“Yes,” Asya Roc said. He stuck his hands in the backpack and pulled out the two Berettas and held them up like Eastwood in Josey Wales. Ice rolled his eyes at D.
At that moment, the door burst open and a pint-sized kid with a red bandanna covering everything but his eyes stuck out a Glock like it was shit on a stick. “Yo—”
Before he got his second word out, D slammed the door on his arm twice. The gun dropped from the kid gangsta’s skinny arm, but the bullet in the chamber discharged when the weapon hit the floor and lodged itself in Ice’s thigh.
“Stupid motherfucker!” Ice yelled as he fell backward into the toilet stall.
Asya Roc now had the two guns out and was trying to jimmy the safety on one of them. “I’m shooting my way out!” he shouted.
D reached over and slapped Asya Roc silly with his right hand, took the guns out of his hand with his left. He dropped them both back into the backpack, grabbed the MC by the collar, and kicked the door open. The dressing room had cleared.
“Yo, get the fuck off me!” Asya said.
“Shut up,” D shot back, pushing his face near the MCs, “and live.” D grabbed him around the waist, damn near picking the kid up, and peered into the main room.
If anyone out there had heard the shot they didn’t show it. The next bout was underway and most eyes were on the ring. All the people who’d been in the “dressing room” had evaporated save the kissing couple who were holding hands just outside the door.
“Where the others?” D asked.
The boyish one replied, “I didn’t see no one else, but I do need glasses.”
To Asya Roc, D said, “You stay behind me. When I say run, you haul ass.”
The MC, bravado on mute, murmured, “Yeah.” His eyes darted uneasily around the room.
They moved past the ring, D guarding the MC like Mom on her kid’s first day of school.
Junot walked up to D. “Yeah,” he said, “you better get him out of here. Niggas is talkin’.”
“They’re doing more than that.”
“Oh, that’s what that was,” Junot said with a half-smile. “Thought it was outside.”
“You like this clown enough to help us out?” D asked.
Junot glanced over at the MC. “You know I like his money.”
“Okay,” D said. “I’ll make sure you get hit off.” He needed another set of eyes. He wasn’t sure if he trusted Junot, but in a room of treacherous people, one semihonest Negro was an asset.
The current fight was a furious affair, both women tossing blows with video-game vigor. Most eyes still seemed to be on the match, but D knew better. There had to be someone else. A couple of someones in fact. These kids ran in packs. That punk with the gun was on some initiation mission, no doubt about that, but there was rarely a lone gunman in the hood. D searched for signs of imminent danger, trying to separate mere curiosity from larcenous intent.
And then they were outside. The Denali was parked right out front and the driver, a wavy-haired Dominican in his thirties, hopped out and opened the door for Asya Roc.
A cutie in black stretch pants and a brunette with a bone straight-haired weave intercepted the MC. Immediately Asya, out on the street and seemingly out of danger, started kicking it to her.
D noticed another jeep, a ragged-looking late-model Range Rover with illegally tinted front windows, parked across the street and down the block. He snatched up Asya again, tossed him into the backseat.
“What the fuck!”
“Get him out of here!” D said to the driver. “Do it right now!”
“What about you?” the driver asked.
“Just get him to JFK!” D replied before slamming the door shut.
Asya Roc rolled down his window. “What about my package?”
“I’m gonna hold it.”
When the Denali pulled off, D stood looking at the beat-down Range Rover. He held the bag over his head a moment. They’d want the guns, D was certain about that. He’d taken a risk not getting in the truck, but holding onto the bag was the only way to find out for sure.
Once the Denali was out of sight, the Range Rover jerked off the curb. Then it stopped. D imagined an animated conversation underway behind the tinted windows. Not awaiting its resolution, he started down the block, away from the club and deep into Brownsville.
D walked fast but didn’t run. While the guys inside the jeep decided what to do, he opened the bag and looked inside at the three guns and the boxes of shells. How many bodies were on these? How’d they get here? Up I-95 from Virginia, North Carolina, or Georgia? Maybe they came cross-country from Colorado or Texas? If his client’s prints weren’t on at least two of them, he would have tossed them in the trash and kept moving. D was about to reach in and start wiping them down with his shirt when a shot zipped over his head. He tucked the bag under his arm like a football and turned the corner like Adrian Peterson.
At Howard Street, D ducked into the crook of a doorway. He wished he’d run in the other direction, toward the Broadway Junction station where he could have hopped on the A, C, or J, or even to Atlantic Avenue where there was an LIRR stop. Either way would have meant people to distract these fools, places to hide, and a train to escape on. In the direction he was headed now, D could duck into the projects, a place where gunplay was a bit too typical for safety, and the elevated 3 subway, which could be an escape hatch but, because it was above ground, wasn’t as easy to use for shelter. He was contemplating doubling back toward the fight club when he spied the Range Rover down at the far end of the block.
The warehouses gave way to the retail strip of Pitkin Avenue, where his mother had bought him his first Nikes, and then D zigzagged through streets of tight, low homes and tenements, and then down past the Marcus Garvey projects, low-rise public housing where he’d spent some very dangerous moments. It was where he’d first met Ice. For a moment D contemplated the man’s fate—a bullet in his leg would likely cause him all kinds of trouble—but this wasn’t the time to be sympathetic. After all, Ice might have set the whole thing up.
D pulled out his cell phone. His sometime employee Ray Ray didn’t live far away. Just over at 315 Livonia Avenue in the same Tilden project building D had been raised in. But why get the kid involved in this mess? It was best to keep moving. Speed, not reinforcements, was needed.
Now he was on Livonia Avenue where the Marcus Garvey projects ended. He made a sharp right and headed toward the Saratoga Avenue subway stop. A 3 train grinded past him on the tracks above, moving deeper into Brooklyn. Surely a train toward the city was coming soon.
He was hurrying alongside the Betsy Head Pool, a WPA relic where, decades ago, D had almost drowned before getting scooped out of the chlorine by his brother Matty who gave him mouth-to-mouth at the pool’s edge. Matty had been a bigger, better man than D knew he’d ever be. But this was no time to remember.
If he was gonna die this night, D told himself, it wasn’t gonna happen on Livonia Avenue. This Brownsville street had already had its chance. But vows ring hollow when bullets blaze past your head. From behind him in the direction of Rockaway Avenue and the Tilden projects, two shots had whizzed past him.
D’s lungs were burning, which was a problem, but this didn’t feel nearly as pressing as the fact that his right foot, left ankle, and both knees hurt with more intensity with every stride he took. Getting shot at had made every part of his body tense up and tingle with pain.
D heard feet stomping about a block behind him. Maybe half a block. Where was the car?
Two long blocks ahead was the subway station. A dubious haven but, at twelve thirty a.m. in the hood, it was all he had.