Читать книгу Suitcase City - Sterling Watson - Страница 15

EIGHT

Bloodworth Naylor aimed the camera and snapped the picture. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh my, my, yes. I love it. I do love it. Turn the other way. To the light. That’s right. Now hold it just like that.”

The boy, Tyrone, turned his pretty head to the side, that sullen, pouty look on his face. That injured-party look. The shutter clicked. The Polaroid that rolled from the camera looked like a mug shot. Bloodworth Naylor moved closer, getting the wound on the boy’s cheek into clear focus. Blood liked the wound. It was lucky. More than he could have asked for if he’d written the story himself, the story of what happened in a bar between a black boy with an attitude and a white man with a bad temper. He told the boy to hold still, adjusted the light from a standing lamp so that it was harsh on the nasty, bruised-mango gash. The pictures were turning out very True Detective, very National Enquirer. Blood took the last picture, then sorted through them all. Lord, weren’t they wonderful?

He put the camera on the table by the lamp. He had the boy in the warehouse behind his rent-to-own furniture store. Back here among the cardboard boxes and the packing crates and the repossessed mattresses and the bedroom suites tagged for the loading dock, nobody would bother them. Nobody would see the splash of light from the camera each time Blood Naylor took a shot of that lovely, ragged little mouth of flesh on the boy’s cheek.

“And you didn’t put no ice on it?” Blood asked for the second time.

“No, man. I told you. I didn’t put no ice on it.”

“That was smart,” Blood Naylor said. Compliment the boy. Keep him in the spirit of the thing. “You know we want it to look as bad as it can look.”

The boy nodded.

“And you didn’t go to the emergency room because they might take some blood, and we know what they might find in it.”

Tyrone nodded again, and Blood thought it would have been nice for the boy to go to the emergency room, get that medical-records thing going, but they couldn’t risk it. A boy with blood like this boy had.

Tyrone had told him the story twice, but Blood wanted to hear it again, at least some of the details. “You just decided to follow those white men into the men’s room—the idea just come to you, just like that?”

Tyrone nodded once more, looked at Blood with those nervous, ready eyes. Blood knew what the kid wanted. Blood’s Special Reserve. And, Lord knew, he’d earned it.

Blood said, “You want to do up?”

The kid looked almost angry now, that big, scary football anger. It made Blood want to laugh, thinking about angry boys on a football field doing angry things by the rules with some referee in a striped shirt and funny pants blowing his whistle when somebody got too specifically angry at somebody else. Blood Naylor knew the real anger, the one that walked the yard at Raiford. It was specific. Someday he might show it to the boy. If he had to.

With Tyrone watching, that baby anger, that nervous impatience, Blood pulled the plastic baggie out of his pocket and stuck the blade of his penknife into it, dipping out the white powder. Bloodworth Naylor’s Special Reserve. The Colombians gave it to him uncut, a small amount for his special customers. None of that baby formula mixed in this shit. Jam up your sinuses, make you shit like a goose. This was the pure extract of the coca leaf, and you had to be very careful with it. A little of it went a long way. A little of it had taken Tyrone Battles, honor student and football hero, a long way indeed.

Blood Naylor had tailed his old friend James Teach for a month, using a car he borrowed from one of the men who worked on the loading dock. Teach had no idea what was happening. What white man would notice a middle-aged nigger in a beat-up Camaro riding along behind him on Bayshore Boulevard and parking outside a doctor’s office when he went in to check on his salesmen? Blood knew Teach’s patterns, knew how he spent the mornings at the office, then went out in the afternoons to bird dog the sales force. How he liked to make the early afternoon pit stops in the local bars, talk some of that jock talk with the Corona-and-lime crowd.

Teach was a football hero, a guy who told a good story about the good old days. Blood sitting out in the trashy Camaro in the hot sun thinking about Teach and the good life. Hell, if one of the men who worked for Blood did two hours in the office, a two-Corona lunch in Old Hyde Park, then called it quits at three thirty, that nigger would be down the road. So Blood knew a few things about Teach, some of them from experience, some from observation, and some from research. Blood figured he even knew things about Teach that Teach didn’t know.

Watching Tyrone’s eager eyes, Blood bent over the glass tabletop and chopped the white powder with the single-edged razor blade. He knew about people’s secret problems. Tyrone’s was this powder here and Teach’s was bourbon. And he knew from reading the sports pages of the long ago that Teach had a very bad temper. Oh, the guy had a reputation for cool under fire like any good quarterback, but there was a disturbing pattern of violence in his life. It was right there in the record for anybody who wanted to read it.

Blood divided the powder into two equal portions and cut them into lines. “Now, you got to take it easy with this. It ain’t that high school shit you used to.” Blood knew the people who supplied the shit Tyrone and his friends used, and he knew what he was talking about. Tyrone took out his wallet, removed a ten-dollar bill, and rolled it with shaking fingers. Blood let his voice go soft, made the sound of an older brother, the sound of caution, good reason. “Just do a line and wait a minute. See how it takes you.”

The boy leaned over and inserted the rolled bill into his nostril. Too eager, too eager by half. Blood loved that youthful eagerness. It made the world go round. It made business run smooth and the money roll in. He watched the boy draw in the line of cocaine and then jerk back with the shock of a pure dose. Pull back like his skull had been seized from above by the talons of a giant, ravenous bird. Well, it had been seized, and so had his spinal cord. Every nerve in his strong, young body was singing the Cartagena conga. Ta, ta, TAH . . . BOOM! Oh my, my, yes.

Blood always cut some lines for himself. Good customer relations. But with the boy, he hadn’t yet. And the boy didn’t seem to notice: that eagerness, Mr. Impatience, telling the boy there was more for him if Blood didn’t take any.

Two weeks ago, Blood had brought the boy back here among the boxes and the crates and told him he had a choice. He could do what Blood asked him to do with James Teach, and Blood would continue to supply him with the thing he loved most in the world, the Special Reserve, or he could go without the drug (Blood described some of the physical unpleasantness of this to the boy) and Blood would see to it that certain people were made aware of some of Tyrone Battles’s activities. Blood had expected some of that phony football anger, some of that young-buck-raging-around-and-confronting thing, but the kid had just looked at him and thought about it, realized that Blood had his balls in a vise, and said, “All you want me to do is confront the guy, piss him off, and see what happens?”

“That’s right, my friend,” Blood had said. “You just get in his face a little like the mean little nigger you are and see what he does. He does nothing, you just walk away. No problem. But he bows up on you, gets in there eating your breath, goes dog to your dog, then you improvise, see where it goes. I told you, the guy has a history of losing his temper. But remember, we want him in trouble, not you.”

The truth was that Blood didn’t know what Teach would do, but he figured it was worth a try, this thing with Tyrone Battles. Even if Teach didn’t take the bait, Blood might learn a thing or two. What had happened, the story Tyrone had just told, was righteous beyond Bloodworth Naylor’s wildest dream.

Tyrone fell backward into a Barcalounger that was about to be shipped out to some whores in an apartment in Suitcase City. The football star sprawled there with his mouth gaping, his hands twitching, his eyes the size of cocktail coasters, muttering, “Oh man. Oh shit.”

“I told you it was good shit.” Blood didn’t think the kid heard him. Whatever. The kid knew what to do next. The kid would hear him when the time came. And if he didn’t, Blood would crank the vise a little tighter on those eager young balls.

It was hot back here in the storeroom, hot and private. Blood left the boy sitting in his coca-leaf hyperdrive dream and walked out to the loading dock. He rolled open the big steel door and let the evening breeze blow across his face. He looked at the two-acre fenced lot where the delivery trucks were parked, Naylor’s Rent-to-Own painted in bold black letters on their sides. He glanced up and down the alley.

To the west, where the sun was setting now, he could see the two whores who usually stood under the jacaranda tree behind the laundromat moving into position for the night. They’d stand there under the tree in a litter of cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, and crack vials until somebody came along and they started hollering, “Booty for sale! I got the softest mouth in Tampa.” Shit like that. They were crack-addicted whores. The walking dead. Blood Naylor had invented a word for them: zombitches.

Blood ran whores, but he did it the smart way. His scam was neat, efficient, and safe. He ran the rent-to-own as a legitimate business, and it did all right, nothing spectacular. But the bulk of his income came from the whores whose apartments he furnished. He shipped cheap furniture out to them, kept them on the books as rent-to-own clients, and recorded his share of their take as monthly payments on the furniture. The cocaine business provided a small part of his revenue. He only dealt with upscale clients: connections in the universities and some people in the medical and legal communities who liked their recreational drugs to come from a discreet and reliable source. It never hurt to have friends in Armani suits.

The sun had gone down over the jacaranda tree, and the two whores were doing business. A white man in a van had pulled up next to them and was negotiating. The two girls strutting their pathetic, skinny butts and talking that whore trash to a redneck from across the bay in Kenneth City. Blood heard Tyrone muttering to himself inside on the Barcalounger. That Special Reserve gave a man power dreams. Blood figured he’d better get back inside before the boy wandered off to stick up a convenience store with his dick. He’d give the boy some cocaine to take with him, put the photos of the boy’s face in an envelope, and stick them in his pocket, maybe tuck a couple of hundred-dollar bills into the boy’s wallet for good measure. Customer relations.

Bloodworth Naylor dreamt his power dream at night, and it was always the same story, and James Teach was always in the starring role. And James Teach was always surprised, beautifully surprised, when his sweet white world turned to blood and shit all around him, and in the dream Bloodworth Naylor was always laughing. And there was someone else in the dream. She was the reason for all of this. A beautiful woman. And, oh yes, wasn’t that always the story?