To Funk and Die in LA

by Nelson George

  “Quiet has kept, you do too,” D said back.

  “In my own damn way.” He gazed over at Asya Roc. “You backstopping the star over there?”

  “As best I can.”

  “Hope you can get him out of here safe,” Ice said. “A lot of people in here would like to pistol-whip him and then piss on what’s left.”

  “I just work for him sometimes.”

  “Yeah. You can’t be with him all the time.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to be.”

  “I bet. He’s why I’m here.” Ice touched the backpack hanging off his left shoulder.

  “This a delivery?” D asked, now worried.

  Ice nodded. “All the way from one of those states where you can buy gats like Tic Tacs.”

  “Why are you doing it yourself?”

  “Better me than one of these damn fool kids. Niggas get stupider every day. Believe that.”

  Over Ice’s shoulder D noticed a wiry young man who, sans forty pounds and years of hard living, looked a lot like Ice. Clearly they were kin. “He with you?” D asked.

  Ice didn’t even turn around. “For the moment.”

  The young man looked uneasy and a little angry. Upon hearing Ice’s comment he walked away, muttering, “I’ma go get some water.”

  Bloody Knuckles had absorbed the smaller woman’s jabs the entire first round—kind of a ghetto rope-a-dope—and was now using her weight to bully her opponent into corners and was smacking BAD upside the head with disrespectful vigor. It seemed just a matter of time before the smaller woman went down.

  “Where is this supposed to happen?” D asked.

  “Here. I know a spot in the back.”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “Like I said, stupider every day.”

  BAD made a sudden comeback with a quick flurry of jabs before the round ended and, in a savvy preemptive move, raised her hands in victory despite getting pounded for most of round two.

  Asya Roc told Junot he’d be right back and strutted over to where D and Ice stood. “I see you guys got acquainted and shit.”

  “Yeah,” D said, a little irritated by the kid’s tough-guy tone.

  “So,” the MC said, “let’s do this.”

  Ice nodded and started past the ring with Asya behind him and D bringing up the rear. Asya Roc didn’t completely owe D an explanation—it was for-hire work, after all. Show up and guard the fool. But making D part of a gun deal wasn’t in his job description. This was felony shit. No plea bargain. Mandatory sentences. A gun deal transacted in the back of an illegal fight club was just plain reckless.

  They went through a metal door and into a storage area converted into a dressing room where a bunch of the fighters were in various states of undress and activity. One woman was removing tape from her hand. Another was squeezing her red-tinted weave under headgear. Another was making out with a boyish little teenaged girl. They paid scant attention to the three men.

  The trio entered a small washroom—toilet, stall, urinal, sink—all of it grimy. The room smelled like mildew stirred in a blender with vomit. D knew this was about the worst place imaginable for this transaction. One way in and out. No windows. No backup. D was cool with Ice—they had a serious bond—but would Ice have set up a jack move on this sucker MC before he knew D was on the case?

  Ice took the backpack off his shoulder and handed it to Asya Roc, who unzipped it greedily. Two Berettas. A Desert Eagle. A couple boxes of bullets.

  “Yes,” Asya Roc said. He stuck his hands in the backpack and pulled out the two Berettas and held them up like Eastwood in Josey Wales. Ice rolled his eyes at D.

  At that moment, the door burst open and a pint-sized kid with a red bandanna covering everything but his eyes stuck out a Glock like it was shit on a stick. “Yo—”

  Before he got his second word out, D slammed the door on his arm twice. The gun dropped from the kid gangsta’s skinny arm, but the bullet in the chamber discharged when the weapon hit the floor and lodged itself in Ice’s thigh.

  “Stupid motherfucker!” Ice yelled as he fell backward into the toilet stall.

  Asya Roc now had the two guns out and was trying to jimmy the safety on one of them. “I’m shooting my way out!” he shouted.

  D reached over and slapped Asya Roc silly with his right hand, took the guns out of his hand with his left. He dropped them both back into the backpack, grabbed the MC by the collar, and kicked the door open. The dressing room had cleared.

  “Yo, get the fuck off me!” Asya said.

  “Shut up,” D shot back, pushing his face near the MCs, “and live.” D grabbed him around the waist, damn near picking the kid up, and peered into the main room.

  If anyone out there had heard the shot they didn’t show it. The next bout was underway and most eyes were on the ring. All the people who’d been in the “dressing room” had evaporated save the kissing couple who were holding hands just outside the door.

  “Where the others?” D asked.

  The boyish one replied, “I didn’t see no one else, but I do need glasses.”

  To Asya Roc, D said, “You stay behind me. When I say run, you haul ass.”

  The MC, bravado on mute, murmured, “Yeah.” His eyes darted uneasily around the room.

  They moved past the ring, D guarding the MC like Mom on her kid’s first day of school.

  Junot walked up to D. “Yeah,” he said, “you better get him out of here. Niggas is talkin’.”

  “They’re doing more than that.”

  “Oh, that’s what that was,” Junot said with a half-smile. “Thought it was outside.”

  “You like this clown enough to help us out?” D asked.

  Junot glanced over at the MC. “You know I like his money.”

  “Okay,” D said. “I’ll make sure you get hit off.” He needed another set of eyes. He wasn’t sure if he trusted Junot, but in a room of treacherous people, one semihonest Negro was an asset.

  The current fight was a furious affair, both women tossing blows with video-game vigor. Most eyes still seemed to be on the match, but D knew better. There had to be someone else. A couple of someones in fact. These kids ran in packs. That punk with the gun was on some initiation mission, no doubt about that, but there was rarely a lone gunman in the hood. D searched for signs of imminent danger, trying to separate mere curiosity from larcenous intent.

  And then they were outside. The Denali was parked right out front and the driver, a wavy-haired Dominican in his thirties, hopped out and opened the door for Asya Roc.

  A cutie in black stretch pants and a brunette with a bone straight-haired weave intercepted the MC. Immediately Asya, out on the street and seemingly out of danger, started kicking it to her.

  D noticed another jeep, a ragged-looking late-model Range Rover with illegally tinted front windows, parked across the street and down the block. He snatched up Asya again, tossed him into the backseat.

  “What the fuck!”

  “Get him out of here!” D said to the driver. “Do it right now!”

  “What about you?” the driver asked.

  “Just get him to JFK!” D replied before slamming the door shut.

  Asya Roc rolled down his window. “What about my package?”

  “I’m gonna hold it.”

  When the Denali pulled off, D stood looking at the beat-down Range Rover. He held the bag over his head a moment. They’d want the guns, D was certain about that. He’d taken a risk not getting in the truck, but holding onto the bag was the only way to find out for sure.

  Once the Denali was out of sight, the Range Rover jerked off the curb. Then it stopped. D imagined an animated conversation underway behind the tinted windows. Not awaiting its resolution, he started down the block, away from the club and deep into Brownsville.

  D walked fast but didn’t run. While the guys inside the jeep decided what to do, he opened the bag and looked inside at the three guns and the boxes of shells. How many bodies were on these? How’d they
get here? Up I-95 from Virginia, North Carolina, or Georgia? Maybe they came cross-country from Colorado or Texas? If his client’s prints weren’t on at least two of them, he would have tossed them in the trash and kept moving. D was about to reach in and start wiping them down with his shirt when a shot zipped over his head. He tucked the bag under his arm like a football and turned the corner like Adrian Peterson.

  At Howard Street, D ducked into the crook of a doorway. He wished he’d run in the other direction, toward the Broadway Junction station where he could have hopped on the A, C, or J, or even to Atlantic Avenue where there was an LIRR stop. Either way would have meant people to distract these fools, places to hide, and a train to escape on. In the direction he was headed now, D could duck into the projects, a place where gunplay was a bit too typical for safety, and the elevated 3 subway, which could be an escape hatch but, because it was above ground, wasn’t as easy to use for shelter. He was contemplating doubling back toward the fight club when he spied the Range Rover down at the far end of the block.

  The warehouses gave way to the retail strip of Pitkin Avenue, where his mother had bought him his first Nikes, and then D zigzagged through streets of tight, low homes and tenements, and then down past the Marcus Garvey projects, low-rise public housing where he’d spent some very dangerous moments. It was where he’d first met Ice. For a moment D contemplated the man’s fate—a bullet in his leg would likely cause him all kinds of trouble—but this wasn’t the time to be sympathetic. After all, Ice might have set the whole thing up.

  D pulled out his cell phone. His sometime employee Ray Ray didn’t live far away. Just over at 315 Livonia Avenue in the same Tilden project building D had been raised in. But why get the kid involved in this mess? It was best to keep moving. Speed, not reinforcements, was needed.

  Now he was on Livonia Avenue where the Marcus Garvey projects ended. He made a sharp right and headed toward the Saratoga Avenue subway stop. A 3 train grinded past him on the tracks above, moving deeper into Brooklyn. Surely a train toward the city was coming soon.

  He was hurrying alongside the Betsy Head Pool, a WPA relic where, decades ago, D had almost drowned before getting scooped out of the chlorine by his brother Matty who gave him mouth-to-mouth at the pool’s edge. Matty had been a bigger, better man than D knew he’d ever be. But this was no time to remember.

  If he was gonna die this night, D told himself, it wasn’t gonna happen on Livonia Avenue. This Brownsville street had already had its chance. But vows ring hollow when bullets blaze past your head. From behind him in the direction of Rockaway Avenue and the Tilden projects, two shots had whizzed past him.

  D’s lungs were burning, which was a problem, but this didn’t feel nearly as pressing as the fact that his right foot, left ankle, and both knees hurt with more intensity with every stride he took. Getting shot at had made every part of his body tense up and tingle with pain.

  D heard feet stomping about a block behind him. Maybe half a block. Where was the car?

  Two long blocks ahead was the subway station. A dubious haven but, at twelve thirty a.m. in the hood, it was all he had. Inside Betsy Head Park he spied two kids playing one-on-one under the lights. D was contemplating calling out to them when another shot landed at his feet. A thug was trying to drive the Range Rover with his left hand while shooting through the open passenger window. A bullet bounced off a cast-iron subway support and ricocheted back at the driver, cracking the jeep’s rear passenger window, forcing him to swerve into the other lane.

  D dashed across the next intersection, the subway staircase only a block away now. He felt vaguely relieved. He was even beginning to smile when the door to the storefront office of AKBK Reality swung open and two men walked right into his path, one of them talking about “the time I scared Lil’ Z,” and D ran dead into his chest. Both went flying down toward the sidewalk.

  D fell atop a 230-pound Latino with the stink of rum on his breath and knocked the wind out of him. He had on a black Nets hoodie, with a fierce-looking salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that, even in a moment of surprise, were narrow and hard. Despite the man’s unfriendly visage, for a moment D felt comfortable on his ample belly.

  With the assistance of his pal, a middle-aged white man with a hot-pink complexion wearing a Yankees jacket, the guy pushed D onto the sidewalk. “What the fuck! What you doing jogging at this time of night?” the Latino asked even as he struggled to rise.

  The shooter who’d been chasing D on foot—a black man in his twenties wearing a red Abercrombie hoodie, holding up his loose-fitting pants with his free hand—had just reached the corner, out of breath but not malevolence. Light brown and round-faced, with fat cheeks and a mouth made for cursing, he stormed over and pulled out a box cutter. “Gimme that backpack, motherfucker!” he shouted.

  “What’s going on here?” the white man in the Yankees jacket yelled.

  “Mind your business, you old motherfucker!” the young man said viciously.

  The Latino guy, still on the ground next to D, looked at the backpack and his eyes got real wide.

  D just said, “This guy is crazy”—which actually wasn’t true. Angry, embarrassed, and homicidal, yes, but this fool wasn’t insane. To D’s surprise, the man on the ground reached over and tried to yank the backpack away from him. Instinctively he pulled away. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Just give that shit to me!” the Latino yelled.

  The box cutter–swinging Abercrombie wearer now swung at the straps of the backpack with his weapon. D quickly rolled away from all three men.

  “You got him!? You got him!?” It was the Range Rover driver, who’d pulled up to the curb and was yelling through the passenger-side window.

  “Yeah,” Abercrombie replied, and then stepped toward D, box cutter low and pointed at his face.

  “Hold on,” the Latino man said. “You ain’t got shit. I’m taking that backpack.”

  “Back off,” warned the Abercrombie kid, “unless you want an extra smile.”

  “Is that right?” The Latino suddenly hopped to his feet, glanced at his friend, and nodded. Two New York Police Department badges and two guns appeared, one of them aimed at Abercrombie and the other at the driver.

  “Put that thing down!” shouted the white cop. “You are all under arrest!”

  On the surface this looked to be a fortuitous turn of events. D was not going to be sliced and diced in some ghetto basement for the backpack. Good news. But being interrogated and possibly incarcerated for what was inside the backpack didn’t strike D as ideal. The Latino cop clearly wanted the bag. What was that about? So D kicked the Abercrombie kid in the shin.

  Grabbing his leg and yelling, “Motherfucker!” the young man, despite the police firearms, swung his box cutter toward D, nicking his forearm through his black jacket.

  The Latino, standing close to the swinging weapon, fired first. The Yankees jacket squeezed off a second. Abercrombie was hit by both shots.

  The driver, without thinking and seemingly with no plan, fired three, four, five shots at the cops, sending blood, smoke, and angry cries into the Brownsville night. The white cop yelled in pain—a bullet had landed in his shoulder.

  D rolled away and then scrambled to his feet to the crackle of police walkie-talkies, the rhythm of a hip hop track pounding from the jeep, two more shots, and voices of distress, anger, and obscenity surrounding him. This was not a good place to linger.

  “Come back here!” the Latino cop yelled when D took off down the street.

  D heard a Manhattan-bound pulling into the nearby station and took the steps two at a time. Blissfully, there was no clerk in the booth, MTA budget cuts having seen to that, so no one noticed D’s wounds. He slid his card in the slot, pushed through the turnstile, charged up more steps, and dove into an empty car on the 3 train, breathing heavily.

  It wouldn’t take long for the cops to figure out he’d jumped on the train. They’d be on him in two stops at most.

  Nex
t stop was Rutland Road, the last elevated station before the subway went underground. When the train pulled in, D dashed to the front of the platform, hopped down the stairs next to the tracks, and climbed over a short fence, putting himself on the dingy side of Lincoln Terrace Park. He went over another fence, headed past some crumbling tennis courts, and found himself on Eastern Parkway, a long tree-lined boulevard that ran across the spine of Brooklyn, cutting tins through Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights.

  D walked a few blocks west to Utica Avenue, a central location for north/south buses and an express subway. He stopped by a garbage can, was about to drop the backpack in, and then changed his mind. As long as he didn’t get caught with the guns, they just might be useful later. So D made a left and then a right, crossing Union Street, which would take him through the heart of Crown Heights’ Hassidic community. It was a place of peering eyes and suspicious Jewish security teams but it felt safer to him than Eastern Parkway’s wide boulevard.

  As he crossed New York Avenue, D suddenly felt very tired. All his joints were throbbing—his knees, his ankles, his lower back. He was in good shape but a full-on sprint through Brownsville with contraband guns hadn’t been on his itinerary.

  Twenty minutes later D walked wearily up Washington Avenue back to Eastern Parkway. He moved past the Brooklyn Museum’s awkward, ornate, classical/modern glass entranceway. A few cars sped by him on Eastern Parkway and D hoped he didn’t look too conspicuous (or memorable). When he reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden he paused, put his feet together, and then counted off ten long strides, stopping before the cast-iron fence that bordered the garden and the thick, dark bushes behind them.