Tiger (13 page)

“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES,” JAKE SAID WHEN THEY
boarded the uptown
B
train, which would take them all the way into Harlem.

“Yeah, it's strange going back to Panama's,” Wally said, the idea of returning to the smoke shop already putting her on edge. “It feels like time travel.”

Back then—before everything came apart—Wally and the crew went to Panama when they wanted phone cards to sell on the street. When they had something to sell, Panama fenced it for them, and when they needed fake IDs or wisdom about what was happening on the street, Panama was their guy. What they didn't know back then was that the
131
st Street Smoke Shop was “
up
,” meaning it was under surveillance by law enforcement who were trying to sting gun dealers off the street. The man they knew as Panama—a huge, menacing man of nonspecific race—was actually an undercover ATF agent named Cornell Brown.

Wally had watched two people die that November morning on Shelter Island—Panama and her mother, Claire.

They got off the train at
125
^th
, and five minutes of walking took them to the intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and
131
^st
, on the southwest side of Harlem. The neighborhood had cleaned up some, but Wally and her friends knew that the criminal undercurrents of those streets had never gone away, and probably never would.

The
131
^st
Street Smoke Shop was shut up and dark. A hand-lettered sign hung on string behind the door
—CLOSED.
Loose trash and smoked-down cigarette butts had piled up against the doorway, likely swept there by the wind. The debris gave the impression that no one had entered the shop in a week, at least. Wally peered in through the window and could see that the shop looked the same inside as always, fully stocked and ready for business. She banged hard on the door, hard enough to clang the bells hanging inside to announce a customer. But there were no signs of life inside.

“Well, that pisses me off,” Wally said.

“Closed in the middle of the day,” Jake said. “Good way to go out of business.”

“Unless your business is something else,” said Wally. “Let's check out back.”

They stepped over the low chain running across the entrance to the small, empty parking lot beside the smoke shop. When Panama had been running the place, most of the real business had been run out of the back entrance, which bordered on St. Nicholas Avenue and the park beyond. They walked to that entrance, not surprised to find it locked with a strong dead bolt.

“Do you have something?” Jake asked Wally, and she fished around her messenger bag, coming up with a Leatherman multi-
tool. She handed it to him, and he used a combination of the main blade and his plastic ID to work on the dead bolt while Wally and Ella stood watch.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Ella asked, sounding practical, not scared. “Even if they did sell the phones, they do everything in cash. I don't see them keeping a list of their customers.”

“Yeah,” Wally agreed, “but we came all the way up here, right? Unless Paige can dig out more for us to work with, tracing the sale is all we have.”

They heard a loud
thunk!
as the dead bolt turned over. Jake turned the doorknob and, just like that, the three of them were inside, closing the door behind them.

A few dirty skylights in the ceiling of the large, crowded storeroom cast a dim yellow glow through the space—enough for the three of them to make their way without turning on the lights. As their eyes adjusted, they discovered that the large room was filled with a massive stash of electronics and home appliances—flat-screen TVs, laptops, music players, Bluetooth headsets, and microwave ovens—hundreds of boxes of contraband stacked all the way to the ceiling with only narrow aisles in between.

“Holy shit,” whispered Jake. “I could shop here.”

They made their way to the center of the room, where a partially open space had been left to make room for a long folding table. Several crates of brand-new iPads and iPhones were on the table, still in their original boxes with the Apple insignia on the outside. Wally noticed that the crates were only halfway unloaded, as if the work had been interrupted.

“I guess that's why they aren't bothering with the storefront anymore,” Wally said. “Here's where all the magic happens. Do you guys see any crates for burner phones?”

“Over here,” Ella said. She pointed to a wall of boxes labeled with every cell phone brand name, plus several with labels in mostly Asian characters. “They're definitely in the burner business.”

“Weird, though,” Jake said. “It's hard to imagine the Get Money Boys in here, running inventory.”

“They'd have someone else working this side of the operation,” Wally said. The moment the words were out of her mouth, sounds of movement came from the deep, dark aisles on the other side of the storeroom.

Wally heard the distinctive
click!
of a bullet being chambered in an automatic handgun.

Shit
.

The Get Money Bitches—girl associates of the Get Money Boys—came rushing out of the far, dark aisles of the storeroom. They were a quick, overwhelming force of nine or ten fearsome-looking young women with half a dozen drawn guns between them. They were various builds, most of them black, and ranging in age from fourteen to their early twenties. Some had shaved heads and baggy gangsta clothes that almost made them look like men, while others wore elaborate makeup and had their hair done in feminine weaves and rows. All moved quickly and looked angry.

Wally, Jake, and Ella instinctively turned to run, but they only made it a few steps before the girls were on them, attacking furiously. Wally felt hands grabbing her by the shoulders in an attempt to drag her down to the floor, but she spun around and landed a series of high kicks—driving back one girl and knocking a
9
mm Beretta from the hand of another. But when she looked back around for her friends she couldn't see them anymore. . . . Had they split in another direction? She could hear the sounds of fighting somewhere nearby—Jake was grunting and growling as he struggled with the GMBs.

“Jake!” she called out, feeling a blast of rage at the possibility of her friends being hurt.

Wally tried to head in the direction of Jake's struggle, but two more of the GMBs came hard at her from the far end of the aisle—that made a total of four ready fighters who would be almost unbeatable in such a cramped space.

“You're done, girl!” one of the GMBs said.

There was only one direction for Wally to go—
up!
—and she started climbing the wall of crates on either side of her, jamming her hands and feet into the narrow spaces between the cardboard boxes. She made it six or seven feet up the wall when several strong hands grabbed her ankles and calves, tugging her down. Wally managed to kick their hands away a few times and held strong for three or four seconds, but soon her muscles were burning from the effort and her strength gave way.

The hands pulled her down and dragged her by the feet back to the space in the center of the storeroom. Jake and Ella had already been corralled, lying faceup on the floor, with the GMBs standing around them in a circle. Wally counted seven drawn guns, now pointed at the three of them.

“Wait—” Wally was silenced by a hard kick to her ribs.

Facing Wally, Jake, and Ella from above—her Glock handgun drawn and chambered—was a young black woman over six feet tall. Her hair was cropped short and she wore a tight white wifebeater, her powerful arms covered with tattoo sleeves, inked and scarred. She wore loose black jeans cinched at the waist with a black leather belt.

“You
crazy
?!” the woman yelled at them. “You know where you are?! You came to rip off the GMBs?!”

Wally realized that she knew the woman standing above them—knew
of her
anyway. Her name was Afrika Neems, and her boyfriend was the alpha male of the Get Money Boys. . . . Wally couldn't remember his name. Plenty of the city's gangs had female associates, but the Get Money Bitches were considered to be almost as powerful within the GMB pecking order as the men.

“We didn't—” Wally began, only to be subjected to another hard kick.

Jake tried to get up to defend her, but as soon as he moved he took five or six brutal kicks that knocked him back down.

Wally forced herself to keep speaking, even if it meant taking more hits.

“We didn't come here to rip you off,” she said.

“Bullshit!”

Two more kicks. Wally struggled for breath.

“You're Afrika, right? I've heard about you . . . ”

Another kick to her ribs.

“Everybody heard about Afrika,” one of the other women said.

“But you didn't hear enough,” said another, “or you'd have stayed yo' white ass far away from here.”

“I heard about you from Panama. We used to trade with him.”

No kicks that time. Afrika gave Wally a longer look.

“Trade what?”

“Nothing. Phone cards. Just for walkin' around money. Small-time.”

“Well, that's too damn bad then, 'cause today you done small-timed yo' ass into hella pain. We got the Boys comin' in today, and I
know
what they gonna do wit you.”

A few of the other girls acknowledged her words with nods, some of them obviously looking forward to witnessing whatever punishment the Get Money Boys would deliver.

“We just came to ask a question. . . . ”

“Well you betta ask now, and I hope it's a good one,” Afrika said, “'cause you done
died
for it today, white girl. Busting in on the GMB? You outta yo' fuckin'
mind.
 . . . ”

Wally thought now, for the first time, how to ask if the Get Money Boys had stolen the shipment of burner phones, and if they remembered who they'd sold them to. She immediately realized how ridiculous and meaningless that question would sound now. Their actual lives—hers, Jake's, Ella's—were on the line.

“Best speak up, girl,” Afrika said. “Ain't no Panama here, and 'til he come back we make the rules here.”

Did Wally hear that right?
Until Panama comes back?
What was she talking about? Panama—Special Agent Cornell Brown—was dead, beyond question. Like the three of them would be soon, if Wally couldn't talk their way out.

“Can we just talk to Panama?” she asked, probing for information that she might be able to use. “He'll tell you we're okay. Where is he?”

“Panama got warrants,” Afrika said. “He gone. He got people in Louisiana, so maybe he there. Don't know, don't much care. The smoke shop is
ours
now. Like
you
is ours.”

Wally's mind spun as she processed the implications: the gang didn't know Panama was dead, or that he had been undercover for the ATF, obviously. Which meant that they didn't know the smoke shop had been under surveillance. Law enforcement had managed to keep all of it under wraps, which could not have been easy, and they'd managed to plant some story about Panama being on the lam somewhere in Bayou country. But why?

She could only think of one answer.

“You need to get out of here now,” Wally said. “We all need to go.”

“Say what? Bitch, you get crazier and crazier.”

“Okay,” Wally said, “then just let me stand up for a minute. I need to show you something. I'm not going to do anything stupid.”

Afrika thought about it.

“Please,” Wally added.

“I s'pose you can't do nothin' stupider than breakin' in here in the first place.”

Wally stood up slowly, her body aching from the many kicks and her fall from the wall of crates.

“I need a radio,” she said.

“What the
what
?” Afrika said.

“Please,” Wally said.

Afrika thought about it, her eyes studying Wally skeptically, but then gave another nod. Wally looked to a shelf nearby, where an old boom box sat. It was an old-school beast of a thing with a manual tuning dial and cassette player. It must have been there for years.

Wally hauled the boom box off the shelf and silently prayed that there were working batteries inside. She hit the power switch, and the radio came to life, blasting classic soul—the Isley Brothers.

It's your thing, do whatcha wanna do . . .

I can't tell you . . . who to sock it to.

Wally turned the tuning dial, passing over news channels and rap and several stations with mariachi music until she finally landed on an unused frequency. The radio was nearly silent then, except for a slight hint of static. Wally raised the boom box up high over her head and paced around the storeroom.

Afrika and the other GMBs looked at her like she had lost her mind.

“Crazy white girl . . . ”

Wally kept her focus, and continued moving through the large space. She held the radio up to the wall, the shelf supports, and the old landline phone on the wall—but nothing happened. She paused, reconsidering her strategy. Her eyes pored over the large space, searching.

The GMBs were focused totally on Wally now, leaving Jake and Ella free to pull themselves up off the floor. They stood and watched their friend with baffled expressions on their faces—the two of them obviously had no idea what she was up to either.

Wally looked straight up—a simple aluminum work lamp hung above the central worktable, its thick orange power cord running all the way up to a beam in the ceiling. She set the boom box down for a moment, cleared a small amount of space on the worktable—carefully pushing aside several thousand dollars worth of iPads—and climbed up onto the table herself, the boom box in hand. She raised it up toward the light fixture, and when the radio was within a foot of the lamp its speakers began to emit a loud, high-pitched screech, similar to feedback from a concert sound system.