Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (6 page)

Funny thing about a murder scene. Hang around long enough, you're a suspect. Only the cops, the paramedics, the medical examiners, the reporters, only they are above suspicion. Most of the time, anyway. Life was like that in Little Beirut. That's what they called the place, Woodridge, a depressed, angry, four-square-mile, armed-camp-of-a-community. Little Beirut. A South Side neighborhood at war with itself. A place where the cops couldn't even finish cleaning up one killing before you'd hear shots coming from the next block over. Like dueling murder scenes. Funny thing about a murder scene. People in Little Beirut were nowhere to be seen when a crime was committed, but they came
out
of nowhere to watch the aftermath. Like vultures to raw meat, we were all drawn to a bloodbath. Death sustained us. And we were all guilty. Everybody. One way or another. Everybody who might have seen it coming and did nothing to stop it.

So we all stood around on sagging greystone stoops and fractured sidewalks, looking suspicious just standing there like that, watching Ant, face-down in the street, at the edge of the curb he used to own. It was two in the morning in the thirty-five hundred block of South Woodridge. Two in the morning, and I had never seen it so bright there, so lit up. Two in the morning, and the place was jumping like two in the afternoon. Nobody
seemed like they had anywhere else to go, nothing else to do. Nobody seemed like they wanted to leave. Maybe it was because they knew what you can't help knowing when you live in “The Root” long enough to know anything. What you know is this: standing around might have made you look suspicious, but leaving was even worse. Leaving could make you a target. Move, and you'd attract attention to yourself. Like you were running from something. Run, and they'd chase you down. And once the chase started, it was all over. Inevitable. No escape. Not from the cops. Not from the thugs. Made no difference who was chasing you, really. They were all driven by the same instincts. The cops, the thugs. So if you left too soon, five-O would think you had seen something, and the bangers, well, they would think the same thing, and they'd all want to come after you because of it. For different reasons. For the same reason. Seemed like everybody on the block knew that. Which is at least one reason why we all just hung there. Like a neighborhood lineup. In suspense while the story developed right there before our eyes, checking all around to figure out who might get cuffed. Funny thing about a murder scene. Everybody feels like the killer's right there in the crowd. Watching. Waiting. Wondering. So everybody there is suspicious. And everybody there is a suspect.

Maybe it was because I had just jumped out of bed, fifteen, twenty minutes earlier. Maybe it was because I was scoping everything—down to the smallest detail—the way I always did. But the whole street seemed to be moving in slow mo'. Blue and red lights flashing like strobes. All the while the police and the paramedics and the medical examiner and the reporters, they were all doing their thing. Checking the body, shooting pictures, interviewing potential witnesses, marking the asphalt. And the rest of us, well, we just watched as they did all this and as Ant's blood slowly ran down the gutter, making it hard to get the chalk mark just right. It was all unfolding right there in front of my stoop. All around, there was a low and constant murmur rising from the crowd. Both sides of the street. Before the night was over, everybody would have a theory. They always did. My only hope at that moment was that I had covered my tracks.

“Punk-ass muthafucka.”

I had been so caught up in studying Ant's body, that I never saw him
coming. But there he was, Russell Carver, standing at the foot of my stoop, hard against the wrought iron gate, heavy lean on his crutches. He had taken a bullet one night in a messed-up holdup. Took it in the back. Doctors over at County left the bullet in there. Too close, they said. Too dangerous. So, for whatever life he had left, Carver would live it on crutches.

“What was that?” I asked.

He looked up at me, standing three steps above him. “ ‘Punk-ass muthafucka.' ” He was damn near breaking his neck, punctuating each word with a whiplash-of-a-nod. “That's what they said 'fore they popped his ass.”

There was a power surge. Adrenaline flow. Couldn't tell whether it was anticipation, or fear. But the blood rush seemed to force my words. “So, you saw it?”

Carver caught himself. He had a bad habit of running his mouth too much. Which is why he was on crutches. Ant had told me that much. Carver turned toward the “Gator” across the street, gazing at the tinted windows like he was looking for somebody looking at him from behind a two-way mirror.

“Naw, man, I didn't see it.” Carver spoke the words so distinctly, much more clearly than he ever said anything I was around to hear. It was like he wanted everybody on the block to be able to read his lips. Or at least the man on the other side of the tinted Gator glass. Carver turned back to me. “I didn't see shit.”

I checked him for a beat, pulled out the Marlboros, lit one. Didn't see it, but he heard it. Life was like that in The Root. Life,
and
death. I turned, gazed at Ant's body just on the other side of the curb, imagined him standing there, the way he was, so full of life, just one week earlier.

“That's funny, yo.”

I looked over at the curb ahead as I walked down Woodridge, headed toward my raggedy-ass greystone apartment building. I saw the skinny sixteen-year-old, who always seemed to be there, at the curb, in front of my stoop. So, there he was again, turning away from another window of yet another car pulling off after closing one more deal. He put the wad
of bills in his loose pocket and smiled in a way I hadn't seen since I moved into the neighborhood at the beginning of the month. It was still hot, mid-September hot, late afternoon, late summer hot, and all I wanted was to get inside, get out of the uniform. All I wanted was to avoid a long conversation with a curbside drug dealer.

I stopped at the wrought iron gate to my place. “
What's
funny?”

“Bus driver,” he said, “walking home from work. The shit's just funny, that's all. Seems like if anybody should get curbside service . . . knowmsayn? Maybe even keep it overnight.”

I nodded. “And, so, where would I park a bus around here, if they let me drive the motherfucker home?”

“Well, I don't know,” he responded, without a pause, unfazed. “Maybe we could work something out right here at my spot, yo.” He glanced down at the ground he had claimed. “Maybe a little barter. You know, you let me set up my office, transact my business inside your bus, I let you park rent-free. Everything's negotiable.”

Life was like that in The Root. No straight lines. Just angles. “Sounds like you got it all figured out,” I said, intrigued.

“Got
that
right.” He pointed to his head, gave me a wink. “Mind like a computer.”

I was struck by how glib he was, how knowledgeable for a boy who seemed to be stuck in a groove. Limited to an entire life right there in Little Beirut, right there on his spot, his whole world on drive-by mode, pulling up to his curb, twenty a pop. What a waste.

“Noticed you just moved in, yo.” He smiled again, that disarming smile that might make you forget for a deceptive moment that he was just another common thug standing there in his baggy jeans, muscle shirt, do-rag, checking the intersection a half-block away, like he had just seen something he was
supposed
to see coming a half-block away. “I'm Ant,” he said, turning back to me, with a special kind of confidence that suggested he knew just who he was, what he was doing, where he was going at every moment of his short life. He was about five nine, just a growth spurt away from the manhood he might never see. A life on the brink. Medium brown skin, kissed by the summer sun. Innocence and treachery balanced on a razor's edge.

I nodded. “D.”

I tried to push open the wrought iron gate, fumbled with the grocery bags, and he stepped to me, trying to help. I didn't really
want
help. He eyeballed me. I felt something drop into one of the shopping bags, but I didn't look down. I locked onto his gaze, as he pushed open the gate and turned to walk across the street. As it turned out, I made it into my vestibule just in time, just before the unmarked car screeched to the curb, stopping Ant in his tracks. I kept moving up the stairs and into my apartment, where I could watch the scene from the safety of my living room window. Ant, up against the car, searched by a linebacker-of-a-detective. Big, Black, bold. Bad enough to work this block all by himself. But Ant was unaffected by it all. I moved away from the window, knowing without knowing just why Ant felt no pain. I checked the shopping bag. Ant had dropped his nine millimeter and a wad of cash inside. I just stood there looking down into the bag for a thrill of a moment.

Don't know why I felt the need to go out for cigarettes that night. Something told me I'd live to regret it, or regret I'd lived it.

“What up, D?” It was Ant, rushing me up the walk to my stoop. “Got my shit?” I knew what he meant was, “You
better
have my shit, and hurry your ass giving it up.”

When we got to my apartment, I paused. What would he do once he got his gat back? Was he going to let me walk? I took the chance, let him in.

I pulled the shopping bag out from behind the couch, handed him the gun, the cash. “How did you know what was coming?”

He flashed that smile of his. “You talking about Moore?” he said, referring to the cop stop. “Detective Maurice? Shit. When it comes to danger, yo, I got eyes in the back of my head.”

He didn't count the money. Just sort of weighed it in his hand. Must have been all right, because he peeled off a couple of bills, dropped them on my table, stuffed the rest in the pocket of his baggy shorts. Just then, as he was turning to leave, something caught his attention. On the table. It was a big manila envelope on a stack of other mail.

Ant took a long hard look at the top envelope, then eyed me, checked
me from head to toe. Nothing in my eyes. I knew they wouldn't give me up. No reaction, but my mind raced while he did the full-body scan. In that split-second eternity he did a flash inventory of my persona; the darkness about me—my eyes, my skin, my short dreads with just a hint of early gray. He seemed to pay special attention to the uniform. What was he thinking about me? He was standing close now, so close he had to look up at me. I was standing over him at six feet. But that didn't affect him since he had that equalizer back under his belt again. And just like that, while I tried to figure it all out, he tapped the envelope.

“A'ight, D.” He held a beat. “Be cool, yo.”

I watched from the windows as Ant hit the street. At that moment, the black Navigator drove up, parked on the other side. The dark tinted glass slowly lowered on pace with Ant's step. There in the driver's seat was Terrell Reynolds, snug inside his high-powered cocoon. Terrell Reynolds. “T-Rex.” Predator-in-Chief. Unofficial mayor of Little Beirut. Ant quickly took the huge wad of bills from his pocket, handed it to T-Rex, said something, I don't know what, but something that made T-Rex look up at my window. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe I had good reason to be. Ant had made me. I knew it. But, had he given me a pass? Or had he given me up to T-Rex? He had read the outside of that envelope he picked up, the one that was addressed to me at the job. And, because he had read it, he knew that my job was not with the Transit Authority.

“That's exactly why I didn't like this assignment for you in the first place.” Brian Jennings was pacing his office as he spoke. He was like that. Agitated. Always. Stressing. Never really mattered what he was dealing with at the time. Made me wonder how he could deal with such high-pressure issues for a living. Life on deadline. Life cut short in the process. “What if you're wrong about his reaction? What if the kid is plotting something on you right now? Blowing this, this . . .
undercover
thing you're trying to pull off.” As he spoke, he turned deeper and deeper shades of red, which was about as much color as I had ever seen on his pale face. “I don't know what you're trying to prove, Dash.”

That's what they called me. David Steven Hunter was my name, but
the people who knew me well enough knew better than to call me any of that. Dash was all the name I needed for a fast-track life, a life in perpetual motion.

Guess he was right. I was taking a huge risk. But that's what I did. For me, the reward was in the risk, hidden there, waiting to be cracked open. I just sat there for a reflective moment, turned away from Jennings, gazed through the wall of windows of his office, looking out at the cubicles and the late afternoon insanity of our world, the world we had chosen—a world on deadline. I pulled out the Marlboros, lit one.

Jennings looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. Just another crazy Black man raising his blood pressure. “You know you can't smoke in here,” he said.

I took a long draw, slowly blew out the smoke. “The way you've been talking, I feel like I'm a condemned man. So, what, you going to deny me a last smoke?”

I took another hit off the cigarette, watched as the medical examiner bent over Ant's body. Looked like the bullet had torn through the back of his head, exploding on impact. Couldn't tell exactly from where I stood, but it looked like the shot was fired point blank, like somebody just ran up behind him, held the gun straight up, knowing one shot would do it. I wondered if Ant had suffered. If he knew what hit him. If he even knew it was coming. His words came back to me: “When it comes to danger, yo, I got eyes in the back of my head.” Guess this time he blinked. Right away, these thoughts were pushed aside by another one. I looked down at Carver, still leaning up against my gate. Did he or anybody else know that Ant was on his way to my place when he got capped? What would happen if they started piecing it all together, found a reason to search my place, found all the rocks I was holding?