“What the li’l muthafucka say?” ML Rex demanded.
“Yeah,” Jones repeated. “What the li’l muthfucka say?”
“He ask why we disgrace ourselfs,” one of the women replied quietly. Her eyes were downcast and even the rouge on her cheeks could not hide her shame. But then her sister added, “He call you a scumbag and sez we should not be wit choo.” She spat at Alejandro’s feet. “He ees a fine one to talk. He use to be a beeg man. Boom, da beeg gangster…but he ees nothin’ no more. Jes a li’l niño who loss hees cojones in jail.”
Ever the peacemaker, Giancarlo felt the escalating tensions and tried to step between Alejandro and the two LA gangsters. At the same moment, ML Rex stepped forward to confront Alejandro and accidentally sent the blind boy sprawling.
Things immediately went from bad to really bad. Jones inserted his hand in his jacket as if reaching for a gun. At the same moment, Zak bent over to fetch his knife from its strap, but he never got any farther. Suddenly, he felt the back of his sweatshirt gathered in the grip of a huge hand that lifted him off his feet and transported him behind its owner, the bouncer Jim, who was surging forward with his brother, Joe.
Jones was not a small man, but he was dwarfed by either of the twin bouncers, much less both. “You pull anythang out of your jacket ’cept yo hand, punk, and I’ll tear your fuckin’ arm off and beat you wit it,” the giants said in tandem. They both smiled, revealing a gold incisor with a diamond inlaid in each enormous mouth.
While his brother kept an eye on Jones, who slowly pulled his hand out of his jacket to show he wasn’t holding anything, Joe leaned over and gently picked Giancarlo up off the floor. “They you is li’l man,” he said gently; then looking at ML Rex like he was considering eating him for dinner, softly added, “I think maybe you owes my liddle brotha Giancarlo an apology.”
For all his bluster, the rapper certainly knew when to fold his cards. “Didn’ mean no harm…an accident, homie,” ML Rex said, and acted as if he were brushing some imaginary dirt off Giancarlo’s shoulders. “They you is, li’l massa. All cleaned up.”
Jim leaned forward menacingly until his massive face was an inch from ML Rex’s. “You ain’t my homeboy, punk,” he snarled. “I sugges’ you keep your LA ass in LA…. This ain’t no fuckin’ Hollywood movie.”
The rapper backed away and then mustered as much dignity as he could and headed for the door. “Move your big ass, bitch,” he yelled at one of the hookers as they were leaving. In the open doorway, Jones turned back and shouted at the bouncers. “Fuckin’ niggahs, I’ll be back wit da Bloods ta shove a fuckin’ barrel up yer asses and blow your shit away.”
Not to be outdone in front of the women, ML Rex pointed at Alejandro and yelled, “And I’ll catch up to you sooner than later. Watch your back, muthafucka, ’cause I’ll be all over you.” Then for good measure, he added, “But I’ll make you watch what I do to the li’l white bitches first.”
“Touch these kids, and I’ll put a fuckin’ cap in the hole where your brain is ’sposed to be,” Alejandro shouted back. As soon as he said it, he felt stupid, like he’d stooped to schoolyard taunting. But before he could think of something more intelligent to say or do, Jim and Joe took two quick steps toward the door and the ML Rex entourage disappeared.
Zak laughed. “That was cool!” he said, mimicking the gangsta swagger that had come naturally to Alejandro. “I’ll put a fuckin’ cap—”
Alejandro whirled and cut him off. “Listen to me, Zak, that wasn’t cool,” he said. “I let him get me down to his level…. I been on that road before, and there ain’t nothin’ but misery at the end. Okay, hombre?”
A sobered Zak nodded, as did his brother. Looking at the pair of chagrined faces, Alejandro’s brown eyes softened again and his smile returned. “Come on, bros,” he said. “Let’s get you a cab.”
Alejandro and the boys stepped out into the New York City night just in time to see ML Rex’s limousine pull away. A brown hand was extended from a window in back.
“Hey, he flipped us off!” Zak exclaimed. He returned the salute.
“Let it go, dog.” Alejandro laughed, slapping him on the back. He ended up having to walk the twins to Ninth Avenue before they could find a cab willing to pull over. “Crosby and Grand,” he told the cabbie when the boys got inside, “no detours.” He handed over a twenty from his recent winnings—an exorbitant tip, no doubt, but insurance to get the boys home safely.
Before he closed the door, Alejandro leaned in and recited his part of the ritual he’d begun with the Karp twins not long after they met. “Remember, do the right thing…,” he started.
“…’cause it’s the right thing to do,” they finished.
Alejandro nodded. “Peace, bros” he said and shut the door. When the cab was out of sight, he thought about what had transpired between him and ML Rex and scowled. Shaking his head, he stalked off into the night. He had more important things to think about and wanted to see Dugan.
4
AFTER THE RUN-IN AT THE HIP-HOP NIGHTCLUB, VINCENT Paglia dropped ML Rex and his entourage off at the Waldorf-Astoria. “Say, Vinnie, since you is shit for a bodyguard,” the rapper said from outside the limo, looking back at the hookers to make sure they noticed how he’d regained control of the situation, “do you think you can get here by ten o’clock tomorrow morning? I gots an important, executive-type meeting at eleven.”
Vinnie nodded and got back in the car. The rapper and his group disappeared into the hotel, but the chauffeur didn’t drive off right away. He picked up the car telephone and dialed a number scrawled on the back of a business card. When the man on the other end of the line answered, he told him everything he could think of about the night’s events. He then listened for a moment, gave an affirmative grunt, put the phone back in its cradle, and drove home to his wife and little girl.
The next morning, he was back to drive ML Rex and his business manager, Zig-Zag Jones, to their “executive-type meeting.” When they got back in the car, he noted that the transaction must have gone well. The rapper was in great spirits when they returned to the hotel to pick up the two sleepy hookers, who were scandalizing the dowagers in the lobby with skirts that didn’t quite cover their assets. Making sure the girls saw the big spender in action, the rapper handed him a hundred dollar bill with a flourish as Vinnie held the car door open.
The group snorted, smoked, and drank the rest of the afternoon away as they hopped from one radio station to the next. Vinnie noticed that ML Rex greeted each of the DJs and show producers like they were long-lost brothers, engaged in the protracted hand jive on the way out the door, and then bad-mouthed them as soon as he was back in the limousine.
When he was through with the tour, ML Rex was ready to get down to even more serious “par-tay-yang” and instructed Vinnie to take him, Jones, “and the bitches” to the best restaurant in New York. Personally, the chauffeur thought that Salvatore’s in Little Italy was the best in town, but he figured the wiseguys wouldn’t appreciate him bringing a couple of niggers and their whores into a respectable family restaurant. So he’d taken them to Le Cirque on Fiftieth and Madison Avenue, across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Then he smiled inwardly when the group was turned away at the door by the maître d’ because “the young misses are not appropriately attired.”
ML Rex put on a show standing outside the door, yelling and gesturing at the maître d’—“Racist muthafucka!”—until the man threatened to call the police. Paglia finally guided the rapper back into the limo with the promise that he’d thought of a better place. “There won’t be any problems.”
After suffering through a berating for being a “stupid ass, muthafuckin’ East Coast cracker,” Vinnie had taken them to the Tribeca Grill—a see-and-be-seen spot with hipster pretensions, but not particularly discriminating about dress codes. “You’ll like this place,” he assured his charges. “It’s Bob De Niro’s joint…you know, the movie star.”
Just to make sure ther
e were no problems, he slipped the hostess the hundred dollar bill he’d been given earlier to seat the foursome right away, and figured the C-note was well spent. He’d been told by his new boss to make sure the rap star was kept “happy and high” until the appointed hour. Several times since he’d first picked up the niggers at La Guardia, he’d placed calls to a mobile number of some kid in Harlem, who’d shown up a half hour later in a black SUV to deliver cocaine wrapped in foil pouches. “Good shit,” his charges told him, not that they’d offered him so much as a snort.
After dinner, Vinnie deposited the group outside the Studio 54 discothèque. ML Rex’s mood took a quick upward swing when the bouncer recognized his face from the Some Desperate S**t Fer Ya album cover and motioned him and his companions to the front of the line. “It ain’t LA,” he told the impressed hookers, “no palm trees or nuthin’, ya’ll understand, but New York ain’t all bad, I guess.”
A few minutes before midnight, Vinnie got a call from Jones, the manager, to pick them up in front of the nightclub. On the way, he punched in the telephone number on the back of the business card. He’d been told not to write the number down and clean it out of his phone’s memory bank after each call, but his own powers of recall weren’t very good so he’d cheated and kept the card. When the call was answered, he identified himself, then listened carefully. “Yes,” was all he said before hanging up.
Pulling up in front of the nightclub, Vinnie was pleased to see that his party was in a good mood and drunk. In the limo, the rapper popped the cork off a bottle of champagne and ordered him to drive back to the hotel where they were going to kick the party into full gear.
Vinnie put the car in drive and eased into traffic. He got on Third Avenue heading north, but instead of turning at Fiftieth Street for the Waldorf, he continued on up past 110th and the northern border of Central Park, until he hung a right and drove into the heart of East Harlem.
Vinnie had no idea whom he was working for and had only met the man on the end of the telephone line once, who’d explained that he was not “the boss, just his messenger.” Nor did he know, or want to know, what the strange instructions the messenger had given him might mean to the people in the back of the limo.
Despite his size and “don’t fuck with me” look, he wasn’t really a bodyguard, just a part-time chauffeur. Violence frightened him. In fact, the only reason he’d agreed to drive the obnoxious nigger and his pals around, and play the role of hired muscle, was because he owed certain disreputable folks about ten big—as in ten thousand dollars—in gambling debts.
Although there had rarely been any hard evidence to demonstrate it, Vinnie considered himself a gambling genius. During March Madness, he thought he’d perfected a system for hitting the over-under on the college games and placed a series of wagers with his bookie. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the cash to make good as each game dug him into a deeper hole. He was considering whether to take the wife and kid and go on a long vacation to someplace, say Venezuela, but then two bad men had come to see him where he worked at the fish market beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d been told in no uncertain terms that the people he owed needed a job done and that he’d been selected to do it.
A simple job, really, said the man in the cliché black suit who did the talking. All he had to do was chauffeur some asshole rap star around, act tough, and follow instructions given to him by another man at the other end of the telephone number he was supposed to memorize. Follow instructions and all his debts would be forgiven. Fuck up and he’d find out what it felt like to fall from the Brooklyn Bridge, but not before other bad men did terrible things to his wife and little girl. “And by the way, Vinnie, an equatorial climate wouldn’t be good for your complexion, so stick aroun’ and do what you’re told.”
Most of the instructions he’d received after that had been as easy to follow as he’d been told. The hardest part was parting with a thousand bucks for the chauffeur who’d been scheduled to drive Mr. Rex. After that, all he had to do was drive, look bad, and do whatever the nigger said…so long as it didn’t mess up the plan. Oh, and report any and all activities of ML Rex to the boss. He did what he was supposed to and could tell that the man on the telephone had taken a special interest in the previous night’s encounter with the little spic, Alley-Handro Garcia, or whatever his name was. What it had to do with where he was heading now he wasn’t sure, but something gnawing deep in his gut told him it wasn’t good.
As he drove into East Harlem, Vinnie sweated until his white shirt was soaking and dark spots were showing through his black chauffeur’s jacket. This is no place for a white boy, he thought. He promised God that if he could just get through this ordeal, he would never bet on basketball games again. Now, football, there was a sport a man with a system could make some money at…
Vinnie had counted on it taking some time before his party would realize that they were nowhere near their hotel. Two of them were from out of town, and the women were too busy with a crack pipe and their professional responsibilities to care. He glanced in the rearview mirror and could see the two men, but only one of the hookers; however, by the contented look on ML Rex’s face, he could guess where the other woman’s face was planted.
When the rapper finally did notice that instead of the Waldorf, Vinnie was pulling over to a curb in a dark and apparently abandoned neighborhood, the chauffeur had a story ready. “Thought you might want to score again before we headed back to the hotel,” he said.
“Well, all right, dog,” ML Rex said without the hooker missing a beat. “Now you thinkin’. For a moment there, I thought maybe you was takin’ us to yer momma’s house.” This brought guffaws from Jones and the other woman, as well as a muffled chortle from his own girl. “Shee-it, my man,” he added, looking out the window, “this place is more fucked up than my old ’hood.” The rapper was staring at a wasteland of boarded-up buildings covered with mysterious gang hieroglyphics; some of the windows were missing boards, the empty spaces staring back at him like mouth and eye sockets in a skull.
At least in Watts there were homes with patches of grass and the occasional palm tree. This section of East Harlem near the river was wall-to-wall cement, asphalt, and brick. The only things growing were weeds that had found some crack in the fractured sidewalks and abandoned lots to exploit, and the rats. Rats the size of Jack Russell terriers scurried down the sidewalks and along the gutters; larger creatures seemed to be lurking farther into the shadows, avoiding even the weak illumination of distant streetlights and the three-quarters-full moon.
“Dis is East Hahlum,” Jones’s hooker said nervously. “We shouldn’t ought to be heah.”
“Relax, bitch,” ML Rex said, annoyed because his girl had stopped her efforts when her sister started talking. “We got Vinnie here to protect us. Ain’t that right, Vin?” The chauffeur grunted in the affirmative as the rapper consoled the hookers. “And we need a li’l more of dat nose candy and maybe a rock fer yer pipe. Now I suggest you get back to workin’ it whilst we wait for the man.”
All in all, ML Rex felt that the trip to New York had been a success. The humiliation at the rap club the night before had wounded his pride, and he’d spent the rest of that evening into the early morning hours roughing up the hookers and devising ways to get even. Maybe he’d fly some of the homeboys from the ’hood to town and spray that little muthafuckin’ spic down. Then he’d buy the Hip-Hop Nightclub and pay some vagrant to burn it to the ground—with those big, dumb, ignorant niggahs inside, and maybe the little white punks, too. Just thinking about it made him feel better…well, that and the cries of pain he elicited from the prostitutes.
The day was better. The meeting with the distribution company for his next CD went exactly as he’d planned. He was on his way to the top, and there was nothing to stop him. Now, if they could just connect for a little more blow and get back to the hotel, all would be well.
• • •
Vinnie was waiting, but not for the coke dealer from Ha
rlem. When he saw the dark sedan pull up behind the limo with its headlights out, he took a quick look in the rearview mirror and stepped once on the brake pedal. The half-dressed hookers were now sitting on the men’s laps and bouncing up and down in tandem with their backs to him. He pressed the button to lower the windows in the limousine, then opened his door, got out, and waddled away from the car as fast as his tree-trunk legs could carry him. Behind him, he heard the rapper angrily exclaim, “What da fuck,” and then, frightened, “Oh shee-it!”
Two figures in dark clothes with black ski masks pulled over their faces had emerged from the sedan, each walking up to either side of the limo. ML Rex’s exclamation was in response to seeing the man outside his window raise his arm and point a semiautomatic handgun at him.
The rapper was fast enough to shove the hooker, who was concentrating on her task and oblivious to the sudden change in circumstances, into the line of fire. The first bullet caught her in the back of the head, spattering gouts of brain, blood, and bone chips over her customer, blinding him. ML Rex started to scream, as did the woman and the man next to him, but the next bullet cut him off as it entered his mouth. The hollow-point .45 caliber slug demolished his brain stem and blew a hole out the back of his skull the size of an orange. He was effectively dead at that moment, but the shooter emptied the remaining bullets into his head, except one last round he sent crashing into the skull of the dead prostitute. It was over in just a few seconds.
Meanwhile, Kwasama Zig-Zag Jones kept screaming, though more from shock than fear. After all, he was the one who’d tipped off the executives at Pentagram Records about his employer’s impending betrayal. He’d been told to make sure that ML Rex was happy and distracted—and that they leave the bar before midnight. “The rest will be taken care of.” He figured that would mean something bad would happen to the boy he’d first known in kindergarten as Marty, and now that the moment had arrived, he felt a small pang of remorse. But it quickly passed like a bit of indigestion. The way he saw it, the world was made up of losers and winners. ML Rex had been a winner until he made the stupid decision to strike out on his own and jeopardize Jones’s meal ticket. That made him a loser.
Hoax Page 5
