“I got some people in town,” I tell her.
“From where?” she asks.
“Atlanta,” I say. “I went to school there.”
“Oh,” she replies, interested in nothing beyond the five boroughs. Twenty-three years old and she suffers from the worst ailment of them all, Hoodvision, that inability to see past the blocks where she was born.
Behind the front seats are two different shopping bags, each topped off with a folded knit sweater. Beneath one is her current man’s stash of product, the other, his take for the week, to be dropped off at an undisclosed location at the end of the day. Heroin has been in short supply since the DEA raid on Jefferson a few days ago. Her boy was suspiciously the only one to make it out before the siege.
It’s not that I don’t know his name. I just choose not to use it. He’s an X-factor in the day’s proceedings, perhaps a catalyst, perhaps a not-so-innocent bystander. We’ll know soon enough.
“How come you never try and talk to me?” she asks, offering a sexy smile, her slight overbite gleaming in the sunrays from above.
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says.
“What about your man?” I ask.
“His days are numbered,” she says.
“What’s he doing in the laundromat anyway?”
“Droppin’ off his clothes. We gotta come back and pick’em up at 5.”
I glance at the bags in the rear again and know that Miel is carrying. There’s no other way this guy would leave her alone in the ride for this long. I see him starting out of the building and know it’s my cue.
“Well, lemme get this food, home girl. I’ll see you around.” I start away, knowing she’ll do anything to have the last word.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says, just as her boy hits the sidewalk.”
“I know,” I yell back, picking up the pace. It’s almost 3:00. I have to move quickly.
The Le Starving Artist Café has barely been built, but there are already rats living in the basement. Not the disease-carrying rodents that infest the city, but four motherfuckers who I have a score to settle with. They are two sets of brothers, Trevor and Neville of Gates Avenue by way of St. Kitts, and Steve and Stacy of Harlem by way of grandparents that moved there from the Carolinas in the 1940s.
Weeks ago they took a stab at looting my crib while I was away at a speaking gig. They jimmied the front doors and came right up the stairs to the cheap wood my landlord assumed would keep out thieves. He was wrong. They made off with some DVDs and my 100-disc changer, ignoring the original Basquiat and twin lamps from Tiffany’s.
Tesa Forsythe saw them from across the street and told me about it. Now the time has come to make things right.
They live in the basement beneath this café. Blankets and space heaters have kept them alive since the autumn chill began. Various hustles keep them fed and functioning. But what’s money worth when there’s no product close by? And the prices in Crown Heights are already through the roof.
“Good lookin’ out,” Stacy yells, draped in the same Pittsburgh jersey he’s been wearing since Monday. They’re all short on costumes since most of the dough vanishes into the good veins they have left.
Food won’t make their jonesing any easier. But it’ll give them more energy, which they’ll be needing shortly. They immediately tear into what I’ve offered.
“Anything I can do for my peoples,” I say. The “peoples” part is not fully untrue since we all used to play ball together in the summer, before they started sniffing and shooting, before the Internet crash that killed their entrepreneurial dreams. But that’s another story. Seems like everybody in The Stuy has a story.
“Besides, I know y’all sufferin’ right now.”
“What you talkin’ about!” Trevor demands, pulling a sleeve down over the arm he punctures most often.
“It ain’t like he don’t know,” Neville argues between mouthfuls of shrimp fried rice. “The man looks like he got somethin’ to say.”
“Only if you want to hear me,” I reply, watching them tear into the food.
“We want to hear you,” Steve assures me as he slurps his soup. The warm liquid returns the yellow to his fair skin.
“You need powder and I need money,” I say. “Somebody’s got both less than a block from here.”
“Who?” Trevor demands.
“I can’t say. But I can say what he drives. ’03 Escalade. Twenty-two-inch rims. Two shopping bags in the backseat. He’s picking up his laundry at 5. Just him and his girl.”
“How do you know?” Neville asks.
“I know the girl,” I say. “And she says this dude’s days are numbered, if you know what I mean.”
They all look at each other, some trembling with the shakes, others shivering from the chills. Like most addicts, they don’t think things through. They just react, moths drawn to the proverbial flame.
“But we ain’t got no heat,” Stacy laments. “I mean, we can’t just run up on the car with nothin’. You know he’s gonna be strapped.”
“Yeah, and ain’t no way to get four gats in a hour and a half.”
I clear my throat. “I might be able to help you there.”
It is a quarter to 5 when I get the urge for something to drink. It happens every once in a while during Texas Justice and today is no different. But for some reason I’m also in the mood for yoga. So I grab the carrying case for my mat on the way out the door, but forget the mat itself.
Both sides of Nostrand are packed with beings headed in every rush-houred direction. From their trains to their homes, from those homes to stores for the ingredients to make meals in time for the best that TV has to offer. Kids of all ages journey from one block to the next to bond with friends and more-than-friends alike.
I see patrolman Nabors enter the Golden Krust carry-out at the corner. I see Miel Rodriguez and her man pull up to the laundromat between Halsey and Macon. I see a gypsy cab slow to a halt in front of Reuben Goren’s precious storefront. Then it all unfolds.
Brownie emerges from the cab’s rear with a half-liter nitro glycerin charge. He kicks a hole in one of the storefront windows and tosses it in. The boom all but deafens everyone in a four-block radius and coats the entire street in shattered glass. The blast knocks Brownie to the ground, but he gets up quick-ly and begins to run down Fulton Street and into patrolman Nabors’s field of vision, knocking over a grandma and a pack of teenage moms with an endless supply of strollered kids.
Officer Nabors IDs the perpetrator and calls for backup, dropping his large container of curry chicken to the ground as he begins to chase the man on foot. Fulton Street, or at least the people on it who are not still climbing up from the explosion, cheer both men on as the chase moves westward.
I then turn around to see four armed men surrounding the Escalade that’s just pulled up in front of the laundromat, their .45 pistols trained on the driver and passenger. Moments later they are chased off by the loaded weapons of those inside of the vehicle.
The thieves are shocked to find that the pistols they’d gotten on loan from a man called Sam were without firing pins. They should’ve known better though, especially since the quartet stiffed the very same man for a pair of Glocks the previous summer, having sprayed him with mace before making a run for it with the merchandise. Addicts don’t think. They just react.
Backup units arrive to aid Nabors, and some splinter off to chase the armed men fleeing from the laundromat. But none of the blue boys notice that the driver’s-side window on Nabors’s squad car is down. Nor do they see the young writer reach through the opening to commandeer the Mossberg shotgun in the holster next to the shifter. The writer slides the weapon into a nylon sleeve normally used for his yoga mat and slings it over his shoulder before disappearing into the local Bravo supermarket for a bottle of Snapple Peach Iced Tea. People see him, but they are not the kind to snitch to the authorities.
Brownie is
tackled, clubbed, stomped, kicked, and then arrested by several white officers who don’t have the brains to make it in any other profession. Trevor and Steve take one for the team as they too are apprehended by officers with few other career options.
Twenty minutes later the fire department is taming the blaze. Three men are on their way to Brooklyn central booking and the young writer is on his way back down Nostrand to his residence, having never earned as much as a glance from the authorities during the entire mêlée.
Sam has his Mossberg by 5:35 p.m. Shango has my money fifteen minutes later. Reuben Goren has a concussion and a cake of shit in his pants. And by five to the hour, Winston will be handing me my tickets.
I am smiling on the inside as I turn onto Madison, anticipating the surprise I’ll find on Jenna’s dark and lovely face. It’s the last house on the left at the end of the block. She lives with a thirty-eight-year-old man who still rents. Tsk tsk.
But then I notice the taxicab in front of the rented residence they share, the place she moved into to remind me of my past transgressions. Perhaps he’s heading into the city to buy some testicles, or maybe a rug for that hairline that keeps going back. Then I see that he’s carrying bags. And she’s right behind him, holding what appears to be a pair of plane tickets.
That’s when I know that the trip to Brazil begins today. The whole “next month” thing was a screen of smoke to throw me off. She knows me so well. She still knows how to make me suffer.
Another rock rolled up that long steep hill, another show of cunning and strength, before I stumble and fall, bouncing all the way back to the beginning. Jenna and I are the only loop I can’t escape, the only checkmate that always evades me. She is like the sound Coltrane chased in his dreams, never to be had, never to be held, never to be won, in a season of games that lasts forever.
ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD
BY ROBERT KNIGHTLY
Greenpoint
Officer David Lodge stumbles when he attempts to enter the blue and white patrol car triple-parked in front of the 94th Precinct, dropping first to one knee, then to the seat of his pants. His nightstick, which he forgot to remove from the ring attached to his belt, is the most immediate cause of his fall. When it jammed between the door and the frame, Lodge had one leg in the vehicle with the other just coming up. From that point, there was nowhere to go but down.
Lodge ignores the guffaws of his colleagues, the eleven other cops of the midnight-to-eight tour, the adrenalin pumping as they mount up to ride out to patrol their assigned sectors. For a moment, as he struggles to gather himself, he stares at a full moon hanging over Meserole Avenue. He wonders if the moon’s bloated appearance is due to the brown haze and drenching humidity trapped in the atmosphere. Or if it’s just that his eyes won’t focus because he passed the hours prior to his tour at the local cop bar, the B & G, just a few doors down from the precinct. Lodge has reached that stage of inebriation characterized by powerful emotions and he stares at the moon as if prepared to cradle it in his arms, to embrace a truth he is certain it embodies.
“Yo, spaceman, you comin’ or what?”
The voice belongs to Lodge’s partner, Dante Russo. Lodge works his way to his feet, then yanks his nightstick free before getting into the car. He is about to address his partner, to offer a halfhearted apology, when the radio crackles to life.
“Nine-four George, K?”
Russo fires up the engine, shifts into gear, and pulls away. “That’s us, Dave,” he reminds his partner.
Lodge brings the microphone to his mouth. “Nine-four George, Central.”
“George, we have a 10–54 sick at one-three-seven South 4th Street. See the man. A woman unconscious in the hallway.”
“That’s in Boy’s sector, Central.”
“Nine-four Boy is on another job, K.”
“Ten-four, Central.”
Russo proceeds down Metropolitan Avenue at trolling speed, passing beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, before turning onto Morgan Avenue. The job on South 4th Street is now far behind them.
“Where we goin’, Dante?” Lodge adjusts the louvers on the air-conditioning vents, directing the flow to his crotch. “The job’s in the other direction.”
“We’re goin’ where we always go.”
“Acme Cake? You serious?”
Lodge steals a glance at his partner when his questions go unanswered. Dante’s thin nose is in the air, his jaw thrust forward, his lips pinched into a thin, disapproving line.
Not for the first time, Lodge feels an urge to drive his fist into that chin, to flatten that nose, to bloody that mouth. Instead, he settles his weight against the backrest and faces the truth. Without Dante Russo, David Lodge wouldn’t make it through his tours, not since he started having black-outs. Nobody else will work with him, he knows. Shitkicker is what they call him. As in, You hear what the shitkicker did last night?
“What about the job?” he finally says. “What do I tell Central if they wanna know where we are?”
Russo sighs, another irritating habit. “C’mon, Dave, wise up. We both know it’s gonna be some junkie so overdosed her buddies dumped her in the lobby like yesterday’s garbage. Now maybe you wanna go mouth-to-mouth, suck up that good HIV spit, but me, I’m gonna let the paramedics worry about catchin’ a dreaded disease. They got a better health plan.”
When Lodge and Russo finally roll up on the scene twenty minutes later, two Fire Department paramedics are loading a gurney into an ambulance. A woman strapped to the gurney attempts to sit up, despite the restraints.
“You see what I’m sayin’?” Dante Russo washes down the last of his frosted donut with the last of his coffee. “Things worked out all right. No harm, no foul.”
Three hours later, Russo breaks a long silence with an appreciative whistle. “Well, lookee here, just the man I want to see.”
Lodge brings a soda bottle to his mouth and takes a quick sip. The one-to-one mix of 7-UP and vodka lifts his spirits. He is on the verge of a blackout now, and predictably reckless.
“What’s up?”
“The Beemer.” Russo jerks his chin at a white BMW trimmed with gold chrome, stopped for the light at the intersection of Metropolitan and Kingsland Avenues.
“What about it?”
“That’s our boy.”
“What boy?”
Russo pauses long enough to make his annoyance clear. “That there car belongs to Mr. Clarence Spott.”
“Who?”
“Spott’s picture is hangin’ in the muster room. He’s one of the bad guys.” Dante’s mouth expands into a humorless smile. “Whatta ya say we bust his balls a little?”
“Fine by me.”
When Russo momentarily lights up the roof rack and the BMW pulls to the curb, both cops immediately leave their car. They are on Metropolitan Avenue, a main commercial street in the northside section of Greenpoint. The small retail stores lining both sides of the avenue are long closed, their gates down and padlocked, but several men stand in front of an after-hours club across the street. David Lodge stares at the men till they turn away, then he joins Russo who stands a few feet from the BMW’s open window. Lodge knows he should approach the vehicle from the passenger side, that his job here is to cover his partner on the driver’s side. But David Lodge has never been a by-the-book officer, far from it, and knowing his partner won’t object, he settles down to enjoy the show.
“Why you stoppin’ me, man?” Clarence Spott’s full mouth is twisted into a pained grimace. “I ain’t done nothin’.”
“Step outa the car,” Russo orders. “And that’s officer, not man.”
“I ain’t goin’ no place till I find out why you stopped me. This here is racial profilin’. It’s unconstitutional.”
Russo slaps his nightstick against the palm of his hand. “Clarence, you don’t come out, and I mean right this fuckin’ minute, I’m gonna crack your windshield.”
The door opens and Spott emerges. A short, heavily muscled black man, hi
s expression—eyes wide, brows raised, big mouth already moving—reeks of outrage. Lodge can smell the stink from where he stands. And it’s not as if Spott, who keeps his hands in view at all times, isn’t familiar with the rules of the game. There’s just something in him that doesn’t know when to shut up.
“Ah’m still axin’ the same question. Why you pull me over when I’m drivin’ down a public street, mindin’ my own damn business?”
Russo ignores the inquiry. “I want you to put your hands on top of the vehicle and spread your legs. I want you to do it right now.”
Spott finally crosses the line, as Lodge knew he would, by adding the word pig to his next sentence. Lodge slaps him in the face, a mild reprimand from Lodge’s point of view, but Spott sees it differently. His eyes close for a moment as he draws a long breath through his nose. Then he uncoils, quick as a snake, and drives his fist into the left side of David Lodge’s face.
Taken by surprise, Lodge staggers backward, leaving Spott to Dante Russo, who assumes a two-handed grip on his nightstick before cracking it into Spott’s unprotected shins. When Spott drops to his knees on the pavement, Russo slides the nightstick beneath his throat and pulls back, choking off a howl of pain.
“How you wanna do this, Clarence? Easy or hard?”
As Spott cannot speak, he indicates compliance by going limp and crossing his hands behind his back.
Russo eases up slightly, then pushes Spott forward onto his chest. “You all right?” he asks his partner.
“Never better.”
David Lodge brings his hand to the blood running from a deep cut along his cheekbone. Suddenly, he feels sharp, even purposeful. As he watches his partner cuff and search the prisoner before loading him into the backseat, he thinks, Okay, this is where it gets good. His hand goes almost of itself to the soda bottle stuffed beneath the seat when he enters the vehicle. He barely tastes the vodka as it slides down his throat.
“You got any particular place in mind?” his partner asks as he shifts the patrol car into gear.
“Not as long as it’s private. One thing I hate, it’s bein’ interrupted when I’m on a roll.”
Brooklyn Noir Page 23
