. He was stationed at an army depot up near Herlong for a while. When he was on leave, sometimes he’d go to San Francisco. He was in a salvage yard looking for—I don’t k
now what it was, but somehow, he found the car.” She smiled like she was seeing her dad tell the story. “He said it was a miracle, like magic, like the car had been waiting for him.” Her eyes brimmed with tears, her voice broke. “It was his dream car. He loved it so much.” She bowed her head. “He loved it so much.” Isaiah went to her and held her and she wept.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The God of Freedom

  Grace entered the knife shop. Chester was wearing a bib and had what she hoped was tomato sauce clinging to his fangs.

  “Hello again!” he bellowed. He went for a hug and she couldn’t escape. He folded her into him, his body squishy and massive, reeking of a cologne that smelled like dead muskrats in an orange grove. She kept her hands on his hips to keep his groin from touching her. Finally, he let go. “You’re looking quite lovely today, my dear. Tell me, how did your father like the knife?”

  “Oh, he loved it! He said it was the best present ever!”

  “Are you here to get him another?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I’m actually here to ask you a favor.”

  “Ask away!”

  “I was hoping I could take some pictures?” she said in her meekest voice. “Dad really wants to see the shop.”

  Chester was ever so pleased. “Why, certainly!”

  Grace took a few shots of the displays and Chester posing with his wares. He looked like a salesman for a tribe of Vikings, holding that battle axe. He insisted on taking selfies, his ponderous arm around her. It reminded her of Gordo.

  “Chester, would it be okay if I took some pictures of your workshop?”

  “Why, of course!” he said with a gallant sweep of his arm. “Right this way.” They went into the back. There was a long workbench. Scattered about were unpolished blades, tools, grinders, rivets, handle materials, and other stuff she didn’t recognize.