Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “She’ll go with you, though,” he told Hart. “Right, Itwaru? You want to get into Investigations anyway, yeah? Before you move on to the commissioner’s office?”

  “Trouble in paradise?” Hart asked.

  Tevis opened a backseat door for her. He wanted to make this a bigger deal than it needed to be? He wanted to disparage her ambition? Dissolve their partnership over a misunderstanding, walk back to the uncle car alone through the cold, well then fine, whatever, go walk back to the uncle car alone through the cold. After she settled herself in the backseat, he clicked the door shut for her, not at all slamming it as she would have. Cataroni turned around to make a sympathetic yikes face. She expected Hart to say something nasty, but the Impala just sped away toward Roosevelt and left Tevis behind. The radio played WFAN sports talk, the investigators’ post-buy ritual. The story of the minute: Tiger Woods’s sixty-five-million-dollar mansion. Up ahead a young brown woman ran out into the street. She had jumped out from between two parked cars, dressed all in black like a shadow, her ponytail flouncing in the Impala’s headlights. To curb his boredom, to teach her a lesson, Hart gunned the engine then braked just short of murder. The woman was frozen; something heavy-sounding shifted in the trunk. Cataroni ricocheted hard against the dash, but Janice, who had sensed this was coming, had her arms extended, her hands braced against the driver’s-side headrest, as if the foot on the brake was her own.

  Turn the clocks back six months. Zip across the country. Zip into a new country, into Mexico, where the famous Sierra Madre Mountains green the northwestern coast. It starts here. Actually it starts under the ground, in the rich soil, with seeds sprouting roots, which sprout stalks five feet tall. Imagine a farmer. To better picture him, give him something a little strange, like an eye patch. At night his hands twitch through his dreams. During the day he snips thousands of marijuana buds off hundreds of marijuana plants. Keep it in the family: the buds then go to his sisters, who live in a nearby adobe with outrageous electricity bills and a satellite dish that snatches dubbed American television dramas out of the air. One sister loves Grey’s Anatomy, the other favors Lost, and they have little to talk about as they set their brother’s buds in a ten-rack industrial dehydrator. After that, they bunch the buds into bricks, wrap those bricks up in cling wrap, and coat that cling wrap in grease, motor oil, and mustard, a smell not unlike Brother Itwaru’s. Up the driveway comes a 1999 Honda Civic, modified, with its battery hidden in the trunk. Under the hood an empty shell of a dummy battery waits for three of the sisters’ bricks.

  Now you have to find someone ambitious or desperate or both. It never takes long. There’s a town not too far away from the adobe—El Rosario maybe?—and in this town there’s a nineteen-year-old boy. Let’s give him a snazzy name, something that hints at his bravery and eventual suckerdom, something like Jerónimo Chávez Morán. The Sinaloa cartel, or rather someone on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel, pays Morán five thousand pesos, roughly four hundred and fifty American dollars, to drive the Civic twenty miles north to the Otay Mesa border crossing. He has been instructed to take the far-right customs lane, where a border agent has been instructed to stop the car on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security. The drugs? The drugs are immediately found. The DHS agent calls over his superiors, who attempt an interrogation, but Morán can tell them nothing because he knows nothing. He hasn’t even been paid yet. Meanwhile, on the far-left lane of the Otay Mesa border crossing, a tractor-trailer carrying 6.9 metric tons of marijuana enters the United States.

  In the backseat of her parents’ SUV, a little girl looking out the window tugs an imaginary handle above her head.

  The trailer’s air horn responds with a satisfyingly noisy honk-honk.

  Throughout Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, shady mechanics tinker on tricked-out trap cars. In the spirit of Manifest Destiny, we’ll send the tractor-trailer into California, into a nondescript warehouse with a nondescript name, less Vandelay Imports than Sunny Brothers Shipping Company. Workers there diversify the 6.9 metric tons of marijuana into a small fleet of vehicles, each one specially equipped with hydraulics that—when the doors are locked, the left-turn signal is blinking, and a switch beneath the dash is engaged—raises the backseat to reveal a secret compartment. Stopping only for gas, beef jerky, energy drinks, and more gas, it takes two guys working in shifts seventy-four hours and a significant amount of bickering to drive one of these cars to the East Coast, to a stash house in the mostly residential neighborhood of Mooreseville, North Carolina.

  That was three and a half months ago.

  Yesterday, a pair of Queens drug dealers drove up from North Carolina with a marijuana-stuffed suitcase in the trunk of their shitty rental car. Shitty because the passenger’s-side window rolled down but not up, as if ghetto touched. Both dealers caught terrible head colds. Professionals, they persevered. When they got home, they sold an ounce of weed to an overweight black kid, Dwayne Jenkins, an ambitious, desperate, American-born nineteen-year-old. Today, on this particular afternoon, you’d find him outside his mother’s apartment building, straddling a construction horse over a deep crater in the street. He had a system: he kept on his person a max of three baggies at a time so that if a DT from Narco ever rolled up on him, he could slip the evidence through a hole in his pocket. From there it would drop down his pant leg and into the crater beneath him. The only hitch: whenever he sold his third baggie, he had to hustle back across the street into his lobby, which is to say his mother’s lobby, where he kept his stash in her mailbox. It was fifty-seven degrees outside, way warmer than yesterday, and all the jetting back and forth had him sweating above his ass crack. With his teeth and long fingernails and the patience of the severely stoned, he picked at the sleeve seams of his sweatshirt so as to turn it into a more breathable sweat–tank top. It was surprisingly difficult work. He had one sleeve off and was biting at the other when he saw a dude from around the neighborhood, a real sleazebucket named K-Lo, who everyone knew suffered from a dangerous blabber infection. He was of course coming Dwayne’s way. K-Lo had brought along with him a slice of hot mess, an Indian chick—dot, not feather—with a twitchy eyelid and chapped lips. Outside of Dwayne’s mother and certain bowling-alley waitresses, she was the most exhausted-looking woman he’d ever seen. She walked quickly, though. Behind her, across the street, out in front of his mother’s apartment building, more heads showed up, but they definitely weren’t customers, or at least they weren’t his kind of customers.

  “You got twenty?” the girl asked.

  “Forgive her,” K-Lo said. “She … we work together? At the copy center? And she’s not exactly the star of customer relations over there. Dwayne, this is Janice. Janice, this is Dwayne. See how that works, Jan?”

  “You got twenty?” she asked.

  “I do,” Dwayne told her. “But it’s not so safe right now, know what I mean?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean. Can you hook us up or what?”

  “Five minutes ago, no problem. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But now? I can’t be doing nothing with police all up in my face.”

  “What?” she said.

  “What?” he said in a girly falsetto meant to mimic her panic. He chin-pointed across the street, where a Chevy Impala sat parked at a fire hydrant. Four antennae rose up out of the trunk, one for every plainclothes in the car. “I mean, are they for real?” Dwayne asked. “Four pissed-off looking white motherfuckers sitting in a tow-away zone? Doing nothing?”

  “Unbelievable,” she said.

  “Believe it,” he told her. “I’m gonna have to go, but I’ll be back here tomorrow, same spot and everything, if y’all looking to get hooked up again.”

  “I need it today,” she said.

  “Well, good luck,” he told her. “But you’re gonna want to be real careful, just saying. Keep your eyes open, yeah? Where there’s some cops there’s more cops, and they’ll bust you for nothing.”

  She didn�
��t even thank him. But that was all right: he was the Godfather, Saint Dwayne, protector of dumb bitches the world over. After K-Lo dragged her away, Dwayne pushed the last two of his baggies through the hole in his pants pocket. It’d be a loss of forty dollars, but since they cost him only ten dollars per, it really was only a loss of twenty, the cost of doing business, a small price to pay for peace of mind. Plus, truth be told, he needed to justify his sore asshole. Why straddle this construction horse if he wasn’t going to make use of its crater? The baggies dropped down next to one of his sweatshirt sleeves and a bag of Cheetos he’d emptied earlier. He wiped his hands together, problem solved, nothing to worry about. Before crossing the street and walking past that gauntlet of cops, he pulled out his cell to call his connects, the dudes who’d driven back up to Queens from North Carolina.

  “Hey, yo,” Dwayne said. “You know that Indian chick you was telling me about? Did she have short hair or long?”

  It was the day after the Tevis breakup. For this afternoon’s shift, Gonz had been ghosting her, not a permanent arrangement, God willing, and not by request, either—she hadn’t talked to Prondzinski yet—but because it was his turn in the preestablished rotation to work the 115. As if in apology, the Big Bosses also teamed her up with K-Lo, the superstar CI who’d dragged her to all the neighborhood parks, where somehow they just kept striking out. Hardly any of the dealers were where K-Lo had said they’d be, and when they were, they weren’t selling what K-Lo said they’d be selling. Uncle continues to be hopeless, Gonz probably said into the Nextel. And when she at last did come close to making a buy, the investigators of course spoiled it by accidentally parking across the street. Yeah right. Accidentally, her ass. Ten minutes later, five blocks south of Roosevelt, off the grid and away from the dealers, she shoved her face close to Hart’s through his open driver’s-side window. She called bullshit. The investigators made a mistake? Parked on the wrong corner? Hadn’t noticed her talking to Dwayne? Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Spittle flew out of her mouth. She accused Hart of sabotaging her out of some sausage-club loyalty to Tevis, and she wanted to know what the fuck. Inside the Impala, Cataroni and McCarthy and Duckenfield all gawked with disbelief. Gonz and K-Lo slithered closer behind her, as if to eavesdrop, which was unnecessary since she was shouting. When Hart opened his mouth to respond, his breath punched her with acid reflux.

  “Who do you think you are?” he said.

  “I—”

  “Who do you think you are?” he said again, the implication being I’m a sergeant, your superior, capable of stripping your vacation days, writing you up for insubordination, killing your career with a bad annual review, kicking your thick ass back to patrol. That’s me. Who are you? It was a question she didn’t know how to answer. To move her face away from his own, he powered up the window. His door swung open and smashed her knees. He stepped out of the car, unfolding himself to full height, waiting for her to say something, anything, and when she didn’t, when she did nothing except pedal backward, he pointed a finger at K-Lo and barked, “You! J-Lo, K-Lo, whatever the fuck … you wanna get paid in cash?”

  Always prepared, K-Lo said, “Or?”

  Hart picked three crack rocks out of his Altoids tin and dropped them one by one into K-Lo’s palm. She’d never seen anything like it. K-Lo’s face registered zero surprise, though, as if this had happened plenty of times before, but then again maybe not: he kept his body half turned, ready to take off and run in case Hart changed his mind. Gonz, meanwhile, was staring at a plastic bag wrapped around a telephonepole wire. She probably should’ve looked away, too, for the purposes of plausible deniability. Paying CIs with drugs—or failing to report an officer who paid CIs with drugs—was not only against departmental regulations but illegal, obviously, potentially punishable with jail time. Hart would keep the cash, K-Lo would sell the rocks for more money than he would’ve been paid for today’s services, and everybody everywhere would win, except Janice, of course. For cues on how to behave she turned to the investigators in the Impala, but she couldn’t see them anymore from where she was standing. Bright sun inflamed all their windows.

  “Gonz,” said Sergeant Hart. “You want a ride back to the uncle car, or what?”

  Hopeful, Gonz looked at her—a chance to listen to WFAN sports talk with the investigators!—and she waved him along. Their shift, and by extension his ghosting responsibilities, had ended five minutes earlier. Now at least she could walk back to the uncle car by herself, without him snarking next to her the whole way. What were you thinking, Itwaru? You on your period or something? They’d have the drive back to the rumpus for all that. Assuming he waited for her at the uncle car. Assuming he didn’t ditch her completely, although not even Gonz was that much of a prick. He’d probably wait for her at one of Woodside’s Irish pubs, probably Saints & Sinners, where he’d have enough time for a beer and a couple of shots, lucky him. What was she waiting for? Standing here for? K-Lo had already left: he went east with one hand protectively plunged into his pocket, his fist presumably curled around the rocks. And so she went the other way: back toward Woodside and the uncle car, solo, just like Tevis the day before. As always she moved quickly, even outpacing the Impala for half a block before it left her behind. The Nextel in her purse put the time at exactly 3:40. The nineteenth of March, a Wednesday. She’d never forget it. On Judge Street, between Britton and Vietor Avenues, she paused to watch a little black kid practicing his killers, hitting a handball off the side of an apartment building, down where the bricks met the sidewalk so the ball would dribble back to him, unreturnable. The Latino with the flaming eyeball grabbed her from behind.

  Before she recognized him, she recognized the tattoo: a bright blue iris, burst capillaries, flames trailing down his neck, as if the eye had combusted straight out of its socket. She recognized, too, the awkward angle of his jaw, the small white nubbins of his teeth. Acne scars—something she hadn’t noticed before, but then again she hadn’t been this close before—pocked his cheeks, over which he’d applied a thin layer of flesh-colored foundation. Other than the makeup, he looked exactly the same, his goatee as finely groomed as it was the only other time she’d seen him, two Saturdays ago, on line at the taco cart. Now he had a hold of her elbow. Behind him, as if she were living a daylight nightmare with all her secret monsters collected on one sidewalk, stood Korean Marty, miserably coughing into his armpit. Since last she’d seen him, he’d grown a hard dark walnut of a hematoma above his eyebrow. Marijuana fumes wafted off his big body, but his apparent friend, the Latino, smelled strongly, overwhelmingly, of baby powder.

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” she said.

  “Oh, jeez,” he said. With both his hands raised in apology, he leaned slightly backward at the waist without actually stepping away from her. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was hurting you. Was I? Come on, was I hurting you?”

  Korean Marty pressed two fingers to the base of his throat and in a raspy voice said, “That’s her, man.”

  “You got a haircut,” the guy said.

  Again: why was she still standing here? She stepped around the little black kid, who like all city kids knew how to mind his own business. He was bouncing life into his handball, getting it warmed up for another practice serve. If she told him to call 911, she knew it would only provoke them. At the end of the block, with her arm clamped over her purse, she turned onto Britton Avenue, which seemed wider, more open. The bright afternoon sun blanched the sky. Deep in her ear she heard the voice of her father, who used to hang his head out her bedroom window to watch her come home from school. Walk calmly, not quickly. If you gotta look back, then take a peek, once, over your shoulder, but don’t ever turn around.

  She turned around and saw the two of them three paces behind her. The skinny Latino nodded at her, smiling. Her elbow still felt hot where he’d grabbed it. She walked faster, did everything wrong, hunched her shoulders and tightened the struts in her neck. On the opposite side of the street, thr
ee teenage girls sat on a stoop, two of them texting, the third staring at Janice with an inexplicably sour expression, as if she held her responsible for something. A block away past Ithaca Street, Janice passed a tall brick building with the penitential air of an elementary school. An hour earlier, she could have sought refuge in a crowd of mothers waiting for their kids to be released. She could have disappeared inside their haze of perfume, their chattering gossip and complaints, but by now that final school bell had already rung.

  She reached into her purse for the Nextel. Unsure of the men’s proximity, she did not dare ask for backup. Instead she slipped the rubber hair band off her wrist and double-wrapped it around the Nextel’s silver transmitter button. Communication could go only one way now, from herself to the ghost. Gonz couldn’t chirp her back, ask her why she was tying up the line, but she didn’t need him to chirp her back. She needed him to listen. She hoped the sports talk on the Impala’s radio wasn’t playing too loudly. The purse hung unzipped off her shoulder. A foot clipped her heel and she stumbled forward before catching herself.

  “Careful!” the Latino said.

  Without turning around, she said, “You two better stop following me.”

  “We better,” he said.

  At the next intersection, she turned off Britton Avenue and onto a long and narrow one-way, Gleane Street, where two- and three-family homes crowded one another. Metal bars protected the windows and air conditioners. Thick trees shaded the sidewalk. To caution drivers, city workers had written SCHOOL X-ING in bright white letters, but to Janice, walking against the nonexistent traffic, it appeared mirrored and upside down. She hoped she was going the right way. She wanted to get onto Roosevelt, but here in Elmhurst, away from the easy crosshatch grid of Jackson Heights, her sense of direction tended to wobble. It seemed familiar, though, this Gleane Street, or at least she thought she’d heard of it before. But where were all the people? A hose seemed to have recently washed down this section of sidewalk, but where was the hoser? Somewhere nearby the 7 train rumbled, the best noise she’d heard all month, for she could assume at least that she was getting closer to Roosevelt and the protection of all its commuters. She couldn’t see the avenue or the train yet, but she did see, a full block ahead, a red-and-black flag saying TERRAZA CAFÉ. When she slowed down, the Latino made no effort at all to keep himself from bumping into her.