The Hard Stuff

by David Gordon

  “Stop! Hold it!” A voice cried out from behind the rocks. “Chief, it’s me!”

  “Cease fire,” the chief yelled, and Donna took cover behind the car, surveying the scene as the dust settled. Five men lay in the road, one still twitching and moaning. An arm waved a hat.

  The chief shouted, “That you, Cook?”

  “It’s me!”

  “How many still alive back there?”

  “Three,” the deputy called out. “Four if you count Ronny there.”

  “Okay. Drop your guns and come out with your hands up. All of you!” The men emerged, slowly. Donna and Logan trained their guns on them. “Now get down on the ground,” the chief continued. He pointed his rifle at his deputy. “You too, Cook. Don’t make me wish I’d shot you.”

  He lay down, and the three of them set about cuffing everyone, then checking the area before letting fire and ambulance come through. The state troopers arrived and provided backup and swept the rest of the camp, grabbing a few stragglers and locating a stash of drugs hidden down a dry well. After Donna called in, the FBI showed up in force to handle forensics and the ATF to look over the immense firepower stockpiled in the camp. Logan hung around, interviewing suspects and waiting to see if her fugitive was among the dead or not. Donna found her sitting in her car doing paperwork in the A/C and got in beside her.

  “Well, the techs found the remains of a male in the wreckage whose one uncharred fingerprint matches Grables,” Donna said. “Interesting part is cause of death. Looks like he was shot, probably by one of his own based on ballistics and trajectory. But that actually saved him from burning to death, which would have saved him from drowning.”

  “Not his lucky day, I guess,” Logan said.

  “Depends how you see it. He’s dead, but it could have been worse.”

  Logan ruffled through her papers. “I’ve got a bunch of conflicting statements here, mostly saying that the camp was stormed by a well-armed team of anywhere from ten to twenty, quote, Asiatics, unquote. So make of that what you will. The kicker is Deputy Droopalong over there. He claims to have been hoodwinked by a bounty hunter named, get this, Jack Me Off.” She grinned. “I ran it just for shits and giggles, but my keen deductive skills tell me that’s a fake name.”

  “I’d concur,” Donna said, thinking of Joe floating by in the car beside her. She wanted to both laugh and scream.

  “It was a pleasure working with you, Agent Zamora,” Logan said then, extending her hand. Donna shook it.

  “Thanks, Marshal. I feel the same.”

  “I admit I checked you out, and when I heard you were the tip-line girl, I figured you’d be all talk and no guts.”

  Donna shrugged, thinking of what Andrew had told her. “No worries.”

  Logan smiled at her for the first time. “You probably heard I was a mean old bull dyke.”

  Donna blushed. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You heard right. I am! But I was wrong about you. You know how to shoot and how to keep your mouth shut. Two of my favorite qualities in a woman. We should get a beer.”

  Donna laughed. “I’d love to. But I’ve got one more loose end to tie up back in the city. Some other time.”

  8

  Joe woke up again in the same car but feeling even worse. Cash was shaking him.

  “Hey, Joe. Get up. We’re home.”

  “Home?” he mumbled. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Sitting up, he saw that Feather and Blackie were gone.

  “Back in Queens, man, safe and sound,” Cash said. “I dropped the guys off, but I don’t know where to take you.”

  Joe looked out the window. Flushing. Main Street surged with people, mostly Asian, though a tall black man in a dashiki was handing out fliers and a Mexican fruit vendor argued with an old Chinese woman or, to be accurate, he shrugged and smiled while she berated him. It was a world away from their last stop, and Joe wondered what the white power campers would think if they woke up here, in their version of hell.

  “Joe?” Cash said, now facing him in the rearview mirror. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you on something? Or off something?”

  “A little of both maybe.”

  “I was wondering. Because you were thrashing around and moaning back there.”

  “Oh.” Joe didn’t remember his dreams, thankfully, but he knew what they contained. That was why he was on something. “Yeah, that. Sorry.”

  “Reason I was asking,” Cash said, “it’s none of my business but … there’s this doctor I know around here. A friend of mine got strung out on dope, and she detoxed him with acupuncture and herbs and shit. I mean …” Cash looked away into traffic. “If you want.”

  Joe considered it. It was either that or back to his grandmother’s and then what? Another fight at the club? More static with the rap guys? He felt exhausted, too tired to make a fist. His bones felt hollow, with that familiar ache that came with opiate withdrawal, and his joints were sore. His nerves twitched and creeped, sending little spasms and jerks through his limbs as he tried to sit still. That’s why they call it kicking.

  “Did it work?” he asked. “How’s your friend doing now?”

  “He’s dead.” Cash shrugged in the mirror. “But the detox worked great. Then he got high again a few months later and OD’d. His tolerance was too low.”

  Joe nodded. “Okay. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Let’s go see the doc.”

  *

  Donna found a parking spot on Roosevelt Avenue under the shadow of the elevated 7 train, which rattled back and forth overhead, carrying residents from the ever-richer, ever-whiter work world of Manhattan to the seething multi-ethnic cauldron of Queens, the most diverse spot on the planet, where millions lived, loved, ate, slept, played, fought, and died in what she’d heard were up to eight hundred different languages and dialects. Jackson Heights, the neighborhood through which she was walking now, had morphed in recent decades from Irish-Italian-Jewish-Dominican-Puerto Rican to Columbian to Indian. Now there was a Little Pakistan and a Little Bangladesh, Tibetan and Nepalese restaurants opening up, and a major Mexican influx. She was hungry just thinking about it and started deciding what kind of food to bring home to her daughter and her mom. Ecuadoran maybe? Suddenly she craved encebollado—fish stew with onion, tomato, and coriander. And some empanadas for Larissa. But first she had to pay the visit she’d come to make.

  Her first call after returning to the city had been Club Rendezvous, the strip joint where Joe worked as a bouncer. She was told he was on a “leave of absence” for “personal reasons” and couldn’t be reached. She decided to try his grandmother’s next since, aside from the club, it was the only address Joe had on record anywhere.

  She negotiated the steps and courtyard, busy with kids playing and a gossiping row of old biddies in folding chairs who she knew would be speculating about her as she passed. Gladys wasn’t among them, so Donna stepped into the dim vestibule—the light bulb had died—and buzzed. A distorted if familiar voice squawked out.

  “Hello? Who is it?”

  “Hello Mrs. Brody. It’s Donna Zamora.”

  “Who?”

  “Special Agent Donna Zamora? We met before?”

  “Who?”

  Donna sighed. “The girl Fed.”

  There was a pause and then the door unlocked. The elevator was broken or anyway it didn’t seem to come, so she walked the four flights and found Gladys peering from her door, which was on the chain. When she saw Donna, she smiled and opened up.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Sorry, hon.” She gave Donna a peck on the cheek and let her in. “You know how it is. Can’t be too careful.”

  “You’re right, Mrs. Brody,” Donna said, though she wondered whether the intruders she feared were robbers or cops.

  “Call me Gladys,” she told her, sitting back in her chair next to the phone and across from the muted TV on which a soap was playing. She waved at the couch. “We’re old frien
ds now.”

  “Thanks, Gladys,” Donna said, sitting. “I’m glad to hear that. I do like to think of us as friends.” She looked around. “I was hoping that Joe might be here, too. Do you expect him soon?”

  “Joe? No. He hasn’t been around lately.”

  “Not at all?” Donna asked. She saw the half-full bottle of Russian vodka on the table along with a few empty glasses and the remains of what looked like a tin of caviar. A pair of men’s slippers were on the carpet near her feet.

  “Nope,” Gladys said, looking her right in the eye and smiling. “Of course I do have other friends besides you who stop by.” She was a good liar. No hesitation, no shame, no defensiveness. Her life as a grifter showed. That’s why they called them con artists, after all: confidence. They won your confidence with theirs. And for a real pro, that confidence—that conviction in her own lie—became so absolute that she in a sense believed it herself, adopted it as the truth. Challenging it, saying for instance: “Aren’t those his T-shirts in that laundry basket over there?” would only invite greater defiance, even genuine outrage that you would have the nerve to doubt her, even when she was totally full of shit.

  “I called the club,” Donna said, switching tactics. “They said he took a leave of absence for personal reasons. I hope he’s okay? That’s why I came by.”

  “He’s fine I’m sure.”

  “He didn’t say where he was going?”

  “Hon, he joined the army once without saying where he was going.”

  “He didn’t even call? What if he’s in trouble?”

  “He never even called when he got arrested. He’d come by after to tell me he was out. Look”—she patted Donna’s leg—“you’ve got to relax. Joe’s like a cat. He comes and goes and if you try to put a collar on him, you get scratched. But if you let him alone, then he’ll come home eventually, purring and sweet as can be.”

  “Or with a dead bird in his mouth.”

  “Ha!” Gladys laughed and reached for the vodka. “Now you get the idea. Do me a favor, hon? Get some ice and a Fresca from the fridge? And a glass for yourself, too.” She picked up the remote. “My show is about to start.”

  *

  The cute little Fed skipped the drink, as expected. Gladys would have been surprised—and impressed—if she’d just fixed herself a vodka and Fresca and sat back to watch a soap. But she left, pressing another card in Gladys’s hand and reiterating how important it was that she speak to Joe. Important to who? Not to Joe, that much was clear. Law of various types had been stopping by to ask about her grandson since he was ten. And before that his father. And her ex-husband. And her, too. Just like her parents before her. Most of the people she knew had the cops come calling sometime. But no one she knew had ever called them.

  Being a professional criminal, of course, meant that by definition many of her activities were against the law. But she also belonged to a class of people who simply lived outside the law altogether, even though the majority never committed any crime. Not even the victim of a crime, in her world, would ever call the police: you called your friends or, if you could, you called on the local powers for help. It simply never occurred to you that the law would help. Many black men, for instance, felt that calling the cops might end with them in cuffs—or worse, full of bullets—no matter the situation. And they clocked a patrol car rolling by with the same wariness they would a known thug or a vicious dog—as something risky and unpredictable to avoid. Immigrants, legal or not, might worry that any involvement with the government at all, however innocuous, might land them in the clutches of the INS, endangering their visas or green cards. Some women, suffering harassment at work or on the streets or even abuse at home, had come to expect nothing—or less than nothing—from the authorities. And so on. If you had no insurance or steady health care, if you owned no property or portfolio, if you had no voice in politics and didn’t see your reality reflected in the media or on TV, if you realized, whether suddenly or as a given from birth, that the social safety net, the assurance of protection and support that society offered, was not spread to catch you, or was so full of holes that it was useless, then you might not feel obliged to hold up your end of the deal either. If you felt the law was not there for you, then you might not be all that inclined to obey it. The rules of the game become meaningless when you realize the game is rigged.

  People like that were, in a sense, natural anarchists, whatever their political opinions or lifestyles. They made their own way, took their own chances, and suffered their own consequences. They were free. But if they fell, they fell—no one picked them up. If they got hurt, got sick, got old, got caught, if they ended up starving or cold or locked up, they were on their own—unless they had friends or family to turn to. So when Joe walked out the door, Gladys knew: he might come home with a bag of money to hand her, he might crawl home bleeding, he might call and ask her to grab that bag and send some of it somewhere for him, or he might never come back at all.

  And that was why, no matter what, that Fed, Donna whoever, would never be more than an outsider in Gladys’s world. They were outlaws, and she was the law. It was cats and dogs. The problem was, though, Gladys liked Donna. And Donna liked Joe, Gladys saw, maybe more than she even realized herself. And Gladys sensed instinctively that this could be just the woman Joe needed in his life. Someone real he could get real with. Someone who could make him happy. Anyway, she was better than that crazy Russian chick, Yelena. Gladys could smell trouble on her from across the room like it was perfume. Even if she did bring vodka and caviar. And match Gladys drink for drink. And crack safes like an artist. And move like a cat, born and bred to outwit and outrun the dogs.

  That was the funny part: Donna seemed like a great match for Joe, though the very thought was ridiculous, like mating a fish with a bird. And Yelena seemed like the last thing her grandson needed. But she was one of them, a natural member of the tribe. They belonged together, like always, against the law.

  9

  Goddamn you, Joe, Gio was thinking as he rode to the meeting with Alonzo and the rap mogul Cold Daddy Collins. He didn’t mean it. Or rather he meant it in the way one might think such a thing about one’s oldest and, he had to admit, closest friend. They’d been pals since Joe saved him from a couple of bullies in junior high—Gio had basically adopted him as a brother—and his family had arranged for Joe to win a scholarship to the exclusive Catholic school he attended. He’d been dismayed to see the condition that Joe was left in after his years in the Special Forces: strung out on drugs and PTSD’d as fuck. So he’d given him the bouncer job as a kind of retirement package, an easy gig that provided a steady income for him and his grandma Gladys, semiretired herself from life as a grifter. To have that suddenly blow up in Gio’s face was a real pain in the ass. Gio Caprisi was a busy man, running a far-flung family empire, both the legitimate, top half of real estate, stocks, restaurants, trucking, paving, hauling, and construction companies, and the not-so-legit subterranean half of, thanks to him, highly organized crime, a man whom hundreds both feared and depended on, knowingly or not, as a kind of combination general and CEO. For him to be in a car with his guy Nero and a couple of other soldiers in the back, heading to meet Alonzo, who reigned over the black gangs of central Brooklyn, and quash some minor beef with a couple of nobodies over nothing, was not only a waste of precious time, it was an insult. That’s why he was cursing Joe under his breath, while Nero stared straight ahead and drove, saying nothing.

  On the other hand, there was no one else in Gio’s life like Joe. He trusted him with his secrets, his money, his safety. He was, without doubt, the person he would call if he himself were in jeopardy. And if Gio had given him the bouncer job out of sympathy, he had also appealed to Joe’s other talents out of respect: ten years at war had fucked his friend up in the head a little, but it had also hammered him into a lethal weapon, the sharp point of a spear. And when terrorists had infiltrated Gio’s world and threatened his hometown, he had launched that spear. Now
those terrorists were dead, their virus destroyed. That’s why, despite the annoyance, despite the muttered curses and grumbles, he would drive across town to take care of Joe’s problem, would look after him now and always. And Nero, keeping silent to avoid bugging his prickly boss, couldn’t help grinning as they arrived for the meeting at a high-end chicken-and-waffles joint set up to cash in on the rapidly gentrifying scene in Crown Heights. It was Alonzo’s place, though the paperwork was all in another name. The building, a converted warehouse, was owned, through another front of course—by another old pal—Menachem “Rebbe” Stone, who ran the Hasidic underworld. Alonzo and Gio were peers who had crossed paths repeatedly, clashed occasionally, and eventually formed an alliance on their way to the top. But Rebbe had been Gio’s father’s peer: he was already at the top when Gio got his driver’s license and had remained enthroned ever since, leading his Orthodox army, who with their beards and suits and long coats looked more like an outlaw band than any of them, really: an old west gang that Gio thought of as the Black Hats.

  But now the only hat in sight was a Nets cap on the head of the kitchen worker, who started over, annoyed and waving a clipboard, when Gio and his entourage pulled into the loading zone where produce was being delivered. Then he saw the faces in the car and stepped away deferentially, ignoring them as they got out. Barry, one of Alonzo’s men, a huge dude in a tracksuit and a Kangol cap, nodded them through the kitchen door. Pete, one of Gio’s guys, stayed behind, leaning back on the car’s hood and lighting a smoke while the others went in. It looked like another warm summer day.

  Inside, countertops and knives gleamed as workers in white bustled about, unloading supplies and chopping piles of vegetables for lunch while big pots simmered on the industrial stoves. In a corner, between the walk-in freezer and the pantry, one table was set off by itself, covered with an immaculate white cloth, and at it Alonzo sat alone, eating a big plate of chicken and waffles, sipping coffee, and reading the Wall Street Journal. He looked up and smiled.