Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  As we drive up the coast, I ask Troy what his plan is. He pauses so long I think he’s not going to answer. Then he does, kind of. “We’re going to go in there and get our drugs. Then you’re going to leave and I am going to fuck shit up.”

  I can’t help but let out a short laugh. The situation seems surreal. “These guys we’re going to see? These are some hardcore penitentiary peckerwoods. I’m thinking they’re gonna be ready for us.”

  Troy smiles. “Definitely.”

  “I don’t suppose you would consider not going?”

  “We’re gonna finish this.”

  Troy and I sit on some crumbling steps leading down to the beach across the highway from the Snake Pit. We are waiting for darkness, staring out at the waves, surfers visible in silhouette.

  “You miss it?” I ask him, nodding to the surf. “You were good.”

  “Nah,” Troy responds. “That ain’t me anymore.”

  “It could be again.”

  “There ain’t nothing good left in me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was never a saint, I know that. But I’m not even human anymore.” He taps his forehead. “Shit is broken.”

  “Maybe it’s just gonna take some time … Dude, let’s just go home. We don’t need to go on with this. I’ll find another way to get us some dope.”

  “It’s not about that, never was.” He stands up. “Besides, I promised that dead kid I would get him some justice. If nothing else, I am a man of my word.”

  It is night and we are down in the Snake Pit. Troy waits behind in a tree line as I walk up to a ramshackle house and knock on a window that now serves as a door. The plan is for me to tell them I want to buy some more heroin and see who is inside. But before I am even ready, the door swings open and I am pulled inside. Someone shoves me to the ground and kicks me in the ribs. “Stay down!” a rough voice orders.

  I eventually roll over and manage a glance around. There is a muscular convict type with greased-back hair and a cowboy mustache standing over me. The small room is filled with expensive goods: jewelry, high-end electronics, fur coats. And there, on a nearby table next to some used syringes and a pistol, is Betty Le Mat’s gleaming Oscar. The sudden realization that I have found the guys doing the home invasions is instantly followed by the understanding that they will surely kill me.

  One of the Nazi greasers I met there before walks in and looks at me. He is shirtless—the words South Bay tattooed across his stomach—and holding a large revolver. His eyes have a crystal meth intensity. “I remember you,” he says, then nods to the others. “Take him into the bathroom and stick him. Make sure to hold him over the bathtub when he bleeds out.”

  South Bay starts to light a Camel nonfilter when a figure looms behind him. It is Troy. He reaches forward and moves a knife across the man’s throat. A mist of blood sprays out and the guy stumbles forward. His gun goes off making a popping noise. As the other greasers scramble for their weapons, I dive behind a couch. The room erupts into complete chaos as men shout and shoot off guns.

  I hear a crashing noise and one of the Nazis falls beside me on the floor and starts convulsing. With a new burst of adrenalin I stand and bolt through the house toward what I hope is a back door. I race through a kitchen area and out another makeshift door into the surrounding trees. As I move away, there is high-pitched screaming unlike anything I have ever heard.

  I frantically claw my way up a hillside on my hands and knees. When I get some distance I finally look back. The house below is now on fire. There are several gunshots and then an eerie silence. I sit there gasping for breath as the house burns. I take out my cell phone and, with trembling hands, call 911. Troy never emerges. No one does. I hear sirens approaching and soon there are emergency lights descending into the darkness of the canyon.

  In the ensuing days, a sanitized story of what happened is offered up to the public. News broadcasts tell of a decorated war veteran who lost his life single-handedly taking down an ultra-violent crime ring. And really, that is what happened. The rest is merely context. In my opinion Troy knew he couldn’t exist in the civilized world anymore so he went out doing something he thought was noble. Beyond the fact that he had become a monster, my friend rescued the city.

  And in the end he saved my life as well. I was literally scared straight by my day with Troy and have been clean since. That night I left the Snake Pit and drove south along the coast, eventually falling asleep on my local beach, curled up beneath the very same lifeguard stand I had slept under as a clear-eyed kid waiting to surf the dawn patrol. I held onto the sand with an anguished desperation, listening to the waves and willing myself back into a less horrific world.

  GARY PHILLIPS has edited and contributed to several Akashic Books anthologies, including The Cocaine Chronicles, which he coedited with Jervey Tervalon. Recent work includes The Rinse, a graphic novel about a money launderer; the novel The Warlord of Willow Ridge; and Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers, a collection of his short stories. For information, visit www.gdphillips.com.

  black caesar’s gold

  by gary phillips

  He had a dream, but it would have made Martin Luther King, Jr. shake his head woefully, Malcolm X tongue lash him severely, and Stokely Carmichael would have pimp slapped him. Frank Matthews, along with the other Frank, Lucas, and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes were, for a time, the kingpins of the heroin trade on the East Coast. Matthews, the self-styled Black Caesar, was a country boy like Lucas. But once he got to the big city, he went all in. Maybe Barnes could quote Moby-Dick and King Lear, but ascending from juvenile chicken thief in his native Durham to numbers runner in Philadelphia to becoming the first major drug lord in Harlem, Matthews had built an organization his compatriots admired and the Mob feared.

  “That moulie’s getting too damn big for that mink coat he struts around in,” Godfather Joe Bonanno was wont to observe.

  For Matthews moved product like no other, a Robin Hood in the community and a terror outside of it. Unlike other smaller pushers in Harlem and beyond, he didn’t rely on La Cosa Nostra to keep him supplied—as generally speaking, they controlled the pipeline. Matthews had a direct South American connection and brought in H and coke that way, cutting out the usual middleman. He invested in property under various fronts and had cash couriered overseas into tax havens.

  One time in Atlanta, Matthews brought together a roomful of big swingin’-dick black and Latino drug dealers to form a combine so as to chill the growing static with the Italian mobsters. Matthews was a strategic motherfucker.

  Like Barnes and Lucas, the high-flying Matthews eventually got his wings clipped and was busted by agents of the then newly constituted Drug Enforcement Administration. But different than those two, he didn’t rat out his peers for a reduction of his sentence. Then again, Matthews didn’t do time in the slammer, either. He liked to gamble in Vegas, these trips also a way for him to launder more of his money.

  As these things happen, he had been in Vegas at the time with a beauty on his arm, losing at the craps tables but not sweating it. His plan was to soon be on his way to LA to catch Super Bowl VII between the Redskins and Dolphins. Yet unbeknownst to him, members of his South American network, along with a lieutenant, had already been arrested. The trap was closing in on him, and at McCarran Airport the DEA slapped the cuffs on Matthews and his lady friend.

  “What took you so long?” he was quoted as saying jauntily.

  Incredibly, his lawyer successfully argued for his bail reduction, at which point Matthews got out of jail and then disappeared. That was 1973. From Chicago to Rome, Nigeria to Atlanta, sightings of Matthews abounded. But none of them panned out. He was never found. Maybe the Mafia had him whacked or maybe Matthews had his face changed and retired to some island with a woman who liked to wear miniskirts and no underwear.

  Chuck Grayson pondered Frank Matthews’s fate and history as he pretended not to fawn over the too-sweet 1969 Mustang Fastback with a Boss 420 engi
ne. Grayson had done his homework and knew less than a thousand of these particular Mustangs were produced that year. There must have been modifications to the engine compartment to accommodate the larger motor, he mused. A woman in stylish clothes and a wide-brimmed sun hat preceded him from the parking lot where several vehicles were on display. Along with other potential buyers, they reentered the main room of Stedler and Sons Auctioneers. There was a photo of the maroon Mustang tacked to a padded board with its order in the auction noted. There were other pictures of various items pinned there as well, including vases and an ivory-inlaid cigar box said to have belonged to President Grover Cleveland.

  Grayson had come to the auction house because this particular Mustang had belonged to Frank Matthews. Stedler and Sons listed the car as having belonged to Ken Schmecken, a producer and shadowy part owner of three X-rated movie theaters in the Los Angeles area. Grayson was something of a Matthews aficionado and always on the lookout for items connected to the gangster. He knew that Schmecken, an oblique slang term for heroin, was one of the names the drug lord had used in hiding his investments.

  Because the car had value as being only one of a limited number, there were several interested parties contending for it when it came up for bid. But Grayson was something of a limited edition himself.

  He was a mid-thirties African American male who’d made his money as part of a start-up online entity that got sold for a nice profit to a conglomerate controlling various commercial websites. He and his friends’ site was one of the first catering to the multicultural geek crowd in all things pop culture, lifestyles, and fashion. Turned out people-of-color dweebs, a group of which Grayson was proudly a member, liked to hang together.

  The car cost him more than he would have liked to pay. This was due to the woman across the room in the hat who kept upping him. But she’d dropped out when the asking price went past $25,000. One, two … the third strike of the gavel sounded and Grayson would soon possess the vehicle.

  The Mustang was found in Altadena in the garage of a house belonging to a long-retired Department of Water and Power secretary named Deborah Keyson. She’d died of pulmonary failure, and any connection she may have had to Frank Matthews or Ken Schmecken was not known.

  The auctioneers had put money into restoring the car and it had been fairly well-preserved under a tarp, the gas and fluids having been drained from it back when. Grayson had chanced upon its photo and description while sitting in his dentist’s office paging through a freshly minted Stedler and Sons catalogue. He immediately recognized the name Schmecken in the brief write-up.

  The paperwork done and money deposited, Grayson drove his prize away from the auction house in Glendale. He couldn’t help but imagine he was Matthews at the wheel on his way to cement a nefarious deal as he drove home to Santa Monica. Along the way his phone rang and he answered, putting it on speaker and propping it in the opening of the car’s built-in ashtray.

  “So?” his girlfriend Mora Fleming asked.

  “Scored it, sweeite.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Want me to bring Chinese or Indian?”

  “I could go for some kung pao chicken.”

  She chuckled. “When do you not want that?”

  “I want you.”

  “Hmmmm. See you soon.”

  Fleming, without her heavy boots on, was two inches taller than Grayson and outweighed his wiry frame by forty pounds—forty solid pounds. She was a bodybuilding chiropractor and gaming enthusiast. They’d met at the annual Nexus of Nerds—Comic-Con in San Diego. She’d come with a girlfriend, a fellow bodybuilder, and they’d turned the heads of fanboys and their put-upon fathers—the two of them dressed in the fantasy of scantily clad sword-wielding barbarian women.

  Standing in line to get into a panel with comics superstar writer Neil Gaiman, Fleming had been impressed with Grayson’s knowledge of the S.T.A.R. Ops game in phantom mode. That, and he managed to look at her face and not just her substantial chest.

  In bed later, cuddling after making love to Fleming in his second-floor bedroom, Grayson saw through the slats of the window the light over his garage snap on. The light was motion sensitive and normally it coming on meant one of his neighbors’ cats was lazing by. But the Mustang was parked in the driveway, near the garage door. He hadn’t outfitted the car with an alarm yet, though he’d put a lock bar on the steering wheel.

  Grayson waited for the sound of the vehicle’s door being opened. He smiled, realizing he better wake up his girlfriend if there was trouble. But the light went off again and there were no more sounds of disturbance from below.

  The following morning he was changing out the battery in the trunk when Fleming asked, “Why the heck is it back here?”

  “They needed all the room up front to squeeze in the big block engine,” Grayson explained, lifting the battery out. He figured the auction house had spent money on the car’s looks but not on a more heavy-duty battery. He intended to not scrimp when it came to his new beauty. He was going to use his electric motor Leaf and go to the auto parts store to trade this battery in for a better one. There was a recessed metal shell that held the battery in its cavity. He removed the housing to inspect it for rust.

  “What’s this?” Fleming asked, reaching a hand into the cavity in the trunk’s floorboard. She worked for a few moments undoing some tape and held aloft a plastic sandwich baggie that had been secured on the frame below the battery’s shell.

  The couple exchanged a look of anticipation as Fleming tore the aged baggie apart and removed a sheet of yellowed paper. Gingerly she unfolded the stiff note and flattened it on the slope of the car’s fastback. On the paper was a sentence in block lettering: SIXTY YARDS NORTH FROM THE PANZER.

  “Panzer?” Fleming asked. “Like German for tank?”

  “Precisely,” Grayson said, heading for the house. “Let me check something, but I think we might have a road trip this morning.”

  “Yeah, where?”

  “Why, a bombed-out French village, my dear.”

  The village had gone by various names and had been used in TV shows and movies several times. It was a World War II–era set in Canyon Country that by the late ’60s had become mired in an ownership battle between its original builder and the children of one of the ex-partners. This made it difficult to rent out. But in 1970, the village was utilized illegally—that is, the producers didn’t bother to pay—for a hardcore shoot called Madam Satan of the SS.

  “You’ve seen this epic?” Fleming asked.

  “Way before I had the pleasure of your acquaintance. In fact, there was a sequel but that one took place in a mad scientist’s castle. Same woman played Madam Satan both times, Jackie Salvo.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Of course I only know this due to my research into the wild and varied career of Frank Matthews.”

  “Of course.”

  Grayson had recalled that under the Ken Schmecken alias, Matthews had been a producer of a porno set during World War II. He’d confirmed this in a nonfiction book he had at home about twentieth-century gangsters which featured an extensive chapter on the disappeared drug lord.

  Fleming wondered aloud, “Does heron, to use the vernacular of the day, retain its potency over decades?”

  “You figure that’s what he has buried there?”

  She regarded the freeway outside the rolled-down passenger window. The Mustang didn’t have air-conditioning. “You think he buried money?”

  “He was a careful dude, Mora. Maybe he was planning in case he had to go on the run and needed to make sure he had enough liquid assets to make a break to Mexico or the Bahamas.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “My little Scarface.”

  He squeezed her muscular thigh. “Better know it.”

  Canyon Country was in Santa Clarita, in the northwest section of LA County. In the last twenty years the area had seen the proliferation of housing subdivisions, but th
ere were still large swaths of underpopulated nature. Using tax records and past articles he’d accessed online, Grayson had obtained the location for the place most commonly called Attack Squad Village, as the set had been used several times in the popular 1960s World War II TV show Attack Squad.

  Once there, they parked and walked along a dusty street bordered by French-style buildings of the proper vintage, a bombed-out church, and a bar called Millie Marie’s among the façades. There was another street, then behind the false front of an apartment building, in the tall weeds, they found the German tank.

  “North is this way,” Fleming said. Each carried shovels. Using a tape measure and allowing for human error, they marked off 180 feet from the tank. Grayson used the point of the shovel to scribe a large circle in the dirt.

  Fleming nodded and got started. He began in another section inside the circle. In less than fifteen minutes they’d uncovered a coffin.

  “Wow,” Fleming intoned. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “We’ve come this far,” he said. They dug the dirt out from around the coffin and together hefted it above ground.

  “Damn!” Fleming exclaimed, sweat on her brow.

  “Here goes,” Grayson said. He used the shovel to lift the lid and let it flop open.

  “Oh shit!” Fleming rasped.

  Inside the coffin were bricks of gold. Grayson picked up a bar, assessing its weight in his hand—roughly two pounds, he estimated. “How is this possible?” he wondered aloud.

  “Gold is good anywhere, Chuck,” Fleming observed.

  “I got that, but it’s illegal to own gold bars.”

  Hands on her hips, she said, “A drug lord isn’t worried about the rules, honey.”