Hard Candy

by Amaleka McCall

  Razor had been Broady’s friend since he was five years old. All of the times Junior had beaten Broady up as a child and their mother let Junior get away with it, Razor was the one who comforted Broady and let him hide out at his house.

  Now that Broady was older, wiser, and bigger than Junior, he was growing sick of his brother’s domineering ways. Broady had at least seven inches and one hundred pounds on his older brother. He’d always resented the favoritism his mother showed Junior, but at the same time, he felt like he owed Junior his life and freedom. Junior was the one who had paid off all the dudes in Shamrock’s spot so they wouldn’t testify as witnesses against Broady in June Bug’s murder, sparing Broady a serious prison bid.

  But Junior was also the one who had turned Broady on to the streets after his basketball dreams went up in smoke. “You need to learn how to earn your own keep,” Junior had told him one day soon after the incident at Shamrock’s. Junior had already decided that Broady’s future in basketball was over, so he turned Broady on to the only other way he knew how to make money.

  Broady was growing a bit wary of living in his brother’s shadow, but he also understood that Junior had taken over an empire. He realized, too, if he played his cards right, he could be the next in line to take over the family business.

  As Broady became immersed in learning the business, he began to see his brother as a hypocrite and a fake. Junior had completely stolen Easy’s street style and identity. Easy didn’t like his workers to be flashy and loud, but Junior was very flashy and loud. Easy had chastised Junior several times, but it had all finally come to a head when Easy gave Junior a direct order that he blatantly disobeyed. Easy was furious, and he quickly shut Junior down, taking away all of his spots and sending him back on the corner to do hand-to-hand sales. Junior was furious beyond words and soon after began plotting his revenge.

  Now Junior was walking like Easy, talking like Easy, and adopting Easy’s same low-profile style. But Broady knew who his brother really was, and he was nothing like Easy. In Broady’s assessment, Junior wasn’t nearly smart enough to run the empire that Easy had grown. Broady knew he was just as good a candidate as his brother. If nothing else, his sheer size and determination would garner him the respect and admiration needed to take over operations in Brooklyn.

  “I’m telling you right now this shit ain’t over. I know it was those cats, and I’m ready to bust my gat at those niggas. War or no war.”

  Junior finally walked over to his brother and looked up into his face. Broady could see the fire in his eyes reflected in his brother’s.

  “Bruh, you don’t want war with me. Sit down and we gon’ talk about this.” Junior gritted, roughly placing his hand on Broady’s huge shoulder and forcing him back down into the sofa.

  Broady relented for the time being.

  “I don’t want nobody to make a move until I have a chance to call a meeting with Phil. I need to find out what the deal is. Right now having all y’all niggas sitting in here tryin’a figure out if and how a nigga came up missing is costing me cake. Everybody get the fuck back to work, except you, Tuck.”

  All of Junior’s workers stood up and began filing out of the room. Broady sat slouched in his chair, meanmugging his brother. Junior was sitting at the end of his couch with his feet up, like a grand pasha. Their eyes locked on each other, and the room seemed to crackle with energy.

  The same way you got that seat by overtaking niggas’ shit is the same way I’m gonna get it, too. For the first time in his life, Broady contemplated doing physical harm to his older brother, for his indifference toward Razor’s possible death.

  “Yo, Tuck, I need you to get in contact with Phil’s main dude. I’ma have to talk to these niggas and see what’s really good. I gotta run damage control. Probably something these hothead-ass niggas done did.” Junior sucked his teeth and huffed in disgust.

  Tuck sat on a bar stool next to the couch and took it all in, while Broady was still glowering at Junior.

  Junior said to Broady, “Son, why don’t you go home and fuck your bitch or something? You look like you need some ass.” He grabbed his remote and clicked on his sixty-inch flat-screen television.

  Avon Tucker sat in a darkly tinted Lexus LS 400 with a black hoodie on his head and dark shades covering his eyes, even though it was well after midnight in Brooklyn. He looked out his windshield at the desolate surroundings. He was parked under the Brooklyn Bridge on a street that had only one streetlight, which just so happened to be out. A rat that resembled a baby otter wobbled by and stopped to sift for food in the various piles of trash that littered the concrete.

  Avon held his burner on his lap, his left hand gripping the handle. Every ten seconds he glanced into his rearview mirror, then left and right, scanning his surroundings as he had been taught. Better safe than sorry.

  After a few minutes, he picked up his “other” cell phone and dialed the phone number again. It rang. Avon’s heart jerked in his chest.

  “Hello,” a female voice huffed into the phone.

  Avon just listened.

  “Hello?” the female said again, more urgently this time.

  Avon quickly disconnected the call. He closed his eyes and bumped his head back and forth on the car’s headrest. That had been the fifth call he’d made in the past thirty minutes. He knew she would be asleep, but he couldn’t help himself. He pictured her smooth skin being touched by another man, her caramel legs intertwined with a man’s thick, hairy leg. His imagination was running wild now. He thought if he called and listened to the background he’d be able to tell if his wife was still all his. He didn’t know why he wouldn’t just speak to her, ask her if she was cheating on him while he was away. Or just tell her he loved and missed her like crazy. But he couldn’t do that. Not right now. It was still way too dangerous.

  The truth was, he didn’t know who he was right now. He certainly wasn’t the same man who’d gotten married in an intimate ceremony on a Caribbean beach four years earlier.

  Hearing gravel crunch behind his car, Avon sighed and let his shoulders go slack as he spotted the car he was waiting for in his rearview. He watched the man climb out of his old black Impala with its blacked-out tints and rush toward the Lexus like he was being chased.

  After looking around like a paranoid schizophrenic, the man quickly flung open the car door and slumped into Avon’s passenger seat. Everything had gone smoothly.

  Avon removed his shades and looked over at the blue-eyed, blond-haired man sitting in his passenger seat.

  They both looked each other over, noting how much they both had changed over the past few months.

  The man cracked a smile and broke the awkward silence. “So, Tucker, how the fuck do you let one of our main targets go missing?”

  Avon gripped his gun tighter and clenched his jaw. “Listen, don’t get in my fuckin’ car and start barking and asking me bullshit accusatory questions. Nobody knows what the fuck happened to Razor—”

  “You mean Corey Jackson, don’t you?”

  “Whatever you want to call him, man. Razor went missing unexpectedly. It was out of nowhere. I was with them one day, partying, the usual shit, and then BOOM! He was gone.” Avon snapped his fingers.

  Avon had been working with Brad Brubaker for four years now and knew how to handle him. They’d both been through hell and back together. The men were, after all was said and done, friends.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be all up your ass, but you know his disappearance has had headquarters asking questions about your operation,” Brad explained.

  “You know what? Fuck headquarters! I’m the one undercover every day, risking my life out here. I’m living with these motherfuckers, rubbing elbows with them, wearing a wire against my balls! So don’t tell me what headquarters thinks or is gonna say.”

  Avon swiped the hoodie off of his head and rubbed his bald head with his free hand, gripping his weapon with the other. Razor was one of his major targets. He knew that Broady w
as looking to go to war over Razor’s disappearance, which had him very distressed. He couldn’t afford for that to happen. It would completely fuck up his career.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger. This shit just stinks. If the local yokels get involved and start getting their own ‘Keystone’ narcos into this, it could fuck up all these months of work.”

  Avon knew Brad was absolutely right. He was painfully aware that any little bump in the road caused the bigwigs at the Drug Enforcement Administration, his current employer, to get their drawers in a bunch. He’d been there, done that. He knew what it was like working for the government, where the bureaucrats accentuated anything negative and played down the positive. Politics ran most government agencies, and that was just a fact of life Avon had to accept.

  “Tell those suits up in the glass offices to calm the fuck down and just give me a chance. I’m this fuckin’ close to finding out who the connect is that Junior took over after Easy Hardaway was murdered.” Avon came close to putting the tips of his index finger and thumb together, trying to make his point. “This missing person’s case is just a bump in the road. I doubt if anybody else will come up missing.”

  Avon was asking for more time, but he wasn’t sure if it was so he could do more work or just so he could stay under longer. This undercover persona and lifestyle were all he knew right now. He didn’t feel like he’d ever live a normal life again. Junior and his crew had become like his second family. He had days where he totally lost sight of his mission and lived completely as Tuck—his undercover street persona. He hadn’t spoken to his wife in a month of Sundays, which he justified by telling himself it was too dangerous to make contact. And so he continued to live the life of Tuck—a single, drug-dealing lieutenant in Junior Carson’s illegal army.

  “I can buy you some time, but not much. This kind of shit can’t happen, Tucker.” Brad prepared to exit the vehicle. They were already over the fifteen minutes alloted to their undercover/case agent meeting.

  “A’ight, Brubaker, I got it,” Avon said, exasperated. He was anxious to leave.

  “Oh yeah, I saw Elaina and the kids. They’re doing well. She says you haven’t called. You might want to get in touch your wife.” Brad gave him a serious look.

  “Thanks. You go find a woman and invite me to your wedding. Until then, let me handle my situation with my wife and kids. You keep your bosses at bay so I can make this fuckin’ case. After our fuckup, we both need this to work out. I think you’d agree with me there.”

  Standing up now, Brad stuck his head back into the car door for a quick minute. “By the way, just in case you forgot, your name is Avon Tucker, not just Tuck. You are an undercover DEA agent. You don’t really work for Junior Carson. You have a wife and two kids that love you. So those girls you have hanging off your neck every night that you may even be fucking, they’re all part of this act. This Lexus, that diamond necklace, and the money in your pocket belong to the federal government.”

  Avon squinted his eyes into little dashes and gazed at Brad with contempt. Brad’s words stung him like an angry swarm of yellow jackets.

  “Just thought I’d remind you.” Brad slammed the door.

  When Avon Tucker was ten years old, the New York City chief of police had handed him a folded American flag amid a flood of flashing camera lights. Avon felt a stomach-sickening mix of emotions, grief and pride among them, of course. He reached his small arms out and accepted the triangular folded material and pressed it up against his small chest. The flag had just come off his father’s mahogany casket.

  Avon remembered the sun burning his eyes as he tried to look up at his mother’s wet face. Her body was shaking with sobs as a chunky older woman belted out a soulstirring rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

  Holding his flag with one arm, Avon reached out and grabbed his mother’s hand. A wet, crumpled piece of tissue clutched in her palm prevented the skin-to-skin contact he craved. Nonetheless, he would take what he could get at that moment. He squeezed her hand tightly and closed his eyes, wanting to see his father one more time.

  When Avon had received the news of what happened, he couldn’t even cry. It didn’t seem real to him.

  As the gunshots echoed into the air, Avon could still hear the words his mother had spoken to him the night before: “Avon, you’re the man of the house now.” It was a role Avon Tucker accepted with pride.

  Months after his father’s funeral, when all of the media coverage of the “Undercover Narcotics Detective Shot Dead in a Buy-and-Bust” had died down and extended family and friends finally stopped visiting and returned to their normal lives, Avon and his family got less donations and fewer calls from his father’s police peers and the public at large. Eventually, the money ran out.

  Avon’s mother had always been a stay-at-home mom, his father insisting that he be the only breadwinner. After his death, with only ten years of service, his father’s pension was barely enough to provide for Avon, his mother, and two sisters.

  To keep his family above the poverty line, Avon started working odd jobs at fourteen years old. After many stints in summer school, he finally graduated high school. Avon enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice only to collect from the Children of Fallen Officers College Fund and the surplus tuition assistance from Pell and TAP.

  Although he had never done well in high school, college had somehow seemed a lot easier to him. Perhaps the fact that he found his courses interesting was what made the difference. Avon completed his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in three and a half years. Though he chose to study criminal justice, he had been vehemently against entering the law enforcement field. His father’s death in the line of duty had vanquished any such aspiration in that area. Yet, a lingering curiosity prevented him from completely dismissing the idea.

  As he prepared for graduation, Avon desperately needed to find a job. There would be no more PELL and TAP checks to help pay the mounting bills at home. So it seemed like fate when he just happened to be passing through the large auditorium-style room where a job fair was being held. He had taken the route as a shortcut to his career advisor’s office.

  As he rushed through the exhibitor tables, he was waylaid by an African American recruiter from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Hey, young brother, let me talk to you for a minute,” the recruiter called out.

  “Nah, not interested,” Avon grumbled and brushed past the man. The name of the agency alone was a big turnoff.

  Avon made it to his career advisor’s office with seconds to spare. He slung his backpack on the floor and slumped down in the chair in front of Ms. Bender’s desk. His advisor was a skinny old white woman who smelled like mothballs and looked like the crypt keeper from Tales from the Crypt.

  She looked over Avon with her icy blue eyes and unfolded her wrinkled, liver-spotted hands. “Well, Mr. Tucker, I have reviewed your records. There are not many options for a student with barely a two-point-five GPA and a major in criminal justice. The private industry bigwigs recruit from us, but they only want the magna and summa cum laude graduates.”

  Avon rolled his eyes in disgust. He’d always believed that college was one big-ass hustle, anyway.

  “There is always the military or some police force somewhere.” Ms. Bender laid her hands flat on top of his file like she was offering it its last rites.

  Avon rolled his eyes and hoisted his bag up off the floor in a flustered huff, affronted that Ms. Bender would even suggest a police force, especially since his father’s picture hung in memoriam in John Jay’s main building, along with those of hundreds of other fallen officers. Avon wanted to slap the shit out of the old woman, but instead he stomped out of the office without looking back.

  He left with a heavy mind, recounting his mother’s words from earlier that morning. “The house is in threat of foreclosure.” Preoccupied with thoughts of his future, he nearly ran headfirst into the same DEA recruiter.

  “Hey, my brother, just stop by for a half a minute. Trust
me, this career ain’t like regular police work. You’re not going to be walking a beat and running down crackheads. It’s one of the only government careers where you can make six figures in five short years,” the recruiter spouted.

  Avon turned his full attention to the eager recruiter. The man had said the magic words.

  When Avon returned home that day, he told his mother of his intention to join the DEA as a special agent. She was visibly shaken and upset and pleaded with him to reconsider. And Avon explained to her that it wouldn’t be like the narcotics unit where his father worked.

  But that wasn’t entirely the truth. Avon had omitted to tell his mother that he would be going undercover, conducting buy-and-busts, and rubbing elbows with dangerous drug dealers, to spare her the worry.

  Avon completed his training and graduated, for the first time in his life, at the top of his class. His career began rather successfully. He was living the life, cracking drug cases like a pro. Within his first two years as an agent, he had won several prestigious awards and was viewed in his field office as a “golden boy.”

  Avon’s career took a turn for the worse, however, when, during a drug raid on the home of a well-known drug dealer, he accidentally shot a fifteen-year-old boy. Unfortunately, the DEA’s confidential informant had provided the wrong address.

  When Avon’s unit rammed the door of the home and entered tactically, there was a lot of screaming and running. As they worked to clear the house, he and Brad Brubaker searched the back rooms to make sure everyone was accounted for. In one of the bedrooms, Avon could hear someone breathing hard in the closet.

  Brubaker put his fingers to his lips to indicate silence, and the two approached the closet on deft feet. Brubaker pulled back the closet door for Avon to clear, and a young boy jumped out with a black crowbar raised in his hand.

  Avon, in knee-jerk reaction, overreacted and let off a single shot. The boy died later that day at the hospital. There was a huge public fallout. Everyone in the city wanted Avon’s head on a platter; firing him wasn’t going to be enough. Avon was ultimately vindicated of any wrongdoing because he was able to articulate his perceived threat—the boy could’ve just as easily had a gun—but his name was forever tarnished by the incident.