Young Junius, page 19
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
“Yo, this shit best get cleaned up,” Black Jesus said. He bent down and picked up the police baton that lay next to the door.
“Milk!”
Milk slapped the kid in the head and took the mop himself, dropped it into the water and put it in the wringer right, then cranked the lever to really get it dry.
At the back of the building, the blood trail had thinned. It ended in a pool around the cop, most of it up by his head. He looked like he might just be asleep if it weren’t for the lumps on his temple, his busted lips, and his swollen eye.
“Yeah,” Rough said, as the other two stood looking. “C Dub did this shit and took three crack rocks off the boy on eight, then went up to smoke base. We got to shut his ass down.”
Black Jesus sucked his teeth. He pointed the baton at the cop and shook his head. “C Dub is just not fucking right today. Not right at all.”
“Let me take his ass down. Give me ten minutes alone with that bitch and his problem be solved for the week. The month.”
Mike Only turned back away from the cop’s body to look at Rough. He frowned, but not like he wasn’t thinking about it. He looked like he might come around. Then Black Jesus shook his head. “What we do with this cop? That’s first.”
Rough waited until it was clear that neither of them had a good suggestion, and then he offered Milk’s idea about throwing him into the dumpster.
Mike Only laughed, but Black Jesus still stood facing the body.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
Roughneck felt as surprised as Mike Only looked, but he hurried to go for the feet so he wouldn’t get blood on him. Also, if the fucker woke up, he did not want to be the one the guy saw.
The three lifted the cop’s body awkwardly: Rough at the feet and the other two each took a shoulder. They pushed through the back doors, and the good part was the cop didn’t wake up while they took him outside.
He didn’t wake up until the first time they tried swinging him up into the dumpster. The first time it didn’t take: Black Jesus stopped at the last second, when he saw they didn’t have enough height to clear the front lip of the dumpster, and the cop crashed into its side with his shoulders and head, the part Mike was still trying to shove over the top.
“Fuck,” was the first thing the cop said. Then he started to squirm. But Black Jesus and Mike Only just exchanged one look, a fast glance of recognition, and then they both swung his upper body into the side of the dumpster, knocking his head against it hard. It made a sound like a gong. The cop stopped squirming.
“Let’s just lift,” Black Jesus said, hoisting his end of the cop over his shoulders. Mike Only did the same, and Rough got the legs high enough to follow when the other two brought the body right to the edge of the dumpster and then hand-passed him in onto the trash.
From the sound of it, he had a soft landing on the bags. They all three listened for a minute to make sure he wasn’t squirming or kicking around, then Black Jesus tossed the baton in after him and they went back inside to get that blood cleaned up off the floor.
54
Seven had the 411’s elevator all to himself as he rode up to twenty, but at each floor he worried it would stop and a cop might get on. On twenty, the doors opened and nothing happened. Seven looked out into the empty hallway.
It wouldn’t have surprised him if the building turned out to be haunted, what with Jason and the other dead brothers all out there somewhere, ready to come back and fuck with him from the beyond. He laughed to himself, hoped that would never come true.
Maybe he would get by without any more shit from the police today. That wasn’t such a big thing to ask, was it? No. He didn’t think it was.
Seven got out and walked the few steps to the TV-land apartment and knocked. He could hear the sound of a woman’s voice talking.
The door opened and Seven saw the TV set before anything else: the old show where a hot chick with black hair and long legs tried not to get into too much trouble. Just a few years back, he’d rubbed out more than a few watching her run around in her short-ass ’70s dresses from back in the day. Too much leg on the show and not enough pussy in his life left him to fantasize at home in the afternoons when he skipped school. What else was a growing young man supposed to do?
“Hey, Seven, what’s up?”
He looked down and there was Malik. “Yo.” Then he looked right and saw only one of the boys from before: Elf sat by himself on the couch.
“Yo.” Seven nodded at the TV and walked into the apartment. Instead of giving dap to Malik, he ran his hand over the top of his head, then palmed it and shook him around. “What’s up?”
Elf pointed at the TV. “This bitch kind of hot, tell you the truth. Boy knows his television.”
“Damn right this boy know his TV. This here TV land.”
After shutting the door, Malik stepped up next to Seven. “So we’ve confirmed that Marlo Thomas is unquestionable more attractive than Lucille Ball.”
“Oh, most definitely,” Elf said. “No doubt.”
“It’s true.” Seven then came right to what worried him. “Yo, where your boy?”
Elf looked to the couch next to him, as if Junius might just appear. “He coming back. Said he was going out to look for you.”
“We’re making some chicken nuggets for lunch. You’re welcome to stay.”
Seven reached down to pull Elf off the couch. “But Pickup left you both up in here, right? He told you to stay.”
Elf nodded, mumbling something.
“How long ago he leave?”
“Oh, he left before Lucy even started. So that’s been almost an hour.”
“Damn.” An image of Junius cuffed and being led out of the building to a squad car flashed through Seven’s mind. “Where he at now?”
Elf looked serious for the first time since Seven walked in. “Yo, I’m sorry about that shit up on the roof, man. I fucked up.”
Seven glanced away, avoiding Elf’s eyes. He didn’t want to think about whether giving them the guns was right. He shook his head. Looking down, he saw Shari had a crazy-ass rug on her living room floor. It had so many colors, you could throw up on it and no one would know.
“Drak has my Tec now, anyway,” Elf said. He pulled up his shirt and drew two Berettas from his waist, aimed them down at the ugly rug.
“Yo! Put those guns away in here right now. This is a no guns, no swearing household.” Malik looked up at Seven like he wanted to know if Seven could believe this.
“Put them away. I see what you got. Now you know how to set those safeties?”
When Elf said he didn’t, Seven stepped over and took the guns, set their safeties one at a time, showing Elf how it was done. Malik complained, but Seven waived him off. He handed one gun back to Elf and pushed the other down the back of his pants.
“I’m a keep this for now,” he said. “So your boy, where he be? Because we need to find him. This place covered with Five-O.”
Elf’s eyes stayed on the TV, but his chin nodded at Seven.
“You guys don’t want to stay for chicken nuggets? They’ll be ready in eight minutes.”
Now Elf turned his full attention to Seven, who nodded toward the door. “We out. Eat that shit cold if you want it.”
“I wouldn’t—” Malik started, but Elf was already up and heading for the kitchen. It was the fastest Seven had seen him move.
Elf opened the oven door and pulled out a nugget. He bit into it and started nodding as he chewed. “Just a little cold in the middle,” he said around the food. “I can eat these.”
“Make sure you leave me some.”
Seven turned and opened the door to the hallway as Elf leaned into the oven to grab more of the nuggets. Malik made a face, but didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” Seven told Elf. “We out.”
55
The part Junius couldn’t believe was the silence, the still quiet. Here he’d shot two in the stairwell, perhaps killed one and left another bleeding, and there was no sound. No screaming, nobody crying for the police, no vengeful crew members yelling after him.
It was just the normal sounds of the building as he made his way up the floors: mothers yelling at their children, boys and girls playing in the halls, girls just a few years younger than him talking on the phone. And the TVs. Seemed like most of the noises he could hear when he stopped to listen were from TVs: the regular weekday game shows, soap operas, and random old sitcoms on UHF.
It was all quiet in his head, too: no voices second-guessing, no wishes that he hadn’t done something, no background buzz about anything at all. Somehow, he felt like all of his thoughts had been cleaned, put on mute.
Maybe it was the desperation of the woman, the way she offered to blow him with that nasty mouth. She was worse than anything he’d seen up in Teele Square or Davis, anything Big Willie put in his way. These towers were a whole different world. Even the air here felt dead.
In Teele Square, everything was open—you could see the sky. Here, it was drab hallways with their dirty, off-white paint, flickering fluorescents, stairways that held the same noises and smells all the way up, as high as you could go.
No air, no light; a world like one underground.
These towers.
It was enough to make you do anything to get out.
He continued up the stairs slowly, listening, his gun still drawn and his knees bent so he’d be ready to move fast.
He tried to walk like the heroes in the kung fu movies on Saturday afternoons, the ones with the wide black pants and the shirts tied across their chests. He moved like a cat, or as close to how a cat would move as he could manage.
Another floor up and the sound of the TVs began to die down. The other noises peeled away. Junius was getting closer to Rock.
Gary Johnson smelled bananas. It wasn’t the smell of fresh-sliced banana bread or a nice cut-up banana on his morning cereal, it was the smell of old, black bananas and peels, a strong smell that hit him as he opened his eyes for the first time. Make that one eye. Even before he knew where he was, he realized that his left eye was swollen shut. Johnson touched that side of his face and felt a bruise the size of a golf ball sticking out where his eye should be.
“Fuck me.” He heard the words come out, felt pain, and then moved, shifted how he lay. He heard the rustling of plastic bags. It felt soft, where he was lying, but there was that smell and something hard and pointy sticking into his lower back. As he came to his senses, the smell grew to include vomit, soiled diapers, and rotting food. By the time he could see his surroundings, it didn’t surprise him to find the rusty metal walls of a dumpster.
Toward the sky he could see one of the brick buildings of the towers. Now he started to hurt. He squirmed to get up, but moving only made him sink deeper into the trash.
He tried to sit and something sharp poked his ass. When he pulled it out, he found a broken-off TV antenna with one end burned black. He threw this against the dumpster’s side.
Last he remembered, he was in the lobby or back hall, fighting or being dragged around by that freak drug addict. Now that his consciousness opened, his pain started to center itself in certain key points: his lower back on the right side, his hands, his head.
His head felt like it had been hit about the temples with a golf club, as if someone tried to hit the ball over his eye with a driver and missed. The front of his face hurt too, but he couldn’t tell whether that pain came more from his eye or his nose.
The nose.
The nose hurt worse than the eye by a long shot. In fact, the eye barely hurt at all. It was just there, a pressure pushing on his face, obscuring his vision. He’d seen worse in all-city boxing, once had both eyes puff out on him, but never had one swollen like this.
His nose was broken; it felt like he was breathing through a chewed-on straw.
Then he remembered his gun. He went for it immediately, but it wasn’t there.
He hissed through bloody lips that split as he stretched them. Next he patted his front down with cold, brittle hands, and when he couldn’t find his badge, it didn’t surprise him.
He rolled to the closer side of the dumpster and clawed at the metal. By working his body against the trash and pushing his feet down into somewhat-stable bags, he managed to stand up and look out over the side.
The first thing he saw was the last thing he wanted to: more officers.
To his right along the fence, a handful of bodies were huddled around the back of the Olds 98. They were all looking down at something—or someone.
That was when Johnson knew they were looking after the boy he laid out.
Kelley was bent down by his head, checking for vitals. That would be just what Johnson needed: to have reports filed about him for a lost gun and assaulting a minor in the same day. That would go over great with his superiors. He’d probably be lucky to keep his job.
He swore softly against the rusty metal. The other officers still hadn’t seen him.
But if the boy was just knocked out—Pooh!—then why were they spending so much time examining him?
Then Johnson got the whole set of details: something about the tilt of the boots on the ground clued him in and made him realize the boy wasn’t going to get up. He wanted to swear again, curse the fucking project gods that put him in a situation as fucked up all around as this one—where he probably needed some medical attention himself and couldn’t face the rest of his detail for not one but two reasons.
“Fuck.” He said it even though it made his lips hurt. He lowered himself back down into the stink and the trash, touched his nose and felt blood caked onto his upper lip and around its sides.
“Motherfuck,” he said, and he thought of the crackhead fuck who did this to him. Johnson had to take that fuck out himself—right here and today—so he could get his gun and his badge back. Of that much, he was sure.
He checked the radio on his shoulder to find out why he hadn’t heard the talk and realized it was broken, smashed in his fight.
He pulled the unit off his uniform and dropped it into the trash. He’d be better off without it now. What he had to do today he’d be better off doing all by himself.
56
Aldo Posey woke to the sound of a phone ringing in the adjacent room. His eyes hurt; overnight the pain had returned—the dryness that only loosened with the day’s first drink.
A clock on the dresser read one thirty, and, from the light coming in the windows, it was definitely afternoon. That was when it hit him where he was. The clock had been in its place on her dresser for more than ten years. He was home, in his ex-wife’s bed again.
He wanted to forget everything he’d done wrong, the ways he’d fucked up, being pushed by his wife and oldest son out of his own house, all that had happened the night before.
It was his drinking, of course, that had led him to this. Aldo wouldn’t argue that. He’d let a great part of himself go. When Temple was twelve, he’d helped his mother kick the old man out of his own house. Temple, the little man, her man. Truth was, Aldo had been proud of how Temple took care of Junius and taught him how to play ball. Even proud of how he stood up for his mother.
But still.
Still, for just this moment of hearing the phone and looking at the old clock on her dresser, waking up in his old bed, he felt like he was home.
The phone rang again.
That was when last night’s events started coming back to him in full. He looked down, saw his clothes and the sheet wrapped around his legs and was grateful to his wife for letting him sleep, not pushing him back out into the world.
He sat up. It was one thirty in the afternoon, plus Gail’s extra five minutes to make sure she was always early, which meant it wasn’t quite that late. Still, this was what Gail would call “sloth.” The answering machine picked up the phone, and his ex-wife’s voice slowly explained that no one was home, not her or her sons. She’d taken his name off the recording. Of course.
The machine beeped and a woman’s frail voice started in. “Mrs. Posey? This Miss Emma Lawrence calling to say I’m sorry about your boys.”
Aldo’s heart skipped a beat. Had she really said “boys”? He remembered the business from last night: the guns in the living room and those hoods of Rock’s he helped force their way in. He prayed it hadn’t led to Junius getting harmed.
Then and there, Aldo swore that if Junius was dead because of him, he’d never take another drink again in his life.
“I extend my condolences to you about Temple, that beautiful boy. May he rest in peace. And I wanted to call and let you know that I just seen your youngest son, Junius, here in the Rindge Towers looking to get himself into no good.”
Aldo slid his feet off the bed and onto the floor. Junius was alive. He wanted his happiness to come from that fact alone, but he knew it came too from the fact that he’d have another drink today.
“I just saw him when my nephew Randall brought him in for a visit. It isn’t good that he’s over here. And looking for the boy they call Black Moses? Guardy Little, is what his name used to be. That boy ain’t never up to no good. Your son here looking to find him, then you got a worry.”
“Shit.” Aldo shoved his hands onto his knees and forced himself to stand. When he’d come last night, he’d brought Clarence. Clarence did not mean anything good for anybody. He was close to Rock and crazy, liable to do any damn thing he pleased.
And he was looking for Junius.
Aldo walked across the floor into the living room, his back hurting and his sciatica, shooting flashes of bright pain all the way down his right leg into his toes. The floorboards creaked under him to match his knees. He really had put some miles on his old body, that was for sure, and he’d be lucky to get many more if he kept up like this.
Two steps more toward the phone and the sciatica was so painful he just wanted to lie down and have a drink.
“You know Guardy be dealing with that man thinks he own my building, Mrs. Posey. You know the one calls hisself Rock? Boy think he the Prudential or some craziness! Never can stand that fool. But—”
