Bronx Noir

by S. J. Rozan

  The red-faced guard regrouped. His glare bounced off her back, her riotous hair, so he turned to Kelly. “John Kelly?” He said it slowly and squinted, and shit, it was that guard.

  Kelly climbed from the basket too, spoke to the horticulturalist worrying over her plants. “Listen, I better go, see if—”

  “Kelly! I thought so!” Wilson’s bark was full of nasty triumph. “They gave us your photo. They want you back, boy. Big reward. Saw you the other day, didn’t I? At the gate.” He came closer, still talking. “This guy’s dangerous, doctor.” He said doctor like an insult.

  “No,” Kelly said, backing. “Keep away.”

  “You’re busted.”

  “No.”

  “What’s going on?” She jumped down, between them.

  “He’s a killer. Escaped con.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re wrong,” Wilson sneered. “Cops passed out his picture. He sliced his wife up.”

  She turned to Kelly.

  “That was someone else,” he said, and he also said, “I’m leaving.”

  “No!” the guard yelled, and drew a gun.

  “Wilson, are you crazy?” Her shout was furious.

  “Doctor, how about you shut up? Kelly! Down on the floor!”

  “No.” Walk past him, right out the door. He won’t shoot.

  “On the floor!” Wilson unclipped his radio, spoke into it, gun still trained on Kelly. “Emergency,” he said. “Dispatch, I need cops. In the conservatory—”

  That couldn’t happen. Kelly lunged, not for the gun, for the radio. Pulled it from Wilson’s grip, punched his face, ran.

  And almost made the door.

  Two shots, hot steel slicing through soft, spiced air. The first caught Kelly between the shoulder blades. To the right, so it missed his heart, but all it meant was that he was still alive and awake when the second bullet, flying wild after a ricochet, shattered a pane in the arching dome. Glass glittered as it burst, showered down like snow, with snow, on waves of icy air Kelly could see. The wind, sensing its chance, shifted, pulled, and tugged, poured in, changed positive pressure to negative and ripped through an edge of the tarp patch. Collected snow slid off the tarp onto a broad-leafed palm. Kelly saw all this, heard a repeated wail: “No! No! No!” He tried to rise but couldn’t draw breath.

  Looking around he saw blood, his blood, pooling. She knelt beside him, wild blond hair sweeping around her face, and he heard her knotted voice, choked with sorrow not for him. “All right, it’s all right. An ambulance is coming.”

  In this storm? And he didn’t want an ambulance, he just wanted to go home. The trees, he tried to say to her, watching the palms cringe away from the cataract of frigid air. But he couldn’t speak, and what could she do for them? I’m sorry, he told the trees. I’m sorry none of us ever got home. Sprinkled with glass shards and snow, losing blood fast, Kelly started to shiver. As darkness took the edges of his sight, he stared up into the recoiling leaves. At least it wouldn’t be as bad for them as for him. Freezing, they say, is a warm death.

  LOST AND FOUND

  BY THOMAS BENTIL

  Rikers Island

  I’ve been running for six months now. What from? you ask. The answer isn’t that simple. To find the right answer, you have to ask the right question. So let’s try that again. The question is, What am I chasing and who’s chasing me?

  In certain circles, they call me Ice T, but my name, date of birth, and Social Security number change more often than songs on Hot 97. I’m a fugitive. I’m a tweaker. Today I’m lost, just holding on for dear life. My minutes are running low. Any day now the heat will come knocking with an all-expensepaid ticket to the not so far off Island—the carcarel hell that will soon be my home. Face it; there are only so many places the Bronx will let you hide. Nothing changes, the streets are still watching.

  Here I am, spun out on crystal meth once more. I stink and I’m weak. I’m penniless and friendless. No more credit cards to squeeze dry, no more checks to wash. The spreads are all used up. What’s a spread? you ask. It’s basically everything you need to know about a person to rob them of everything they have. Cough up 250 bucks and I’ll get you everything you need to be John Smith today and Michael Phillips tomorrow.

  I might look and feel like shit right now, but after taking a shower and putting on an Armani suit, I could talk a pretty bank teller into doing just about anything. Granted, of course, the vic’s got decent credit and hasn’t notified the bank. I sometimes wonder why they call my racket “victimless” crime. I’ve left hundreds of victims in my wake. But let me tell you, it takes balls to walk into a bank and cash a check that’s hotter than the surface of the sun. You gotta have heart, but you also need brains, wit, and charm. You have to know how to talk to people. Those stick-up kids I met the last time I was on Rikers Island would put a cap in your ass in a heartbeat, but they wouldn’t touch my racket if their lives depended on it.

  It takes a good measure of intestinal fortitude to hustle banks, but I’m a bona fide addict. From the high-end hookers to the high-priced hotels, from the grams of ice to the pure ounces of MDMA, somehow I had to support this lifestyle. Ice, my drug of choice, is driving this bus. Hence the street moniker Ice T, bestowed upon me by my dealer.

  Those days have lost their luster. Every bank and plush hotel in and around the five boroughs is on alert for this “multi-state offender” known to defraud innkeepers and bankers alike.

  Life has taken that proverbial turn for the worse. I need a place to stay and a chance to stave off the creepy meth paranoia that’s quickly approaching. That’s what six straight sleepless nights will do to you.

  The streets of the Bronx at 3, from Gun Hill Road to 161st Street, have morphed into a bizarre netherworld of voracious fiends, dealers, hookers, and the hungry. Tonight, I’m one of them.

  Broke and scared, I call Heidi’s pad looking for Billy. He’s my “business partner.” Heidi is his girl and she’s a sweetheart. She spends her days smoking shards and her nights turning tricks. Sometimes I wonder if Billy is her man or her pimp. He’s my partner in crime, but hardly a friend. I’m always welcome in their home, but that comes with a cost. Any devious heist Billy has planned will now include me. Nothing in this life is free. They’re never without crystal meth, which they always share, without question. Once I hit that pipe, I will agree to whatever scam he has in mind, usually cashing some dirty check. At times like this I’ll pounce on any opportunity to line my pockets. Billy’s generous with his drugs and the loot we make. I usually get half. He’s also smart, never taking the chance of cashing checks himself.

  I failed to mention that Billy is also my dealer. Whatever money I make with the check and credit card cons ends up going right into his pocket for a few grams of ice, and again I find myself at square one.

  “I’m spun out and the warrant squad is on my ass,” I say with a shaky tone. Billy senses the desperation in my voice when I call him from Jerome Avenue. Visions of dollar signs dance in his head. The last thing I want is to be part of another heist. I soon would have no choice. He’s a viper with a clean face and he’s turning me into a monster like him. There’s some devil in me—he didn’t craft it, but he promised life to it if I would just ride with him.

  Heidi’s apartment is in Hunts Point, smack dab in the middle of a thriving crack scene. Billy is the only apparent source of crystal meth in the neighborhood. As I ramble on from block to block, on my way to their building, I can’t help noticing how much this part of the Boogie Down feels like a ghost town. Warehouses and abandoned tenements line these dark avenues. On every shadowy street, thugs wearing black hoodies loiter, whistling at cars as they cruise past, running up to the few vehicles which pull up, and making sales. In murky corners, pressed against walls like statues, ebony figures appraise foot traffic. Some young bloods use laser pointers in what seems to be a code to warn of approaching cops, while shabbily dressed baseheads try to hawk everything from boom boxes to jew
elry in exchange for a taste of poison. These same apparitions I will soon rendezvous with in the sullen halls of C-76, Rikers Island.

  I’m looking at these streets through the eyes of a fugitive and a tweaker. The Bronx has become a carnival of flesh and bone. I step over an older white guy who’s obviously been jacked for money, drugs, or both. He’s lying facedown on the street, the back of his head smashed open and raw. It’s the best Hunts Point has to offer, a street dealing scene that would make any hustler proud. Offers of every kind fill my ears as I make my way to Heidi’s apartment. To some, these streets are neon dreams come true, but to me, a speed freak at the end of his rope, it’s a ghost town.

  Billy and Heidi live the typical tweaker life in the ever-so-typical tweaker pad. Billy is a complete and brilliant idiot. When I step inside their small, musty studio apartment, Billy is scrunched over his computer like something kept in the closet. The front room is damp. Torn wallpaper covers large holes through which the scuttle of crablike creatures can be heard. Postmodern artwork embellishes the back walls.

  Heidi steps from the dimly lit recesses of her closet completely naked except for a pair of electric-blue lace panties. She’s a beautiful blond nymphomaniac whose appetite for spiking speed is insatiable. At times her eyes reveal a glimpse of the lost innocent nineteen-year-old from Petaluma, California.

  It’s late, almost 3 a.m., and she’s getting ready for work. Ice, she always tells me, is essential for turning tricks—all the girls she works with do it. I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but at the same time, all I want her to do is shut up and offer me a hit. She approaches me wearing a dirty-blond wig and I assume this is a request from one of her regulars. As she gets closer, I notice she’s holding something against her small chest. Curling it outward with the needle-tracked arm of a nightmarish ghoul, she reveals a glass pipe packed with crystal meth. Heidi hands me the instrument of my demise. Before she disappears into the bathroom and just as I’m about to get a taste of the sweet poison, she flashes in front of me a New York State Driver License bearing the picture of one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

  “I need to look like her by tomorrow, think I can pull it off?” she asks.

  Never, I think to myself, but appease her by agreeing. At that moment I know Billy is working on something big, something with many zeros attached to it, the ultimate grift. I will be getting my assignment soon.

  The first hit I take fills my lungs and makes the synapses in my brain fire off like the Fourth of July. Dopamine overflows. At the edge of my hazy percept, I can barely make out something Billy’s saying about how “hot” their apartment has become. He’s convinced a guy we work with is a snitch. This is the last thing I want to hear.

  The sky in my mind suddenly grows darker. Visions of decay and violence fill me with a sense of doom. Is my paranoia rooting deeper or is it a premonition of events yet to come?

  A month on Rikers Island, then I was bailed out. Like a fool, I ran. I became totally aware of my situation, of the utter hopelessness of where I was and where I would end up. All of my demons came to the surface. I got two grams of speed, then what? I pull off another one with Billy, make $2,000, then what? Now I’m back where I started.

  A black chasm of despair opens inside of me. Here I am, six months later, strung out worse than ever, out of money, trying to rest my beaten body in some sketchy tweaker pad. I am miserable and want this to end. I don’t just want a break from the drugs and crime, I want to go back to before I snorted that first line of crystal, before I knew how fuckin’ amazing that feeling was, before I experienced the rush from a successful heist and tasted the pleasures of other people’s money.

  Five days of being awake begin to take their toll. I feel myself getting drowsy, slipping into darkness. It’s that halfdrugged sleep that comes at the end of every run, coupled with the handful of Valiums Heidi gave me earlier. Everything fades to black.

  It’s late in the morning when I’m violently awoken by a cacophony of sound: deep guttural voices, the distinct clinking of metal cuffs, and an orchestra of bleeps, blips, and chirps from a police radio.

  “Wake up, ya piece a shit, and let me see your hands,” orders a red-haired freckle-faced detective with an uncanny resemblance to Richie Cunningham from Happy Days.

  I get up slowly in a half-asleep, half-dazed stupor, wearing only jeans and a T-shirt. I’m still having trouble making sense of this scene when from the corner of my eye I see Billy being dragged out of the apartment by two uniformed officers. Here I am, smack in the middle of a raid. The bench warrant I have is hanging over my head like some dark and dreary cloud ready to release torrents of rain.

  “Get on some shoes, pal. Had a nice run, but it’s over now,” another cop says. He reminds me of this thugged-out Puerto Rican brother I knew the last time I was on Rikers, covered with jailhouse tats. I have an eerie premonition of where I’m going and the company I will soon keep. I feel a dampness permeating my palms and can hear my heart palpitating loud enough, I think, for everyone else to hear too. Anxiety is rearing its ugly head. Rikers Island will be my new home.

  Central Booking is the first stop. “Inside” again. I’m thrust into the wheels of justice and the long, drawn-out grind of due process. All of it leads up to the Day of Judgment when I will hear the inevitable: One year on Rikers.

  Though I’ve taken this trip several times before, I’d usually be out within a week. But a year? A year without ice? A year without women, decent food, privacy, freedom? Despair overwhelms me. Something about this bus ride out to the Island seems different, darker. The level of hopelessness I have reached, somewhere between wanting an eternal slumber and desperately needing to see the faces of my family, is at a depth I never knew existed. An image of my mother bidding me farewell leaves a smoky crater in my mind.

  I glance across the aisle and notice a heavyset Latino brother with a tear drop appropriately tattooed on his face. With a look of utter anguish, he gazes out the caged bus window.

  From the shores of Queens, a mile-long bridge rises over the East River toward an island officially located in the Bronx. This sprawling city of jails waits with open arms to welcome the pariahs of the five boroughs.

  As we approach C-73, the reception jail, the mood is a blend of somberness and tension so thick you could cut it with some crudely fashioned prison dagger. It takes four hours to get through the intake process; forms to fill in: name, age, height, eye color, identifying scars, religion. By the time it’s over, the Department of Corrections knows more about me than my mother does.

  I strip down to my boxers. Each item of clothing examined, then packed away in a yellow canvas bag. I’m assured everything will be returned upon release. Yeah, right, I think. I’m handed a “full set-up”—towel, soap, bedding, and the green jumpsuit that will mark me a bona fide criminal for the next twelve months. Finally, I’m escorted to a housing area. Through several sets of doors, each one unlocked, opened, closed, and locked again, before going on to the next, down dimly lit, cold hallways rich with that institutional stench.

  The weight of a six-day speed binge, a day in court, and another day of “bullpen therapy,” as cons call the endless hours in holding cells, have taken a toll. All I want is to pass out. Through my exhaustion I gladly accept the metal cot, thin and tattered mattress, and the wool blanket that looks and smells like it hasn’t been washed in months.

  I’m assigned to housing area: 9 Main. It’s a barrack dorm with beds lined up next to each other, separated by three-foot lockers. This is how I will spend the next 365 days—stripped of everything but a locker and a cot.

  It’s close to 12 a.m. when I enter the dorm. Most of the residents are wide awake, even with the facility lights out. This is the typical after-hours scene in most housing units on Rikers. It’s called “breakin’ night,” staying up after the lights are out to hustle tobacco, do push-ups, or simply pass the time by reminiscing about the street life. It’s a picture alarmingly similar to the scene
on the blocks so many come from. These ghetto celebrities and ’hood movie stars are energized by the cover of darkness.

  Despite the ruckus, I settle into my space and drift into a catatonic state. For a moment, I linger in that zombie-like state between wakefulness and deep sleep and think the last forty-eight hours were a surreal dream. That first morning in Main is the darkest dawn I’ve ever known.

  The entire dorm is roused for chow at 4:45 a.m. It feels like the coldest winter ever as I lurch toward the mess hall. The echoes of large steel prison doors slamming wake up each and every prisoner confined within this penal colony’s unforgiving walls.

  Just a harmless speed addict, I think to myself, I never intended to hurt a soul. Especially not the retired couple whose pension checks I pilfered or the single mom whose life savings account I drained. What a time to be thinking about my vics. How will I stay afloat with the weight of my conscience suddenly acting like a ball and chain? I will surely drown in the insanity of this institution, and I realize how urgently I need a life preserver.

  Down the concrete and steel hallways of the jail, I walk alongside misfits of the morning. Entering the large steel dining area, still half-asleep, I’m assaulted by the echo of clanging, banging, and hammering steel. The noise, the noise! Steel walls, steel doors, steel pots, steel pans, steel benches, steel tables—all of which underscore the hell society has banished me to.

  As I drag my tray down the stainless steel line, kitchen workers throw and splatter food on my plate. I don’t make eye contact, just try to put one foot in front of the other.

  I sit next to an older, bespectacled junky who obviously doesn’t know the meaning of water or soap. I eat cold cereal. With my face down, I think about how I can’t wait to get out, get out and…then suddenly it hits me—I have nothing to get out for. I have no life on the outside worth returning to. The girl I loved, an addict like me, was lost to the streets last I heard. I’m a college drop-out with only lies to put on a resume. When I get out, the only choice I have is to return to the mix, the only thing I know, which will land me right back in this hellhole. For the first time, I consider hanging up, ending it all. Believe it or not, it’s hard to pull off in a place like this. I go back to my cot and sleep another eight hours.