“I …”
“You have nothing to bargain with, except your blood. If you want to test me, just wait a few more hours. By then, the sun will be up.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” one nurse whispered to another.
Darnetra and Dawn lay on separate tables, connected by a complicated network of tubing, all monitored by vital-signs gauges.
“Why not, girl?” the other nurse said. “These damn interns, they’ve been doing secret plastic surgery down here for years. Making an off-the-books fortune at it, too. What’s wrong with us getting a taste?”
“But look at her. She’s not even … human.”
“Way I heard it, neither was the guy who brought her in here. But he’s paying for the party. I don’t know what he thinks he’s buying for all the money he spent, but he just bought me a new car, honey.”
The overhead lights flickered briefly. The fluids started to move in the tubes.
Invisible in the shadows, the nondescript man waited.
for Champion Joe Lansdale
PIG
Pig was my friend, so I didn’t have any choice. I don’t mean I ran with him, or even that he could claim my crew. But I was in his house a lot, and there’s no keeping something like that a secret around here.
His mother treated me better than I thought mothers ever did. Any mothers. I ate the food she made. Food she cooked, I’m saying. I even slept over more than a few times. Times when I couldn’t stay where I lived.
I don’t know why I’m making this sound better than it was. The truth is, once I got too big for my mother to have around when she brought a man home, that was the end. She said I made them uncomfortable, even though I stayed out of sight and never said a word. The first time one actually got up and left without … Ah, it doesn’t matter. My mother told me how it was going to be from then on out. She made it real clear. In case I was deaf and blind, I guess. Or maybe she just figured me for stupid—she’d said that enough.
But nobody ever called me out of my name behind being seen with Pig. My name, it wasn’t one I put on myself. I don’t know exactly when people started calling me Viper, but it stuck. That’s a joke—if you don’t get it, you live somewhere else.
I earned that name. Move on me, and your next meal was going to be the steel-in-the stomach special.
One more year and they’d stop giving me ninety days in juvie. Or probation and all that counseling crap. I’d be old enough for the state pen. That’s where they all said I was going anyway.
My destiny, like.
I didn’t care about that. But I was glad I was so good with a blade. Plenty of bad guys who made their name behind being shooters didn’t last long behind bars. You don’t get to carry a Tec-9 in there, but you can always get your hands on a spike. Specially if you had a crew waiting on you.
If it wasn’t too bad out, I had plenty of other places to spend the night. Our clubhouse was one. I don’t mean some cute little shack guys built out in the woods, with a “No Girls Allowed” sign. Our clubhouse was a filthy basement … and it stayed filthy. Not because we wanted it that way—although some of the guys probably wouldn’t have cared—but it didn’t have lights or running water, so what could we do?
Girls were definitely allowed. Any girl who came down those steps knew what was waiting on her. And what came after that. It didn’t stop them. Some of them, anyway.
The building was going to get torn down one day. Most of it was already gone. But around here, we didn’t think about things like that.
Tomorrow things.
A number on a building, that might matter if you were looking for some house. But we all knew where we were going, so who gave a rat’s ass?
And once they put a number on your back, everyone would have the same address. In the winter, even trying to sleep under a pile of old rugs, the place was just too … ah, it was impossible. Bone-eating cold and junkies, too. They only came around when it was way below freezing. They weren’t afraid of anything we might do to them; they were past that. What scared them was the thought of anyone grabbing their stuff before they could fire up their pipes. Hardcore crackheads, they’re not scared of nothing. Nothing except losing the rock they just scored.
I could see how Pig got the way he was. If my mother fed me like that, I’d probably weigh three hundred pounds, too.
Pig’s mother, she’d make you eat. No matter how much you chowed down, she’d ask you fifty times if you had enough.
Pig didn’t have a father around. Most of us don’t. Some of us knew a name our mothers told us. Some actually knew a man who they could point to—even had his name on their birth certificate. But nobody had one like on TV. You know, one that lived with them and all.
A father like that, a guy who had a job, took care of his family, that was just crazy. Nobody who had all that would ever stay where we did. Everything was rotting wood and broken concrete. A place where you could have your application in for the projects your whole life, but they’d never call your name.
I don’t know how they’d do that, anyway. Nobody had telephones. Not in their houses, I mean. Everybody had a cell. You didn’t have a cell, how could you do business?
Pig lived on the far edge of our turf, just a couple of blocks away from a real nice neighborhood. One with little houses with lawns and all.
All those houses had burglar bars. And nasty dogs inside those bars, in case someone from where we lived wanted to visit.
We didn’t need that stuff—kids from those neighborhoods never wanted to visit us. Or maybe they did. I couldn’t read their minds. But if I was them, I knew I wouldn’t. I guess that was as close as I could ever get to thinking like they did.
I remember the first time I came to Pig’s house, how he kept telling me it would be okay. Every step we walked, it seemed he had to keep telling me that.
It was so cold that even the corner boys were inside someplace. Night, it would be different. No matter how cold, sellers would have to be there for the buyers. Didn’t matter if was dope or pussy. You sign up for that gig, you better show up. I got plenty of offers, but I never took those jobs. I had plans for myself. Big plans. After I did my first bit, I mean. For what I wanted, you have to prove in, first. Show you can do time the right way. Come in alone, and stand up once you get there, put in some work. I’ve seen whores out in weather that kept the cop cars inside their garages. I knew why that was. I saw the way my mother acted, anytime she could get a man to come home with her.
That first time, Pig’s mother must have seen us coming—she had the door open before we even got to it.
“Mom, this is Viper. He’s my friend.”
Any other mother, you bring home a guy named Viper, she’s gonna ask a lot of questions. Pig’s mother didn’t ask a single one. Just put another plate out like I was going to be there for dinner. Or supper, or whatever they called it—I remember it was around four in the afternoon.
That night, she said I’d have to share a room with Pig. That’s when I found out his real name was Alexander. I put up a little fuss, but she said there was a spare bed, and plenty of blankets.
I never expected she’d do any more than let me sleep in the basement. That would have been fine with me—you don’t cop an attitude when someone does you a solid.
In the morning, she gave me fresh clothes. I don’t mean she washed mine; I’d slept in what I’d been wearing.
“These were my late husband’s,” she said. “Alexander’s father. He was about your size. Maybe a little bigger, but I’m sure they’ll fit.”
There was a winter coat that fit pretty good, too.
Then it stopped being winter. Why in hell Pig had to pick such a beautiful spring day to go sit in the luncheonette I’ll never know. I guess maybe he thought he was waiting for me. All our crew went there after school—the ones on probation, I mean. If you cut school, they’d put you back in juvie.
But he had to know I wouldn’t be going home with him that day, not with the weather being so nice
.
It doesn’t matter now.
Our club had never claimed the luncheonette. It was too big of a place, and right on the border, too. No one club could ever hold it.
And if the owner blamed us for losing business, we’d be out. He could do it, too. Always had three or four guys behind the counter. From the look of them, they sold a lot more than those slimy sandwiches nobody ever tried to eat twice.
Pig saw me come in and called out my name. Waved me over to the back booth like we had a meeting set up or something.
When he did that, I didn’t have any choice. If I acted like I didn’t know him, punked him out like that, it would have been serious disrespect. Pig showed a lot of heart, taking that risk. I couldn’t put him down in front of everybody; that would have been just wrong.
So I walked all the way over toward him, passing between the round seats at the counter to my right and the booths on my left. I was going all the way to that back booth. That’s all I wanted to do. Go there, sit down, and tell Pig how things were.
Only I never got that far. I was only about halfway there when someone on my right said, “You gonna pork that piggy tonight, faggot?”
Later I learned the guy’s name had been Tico. Tico something, it doesn’t matter. I keep telling myself I’d been headed straight for that back booth. Over and over, I say that in my mind. That’s the only way I can make what happened come out right.
I was still walking, not looking back, wiping the blood off my blade on a paper napkin, when I heard the first shots. I snapped my knife closed, wiped it down again, and threw it over the counter.
Tico’s boys were there way before the cops. What else? I mean, they were already there.
Mine, too.
When the cops finally rolled Pig off of me, he was dead weight.
Over twenty slugs in him, the way it’s told now.
Any crew would be proud to claim a man like that. So when I poured his “X” onto the sidewalk a few nights later, I wasn’t alone.
Neither was Pig.
for Greg and Marilyn
A PIECE OF THE CITY
1
Just because you live someplace, that doesn’t mean you understand how it works. The city where I came up is a perfect example. Everybody who lives there talks like they know all about it, but they never will. If you want to figure out how the city really works, you have to get far away from it. When you’re down too deep in it, all you can see is your own little piece.
I know what I’m saying. I’ve been away, for a long time now. There isn’t much to do here, once you figure out how to stay alive. So I’ve been studying the city long distance, getting ready for when I come back.
What I finally figured out was that there isn’t just the one city, like people think. I mean, everybody knows there’s different parts, like Queens and Brooklyn. And there’s parts inside the parts, like Harlem and Greenwich Village. But the city is really cut up a lot smaller than even that.
2
When I was a kid, the city was split up into little tiny pieces, all the way right down to the blocks. Our territory was three streets, plus a vacant lot, where they had torn down some buildings. Any time you left your territory, no matter where you went, you were an outsider.
Mostly, we got around by subway. You might think, nobody owns the subway, but you would be wrong. The subway, it’s just like the city itself. It’s a great big huge thing; but, the minute you put people into it, it starts getting cut up into pieces.
Like, if you got on a subway car, and it was full of boys from another club, it was their car. And if you had enough boys get on with you, you could maybe make it your car.
Other people riding the subway, they would watch this happen right in front of them, and not pay it any mind. When I was a kid, I thought that was because they didn’t understand what they were seeing. Now I know different. They knew. But to them, the subway was like a bad neighborhood they had to go through every day to get to work. They would never want to live in a neighborhood like that, so they never wanted a piece of it for themselves, that’s all.
But the block, that wasn’t like the subway. The block was permanent. You were there every day. When outsiders came into your block, you had to make them pay tolls. Because if people could go through your territory without paying, it was like it wasn’t yours at all.
The City—that’s the government, not the territory—it owns the subway, so everyone who rides has to pay. But, if you were riding with some of your boys, and a kid got on alone, you could collect, too. Charge a toll, because that was your piece he was standing on, then.
It was the same on our block. We didn’t own the buildings—nobody around there did. Even the men who came to collect the rents, they lived somewhere else. The City owned the streets, just like it owned the subway. But the City wasn’t around all the time, and we were.
3
It was that rule, about paying the tolls, that got me sent away. The vacant lot was between two territories, ours and the Renegades’. We both used it, for different stuff, but neither of us claimed it. If a coolie—a kid who wasn’t with a club, or what they would call an off-brand today—went through the lot, any club that was there could take the tolls from him.
We had little clashes with the Renegades about the lot, but it was mostly just selling wolf tickets, loudmouthing around. Both clubs knew; that vacant lot, it didn’t move, but it was just like the subway. The only time you had a piece of it was when you were right there to hold it.
The leader of the Renegades was a skinny little guy called Junta. All of the Renegades had those PR names, but PRs, they don’t always look like each other. Some of them were so black, if they didn’t speak that Spanish, you would think they were colored. And some of them were as white as us, with everything in between. The only way you could tell for sure was from listening to them talk—even the ones that talked English, they didn’t talk white.
I didn’t know how Junta got to be leader. He wasn’t a great fist fighter, he didn’t have any kind of rep with a knife, and no one ever saw him with a pistol. I didn’t see where he was any great brains, either.
The reason I knew about Junta is that I had to meet with him a few times, one-on-one. I was president of the Royal Vikings, and, sometimes, we would have a sit-down, to settle a dispute. If the presidents couldn’t settle things, then the warlords would get together, to set the rules for a clash. But it never came to that, between the Renegades and us.
Junta and me, we made a treaty, to have our clubs share the vacant lot. The way Junta explained it, the lot was kind of like the gateway to our two territories. If we fought each other over it, we’d always be having that same fight, over and over. We needed to protect the gateway from outsiders; that was most important. Better to share a little piece than not to have any at all, he said, and he was right. So our treaty was, whoever was on the set, for right then, it was their piece.
4
It started when one of the Mystic Dragons got himself a girlfriend in our territory. He would walk right through our block, flying his colors, and nobody was crazy enough to make him pay tolls. The Mystic Dragons, they were a major club. People said they could put a thousand men into a meet, and a couple of hundred of them would have guns. Real guns, not zips.
The way guys in gangs talk, a lot of that was probably just blowing smoke, but there was enough truth in it to keep us all chilled. Our club, the Royal Vikings, we could put, maybe, twenty guys out for a meet … and some of them would make it only because they’d be scared not to. If a club like ours ever vamped on a Mystic Dragon, we’d be finished.
What kicked it off was the day Bunchie came charging down the steps to the basement we use for a clubhouse.
“Mystic Dragons!” he yelled.
“What?!” Tony Boy said.
“Mystic Dragons! All over the block. They got a car at both ends. And one parked right across from here!”
Everybody was getting all excited, talking at once. “Cool it,�
�� I told them. “If this was a raid, they would have been down here already.”
“The president is right,” Little Augie backed me up. But I could see he was nervous.
I looked around the basement. Just five men, plus me. I thought about sending Sammy out to see what the Mystic Dragons wanted—it wouldn’t look good for the president to go himself. But if they saw the guy we sent was our warlord, they could get the wrong idea.
I could send Little Augie, but he’s not a good talker. And bringing the Mystic Dragons down to that ratty basement would be showing them too much.
I had to think. Everyone went quiet, waiting on me. All we had in the clubhouse was Sammy’s zip, and some bats and chains. I knew at least a couple of the boys always had knives, but Bunchie had said there were three carloads of Mystic Dragons.
“I’ll handle it,” I told the others. “I’ll go see what they want. No reason to let them see what we’re holding down here.”
“You want we should go with?” Little Augie asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “But stay back. Right against the building, understand? Don’t crowd nobody.”
I was proud of my boys. They looked sharp and hard, in their white silk jackets with Royal Vikings across the back. Our jackets are all custom-made, by this very classy place down in Little Italy. They cost a lot, but they say a lot about us, too, so they’re worth it. Two of the boys stepped out first, then moved off to the side to let me through, while the others filled in behind.
The Mystic Dragons’ car was a big black Buick. A four-door. Facing the wrong direction on our one-way street, so the driver was against the curb. As I walked over, the back door opened, and three men got out. They didn’t say anything. The driver looked at me out of his window.
“You Hawk?” he asked.
“Right,” I said. That’s the name I go by. It was written in purple script on the left side of my jacket. On my right sleeve, there were four little hearts; meaning, I’m the president. Sammy, our warlord, had three on his. We didn’t spell out the offices, the way some clubs do.
Mortal Lock Page 12
