D dashed across the next intersection, the subway staircase only a block away now. He felt vaguely relieved. He was even beginning to smile when the door to the storefront office of AKBK Reality swung open and two men walked right into his path, one of them talking about “the time I scared Lil’ Z,” and D ran dead into his chest. Both went flying down toward the sidewalk.
D fell atop a 230-pound Latino with the stink of rum on his breath and knocked the wind out of him. He had on a black Nets hoodie, with a fierce-looking salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that, even in a moment of surprise, were narrow and hard. Despite the man’s unfriendly visage, for a moment D felt comfortable on his ample belly.
With the assistance of his pal, a middle-aged white man with a hot-pink complexion wearing a Yankees jacket, the guy pushed D onto the sidewalk. “What the fuck! What you doing jogging at this time of night?” the Latino asked even as he struggled to rise.
The shooter who’d been chasing D on foot—a black man in his twenties wearing a red Abercrombie hoodie, holding up his loose-fitting pants with his free hand—had just reached the corner, out of breath but not malevolence. Light brown and round-faced, with fat cheeks and a mouth made for cursing, he stormed over and pulled out a box cutter. “Gimme that backpack, motherfucker!” he shouted.
“What’s going on here?” the white man in the Yankees jacket yelled.
“Mind your business, you old motherfucker!” the young man said viciously.
The Latino guy, still on the ground next to D, looked at the backpack and his eyes got real wide.
D just said, “This guy is crazy”—which actually wasn’t true. Angry, embarrassed, and homicidal, yes, but this fool wasn’t insane. To D’s surprise, the man on the ground reached over and tried to yank the backpack away from him. Instinctively he pulled away. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Just give that shit to me!” the Latino yelled.
The box cutter–swinging Abercrombie wearer now swung at the straps of the backpack with his weapon. D quickly rolled away from all three men.
“You got him!? You got him!?” It was the Range Rover driver, who’d pulled up to the curb and was yelling through the passenger-side window.
“Yeah,” Abercrombie replied, and then stepped toward D, box cutter low and pointed at his face.
“Hold on,” the Latino man said. “You ain’t got shit. I’m taking that backpack.”
“Back off,” warned the Abercrombie kid, “unless you want an extra smile.”
“Is that right?” The Latino suddenly hopped to his feet, glanced at his friend, and nodded. Two New York Police Department badges and two guns appeared, one of them aimed at Abercrombie and the other at the driver.
“Put that thing down!” shouted the white cop. “You are all under arrest!”
On the surface this looked to be a fortuitous turn of events. D was not going to be sliced and diced in some ghetto basement for the backpack. Good news. But being interrogated and possibly incarcerated for what was inside the backpack didn’t strike D as ideal. The Latino cop clearly wanted the bag. What was that about? So D kicked the Abercrombie kid in the shin.
Grabbing his leg and yelling, “Motherfucker!” the young man, despite the police firearms, swung his box cutter toward D, nicking his forearm through his black jacket.
The Latino, standing close to the swinging weapon, fired first. The Yankees jacket squeezed off a second. Abercrombie was hit by both shots.
The driver, without thinking and seemingly with no plan, fired three, four, five shots at the cops, sending blood, smoke, and angry cries into the Brownsville night. The white cop yelled in pain—a bullet had landed in his shoulder.
D rolled away and then scrambled to his feet to the crackle of police walkie-talkies, the rhythm of a hip hop track pounding from the jeep, two more shots, and voices of distress, anger, and obscenity surrounding him. This was not a good place to linger.
“Come back here!” the Latino cop yelled when D took off down the street.
D heard a Manhattan-bound pulling into the nearby station and took the steps two at a time. Blissfully, there was no clerk in the booth, MTA budget cuts having seen to that, so no one noticed D’s wounds. He slid his card in the slot, pushed through the turnstile, charged up more steps, and dove into an empty car on the 3 train, breathing heavily.
It wouldn’t take long for the cops to figure out he’d jumped on the train. They’d be on him in two stops at most.
Next stop was Rutland Road, the last elevated station before the subway went underground. When the train pulled in, D dashed to the front of the platform, hopped down the stairs next to the tracks, and climbed over a short fence, putting himself on the dingy side of Lincoln Terrace Park. He went over another fence, headed past some crumbling tennis courts, and found himself on Eastern Parkway, a long tree-lined boulevard that ran across the spine of Brooklyn, cutting tins through Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights.
D walked a few blocks west to Utica Avenue, a central location for north/south buses and an express subway. He stopped by a garbage can, was about to drop the backpack in, and then changed his mind. As long as he didn’t get caught with the guns, they just might be useful later. So D made a left and then a right, crossing Union Street, which would take him through the heart of Crown Heights’ Hassidic community. It was a place of peering eyes and suspicious Jewish security teams but it felt safer to him than Eastern Parkway’s wide boulevard.
As he crossed New York Avenue, D suddenly felt very tired. All his joints were throbbing—his knees, his ankles, his lower back. He was in good shape but a full-on sprint through Brownsville with contraband guns hadn’t been on his itinerary.
Twenty minutes later D walked wearily up Washington Avenue back to Eastern Parkway. He moved past the Brooklyn Museum’s awkward, ornate, classical/modern glass entranceway. A few cars sped by him on Eastern Parkway and D hoped he didn’t look too conspicuous (or memorable). When he reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden he paused, put his feet together, and then counted off ten long strides, stopping before the cast-iron fence that bordered the garden and the thick, dark bushes behind them.
He bent down and squeezed the backpack through the bars and deep under some bushes. Using his cell phone as a flashlight, D made sure the bag was fully covered. Satisfied, he stood up, looked around, and continued west. His new apartment was just a few blocks away. He needed to sleep. Only after that would he turn his attention to the only question that mattered: what the fuck had just happened?
. . . TIL THE COPS COME KNOCKIN’
The next day the NY1 Time Warner cable channel reported that a shoot-out between two New York City policemen and two gunmen ended in the deaths of the two criminals. The official story was that two off-duty officers were walking toward their cars at the end of their shift when they were fired upon by a man from a jeep and one on foot. The off-duty officers returned fire. The two shooters, Aaron Hall and Dalvin DeGrate, had long rap sheets for violent crimes and some association with a branch of an East New York drug gang. There was a recently opened real estate office on Livonia Avenue and police theorized that the gunmen mistook them for employees of that new company and were attempting a robbery. Apparently the owners had recently reported extortion attempts to the local precinct. There was no mention of anyone matching D’s description.
D chewed on his oatmeal laced with almond butter and mulled over the news report. It was going down as a botched robbery attempt in an area known for crime. Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it was still a mantra in some parts of BK. While D’s absence from the report was a momentary relief,