63
“SOMETIME SHE JUST SLEEP for hour and hours,” Alisha Watkins said, looking down at her two-month-old baby. “I think she never wake up. But then like other time … she just cry and cry, like she crazy or something …”
“Maybe she’s sick,” Darryl King’s mother said indifferently.
They were standing by the kitchen sink, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee cups full of Bacardi. It was just after eleven at the Charles J. Stone Houses. Darryl, Aaron, and Bobby were sitting at the dining room table, passing around a 9 mm and a Glock machine pistol. The two women were watching them carefully through the window-sized opening in the wall.
“Nobody else shoots Mr. Bomb,” Darryl was saying once more. “That’s my job.”
Darryl’s mother looked out at him and shook her head. “That’s all he talk about now,” she told Alisha in a hushed voice. “‘When are we gonna shoot ’im? How we gonna shoot ’im?’”
“He just concerned, that’s all,” said Alisha, who had her hair cut in a bowl shape and wore long eyelashes. “He just gotta lot of concern on his mind.”
In the other room, Bobby pulled the cartridge out of the Glock and dropped it on the table.
“Don’t you scratch that table, Bobby,” Darryl’s mother shouted from the kitchen. “You don’t live here.”
She took another sip of Bacardi and turned back to her son’s girlfriend and the baby. “I just want for him to be happy, you know what I’m saying?” she told Alisha. “But sometime, I think he get so concerned he gonna go and shoot me.”
“Darryl wouldn’t do that,” Alisha said, rocking the baby in her arms. “He got a good heart.”
“Well, I know that,” his mother said a little resentfully. “I just worry sometimes.”
The air was getting dense and humid now, like a thunderstorm was about to break out. In the other room, Darryl was still talking to the others like he expected the probation officer just to show up on his doorstep. Bobby and Aaron were playing along with him so he wouldn’t get mad again.
Two flies chased each other around a light fixture and the television showed people throwing a parade for a famous mobster who’d just been acquitted of trying to have a man killed. There were fireworks and champagne everywhere.
“Living large,” said Bobby.
In the kitchen, Alisha was gently wiping the baby’s head with a damp cloth. The child was still sleeping, but both her tiny fists were balled up like she was in a rage. “You think she look like Darryl?” Alisha asked.
Darryl’s mother pursed her lips and looked down at her granddaughter. “She have his mouth,” she said.
“Well, I hope she don’t have his temper.”
“That’s for sure,” Darryl’s mother told her.
Alisha put the baby down on the table and saw it was time to change the diaper again. “I wanna raise my baby to be more like calm,” she said, reaching for a tissue.
“Yeah, I wished I’d have done that too,” Darryl’s mother said, like it was something she’d just thought of. She drank the rest of her Bacardi and poured herself another one.
In the other room, they were almost finished loading the weapons and Darryl was saying that everyone in the organization should show up at the apartment tomorrow morning for a business meeting and strategy session.
“Nine-thirty,” Darryl said.
“Why you put it so early?” Bobby complained. “I wanna sleep.”
“So go to sleep early tonight,” Darryl said. “You got a job now.”
In the kitchen, Darryl’s mother rolled up the sleeves of her yellow blouse she’d taken from the previous tenants’ closet and looked over at her son’s girlfriend.
“Well, I ain’t gonna be around tomorrow,” said Alisha Watkins as she got through putting on the new diaper and throwing away the old one. “I gotta take the baby to the hospital. The doctor say maybe she sick because I smoked crack when I was pregnant.”
“So she’s addicted?” Darryl’s mother asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Alisha said. “I just hope my social worker don’t find out. Then I will never hear the end of it.”
64
FOR MOST OF THE night, I sit up in bed, studying Andrea’s sleeping profile in the moonlight.
I can scarcely believe the symmetry of her features or the softness of her skin as she lies there next to me. I can feel the warmth from her body even when she’s a few inches away. She tucks an arm under my side and rolls toward me with a slumbering sigh. Her cheek rests on my thigh, and her hair spills out across the bedspread. A garbage truck calls out in the night, but otherwise there’s silence outside.
For a moment, I feel absolutely still inside. I never want to move again. I want to stay here in the sanctuary of this bed forever, feeling safe and protected, with Andrea by my side. Darryl King, Richard Silver, and the rest of the outside world can go to hell.
Andrea moans again and hugs my leg. I touch her face lightly with my fingertips. I still don’t completely understand why she came home with me after the horrible things I said tonight, but somehow she’s forgiven me.
I try thinking about what it would be like to live quietly with her. I imagine a parallel life, a route that I didn’t take. One in which I somehow manage to get into the right school and get a good job. In which I marry Andrea and provide her with a home with a backyard and a car and kayaking vacations and anything else she wants. In which I come home from work before six every night and never lose sleep worrying about anybody else’s problems besides my own or my children’s. A family man.
It’s probably a longer life than the one I’m living now, and certainly a happier one. I wonder if it’s too late to call Richard Silver. What he’s offering me can make all that real. So that I never have to go out and face the Darryl Kings of the world again.
But I don’t reach for the phone, and as the clock near my bed flicks past 3:30 I start to get an uneasy sense of anticipation. Like a boxer the night before a fight or a soldier before a battle. The informant says Darryl’s been talking about his probation officer. Angel says he believes the guy. We’re getting closer to Darryl. I know it. It won’t be long now. I feel like I’m standing on a precipice, looking down.
I start to get scared again and I tell myself it’s not too late to pull back. I can try calling in sick and staying in bed with Andrea all day. We can lie there in the morning sunlight, giggling, making love, and planning a new life together while somebody else goes looking for Darryl King. But the more I think about it, the more impractical the plan seems. Even if I could convince Andrea to stay here, I know I’d feel guilty and ashamed if I didn’t go with Bill and the others to find the informant. I started the Darryl King case and I need to have a part in ending it.
After that, I promise myself, I’ll think about making a new life for Andrea and me. If she’ll have me.
As the sky slowly lightens and birds begin to sing, my decision becomes clear. I have to go. I lean down and kiss Andrea’s lips. Her breath is heavy and sweet and she sleepily puts her arms around me.
“Is it time already?” she murmurs.
65
DARRYL KING WOKE WITH a start and a loud throbbing in his ears.
At first, he thought it was his heart pounding double time from all the crack he’d smoked the night before. Then he realized somebody’s car stereo downstairs had the bass turned all the way up, so it sounded like a giant heartbeat on wheels.
He was pissed about being awake. For a second, he thought about finding his 9 mm and firing a couple of rounds out the window. He’d been having a nice dream.
Now he couldn’t remember what it was.
66
AT TEN O’CLOCK, on a morning when the city seems dipped in bacon grease, I follow Angel, Bill, and four other field service officers into the lobby of Building C of the Charles J. Stone Houses. The Fortress is spray-painted above the entranceway in bold black letters. A forbidding name for another numbingly dull building in a numbingly dull city hous
ing project. Three teenaged boys loiter by the front door, watching us carefully. One of them, a jumpy teenager with a flattop and a harelip, opens his eyes wide and goes dashing for the stairwell door. I think I’ve seen him somewhere before, but I can’t remember when.
It gives me an uneasy feeling. “What do you think that’s all about?” I ask, trying not to sound so hyped-up.
“Ah, he probably thought we’re cops and he’s carrying drugs on him,” Bill Neill grunts. “For crying out loud, don’t make a federal case out of everything.”
I got myself up with three cups of coffee this morning and I’ve been riding on a wave of fear and adrenaline ever since. I almost threw a petty thief down a flight of stairs while we were taking him in a couple of hours ago, and since then everybody keeps telling me, “Cool out, cowboy.” But all I can think about is Darryl and how I can’t wait to get my hands on him. It’s not even rational anymore. He’s just this thing standing in the middle of my life, and I have to get rid of him.
Let’s deal with them on their terms, is the way I’m looking at it now. They slap us in the face, let’s kick them in the nuts. It’s all right with me. I know the old way doesn’t work anymore.
“Where’s our police backup?” I ask.
“Hey, Baum,” Bill says, furrowing his brow, “we’re just talking to a potential informant here. If you’re scared, you can sit in the car outside. It’s probably just gonna be the guy who buried the rest of Shoe Man’s shoes.”
I point out where it says “D.K. All the Way” on the wall by the elevators. “Does that look like nothing?”
“Ah, people write all sorts of shit on the walls,” Bill says. “If you grew up in a project, you’d know that, Baum.”
I don’t like him pulling ethnic rank on me like that. I wonder if this is the start of a subtle rift between us. “I’d still like to know where these cops are.”
We just recently began taking special precautions on these investigative fishing expeditions. After Darryl’s big shoot-out and the incident where the cop shot Jamal Perkins, there was a flurry of interdepartmental memos and a bunch of high-level meetings with the brass and community groups. So the other day, the commissioner declared that we should go out in units of at least four and have at least one senior police officer on hand when we go looking for Darryl. I guess they’re worried that otherwise one of us might shoot another kid or something.
Bill frowns at me and tries to raise the police on his walkie-talkie. For a few seconds, all we hear is a snowstorm of static and then a cop’s voice cuts through. “Where the hell are you guys?” he says. “We’re waiting for you on the twelfth floor.”
Bill clicks the radio off. “Okay, Baum? Good enough? Or do you need somebody to hold your hand?”
“It’s all right, man,” Angel tells me as he swats at a passing fly. “Bill’s just being hump …”
While I cool out a little, Bill asks another officer, who’s holding a walkie-talkie, if there’s any further information about Darryl King.
“That King guy is probably a million miles from here,” Angel says, pushing the “up” button at the bank of elevators. I notice the light doesn’t go on.
“Now that is pure bullshit,” Bill tells Angel as he lifts his injured left leg and hops up and down on his right leg to stay balanced. “That mutt has probably never been more than ten blocks from the house he was born in. Where is he gonna go? Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos? Here is all he knows … You know that, Baum, don’t you?”
“Sure thing, Bill.”
Bill directs me to look out at the courtyard the way a college professor would direct a student’s attention to the blackboard. “Given Darryl King’s life experiences, I say he is still at large in this borough, if not this immediate neighborhood.”
“You sound pretty sure.” Angel hitches up his jeans under his bulletproof vest and Virgin Islands T-shirt. “Especially since they might have caught the guy this morning already …”
There was an unconfirmed radio report earlier this morning that said somebody answering Darryl’s description got picked up in Brooklyn last night.
“Pure bullshit,” Bill insists.
“Okay,” says Angel. “Care to put ten dollars on a bet?”
Bill shakes his hand enthusiastically. “Remember,” Bill says with a grin. “I’m not saying he has to be in this building or anything. Just the general area … like the Eastern seaboard …”
“Heh, heh, heh. You’re fulla crap, Bill.”
I notice one of the elevators seems to be stuck on the sixth floor and the three other elevators are completely out of service. I push the buttons three more times before I give up. “I think we’re gonna have to use the stairs,” I say.
Everyone groans, except for Angel, who grins and slaps his taut, muscular thighs. “I run up and down stairs like these five times a day,” he says, reaching over to pat Bill’s ample stomach. “Unlike certain members of this unit who exercise primarily by opening and closing the icebox …”
The seven of us head for the stairwell. The higher we go, the more evidence we find of insane and dangerous behavior. By the second floor the air is stinking from recently smoked crack and sprayed urine. The graffiti on the walls is unintelligible. Nobody could mistake this for art anymore. It’s just bits and pieces of angry, throttled language. “XMCREW”—“DJC34”— “EHWRT.” Like the artists got too deranged to put their ideas in any kind of order.
What’s really extraordinary, though, is the vomit. It’s caked on the walls, as though somebody threw up on the floor and then picked it up and put it there with his hands.
“How far do we have to go?” Bill asks me on the fourth-floor landing, which is strewn with crack vials.
He grimaces and grips the banister as he lifts his left leg slowly. For a moment, I smile because Bill looks like an overweight ballerina doing a bar exercise. But then I realize how much it must hurt to climb all these stairs with his wounded leg.
“Twelfth floor,” Angel says for the fifth time this morning.
“Why couldn’t he meet us at the bar around the corner from work?” Bill asks.
“I don’t know. I guess he feels safer here,” Angel says, sprinting ahead of the rest of us. The guy’s in incredible shape, even for a former lightweight fighter. He must never drink beer at home or something.
“Well, if he does have anything to tell us,” Bill says, “he won’t be safe for long. Everyone in this building will know we came by to see him.” He steps over a turd and a spent bullet shell on one of the steps. “Fuckin’ animals,” he mumbles.
“It’s our job to keep ’em locked up, Mr. Bill,” Angel says over his shoulder.
“Bullshit,” Bill tells him.
From the floors above us, we can hear the echoes of feet shuffling, doors slamming, and voices squealing. Between the fourth and fifth floors, we pass this strange-looking guy with a tangled beard and squeegee, who’s just standing there, pointing upward, like we need him to tell us where we’re going. Then he looks at us like we owe him a tip or something. Fuck him too. By the seventh floor, the stuffiness is getting to me and I find myself short of breath. Bill uses the break as an opportunity to light another cigar.
I look around at the cracked steps and broken railings. Bill blows out another heavy cloud of cigar smoke and the rest of us begin to choke and cough.
“You guys didn’t smoke, we’d be there by now,” Angel taunts us as he heads up toward the next flight.
“If the people didn’t smoke crack, we wouldn’t have to come at all,” one of the new guys in the unit says. Another of the rookies yodels like a Swiss mountain climber.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Bill says, rubbing his wounded knee. “Look at this, Baum. Angel and me are surrounded by idiots.”
“You know something I just realized, Bill?” I ask. “This is the building Lee Harvey Oswald lived in when he stayed in New York …”
“Really?” Bill asked.
“Oh yeah,” I tell him with
a straight face. “He sang in a doo-wop group called the Red Squares. You knew that, Bill, didn’t you?”
Bill looks at me carefully for a second and then waves his cigar in disgust. “Oh, you’re fulla shit too …”
Everyone else starts laughing and Angel whacks me affectionately on the shoulder. Even Bill smiles.
“Onward and upward, Private Vasquez,” Bill says, trudging up to the next flight.
“Whatever you say, General Custer.” Angel salutes.
A few minutes later, we arrive on the twelfth-floor landing. Bill clasps both hands around the butt of his gun, glances through the porthole, and shoves himself out into the hall. Angel gives me a look like he thinks Bill is being a self-conscious show-off. The rest of us spin out after him, one by one.
67
DARRYL TOLD HIS MOTHER to get his great-grandmother out of the apartment. “Aaron says they’re coming upstairs right now,” he said. “She’s making too much noise.”
Ethel McDaniels, his seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother, was holding on to the frame of the kitchen doorway as Darryl, Bobby, and the dozen other young men handled their guns. The old woman was too scared to stop crying.
“She’ll be all right,” Darryl’s mother said.
“Tell her to shut up or I’ll shoot her.”
Darryl’s mother went over to hold her grandmother’s hand and stroke her trembling gray head. “Don’t mind him, Grandma,” she said. “He’s just feeling hyper.”
“Bobby,” said Darryl. “Go see what’s up.”
Bobby Kirk shoved his .45 and his 9 mm into the tight waistband of his broad jeans. He straightened the thick gold chains around his neck, opened the apartment’s front door, and stepped out into the hall.
68
THE FIRST THING I hear on the twelfth floor is the jangling of necklace chains. The first thing I see is an enormous young guy wearing the chains and a nameplate ring. Two big H’s are carved in the hair on either side of his head.
Slow Motion Riot Page 33
