[Sign Behind the Crime 02.0] Aries

by Ronnie Allen

  The rain hit just as she reached a half mile. Just a drizzle, not nearly enough to stop her. She made another half mile with her heartbeat not even reaching her optimum. One thing that served her well in the academy was her strong physicality.

  Then the thunder boomed and jolted her but, with no lightning, she continued. Rain poured without warning a moment later. Okay, there were warnings. She chose not to heed them. She found herself splashing in the puddles on the track. This wasn’t one of her smartest moves, but she needed to release the tension from this morning. Her light gray sweats were drenched and stuck to her. Her T-shirt clung to her breasts. Oh God, she’d have to sneak into the back entrance of the precinct looking like this.

  And I wanted to be taken seriously?

  With her jogging attire adhering to her body like saran wrap, she felt she looked like a pin up in a porn magazine. She could have been one, too. Hadn’t she refused a couple of years ago, less than politely? She wrung out her ponytail while she stopped under a tree for shelter. Her white sneakers, saturated with rainwater, had turned red. Red? She looked at her legs and red water splattered up both, to her crotch. This wasn’t red water.

  This was blood.

  She ventured into the dense foliage, following the flow of the darkest red. She spread her feet to walk beyond the outline of the stream, pushing aside dangling branches with her forearms, careful not to touch the branches with her hands.

  She stumbled upon the dead man.

  Literally.

  She twisted her body like a contortionist, so she’d land on her butt, not flat on her face when she fell over his blackened toes. Sitting up with her hands in the air palms facing out she stared at the mutilated dead man fed upon by vultures. Damn it!

  She recognized him.

  CHAPTER 3

  With headphones on, bobbing his head to the beat of the rap on the YouTube video, Frank Khaos sat pensively at his desk in the back office of his gym, tapping a pencil on a folder while analyzing the thought processes of his new charge. The beat was typical to a 2K14 rap, steady rhyme scheme--fourteen syllables a line, sixteen bars long, fast tempo.

  Frank sighed. Okay, the kid could follow a pattern. Good. Could pay attention. Think logically? Maybe. Depressed. Telling the story of his life. The story of his gangbanging life. The story of his years upstate in a New York prison.

  The kid had posted this--Frank checked the date of the YouTube video--last week when he got out. What wasn’t included, which didn’t surprise him, were any aspirations for the future. Nothing to say what excited him. Without a passion, he knew this kid, this gang fringe member, would be heading right back to the Harlem gang that initiated his incarceration.

  Okay, first job. Find out what gets this kid up in the morning.

  Opening the kid’s jacket, he peered into the cold, heartless eyes of a nineteen-year-old’s mug shot. His face was expressionless. His Afro looked filthy with specks of cotton, most likely from his sweatshirt. Acne raged on his forehead and chin. His oval shaped face was clean-shaven. Both parents were African American from his facial features.

  Frank knew those eyes wouldn’t have changed, even though the kid was now twenty-four. The kid had gotten five years for possession of one firearm and three glassines of heroin. Guess he didn’t hit the square. Yeah. Definitely. A gang initiation gone bad.

  He was supposed to sell the glassines to a customer who turned out to be an undercover DEA agent. The gang denied knowing him. No one came forth to say that he could have been set up. Frank shook his head. That’s the way it is in gang related cases. No one to talk to. No one gave a damn. Witnesses disappear. The notes in the file indicated that he wouldn’t rat. Good thing. He’d be dead by now if he had.

  A knock at the door brought Frank back to the present. He closed the folder, slipped it into his middle desk drawer with his headphones. He turned in his swivel chair to face the door. “Come in.”

  The door opened. “Doc, Jarvis McKinley is here.”

  “Thanks, Dale. Come on in, Jarvis.” He looked up into the cold dark eyes he expected. The teenage acne was gone. “Have a seat.” He pointed to a club chair opposite his desk.

  Jarvis came into the office, looked around at the furnishings, his eyes smug, and his lips pursed together.

  Frank had made it a point to decorate in plain woods in his desk and wall cabinets that hugged muted beige walls. The carpeting was a brown tweed that pulled together the light brown tones in the upholstery in the couch and club chairs. It was nothing to intimidate or tempt for burglary or vandalism.

  Jarvis sneered and sucked his teeth at Doc as he sat down in the chair. As he leaned back with resentment on his face, he rubbed his hands over the scotch guarded fabric armrests. “My name is Pitbull. Don’t fly by Jarvis.”

  Frank smiled, knowing he’d knock that smug look off his face. In time. “In here, you do. How did Pitbull come about?”

  “My mama named me that when I was a kid. Said I’d attack like a pit with no reason. Sorta stuck. An’ I do.” He leaned forward and stared straight into Doc’s eyes.

  Frank assumed Jarvis didn’t see anything through that stare. “Why are you here, Jarvis?” He relaxed, leaned back in his chair, his arms on the armrests, open and ready to handle the anger that he had trained himself to repel and make slide off him like warm butter.

  “Don’t you know? You get all my homies in here.”

  “I want to hear it from you. What do you want to gain from being here?”

  Jarvis emitted a sadistic laugh, shaking his head. “I’ve been warned about you. You like to get inside everybody’s head. Well, White Boy, you ain’t gettin’ inside of mine.”

  Frank didn’t flinch a muscle. He’d never back a kid into a corner, not unless he wanted to be bit by a venomous snake. “White Boy, huh? How’d that work on the inside if you called someone that?”

  “I had my share of bein’ in the box, not for long, or maybe longer. Don’t remember.” He shrugged. “Those correction officers, they messed with any of us from the hood they could get their hands on. But I don’t care, I’m good at fightin’.”

  “Tell me, how many times were you put into solitary?”

  “A couple months at a time. Maybe three, no, four.”

  “That probably delayed your release. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah. I had no place to go, anyways. An’ fightin’ is the only thing I’m good at.” The smug expression hadn’t left his face. The expression deepened. Pride.

  “Well, in case you haven’t thought about it, so am I, Jarvis.”

  “Oh yeah? Let’s go, anytime, anywhere.” He perked up ready to strike.

  Here comes the venomous snake.

  Frank had gotten the response he wanted. He was little unorthodox in his methods, but they worked. He didn’t crack a smile, knowing it was a sure sign of disrespect to laugh at the comment. “Not so fast, Jarvis. We will.” He settled on a deliberate pause. “In the cage, when you’re ready.”

  Jarvis’ eyes lit up for the first time. “You’re shitten me.”

  Yeah, Frank got the response he wanted, again. Jarvis became interested and engaged. “Nope. But first, see the rules up on the chart on the wall?” Doc pointed and Jarvis nodded. “What’s the first one?”

  “Khaos Rules.” Jarvis read it but squinted as if confused.

  “That’s the name of the gym. Look at the twenty items below that.”

  “Check your ego and your bad day at the door.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t know what ego is.” Jarvis glanced away.

  Okay. He’s embarrassed. Let it go. “Attitude, thinking you can take on anyone,” Frank responded casually. “If you’re pissed at someone from something that happened earlier in the day, you don’t bring it in here.”

  “Uh, that’s gonna be a problem. The COs upstate told me all the time that I got that problem. I don’t forget. In lockup, you couldn’t forget. Had to watch yo back all the time.”

&
nbsp; “Well, here you’ll learn how. Before you leave here today, you’ll read the other nineteen and remember them.”

  “Yeah sure,” Jarvis said.

  Frank shot him a glare.

  “I meant, the first rule will be hard for me, an’ I’ll read the rest of ’em. But I gotta tell ya, I’m not good at followin’ rules.”

  “Think that’s why you’ve gotten into so much trouble?”

  “Probably.”

  “Even your gang has rules. Follow them?”

  “Yeah, too good.”

  Frank nodded. The kid’s getting it. Hopefully, the five years did him some good.

  “Hey, what do I call you, anyways?”

  “Definitely not White Boy. Khaos, Doc, Frank. Sometimes, I even get called Dad. Whatever comes out of your mouth that’s appropriate.” He gave it a moment to sink in. “Got your med clearance?”

  “Yeah.” Jarvis tugged it out of his baggy jeans pocket. He handed Frank a crumpled piece of paper.

  Frank handed it back. “Un-crumple it. That’s an official document.”

  Jarvis tried to smooth out the wrinkled paper, rubbing his hand over it, on his knee. He handed it back.

  Frank nodded, his lips curling up in approval. “You’re five ten, one sixty, you look like you’re in shape. Work out in the gym much?”

  “Every day, upstate. Pretty big gym, too.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Weights when we were cleared for it, cardio, they had us run track. It was way better than working out in a homie’s basement. We couldn’t afford to go to a real gym.”

  “Very good. In here, you’re in welterweight. You’ll learn the weight classes for matches. Just to give you a comparison, I’m six four, two seventy, which puts me in super heavyweight. If you were participating in a United Fighting Championship regulated match, we call it UFC, you’d have to fight someone exactly your weight, but here, in training, we mix it up. Okay, right now you’re clean. Plan to stay that way?”

  “Yeah. I do. The junk they caught me with wasn’t mine. It was for a sale. I don’t shoot.”

  Frank looked at him long and hard. “What did you do?”

  “Barbs. They detoxed me at Rikers. Been clean five years. I could have gotten shit any time, but us with drug offenses, they searched our cells and lockers at random, strip-searched too, and they didn’t hesitate to go in. You’re gonna read it anyway in my file. The first time a CO did that to me, he went in deep. He pulled an’ it hurt, man. I had nothin’, no drugs inside of me, but I shitted on his fingers on purpose. The food was givin’ me cramps an’ I let it all out. Man, they were pissed. That earned me a beat down by three COs an’ four months in the box. Couldn’t help it. I had to let them know they were hurting me. But I’m not usin’ now.”

  “Okay. Good. Just so you know, as a condition of your probation, you’ll have mandatory drug testing.”

  “Yeah. I know. My probation officer told me.”

  “Good. He’ll call me if anything comes up, even performance enhancing stuff from a health food store. You do not want that. Not only will you be bounced from here, you’ll go back upstate. That wasn’t your first arrest. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I have to let you know what we talk about in here, stays in here. Nothing’s recorded.”

  “You expect me to buy that?”

  “Yes. You have doctor-patient privilege.”

  “I know you’re a shrink, but that even goes in a gym?”

  “Yes, I hate that term, though. I’d hate to think I shrank anyone. But yes, I’m a psychiatrist. The only time I have to report something to the police, immediately, is if you tell me a crime is about to go down. No matter how small, no matter to whom. Understand that?”

  “Yeah, that outreach lady who comes to speak with my mama told me the same thing.”

  “You mentioned your mom twice, so are you close with her?”

  “Yeah. Very. When I went away the first time I was sixteen and only for ten months. That almost killed her. An’ this time, I was sure it would put her into her grave. I can’t hurt her no more. I gotta stay clean an’ get my act together.”

  Frank was getting closer to finding out what he needed to know. His starting point. “What have you thought about doing to make that happen?”

  “Don’t know yet. Upstate I got my GED an’ I got trained for electrician. Got a certificate. But I was talking to my PO. I still got a lot of ‘anger issues,’ he called it. Thought comin’ here would help me deal with it, an’ I like fightin’. I busted up some gangbangers real good.”

  “Okay. Come on, I’ll show you around.” Frank got up, flexing his muscles, stretching every part of his torso. His T-shirt clung to his defined mass.

  Jarvis got up and stared at him with his gaze following the outlines of Frank’s chest and settling on the tats that covered his arms. He backed away a bit, licked his lips, and swallowed.

  Good, got the intimidation across.

  Intimidation was big in gangs. Physicality ruled. The bigger, the better, equaled more respect. So did weapons. The bigger the better. Frank felt his Glock 19, NYPD issue, in his ankle holster rub his leg as he started to walk. It wasn’t the biggest, but one of the few in this building. No need for Jarvis to know about that.

  “You wear the name of the gym on your T-shirt?” Jarvis asked.

  “Yeah. Good advertising. Everyone in here wears it. Everyone--cleaning people, trainers, and all the guys who work out here. In this gym we’re all equals. Uh, except for me. My word is final.”

  “Uh?”

  “Know the difference between a noun and a verb?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “A noun is a thing, a verb, action. It’s both with me. My rules, the noun, and I rule, the verb. What I say goes in here. Got it?”

  “Yeah, but I gotta say, Doc, that maybe you should look at the first rule.”

  All right, he could dish it out and take it as well. “Okay, Jarvis, well done. As long as you said that respectfully, I’ll let it slide. Are you ready for a workout?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Let’s get your gear.”

  Frank opened the door to the office and walked with Jarvis down a hallway into the main part of the gym. He stood for a moment for Jarvis to take it in. It was a lot to take in, over seventy-five hundred square feet of the best mixed martial arts equipment as could be found in any upscale MMA Manhattan gym.

  But this one was in Central Harlem, in the poorest area, and it was free.

  “Can anybody come in here?”

  “Only if they’re in a New York City gang. If they’re referred by their probation officer, lockup, outreach, or if I recruit them.”

  Frank counted his blessings every day that he had this gym and was able to give back. He mouthed a big “thank you” to his parents in the sky, who, by adopting him at ten and getting him out of the group home, had prevented him from becoming prey for his neighborhood gang.

  He glanced at Jarvis who probably had a similar childhood to his own.

  Man, could things have turned out differently.

  Dale approached and handed Jarvis his workout gear. A black Khaos Rules T-shirt with the letters in a white Gothic font with a white leaf pattern forming a rectangle border, black cotton pocket-less workout pants, a protective cup, white crew socks, fingerless black leather gloves, and low top, solid white sneakers.

  “Thanks, how did ya know my size?”

  “Everything’s in your file. The locker room is through there. Pick a locker, make sure you remember the four digit code you type in. Put everything in there. Even your phone. No phones in the gym. Don’t want any calls or texts interrupting a workout.” Frank looked at his wrist. “Leave your ID band in there, too. And make sure to wear those gloves at all times in here.”

  “Why the band and gloves? Maybe I’ll meet one of my homies in here that joined when I was away.”

  “Exactly. No flagging. No gang affiliation IDs in here. No one knows wh
o’s in what gang. All equal. Clean slate. Can’t hustle anyone if you don’t know who’s who and you can’t judge them either.”

  “But even in lockup we had our tats showin’ on our hands so people could see our set. So people outta our crew knew better than to mess with us.”

  “Okay. I’ll address that. Been asked before. First, this isn’t prison. This is real life, a real gym. Guys in here want to leave the gangbanger lifestyle. Don’t want temptation. And we want to encourage communication, not keep people away. Even in training, guys won’t want to fight if they think you have a gang to back you up when you go out the front door. Besides, it’s how you make out in the cage that forms who you are, not the gang. Got it?”

  Jarvis nodded. The light bulb went on. “Thanks.” He headed to the locker room.

  Dale stood with his hands on his waist. “Okay, Frank, how did it go?”

  Frank smiled at his best friend. “He’ll be fine. He’s a good kid. I think I can save this one.”

  “Why would I expect you to say anything different, bro? Where do you want to start him, any idea? We have a spot in the beginner wrestling group.”

  “No, no groups yet for this kid. Individual training first. I get the impression he isn’t a team player just yet. Oh, while I’ve got you here.” He pointed to the back end of the space with the mirrored wall. “I noticed some of the vinyl tiling around the treadmills and step machines aren’t lying flat. Get some of the kids to snap them back into place.”

  “Will do.”

  ***

  As Jarvis looked around in awe at the massive area, Frank saw him relaxing. The kid looked limber, eyes less rigid, facial muscles less taut. He relaxed in the gym, too. It was his protective environment. Jarvis nearly tripped over his own feet, as his attention was glued to the cage, when they walked past.