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. Inside Betsy Head Park he spied two kids playing one-on-one under the lights. D was contemplating calling out to them when another shot landed at his feet. A thug was trying to drive the Range Rover with his left hand while shooting through the open passenger window. A bullet bounced off a cast-iron subway support and ricocheted back at the driver, cracking the jeep’s rear passenger window, forcing him to swerve into the other lane.
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.
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