The Accidental Hunter

by Nelson George

  “Blond hair?”

  “Yeah, dog, the hair was wrong and her clothes were wrong, but she moved like Areea. It was the way she strutted. I was gonna step to her but, you know, I wasn’t sure.”

  “You did the right thing. How long ago was this?”

  “Ten minutes or so.”

  “Good looking out.”

  D announced her description into the earpiece and his words flowed out to the Beacon staff, the D Security team, and the NYPD. He’d seen at least three or four women with hair like that. It was so conspicuous. Made for a laughable disguise unless that was somehow the point.

  “It went well, huh?” Ivy Greenwich stood next to D, looking older than D had ever seen him.

  “Yeah, I guess. You still manage her. Her value has been enhanced and all who opposed you have been subdued. Nice.”

  “My son is in the hospital and under police custody, D. That isn’t nice.”

  “At least it’s settled.”

  “You know how family is, D. It’s never settled. Not until the day you die.”

  “Thank you, everybody, and good night!” Bridgette shouted for the cameras, and then headed toward D in the wings, surrounded by the cream of hip hop’s hierarchy. She grabbed D’s arm and walked straight toward the backstage door. Ivy was a stride or two behind. D’s eyes roamed the corridor, looking for a black blond girl. He felt as if he were in a video game waiting for a shooter to pop out from a doorway. The backstage door was just ahead. Jeff Fuchs stood there holding it open.

  To D’s left, four young black women in blond hair emerged from a dressing room. One had short hair. One had fried hair. One had braids. One had an Afro. D did the wrong thing—he stopped dead in his tracks, trying to figure out who was who. His indecision was all the time Areea needed. Out came the plastic gun from her bag. D grabbed Bridgette and threw her behind his body. Areea fired and a bullet whizzed past D’s left shoulder. She aimed and fired right past D again—he thought he smelled gunpowder—and a spray of blood popped into the air. Areea threw her head back in a laugh. D leaped at her, knocking the little weapon from her fingers and pushing her to the ground. Along with Jeff, D pressed her against the floor, her wig askew, her makeup a mess.

  Bridgette screamed. D looked around and watched as Ivy Greenwich stood alone in a sea of frightened people, holding his stomach with both hands as blood flowed through them.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  D sat behind his desk at D Security and listened as Kirby Turner spoke. “If you agree to these terms the check will be at your accountant’s office tomorrow afternoon.”

  “So your office will handle all the paperwork for me?”

  “Just like I told your lawyer, D. All you have to do is keep people safe and keep seeking out new business opportunities. You are a famous brand in the security world now. You saved a star twice in one week. You’ve seen the calls you’ve received. Everybody wants to feel safe, especially in this world right now. You represent security.”

  “Tell that to poor Ivy,” he said sadly.

  “Well, that woman was trying to shoot Bridgette Haze.”

  “Maybe. Areea’s not talking.” He paused a moment and looked down at the papers. “Yeah, everybody wants to feel safe.”

  His staff was in the next room waiting patiently at the conference table when he and Kirby walked in. She sat in the seat Mercedez used to occupy. Mercedez sat on the other side, next to Jeff. D sat in his usual spot and told them that KT Investments had put a “substantial sum” into D Security and that “effective immediately” she would be the new CFO and that all paychecks would come through her office. In addition, the staff would have to submit to new background checks and sign confidentiality agreements that would be legally binding.

  Clarence laughed. “Is that all, baby?” he said to Kirby.

  “For now,” she said, “unless you wanna discuss more with me after the meeting.”

  D cleared his throat. “Okay, does anybody have any real questions?”

  Clarence spoke up again: “What about Bridgette Haze?”

  D got a little irritated. “What about her, Clarence?”

  “Are we still working for her? I never got that autograph for my niece.”

  “No, we are not.” D looked around the room. It got very quiet. “She ran into Will Smith at a party and is now using the same people he does—ex-Israeli–secret service folk.”

  “Fuck her.” It was Jeff.

  “Okay,” D said, “that’s all ancient history. Let’s go over our assignments for this week and show Ms. Turner how sharp we are.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Bridgette sat on the sand at Zuma Beach, still in a wet suit. A boogie board lay at her feet. It was a warm April morning in California. “I’m looking forward to Asia. I’ve always wanted to vacation there.”

  D lay in bed in Manhattan, his shades drawn, the blanket pulled up to his neck. It was after one in the afternoon. D was in no rush to get up.

  “Doesn’t sound like much of vacation, Bridgette. Tokyo, Osaka, and then South Korea and Thailand.”

  “I’ll find time for dancing and sun, D. Believe me. So how’s your side?”

  “Got the bullet in a little bottle on my desk. I can’t play ball for another couple of months, though there’s been some discussion of me taking up yoga.”

  “Cool. I love yoga. We can do a class when I come back.”

  “Yeah,” he said unenthusiastically. Then with real concern he asked, “So how’s your family holding up?”

  “My parents are doing as well as you could expect. We got another shrink coming to see Jen. Our attorney thinks the DA may go along with a mental-illness defense—I think that’s what they call it. We’ll see, you know. It’s been tough. Family shit. I know you know.”

  “Yeah,” he replied softly. “Bridgette, I don’t think we should do yoga together.”

  She giggled. “The big black man is scared of being embarrassed.”

  “In a way. I’m still getting calls from reporters, Bridgette, and they’re not asking about you anymore. They’re asking about me. Who am I and other silly shit like that. I can’t have that. You’re just too famous for me.”

  There was a long silence on the line from California. “Are you dumping me?” she asked finally.

  “I’m just being realistic about who you are and who I am.”

  “I can’t believe you would say something so silly. That’s kiddie talk, D. I know you’re a man. Just be the man you are and it’ll all be okay.”

  “No. No, it won’t. I know who I am, Bridgette. You need to be realistic and recognize who you are. What I’m saying is for the best.”

  “The best?”

  Bridgette clicked off her cell and tossed it onto the Malibu sand.

  D placed his phone on the bed and looked across the room at the photo of his family.

  * * *

  Four hours later D stood next to his mother in a church off Eastern Parkway in the ghetto end of Brooklyn, not that far from the street where he was born, scarred, and shaped. His mother, Zena, held his arm. The wedding march began, with the melody being carried by the saxophonist from Night’s touring band.

  “There’s quite a few nice black girls who attend this church, Dervin,” his mother said. “They cook. They have regular jobs.”

  “Ma, don’t you think you should be focusing on your marriage?”

  “I got mine, Dervin Hunter. What do you have? You have a business. That’s good, but that is not a life. Besides, I want some grandchildren and you have to give them to me. You know you’re my only son.”

  “I know, Ma.”

  D tugged at her arm as the organ played the wedding march, and they moved forward down the aisle.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was dark when D slipped out of the reception being held in the church’s basement. He’d danced with his mother and stiffly hugged his new stepfather and even flirted briefly with one of Willis Watson’s chunky but funky divorced daughter
s. He had a TZL car take him out of Brooklyn to Queens, to a long cemetery that twisted around an elevated roadway into Manhattan. Of course the cemetery was closed, but D had done this before. Heedless of his loafers or his suit, D scaled the low wall. They were just clothes. They’d be old one day. Just be things he used to wear when he was young.

  The swoosh of cars and fleeting beams of light filled the dark cemetery. There was no silence on these grounds. No sense of peace and quiet. Modern life still seeped into the afterlife for those buried here, so D felt no need to be embarrassed by this intrusion. Appropriately, he came upon Matty’s grave first. Turning to his right, he knew Rashid was two graves down and Jah just three beyond him. And to D’s left, three plots down, he could see construction had begun on the stone structure that would reunite the Hunter clan just as if they’d been dining on a Sunday afternoon.

  He sat down on Matty’s grave, plucked his pillbox from inside his jacket and the bottle of Evian from his side pocket. He washed his meds down with mineral water and then lay down, his head near Matty’s headstone. One day he’d join them, he thought, and finally he wouldn’t feel so guilty for being alive, so angry at them for leaving, or so profoundly alone. Until then he’d continue to live the best he could. After all, in this world, everybody wanted to feel safe.

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  ___________________

  I’VE GOT DREAMS TO REMEMBER

  D Hunter had been having sad, traumatic, musical, sometimes unspeakable, oft times prophetic dreams since he was eight. All three of his brothers had been murdered in Brownsville by then, so there was no doubt that this trauma had twisted up homeboy’s subconscious.

  But did these dreams really contain prophecies? He never understood them while they were happening. Not until well after the fact was their truth revealed. He certainly didn’t think he deserved foresight and he sure as hell didn’t want it, since it felt more an affliction than a comfort. D’s dream on his last night living in Manhattan had gone like this:

  A soul singer, resplendent in a shark fin–silver suit with three buttons open on his white shirt, was onstage at some Chitlin’ Circuit palace that could have been Harlem’s Apollo, Chicago’s Regal, Philly’s Uptown, or DC’s Howard back when a Negro’s big-city life was trapped within a few square miles per metropolis.

  But the soul singer wasn’t singing. From his open mouth came the percussive sounds of bass, drums, and even keyboards, as if Doug E. Fresh had been teleported back to the ’60s. Break beats—“Funky Drummer,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat,” “Tramp,” songs recorded before D was born and reanimated by DJs and B-boys—exploded in a barrage of rhythm.

  D sat alone, orchestra center, row E, seat twenty-four, his eyes locked with the shark skin–suited beat boxer as the lights went down and the singer became a living black-light poster with his teeth, cuff links, and pocket square radiating a blue neon glow.

  Three female background singers appeared floating behind the singer, cooing some nonsense doo-wop sounds like street-corner kids from the ’50s. Yet they were garbed in matching red Adidas sweat suits, classic white-shell toes, and the kind of red Kangols that LL used to rock. Doo-wop and hip hop, the neon blue lights, and the beats assaulted D and sent him scurrying out his seat, up the aisle, and into the lobby’s blinding white light.

  And then D woke up.

  100 YARD DASH

  Here’s how it worked. A white van swung down Rockaway Avenue about seven p.m. every couple of months and scooped up a group of women waiting in the shadow of the elevated BMT subway station at Livonia Avenue. They were mostly stocky, as Brownsville women tended to be, and held their gear in shopping bags. They wore old Baby Phat sweat suits (with the long cat logo) or newer House of Deréon or Apple Bottoms jeans purchased on Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville’s main shopping drag. One or two had little kids with them. A few were missing front teeth. The vets spoke to each other—recounting old fights and showing off their newest scars. A newbie or two stood off to the side eyeing the competition, wondering which of these women they’d be punching in a few hours.

  In the van Deuce Chainz, the promoter of the Brooklyn B-Girl Fight Club, laid it down for first timers. Winner got three hundred dollars. Losers got fifty. Three rounds of two minutes each. Taped hands but no gloves. Mouth guards. Headgear. No biting. No spitting (unless accidental). No fighting in the van home afterward or you get kicked to the curb.

  Once filled with these distaff warriors, the van rolled through a corridor of public housing, past the Tilden, Van Dyke, and Brownsville projects, scattered crumbling tenements from the twentieth century, some tracts of new local church–developed private homes, and then made a right into an industrial park of nondescript two- and three-story factories and warehouses.

  The fights moved around to one of three locations in this industrial park up toward Atlantic Avenue. Except for the trainers, the audience was invitation only. Hustlers, thugs, gamblers, pimps, and other choice customers filled the room. Tims, low-slung jeans, colorful underwear, and red bandannas, both in back pockets and around necks, were in abundance. Guns were checked at the door, though Deuce Chainz’s security guards wore visible holsters to let niggas know. This, after all, was the Brooklyn B-Girl Fight Club, a place as combustible as a ghetto gas oven.

  Usually deserted at night save the occasional truck, on this evening the street in front of the industrial building teemed with jeeps and pedestrians, a miniparade of folks from Brownsville, East New York, and as far uptown as the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. It was a bimonthly ritual in the heart of the hood that had given the world Eddie “Mustafa” Gregory, Riddick Bowe, and “Iron” Mike Tyson. Brownsville was many things, and one of them was a place where bloody knuckles reigned supreme.

  Those standing outside trying to talk their way in were not surprised to see a black Denali jeep parked in front. For any ghetto celebrity, the Brooklyn B-Girl Fight Club was a requisite stop. Some thought the vehicle belonged to fight fan 50 Cent or maybe BK’s de facto mayor Jay-Z. Instead, the hottest young MC in the city, Asya Roc, popped out of the jeep, china-white do-rag offset by his almond, girlish eyes and a mouthful of fronts as amber as a harvest moon.

  By his side, in an oversized black tee, black jeans, and sneakers, and a woolly natural hairstyle, was D Hunter: bodyguard, student of musical history, owner of a failing security company, HIV positive, and Brownsville native son.

  D never enjoyed coming to these fights (watching out-of-shape women bash for cash didn’t move him), but quite a few Brooklyn MCs did, such as tonight’s client. D was to go with him here and then accompany him to John F. Kennedy International Airport and put him on a flight to Europe. Asya Roc was a new breed of New York rap star who rhymed like he was from ATL or Texas. Atlanta, Memphis, and Miami ran hip hop in the twenty-first century’s second decade, and if you wanted to be on the radio, even in New York, you had better put some twang in your delivery, cuz. Asya was from Canarsie, but on record he sounded like a Southern boy cruising in a candy-colored Caddy.

  The bout underway featured Bloody Knuckles versus BAD, a.k.a. Bad Azz Beeyatch. Bloody Knuckles was a big gal with short dyed-blond hair and a couple of twisty tattoos on her fleshy, light-brown arms. She had no technique but swung fast and often and would definitely hurt you when she landed solid. BAD was taller but slighter, with Michael Jordan–like dark-chocolate skin, actual muscle tone, and she had some training. Her jab was very crisp and quickly she was bloodying her knuckles on Bloody Knuckles’s nose. Jab. Jab. Jab.

  Asya stood next to Junot, a Dominican fool with more diamonds in his mouth than on his glittering chain. The two were rooting for different girls just for the hell of it. Neither was invested in the fighters—as athletes, women, or even human beings.

  From behind D a voice said, “You got a
good heart, dude.”

  D turned to his right and there stood Ice, big bald head, thin salt-and-pepper line of a hair around his jawline, and drooping eyes. His burly shoulders, product of many jailhouse bench-press reps, were the size of newborn babies. The last time D had seen Ice was in the basement of a house in Canarsie a couple of years back. Also in that basement, tied to a chair, had been a rogue FBI agent (and wannabe hip hop mogul) named Eric Mayer, a nasty manipulator who’d engineered the killing of a woman dear to D along with two decades of other foul behavior. D had nodded his consent and hadn’t looked back. The rogue agent hadn’t been heard from and these two hadn’t spoken since.

  “Quiet has kept, you do too,” D said back.

  “In my own damn way.” He gazed over at Asya Roc. “You backstopping the star over there?”

  “As best I can.”

  “Hope you can get him out of here safe,” Ice said. “A lot of people in here would like to pistol-whip him and then piss on what’s left.”

  “I just work for him sometimes.”

  “Yeah. You can’t be with him all the time.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to be.”

  “I bet. He’s why I’m here.” Ice touched the backpack hanging off his left shoulder.

  “This a delivery?” D asked, now worried.

  Ice nodded. “All the way from one of those states where you can buy gats like Tic Tacs.”

  “Why are you doing it yourself?”

  “Better me than one of these damn fool kids. Niggas get stupider every day. Believe that.”

  Over Ice’s shoulder D noticed a wiry young man who, sans forty pounds and years of hard living, looked a lot like Ice. Clearly they were kin. “He with you?” D asked.

  Ice didn’t even turn around. “For the moment.”

  The young man looked uneasy and a little angry. Upon hearing Ice’s comment he walked away, muttering, “I’ma go get some water.”

  Bloody Knuckles had absorbed the smaller woman’s jabs the entire first round—kind of a ghetto rope-a-dope—and was now using her weight to bully her opponent into corners and was smacking BAD upside the head with disrespectful vigor. It seemed just a matter of time before the smaller woman went down.