“Okay,” the operator began, sounding very alert now, “let’s start by getting your information—”
“I always see those signs on the subway, right?” Wally continued. “They say, ‘If you see something, say something.’ So I guess this is me, like, saying something.”
Before the 911 operator could respond further, Wally recited the Townsends’ Upper East Side address and hung up the phone. She couldn’t be sure if her call to the authorities would immediately make Kyle’s situation at home better or worse, but at least his case would be in the hands of people whose actual job it was to help.
17.
WALLY, JAKE, AND ELLA CAUGHT THE L TRAIN INTO Manhattan and then transferred to the downtown 6, joining hordes of commuters jammed together on the morning trains.
“It feels good to be crowded and squished again,” Ella said with total sincerity. “There are more people in this train than in the entire town near the farm.”
They got off at the Bleecker Street station and walked one block north, where there was a small, independent cell phone shop called Soul Cell. As they walked, Wally checked the street and sidewalks behind them to be sure they weren’t being followed—the menacing phone call in the middle of the night had put her on high alert. Whatever it was that Alabama and the other goons were after, she had no reason to believe they would stop coming for her.
Do you have her? the man had asked. Replaying those words in her mind still sent a chill through Wally. What the hell was going on, anyway? The only thing she knew was that she finally had a major lead in her search for Tiger—the photo of him on the burner phone—and her chances of finding him probably hinged on the legendary abilities of Paige Jefferson.
It was a few minutes after ten when the three reached Soul Cell, just in time to find fifteen-year-old Paige Jefferson opening up the shop by herself. Paige smiled broadly at the sight of them.
“Jake? Ella?” Paige beamed at her old friends.
Wally managed to stop in at Soul Cell from time to time, but Paige hadn’t seen Jake or Ella since they had moved upstate. The three of them crashed into each other on the sidewalk, wrapping each other up in a group hug.
“You’re opening up shop without your folks?” Wally asked when the love fest finally broke up.
“Dad’s working a freelance IT gig today,” Paige said, “and Mom had some tax stuff to take care of downtown.”
Paige’s mother was a Jamaican immigrant who had worked for years as a nanny and housekeeper, eventually saving enough money to open her own business, Soul Cell. The small shop catered mostly to the cellular needs of the students at NYU, just a block away. Mrs. Jefferson was a large woman—three hundred pounds or so—and usually wore some sort of African wrap as a dress with her hair in a massive dreadlock ponytail. She and her husband had home-schooled Paige since the age of ten, but their daughter was a typical enough New York teen in most ways . . . except for the thick dreadlock ponytail hanging halfway down her back, like her mother’s.
The three of them stood by while Paige opened the shop and set up for business, lighting the floor-to-ceiling display cases full of hundreds of phones and accessories. When she was done, she invited them all into the backroom repair area. Paige had a well-earned reputation as a sort of cell phone savant—Wally and her friends had always called her the Cell Phone Whisperer. She could fix damaged phones and retrieve lost data where others failed, including some miraculous feats in which she had revived phones that had been swamped in water, trampled in mud, and lost in some unmentionable places that Paige didn’t usually like to talk about.
“What’s up?” she finally asked when her worktable was clear and ready to go.
Wally pulled out the cell phone that had Tiger’s photograph in its memory and handed Paige the phone and the battery that she’d removed.
“It’s Korean,” Paige said, examining the phone closely. “A burner, obviously, but not bad quality. No great features or anything, but reliable. We don’t carry it here, but it’s probably sold in forty or fifty tristate locations. Why did you pull the battery out?”
“Well,” Wally said, “I’d say there’s about a fifty-fifty chance that if you fire up that phone, thirty minutes later some armed creeps will show up at the door of your shop looking to hurt me.”
“Huh,” Paige said, apparently unimpressed. “You know what we call that around here?”
“What?” Jake asked.
“Tuesday,” Paige said with a sly smile. “Just kidding. Hold on a sec—I can make sure we’re not traced.”
She reached up toward the wall, where a small, homemade-
looking black box was mounted, with only an on-off switch on its front and a small indicator light. Paige switched on the device and the light glowed red.
“Signal jammer,” Paige said. “Look outside.”
The four of them looked out through the shop to the busy sidewalk out front. Streams of commuters and students were moving in both directions, many of them either speaking or texting into their cell phones. Within seconds of Paige’s activating the jammer, the pedestrians began stopping in their tracks, glaring at the suddenly useless devices in their hands with looks of betrayal.
“I so love that!” Ella said. “Look how lost they are—it’s like you ripped out their souls or something.”
“I know,” Paige said, giggling. “Pathetic. It’s oddly satisfying to be a Tower God.”
With the jammer in full effect, Paige placed the battery back in the burner phone and turned it on. Within twenty seconds the device had fully booted up. Paige’s fingers ran over the controls with lightning speed as she explored the workings and storage of the device.
“We have a call history that is set to erase automatically,” she said, “so it appears blank. We have no GPS feature, but there may be some location-related metadata stored in the RAM, depending. We have two downloaded files, which are photographs. One of you Wally, dressed for clubbing and the other picture . . . whoa. This guy is hot!”
“Easy there,” Wally said. “That’s my brother.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I know. He’s pretty good-looking. And screw you for being so surprised that we’re related.”
“Okay,” Paige said finally, setting the phone down on her worktable and giving Wally an attentive look. “Tell me the story.”
Wally paused. She had known Paige for nearly two years, but their relationship was really just based on business. During her time on the streets, Wally and her crew—including Jake and Ella—had earned money trading in black-market calling cards, and Paige and her mother had occasionally dealt with them. Wally and Paige shared a mutual trust, but it had never gone deeper than that.
“I’ve been looking for my brother for a long time,” Wally said. “His name is Tiger, and this photograph is the best lead I’ve found. Although, to be accurate, it sort of found me.”
“What do mean?”
“I had a run-in with some men—”
“The gunmen that are supposedly after you . . . you weren’t kidding about that?”
“Not kidding at all. This phone came off one of those guys. I have no idea what they want from me—all I know is that they have something to do with Tiger. Whatever you can dig out of the phone might be my only way of finding him.”
“But no pressure,” Jake added.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Wally.
Paige thought about it. “Well, like I said—there may be some metadata stored in here, off the directory. Depends on the carrier. It’ll take me a while to dig it out of the memory, so I’ll have to get back to you on that. For now, let me find the CID and see if I can get you the point of sale—I have connections with most of the distributors.”
“That would be great.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Paige said w
ith a sly smile. “I’ll help you however I can, and once you find Tiger you can introduce me.”
“Paige, I’m shocked,” Ella said, faking a gasp. “I didn’t know you were such a diabolical slut.”
“Everyone needs a hobby.”
“Done, then,” Wally said. “I think you’d be good for him.”
Paige held up her finger in a gimme-a-second gesture, and headed into the back office of the shop. Within just a few minutes, she returned with a discouraged look on her face.
“I don’t think this will help you much,” she said, holding up a napkin with a few scrawled notes on it. “That unit was part of a delivery of two hundred cell phones that were jacked two weeks ago from a truck up in Harlem—on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I talked to the distributor and he said their delivery guys get hassled by local gangs up there all the time. The shipment was never recovered, so there’s no way I can tell you who that phone was sold to.”
The news didn’t have the negative effect that Paige had anticipated. During their time as a crew, the three of them had done a fair amount of “business” in that area of the city, and their street knowledge was still intact—the three of them looked at each other, calculating the possibilities.
“GMB runs those streets,” Jake said.
“What does that stand for?” Paige asked. “Or do I not want to know?”
“GMB—the Get Money Boys,” Ella said. “Hard-core bangers.”
“Whatever they ripped off, they always fenced it with Panama’s smoke shop,” Jake said. “Back in the day, anyway.”
“Panama’s long gone,” said Wally, “but if someone else is running his shop now, maybe we can still track the phone.”
“I guess we’re going to Harlem,” said Ella.
18.
“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES,” JAKE SAID WHEN THEY
boarded the uptown B train, which would take them all the way into Harlem.
“Yeah, it’s strange going back to Panama’s,” Wally said, the idea of returning to the smoke shop already putting her on edge. “It feels like time travel.”
Back then—before everything came apart—Wally and the crew went to Panama when they wanted phone cards to sell on the street. When they had something to sell, Panama fenced it for them, and when they needed fake IDs or wisdom about what was happening on the street, Panama was their guy. What they didn’t know back then was that the 131st Street Smoke Shop was “up,” meaning it was under surveillance by law enforcement who were trying to sting gun dealers off the street. The man they knew as Panama—a huge, menacing man of nonspecific race—was actually an undercover ATF agent named Cornell Brown.
Wally had watched two people die that November morning on Shelter Island—Panama and her mother, Claire.
They got off the train at 125th, and five minutes of walking took them to the intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 131st, on the southwest side of Harlem. The neighborhood had cleaned up some, but Wally and her friends knew that the criminal undercurrents of those streets had never gone away, and probably never would.
The 131st Street Smoke Shop was shut up and dark. A hand-lettered sign hung on string behind the door—CLOSED. Loose trash and smoked-down cigarette butts had piled up against the doorway, likely swept there by the wind. The debris gave the impression that no one had entered the shop in a week, at least. Wally peered in through the window and could see that the shop looked the same inside as always, fully stocked and ready for business. She banged hard on the door, hard enough to clang the bells hanging inside to announce a customer. But there were no signs of life inside.
“Well, that pisses me off,” Wally said.
“Closed in the middle of the day,” Jake said. “Good way to go out of business.”
“Unless your business is something else,” said Wally. “Let’s check out back.”
They stepped over the low chain running across the entrance to the small, empty parking lot beside the smoke shop. When Panama had been running the place, most of the real business had been run out of the back entrance, which bordered on St. Nicholas Avenue and the park beyond. They walked to that entrance, not surprised to find it locked with a strong dead bolt.
“Do you have something?” Jake asked Wally, and she fished around her messenger bag, coming up with a Leatherman multi-
tool. She handed it to him, and he used a combination of the main blade and his plastic ID to work on the dead bolt while Wally and Ella stood watch.
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Ella asked, sounding practical, not scared. “Even if they did sell the phones, they do everything in cash. I don’t see them keeping a list of their customers.”
“Yeah,” Wally agreed, “but we came all the way up here, right? Unless Paige can dig out more for us to work with, tracing the sale is all we have.”
They heard a loud thunk! as the dead bolt turned over. Jake turned the doorknob and, just like that, the three of them were inside, closing the door behind them.
A few dirty skylights in the ceiling of the large, crowded storeroom cast a dim yellow glow through the space—enough for the three of them to make their way without turning on the lights. As their eyes adjusted, they discovered that the large room was filled with a massive stash of electronics and home appliances—flat-screen TVs, laptops, music players, Bluetooth headsets, and microwave ovens—hundreds of boxes of contraband stacked all the way to the ceiling with only narrow aisles in between.
“Holy shit,” whispered Jake. “I could shop here.”
They made their way to the center of the room, where a partially open space had been left to make room for a long folding table. Several crates of brand-new iPads and iPhones were on the table, still in their original boxes with the Apple insignia on the outside. Wally noticed that the crates were only halfway unloaded, as if the work had been interrupted.
“I guess that’s why they aren’t bothering with the storefront anymore,” Wally said. “Here’s where all the magic happens. Do you guys see any crates for burner phones?”
“Over here,” Ella said. She pointed to a wall of boxes labeled with every cell phone brand name, plus several with labels in mostly Asian characters. “They’re definitely in the burner business.”
“Weird, though,” Jake said. “It’s hard to imagine the Get Money Boys in here, running inventory.”
“They’d have someone else working this side of the operation,” Wally said. The moment the words were out of her mouth, sounds of movement came from the deep, dark aisles on the other side of the storeroom.
Wally heard the distinctive click! of a bullet being chambered in an automatic handgun.
Shit.
The Get Money Bitches—girl associates of the Get Money Boys—came rushing out of the far, dark aisles of the storeroom. They were a quick, overwhelming force of nine or ten fearsome-looking young women with half a dozen drawn guns between them. They were various builds, most of them black, and ranging in age from fourteen to their early twenties. Some had shaved heads and baggy gangsta clothes that almost made them look like men, while others wore elaborate makeup and had their hair done in feminine weaves and rows. All moved quickly and looked angry.
Wally, Jake, and Ella instinctively turned to run, but they only made it a few steps before the girls were on them, attacking furiously. Wally felt hands grabbing her by the shoulders in an attempt to drag her down to the floor, but she spun around and landed a series of high kicks—driving back one girl and knocking a 9mm Beretta from the hand of another. But when she looked back around for her friends she couldn’t see them anymore. . . . Had they split in another direction? She could hear the sounds of fighting somewhere nearby—Jake was grunting and growling as he struggled with the GMBs.
“Jake!” she called out, feeling a blast of rage at the possibility of her friends being hurt.
“You’re done, girl!” one of the GMBs said.
There was only one direction for Wally to go—up!—and she started climbing the wall of crates on either side of her, jamming her hands and feet into the narrow spaces between the cardboard boxes. She made it six or seven feet up the wall when several strong hands grabbed her ankles and calves, tugging her down. Wally managed to kick their hands away a few times and held strong for three or four seconds, but soon her muscles were burning from the effort and her strength gave way.
The hands pulled her down and dragged her by the feet back to the space in the center of the storeroom. Jake and Ella had already been corralled, lying faceup on the floor, with the GMBs standing around them in a circle. Wally counted seven drawn guns, now pointed at the three of them.
“Wait—” Wally was silenced by a hard kick to her ribs.
Facing Wally, Jake, and Ella from above—her Glock handgun drawn and chambered—was a young black woman over six feet tall. Her hair was cropped short and she wore a tight white wifebeater, her powerful arms covered with tattoo sleeves, inked and scarred. She wore loose black jeans cinched at the waist with a black leather belt.
“You crazy?!” the woman yelled at them. “You know where you are?! You came to rip off the GMBs?!”
Wally realized that she knew the woman standing above them—knew of her anyway. Her name was Afrika Neems, and her boyfriend was the alpha male of the Get Money Boys. . . . Wally couldn’t remember his name. Plenty of the city’s gangs had female associates, but the Get Money Bitches were considered to be almost as powerful within the GMB pecking order as the men.
“We didn’t—” Wally began, only to be subjected to another hard kick.
Jake tried to get up to defend her, but as soon as he moved he took five or six brutal kicks that knocked him back down.
Tiger Page 13
