by D
All of these things matter, as you’re outnumbered and outgunned. Whether you fail or make it happen, you’ll still be on the run. A dead man near the top sends shockwaves through everything. It takes food out of kids’ mouths. It turns corners against one another.
You refill the tank in Greensboro just in time to see some state troopers breaking up a dispute between a guy and a pair of white broads. There are TV cameras and a couple of men who look like bouncers. You even make out the nerdy guy with glasses. They’re filming an episode of Cheaters, which means that somebody just got caught stepping out on somebody else. You don’t stick around to see which is which and what is what.
You’re just past D.C. when your eyelids start closing against your orders. As you don’t want to run into a semi, you pull into a motel and book a room for the night. Unlike that fleabag you visited to meet up with Reggie, this place smells like perfumed soap. The bed is already turned down. There isn’t a trace of dust anywhere. As soon as you’ve given the room a once-over, you’re laying under the crisp sheets, too tired to even turn the lights off.
Behind your eyes you see the old neighborhood, the way it was before all of this. You see the fat Yemeni with the Afro who flirts with all the young girls. You miss the salmon and mac-and-cheese at Exquisite. You miss Chief. You even miss Will. You remember that time he tried to pop a wheelie with his chair and flipped over. It was the funniest shit you’d seen in the world. Even Will laughed. It’s the last time you remember all three of you laughing together.
Your eyes pop open nearly ten hours later. The sunlight at the edges of the closed blinds looks like fire at first glance. But after a few seconds you realize it’s just another day. As this is your third day without a shower and checkout is in less than forty minutes, you jump at the opportunity.
You feel like a new man as the warm water covers you, followed by layers of lather and a fresh shave. You put on the second of your three new shirts, the green one with Adidas in black letters across the front, and a fresh pair of jeans. The clutch has left a scuff on your new Jordans. But it won’t matter anyway since you’ve been voted Most Likely to Get Killed in Them.
You grab pancakes at the diner a few blocks up. It’s owned by a guy named Mel and the cashier’s name is Vera. Where the fuck are Flo and Alice? The coffee is like heaven though. It will definitely come in handy on your way to hell.
You don’t really believe you’re returning to the devil’s playground until the skyline comes into view. You can remember being seven or eight down at the Brooklyn Heights promenade with your foster dad at night, trying to count the lights on in all the buildings. You asked him why people didn’t turn them off when they left their offices and he explained that if they did, the world couldn’t see New York. You asked why the world needed to see New York and he said something like, “Because this place gives more hope to the world than anywhere else.”
Even as a kid you thought that he’d seen one I Love New York commercial too many. But just like you, he had never lived anywhere else. He never knew what other cities might have been like. He died thinking that New York was the only place where he would ever belong. You felt the same way until you left. But now you’re back, and you’re probably going to die. So in the end you didn’t get that much further than he did.
After the Holland Tunnel you go over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn and hit a left on Myrtle. It’s after lunch and before rush hour, so the traffic is relatively light. There seem to be more white folks on the streets than there were six months ago. More new buildings. Places that had been dead and buried for years have new windows and paint jobs. The windows have signs that say Condo and Co-op and Commercial Space Available Here.
The old corners are clean. There’s a Subway sandwich shop where the old cleaners used to be. The pizza spot on Lafayette where you’d get chicken nuggets after school is now a donut shop promoting their newest blend of coffee.
But there’s still the one-legged man in the Puerto Rico tank top rolling along Fulton. He’s always thinking about his next drink, knowing that his disability check will be in the mail soon, and that the demons he seeks to escape are there waiting for his next bottle to run dry. You’ve read about alcohol being a killer, but this man’s been at it for twenty years straight and he looks pretty much the same. From what you can tell, after losing the leg he’s never been hurt again, never been sick, never missed a day on the avenue. He needs to be in the world in a way that Alonzo and Meechie and Star and all the others didn’t. You have no idea why God does what he does. But then again, it’s not your place to say.
Every few blocks you have to remind yourself that you shouldn’t really talk to people. You’re here to do a job that requires stealth. It’s hard not to roll down the window and give a nod to the folks you know. So you push up Nostrand all the way out to King’s Plaza.
You take a seat on a bench inside the mall and flip through a local newspaper, the Brooklynite. Somewhere in the classifieds you find an ad for rooms being rented weekly. The woman who answers the phone sounds Eastern European, maybe Serbian. She says there are openings at seventy dollars a week, which includes utilities and fresh sheets. Four people share a shower. You don’t plan to be around long enough for that to get annoying.
It’s about five minutes away from the mall. The woman from the phone is tall and slender. You can tell that when she was younger, her titties probably stood straight out, defying gravity. Now they sag. The circles under her eyes are dark. At some point she had been a contender, even if it was a lifetime earlier and in a place halfway around the world
She leads you to the fourth room on the hall. There’s a dingy window, a water stain on the ceiling, and a full-sized bed with a bent frame. You don’t ask how the damage came about. You give her three Benjamins for a month’s rent and a look that says she needs to beat it. She exits quickly, her aging pussy most likely moist from the smell of new money.
You sit your bags down and stretch out on the bed. Your feet dangle over the edge but it’s softer than you ever would have imagined. Your eyes close and you sleep again. This time you see nothing but darkness. You float through that beautiful nothing for hours.
Your phone jerks you awake, the tone playing a snippet of Big Boi’s “Kryptonite” until you answer. There’s a voice on the other end of the line that you don’t expect. It’s Chief.
“You here yet, nigga?”
You don’t say anything. This is a number he shouldn’t have. But then again, you shouldn’t be here in the first place. You pull yourself together and speak.
“How you know where I am?”
“You know the answer to that,” he says. “We need to talk.”
“What, before you put a hole in me?”
“You don’t even know what’s been goin’ on.”
“You can explain if you want.”
“Not on the phone. Meet me down in Dumbo, on that little gravel part under the bridge. I’ll be there by myself. This ain’t a setup. I put that on everything.”
“What time?”
“Two hours, like 11.”
“I’ll be there,” you say, and then hang up.
You reach into the bag for the Beretta and the .380, the only guns still there. For some reason you thought there were more. Your legs start to tremble as you begin to think it all through. You’re tired. You’re worn down. You could stay here for a month and there’s no way they’d find you. You could wait for the cops to get to Will and Chief and the rest of them, and everything would be fine. You don’t have to meet Chief. You could even turn tail and head to Cali. You could stand by on the first flight out of JFK and never look back.
But you ran once already. And those you left behind are the ones who went after your new life the first chance they got. All of this sneaking around, all of these precautions, and they found you as easily as if you had a sign around your neck with your name and phone number painted on it. Duronté should never have trusted you. No one should have.
&nb
sp; ***
You haven’t been downtown in a long time. You used to go to the movies on Court Street, but then you stopped. Maybe it was because you always ended up sitting in front of two people who didn’t know how to keep their mouths shut while the picture was rolling. Maybe it was just easier to get whatever you wanted to see on bootleg for half the quality and half the price.
You park on Joralemon and make the walk down to Front and then all the way out to the meeting spot.
No one used to come down here when you were growing up. People would talk about it as a place where junkies would come to shoot up. Being high in front of the skyline gave their delusion an added effect. And when that delusion ended, they’d head back to civilization, past the Fort Greene projects, so that they could rob somebody else in the name of getting another delusion going.
You look around as you come closer to the spot. There are no parked cats with shadowy figures inside, no suspicious-looking people pretending to walk dogs or read newspapers at 11 o’clock at night. There is, however, a figure sitting on the stone steps that lead to a beach—a manmade stretch of rocks and gravel currently swallowed by the tide.
Thirty yards closer and you can see that it’s Chief. He’s picked up about twenty pounds in six months and has one of those sculpted beards that the barbers darken. As you come up on him, he looks like the loneliest man in the world.
“If you gonna kill me, get it over with sooner than later,” you say.
Chief turns to you with the smallest of smiles across his lips.
“What’s so funny?” you ask, pushing more threat into your tone.
“I ain’t never been no killer,” he says. “If I was, I wouldn’t need you.”
“How’d you get my number?”
“You been livin’ in the ’90s,” he says. “Everywhere that you used a debit card after you left, Will knows about. He got some private investigator keeping tabs on you like that.”
This is the part when you feel really stupid. “So he knew I was comin’?”
“People been on the lookout for days. Somebody saw you in that sorry-ass Honda today and called me. I got your number off the computer at Will’s crib.”
“So what you want with me?”
“Nothing,” he says, as if merely saying the words brings some kind of relief. “I just want all this to be over with.”
11.
“Lookin’ back, I knew from the beginning,” Chief concludes.
Both guns are cold and heavy against your back. But you keep them right where they are. It has taken more than an hour for your boy to explain everything that has happened since you left. Very little of it surprises you at this stage. But when he’s done, all the gaps are completely filled.
It turns out that Will let Star go only so that he could frame him for a murder. He got one of those guys who had actually survived the ambush to flip for him and testify that Star had killed Her. Neither Chief nor he know that you were the one who pulled the trigger on that one. Or maybe they do.
Their crew broke out as soon as the last man had fallen, leaving a body count in the double digits over the course of a day, including the ones you bodied. The story had gone national, but the murder couldn’t be pinned on anybody. All the guns were found clean of prints. No witnesses. It was like the Terminator had come out of nowhere, whacked an entire crew, and then vanished.
On the underneath, Will sent people to all of Star’s strongholds that he knew about. He sent them in suits, speaking in code, pretending to be liquor distributors, wannabe bouncers, or real estate agents.
But as it turned out, an army in the hands of that crazy nigga in the wheelchair was the absolute worst thing to happen. He turned into Hitler, making long lists of everyone still breathing who had done him wrong. He ran heists. He made hits. He set people up with the cops. He became that nerd that everybody shit on in high school back from the dead as a muscle-bound millionaire with a grudge to settle.
He scraped together the product that Star had left on the street while Star was making a run for the border. The package Will sent to the homicide detective on the falsified murder case got held in the mail for a few days, which had given Star a window to empty his vaults, transfer most of his money offshore, and make a run for it.
After that, whatever had been stretched thin inside of Will finally snapped. He invited the twins to Brooklyn to discuss the opportunity to set up their own franchise in the ATL. The catch was dealing with you. Will gave them the house address, information on Duronté, and whatever else he might have had. Then it was their show. Throwing away a low six figures in product didn’t mean a damn thing to a wheelchair-bound maniac in over his head.
Then it all started to fall like dominos. Loyal crew members flipped like switches. Doors got kicked in. There were busts and seizures and more bodies. Chief didn’t know why it hadn’t made bigger headlines, but a cop in Will’s pocket told them that the case was tied into a bigger DEA probe, that they wanted to hold out on making arrests until they had a lock on Will’s supplier. But as the supplier vanished, so did their case.
Now there’s no new product. Will’s six-month rule is coming to an end. He’s holed up like Nino Brown in a house off Ocean Avenue, trying to avoid the cops and find a new connect. But there’s been no luck. He’s made too many enemies and he doesn’t have enough dudes left to hold out if there’s a war.
“But what about me?” you ask.
“What do you mean what about you?” Chief replies.
“Why he so pressed to fuck my shit up?”
“He thinks all of it’s your fault.”
“The fuck is he talking about?”
“He said that you would have talked him out of the dumb shit he did that got him into this mess, that if he’s about to go out, you should go out with him.”
“Damn,” you say. “He really is out of his mind!”
“C’mon, man, you know he ain’t been right since Skate City.”
There is a brief moment of silence when those words hit the air.
“He thought that if shit got hot down in ATL you’d come back, that you’d help him get shit right.”
“That’s what he said?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Then he really is crazy. How the fuck did the twins go along with this shit?”
“They ain’t have a real choice,” he replies. “You know how a crew works … So now you see why I called you down here.”
“Yeah, but what do you want me to do about it?”
This is when he turns away from you, looking across the river toward where the Twin Towers used to be.
“Will has to go.”
“Since when did I start being the man to put the work in.”
“When you started puttin’ work in,” he says. “Star’s bar, the dark-skinned fuckin’ cousin, and his bitch. There was no way in hell you coulda got back here without bodyin’ some muthafuckas.”
“But what about you?” you charge back. “You been up here.”
“Doin’ what I always do,” he replies smugly. “Computers, Internet, cell phone. I’m the fuckin’ nerd from the projects. I ain’t around none of that. Shit, I’m lucky if Will even returns my phone calls these days.”
What you want to know is why Will has to end up dead. You tell Chief that he can testify or find a way to frame Will.
“If he dies he comes back as someone else, somewhere else. He starts over, never remembering what he did here. Lock him up somewhere and he’s trapped with his demons for another twenty years. I don’t think he’d want that. All of this shit is about him not dyin’ the last time.”
When you think of your homeboy, you think of him still standing, of the three of you racing up the block, you and he neck-and-neck with Chief trailing behind, an ice cream bar in one hand and a pack of Now and Laters in the other. There was the arm-wrestling series, the professional league that gave you your first and only broken bone when you tried to hit Will with a flying elbow and ended up sm
ashing your arm on the concrete.
You think about when you each kept count of how many girls did or didn’t look you up and down in the hallways in middle school. You think about the twenty dollars riding on who would get some pussy first. You lost. And you paid. When he lost, he always made it playful, but underneath the fluffy words he was telling you to go fuck yourself. And you considered most of this when you left. Still, it hurts all over again.
But this isn’t some storybook. It’s not like you’re carrying the only nine that can kill him or something. It’s not like you don’t have enough sins to try and balance out on judgment day. Yeah, you’ve killed, but you ain’t that much of a killer.
“I can’t even do it,” you sigh. “You on your own.”
Chief’s face falls to the ground and shatters into a million pieces. He looks like a kid whose balloon is flying high into the sky and away from him forever. He wasn’t expecting you to say no.
He parts his lips as if he’s about to mutter something, words that never hit the air. The buckshot blows a hole in his back, spraying you with your homeboy’s blood before he falls lifeless at your feet. You stare down at your fallen friend. From this angle he looks like just another dead body. And that’s what you tell yourself. He’s just another dead body, not another piece of the present made permanently past.
Chief’s killer has a face that you recognize, one colored by grief and that same stupid grin he’s been wearing since that first night you met him at Duronté’s. Almond is here and now, and he’s moved the next shell into the breech of his twelve gauge.
Your right hand is faster than your left, so it’s the .380 you fire indiscriminately at the armed shadows coming toward you. This is a bold move, to let off like this in the middle of white-people land. But you like life. You like living. And as your last true friend in the world, who wasn’t a killer but who just got killed, slips further into the darkness of departure, you want Will to know that you could’ve been a contender.