Young Junius, page 12
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
Junius laughed. “No niggah crazier than me.”
Elf turned his back to 412 and sunk down against the pebbles, his back against the short wall.
“Ha!” he said. “Fuck!” He yelled the words like he wanted to test if anyone could hear him. He looked up at the sky and laughed. “Damn, man, you is a crazy niggah. It’s true.” He shook his head and kept laughing.
Junius sunk against the wall too. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m crazy. This all is some crazy shit.”
“Roughneck telling Rock where we at right now. His boys coming up in the elevators.”
“Like we G.I. Joes or some shit. Snake Eyes right here!” Junius held up the gun. Laughing felt good against all the other seriousness, and he let himself go—threw his head back and barked at the blue sky. “Here I am,” he yelled.
Elf scrambled up onto his feet. “Fuck! You just bark right now?”
Junius barked again, this time like a bigger, angrier dog. Elf stumbled. He held his hands up, still laughing, trying to get Junius to stop, and then he tripped and fell backward onto his ass on the roof.
His gun went off.
Elf rolled over and checked himself with his hands to see if he’d been hit. Junius heard a ringing in his ears. Elf’s face had gone from laughing to ashen, and Junius dove forward, flattened himself against the hard pebbles. The shot would be heard down on the street; twenty-two stories below them and all the way down, Junius knew, people would hear the shot.
Elf lay flat against the roof. “Shit.”
“Told you not to take off that silencer.”
“No, you did not. You did not ever fucking say that shit.”
“Safety then, niggah,” Junius said. He held his gun toward Elf to show him how the engaged safety looked.
“Shit, man. You think they—”
“Hell, yes, people heard that. All the way up and down, that shit be known.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
They lay there a while, listening to the sounds of the world around them. All was quiet, but Junius knew that didn’t matter. Rock’s boys could be rushing up the stairs or riding elevators to come after them.
“Nah. You did not say shit about no silencer.”
“I—”
“No.”
“Fuck. Come on,” Junius said. He started crawling toward the door for the stairs back inside. When they were halfway to it, Drak popped out, holding his gun in front of his chest like a cop on TV.
“Yo!” Junius dropped the Tec and held his hands up, empty. “It’s cool, man. Be cool.”
“Someone up here buck shots?”
“Yeah,” Elf said. “We saw that boy Roughneck up here trying to check out Marlene’s tower so we had to let off at him.”
Drak waved behind him for Jason to get low. In a moment they were both out on the roof, holding their guns.
“I don’t see him,” Drak said.
“Nah. He gone. Niggah scared.”
Jason and Meldrak exchanged a look, then ran to the wall closest to 412. They got down and looked out over the edge.
Elf started to go with them, but Junius held his arm. “Stay here.” He raised his chin at the other two. “Someone sees them, maybe they think they the ones let off.”
Junius got up and brushed off the front of his jeans and his jacket. The pebbles of the roof had made welts into the sleeves of his coat.
Drak and Jason came back from the edge. “Nothing on Rock’s side,” Jason said. “Shit look quiet as kindergarten.”
“Kindergarten ain’t that quiet,” Elf said.
“That’s the point. You don’t know what might come down.”
At that moment, Junius saw movement on the opposite roof. Behind Jason and Drak, Hammer and two other soldiers came out the door with their guns up. It didn’t take more than a second to see they had guns. They came out shooting; before he even got to the edge, Hammer leveled his gun and fired. Junius jumped at the ground as he saw blood spray across the pebbles in front of him.
34
The sound of Hammer’s gun was different than Elf’s had made, different than what Junius heard yesterday when he shot Lamar. Hammer was letting off multiple shots at one time. In front of Junius, Jason crumpled to his knees, a series of red spots already spreading across his sweatshirt.
“Shit, niggah!” Meldrak was down already by Jason, hitting him in the shoulder to wake him, but Junius could already see dead in his eyes. Then, before his body folded again, his head exploded out one side with a loud pop. Junius looked away, but it was too late: he could feel the wet and a small chunk of something hit the side of his face.
“Nasty,” Elf said.
“Fucking Jason,” Meldrak slurred.
The stream of shots from the other roof stopped.
“Motherfucker got that shit on full auto,” Meldrak said. “Niggah got the modified.”
“I got—” Elf held his Tec toward Meldrak, and Drak grabbed it right out of his hand.
“Let me see this shit.” He put his own handgun, something smaller, in front of Elf. Junius saw the name “Beretta” stenciled across its side. Elf took it, and Junius wanted to smile.
He wiped his face with a sleeve and saw that it came away streaked with blood.
Meldrak kept low and moved carefully toward the edge of the roof. “Shit ain’t full auto,” he said, “but this clip much bigger than mine.”
Before he got to the edge of the roof, Meldrak jumped up sideways, and popped off about five shots. They came slower than Hammer’s, each one firing on its own, making a separate sound. Five individual bangs.
Someone swore on the opposite roof.
Elf looked to Junius, and Junius could tell he was pissed off about having a smaller gun.
“Fuck you niggahs doing,” Drak called.
Junius swore. In front of him he could see the gun Jason still held in his dead hand. He took it and gave it to Elf. “Now you got two.”
“Ok,” Elf said. He looked at Junius, waiting to see what would come next, what Junius would do.
A series of shots echoed again from the other roof, more automatic fire. Elf was already starting a low scramble toward the edge.
“What the fuck,” Junius said. “Buck shots.”
Another volley of automatic fire tore through the air and took chunks out of the bricks of the stairway exit just behind Junius. Elf was crawling toward the wall, and Meldrak moved low along its edge. Junius wanted to get up and to see the other roof—who was there and who was shooting—but instead he scramble-crawled back toward the stairs and then around behind.
As he moved to its side, he heard a few more shots and more bricks breaking. With the doorway at his back, he stood against the bricks, facing away from the 412. He didn’t see anything on the roof of 410, but then he saw a sudden, small movement along the edge. He saw a glint that looked like glass in the sun, a lens maybe, or even—he was about to think—a sight. And then he saw the muzzle flash of the rifle and heard the shot, not loud, more a hiss like the whisper from a silencer.
He cursed at the fact that Elf had started this with his mistake. Junius looked at his own gun’s extended barrel, the silencer he hadn’t taken off. The weapon was really long with the silencer sticking out, but he was glad to have it.
With both hands on the gun, one on the handle and one holding the clip, Junius ducked around and shot four times at the other roof, one trigger pull for each shot. The bullets screamed out through the silencer, making a high whine as they left the gun, something like a whistle. The kickback was so small Junius hardly felt it. Everything about shooting the Tec-9 was just too easy. Especially knowing he had twenty-eight more in the clip.
“Fuck.” He slipped back behind the stairs again. He’d fired from the waist, barely aiming, but there was no one to hit. He didn’t even see where the bullets went. But he’d fired. In the middle of all this crazy shit, he’d fired off four fucking shots at Rock’s house.
35
Junius looked out again from behind the stairs: Elf and Meldrak were still lying low against the wall. Nothing moved on top of 412. On 410 he could see the glint of the lens, or sight, but nothing else.
Then something on 410 moved: a black thing like a dark coat rose just a little above the wall, moved to Junius’s left, and was gone. It was like watching sharks on TV.
Back toward 412, blood spurted out of what was left of Jason’s head and pooled around his shoulders, a chunk of skull and hair missing. The rocks that had been white were now red all around him. Steam drifted up off the blood into the cold.
Elf shifted onto his knees and tried to shoot double fisted, both Berettas raised at 412, but Meldrak pulled him down onto the ground. Hammer rose up for a moment and shot across the ledge.
Junius wanted to fire, but by the time he had the thought, Hammer was gone.
Footfalls pounded the stairs in the building, and the door behind Junius slammed open. He heard pebbles crunching under feet and saw Seven Heaven and Big Pickup standing next to Jason’s body, firing wild at the opposite roof with automatic Tec-9s. When their guns started clicking on empty, they ducked back into the stairway, and Junius could hear them cursing as they reloaded.
That was when Junius heard the sirens—a lot of them—coming from the street below.
“Fuck,” Drak called out over it all.
Seven Heaven stuck his head out the door and yelled for them to get off the roof. Junius saw Hammer and a few of his boys running back into 412. He got ready to shoot, but then Elf and Drak were up and running across his line of fire. He lowered the gun and turned into the stairway, where he was pushed along past Seven and Pickup, down onto the landing of twenty-two.
“Shit motherfucker, shit,” Pickup said. “Move!” He clapped Junius on the back.
“What about—” Junius asked.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Elf and Drak came running down the stairs, and then Seven and Pickup started down.
“What about Jason?” Junius asked. “His body?”
“Shit,” Pickup said. “Another niggah dead in the towers. That’s what the police think. Won’t do shit.”
“Huh?” Even from inside, Junius could hear the wail from the cop cars twenty-two stories below. When they reached the hall, Seven and Meldrak broke off toward Marlene’s.
Pickup led Junius and Elf down to twenty and to an apartment in the middle of the hall. He knocked on the door and a little boy opened it right away.
“What’s up, my man?”
“Homeboy, your moms at home?” Pickup asked. The kid shook his head. “Hang out with these cool brothers then, all right?” They gave each other a pound, and Pickup pushed Junius and Elf inside.
Then he was gone.
The kid closed the door. Junius was in the middle of a living room that smelled like fried food and spices. On his right was a tan couch with yellow flowers on it and dirty covers on the arms. The couch faced a big TV set with a pair of pliers sticking out where the channel knob was supposed to be.
“Sit down, suckers.”
The Price Is Right was on TV. “Bob motherfucking Barker,” Elf said, and he moved to the couch.
Marlene slid the drapes to the side so she could look down at the street below. She saw three police cruisers on Rindge Ave., lined up, ready for business. Seven opened the apartment door behind her.
“Time to go,” he said.
She turned to see him taking her fur out of the closet. He held it up for her to slide into.
“This was them,” she said, pointing in the direction of 412. “Rock’s boys. Let Cambridge finest go up there.”
“All three towers today,” Seven said. “Our eyes on 410 dropped shots in this, too. With Drak and your people on our roof.”
She squinted in her anger. “The kids? They went up on the roof? With guns?”
Seven tilted his head, as if asking if she really wanted to know the answer to that question. She didn’t. Of course he gave them guns, but to kill Rock and Black Jesus, not to take shots at clouds.
“They started this?”
Seven held out his hands. “Too soon to know. Too late to stand here discussing.”
“Ok.” She finally came across the room to slip on her coat. “Where we going?”
“The usual,” he said, and ushered her out the door.
36
Barker was setting up the second showcase showdown when the sirens finally stopped screaming from the street. Even on twenty, they were loud enough to hear over the TV, and the kid had to turn it up for him and Elf to hear the descriptions of the prizes.
Junius sat still with the gun in his hand, its silencer resting against his leg. Elf had tucked the twin Berettas into his jeans somewhere, but Junius wanted his gun in his hand.
He wasn’t interested in the showcase showdown; instead he wanted to know what was happening outside, up on the roof, in the other buildings.
“When’s it safe to leave?”
“When Big Pickup comes back for you, is my best guess. You’d think he’ll be back soon.”
Junius didn’t say anything.
“After Price I like to watch I Love Lucy. You guys like Lucy?”
“She all right,” Elf said. “I kind of do.”
“Good. Not like she’s sexy or nothing, but it’s a laugh.”
Junius turned to Elf. “The fuck you start up there?”
“Please,” the kid said, not taking his eyes off the TV. He pointed to a crocheted sign above the television that read, “This is God’s house. Please speak accordingly.” Junius waited for him to laugh.
“It means no swearing.”
“Right.” Junius tapped Elf on the shoulder, nodded toward the door and all that was beyond it. “What you think about that, man? This crazy, right?”
Elf turned his head all the way to one side and then back again, taking his chin to his shoulders. He touched the scab on his lip with a finger. “This what it be.” He patted the front of his jeans, where Junius assumed he’d tucked the Berettas. “We past the point of no turning back. From here on out, we just got to act like we know.”
“Show and prove.” The kid nodded. “If you think you know what that means.”
They took Marlene down the east stairs.
Big Pickup joined them on the way down, Drak and Seven going first, then followed by her and the big man. She wore heels, and that was a mistake, of course, but the stairs were too dirty to go barefoot now, too much broken glass, and so she had to make do. Her calves were hurting by the time they reached ten, and at five they were screaming for her to stop.
“Fuck me,” Marlene said. “Why couldn’t we just use the elevator?”
“Bullshit is that we didn’t get you down in it first, when the firing first started,” Pickup said from behind her. He lifted her in his arms, one forearm under her knees and the other along her back, and carried her down the stairs.
“Now this,” she said, looking up into his face—not really such a bad face, actually—“is the way for a lady to travel.”
She didn’t miss noticing when Seven looked back at Pickup with contempt. “I didn’t hear you say take Marlene out back when.”
These guys were hardly breathing heavy, even after seventeen flights. These were the ones to keep around her. Somewhere along the way she had made a set of good choices with these three, Seven and Pickup especially, even if they didn’t always get along.
“Plus,” Seven continued, “Rock’s boys find out we take her in the elevator first sight of a few shots, they gonna be waiting one time and roll up.”
“He right, too,” Meldrak added.
“You got Raphael set up on the other side?” Seven asked.
Pickup grunted. “He be there.”
At the basement, they took her past the boiler room and the janitor’s closet to the maintenance tunnels underneath the towers.
There was no one at the door, and Seven opened it without using his key.
“Don’t we usually—” she started to ask.
“I’m on that,” Seven said. “I’ll find out who left his post.”
On the other side of the door, Pickup set her down. He had to stoop in the low tunnel, the naked lightbulbs right alongside his head. The tunnel was maybe two hundred feet, and halfway through it they could already hear Raphael give them the all clear from the other side.
“Coming with Marlene,” Seven answered. “You get the elevator?”
“Got it.”
Marlene could see Raphael, one of her Latino boys, waiting at the end of the tunnel.
“Cops come at you yet?”
Raphael said they were sticking with 411 and 412 so far, and she liked the sound of that.
In the basement of 410, Raphael made a show of kissing the back of Marlene’s hand. She wasn’t sure why he did it, but he always did. Maybe it was his thing.
He led them to the elevator and they all squeezed in, Marlene at the back behind Seven and Pickup. She could barely see the doors around the two giants. She put a hand on each of them.
“You two both did a good job today,” she said. “Be good to each other, all right? We’re on the same side here.”
They both shrugged awkwardly and nodded toward one another. She knew that was the best she would get. Pickup had high aspirations, and Seven got his spot by never being content himself. She’d have to find a way of appeasing the both of them. Making Pickup her head of security hadn’t done it, especially since Seven kept putting his hand into that pot. She’d have to find something else.
Meldrak spoke, his voice scratchy like his mouth was too dry. “Jason dead,” he said. “Big Hammer let off a full clip and tore his ass to pieces.”
“Jason, my Jason?” she asked. “From twenty-two?”
“That’s your boy,” Seven said to Raphael—Jason was Puerto Rican too. “Round up the clan.”
“Fuck you.” Raphael said it like a matter of fact, like you would say “Good morning” to a stranger, the antagonism between the black crews and the boricuas always there, even when they were working for the same set or living right alongside one another on the same floor.
