“News flash,” Toback said, “the world isn’t fair. You’re right, Richie. But what does being right get you?”
He frowned. “What does this assignment get me?”
Toback shrugged. “Maybe it’s an opportunity to get away from all that. To go somewhere where you’re not some kind of goddamn pariah.”
The two men sat there and stared at each other.
“I’ll do it,” Richie said.
Toback grinned. “Good.”
“But...” Richie held up a traffic-cop palm. “... only like this: I don’t set foot in a police station again, not on either side of the river. I work out of a place of my own. And I pick my own guys. Guys I know wouldn’t take an apple off a cart, a nickel off the sidewalk.”
Toback thought about that. “Worked for Eliot Ness.”
“My favorite show, as a kid, Untouchables.”
His boss grunted a laugh. “That explains a lot.”
“Well?”
Toback’s eyes narrowed. “Done.”
The two men shook hands.
Almost twenty-four hours to the minute from the time those GIs had stuffed four duffel bags of high-grade powder into Frank’s trunk, a phone began to ring in a detached shed next to a decrepit clapboard house in North Carolina.
The house looked like Dorothy’s tornado had picked it up and set it down hard; but this wasn’t Kansas and it surely wasn’t Oz. This was Greensboro, where crickets and bullfrogs were announcing the coming night, and a couple of black teens were playing catch.
Playing catch was understating it: one kid had a catcher’s mitt, sixty yards away, and the other had a piston for an arm. The dark yew trees weren’t impressed, throwing longer and longer shadows, making it hard for the kids to see; and the yard was an unlikely practice field, littered as it was with car parts and the scavenged, discarded vehicles that had given them up.
Within the shed, Melvin Lucas, in overalls and his early twenties, was reading Players magazine and paying no attention to the greasy, ringing phone on the workbench where he sat.
His brother Huey, working under a car nearby, yelled, “Will you please answer the bastard?”
Melvin took his eyes off Pam Grier’s bosom and got the phone, saying into the receiver, “Yeah,” unenthusiastically.
“Let me talk to Huey,” a voice said.
Melvin didn’t argue, merely said, “For you.”
“Who is it?”
“I dunno.” Melvin set the phone down on the workbench and his ass on his stool and went back to Pam Grier.
In overalls he’d just gotten dirty today (as opposed to Melvin’s, which had a month’s buildup), Huey Lucas — bright-eyed, good-looking, a young thirty — came over, wiping his hands with a rag.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone.
“Huey?”
He frowned. “Who’s this?”
“Frank.”
He gave Melvin a “what the fuck” look. “Frank who?”
“Frank your brother.”
“... Been a while since you called. Mom could use a damn phone call, time to—”
“You want to bust my ass over that, or come up north and get rich?”
Huey’s smile was so big and pretty, it drew Melvin’s attention away from the skin mag.
“Frank,” Huey said, butter wouldn’t melt. “What a damn treat hearing from you.”
The brand-new two-story house in the housing development cost Frank fifty thousand dollars. Any misgivings the Realtor might have had, selling to a man of Frank’s complexion, were overcome by the sight of an open briefcase containing cash payment in full.
On a sunny spring afternoon, Frank was setting up Bumpy the German shepherd in the backyard with a doghouse and a fenced-in run when he heard the unruly caravan of cars arriving like the opening of The Beverly Hillbillies. All of his neighbors were white, and Frank had to grin to himself, thinking of the dozens of conversations his ragtag family’s arrival would inspire around here this evening.
But his brothers and cousins would all learn to fit in. This wasn’t Dogpatch, USA, it was Teaneck, New Jersey, and they would adapt. They would have to.
Still, their very lack of sophistication recommended these country boys to Frank. With what he had to accomplish, how could he turn to the usual sleazy Harlem suspects? But a country boy wasn’t used to flashy cars and flashier women and diamond jewelry and expensive threads.
A city boy would take your last dime, then swear on his mother’s grave he never touched it. A country boy wouldn’t steal from you if his wife and kiddies were starving. City boys were selfish sons of bitches, but country boys were loyal as that German shepherd in Frank’s backyard.
Assorted cars and pickup trucks soon lined the curb and jammed the driveway. Frank’s five brothers, three cousins, their wives and kids and of course their gray-haired mother in cardigan and string-of-pearls climbed from the vehicles looking almost as excited as they did exhausted.
Just as Frank was coming out the front door with the big dog trailing, Huey was arguing with Melvin about whether this was the right address or not: Huey thought it was. The new Lincoln Town Car parked just outside the garage may have given some of them doubts — how could that be their brother Frank’s ride? One of the younger Lucas boys said he didn’t want to get shot for trespassing or nothing.
And Frank’s mother had said, “Shot for trespassing or anything, Cleon.”
That was when Huey noticed Frank, and there were hollers and hoots as Frank went straight to Momma and took her in his arms and held her for the longest time.
Then he gave each of his brothers a quick hug, which may have surprised them, since he was normally not demonstrative. But he was happy as hell to see them, and could hardly contain himself.
Frank had spent two days picking out the furniture himself and the last of it had been delivered just this afternoon, so the place had not only a showroom look but smell. Momma had never seen a kitchen this big, even in the restaurants where she’d worked from time to time, and — Frank having anticipated her needs with his own trip to the supermarket — the new house was soon filled with the old smells of downhome cooking.
Within two hours of their arrival, the extended Lucas clan was sitting around a vast dining room table passing platters around. Even Nate’s joint in Bangkok couldn’t hold a candle to this soul food. And of course Frank, loving having everybody here, sat at the head of the table.
At the moment, brother Turner was bragging on his eighteen-year-old son, Stevie.
“Boy’s got an arm on him, Frank,” Turner was saying as he navigated a chunk of corn bread, “major league arm, I’m tellin’ ya. Ain’t that right?”
Nobody at the table argued, though Stevie himself just smiled shyly and shrugged.
Frank, spooning some black-eyed peas onto his plate, gave the kid a smile and asked gently, “Show me after supper?”
Stevie grinned and nodded.
But his proud papa wasn’t finished: “You can’t catch him, Frank. Why, he’ll take your head clean off. Talkin’ 95-mile-a-hour. Any idea how fast that is? Here’s how fast: you see the ball leave his hand, and that’s the last you see of it, ’fore it knocks you flat.”
That made Frank laugh. “Is that right,” he said.
At that moment, if pressed, Frank Lucas might well have admitted never feeling happier.
But before Frank went back outside, to try to catch a fastball in the dying light of day, he abducted his mother from the kitchen — the other girls could take care of clean-up patrol — and gave her the grand tour.