Bosstown

by Adam Abramowitz

  “You mean’s he the next coming of Manu Ginóbili? Hell no. But he got just enough to squeeze his shot off. Ain’t that right, Z?”

  “I‘m not one to boast,” I say.

  “Shit, what’s to boast about? I just called you a one-dimensional baller.”

  “I’ve been called worse. You want to tell me what’s going on, D?”

  “I don’t think so. What’s he holding there?”

  Switchblade makes a show of finger walking through my belongings, pulling things up for Darryl’s inspection, holding up one of several pictures of Britta Ingalls I’d lifted off her wall. “We seen him at her crib tonight?” Switchblade pops the picture with his index finger. “Rolled out when po-po showed, figured they done got his ass. But then here comes Slick, rolling Tremont like he ain’t got a care in the world.”

  “Climbed in through her window like a damn monkey,” Brick puts in. “I’m telling you, D, this the nigger lost your money, right here.”

  “Your money?” I say, the picture getting a little clearer but no less dangerous. “By the way, nice collection you got there. You always DJ the Black Hole parties? I gotta admit I didn’t peg you for a rock-and-roll guy.”

  “Black people can’t like rock?” Darryl talks toward the window but meets my eyes in the reflection.

  “Puts you in the minority. And not a whole lot of black rock bands to follow either.”

  “No? Maybe you just don’t know your music.” Darryl turns, counting off fingers. “TV on the Radio, Bad Brains, Living Colour—”

  “Okay, I get the point. It’s just the racist white boy in me. Once in a while I let him out to play. And speaking of white, you ever shop Junior White’s off the Square?” Darryl slides his eyes toward his men, getting almost imperceptible negative head shakes in response. “No? The place is awesome, but their organization’s for shit. You gotta have beaucoup time on your hands to find what you’re looking for, but there’s gold in them thar records.”

  “What do you want, Zesty?”

  “What do I want? That’s a funny question, considering. But since you asked, D, why am I here?”

  “Simple case of mistaken identity. You want to leave, be my guest.”

  “Just like that? This is Gus’s regular run, right?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I want to know who ran me down,” I say. Though at this point all signs point to Gus driving Britta’s Buick. But does Darryl know this?

  “Then we both after the same thing. How’d you end up with that package this morning?”

  “Luck of the draw.” I explain to Darryl what I explained earlier to the detectives. “Shit happens, right? What can you do?”

  “Bike better.” Darryl joins the chorus of my critics.

  “Easy to say, D, only getting run down on Boylston wasn’t an accident. But you already know this.”

  “How you figure?”

  “Because your boys have been on my tail since I got out of the hospital. And Gus is missing. You responsible for that, too?”

  Darryl ignores my question, but I already have the answer. They wanted Gus, got me instead.

  “So why were you at Britta’s place?” Darryl asks. “What’d you expect to find?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know, D. I’m just groping around at this point, but Britta flat-out lied telling my dispatch I never showed to pick anything up. Those your orders she’s following? Britta just doing what you expect of her, that being your money.” Darryl turns slowly and glares at Brick. “That’s a lot of cash to be moving around, D. You got an aversion to online banking?”

  “What do you want, Zesty?”

  “I was thinking maybe we could work out some type of repayment plan.”

  “You can’t fuckin’ be serious. You just told me you don’t know shit, got set up, and now you want to pay back the money you lost?”

  “My package, my bad. I got professional pride, D.”

  “You also got fifty large lying around, Z?”

  “That what it was? You must be one hell of a DJ if that’s your going rate.”

  “Right.” Darryl lifts his chin toward the door, giving Brick and Switchblade the signal to leave. “Hold up. O, give the man his bag.”

  Switchblade pivots in the doorway and pump-fakes once before shoving the bag hard into my chest.

  “Notice I didn’t flinch for his fake,” I say to Darryl after the door clicks shut.

  “He’s too fast is why, like I always tell him. You got to sell it slow to muthafuckas don’t have them fast-twitch muscles working. Play with their heads. Young guns don’t never listen.” Darryl paces the floor, stops and looks contemplatively out the window toward Dudley Square.

  “Okay. So what now?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure. But I gotta be honest with you, Zesty, the businessman in me just says shoot you and that’s the ball game right there.…”

  “But…,” I say, hoping there’s a “but” coming.

  “You come with too many strings attached, right?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I say, though I don’t really know what he’s talking about until I do. “Yeah, Zero can be a handful.” I find Darryl’s eyes in the darkened window, disappointed but not entirely surprised to have my brother surfacing in this mess.

  “And I’m assuming five-oh sweat you after the money shower?”

  “Detectives,” I say, before adding, “Robbery homicide,” giving Darryl something else to consider, but holding tight to their line of questioning that led to the Wells Fargo heist and my Collin Sullivan connection.

  “So there’s two reasons,” Darryl says glumly.

  “And we’ve been playing ball a couple of years makes three.” I figure the more reasons I can give Darryl not to shoot me, the better.

  “You a hacker,” Darryl says. “Let’s just leave it at two.”

  “Whatever does the trick.” Which still begs the question: “So what’s next?”

  “Next we get you another shirt because you smell like ass. Then we take a ride.” Darryl whistles loudly, drawing Brick and Switchblade back into the room.

  “Whassup, D? I get to shoot this nigga now?”

  “Not today.” Darryl stands up, scratches his beard absently, and throws me a T-shirt from one of his crates. “You search him before you brought him to me, C?”

  “Huh?”

  “What, you harda hearin’ all of a sudden?” Darryl is almost a foot shorter than Brick but nearly as thick, a narrow waist exploding up into a bulky chest, muscled arms, and shoulders with shoulders on them. I might be a pain to guard on the basketball court because I don’t mind running around to find my shot, but when I end up covering Darryl, there’s little I can do to keep his rear out of the paint, his combination of ballhandling and brawn usually leaving me sore, my ribs a pounded slab of beef. Darryl’s right, I am a hacker. Only on the court it’s called survival.

  “We took his bag,” Brick says defensively, his body retreating without actually taking a step back.

  “But no pat down, right? No dickie check.” Looking hard at Brick.

  “No.”

  “Yeah, well the muthafucka’s packing a cannon down the front of his damn shorts, and I’d like to know how the fuck y’all missed that?” Darryl points emphatically at my crotch, where the gun is wedged awkwardly and outlined in the Lycra like the cucumber in This Is Spinal Tap.

  “I mean, got-damn, Cedrick. You ever known a white guy hung like fucking Godzilla over here? Ever?”

  “Hey.” I adjust the Glock from outside my shorts, letting them see my hands as I move. “Least I can jump.”

  EIGHTEEN

  We pile into Cedrick’s Pathfinder, Switchblade glancing rearview, his eyes registering my hand resting on the waffled butt of the 9mm inside my bag.

  “Music?” Cedrick asks.

  “Just drive.” Darryl stares out the tinted window.

  “Corners?”

  “Nigga, what I say?”

  We drive de
ep into the heart of Roxbury, Dudley to Zeigler to I don’t know where, the streets dark and mostly empty, a couple of hoodies marching briskly, hands deep in kangaroo front pockets, empty lots, boarded-up houses, steel-awning bodegas and metal-ribbed liquor stores, check-cashing joints and storefront ministries. Pizza shop, Chinese, barbecue, liquor store. Dollar store, Nation of Islam, check-cashing joint, liquor store, Baptist church. Left, right, left, the open-air nightlife of the revitalized South End only a mile or so away, but it might as well be a thousand, the renovation bomb having missed this section of the Berry completely. We glide by gang-tagged walls, urban slices of crumbling and neglected asphalt pie spoken for with bullets, RIP murals—blood and roses, crucifixes, basketballs, pit bulls, and hand cannons—layered six coats deep, hard and glossy in the theatrical vapor glow of streetlamps.

  We hit corners, activity amidst desolation. Teenagers in white tees sewn for giants, worn by scarecrows, Celtics jerseys, black “B” baseball caps, shorts hanging down to the tongue tops of Air Jordans, slack-eyed crews snapping to life as the Pathfinder rolls past, elaborate birdcalls, hand signals, shadows darting into alleys. Brick powers down his window to give them all a long cold stare, his hand dangling idly, middle, index, and thumb in the form of a gun, message received loud and clear: Hold down the corner.

  Darryl rests his forehead on the blackened glass. I don’t figure we’re visible from the outside; Brick’s presence is enough to jump-start the crews to action.

  “Yours?” I say to Darryl as he turns to me, distracted, like he’s completely forgotten I was there.

  “The crews, they’re mine. The corners?” He shrugs. “It’s like real estate everywhere else, changing hands for whoever can hold it down.”

  “For sure we holding them down now,” Cedrick says. “And tomorrow and the next day. For real.”

  “For real for now.” Darryl sucks his teeth, slumping back to the glass, the weight of the world. “But a month from now? A year? We still gonna be humping these corners change of season come?”

  “We do what we gotta do, D. If we want ’em.”

  “See, there’s the magic words.” Darryl comes off the window, finds Brick’s eyes in the rearview. “If we want ’em.”

  “You don’t want ’em, D? We spreadin’ out, ain’t we, from Humboldt to Seaver, nigga get your Glocks out!”

  “Damn, C, I told you, this push ain’t nuthin’ but a one-off.” Darryl is almost hissing now, the buzz of his voice even causing O to flinch out of his low-lid coma. “Have we been strategizing corners?”

  “Corners the mainstay,” O murmurs from under his “B” hat bill. “Bread ’n’ butter.”

  “Okay, corners the starter kit, no doubt. But we’ve been expanding our horizons, ain’t we? Wonder Bread square, but the world’s round, right? Get that through your damn thick heads already. Round like a basketball. Find me a corner on a basketball, C. Hold me down a corner you’re so fond of, the corner be all yours.”

  “Ain’t no corners to hold down, D. I get what you’re saying, only like … like … Yo, O!” Brick punches O hard in the shoulder, though it doesn’t seem to hurt him, more steel inside that tracksuit than one would suspect. “You gon’ help a nigga out or what?”

  “Change be hard,” O says from beneath his cap. Ghetto sage.

  “There you go!” Cedrick, expansive. “Fish outta water. Nigga out the hood. This is what we do, D. I hear you ’bout spreading our wings and shit, but look how that’s shaping up.” Brick tosses his eyes in my direction. “I still don’t get why you won’t let me just cap his ass and be done with it. This dude’s a loose cannon, D, you know that, right? He’s all up in our business from Black Hole to the white bitch, our money on the street. All due respect to y’all playing hoops together, but there’s gotta be another white boy out there you can school.”

  “Word.” From O.

  “Word. And you know that Glock he holding be a muthafuckin’ cop gun, and here we are driving his ass around. We get pulled over, you know how that shit’s gonna go down. I ain’t questioning you, D, I’m just saying—”

  “What, one and done?”

  “Exactly!” Brick is fully animated now, a fine mist of spittle flying toward the windshield. “One and done. Hell, use the damn cop gun. You know they be happy to get it back.”

  “And what do we do about his brother?” Darryl says, O back to slouch-napping in the front seat, his inactivity about as comforting as a viper lying in wait.

  “I cap him too if I have to. Who’s his brother?”

  “Go ahead, tell him, Zesty. But first, do me a favor and take your hand out of your bag. If I thought having you dead was a good idea, believe me, it’d be done already.”

  “His name’s Zero Meyers,” I say, my hand coming out slow and empty.

  “Oh dag! For real?” Brick checks me in the mirror again as if he expects to see a different person. “Zero Meyers, huh? I din’t know he had a faggot ass brother. Goddamn, D, they don’t look nothing alike at all.” Cedrick shakes his head in disbelief. “So now what?”

  “South End,” Darryl says, turning to me. “Cathedral. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Headache.” I stick my thumb into the soft spot above my good eyebrow, not bothering to explain the static building up again, the presong pain worsening as a familiar guitar riff wedges a foothold between my ears.

  “Yo, me too,” Cedric declares from the front. “This shit’s gotten mad complicated. Zero muthafuckin’ Meyers!”

  “So take something and quit whining, both y’all. Didn’t I see a bottle of Advil in your bag, Z?”

  “I’m trying to lay off. It messes with my stomach. You want one, C? No hard feelings, cap my ass and whatnot.”

  “Be much obliged.” Brick extends his hand palm up behind him, and I shake one of Sam’s magic blue capsules into his mitt. He glances at it, pops it into his mouth, and puts his hand back again. “I usually take two.”

  “If you insist.”

  Darryl motions for me to get out at the corner of Washington and Monsignor, the Gothic Cathedral of the Holy Cross dwarfing the low-rise orange bricks of the Cathedral housing projects and Cathedral High. To my surprise, Darryl slides out behind me and taps the Pathfinder, sending it on its way.

  I start walking a bit just to get loose, the opening guitar strut of the Del Fuegos’ “Don’t Run Wild” providing me a little gimp rhythm, staying close to the buildings, wary of police cruisers probably out there looking to pick me up on my bike. All-points bulletin: Zesty Meyers, armed and stupid fucking dangerous.

  “How you going to get home, D?” The Pathfinder’s brake lights flash once, disappear around a corner.

  “Which home?” Darryl keeps my snail’s pace, holding the outside position on the sidewalk. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I got a few spots I can lay my head.”

  “One of them Britta Ingalls’s place?”

  Darryl stops in his tracks, leaving me exposed until I step back to retrieve his muscled cover. “Nah, it’s nothing like that, just business.”

  “So you’re like what, the Company Store? She works for you, rents one of your places.”

  “What?”

  “Please. I saw her lease. It had your Cabot address on it, and anyway it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Like Cedrick said, I had to climb through a window to get in. Cops had to break the glass to come up the rear. No busted locks means your boys must have had a key, walked right in, torn the place apart, and locked up behind themselves.”

  “Maybe Britta just a slob.”

  “I don’t think so.” We keep walking Washington, the skeleton frames of half-built buildings rising out of precast concrete, soaking up the moonlight. “I suppose they could’ve just been watching the house waiting on Britta, but they don’t exactly strike me as sit-around type of guys.”

  “No, I’ll give them that, all right,” Darryl says. “They’re doers in every sense of the word.”

  “They find what they were looking
for?”

  “You think they’d stick around if they did?”

  “I guess not. You got a lot on your plate, D.”

  “A brotha got to be diversified in these uncertain times, Zesty. Lot of changes going on around here.”

  “No doubt. Only I still don’t get it. If that money I lost is yours, D, why have a messenger run it across town for you? Why don’t you or your boys just pick it up at Black Hole?”

  “C’mon, Zesty. Think, now.”

  I do the thinking out loud, the required concentration pushing back the static that was hurting my head, the guitar riff still there but comforting, everything clicking now. “Distance,” I practically sing. “There were pictures in Britta’s place, looked like parties, promotional events; you were in the background in a lot of them, doing your thing. I didn’t recognize you outright because I wasn’t really looking at you. As far as anybody knows, you’re just the handpicked DJ for parties and events. That’s how you keep face time to a minimum, come and go without attracting too much attention. Which probably means you’ve got some sort of stake in the business. Pretty smart.”

  “What is?”

  “Figuring that if you’re tied into a rap label you’re going to get looked at tighter? IRS. Feds. But straight-up rock and roll? A black guy in Boston? No way. That’s why Britta lied about the package. So the money isn’t tied back to Black Hole. Tied back to you.” And that’s what I have to assume she’s also told Brill and Wells, their only lead at that point circling back to me and, inevitably, Zero. So why’s Britta ducking Darryl and his men? What are they looking for? Is there more of Darryl’s money unaccounted for?

  “Britta works for you,” I say, trying to talk my way into clarity. “Gus has the Black Hole courier account. Maybe after a while Gus figures out what he’s delivering and tries to take some of it off you. Him and Britta. They set me up. Together.”

  “And you know that because?”

  “The car that hit me, Britta’s car, is sitting in your driveway. And I know Cedrick and O have been tailing me since I left the hospital, already trashed Britta’s apartment, and were sitting on it waiting for her to show when I got there.” I leave out Albert’s sighting on Thayer Street; a well-concealed set of eyes is always a good thing to have on a darkened Thayer Street.