The Accidental Hunter

by Nelson George

  D nodded goodbye and exited the car. When he entered his office he found Mercedez sitting behind his desk and on his computer. She looked up and smiled. “Hey, how was Oz?”

  “Better than the show,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m checking out Bridgette’s fan site. Damn, they already have your picture up there. They move as fast as the Post. You wanna see?”

  D shook his head and slumped into the chair that faced his desk. It was good to be back in his dark office, though he would have preferred to be alone.

  “Since I’ve been here a woman’s called three times.” She handed him a piece of paper with a number scrawled across it.

  “Laurita Grayson?”

  “Says she’s Ray Ray’s mother. She said it’s an emergency.”

  D grabbed the phone from his desk and began dialing the number.

  “I know it’s been a long day,” Mercedez said, “but I wanted you to know, I think you did the right thing.”

  D stared into space, as motionless as a monument and just as grim. The voice that answered was black, female, and very ghetto.

  “Who this?” Laurita Grayson asked.

  He introduced himself, listened, and then almost cried.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kings County Hospital is one of the oldest in Brooklyn. Its central hub is an old brick structure that dates back to the 1930s and Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA. Once a noble example of can-do American spirit, it was now an ancient relic in desperate need of a modernization that was unlikely to come. There were newer parts to the Kings County complex (across the street was Downstate Medical Center), but the overall atmosphere was of a place where old illness hung in the air, infusing new patients with a sense of lingering disease.

  Ray Ray hadn’t been there long enough to have had any of the building’s old maladies seep in. Besides, his system was already pretty busy with new ones he’d acquired in the service of D Security.

  “You looking good, my man,” D said with a fake smile to the young man sitting in a crowded ward with his broken right leg elevated and his right wrist covered in bandages.

  “You a funny nigga, you know that?”

  D reached over and took Ray Ray’s good left hand in both of his. “Son, was this an accident?”

  “Yeah. I think so. We was out on the Conduit in Queens and I took a curve too fast, yo.”

  “I spoke to your mom on the phone and told her I’d definitely help with the bills.”

  “That’s cool, yo.” Ray Ray’s eyes shifted toward the door of the ward and a deep smile curved his lips. “Yo, what’s up, Areea?”

  Areea Lucas came walking toward the bed in black leather pants, jacket, and boots and a white turtleneck. There was a large vintage cross dangling around her neck and nestling between her ample breasts. Golden-brown skin, like butter rolls fresh from the oven, covered a face of dramatically plucked eyebrows; small, intense eyes; a flat nose; and round, authoritative lips. These were lips that never pouted. They were used to giving orders and having them executed.

  “The real question,” she said when she’d reached his bed, “is how are you?”

  “I’m good. I’ll be back riding soon. Believe that.” Ray Ray, who’d been grateful that D had come by, was anxious speaking to Areea, sounding both smitten and intimidated. He introduced D to the woman, who said, “I saw you on MTV News this afternoon. Did they ever find that gun?”

  “Gun?” he said warily. “Is that what they said? There was no gun. The man just acted in a threatening manner and I couldn’t take chances.”

  “Yo, D, what’s up with that?” Ray Ray asked. “You in MTV rotation now?”

  “Oh, yes,” Areea answered as she studied D’s face. “D Hunter is famous. I’m impressed you know someone who hangs out with a real American idol.”

  “Yo, Areea, I don’t know about that. I just know I was in a situation at a nightclub where some niggas was about to do some dirt to me and mine and D stepped up and handled his, you know.” It was a beautiful falsehood. There was a kernel of truth in what Ray Ray said, but also enough quality deceit to truly impress D and, perhaps, cool Areea’s suspicions.

  “A guardian angel, huh?” Areea said as she continued to survey D. It wasn’t a sexual gaze but the wary look of one warrior sizing up another.

  “Angel, no,” D said. “But a guardian if the opportunity allows. Unfortunately, I can’t keep young men from crashing bikes.”

  “No one can do that,” she replied. “Boys will be boys. All a woman can do is suggest what road to take and be supportive. Boys will fall down all by themselves.”

  “Areea runs the motorcycle club I was riding with, STP. Not only is she a hottie, but she’s probably the best rider in the crew.”

  “Impressive. What do you do for a living, Areea?” D asked.

  “Oh,” she answered coolly, “I keep it moving. Nothing regular. Just enough money to keep gas in the tank. You know how that is.”

  D said, “Yes, I do,” realizing this woman was not going to make anything easy for him.

  Areea turned her attention back to Ray Ray. “I know you didn’t ride with us long, but you got a lot of love from the members, so we decided to help you a little with your bills.” She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a manila envelope that she placed in Ray Ray’s good left hand.

  He squeezed it and felt the flat rectangular thickness of bills stacked and wrapped in rubber bands on his fingertips. “Whoa!”

  “It won’t pay all your bills,” she said, “but it’ll help a little.”

  Ray Ray thanked her profusely. The polite young man under the thuggish demeanor that D had peeped before was now completely out in the open. “Damn, Areea. I got much love for you and all the riders, yo.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “You’re welcome. I just ask one thing of you, Ray Ray.”

  “Whatever. Whenever.”

  She leaned closer toward him, and D asked if she wanted him to leave.

  “No,” she said softly. “You’re a friend. What I have to say is no big secret. Ray Ray, I just want you to remember to treat us right, okay? Me and everybody in the club just want to be treated right in whatever you do or say. You do that and we’ll all stay cool. That’s all, Ray Ray.”

  Ray Ray felt a chill when she spoke, so he opened the envelope and looked inside to recapture his sense of comfort. Seeing the money certainly did the trick. “How much is that, Areea?”

  “As Tony Soprano would say, Five large.”

  D said, “That’s quite generous. Your club must win a lot of prize money.”

  “We do the best we can, Mr. Hunter.” She leaned down and gave Ray Ray a kiss on the forehead. “Gotta go, Ray Ray.” She stuck out her hand and held D’s in hers. Her grip was solid and supple at the same time, an exciting combination but, again, no sensuality flowed from her to him. She was probably just seeing how easily he could be macked—should the need ever arise. “Mr. Hunter, do you ride?”

  “It’s D, Areea, and while I’ve been on a couple, I wouldn’t say I was a rider.”

  “You should take it up. Nothing gets you through city traffic faster.” She actually winked at D when she spoke, a cockiness that made the blood rush to his face. Both he and Ray Ray watched her leather pants swish out of the ward and then turned toward each other.

  “Well,” D said accusingly, “did she just buy your loyalty and silence with five thousand dollars or am I mistaken?”

  “No, D, you my dog. No doubt.” Ray Ray’s mouth said one thing but his face suggested sudden, unexpected confusion.

  “So, dog,” D wondered, “what are Areea and the crew into?”

  “From what I could see, and I didn’t get that close, yo, I saw a lot of guys carrying packages around town. You ever see that flick about the English dude who drove shit and protected that fly Asian shorty?”

  “The Transporter?”

  “Yeah, that’s what they are—transporters. They get a fee and, depending on the situation, a
cut. They roll up and down the East Coast as far south as VA.”

  “They go that far on those speed bikes they had out at Starrett?”

  “Nah. Seems like they have access to all kinds of bikes. I saw some Harley Roadsters a couple times. You know, those bikes are like chillin’ on your sofa. When I asked about them, guys would say they were loans or leased. They’d say that Areea and I-Rod hooked them up.”

  “Is that the guy who was grandstanding that day?”

  “Yeah. That dude loves an audience. He talks loud. He talks all the time. He has to have everyone paying attention to him.”

  “How does he get along with Areea?”

  “You saw her, dog,” Ray Ray said with a smile. “He talks loud but she’s in charge of every situation.”

  “So what about Night’s kidnapping? Anything?”

  Ray Ray fingered the money in the envelope, agonizing over what to say. “I wasn’t in their inner circle, D. I’d just got there, you know.” Ray Ray fell silent.

  D just stood by the bed looking at the young man, awaiting his move.

  “All I heard was some guys joking about being chased by the police and about how someone they had riding with them looked like he’d shit a brick.”

  D’s face went red. “That’s it?”

  “I’m sorry, D. That’s all I heard on that.”

  “Cool.” No use pushing the boy. He’d gotten a broken leg on D’s behalf, so why alienate him? “You did a great job, Ray Ray. I put you in a dangerous position and you handled it. I don’t have a package for you right now but I will.” D leaned down, gave him a hug, and headed out of the ward.

  Back outside Kings County, D mulled over the info he’d gleaned: This Areea was definitely the woman on the bike and that I-Rod was likely to be the one whose bike D was on. If those guys were transporting, someone in the crew probably had a jacket—something to run by Fly Ty. The easy availability of bikes suggested either I-Rod or Areea worked for or had a tight relationship with a dealership, bike-repair shop, or manufacturer. Ray Ray had given D a lot. Even his accident was a plus—if he hadn’t gotten hurt it would have taken D a lot longer to encounter Areea. Still, that five thousand dollars was a lot of cheese for a young ghetto boy and seemed to have put a lid on Ray Ray’s memory. Even though it had been a long day and the sun would soon be setting, D decided to follow up on Rodney’s lead.

  * * *

  When D entered her parked car, Mercedez asked, “How’s your cousin?”

  “He’s good,” D said, lying smoothly. “Just messed up his leg playing ball. Young men can be reckless.”

  “Can I tell you that I feel honored?”

  “You just did but I have no idea what about.”

  “Everyone at the company says no one gets to meet your family. In fact, no one’s even sure you really have a family.”

  “Oh, I got family. They have really left their mark too.” He got quiet a moment.

  Mercedez thought he might say more. When he didn’t, she asked, “Back to the city?”

  “No, let’s take a ride to Hollis, Queens. Take Linden Boulevard out.”

  As Mercedez pulled away from the lot, a black-clad motorcyclist on a Kawasaki Ninja coasted by.

  “Nice ride,” she observed.

  “Yup,” he said, as the bike idled at a red light before taking off.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hollis, Queens was the first of the many obscure black working-class enclaves to become internationally known via hip hop. Before Run-D.M.C.’s emergence in 1983 with the twelve-inch “It’s Like That” b/w “Sucker M.C.’s,” Hollis was the harder cousin of the more bourgie St. Albans. In the sixties and seventies, the adjoining hoods were a mecca for blacks from Brooklyn and Harlem seeking homes within the city limits that afforded their families a backyard, a parking garage, and a wood-paneled basement. Several generations of musicians called the Hollis/St. Albans area home, including James Brown, Count Basie, Roy Hanes, and Ivy Greenwich’s first client, Adrian Dukes. Dukes had purchased a nice two-story house in St. Albans just off Linden Boulevard for his wife Rowena, himself, and their anticipated family a year before his suicide. It was there that the R&B singer wrote songs on the living room piano, barbecued in the backyard, and hoped to conceive a son he planned to name Roderick.

  This comfy, aging, yet well-maintained home with plastic covering the living room furniture and renderings of Dr. King and a blue-eyed Jesus in the dining room was empty this overcast early-spring night as D rang the buzzer. While he waited to see if anyone was home, he recalled how much his mother had yearned to move to Queens after his father had split. This was just the kind of house she had dreamed of. A place where her boys could play on grass, not concrete, and where the basement would be a playroom where she could monitor them at night. It never happened for the Hunter boys. They spent their lives stranded on the unforgiving streets of Brownsville.

  “Nobody’s home,” Mercedez said.

  “Yup,” D replied, still caught up in his thoughts.

  A woman shouted from their left, “You looking for Rowena Dukes?” She appeared to be in her late fifties, carrying a Macy’s bag in one hand and pushing a shopping cart with the other as she came up the walkway to her home.

  “Yes, I am, miss. I’m a record producer. My name is D Hunter. This is my associate, Mercedez. We’d sure like to talk to her about music.”

  “Well,” the woman said, “every day about this time she’s usually over at the center. It’s a few blocks away, right across from what they used to call Andrew Jackson High School.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said, then walked over to the woman and took the heavy Macy’s bag and carried it for her into the house.

  Back in the car, Mercedez remarked, “I’ve never seen you so sweet.”

  “You act like I’m a mean guy or something.”

  “Well, you kind of are a mean guy, D. I know it goes with the job and shit, but you definitely aren’t the warmest, most welcoming person.”

  “I’m as nice as the next man,” he said defensively.

  “To an old black woman you are warm. To everyone else you can be chilly.”

  “Then they must have had a cold when I met them.”

  “Yeah,” Mercedez said, “that’s the D I know.”

  The car rolled down Linden Boulevard, past two-family homes and small, modest commercial strips of grocery stores, pharmacies, and takeout food. D turned left at the old high school and spied a storefront that had a hand-painted sign that read, HOLLIS HAIR. But stenciled on the window in graffiti-influenced lettering were the words, HARPER’S SCHOOL OF RECORDING ARTS. A thick burgundy curtain hung behind the glass. In front of the building, chained to a fire hydrant and right under a streetlight, was a spanking-new Suzuki bike.

  As he crossed the street toward the bike, D planned to open its glove compartment and take a look inside. But he dropped that idea when a solidly built and familiar young black man came outside. It was the guy whom D had encountered in various places over the last few weeks. They’d exchanged many a glance—most of them unfriendly. It was time for a showdown, D thought, and felt the muscles inside his shirt tighten and flex.

  “This your ride?” D asked.

  “And what if it is?” the surly young man answered.

  “It’s a beautiful thing. Must cut through city traffic like A-I through the Knicks.”

  The guy didn’t reply, just looked at D and Mercedez and pulled on his cigarette. D could see his gears were turning and was fully prepared for the young man to bum rush him or even reach into his pocket and squeeze off. D was about to try another conversational gambit when music erupted from inside the building. It was a live band playing the bridge to Slave’s “Just a Touch of Love.”

  Just as quickly as it began, the music stopped and a woman yelled, “Roderick, are you through with that cigarette yet?”

  Roderick, a.k.a. I-Rod, turned his head and yelled back, “Almost!”

  “Hey, Roderick,” D said,
and moved toward the younger man, “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m D Hunter. I work for Ivy Greenwich, the talent manager.”

  Roderick’s face grew harder. He knew damn well who this man was and who he worked for. He was highly offended that D was going to play it as if they’d never met before. He didn’t respond to D’s outstretched hand. Ignoring the dis, D continued, “My associate Mercedez Cruz and I are looking for your mother, Rowena Dukes. We were told we could find her here.”

  Roderick closed the door behind him. “You were told wrong.”

  “Really,” D said with false innocence. “You mean to tell me that Rowena Dukes, widow of the singer Adrian Dukes, doesn’t run a cultural center at this location?”

  Roderick gazed at him with that petulant sneer young men employ to intimidate their elders. It was nowhere near as effective as D’s battle-tested glare but one day it might ripen into something truly threatening. The testosterone both men were emitting through their flared nostrils was counteracted by the arrival of Rowena Dukes at the door.

  “What is going on here?” She was five-foot-four, about fifty, with graying dreads, dark, almond-shaped eyes, and hellacious curves in a number 8 Sprewell T-shirt and Baby Phat jeans. What if Angela Davis had Betty Boop’s body? That was Rowena Dukes.

  “Hello,” D said with an incandescent smile that stunned Mercedez. Her boss was showing her some heretofore unknown dimensions to his game. D moved past Roderick and introduced himself as “an employee of Ivy Greenwich, but not his representative.”

  “Mr. Hunter,” she said, bemused, “I don’t get told too many riddles during my day, so I’ll give you a minute more than I’d originally intended, but don’t waste my rehearsal time.”

  “Well, Mrs. Dukes, it’s a little complicated. If we could come in and chat, I think you’ll find what we have to say interesting.”

  “This man is full of shit,” Roderick spat. “Ivy Greenwich is a thieving snake. This man works for him, so you know he’s got some trickeration up his sleeve.”

  “Enough,” she said firmly. “If this man wants to speak to me, and he’s been respectful, then he’ll get five minutes of my time. Now why don’t you all come on in.”