by Omar Tyree
He said, “You owe us your fuckin’ life now. Twice! So you gon’ write something about this shit and give us some dividends on it. And you gon’ say, ‘This book is dedicated to the life and times of Greggory Taylor.’”
Jurrell sat back down across the table and aimed that gun barrel right at Shareef’s heart again.
He calmed down and said, “I kept thinking about how I could get involved with you on the business level, man. And I could see that you was still hesitant around me. You got all the reason in the world to be. I’m still a crafty-ass nigga, just like you. And we both from the streets of Harlem. That’s why ya’ ass was crafty enough to get away. But you know what? Some things in life you ain’t gon’ get away from, Shareef. And whether you like it or not, you connected to my hip now. That’s for real.”
Jurrell sat back and smiled and added, “Just like old times in grade school.” Then his smile quickly disappeared. He looked across the table at Shareef and said, “The bottom line is this, man. I’m fighting for my life to get the fuck off these streets. I did ten years in jail and I’m not goin’ back. We still got niggas who hustled in the eighties who just getting the fuck out of jail. And now these white ma-fuckers got condos coming up in Harlem, and we can’t get in that shit, because of co-ops and tenant organizations and shit like that, frontin’ on us?”
He shook his head and said, “Nah, nigga, fuck that. They not locking me out. This ain’t South Africa. Harlem gone stay home for me. And I ain’t goin’ no-fuckin’-where. So now I just found me a new partner in business, and we going legit.”
Jurrell continued to stare across the table at Shareef to make sure he understood everything. For the moment, Shareef was still silent.
Jurrell looked down at the pistol on the table and said, “I hate to come at you this way, Shareef, but just in case you forget how serious I am when you leave Harlem, you gotta remember that you got a public access website.” He looked back into Shareef’s eyes and warned, “I know where you live. I know who your wife is. I know who your kids are. I know where your next book signing is gon’ be. I mean, you got a open-fuckin’ book on your life, Shareef. And like I said, man, I’m not try’na come at you that way, but…”
Meesha happened to walk past the kitchen door when Jurrell revealed how much information he was hip to. Shareef figured that any girl who was a fan of his could log on to his website and tell Jurrell everything he needed to know.
Jurrell sighed and said, “I’m just try’na live my life on the straight and narrow now, man. I ain’t had to kill nobody with one of these things in years. But today I had to kill somebody for you, and then I had to kill somebody for G. But what if I ain’t find out about this shit today, Shareef? Where would you be then? Where would we be?”
Shareef began to shake his head defiantly. All he could think about was the threat on his life and his family.
He looked back across the table and said, “Jurrell, there’s a lot of ways out here for you to make a honest living without threatening me and my family, man. I mean, I can’t let that shit fly.”
Jurrell looked across the table and grilled at him. But Shareef didn’t budge. He meant that shit, and he was ready to go to the grave for it.
That’s when Jurrell broke out laughing. He stood back up from the table with the gun in hand and said, “You’re the same fuckin’ Shareef, son, after all these years. A nigga threaten you and you jump the fuck up and start swinging. That’s just what G said. He told me last night, ‘That boy Shareef a real-ass nigga!’ I said, ‘I know he is. I went to grade school wit’ ’em. And he was the only li’l nigga hard enough to fight me. He a beast!’”
Then Jurrell became serious again. He said, “But we ain’t kids no more, man. And we not gettin’ no younger. I can’t sell drugs on these streets and stick niggas up no more. I’m out of time for that shit now.”
He held up the gun and said, “I’m not try’na hold on to this for the rest of my life, Shareef. You gotta believe me, man. So here’s what I’m gon’ do. I’m gon’ give you the gun. And if you don’t think my word is bond on this shit, then kill me right now and your family’ll never have to worry about me.”
Jurrell actually sat the gun down in front of Shareef at the table and walked back over to the other side to take a seat.
Again, Meesha showed up at the doorway to the kitchen. She couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Jurrell had lost his damn mind!
Shareef looked at the gun sitting out on the table in front him, and he remembered all the fistfights they had had in their youth. Despite how brave everyone thought Shareef was, he remembered fighting Jurrell more because he hated the feeling of being so afraid of him. Jurrell had always been terrifying. And Shareef had always wondered how a young boy could be without morals or common decency. Shareef couldn’t understand him, so he chose to fight off his insanity. Now they were face-to-face again, and he was being forced one more time to deal with Jurrell’s challenge.
Shareef thought to himself, This motherfucker! I hate this motherfucker! I don’t wanna have to deal with this nigga again. I had nightmares about having to fight this boy. He’s probably the reason why I’m so fuckin’ kamikaze now. I always had to deal with his crazy ass! So if I shoot his ass in the head right now, I’ll never have to deal with him again. And I’ll just leave Harlem the fuck alone and never come back here.
Shareef was thinking about it. He was thinking about it strongly. And Meesha had no idea what he would do. Based on what Jurrell had told her about Shareef, she figured he was brave enough to actually pull the trigger. But all she could do was breathe and wait. They were two type A men with a gun out between them. She realized that any interference could prove deadly. Neither man budged at the table while the oxygen in the room seemed to evaporate.
Finally, Shareef came to his senses and shook his head.
“I don’t deal with guns, man. That’s not my thing.”
He didn’t even move to touch it.
After he said that, Meesha was able to breathe again.
Jurrell left the gun out on the table and didn’t touch it himself. He said, “What are you gonna do then? You wanna fight me? We too old for that shit now, too.”
Shareef looked at him and cracked a smile. He said, “It takes a lot of heart for you to put your life on the line like that.”
Jurrell responded with no smile. “That’s how serious I am about this shit, man. This ain’t no fuckin’ game. I’m try’na get my life right.”
Shareef joked and said, “Is it real bullets in that gun?”
Jurrell eyed him before he grabbed the gun off the table and pulled the cartridge of bullets out the back in one quick movement.
He answered, “Like I said, I’m dead serious about my life. I got a lot of shit I still wanna do, and I don’t want my prison record to stop me. So maybe it was divine intervention that G got killed today.”
He said, “He was my last line to the streets. I wasn’t really dealing with anybody else. I ain’t have to. G did good business. I’m gon’ have to square his sisters away now like they’re my own.”
Shareef nodded and wondered how anything would work with Jurrell. What exactly was his plan?
“I mean…what do you want me to do?” he asked. He was still confused by it all.
For Jurrell it was simple. He said, “First of all, fuck Michael Springfield. That was divine intervention, too. You didn’t really need him anyway. So first, you want to write a book about a young blood trying to be famous on the streets of Harlem, and how that shit led to his end. And that’s all based on G. I’ll give you more of the details on him. Then, after that, I’ll talk to the people on the streets who got the hot stories to tell—I mean, and I got a lot of them myself—and then I’ll sit down with you about the best way to tell them, and you write the books and kickback my percentages. Then I’ll hook up with the street and prison niggas to make sure these books sell. Or at least up in Harlem.”
He said, “But if you buy off t
hem hip-hop magazine niggas—and you can buy them off if you know the right people—you can get them to do full-page ads on our shit. And once these rap niggas get used to seeing our shit selling in their magazines, we can step to them about getting these film deals poppin’. You feel me?”
Shareef cracked another smile.
He said, “You make it all sound like clockwork. But it ain’t that easy.”
Jurrell didn’t budge. He said, “Let me ask you a question then, Shareef?”
“What’s that?”
“Do you consider yourself one of the best writers from the black community right now?”
Shareef smiled again and started laughing.
“Come on, man, don’t fuck with me like that. I’ll write circles around most of these clowns out here.”
Jurrell said, “Exactly. Now let me ask you another question.”
Shareef paused and waited.
Jurrell said, “Would you consider me one of the most gangsta-ass niggas you ever met in your life?”
Shareef looked and grinned. There was no question about it. Harlem was one of the most vicious communities, not only in America, but in the world. So if Jurrell Garland could scare other criminals half to death in Harlem, then he had to be one of the toughest street gangstas alive. Shareef could see exactly where he was coming from.
Jurrell told him, “Real recognize real. We could be that next level shit out here.” He stopped with excitement in his eyes and asked Shareef again, “So, what are you gonna do, man? Are you in or what?”
Shareef looked down and thought about it. Then he looked back up and asked, “What would you call this first book?”
Jurrell didn’t hesitate. He answered, “To Live and Die in Harlem. That’s the only title I want for this first one. ’Cause that shit is real. That’s how gangsta-ass niggas think. Either we livin’, and that mean’s living how we want to, or we dying out this motherfucker. Because we won’t have it no other way. That’s why Baby G was so fuckin’ hardheaded.”
Jurrell sized up Shareef and said, “That’s why you so hardheaded. And that’s why I’m hardheaded. ’Cause I’m not lettin’ no motherfucker tell me I’m not gon’ have one of those Park Avenue condos. Fuck that! I will be up in that ma-fucka with my feet kicked back.”
Meesha smiled from the kitchen doorway. Jurrell caught her and said, “Yeah, and I might let you come over, too.”
She finally spoke out loud. “Whatever. I’ll be more than your maid, I know that much.”
Jurrell joked and said, “Yeah, you’ll be the maid, the cook, the door girl, the sex slave. And it’s all good.”
Meesha shook her head and grinned. Her good-natured loyalty was what Jurrell liked about her. Otherwise, he would have never trusted her in his inner circle. A girl had to be more than just pretty. She had to know when to respect the world of the man she chose to be with.
Shareef smiled for a minute, but then the pain from his left side reminded him of the violence they had just escaped from.
He asked, “So, how do we clean up this mess that we’re in?”
Jurrell became serious himself. He said, “Well, you know the cops are looking for you. But they don’t know I have shit to do with it. And that’s how it needs to stay. So you tell them the truth about what you can, make up some shit when they get too close to the truth, and whenever the truth gets too complicated, then you tell them you don’t fuckin’ know. It’s that simple.”
Shareef tried not to grin across the table, but he couldn’t help it. Jurrell sounded like a much smoother criminal now. So Shareef nodded and said, “I’ll keep that all in mind.”
Interrogations
MEESHA DROVE Shareef back to 125th Street alone, while Jurrell remained behind at the house. There was no sense in Shareef trying to run. Every finger pointed back to him, and there was no way the NYPD was not going to catch up to him for questioning. So the plan was to allow them to capture him. Then it would be up to Shareef to handle himself accordingly.
Meesha stopped and looked at him before he climbed out of the Explorer. He was wearing his ragged, bloodstained, light blue tennis shirt again.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m all right. I’ve had bruises before. It ain’t no biggie. So let me get back out here and go take care of business.”
Meesha placed her hand on his left knee with care and told him, “Be safe.”
“You too.”
When Shareef climbed out of the black SUV, Meesha made a U-turn and headed quickly away from him. Shareef walked back toward the hotel on 124th and Frederick Douglass. He passed the Hue-Man Bookstore and the Magic Johnson Theater without much notice. He didn’t look like a superstar author at the moment, he looked more like a down-on-his-luck panhandler who had fallen off the back of an eighteen-wheeler on the highway. So no one bothered to notice him.
However, when he arrived at the entrance of the hotel, the NYPD knew exactly who he was. They ran right up behind him with their guns ready.
“Shareef Crawford, we need to take you in and talk to you at the station. You have the right to remain silent…”
Shareef turned to face them and slowly raised his hands. “Can y’all get my luggage from the front desk of this hotel. I was just coming back to get it.”
They put handcuffs on him and responded, “Yeah, sure, somebody get his luggage.”
All of a sudden, all of the pedestrians’ eyes on the sidewalk were on Shareef as the police led him into a squad car to take him to the station. Fortunately, the Harlem police station was right around the corner, literally one block away, near St. Nicholas Avenue, and less than five blocks south of the park.
Imagine that. Harlem life was that bold. The police station was right there in the thick of things. Nevertheless, desperate people did what they felt they needed to do.
Once Shareef was secure inside an interrogation room on the second floor of the precinct, he sat in a lone chair behind a small table. Then he watched as the arresting officers went through his luggage. But unless someone at the hotel had tried to frame him for something, he was clean.
A plainclothes detective walked in next and asked the uniformed officer, “Did you find anything in there worthwhile?”
He was a large black man in an ugly, dark sports jacket. What the hell did it matter when you were dealing with violence, despair, lying, stealing, murder, and criminals all day? Twenty-five years of that would make any man glum. So his wardrobe matched the mood of his business.
His partner walked in next, a smaller Latino man with a cleaner, sharper dress code. At least he looked like he tried. But he hadn’t been in the profession as long.
The two of them were the same tandem who had investigated the execution-style murder at the storefront on Adam Clayton Powell that week. And that case hadn’t led anywhere yet.
The uniformed officer shook his head. “Nah, he’s clean.” He left the room and closed the door back.
Shareef looked up at the black and Latino detectives and immediately thought about a million cop movies and television shows that he had watched since he was a kid, including his all-time favorite, Across 110th Street.
Okay, here we go, he told himself.
The Latino partner started on him first. “So, ah, Shareef…what do you have to tell us today?”
Shareef sighed and said, “About what?” He figured it would be a long, grueling interrogation, so he wanted to pace himself and take it all slowly.
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess we can start off with fourteen homicides in two days, including a stripper who was just found raped and shot to death inside of an apartment building leased by a guy named Spoonie, aka Wallace Lattimore, who I believe was seen walking with you toward St. Nicholas Park earlier today, before we found him dead on the scene at the park. And this is after two armed men were found dead after shooting at you just up the street last night. Now I know you have something to tell us about all of that, Shareef.
“I hear
you’re an, ah, writer of some sort,” he added.
The older black man, who was the lead detective, corrected him.
“He’s a New York Times bestselling author. That’s the big leagues in the book world,” he noted. He said, “That’s equivalent to a platinum-selling artist in music, or a blockbuster actor in a film.”
The partner nodded. “Oh, is that right? Well, Shareef, I like stories. So let’s see if your story on this matches mine.
Shareef nodded back to them. He wanted to start off with the truth.
He said, “It all started after I went to visit a guy named Michael Springfield in prison about writing his life story. And I still didn’t know if I wanted to do it or not, but then all these people I never saw before started asking me questions about it. And them two guys last night tried to shoot me over it. So I took off running before they got in a shoot-out with somebody else.”
Then he began to mix his truth with lies. He said, “And I didn’t look back behind me to see who it was. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. So once I made it to Adam Clayton Powell, I jumped into a cab and told him to take me downtown. Then I got down there and checked into the Hudson off of Broadway.”
So far it all made sense to the detectives. Shareef hadn’t said anything to alarm them. But they were far from finished with him.
“So, why did you come back up to Harlem, to get your luggage?” the lead detective asked him.
Shareef dropped his head. He had to look remorseful. Then he raised his head back up and said, “Spoonie called me up and told me that he knew who was after me. He said all they wanted to do was make sure I wasn’t planning on putting their names in anything. And he said they wanted to see me face-to-face.”
He said, “Now at first—I mean, I’m not no fool, man—I figured they gon’ try to kill me again. They were just shooting at me last night. But at the same time, if they really wanted to meet me face to face—I mean, I know I’m not no snitch—so I told myself, ‘Look, I’m just gon’ tell them I’m not trying to do that and get it over with.’ I mean, I’m from Harlem, man, I know how it is. And I figured if they looked me in the eyes and met me, they could tell.”
