“Simple as that, huh? So did you have anything to do with crack coming into the hood? I mean, that’s what really changed everything—the culture and the music.”
“I had nothing to do with that. Not personally.”
“But you were involved with the government. With the FBI and, maybe, the CIA. C’mon. You gonna come clean or not?”
“In the early ’80s, a few entrepreneurs in Texas identified building and maintaining prisons as a great business for a spread-out state with lots of small towns. Construction jobs. Food and laundry supplies. Uniforms. The prisoners can work for third world wages. Motels for visitors. Car rentals. The economic benefits went on and on.”
“But they needed a way to fill these new prisons up.”
“Right. Freebasing was popular out here and in a few other parts of the country for a while.”
“Richard Pryor.”
“Yeah. Coke was expensive, so you needed money if you were just gonna sit there and cook it all day. But when the crack thing started to happen, you had the perfect storm—an addictive, crime-inducing product, a demand for more prisons, and, along with that, mandatory sentencing for possession of small amounts of crack rock. So it wasn’t some simple CIA plot. It was a group of like-minded individuals in Texas, California, and Colombia who came together and connected these dots.”
“And you were one of these individuals.”
“No. I would never have helped these people do what they did. I knew about them but, honestly, they were too powerful, too connected. God will punish them for this, just like He will for what happened to Tupac and Biggie.”
“Go on.”
“Eventually Malik and Eric became competitive. Very competitive. One was on the West Coast but had his secret life—”
“And wife.”
“Yeah. Well, they both wanted a piece of Tupac. He was connected to both coasts. He had political ties to old-school nationalists and gangsta ties to all the color-coded fools out here. For me, Tupac could have been the political leader hip hop seemed destined to produce. If he’d made it to thirty-five he’d have been a movie star. If he’d made it to forty-five he’d have been the leader of his own international diaspora political movement. One Saturday afternoon he sat right where you’re sitting and told me his dreams. I was gonna make it happen for him. I was gonna raise the money, make the connects, and over time set up his future. He was gonna be my legacy. I knew in my soul that Tupac was why hip hop was invented. To nurture that young man and make him the leader that would bring it all together.”
“Sounds like a beautiful plan.”
“Malik didn’t like it. He was jealous of me anointing Tupac. He acted like a child. Maybe he’d become too close to the business and had internalized contempt for artists. I don’t know. He feared Tupac, and I believe Malik definitely contemplated having Tupac killed. Now Eric, who’d become this East Coast loyalist, came to hate Pac after he began attacking Diddy, Biggie, and all these folks he loved.”
“Seems a stupid reason to have someone killed.”
“For some white boy who really wanted to prove something to himself, it somehow made perfect sense. By ’95 Malik and Eric were so deep into their own individual journeys, either could have had it done.”
“Not together?”
“I don’t think so. Possible, I guess, but I don’t think so.”
“And Biggie?”
“That was definitely arranged by Malik and his Rampart scumbags. Eric had been friends with Diddy since the Jodeci era and this was Malik’s way to send a giant fuck-you his way.”
“This is crazy shit.”
“People always look for complex motives in conspiracies. All it really takes to change history is a few individuals with enough money to buy obedience, enough insight to identify weakness, and the will to do terrible things. Malik is dead but Eric is very alive. That bastard is part of my legacy too.”
“So it was Eric who had Dwayne killed?”
“Yes. That I’m sure of. He thought Malik had cooperated with your friend’s book and was afraid of being exposed. No doubt about that. I’ll tell you something else.”
“What now?”
“All those East Coast Bloods you’ve been getting the last few years? Well, Eric’s been selling them guns. It’s his way of still having some influence on the street. Gun dealing is how he’s kept his hand in, even after New York hip hop became kinda irrelevant.”
“Why? He must have made a ton of money.”
“Having power and influence is a bigger drug than coke or pussy. Believe me, I know. Listen—if you ever find the two kids who stabbed your friends, I bet they’ll be in possession of some shiny new guns.”
“Like Berettas?”
“Like Berettas. Desert Eagles. Whatever niggas can kill other niggas with.”
“Is that it? Is that everything?”
“Hell no. There’s a lot more. We could talk about Nas versus Jay-Z. Cash Money. Why is 50 Cent’s entire career predicated on dissin’ other MCs? Who placed the gun in Lil Wayne’s car that got him a bid at Rikers, and who benefitted from his absence from the marketplace? The waves of shit we set in motion are still rippling.”
“All started with one silly report my friend wrote for a couple thousand dollars.”
“Yes. That did it. I had the money. I had the contacts and a vision for black people. I’d seen white men shape history and I wanted to do that as well. But niggas are a hard bunch to control. So when I realized I couldn’t control them, I tried to guide them. When I couldn’t do that, I decided to just take what I could get.”
“How can I believe a word of this?”
“Don’t be stupid, D. You think white men are the only ones who can play chess?”
“You told me all this cause one day I’d come after you for Dwayne’s murder.”
“Nigga, please,” Amos said with a bitter laugh. “You giving yourself a little too much credit. If I hadn’t told you all this, you’d still be looking around Brownsville for two kids with box cutters.”
“Okay, motherfucker: why?”
“Cause …” Amos paused and suddenly looked sad. “Cause, just like you, I’m dying a little every day. I have inoperable colon cancer—just like every other black man who ate too much pork and smoked too many Kools. Got a year. Maybe eighteen months. Your HIV ass will probably still be here when I’m gone—but only if you’re real smart.”
“It’s that white guy, right? The one I met at the commercial shoot. Looked real military. He’s the FBI guy.”
“No. He was probably just a guy paid to fuck with you. All I know is that Eric’s made a lot of money and done a whole lot of dirt. Motherfucker’s resourceful when it suits him. He’s got the same quality Phil Jackson has—he knows how to get talented black people to do his bidding, even if it’s sticking a knife in someone’s neck.”
“All this shit you’ve told me, I don’t know what to believe.”
“It’s your choice. Everybody can’t process the truth when they hear it.”
“I should kill you. How about that? For Dwayne, for Amina, and the people I don’t know who are dead because you wanted to turn a dime into a dollar.”
“Maybe you should. Would save me some time. But you won’t. Besides, that wouldn’t stop Eric. It would just make him happy. One less thing to worry about.”
D stood up, leaned across Amos’s desk, and snatched the older man up like a sack of dirty laundry. He stared into the man’s frightened eyes a moment and then reared back and drove his right fist into the center of Amos’s face, sending him backward with a broken nose. He landed hard on the ground and his head snapped back against a chair.
D looked down at the moaning, crumpled body of Amos Pilgrim and seriously contemplated finishing the job. He breathed heavy and heard his heartbeat. It wouldn’t take much. D’s fist was sore and flecked with blood.
The murderous impulse passed. His breathing slowed. Amos said something but D had heard enough and was out the door an
d back in the living room before he realized how much trouble he’d be in if Pilgrim pressed charges.
Once back on the Pacific Coast Highway, D made a strategic decision. He MapQuested LAX and looked at his watch. Only nine-thirty. By ten-thirty he was sitting in a business class seat on a red-eye back to New York.
CHAPTER 28
IT’S LIKE THAT
The plane was sitting on the tarmac at JFK and anxious New Yorkers awaited the beep that signaled the race to open the overhead baggage compartments. D flicked on his BlackBerry, not sure what message would be awaiting him about his roughing up of Amos Pilgrim.
Nothing from the left coast, but many a missive from his man Ray Ray. Ice needs to see you. Get at me. There were four of them. 12:40 a.m., 1:15 a.m., 3:02 a.m., 4 a.m. D called from the plane but got Ray Ray’s voicemail. While in baggage claim the return call came through, Ray Ray’s tired voice was as sad as a tear.
The taxi driver didn’t want a shorty, especially to where D had to go, but once inside the vehicle there was no removing his sleepy, irritated, angry self. The destination was not Manhattan, but an uninspiring patch of Brooklyn bordering Jamaica Bay known as Canarsie. Named after Indians, the remote area in southern Brooklyn had been home base to nearly every ethnic group to pass through the city except Native Americans—Jews, Italians, Southern blacks, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Russians, and more. Tightly packed homes with street-level garages and narrow backyards dominated the area, and it was in front of just such a nondescript house that D emerged from the taxi and, bags in hand, walked up a stone staircase.
The buzzer said S. Compare, but the sleepy-eyed teenager who peered at D through the glass looked more Latino than Creole. He opened the door without a word and D entered. The place looked like it had once housed a nice working-class family—a plastic-covered sofa, framed family pictures on the walls and end tables. But fast food wrappers, discarded cigarettes, and the stench of men who rarely showered suggested its current life was a flophouse.
“I gotta frisk you,” the teen said, the first words he’d uttered. D put down his travel bag and suitcase and submitted to a very rudimentary search. Down a staircase into a carless garage, D followed the youth, knowing whatever was down there wouldn’t pretty.
“What up?” Ice said. D stopped at the bottom of the steps. “Hope you had a nice flight.”
Strapped up with belts and rope in a makeshift electric chair was a bloody, tattered, hollow-faced, and defeated Eric Mayer. Wires were clipped to his right and left wrists, his bare feet, and somewhere between his legs that D decided not to look at too closely. They were all hooked up to an electric contraption with bad intentions.
“You know this man?”
“Eric Mayer,” D said, not moving any closer.
“Not Rico Drayton or Andre Young?” Ice pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and leafed through credit cards and various fake documents. “This white man has a lot of black-sounding names.”
D finally walked over to Mayer, studying him the way scientists do a frog they plan to dissect.
“How’d you find him?”
“I didn’t. Fool was looking for me.”
Ice stepped to Mayer with an open palm and slapped him into semiconsciousness. Mayer groaned and a bubble of blood popped out of his split lips.
“Motherfucker was going around the Ville acting like he was welfare and he had benefits or something for me. One of my kids had bought guns off him awhile back. Sometimes he’d work out of a place on Atlantic.” Ice produced a big Jamaican spliff. “You want some?”
“Not before breakfast.”
Ice fired up the joint and inhaled deeply before speaking again. “After I snatched him, I took a picture of him and sent it around to a few niggas. It came back that he was the fool who hired those kids to wet up your friend. Two thousand—a G apiece. But they say he really killed the man.” Ice reached behind his back and pulled a revolver out of the waistband of his quite visible Fruit of the Looms. “You wanna handle this?”
D pulled out his wallet and offered Ice $900 in cash. Ice held out the gun as he took another puff. Spliff still between his lips, he took the money.
“I’ll have Ray Ray deliver the rest.”
“No rush,” Ice said. “I know you’re good for it.”
“You sure this man is the killer and not the two kids?”
Ice shrugged. “This is as close to justice as I can offer. And definitely all you can afford.”
D walked over so close to Mayer he could smell the funk of the beaten man’s loose bowels. “Why did you kill Amina Jones?” Mayer’s eyes were red—at least what D could make out through the puffy, bruised eyelids. The question seemed to actually amuse Mayer.
“Well, well, well.” That was all the beaten man said.
D didn’t like Mayer’s flippancy and punched him dead in the mouth, loosening several front teeth and sending the chair he was tied to down to the garage floor. He stood over Mayer and peered at his bloody knuckles.
“Don’t you worry about anything else.” Ice stood next to him and patted his shoulder reassuringly, a gesture that made D feel complicit in a way that disgusted him. “Jamaica Bay is a few blocks away.”
D nodded and headed back upstairs.
Canarsie was the last stop on the L train, a subway line associated in the twenty-first century with hipsters who got off in Williamsburg and Bushwick. But the last stop on the line was in the ass end of Brooklyn; it was a place that journalists and policymakers didn’t report on or worry about. It was out there, not violent enough to be Brownsville or beautiful enough to be Fort Greene. Just a place where fingers trailed off the map, deeply disinterested.
D sat in the first car of the L train, his bags stacked on the seat next to him, wondering if revenge was ever actually sweet, cause mostly it felt like mourning with a smile.
CHAPTER 29
TIME FOR SUM AKSION
D stood in front of his office door, keys in his right hand and a plastic bottle of water in the other.
He’d learned so much in Cali that his old surroundings felt somehow unfamiliar, like he was seeing the lobby, the elevator, and the hallway with new eyes. It was D’s Matrix moment and it felt as unsettling as anything Neo experienced after taking that pill. He knew the answers now and it neither satisfied him nor gave him a feeling that justice had been served.
And then D was in the exact spot where Dwayne Robinson had died not too many months before. There was no mystery to the death anymore. He’d filled in the last spaces in that crossword puzzle. There was no sense of accomplishment, however, no smug glee at having solved the puzzle—if “solved” was even the right word. His friend had died to cover someone else’s tracks, to cancel out the memory of acts concocted by a small group of self-important men. What could he do with this tale? Post it online was the most likely scenario. There it would live alongside tales of the Illuminati, MK-ULTRA, and the secret coding of the Roc-A-Fella Records logo. In other words, his story would be embraced by the deep conspiracy theorist, read for amusement by the slightly paranoid, and ignored as crazy shit by everyone else.
So he stood in the space where Dwayne’s life had bled out and said a prayer for his soul and hoped the Lord already had him writing an additional psalm to the Bible, angel wings slightly tilted for just a touch of B-boy swagga.
D fumbled a bit with the door before realizing that other members of D Security had been in and out while he was in Cali and, apparently, had been careless in locking up. Just something to put on the agenda for the next staff meeting.
Another thing to add to that agenda was that the light had been left on in his office—a crack of it slid out from under his closed door. But when D entered the room, he found a well-built black man with braided hair, a red and green dashiki, and a Desert Eagle in his hand sitting behind the desk. If D looked like a linebacker, this gentleman was a fullback, and the two of them seemed destined to meet head-on in a football field some snowy December afternoon.
D actually chuckled when he recognized the face. “Damn,” he said.
“Yeah,” Malik Jones replied, “it’s your office. You might as well take a seat.”
Jones looked darker than in his photos (tanned from time in the Caribbean or Africa?), and fuller, like he’d been eating well and wasn’t afraid to let his belt out a notch or two. There was even a hint of an accent in his voice—something black and foreign and decidedly affected.
“I didn’t think it would come to this. Didn’t think there would ever be any reason for us to meet.”
“Things happen,” D answered.
“Yes, they do.”
“You been in the Caribbean?”
Malik smiled. “I’m at home wherever black folks gather.”
“Yeah,” D said. “Rikers Island. Compton.”
“New Jersey.”
“Is this about your wife?”
“I know you didn’t kill her. But you got her involved.”
“You mean I got involved with her.”
“You got involved with her to find out about me, and that got Eric all concerned, and the fool did what fools do.”
“That’s bullshit. You killed her. You killed Amina. She would never have written that letter for anyone but you.”
Malik’s voice had been steady so far but real anger was building in him and starting to bubble over. “You can act all virtuous, but you protect the scum of the earth. You know I know.”
“So it’s all about guilt?”
D used his right foot to sweep across Malik’s left ankle, causing him and the chair to spin sideways. Malik lost his balance and D lunged with both hands for the gun. Malik squeezed off a shot that whizzed past D’s ear and exploded into the door behind him. As the two men wrestled atop the desk Malik pulled the trigger again, nicking D’s left bicep and sending a spurt of blood back into Malik’s eyes.
D recoiled, his left arm smoking from the hole in his black suit. Malik fell to the floor, his hands furiously rubbing his eyes. For a moment both men, damaged and fearful, tended to their wounds. Malik recovered first, his survival instincts sharp after years hiding in the shadows. He pulled himself from the floor and, through truly bloodshot eyes, spied the gun on top of the desk. He lunged for it with both hands, determined to fire a kill shot.
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