Young Junius, page 23
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
“I’m a get to work now,” the cop said. He was black and not someone Rough had ever seen before. Definitely not from around here. Boston maybe? He weaved farther into the apartment. “That my gun?” he asked, pointing at Rough’s feet with his nightstick.
Rough looked down and saw the Smith & Wesson. He bent and picked it up, holding it by the cylinder with the barrel pointed down. The cop reached out for it, but stood where he was until Rough stepped forward to place the gun in his hand.
“Thanks.”
Clarence was pulling his belt tight around his waist, smiling like he wanted to see what would happen. He showed his hands and then started to get up.
Rough gestured to Milk to put his gun away. “This a cop here. Police.”
“He don’t see nothing. Do you, cop?”
“I don’t see anything now, but something happens, I’m a to see that.”
“Milk my titties,” Clarence said, squeezing one of his pecs. He pushed his lips out. “Go on. Get ghost, son. Me and my officer got something to settle.”
Then Clarence held the badge out for them to see it: it was round at the bottom and with a crest on top. He held it up to his chest, smiling like a true crackhead, as if nothing mattered in the world.
“Who’s the cop now, pig? Why don’t you come show me?”
At that, the officer pointed his gun at Clarence, aiming low toward his legs, and shot. Clarence howled, collapsed sideways onto the bed, and went for his knee with both hands. He cradled his shin, both eyes squeezed tight. Rough started to imagine what getting shot in the shin might feel like, how it’d be to have that bone shattered, and he didn’t think about it long. Didn’t want to. The blood wasn’t gushing from the wound, but Rough saw some of it seep through Clarence’s hands.
“C Dub,” the cop said. “Show me a smile.”
“That’s cool,” Milk said. “We out, right?”
Roughneck and Milk both stepped toward the door, the cheap piece of hollow metal that would no longer go back on its frame.
Clarence made a sound that was part pain and part something else. Then he smiled at the cop, showing all his teeth and wildness in the eyes.
The cop hobbled forward toward the bed and tucked his gun into its holster. He gripped the nightstick with both hands. “Go on,” he said, over his shoulder. “Don’t make me tell you again.”
Rough grabbed Milk by the sleeve of his sweatshirt and pulled him out into the hall. He did his best to close the door, leaning it against its frame from the inside. When he turned, Milk was already halfway to the stairs and past the elevator. He didn’t look back, and Rough didn’t either, not even when he heard the nightstick hitting something hard.
Seven Heaven pushed the elevator call button.
It came and he got on, but as soon as it started up he realized how bad it would be if he got to the top and the doors opened on Rock’s boys. Even with his Tec ready, he’d be looking at guns in his face and no time to talk. He pushed the button for seventeen and the car stopped. Better to go softly up the stairs, where he could listen and creep, than to drop onto an upper floor in Rock’s building.
In the hall, he didn’t see anyone—just the dim fluorescents and the dirty walls. Then he heard a sound, something like scratching from the stairway, and he turned in that direction. When he did, the door opened and a thin, frail woman wearing a worn bathrobe and light blue fuzzy bedroom slippers walked out. She was holding the robe closed against her body, but even with her arms around her, Seven could tell she needed to put on weight. Her collarbones stuck up around her neck on each side, and he could see the tendons leading to her jaw as she came closer.
Her stomach poked out, distended below her arms like the Ethiopian kids you saw on TV with the flies buzzing on their faces. Like that or like she was pregnant. She looked hungry and cold but smiled wide, revealing teeth connected to gums that wanted to leave her mouth altogether. She cradled a big handful of crack rocks against her side with one arm.
Behind her, Seven thought he saw a white-and-black Air Jordan in the stairway through the gap in the door. Then it was gone.
“Handsome,” she said.
“What happened?”
The woman didn’t answer, but instead caught his arm and held it. “You Seven Heaven?”
Seven shook his arm free and pushed past her toward the stairs. Behind him, he heard the elevator doors close.
When he didn’t answer, she yelled, “Fuck you then! Stank-dick motherfucker!”
Seven didn’t look back. He got to the door and peered through its square window. It was dark on the other side, but he could see something black against the brown paint of the wall. He turned the handle and tried the door. He could only open it a foot before it hit something. Then what it hit moved and made a sound. He saw a Jordan kick once on the floor.
He pushed through the door into the stairway.
There on the floor, he saw a Latino kid lying in his own blood. He shifted when he saw Seven, smiled through the blood in his mouth. He was holding his stomach with both hands like he was trying to hold his life inside with his fingers. There was money around him on the floor: fives and tens in the blood, some bills crumpled between his fingers like he’d tried to use them to plug the holes. His breaths came slow and far apart, but his eyes moved, following Seven.
Past this, Seven saw more blood on the wall down the stairs, a trail of it leading away from the next landing.
Seven turned back to the Latino with the Jordans. “Who did this?” he asked.
The pusher smiled, blood between his teeth. “Ambulance.”
Seven saw a few weed bags on the floor and up around his head. The rest of what he held had probably been picked clean by the woman in the robe—the reason for her smile.
“Ambulance,” he said again.
Then Seven saw a shell casing on the floor by the far wall and he wished he hadn’t. He could tell the gun it had come from, but pretended he wasn’t sure until he picked it up and held it himself in his own two fingers. He still didn’t want to know.
Seven looked back at the slinger, who knew what he was getting into when he decided to play the game. He wasn’t going to live long enough to see the inside of an ambulance.
The white uppers of his Jordans were stained with blood. Such a shame to fuck up a nice pair of $120 sneakers like that. Not that that mattered; not that there weren’t much bigger things to deal with.
Seven started up the stairs, hoping to get to Junius before Rock did.
66
Junius crawled back down the stairs for the first landing down from twenty-two. If he took a shot, he wanted to be standing and ready to run. He crawled down to the landing and then made the turn around the corner for the next flight, holding his gun over the rail, ready to take a shot at legs or feet if someone started toward him.
He glanced at the doorway to the next floor, the twenty-first, and this doorway was empty also, exactly the same as above: someone had taken the doors off their hinges to leave empty doorways here on the top two floors.
Dropping down into a crouch to see the other end of twenty-one, Junius made out feet on the stairs—a pair of legs and even, suddenly, a face with a gun.
He fired.
Junius didn’t dream of making the shot at that distance—all the way down the hall—but he hoped letting off a shot would stop the guy from coming, give him the time he needed.
He vaulted over the rail and onto the first flight down from twenty-one, then jumped down to the next landing. He turned and nestled himself into a corner, his back to the walls, where he could see the stairs above and below him, the stairs and the landings and the hall.
A shot echoed from above, from somewhere at the other end of the hall, and this one was loud—a real gunshot, not like the whistle of his silencer. Something landed in his hair, and Junius brushed it off, looked up to see a small cloud of plaster dust a few feet above him. A shot had hit the wall there, maybe three or four feet from his head.
Junius ducked lower, gripping the Tec in both hands. He slipped a fresh magazine from the back pocket of his jeans and switched it for the one he’d partly used.
He watched the stairs and the hall.
Elf sat on the couch trying to make nice with Miss Emma. She was a nice old lady and after she offered him the Kool-Aid a second time, he agreed to have a glass.
It was good, too. Elf felt his stomach grumble and he knew he was hungry, that the chicken nuggets weren’t enough. But he couldn’t ask this woman for food straight out either, and Seven told him not to leave until he and Junius got back.
Bullshit, is what it all was. The second time today he’d been left behind. He knew he could handle himself in these towers. He smiled at the old woman, did his best to act interested in what she had to say, but what was she talking about? Something about all the phone calls she made around North Cambridge to folks.
“That’s how I came up on the truth about it, finally,” she said.
“Truth about what?”
She shook her head. “Boy, ain’t you been listening to anything I just said?”
Elf smiled. “I apologize, ma’am. I guess my mind started to wander. I tend to do that when I’m hungry.” She crossed her arms, went back to gliding in her chair. She didn’t make any motion to pick up on his comment about being hungry, but there it was.
“What was you saying?” he asked.
“Something important. I’m talking about your friend’s older brother, Temple. Ain’t you the least bit interested in how I found out what happened to your friend’s brother?” She looked down to her lap. “Such a shame, really.”
“What?” Elf said, forgetting his stomach for the moment. “What you mean, ‘What happened to Temple?’”
She sucked her teeth. “Can’t even think beyond your own stomach is the problem with you, is it? That all you got on your mind—food?”
“Tell me what you was going to say about Temple?”
She stared back at Elf, pursed her lips in front of her face until they stuck out almost as far as her nose. “Boy, now you want to know about how Temple died? Feel like listening?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Elf said. “Yes, ma’am.”
67
Gary Johnson crossed the small, dirty room in two limping strides and swung the nightstick down hard on Clarence, who tried to block it with his right arm. It hit the forearm, which made a sound like it broke, and a memory in the back of Johnson’s mind sprang to life, telling him he’d done damage to that same arm earlier.
Clarence bit down hard, gnashing his teeth, his lips pulled back. He was on the floor at the end of the bed. His face shook but he didn’t make a sound, didn’t scream. Instead, on his next breath, he moaned like something good had happened, said, “Yeah, motherfucker!”
Johnson tried the other direction now, swinging from his ankles in an uppercut and going for Clarence’s face, but he lost some of his balance, and Clarence caught the end of the nightstick with his left hand. Now he made another sound, this one more like pain, and pulled on the stick. But Johnson shoved it at him, pushing the end into Clarence’s neck. That stopped him, and Johnson swung again, brought the stick down hard at Clarence’s chest now, hitting him between the shoulder and neck. He heard the collar bone snap.
“Yeah, motherfucker,” Johnson said. “How you like that?” He slapped his badge across the floor with his stick, knocking it away from Clarence.
Clarence fell back against the blankets, nodding and sticking his tongue all the way out to lick at his chin. “Mmmm,” he said, nodding.
Johnson sat down on the bed, breathing heavy, his lungs pumping. He could hear a rattle in his chest and hacked, trying to catch whatever was loose, and spit something red and thick onto the floor.
“Nice,” he said. “Aren’t we a fucking pair.” He coughed and spit again. “How about I kick the shit out of you and then we both us go to a hospital?”
Clarence spoke through clenched teeth. “Fuck off, pig. Just get your badge and get out.” He pulled in a big breath of air and shouted, “Leave!”
Johnson looked to his badge on the floor, not ten feet from where he sat. The crackhead was right: he should just get out, get the fuck gone and leave this mess in his wake. Get back to his unit, if it wasn’t on blocks by now, and drive his own self to a hospital. But getting up off the bed, picking up the badge, and walking were not actions that would come easy.
He reached for the radio on his shoulder, then remembered that it wasn’t there. Lost or broken, he couldn’t remember which, and at this point it didn’t matter.
“Fuck,” he said, looking down at his legs. “Look at us both now.”
Big Pickup didn’t like finding TV Malik alone in his apartment. That Junius had left a long while back and that Seven and Elf went on to find him didn’t sit well either. Pickup knew this wouldn’t go over well with Marlene. She wanted to know what was going on at all times; she wanted control. Now, with Seven Heaven and the boys gone ahead, after who knew what—maybe even Rock—the other part that Pickup didn’t like was it meant he had to follow.
That was what Marlene had asked him to do.
He had to go after them, and since they weren’t in Marlene’s towers—he’d been in and out of those plenty to know—all three must have gone on to 412. Pickup thought back to the stare-down that morning between him and Roughneck—Roughneck and Black Jesus. They were not his friends.
He was not meant to go over there. Doing it was like trespassing, and trespassing made it open season—open season on his ass.
“This ain’t good.”
“Nah. They’ve been gone for a while now. My guess is they’ve got the jump on where you’re going.”
Pickup shook his head. “What you say?”
“I said—”
“Nevermind.” Pickup cut him off with a wave of his hand and left the TV-land apartment behind.
He rode the elevator down to the bottom of 411 by himself. No cops were out front, so he told the boys and the slingers in the lobby and out front to get back up on sales. Shit had come apart a little today with the cops on the scene, but now it was time to make sales. Even though Pickup liked giving the order, it made him pissed at Seven. Seven wasn’t doing his job.
Seven was the top man, the one supposed to be in charge.
No matter what was going down, it was Seven’s job to be on top of it all, to make sure areas were covered for sales: lobbies, stairs, wherever.
Pickup would have to make Marlene aware of this. She had trusted him to do it, too. That was a note of confidence.
But first he had to find what was what in 412. He had to find Seven Heaven and Little Elf and Junius Posey. Those motherfuckers still stood in his way.
He came out into the cold air and looked around. The sun sat low over the old Polynesian restaurant on the other side of the highway, stretching its rays along the bottom of a few thin clouds. The wind had increased and the temperature was dropping.
“So what you gonna do now?” one of the soldiers asked, a boy barely seventeen.
“Shit.” Pickup didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to think it, and definitely didn’t want to do it. He shook his head, pulled the Tec-9 from the back of his pants, and tucked it inside his jacket. He pulled back the bolt and slid it forward, setting a round into the chamber.
He spoke into the wind, didn’t care if the others heard him or not. “Lock and load, son. I’m going up into the 412.”
68
Seven had just come up a few flights when he heard the shot. He heard the familiar whistle first, the sound of a silencer he’d customized himself. The shot was fired from above him on the stairway, his stairway, and Seven knew Junius couldn’t be far.
Then he heard a second shot, and this one was loud. It sounded like it had come from the far side of the building, maybe the other end of a hall.
That shot was from a handgun. Possibly a Beretta or maybe a Walther. No silencer.
He felt the side of his jeans for where he’d slipped two of his fifty-round clips into the pocket that some jeans company had meant for a hammer. His hammer was like this: nine millimeter and ready to go bang.
The Tec-9 in his hand was one of the few he’d modified to go full auto. If shit came down to seriously fucking something up, he was not about to be letting off a few shots. He’d be letting off many. He fingered the trigger guard and felt his pulse quicken.
Yeah, something was getting ready to go down.
At the next hallway up, nineteen, Seven hit the door and raced down the hall. If someone was shooting from the far stairway, that was the one he would take. If he was coming up on somebody from behind, he didn’t want it to be Junius, he wanted it to be one of Rock’s boys so he could open up and ask questions later.
He was quiet at the doorway on the other end of the hall, looked through the small window onto the stairs. No one was there. Then he opened the door slowly, turning the knob all the way before pulling the door.
He slipped out into the stairs and closed the door himself, letting the knob and the bolt settle softly. Then he made his way around the outside wall, keeping his back against it, the Tec in front of him. He climbed the stairs sideways, watching the next landing and the flight above, staying slow and careful, making sure he didn’t see anyone above him up on twenty.
He was on the landing between twenty and twenty-one when he heard the blast of a shotgun from the other end of the building. He could see the hallway on twenty-one didn’t have a door on it, and that explained the clarity of the sound.
Seven made his way along the wall, watching above him. He was close to where the first loud shot came from. That he knew.
Clarence reached across his body with his left hand, straining to get into his right-hand pants pocket. He could feel two rocks in there but getting at them would be hard. The cop still sat on his bed, breathing hard, something inside him rattling and wheezing. Slowly, Clarence managed to slide one of the rocks upward by trapping its bottom half and pushing it against his skin, squeezing it toward the opening at the top of the pocket. He finally felt the tip of the baggie against his fingers and pulled at it, brought it out so he could see the white hardness inside the ziplock.
