by D
You remain calm as a woman who you know is somebody’s mama leads you to the basement where the safe deposit boxes are kept. She examines your key as she slips it into the lock next to hers. Then she gives you privacy.
The bills inside aren’t organized. They’ve been stuffed in there in odd increments. Nothing is bound. So you end up stuffing it all into the gym bag you picked up on the way. You slide an empty box back into its container and make your way up out of the branch, walking right past the lady you were supposed to notify when you were taking off. But it’s no matter. Neither you nor your cousin will ever set foot in this branch again.
Duronté is sweating bullets when you climb back into the car.
“What the fuck took you so long?”
“You don’t know how to fold and stack?”
His face turns red. “Oh,” he stutters. “My bad.”
“So where it gonna be?”
He gets a one-way ticket to Memphis from Birmingham. The plan is for him to drive to Alabama, sell his car, find a motel for the night, and then cab it to the train station. He buys a prepaid cell from one place and a phone card from another. Then he drops you off at the first MARTA station you come across.
“Handle this for me,” he mutters in a way that says he’s doing more asking than telling.
“I’ma do what I do,” you say with a grin. “Everything’s gonna be straight.”
He turns onto Piedmont and filters into a stream of busy traffic. You don’t watch him leave. You know that if anything, he will be the one to survive this. God always seems to give idiots the help they need.
6.
“Muthafuckas ain’t tellin’ if they know who it was,” Meechie says, sounding out of breath, as you close the screen behind him. “I asked all over the place.”
“So you think it might be somebody you know?” you ask.
“Maybe,” he says. “But prolly not,” he murmurs. “I mean, who the fuck kills anybody over weed? And from what the paper say, they didn’t touch any of the product.”
It turns out that the fire made the news, which is good because the media can fill in some of the blanks on what the cops know. Since most of the weed was kept in the fridge, it was still there when the cops finally got to it. But there’s no mention of your cousin’s name, or his mother’s. And there’s no mention of Alonzo or his body. So whoever was there covered up the worst of the charges. So much for finding a gun. Even so, there’s no doubt that your boy is a dead man. If he wasn’t he would’ve checked in by now. Duronté, however, is wanted for questioning, which means you were at least right about one thing.
Normally these kind of things happen over real estate. Maybe word got out that your cousin was coming up in the world and they figured the best thing to do was take him down a notch, show him that it’s real in the battlefield and all that. This is the kind of thing the person who did it would keep his mouth open wide about, knowing that it would either draw out his enemies so that he could get a clean shot, or that it would prove Duronté didn’t have the nuts to do anything about it.
Either way, you’re not so sure of where to begin, and you can’t trust any of the people you’ve got on the street past doing what they already do. Shit, you’ve only been up and running for a matter of days now. There’s no telling what kinds of rats and snitches might be on the payroll. Duronté threw a lot of money into the furnace that was supposed to fuel the engine to carry you to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous status. But right now all you’ve got are dead bodies with the threat of even more. Sound familiar?
You and Meechie sit there for what seems like hours but is really only about half of one, trying to figure out how to bring the niggas who got Alonzo back into the open. This ain’t TV, so you know that any pros won’t make the simple mistake of putting themselves in your sights. They’ll be ordering takeout and staying low for a while. And if they came from out of town, they’re already gone.
The practical thing is to let it go, but if word gets out on the street this early that y’all are weak, plenty of somebodies will do their best to body the anybodies in your crew as soon as possible. Yet you don’t have the manpower for a full-fledged war. You’re also trying to wrap this up with a bow. There’s still school, after all. You tell Meechie that you’ll call him if you need him. But for now you’ve got to think. It’s just before 4. Duronté should be trying to hock his ride somewhere in Birmingham.
You realize that there would have been no less risk in him driving straight there. But he had said that he was “tired of that piece a shit anyway.” You found it hard to believe when you heard the words. You thought that car was his pride and joy, the one thing God had given him, if nothing else, with that lottery ticket.
You drive to the Ikea in the city and drop close to two grand on furniture. You don’t really even look at what color things are. You just want to fill the space, to give your mind something to do while you try and figure out where you are and what moves you have to make on a board where the enemy has taken far more from you than you have from them.
You jam more boxes than you thought could ever fit into a CRX and wheel them back to your place. You’re assembling your futon when the phone rings. It’s Frank.
“We need to talk,” are his first words.
“About what?” you ask, keeping it cool, playing it like nothing he tells you can matter.
“My bad about yesterday,” he says humbly. “I ain’t mean to try you like that. Lonzo was my man. I known D and Jamar forever. And you was there, this outside nigga from New York callin’ the shots, and I took it personal.”
“Ain’t no room for personal in business,” you say.
“I know who hit Lonzo!” he blurts out.
“Who?” you ask coldly.
“Them niggas from Chicago.”
“Which niggas from Chicago?”
“The ones you buyin’ from. They ain’t no suppliers. They fuckin’ killas. I done jobs wit’ them before. They workin’ for somebody.”
“And how come you just tellin’ me this now?”
“’Cuz I ain’t know about it until right now. Ran into my man in the emergency room and he told me a piece. Once you got one piece, the others come to you, if you know what I mean. That’s why I said that we need to talk.”
Part of you thinks that this is the kind of break you were hoping for, something to come aloose on its own. But you can’t be sure if you should trust Frank. How can you trust anyone whose ass you kicked the night before?
“So whatchu want me to do?” you ask.
“You ain’t gotta do shit. I’ll put the work in myself. The only time you hear about it is when they set the wake.”
“How do I know if this shit ain’t a setup?”
“You can come with me if you want. Put somebody behind my seat with a fuckin’ pistol. I got three cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder. Good thing it ain’t my shootin’ arm.”
“We are on the phone, you know. Meet me on Old National.”
There’s a short pause.
“What time?”
“Let’s say 8,” you reply. That is four hours away. Jamar should be out of Drama Club way before then.
“A’ight,” he says, hanging up the phone.
You don’t know what scares you more, the prospect of having to kill somebody tonight or the idea of walking into the setup of all setups and dying over some shit just because you were a guest in the wrong house during the wrong week. You think about Jennifer, even though you can’t afford to. You need a bigger piece of the God-given magic that is her body. But not now.
That Glock of yours still hasn’t been fired. While you want it to stay that way, you’ll feel safer if it’s under your seat. Your tags are in-state, and from now on you’ll stay in the right lane and under the speed limit. No more weed. No more drinking in the ride. Keep the volume on your system low. Make yourself invisible to the all-seeing eyes and you’ll get there without any surprise stops. You have to keep moving. That’s the only
thing left to do.
“So what you mean you used to work for him?” you ask Frank as you hand him a taco from the value pack you just picked up. You’ve been across the street from the Dugan’s parking lot for an hour. You can smell the wings from outside.
“I did my last bid in Chi’. Boosted a van for some dudes that wanted to hit this jewelry store. Shipment was coming in and they had one of the guards ready to throw a wrench into the routine so that they could make the grab. Somebody fucked up and the two dudes never made it to the car. They went out the back and I pulled off just before the cops got there. Weeks of fuckin’ planning and they still didn’t get it right. But they got outta there like ghosts. One minute they were all over the police scanner, the next minute the cops is scratchin’ they heads. Shit was like seven years ago but I remember it plain as day. Cops caught me right out front. I was singin’ to Cameo’s ‘Single Life’ on the radio when the cop came and tapped on the glass. And that was fuckin’ that. So I’m here at the Flame the other day with my boy Terry and we see one of ’em, Larry, you know the lighterskinned one”—he means Almond. “Dude is buyin’ me drinks and tellin’ me to stay around and kick it with him.”
“And did you?” you ask.
“Hell yeah, I did!” he grins. “How the fuck was I supposed to turn down free drinks and dances?”
He goes on to explain that the next thing he knows, he and Almond are the best of friends. You wonder why anyone rolling in a Beemer like his is going to the Flame instead of Magic City, but maybe he’s into the occasional chick with stretch marks and the one who calls every man gay who doesn’t want a dance from her skinny ass.
Somewhere over the course of the night, Frank lets it slip that he’s working for somebody now, someone who’s making a lot of moves in a lot of different places. At first you wonder if Star isn’t dead after all, if the whole car crash thing up in New York was just cover-up so that he could go underground.
But that kind of shit doesn’t happen in real life, and even if it did, wouldn’t you be more than enough of a reason for him to show up and pull the trigger himself? And why the fuck would anyone have a guy playing top dog in an out-of-town operation who can’t keep his mouth shut?
But Frank’s encounter with Almond had taken place the day before the twins paid Jamar that visit. And as Duronté wasn’t into anything heavy, maybe they threw caution to the wind. You want to be that lucky for once.
So now you’re parked diagonally across from the club. The Beemer’s in the valet part of the lot so you know he’s back in there. Hell, maybe both of them are. If they come out, you’ll follow them wherever they head and start shooting until you get some answers. But you have to find out if Frank’s story is real or not while still trusting in his plan. It’s going to be a balancing act. But at this point, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
You sit out there for the better part of three hours, taking turns resting your eyes. There’s nothing but the sound of crickets and valet parkers talking shit about which dancers they’re sure they can fuck. What are the chances of a couple of dudes getting paid to park people’s cars getting with women who find new suckers every month to pay their rent? It’s like going up against an army with a pistol. But ego gets everybody’s ass in a sling at least once.
Part of you wants to go inside and see the sights. But the rest of you knows that if anybody in there recognizes you, it’s all over. Either they call in the dogs and you walk out of the club to catch a drive-by, or they turn tail and disappear, leaving your enemy without a face. And if you don’t have faces or names, you’re gonna be up shit’s creek real fast.
“You done this kinda shit before?” you ask Frank.
“I done every kinda shit there is to do,” he says with a sigh. “This shit right heah ain’t gonna be no biggie.”
“I thought you said you was cool with this dude.”
“I worked with him once. And I ended up doing five because of it. Did them muthafuckas keep my commissary phat? Did they take care of my kids? They ain’t do shit but keep breathin’. So why the fuck would I stay loyal to ’em?”
You give him a nod. It sounds reasonable enough. And though you ain’t a career criminal, you can say that it actually sounds fair. There ain’t no honor among thieves or any of that shit. Will taught you that much.
Forty-five minutes later, Almond comes out of the place in the same suit you last saw him. He looks so full of liquor that he might bleed it if you cut him. There a broad with him: light-skinned and skinny. No tits. No ass. All legs. But if that’s his thing, so be it.
He hands her the keys and she drives them out of the lot. You wait til they turn at the light and then follow them onto 285 going south. They turn off on the Campbellton Road exit heading over to 85, where they turn north into midtown. They park at the Sheraton Colony Square. But you still have to park, which means you might lose them.
“I should try and see what floor they’re going to,” you say.
“You don’t have to,” Frank replies with a grin.
“Why?”
“Because he already gave me the room number. The muthafucka might’ve told me where he kept the weight if I had asked. He was that gone.”
“He usually hold?” you ask, worrying that your two guns might not be enough.
“Prolly. But I ain’t never seen him pull out. He’s supposed to be a killer and all that, so I cain’t really say.”
This crime is definitely more of an art than a science. Or at least it seems to be with the clowns you’re working with. You both get out of the car with your pieces, yours at the back of your jeans with a shirt as cover, his lodged between jeans and his hip bone. Your breathing gets heavy—it’s only a matter of minutes before you’re back in the bottom of the hell you just escaped from. That boomerang is coming right back for you. You can feel it cutting through the air, calling your name. You almost want to just stand there and wait. You almost want it to put you out of your misery.
7.
You notice that there’s a full moon as you cross the street to the hotel entrance. A warm breeze is in the air, and for once the night isn’t trying to strangle you with humidity. This is the kind of night where you should call up a broad and watch movies on her couch. You even have a number to dial for once. But instead, you’ve got the barrel of a pistol rubbing against your ass cheek, and before the night is over you just might have to kill somebody.
Frank pops a stick of Trident in his mouth and starts humming Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II,” mouthing the lyrics as a piano lounge fills with folks who will never have a clue. The guy at the piano reminds you of Magnum P.I.
Instead of catching the show, you both cut left for the elevator banks. The hotel concierge gives you a nervous look, but it doesn’t last long. She probably figures you’re a rap group—she must see a few of them. You’d like to see more of the legs underneath that skirt. You wonder if her pussy hair is as blond as the mane on her head. But unfortunately there’s no time or means to find out.
“Hit 23,” Frank says. You follow his order. The doors close.
“You ever been in this hotel before?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he says, biting into his gum like it’s carne asada.
“What’s security like?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “They ain’t gonna stop Ocean’s 11. I’ll put it to you that way.”
You’re wondering if there are cameras in the elevators and hallways, if you’ll get picked up on tape coming and going from the room. You’re on 17 when your spider-sense goes off. You turn to Frank just in time to see him reaching for his piece.
His nose isn’t taped across the middle, so you realize that you didn’t actually break it. But it shows red on his caramel. You fire a jab at his nose, but he moves and somehow you end up hitting him in the throat. He starts to cough as he loses his grip on his pistol.
You aim to kick him in the nuts, but he catches your angle and slams you against the elevator, trying to pin your wrists
with one hand. Your knee to the groin is on target and he doubles over. You kick him in the face, pull your own piece, and fire a single bullet. The round peels a piece of his forehead off like a scab. He falls to the elevator floor, dead.
The doors open at 23 just as blood starts to pour from the hole in Frank’s head. You back out, not knowing who’s in the hallway. You check your clothes. No blood you can see. Most of it’s splattered against the elevator wall. There’s sixteen left in the clip, plenty of ammo to get some answers with. There’s just one problem. He didn’t tell you the room number before you killed him. You’re praying there are no cameras.
Since you’re not going to go door-to-door with a body in the elevator, you have to make a run for it. Once that elevator returns to the lobby, somebody’s going to call the cops. Once somebody calls the cops, you’ve got five minutes to get out of there before you face the risk of some full-scale building search that’s going to get you at least ten for manslaughter. Fuck that.
You head for the closest stairwell and track down twenty-three flights. You jump the last step on every floor, trying to pick up speed, trying to get to the building exit before somebody spots the body. You can feel the sweat staining your pits as you push your body downwards. You get to the first floor just as the commotion starts brewing over by the elevator banks. You glide through the automatic doors and out to the street while guests and staff set their eyes on the man who just tried to kill you.
Two cop cruisers explode over the hill and right up to the hotel entrance. You turn the key in your ignition the minute they come to a stop and pull off into the night. You wonder if he sold you out because of the ass-whipping or if it had already happened before that.
Every nerve in your body begins to tremble as you turn onto Ponce de Leon and push north toward Briarcliff. You take in deep breaths. You try to remember everything in that book on meditation you once took out of the library. You picture yourself back at your crib, assembling all the furniture, putting things on the walls, flipping through school catalogs to nail down which classes you’re going to take.