“A thousand dollars,” Isaiah said, picking a number out of the air.
“A thousand-you must be joking,” Tudor said. “I’m not paying you a thousand dollars or anything like it. You think I just fell off the turnip truck? Who do you think you’re dealing with? I was hustling for my daily bread while you were still in-where’re you going?”
Tudor caught up with Isaiah in the parking lot. “My offer is two hundred dollars and that’s overly generous if you ask me.”
“No thank you.”
“No thank you? You’ve never made two hundred dollars for a day’s work in your entire life.”
“Yes I have.”
“I’m losing my patience, young man, but I’ll tell you what. For the sake of the girl’s safety I’m going to let you rob me today and today only. Three hundred dollars but only when Darcy is returned unharmed to her mother. Do we have a deal?”
“No, we don’t have a deal.”
“Let’s have a reality check here, shall we? You know as well as I do that fetching that girl is no big deal.”
“If you think it’s no big deal going into a Crip hood and taking a girl away from a drug dealer I’ll give you three hundred dollars and you can go get her yourself.”
“You’re a tough negotiator and I can appreciate that, but you’re about to negotiate yourself out of a very substantial paycheck.” Tudor looked at Anita, smiled, and said: “Everything’s okay, boo, we’re just coming to terms.” Anita popped her gum. “Now you listen to me, young man,” Tudor said, “you are making me look bad in front of my fiancée, something I can assure you I will not forget.”
“What happens when you remember?” Isaiah said, letting the threat pass.
“This is my last and final offer and I am not a man who bluffs. Five hundred dollars, take it or leave it.”
“I’ll leave it.”
“Well, you have just thrown five hundred dollars out the window and you only have yourself to blame. I won’t have my arm twisted, not even for Anita.”
“Tudor?” Anita said. “Don’t even say the word pussy ’til you get my daughter back.”
Tudor smiled like he’d farted in a crowded elevator. “Will you take a check?” he said. “I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”
Cruising slow through a Crip hood and looking for someone was drive-by behavior and likely to get you shot. Isaiah found three girls about Darcy’s age in the Baskin-Robbins eating double-scoop cones and talking loud.
“I’m looking for my sister, name is Darcy?” Isaiah said. “Mama died and I got to tell her.”
“Why don’t you call her?” one of the girls said.
“I don’t know how she gonna take it, you feel me? For all I know she might faint or something. I need to be there with her.” The girls told him a light-skinned girl named Darcy was living in a brown apartment building three blocks up on Prince.
The brown apartment building was L-shaped. All the doors were facing in, big white patches where the paint had chipped off the stucco. Laundry was draped over the second-story railing, an overflowing dumpster in the parking lot. Isaiah parked the Explorer facing the sun so you couldn’t see him through the glare of the windshield. Women sat outside their doors talking. Kids ran up and down stairs, old men played dominoes.
Isaiah was eating the last of the trail mix when Darcy emerged from an upstairs apartment. She was sixteen going on thirty-five, wearing a bathrobe over a slip and fuzzy slippers. She leaned against the railing and looked down at the parking lot like she was disappointed it was still there. Somebody called her. Her shoulders sagged. She looked skyward and shuffled back inside.
Isaiah saw himself going up the stairs and knocking on that door and Shake coming out in a do-rag and no shirt and asking him what the fuck he wanted and then explaining to him that he was taking Darcy home and Shake drawing a pistol and shooting him in the head. Clearly not his best option and after thinking a bit he came up with another.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“A girl, they’re holding her captive. She’s only sixteen. I think they’re messing with her.”
“What is the location, sir?”
A few minutes later four squad cars were jammed into the parking lot. A crowd watched an officer come out of the apartment holding Darcy by the arm. “I haven’t done anything,” she said. “Let go of me!”
Two more cops brought Shake out in handcuffs. “You muthafuckas is wrong,” he said. “That girl’s consensual.”
It was a revelation. Isaiah made a thousand dollars in one day and there were new messages on his voice mail. Word must have spread all over the neighborhood. They’re bullying my daughter. The police set me up. I want to find my birth parents. My class’s computers were stolen. I can’t find my husband. I can’t get away from my husband. My boy did not commit suicide.
Why not charge them for his services? Isaiah thought. Not like he charged Tudor but get paid, be worth something. He knew what Marcus would say.
Get paid? You wanna get paid? Didn’t I tell you about money?
“It’s not about the money,” Isaiah said. “I can help people, start giving back to the community, do some good out there just like you said, remember?” Isaiah waited. He could see Marcus at the breakfast table with his Shredded Wheat and coffee, leaning back in his chair, nodding, weighing.
“We’ll see, Isaiah. We’ll see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY R.I.P.
August 2013
Skip was arrested and taken to the county jail hospital with a severe concussion, cervical damage, a fractured clavicle, a broken jaw, broken ribs, and a torn rotator cuff. Just before he fell into a coma he said to the doctor: “My dogs.”
Isaiah, Harry, and some volunteers from the animal shelter went out to Blue Hill and rescued the dogs. Goliath, Attila, and some of the others were too vicious and had to be euthanized. Harry distributed the rest of the dogs and puppies to foster homes, rescue shelters, and his pit bull breeder friends. There would be more pit bulls in the world but Harry couldn’t bear to put them all down. Isaiah kept a puppy for himself. With Alejandro gone he needed a warm body in the house.
Cal voluntarily checked into the Tranquility rehab facility in Malibu and saw Dr. Freeman three times a week. Somebody snapped a picture of them walking around the grounds together and sold it to the tabloids. The sales of Dr. Freeman’s book went up six hundred percent.
Anthony was going to quit his job right after Cal’s divorce but Noelle was gathering material for a book about her life with a famous rapper. When Cal started losing his mind it was too juicy to pass up and she made Anthony promise he’d stay until Cal either died or got locked up somewhere. She needed a good ending. Noelle pitched Up from Nothin’ and Back Again to a publisher that specialized in tell-alls. She told the editors about the giant pit bull, the bonfire, the hit man, and the underground detective they called IQ. The editors gave her an $850,000 advance.
Rodion, Noelle’s bodyguard, was ogre-big, his eyes like a fish on ice and a Neanderthal forehead that slanted back from his one shaggy eyebrow. Rodion was a former KGB officer who specialized in enhancing the interrogations of dissidents. His favorite implements were his huge gnarly hands and long sharp fingernails. Byron said they looked more like ostrich feet than human appendages.
When Charles heard Cal’s track, “The Fuck Am I Doing on This Earth?” he knew the album would be a disaster. From his point of view, the sooner Cal got to the studio the sooner he’d humiliate himself and clear the way for Grandyose. And it was Bug who asked Noelle to be on the diss track. That was why the calls weren’t on Charles’s phone.
Charles shopped his Takin’ Over album to other labels but there were no takers and without paychecks the brothers were soon broke. They hung out at Cal’s crib, drank his liquor, and played video games on the ninety-inch Sharp. One afternoon, Charles was on the phone trying to get back into the drug business and Bug was cleaning up the mess from the bonfire. The PAWG and her PAWG friends were coming over to swim and ashes were getting into the pool.