Young Junius, page 28
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
“Used to be he’d get in a fight or something, I could just go down and fix things, pull him out and set him straight.”
“When was that?”
He tried to think it through, count the years, but he’d lost track.
“Seems like it wasn’t that long ago.”
When she didn’t answer, he said, “I lost my older boy this week.”
She slid back and forth in her glider, the blanket she was making on her lap. “I’m so sorry about that. He was a good boy, much as I can remember. Now your youngest here trying to fix it, but the problem didn’t start here.”
Aldo sat up and looked at her. “That’s what I came to hear. How this happen?”
“Shame.” She shook her head and turned to him. Their eyes met for the first time, and Aldo looked away. Her lower lip was pushed out in disgust at it all.
“Didn’t even involve these towers, though that’s not what Willie told your Junius. Then the boy come up here, looking for trouble, doing what he thinks needed doing. You know how that goes. Been there yourself, I imagine.”
Aldo nodded slowly. He was back to looking at the kitchen again. It didn’t matter whether he stopped drinking today or tomorrow. Or at all.
“Now he taking on these towers, trying to prove hisself a man.”
Aldo got up and stepped around the coffee table, across the rug, and onto the linoleum.
“Might as well,” she said.
In the cabinet by the stove, he found a bottle of malt liquor unopened, cooking sherry, and a fifth of good scotch.
“Malt liquor ain’t mine,” she told him. “So don’t go telling me I should keep it cold. That swill can rot for all I care.”
He turned the bottle around to see the label: Olde English 800, the eight ball, one of his favorites.
“Shit,” he said. Even now it felt a shame to see the bottle left forgotten. He wanted to put it in the refrigerator. Instead he took out the whiskey. “Just one pull.”
He straightened up and screwed off the cap. It stuck, sugar crystalized inside it, but he got it off and brought the bottle up to his mouth before he realized it was bad form.
The old woman watched him. “Don’t stop on my account.”
Careful not to let the glass touch his lips, he poured just a little under his tongue. It brought a sense of warm he hadn’t felt all day.
“Talk to your wife today?” Miss Lawrence asked. “I’m thinking she be home by now.”
“Not my wife.”
Aldo wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. He opened a cabinet and saw white mugs lined up on a shelf, took one, and set it down onto the counter. Slowly, carefully, he poured two fingers of the whiskey into it, then set the bottle on the counter and raised the mug, knocked that off in one pull. Now he was warm; he could feel the strong heat of the drink spreading through him, burning down his neck and settling at the pit of his gut.
“What is wrong with these boys?” he asked, raising his voice a touch so she would know he was serious. He poured out three fingers this time and turned, ready to meet her eyes and accept any criticism, any doubt.
But she wasn’t even looking. She’d gone back to poking with her hook.
“I can fix this.” He took a small sip and set the mug on the counter. “They won’t take both my boys in one week.”
“One bad enough,” she said. “Sure is.”
Then another gunshot came from above, louder than the others.
“Shotgun,” she said. “That belong to Harold. Poor child, he never was any good.” She shook her head. “What you gonna do? Tell me how you fix this mess?”
She looked at him without anger, disappointment, or even concern for his drinking. She sat there taking it all in, every bit: the building, his drinking, the shooting.
She went back to her blanket.
“I’m gonna go up there and take that boy home.”
He watched her hook dip in and out of the yarn, raised the mug and took another sip.
81
Elf stood aside to let Big Pickup choose where they went and what they’d do. The hall they were in looked exactly like the one on fifteen, just like all the others he’d seen in these towers. They all smelled the same too—like old funk mixed with piss.
Pickup turned toward one end of the hall and told Elf to come on.
“Yo, you fucked up that cop,” Elf said. “That pig got bitch-slapped.” He tried to laugh, but the truth was he hadn’t liked it.
Pickup didn’t respond. Elf heard another series of shots from above and behind and jumped. He spun with his gun out, but it hit against the wall and fell to the floor. He stooped to grab it quickly, hoping Pickup hadn’t seen.
Pickup reached the door at the end of the hall and stooped to look through the small, rectangular window into the stairway. Its glass was crisscrossed with thin red wires.
“See what I’m saying?” Pickup asked. “That’s why you weak.”
He turned the knob and opened the door partway. As soon as it opened, Elf heard the whistle of air rushing up and down the twenty-two floors. Then he heard another shot go off, and this time it was much louder, echoing up and down the hard walls.
“Fuck.”
Pickup blocked his path into the stairwell with his body. Before he moved through the door, he turned to look back at Elf. His eyes were small, his brows pushed together. “You scare like a bitch on me, I shoot you myself.”
“I—” Elf said.
“And you drop your gun again, you’ll deserve it.”
Pickup stepped into the stairwell as a huge gunshot boomed from the floor above. Elf cringed, trying not to jump.
“Yo, shit is loud is all.”
“Gonna be louder when you pull the trigger. You handle that?”
Elf caught the door and stepped through it. As soon as he did, he saw blood on the railing. When he looked up, he saw it dripping from the flight above. He saw another drop fall and turned, watched Pickup start up the steps along the wall, his Tec out in front of him.
Elf thought he could hear crying, like someone was bawling but trying to keep it quiet. Then he heard a big sniffle. Someone was worse off than he was. He had that to keep him steady.
As Pickup walked around the outside of the stairwell, aiming up, Elf did his best to cover their backs. He held his gun with two hands and aimed it down the stairs, stole looks above them at the blood but tried not to think about it, his lips sucked into his mouth to keep from swearing.
The crying was louder as they came higher, and now Elf could see the blood trail down the side of the stairs. Pickup had reached the next landing. He put the first finger of his left hand to his lips and the crying stopped at a final sniffle.
Elf came up behind him, stepped in front to see who was there: it was Ness crying with snot running down his mouth, his face all mashed up like it got when you were just a little dude, bawling your ass off because someone knocked you down.
Pickup kept his finger over his lips as he walked sideways. He swayed his head toward the hallway like he wanted a better look.
Ness raised his hands above his shoulders. “I promise I won’t do nothing,” he whispered.
“What happened?” Elf asked, coming up the rest of the stairs. Pickup shot his left arm out in front of him, but Elf could see all of Ness now through the rails and what he saw looked bad: Ness bled heavily from his legs just below the knees. All Elf could see was blood—a mess of it covering his pants, sticking them to his shins; blood covering the steps, dripping down to the landing below.
Elf swore, and Ness started crying again, but Pickup gave a look and Ness covered his face with his hands. For a moment, this quieted the sounds, but then Ness screamed, full-on howled into his palms and let out a cry so full of pain and frustration that Elf stumbled back against the wall.
The scream echoed around the stairwell.
Big Pickup swore, and Elf heard silenced shots firing from his Tec-9. He turned to see the muzzle flash from the gun as the shots kept firing up the hall, then he tripped down a stair or two and landed on his hands and knees. He was about to swear, but Pickup looked down at him, and the disgust on his face was enough to shut Elf up.
Pickup stepped into the next hallway with his gun by his side, following the direction he’d just shot. Elf collected himself, slowly got back to his feet, and went up to the next landing to see what he’d done.
Ness had stopped crying. He looked at Elf like he couldn’t believe what was happening.
“Who he shot?”
Elf looked up the hall. He saw Pickup’s back, mostly, his body taking space, but then he noticed a mound on the floor: body parts and clothes.
“Is that Dee?” Elf asked.
“Fuck,” Ness said. “Bitch capped my boy.”
Elf could barely believe what he was seeing. “Yo, he fucked him up.”
“Shoot his ass for me, then. Fucking blow him away.”
Elf looked down at the gun in his hand, the one from Miss Emma, and then back at Ness.
“Shoot me, then,” Ness said. “Just kill me now.”
“What happened to your legs, niggah? Who did that?”
“You hear what I said? I said kill my ass.”
Elf looked back up the hall. Pickup had stopped by Dee with his gun pointed down. Another series of loud shots echoed down the far stairway, and Pickup got low.
“Everybody shooting,” Ness said. That was when Elf noticed the Tec on Ness’s other side, just laid out on a step, peaceful as a puppy.
“Who shot you?”
“I just fucking smoke weed son, get high like Apollo 7.” Ness looked at Elf. “You holding? I know you can see I be hurting.”
It took Elf a second to register what he was hearing and another to take mental inventory of his pockets. “I got trees,” he said. “But how you gonna smoke with all this shit?”
“Watch me.”
“Ok.” Elf took the rolled ziplock bag out of his jacket and offered it to Ness. “Smoke, brother.”
“Got papers? A pipe?”
Up the hall, Elf watched Pickup stand to full height. He’d seen something beyond Dee and started talking. It looked like he was speaking to someone in an apartment on the right side of the hall.
Then Pickup raised his Tec and held it at an angle, as if he was pointing it at someone on the floor.
Rock had come halfway to the end of the hall when he heard the elevator doors open behind him. He cursed, then flattened himself against the wall and aimed the Uzi back at the elevator. Just to keep anyone from thinking they weren’t in the middle of some serious shit, he shot a few rounds down the hall.
“You do not want to come up in here now, motherfucker!”
Watching both stairways and the elevator doors as best he could, he inched forward; if he could get to the elevator and flip the manual-hold button, the damn thing might come in handy as a way out. He thought he still had the special key that would keep it from stopping on any other floors on its way down too. If shit went wrong, that was an out he might have to take.
Bonnie barked louder from inside his apartment. If she was fucking up things inside it, gone to town on his leather sofa or torn up his Persian rug, she’d be out on the corner come morning. Fuck that shit. For the amount he’d spent on her, she could tear up the couch and still stick around. But if she did anything to Berry—
He stopped himself; that was a possibility he didn’t want to consider.
“Shut up!” he yelled at his apartment. “Bonnie! Sit!”
For the moment, the dog stopped barking.
He got to the elevator and spun quickly into the car, holding the Uzi at his waist, ready to fire.
But he didn’t need to. All he saw was the slumped body of a black policeman, probably the same fucked-up cop that his soldiers had been trying to get rid of all day. And now someone was fucking with him: sending this cop on up to his floor to show him he still had this problem on his hands.
Rock swore again at the air.
He heard more shooting from down on the next floor and stepped into the car.
He kicked the cop hard in the thigh, then again in the top half of his arm. The dumb pig just crumpled against the floor, limp against the wall.
“Yeah,” Rock said. “Motherfuckers sent you to fuck with me, huh, dead cop? Fucking dumb-ass pig?” Rock kicked him again. “Stupid, stupid motherfucker! You should know to stay out my towers!”
The cop’s head looked like it’d just been barrel-slapped by someone’s gun: his bald scalp was split open over his ear and fresh blood trailed down his neck.
“Stupid ass,” Rock said. He turned away from the cop and pulled the manual-stop button on the elevator before stepping back into the hall.
He looked up and down the corridor, heard more shooting from the floor below, and knew it was time to act. It was time to man up and show people some shit.
“Yo, Hammer!” he called. “Hammer!”
When no one answered, he popped a new clip into his Uzi and started up the hall.
82
Marlene couldn’t wait.
She’d smoked a half-dozen Newports and her throat hurt. Today’s pack was down to its last three and that told her it was time to go. They called her the Oracle for many reasons, but one of them was supposed to be her knowledge of when to act and what to do in a given situation. Whether the title applied or not, she believed in actions defining themselves, that you pushed ahead and the world formed to meet your moves—a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Now it was time to listen to the voice telling her to go, that things were taking too long; something, everything, was fucked up.
Seven Heaven, Big Pickup, and the two kids had all been gone for too long. First Seven had left and not come back, then Pickup disappeared. They both liked to keep her away from any action, high up in her tower, but she was no one’s princess. No, she was a woman capable of handling whatever came her way.
If either of those two got hurt, or worse—the young bucks she sent over to do a man’s job, a job she should have done herself—that shit would be on her conscience in a big way.
Out the window, the sky had grown dark, but below, the streetlights of Route 2 and the Alewife T station lit the night. Even Rindge Ave. and the area in front of the towers was well lit. Just another benefit of life in the towers: it was never fully night, never time to pack up shop and go to sleep. A 24-7 candy store—that was her home.
She saw a Honda Accord turn off Rindge Ave. into the parking lot; she didn’t recognize the car, which meant it was probably a customer. She laughed, just one short breath, thinking that with all the commotion and the warring, she wasn’t even sure if someone was downstairs to sell. Then she laughed again at her concern. There was always someone downstairs, always ready to sell drugs and make some money.
Marlene crossed the floor from the windows, toward her door, then stopped at the coatrack and pulled on her shearling and a warm hat.
It was Seven she worried about most. Just Seven. And maybe it was time she acted on those feelings, did something about the man who considered himself her brother’s best friend. In the year since Malik went to prison, Seven had become her best friend—the person closest to her and most on her mind.
She slid open the hall closet and took a fresh pack of Newports out of the carton on the shelf. This went into one of her outside pockets. Behind the carton and underneath some old clothes was her gun box. She pulled it down and set it on the floor. When she’d dialed the combination on its locks, she lifted the lid and looked down on her little black beauties: two Taurus Model 85 small-frame revolvers, .38 specials with rosewood grips and gold finish. She loved her .38s, their gold triggers and safeties accentuating the color of the rosewood. She took each one out of the black foam that lined the case, kissing their barrels gently before sliding the guns into the two inside pockets of her coat that she’d had fitted specifically for this purpose.
After putting four speed loaders into her outside jacket pockets, she shut the lid of the case and slid it back into the closet along the floor. As she stood up again, she reached into the way-back corner of the closet, feeling around for the cold steel behind all the coats and umbrellas. She brought out the Benelli M2 tactical shotgun. Semi-auto and loaded for bear, this would be her first line of defense, the stopping power she’d need if she came up against anyone from Rock’s crew who was armed. Marlene jiggled the weight of the gun, getting her sense for it. She knew it was loaded—cleaning these three guns and making sure they were loaded was as much a part of her morning routine as drinking her coffee.
She knocked at the door before opening it onto the hall. Even if Raphael wasn’t every bit the soldier she expected, she didn’t want to know. When she thought he’d had enough time to get presentable, she opened the door.
Meldrak and Raphael both stood there, hands behind their backs like this was some kind of gentlemen’s army.
They both tried not to look surprised when they saw her holding the Benelli across her chest.
“You boys ready for a little errand?” she asked.
They both nodded in agreement.
83
Seven Heaven lay on the floor of the apartment looking up at Dee. He couldn’t believe that this stupid kid had gotten the drop on him and put a bullet in his back. He couldn’t believe that or that Dee was right here standing in front of him, waiting and not shooting him dead.
Seven had the Tec in his hand, looked down his arm and could see it, but it wouldn’t move; his fucking arm would not lift the gun up to shoot.
“You better shoot my ass,” Seven said. “Because if I get this gun up and squeeze the trigger, your ass dead.”
Dee’s eyebrows rose up his head. “Really?” He shook his head. “Tell me how you feel first. How it feel to have a bullet in your back.”
It actually didn’t feel that bad, didn’t feel bad but for the fact that he couldn’t feel anything. Seven looked down his body like it was foreign soil: nothing seemed attached to him anymore, not attached or a part of him. He couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t move anything. He tried shaking his feet: nothing.
