Young Junius, page 16
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
Clarence smiled. He knew he had this coming. All he had to do was keep this high and feel out everything he needed. So what if Rock found out he was smoking crack. He’d be all right when he knew what Clarence could do on it.
He’d go down to the lobby and get more first, hit that, and then go out to deal with Junius and the cop, clean up the whole fucking towers, maybe Marlene too.
All that after he got another rock.
He took his Walther out of the dresser and tucked it into the back of his pants, then hung his shirt over it and crossed the room to the door, leaving his jacket on the couch. Everything he had to go after now was inside this tower, right here in the 412.
He knew it, could feel the building telling him it had everything he would need.
46
“I’d hate for you to run off already,” Miss Emma said. “At least sit and finish your Kool-Aid.”
Rough turned to the old woman. “He’s trying to find Guardy Little.”
“Oh.” She turned back to the blanket in her lap and her crocheting. “Best I should stay out of that, then.”
Junius drank the red Kool-Aid. It tasted sweet, with just the right amount of sugar. It didn’t taste like cherry; it tasted like red Kool-Aid was supposed to—like red itself was a flavor.
Junius looked at Rough, but Rough didn’t say anything. Behind him, the clock on the wall read one fifteen: only forty-five minutes left until when he told himself he’d be back to get Elf. Junius downed the rest of the Kool-Aid in one long swallow, trying to be polite. “You going to tell me where he be?”
Rough shook his head, shrugged. “I can tell you his apartment, but he won’t be up in there right now.”
“Why are you so angry?” Miss Emma asked. “You’re such a young man.”
Junius set the glass down on the coffee table, in the middle of a doily, and backed toward the door. “I apologize to you, ma’am, if I seem rude today,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“He mad because his brother dead,” Rough told Miss Emma.
“What?” She looked at Rough and then back to Junius. “Is that true? Temple dead? He’s so young!”
Junius looked away from her. Why he had to be the one to confirm his own bad news, he didn’t know, didn’t like.
“Randall?” She waited for an answer.
Rough nodded. He’d just said it plain and straight, and now he confirmed it with a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And your mother?”
Junius could hear the glider creak in the quiet. Dust spun and circled in a ray of light on the other side of the room.
“She ok,” he told her. “Upset, but—” He stopped because he didn’t know what else to say.
“That is no good,” Miss Emma said. She sucked her teeth. “No damn good.”
And Junius knew it wasn’t.
He knew that more than anything. He also knew it hadn’t helped that he dropped Lamar, or that Jason was now dead on the roof. None of it did any damn good, and still he wanted to take it further, take more bodies with him. If he had his reasons, and he did, then anything he did made more sense than the rest of it.
“Who did this?” Miss Emma asked. She looked to Rough for her answer, but he stayed silent until she asked again.
When he answered her, Junius watched his eyes, watching for the lie when he said someone other than Rock or Black Jesus. Instead he said, “I don’t know.”
Junius didn’t blink, kept his eyes on Rough’s for any sign that he did know, that it came from someone he knew, but he didn’t see anything. Two weeks on the street was enough to know when someone was lying: you worked a corner and you had to know who told the truth, who had the money, and who was a cop. Junius had worked Teele Square for two years.
Rough wasn’t lying.
“Don’t know? No damn good you are!” Miss Emma started to get out of her chair. “Get me that phone and I’ll see who up in here knows what! Think we don’t know what’s going on? I can tell you how this terribleness happened in two calls. You watch me!”
Rough smiled. He helped her up out of her chair after Miss Emma had set her blanket and her crochet hook on the table. She shuffled toward the empty kitchen, mumbling to herself that she knew who she would call and that she still had friends who could tell her what was happening. “Think we women don’t know what’s the what,” she said.
Rough laughed, then he saw Junius’s face and he stopped. “Sorry,” he said. “But you know she gonna come back saying it came from nothing. No good reason and she’s right.”
Rough tilted his head toward her. “Or, she could find out clear as day what went down. Who did what. She could come up with most anything. No telling.”
“Yeah, well I ain’t about to wait.”
Rough shrugged. “Guess you know where you headed.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“It’s cool. But watch out for Clarence in here. That niggah wild.”
“Yeah. I heard that.” He clapped his palm against Rough’s and nodded at the bigger man.
Rough nodded back, and Junius slipped out into the hall.
He didn’t break stride when he was out of the apartment, walked right to the stairs and opened the heavy steel door. Inside the stairwell, he listened, wanting to hear voices so he’d know who else was around.
47
Clarence stepped into the hall. He wanted to punch holes in walls, shoot people who needed shooting.
“Fuck,” he said, drawling out the word, listening to how long he could stretch out the uhhh sound. He rubbed his fingers and it felt good to feel the slide of his thumb across the others’ pads. This was not a moment for the stairs, though he felt like he could sprint down them; it was time for a nice, slow ride in the elevator. He’d ride like the king he was. His apartment seemed to let him out directly in front of it, as if he’d only blinked and was already pushing the button. He heard the pulleys spinning and the cables stretching from the other side of the doors, wheels rolling up supports to bring the elevator car his way.
This was how it was supposed to be.
“Fuck.” He punctuated it with a fist to the right elevator door. Satisfied that he had made a dent, Clarence checked his knuckles: they looked like normal, and he didn’t feel a thing. He punched the same spot on the door again, deepening the dent, and nodded. He was ready for anything that came his way.
“Yeah,” he said, and at that moment the elevator doors opened.
The car was empty.
He got in and rode to the lobby by himself, punching his fist into his empty left hand as he listened to an imaginary beat in his head that felt like it was tailor-made for the situation. He tapped his feet. No one got onto the elevator as it made its descent; no one stopped it between the eleventh floor and the lobby. Clarence wasn’t even sure if he cared who was there when the doors opened: if it was Roughneck, he was getting fucked up; if it was someone else, the same; if it was that cop who had dropped Pooh, he was getting beat down.
The elevator dinged, which struck Clarence as odd; he couldn’t remember the last time he heard it make a sound. Then the doors opened, and he was looking at the place where a fancier elevator might have a series of numbers to mark the floors, so he didn’t see the lobby immediately.
“Mo-ther-fucker!”
He heard it before he saw who was speaking, but as soon as he did, he knew exactly who he’d find.
“Yes, sir,” Clarence said, stepping out of the car to stand in front of the cop. The lobby was empty but for Rough’s boy Milk standing by the doors, and the cop, Officer Johnson, Clarence now read off the tag above his badge. The cop had his nightstick in one hand and was smacking it into the palm of the other. He looked almost as happy to see Clarence as Clarence was to see him.
“You fucking run?” Johnson said. His eyebrows came together above his nose; his mouth pursed into a thin smile. “We love it when you motherfuckers run.”
“I’m here now.” Clarence held his hands out by his sides. His arms felt just a little heavier and the beat in his head was getting softer. But he knew how to get it back.
He stepped to the cop. “Come on.”
Johnson swung with his nightstick, and Clarence raised his arm to block it. The stick hit his forearm, and Clarence heard a crack, felt his first pain since hitting the rock upstairs, but the pain was just a tiny feeling compared to the roar it started inside him. The new strength of the bass track made him quiver. He ripped the stick from Johnson’s hand and threw it across the lobby.
“We won’t have that,” Clarence said, and grabbed the front of the stiff blue uniform with both hands. He pulled the cop toward him, brought him close enough that he could smell the cop smell. “You want me? Clarence right here for you.”
The cop swung and hit Clarence in the kidney with a tight hook. He might as well have tried pinching him for how much it hurt.
“Yeah,” the cop said. He head-butted Clarence in the middle of his face, connecting with the top of his forehead against the bridge of his nose, and Clarence saw black. He felt his eyes tear up and his face squeeze together on its own.
He heard, “This is exactly where you should be, you fucking crackhead.”
He was still seeing black, but Clarence knew exactly where the elevator was behind him and he’d already heard the doors close. He spun with the cop’s uniform in his hands, and twisted Johnson’s body as he did. In the last second before they made impact, his sight came back and he saw the silver doors of the elevator just a second before he smashed the cop’s face into them. The cop’s body went limp a little, and Clarence tasted his own blood on his lips. He spit against the doors and saw red.
“Yeah.” With one hand he pushed the cop against the metal doors at the shoulder and with the other he grabbed the back of the cop’s head and pulled it toward him so the cop could see his face. “You see me?” he asked.
Then he slammed the cop’s face into the elevator doors again.
“The fuck are you doing, C?” Milk tried to grab his shoulders. “This dude’s a fucking cop, and we got more cops all over this piece!”
Clarence brushed him back. “So be the fuck out, you don’t want part of this.”
Milk took his hands away, and Clarence heard his feet on the lobby tiles as he went for the stairs.
“Just you and me now, Officer.”
“Good.” The cop hit Clarence in the stomach with an elbow that made Clarence want to double over. He rested his forehead against Johnson’s shoulder and breathed hard. He could feel Johnson getting stronger, pushing back against the elevator doors, and he tried to slam the cop’s face into the doors again, but this time the cop held himself still, didn’t let Clarence control him.
He spun and hit Clarence in the gut for real this time, up under the rib cage. Clarence wanted to vomit or sit down and take a shit, he didn’t know which. He felt his buzz from the crack slipping away and wished he was upstairs again, sucking on another hit—or three—and ground his teeth together. When he looked up, he saw the cop’s chest in front of him and jumped at his face. The crown of his head connected with the bottom of the cop’s chin and the cop went slack for a moment. He heard the back of the cop’s head hit the elevator doors.
“You!” he shouted, hitting Johnson in the hip with a low, hard right. “Do not!” He followed with a left to the cop’s stomach, doubling him as he stood to go higher with his next punch. “Come into this tower!”
The last punch, an uppercut, landed under Johnson’s chin and spun him into the doors. The cop went slack, but Clarence held him up. He reached around to his back and brought out the Walther in his right hand, holding it around the barrel to use like a mallet.
“To fuck with us!”
He punctuated this last exclamation by jabbing the barrel of the gun into the cop’s lower back, the soft place above his belt and hip bone, exactly where he thought he’d hit kidney. The cop squirmed and reared back. His knees buckled, and Clarence let him fall.
Behind him, Clarence heard the jingling of keys and the front door of the building. He turned and saw a woman in her sixties holding a brown paper bag of groceries. “Oh my God,” she said.
Clarence raised the gun at her and ground his teeth. “Get the fuck out!”
She hurried back out of the lobby with her groceries.
“Fuck with Pooh!” Clarence said.
He kicked the cop in the side, then pulled his foot back to kick again, thought about kicking the cop in his face, and then stomped down on his fingers instead. That got the desired reaction from Johnson, who cried out and rolled into a ball against the elevator doors, his back to Clarence. Clarence kicked him in the back this time, and, coming to his senses a little, he pulled Officer Johnson up by the back of his uniform. He had to pull on it hard to get enough loose fabric to grip each shoulder, but when he did, he started to drag the cop toward the back stairway doors.
The cop started kicking and spun in Clarence’s hands to try to get free. That was when Clarence cracked him twice in the side of the head with the butt of his gun. After that the cop was out.
Clarence pulled him out of the lobby, through the stairway doors, and around to the back of the building where they were supposed to put the trash out.
He dropped Johnson to open the back door and realized he still had his Walther in his hand. As he stood to tuck it into his pants, he noticed the cop had left a trail of blood along the floor. Maybe some of it was his own, too. He wiped his hand across his lips and saw red when he brought it away. He wiped this blood off on the cop’s uniform. That was when he saw the cop’s gun.
He pulled it out of the holster and looked it over. On the side it said, “S & W”—Smith & Wesson. It was silver with a nice-looking black grip. Cold steel! This was a cop gun, the kind that would only be traced back to a cop. He wasn’t sure if he’d get away with capping Junius with it and have that go back to a cop, but it was worth trying. He tucked it down the front of his pants, then carefully took the gold badge off the front of the cop’s shirt and pushed it down into one of his back pockets.
“Motherfuck you,” he said to the cop. “This is why you do not come up into this tower, you fucking piece of shit cop.” He kicked Johnson again in the side.
Now he’d need to call Rock and get someone down here to do a cleanup. He needed more of that Ready, too; his high was gone and not only did he feel tired and spent and empty, but his forearm, his back, and his nose all cried out for some kind of self-medication.
He kicked the cop again and then left him, headed for the stairs and the second-floor landing where somebody’s boys would be selling. There he could tell a young one to go clean up the blood and get another rock to take back to his apartment.
48
Marlene took a deep breath and raised the glass of white wine to her lips. She sat on Malik’s couch, his TV set off and no sound in the apartment but the sound of someone else’s TV coming from across the hall.
The wine tasted crisp, like an apple or a pear, and it was cold. Since Malik had gone away and left an empty refrigerator, she’d been using it to store her whites: the wines she was trying to get used to so she could talk about them with Anthony. She kept the reds under her counter, away from the light, but she liked those even less. Truth was, none of the wines tasted to her like something people would go crazy over.
Usually she had to send someone over here to get her a bottle or two every now and then. Now she scanned the layer of dust on the coffee table and on top of the TV. She needed one of the girls to come over and clean this place more often. Who knew what amount of dust she was sitting in on this couch.
But she didn’t want to think about that, not when there was so much else going on.
Seven Heaven sat on the love seat across from her. He’d have ideas about all this, but she knew he would wait to hear hers first.
“What you think?” she asked. “How long until those young bucks get us all killed?”
Seven laughed, shook his head. “They with the TV boy, Shari’s kid on twenty. They hold up fine there.”
She nodded. “How about us?”
Seven shrugged.
Marlene took another sip. “Just tell me I did the right thing.”
“You did the right thing.”
“Shit.” She laughed. Seven always told it to her straight, so if he was willing to lie to her now, it meant she’d really fucked this up. “You think it’s that bad?”
He folded his arms. “It’ll be all right. Just so long as they don’t tell Rock who said it was him killed Temple.”
“We could pull them off.”
Seven frowned, shook his head. “We go get them out of TV land and tell them to go home, we gonna have a problem with them too. They young, but now they had a taste.”
“No.” Marlene stood up. “Get them out before more shit comes down. We made a mistake.” She drained the rest of her wine.
Now Seven Heaven stood up. If he wasn’t her brother’s closest friend, she’d let herself act on their attraction again, make their relationship more than just the work level. She thought back to the one time they made love on a Sunday afternoon, fell into what they both really wanted. She could still smell his scent, the cigar smoke on his sweatshirt.
“No,” he said. “We don’t—you don’t—make mistakes. That’s not how we run this. You tell them what you told them, then it be right. Rock our problem and now we sent them his way. They get killed, it’s on him, not us.”
She bit her bottom lip, pushed up her sleeves. Malik’s apartment was warm—all that free project heating pent up in one place. Soon it would be safe to go back to her apartment; she’d be more comfortable there.
“Maybe I did do the right thing. They wanted guns, we gave them guns, sent them in the right direction. But—” She let it hang, thinking the next part through to be absolutely sure.
Seven waited. When she was ready, she said, “But find out what really happened to Temple. This comes back, I want to have the truth in my hands. Use whatever leverage that can give me.”
