Chapter Six
Crossing the bridge into Imperial Courts in Watts, my hands felt clammy as I gripped the steering wheel and a dull thud stabbed me in my stomach. My intestines growled and felt all twisted up. My gut was saying that this was going to be dangerous. That wasn't a good sign. My gut never lied.
At first I felt this dropping sensation from my chest to my stomach, and then my heart went into a full throttle of arrhythmia. I did a series of deep breathing just to slow my heart rate down. My tae kwon do instructor, Mr. Wong, always said to breathe deeply before going into battle. I guessed I was going to have to go to war. Unfortunately, I didn't know who the enemy was.
I wanted to back out, but something compelled me forward. I knew my life would change if I even talked to Tank. Then I'd be committed, and once I was in, I'd be all the way in, even if it meant my death. Oh, no! My feelings flip-flopped. Hell naw. I was back to cussing again.
I should turn this car around and go back home.
I had too much to lose. I was just beginning to get a toehold on life again since I'd lost my police job. The PI jobs were coming in steadily where the good months carried me over the slow months.
My mind stayed in a battle with the pros and cons of getting involved. Here I was even thinking about the new American Dream of becoming a reality show star. I didn't need this drama in my life. But then, Mayhem's blackened eyes would come back and haunt me all over again. No, I had to do whatever I could do within my power to help my brother. He was all I had of my siblings.
I called Tank several times more to no avail. I started to turn back around, but my mind wouldn't let me. Now I was curious and I was compelled to go forward. Where was Tank? Did he set my brother up? Wasn't he supposed to be his lieutenant?
What was going on? Why did Mayhem want me to go to Brazil? What could Tank tell me? I needed more information and the only way I could get it was to go see Tank.
As I drove through the outhouse dark streets, I saw the differences from Baldwin Hills, less than twenty miles away. Graffiti marking different gang territories let me know on whose turf I was treading. Bullet holes left their marks on different walls, houses, and cars too.
I realized that I was entering what was an entire subcultureâthe other America. I was born into it, but through a twist of fate, somewhat escaped it. After being raised in foster care from age nine, somewhere along the way, I decided I couldn't live like this. Petty, low-level crime. Gangbanging. The world of get-money chicks. Sheesh.
My mother was a Cripâa gangbangerâuntil she went to prison. Now she was still a respected OG. No, I had to break the cycle.
For years I carried survivor's guilt, but now I felt like an ambassador. I was like a spy who could slip in and out of corporate America, then go back to the underworld. Although we had a black president, for too many of my people things had not changed. The recession, unemployment, things for many had not gotten better; they'd just had gotten worse. The Black middle class's grip on its lifestyle was tenuous, to say the least. People seemed to be slipping into darkness.
I couldn't even say if it was a good thing or bad, but some men refused to be out of work. Men like my brother. They created work for themselves and othersâeven if it was on the wrong side of the law.
Thinking of it, I noticed something. Now that I was in South L.A., a sense of danger quivered in the air. I smelled it and I could taste it. I could feel the tension between the gangs and the police cars, which prowled the streets all night. Yet, at the same time, I personally felt an alliance to my people. I felt like I was entering a colonized state. A police state. With the fading middle class, some of the denizen had slipped into a permanent underclass status, but these are my people and I have to help and defend them where I can. Besides, I could get into cracks the police couldn't get in.
Why? Because I spoke the language of the hood. I knew it because I grew up the first nine years of my life in nearby Jordan Downs Projects.
Ebonics was a language, and like any first language, you had to grow up hearing it to understand all its subtleties and nuances. There was a rhythm and a poetry to the language of the street. It changed and grew every day in an ongoing effort to continue to dupe the law. And it always amazed me how the language lost its punch when I hear it bastardized by mainstream America. Even newscasters tried to speak in hip hop these days.
My car was old and I didn't have a navigation system, so I relied on my memory of the Watts streets' layout. I felt a sense of unease in the people who were out this time of night as I drove up the street. Unless you were in the 5 percent oligarchy, you were like the rest of us, who were living in a time of uncertainty. People who once held six-figure salaries no longer had them. Unemployment benefits had been extended beyond twenty-four monthsâa benefit that was previously unheard ofâand still there were not enough jobs. Middle-class America had taken up in arms and was Occupying Wall Street all over the country. The whole world had changed overnight for us Americans. In a crazy way I understood how the man I'd read about in the paper felt, who, after having been Harvard educated, and a former Wall Street investor, was now robbing banks. He probably felt like the bottom had fallen out and he had nothing to lose. The world, including mortgages, was upside down and people were losing homes to foreclosures like houses under water during a tsunami.
Regardless of what was going on, everyone was in search of that elusive American Dream. People were desperate, and desperate men would do what they had to do to eat. I had to assume this had been Mayhem's stance all alongâeven before the economy crashed.
I guessed I'd already been through my own peripeteiaâthe point when everything the heroine thought she knew about life was wrong. The point when my American Dream and my ideal job were snatched out from under me like a double whammy rug, leaving me to fall on my big posterior. Yes, I'd lost my hard-won job as a police officer, and had gone through the shame and degradation of being a drunk who hit bottom. But with my loved ones' help, I'd worked hard to build my life back. And this time around, it was better than before. So I really had a lot to lose, even looking into this case.
As early as it was, the crackheads filled the gray streets. People who looked old beyond their years shuffled up and down the streets. Strawberries trying to hook up with tricks stalked the boulevards. Their hips swiveled dangerously as they teetered up and down the stroll in high stilettos. Most of the working girls wore almost nonexistent short skirts, which resembled tube tops and string-like halter tops, although it was forty degrees outside. Some gangbangers, pants hanging low and showing their boxer shorts, leaned on corners, waiting to sell their next bag. The sounds of sirens played in the backdrop like beats to a rap song.
I finally located the address, deep within the projects. It was a single-story stucco bungalow. I looked around and pulled my Glock out and put it to my side. I approached the door, paused, then knocked.
“Who is it?” a baritone male voice barked.
“Z. I met you before. Mayhem sent me. I tried to call you.”
I saw his light brown iris squint as he looked directly into my eyes from out of the peephole.
“Ain't you One time?” One time was the street phrase for the police in L.A.
“Not anymore.”
Slowly, the door cracked, sending out just a shard of light onto the porch.
“So you're boss man's baby sis.” He said it more as a statement than a question.
Finally, he opened up what sounded like a dozen deadbolt locks. He was strapped, and pointed his gun from side to side on the door. He craned his neck, looked around the corner, and pulled me in.
I put my Glock back into my sling-shot, which hung under my arm. Once inside, I got my first good look at Tank. I was so afraid the first time I met him at one of Mayhem's spots, I didn't really get a good once-over of him. He wore a close fade haircut. He really didn't look like Michael Clarke Duncan. He was just big like himâlike a Mandingo slave who was bred by the former slave owners to be strong enough to build this country on his back.
This early morning he wore a wife beater, which revealed an old bullet wound on his huge left bicep and what looked like a razor slice across his throat, which had miraculously healed in a large wormy keloid. Just seeing his battle wounds made me unconsciously touch my old bullet wound above my heart and I experienced a sharp stab of pain just from the memory. The irony was I was shot in the line of duty by so-called “friendly fire” from my two officer colleagues trying to cover up their corruption.
“Yes, I'm Mayhem's sister.”
“What do you want?”
“Mayhem sent me to you. He said you would know what to do.”
“Okay. C ... cc ... could you show me some I.D. or something?” This was the second time hearing him speak, and I'd never realized he was a stutterer. But maybe he was just nervous.
“Why? Don't you remember when I came back and saw Mayhem last year?”
“I can't exactly remember what you looked like. You've lost weight or something.”
I pulled out my private eye badge. True; I had trimmed down since taking tae kwon do, and I was wearing my hair longer.
“Okay, now I remember you. You've fallen off some. I remember you being thick.”
I flexed my muscles, which were still small, but more defined. “Working out. Okay? Am I straight with you?”
“Yeah, come on in. Things are getting hot around here. Got to get off the street. Are you strapped?” he asked me as one more precaution.
“Yes, but I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to try to help my brother.”
As soon as I stepped into the living room of a home, I inspected the room in a cursory glance. It looked like it was a typical project home: swamp-colored carpet, matching pleather loveseat and sofa, fake leopard-skin and giraffe-print throw pillows, fake wood table and étagère, cheap wall prints of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The only difference in this living room and the many living rooms I'd been in were the two computers on the table pushed over in the corner. A TV blared in the corner.
“Could you cut the TV off?” Okamato, who was also my trainer, had taught me to shut off all TVs to keep from being ambushed when you stepped into a home. You never knew what danger lurked under the noise of that TV. Urban legend had it that a police had been stabbed from an unknown party in the house while the TV was playing
The Price is Right.
Tank sauntered across the floor and complied by pushing the remote. For a big man, he was light on his feet, like a linebacker. I kept my back to the door, another habit I learned as a policewoman. Meanwhile, I scoped all the corners. We appeared to be alone, except for a blue pit bull sitting in the doorway of what I assumed was a kitchen. He looked poised to attack.
“Sit, Killer,” Tank ordered. The dog sat back on his haunches, and settled down.
“Anyone else in the house?”
“No.”
My back was ramrod straight, and all my senses stood at attention as I did whenever I felt the need to be on point. I started to ask for Tank to lock up the dog, but changed my mind. The dog seemed docile around his owner.
I got straight to the point. “Who set my brother up?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“Back to my question. Did you rat him out?”
I thought about how many times lieutenants betrayed their leader for the enemy's side.
“Hell naw. Me and Big Homie go way back. W... www ... we got jumped into the Crips together when we was twelve. He like a brother to me. He my nigga. My dog.”
Tears glistened in Tank's eyes, which was kind of touching in such a bear of a man, and I kind of felt like he was telling the truth. But something made me hold back my trust. I needed answers first. “What happened to my brother then?”
“I swear on everything I love, I didn't have anything to do with it. Like I said, I was doing a run that day. I believe Big Homie was set up by someone else.”
“Who ?”
“As I said, I was gone makin' a run for Big Homie. The person who was supposed to make the run called in sick.”
“What is his name?”
“Playboy.”
“What happened to him?”
Tank didn't answer.
I pressed the issue. “Where is he at now? I want to talk to him.”
“We won't have to worry about him no more.”
A chill raced through me when he said this, but I had to stay on point about my brother. Now I remembered I was in the jungle. This was one of the laws of the jungle. There were laws you abided by in that jungle. I thought of the word on my crossword puzzle I was working the day before. Quisle: to betray, especially by collaborating with an enemy.
“Did you find out who took my brother?”