“Yo, son,” the smallest teen said to the largest, “I finally found your daddy!” The other teen laughed and the big boy, clearly not quick-witted, mumbled a weak comeback. The smallest guy, who D heard the others call Coo, got a malicious expression on his tight, mean face as he looked at the papers wrapped around the homeless man and then reached into one of his sagged pants pockets.
Out came a crumpled matchbook. He lit one match and threw it in the general direction of the homeless man. The match fell harmlessly to the floor.
The biggest teen, known to his fellow Bloods as Ray Ray, seized upon this moment to regain his honor. He took out his lighter and then sat on the bench as the homeless man slept unknowingly below him. “This nigga stinks!” he announced, and began lowering the lighter.
“Don’t do that!” D Hunter spoke with force, but he didn’t shout. It was a strong, flat statement. Not a demand, really. Just a very firm statement. Still, it startled Ray Ray, who immediately clicked off the lighter. Coo and Tone, the midsize teen, glared at the speaker. D now stood near the stairs, his hands in his jacket pockets, his eyes locked on them. Coo had a hearing coming up on Monday about an assault on a classmate, a pocketful of marijuana, and a girl waiting for him in Washington Heights who’d just gotten off her job as a barmaid. He didn’t need the static. Still, you couldn’t let some old nigga dis you.
“Who the fuck ya talkin’ to?”
When D Hunter spoke, he knew there could be a problem, but it wasn’t his nature to be an innocent bystander. Instead of waiting for the three to gather themselves, D walked toward them. Slowly. Calmly. “No need,” he said, “for you brothers to get in trouble over some dumb shit.” D ignored Tone but kept his eye on Coo and Ray Ray, who was only an inch or so smaller than him. He knew if he could cool out the smaller kid, things wouldn’t have to escalate. He wasn’t packing, but having his hands in his pockets didn’t let them know that. He was now close enough to smell the homeless man himself.
D was smiling when, out of the corner of his left eye, he saw Tone reach into his pants pocket. He immediately recognized a box cutter in the teen’s hand and knew that, as a general rule with young boys, box cutters traveled in packs. So with a quick sidestep left, D moved toward Tone. Using his left palm to brace himself, D went down and swung his legs around, smacking them right into Tone’s midsection. Both the box cutter and the teen went flying backward off the platform and onto the tracks.
D landed sideways, his leather jacket scrapping against the floor as Ray came at him with a raised size-thirteen boot. Twenty-first-century kids are deficient in the old urban skill of boxing; those with deft hands are more likely to DJ than throw blows. But the rise of big, heavy boots as inner-city fashion had elevated stomping. Now it was an essential part of any fight. Pushing a man down and then stomping him senseless was a primary fight strategy of the hip hop generation, and this kid was determined to display his skills.
As Ray Ray raised his left boot, D reached out both his hands and yanked his assailant’s right leg. Ray Ray, both feet in the air, flipped up and back, landing with a solid thud against the cold concrete platform. He grabbed the back of his head in pain, emitting a childish wail and crying. “Coo!” he shouted. “Help me, Coo!”
Alas, Coo was gone. Just as Ray Ray crashed to the platform, Coo had turned and jetted up a staircase, leaving the fate of his two friends in the hands of this surprising adult.
“Bitch-ass nigga,” D said under his breath, as the rumble of an incoming uptown C train filled his ears. He looked over at the platform where Tone was struggling, groggy and glassy-eyed, to get to his feet.
All the lights were green at the Chambers Street station when D jumped down onto the tracks, grabbed Tone around the waist, and with one motion, tossed the teen onto the platform.
On the ride uptown on the C train, D sat next to two boxer cutters, five bags of herb, a two-way, a beeper, $323 in cash ($52 of it bloody), a couple of wrinkled condom packets, and one worn-out wallet. He looked down at his treasure and then up at Ray Ray, who held D’s black handkerchief to the back of his neck.
“This wasn’t at all necessary, Ray Ray,” D said to his new acquaintance.
“I know. Coo is always startin’ shit.”
Tone was slumped across from them on a seat, looking menacingly at D but too sore and defeated to do anything about it.
“Why you ain’t call the po-po?” Ray Ray asked.
“I don’t think it would solve anything,” D said. “You and your brother just need to start hanging out with a better class of Blood.”
“How you know we brothers? Half-brothers really. Most people don’t see it.”
D grunted. “I just know.” He was silent a moment and then said, “You know, you could get a real job, Ray Ray. One that pays all right, is steady, and could give you a little action. Even a little authority.”
“I know you ain’t the police.”
“That’s right,” D responded. “But I am in the safety business. You know, Ray Ray, the world as it is now: everybody wants to feel safe. What I do is help them. Maybe you can be of assistance someday.”
The burly teen just looked at his enemy/benefactor as if he were crazy.
* * *
Back in his apartment in the hours before D closed his blinds, he pressed play on his CD player and slid on the blinders to cover his eyes. He lay in bed smiling as music filled his little room, obscuring the stale aroma of static air, funky socks, and takeout Thai food. D was transported to a place where he felt loved, where complex problems were solved by laughter and the air smelled of yellow roses rubbed against a lover’s wet thighs. No confusion. No roadblocks. No money problems.
In this state there was a sense of elevation and peace that allowed D to lie motionless for hours. The two-way was off. The phone was off. Manhattan’s hum, constant, exciting, and ultimately maddening, disappeared when confronted by the bass-and-drum grooves that rolled over his body. Time stopped. At least D felt it did, which was all that really mattered anyway. Some long-ago girlfriend called this place D’s dungeon. Maybe when she became a woman she’d understand why D loved the stillness of his music-filled room and how hard it was to share.
D reveled in his CD-equipped dungeon. Once in this mood, he measured his movements closely since, if this was truly a dungeon, he wanted to feel his chains, to feel his flesh strain against them. Mostly he played moody mid-nineties music made by morose, obsessive Brits—Tricky, Portishead, Seal, Massive Attack. On certain nights he’d throw on some old-school alternative—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam—music by the depressed junkies of rainy Seattle. Almost no rap. None of those juvenile male R&B singers. None of those groups singing songs for black-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-da-nigga-forgot-to-beep. D avoided the music of black people defined by clichés.
It was one of the many reasons he still played a lot of Adrian Dukes. Not that there was a lot to hear. The man only made two albums. Still, Adrian Dukes moved him. His voice made D remember and forget and feel strange and smile, and then D started crying, one crystalline tear after the other. Adrian Dukes wasn’t Otis or Teddy or Marvin or Aretha, though who knows what he could have done if he’d lived longer. Yet Dukes had had his own thing—a voice that was as salty and sad as a drop of water from the big brown eye of a black baby boy who suspected that the best part of life was over the moment he’d left the womb.
Dukes reminded D of his brothers. He reminded D of his mother. He reminded D of his family’s living room closet, and somehow that made D feel safe. D played the music of Adrian Dukes as if his songs were hymns, or maybe they just sounded that way because Dukes had the voice of a choirboy. Maybe it was because he’d committed suicide at twenty-seven, leaping out of a Manhattan hotel room and into the footnotes of R&B history.
For all those reasons, D’s mother had played Dukes’s big hit, “Green Lights,” religiously.
Green lights
(As far as the eye can see)
Green l
ights
(Yet you’re still so far away from me)
Green lights
(Make your voice stop calling me)
Green lights
(You are the love I could never keep)
Green lights
Green lights
Oh yeah, bright, bright green lights
Adrian Dukes had taken Zena Hunter to an elevated, pretty place, far removed from the cold, calculating streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn. D remembered the nights that Dukes’s “Green Lights” played on the living room stereo. He’d crawl out of bed to watch his mother on the love seat with the ripped, already yellowing plastic covering. She’d be by the window facing the parking lot in her powder-blue bathrobe. A Kahlúa and cream sat on a glass holder on the marble living room table, Zena’s face silhouetted by lights from the project building across the parking lot. So many nights, that’s what D saw as he crouched in the hallway with his cheek pressed against the wall.
One time in the elevator after school, Mrs. Sumner, their next-door neighbor, had remarked, offhandedly, maybe, but with some malice, that his mother played that Adrian Dukes too much, that his song poured through her wall like a damn leak. “Don’t you want her to listen to something else too?” she had asked young D. He’d just shrugged the way kids do when they’re too young to dis adults and then helped Mrs. Sumner carry groceries to her door and walked down to his family’s three-bedroom apartment, empty because Ma was at work, pressed play on “Green Lights” with the bass knob on ten, and pulled out one of his mother’s Heinekens. He’d sat by the window where his mother usually sat, hoping that maybe one day, as that song flooded her apartment, Mrs. Sumner would find the same comfort in Adrian Dukes that his mother did. And if Mrs. Sumner didn’t, D figured he could live with that.
Chapter Four
The point guard had pretty legs. It was not often D could say that about someone bringing the ball up court, but this particular afternoon at the Reebok Sports Club, he couldn’t lie. He loved the way the shorts hung from the point guard’s thighs.
So D wasn’t happy when a knucklehead investment banker with a bad toupee tried to post-up his point guard, the lovely Mercedez, by shoving his butt into her stomach and swinging his arms too liberally. The ball flipped the banker’s way and, with undisguised glee, he prepped to school Mercedez. As he turned to fake, D made his move. By the time the banker began to release the ball, D was airborne. With outright malice, D came across and smashed the ball right into the banker’s mug. Down went the banker, his nose a rosy red.
“Sorry,” D said, “I got too aggressive.”
“You sure did.” This wasn’t the banker, but Mercedez, who’d caught D’s elbow in the head. The investment banker glared and stared, but after a brief pause for the cause, they finished out the run.
“Were you trying to help me or hurt me?” Mercedez asked as they left the court.
“I guess you’ll never know,” D replied.
“All I know,” said Jeff, who’d been playing with them, “is that he lets me get posted on the regular.”
The Reebok was a super-yuppie gym on Manhattan’s West Side. NBA-quality court. Every damn fitness machine imaginable. Scores of trainers. Two restaurants. Four floors. Upscale but not snobbish clientele. Sprinkled in among the white collars were rap stars, ticket scalpers, loan sharks, and private investigators.
Jeff loved the Reebok because the few sistas who worked out there tended to be models, record executives, or personal trainers—three types of women he related to easily. Jeff ran with Mercedez and D, though ball wasn’t his passion. He was addicted to Reebok’s Jacuzzi.
“Jeff,” D warned, “you are gonna turn into a prune.”
“True,” he answered, “but I’m gonna be the most chilled out motherfucking prune ever, son.”
After showering, Mercedez and D met in Reebok’s cafeteria-style dining area for smoothies fortified with protein. Mercedez sat down across from D and, out of the blue, said, “You know, D, you’re full of shit.”
“Okay, what did I do?”
“You gave me that speech when I got the job about being laid-back and not using violence, but I see you definitely go for yours.”
“Mercedez,” D replied, “I do mean what I say. I shouldn’t have touched Brookins. I should have spoken first. And you really shouldn’t have tripped him. You know, if you’d let him attack me, I’d have had a possible assault charge to hold against him.”
“So what you’re saying is I should have let him jump you?”
“Kinda,” D said thoughtfully. “At least then I’d have some leverage if he tries to sue me or the company. Listen, I’m not mad at you, Mercedez. It’s just that we have to be smart about what we do. This company is still young. It’s not even walking yet. I’m not full of shit, but my judgment isn’t always as good as my philosophy.”
“But,” a third voice said, “it’s a lot better than it is used to be.” It was Jeff, his skin flush from the Jacuzzi. “This man tries to act all calm and shit, but you know, there’s a lot of bully in him. I bet he used to take plenty of lunch money when he was a kid.”
“Nah,” D said. “I was a quiet kid. Read books.”
“You believe him, Mercedez?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Thank you.”
“You know,” she went on, “I get the feeling there’s a little boy inside this big guy.”
“Oh,” Jeff groaned, “if you’re gonna talk like that about this dusty motherfucker, I’m leaving.”
“No, we’re all leaving,” D said. “We have a meeting and since I own the company, I need to be there.”
In the cab downtown, Jeff and Mercedez started talking about what they had done on New Year’s Eve 1999. She had been dancing to merengue with cousins at a house party on the Grand Concourse. Jeff had worked, watching the back of a pop star as she and her pals did white lines in a Midtown hotel suite.
“What about you, D?” she asked.
“I just visited with some family,” D answered. “Real low-key. To me it was just another night at the end of a day. It didn’t change anything. Not for me it didn’t.”
Jeff, an often excitable guy, took issue with D and rolled into an explanation of all the changes the new century had brought forth, from Internet billions to 9/11. D just got quiet and gazed out the window.
* * *
There were already two members of D Security waiting when they got there. Within fifteen minutes, three more of the team had arrived. A half hour later, ten men and two women piled into the conference room. Once a month, the staff of D Security gathered together to catch up and compare notes. Danny Wallace, a burly, slightly effeminate bouncer from Hollis, talked about the latest trend in drag queens—black guys dressed as Britney Spears. Jeff Fuchs talked about the growth of the Bloods gang and how it was affecting security at hip hop parties. When it was D’s turn he talked about money: “Between salaries, insurance, medical, overhead for the office, and miscellaneous, we’re in the red for the third month in a row.” The room was quiet and then Jeff, trying to lighten the mood, said, “Sowhatchasayin’?”
“I’m saying the concept of D Security is sound, but we simply need to bring in more business.”
There was a lot of discontented grumbling after D’s announcement. Some wanted to lose the office. Others suggested charging more. They all agreed on one thing—whoever brought in new clients received a 10 percent commission on the deal. Afterward, when only D and Jeff were left, they sat in D’s black-walled office. Jeff’s right leg pumped up and down as he spoke.
“Yo, son,” he said in a high-pitched, rapid tone, the relaxation of the Jacuzzi long gone, “we can’t let this go down. If this company closes up, I got to go look for work again. You know that can be hard for me.” Jeff had a small but pungent criminal record that included breaking and entering at a sneaker store when he was twenty (he was going to hawk the overpriced footwear for wholesale prices) and robbing a cabbie at knife-point two blocks from
One Police Plaza (“By the time I got up my nerve, we were already downtown”). Not the résumé of a hardened thug, but certainly not that of a white-collar employee either. Between his stint in a methadone center, his white-Negro accent, and his high-school equivalency diploma, Jeff was a white man with limited prospects.
Besides, handling the door at Manhattan nightclubs gave Jeff prestige and power he both adored and needed. Although not incredibly lucrative, club security was steady, and you met stars and young women in really tight dresses. “D, I know another way we could make some paper.” D could tell by Jeff’s hungry expression that he wasn’t going to like the suggestion. “We could just start taxing some of the dealers at the Tea Party and the other spots. We don’t have to carry no weight—just tap the flow.”
“Life’s too short,” D said, sounding as final as a coffin closing. “I’m not getting my hands dirty. Neither are you. We can build D Security into a real business, Jeff. We can get out of entertainment and eventually provide guards for banks, malls, the works. Everybody these days is afraid of everybody else—fuck what the crime stats say. The whole world wants to feel safe and no one does. We just need to stay afloat to capitalize on it. Taxing drug dealers will just pull us down.”
Jeff, to D’s surprise, simply sat back and let him talk. When D was through, his friend sighed. “Sorry I brought it up, D. I know how you feel about being safe and all that.” Jeff was going to let it drop, but then anger flashed in his pale blue eyes and his voice filled with jailhouse passion. “But if we really need to get a little dirty to stay in business . . . Don’t be proud, D,” he said. “I want to stay legal. But you and I both know not everybody legal is clean. Surviving is what it’s really about.”
The Accidental Hunter Page 4