RUFF STUFF

RUFF STUFF

A

Novel by Smcallis

This is a work of fiction. No similarities between any person living or dead is intended, and any such similarity is purely coincidental. All characters © 1992 by Smcallis.

CHAPTER 9

A NETTLESOME CATCH

CURTIS ISAAC WAS A GANGSTA. A thug, a hoodlum, a petty criminal-architect whose sole motivating purpose was to effect fear in the local populace and thus gain respect. Respect, is the currency traded on the streets, respect, the stock and trade in the Projects, respect, is what makes the difference between a man and a Gangsta in the urban sprawl of Hamtramck. Isaac, he needed that respect, if he were to maintain his position as boss, shot-caller, Lord High Pooh Bah of The 42nd Street Curs, a minor street gang, renowned for their ultra-violent culture, access to illegal drugs, guns and freight. The Cur’s made their home in “The Hornets” a hulking, Johnson era project, these were a nasty swarm of wasp. Their willingness to commit murder was legendary, as was their staggeringly poor marksmanship. It was a thug’s life.

It was a cold morning; High-Top warmed his hands over a burn barrel that stood in the vacant lot between the two derelict buildings that served as the executive office of the 42nd Street Curs. He deliberately rolled a cigarette, licked the edge, and lit it on a flange of glowing metal. He took a puff, and passed the fag to his boss.

“Yo, dawg, I say we do business wit him, chea?”

Isaac said nothing.

“Aw snap! Man, he be cool up-and-down! He gonna slide, past West side brutha. Fo real! Tell me I didn’t lite dem Chessie bitches for nothing! Ee got the goods, ee got duh connections. It’s lak free money home-ee.”

Isaac drew down on the cigarette he remained apathetic. He didn’t like it. High-Top was number two, his chief lieutenant, confidant, his best friend and arch-rival. High-Top was hot on the success of a raid on a cross-town rival gang, the Chessies. High-Top and his crew killed five Chessie bangers, and in the process captured a semi-trailer. The Curs were now sitting on a windfall, almost two tons of pure cocaine. Exactly what to do with the cocaine, how to get rid of it, how to defend it, that was what this meeting was about.

“Muthafucker and piss!” Exasperated with his boss after months of indecision, High-top stabbed a finger in Isaac’s face, a shocking act of complete disrespect. A direct challenge to Isaac’s authority, “You nev’ah gonna be more’n a sorry-ass two-bit muthafuck’n nigga. ‘Zac, you pass on dis deal brutha, you are one fucked-up crazy nigga. Dis is gold baby.”

“Ain’t-a-gonna-swap.” Isaac was adamant. “I don’t do no buiz-ness wit no whiteys.”

“What the fuck you talk’n ‘bout?” High-Top snorted, this was beyond impossible; he’d done all the work. He planned the raid, staged the raid, pulled the trigger, he had the freight. Now Isaac didn’t want to do business because the buyer was white. Racism was a waste of time, a game for schoolyard punks this was business.

“Let me truthanize you muthafucka! Dem Chessies be bad man. I killt five home-boys for dis shit! Dey hit us, we hit back, dis is war! We need dis freight to defend our territory. Two million dollars dawg! You pass up dis deal, I swear, I’s gonna bust a cap in yo head.”

Isaac’s eyes narrowed, the tension between the two men escalated to a palpable level. It was not an idle threat. Isaac expected this move long ago. High-Top had the muscle, his crew was loyal, and they outnumbered his. The deal was for two-million dollars of pure cocaine. High-Top negotiated the deal. Isaac was never so clever. Murder he understood, extortion, intimidation, manipulation, these were the tools of the trade. Isaac was a common hoodlum, an evil-small minded little man. He thought small, but he fought hard, and held on to what was his with a vicious psychopathy that would have made Joseph Stalin proud.

The two men grew up together; Curtis Isaac and Reginald Carr, they went to school together. Expelled together, both men made their bones in the ranks of the Curs; blood in blood out was the rule of the street. Isaac was always the leader, the more vicious of the two. Isaac was a narcissist, a nihilist, a pure sociopath. Isaac was the kind of punk you read about in the newspaper, the one who kills his own mother for bus fare. High-Top by contrast was intelligent, introspective, always a quick wit and a good leader. The two men fed off each other, together they were greater than the sum of their two parts. Each supplying what the other lacked. If the situation called for smarts, the figuring out, the what-to-do, High-Top was there. If it required murder . . . Isaac was more than willing to supply the dirty work. Now, after twenty-five years on the street, the two men stood at the pinnacle of a minor criminal empire. Forty-two blocks of Hamtramck territory, two-million dollars and two tons of cocaine.

Isaac’s control over his territory was absolute. Death, in the form of drive-by shootings was the penalty for even the slightest incursion. Protection money was his stock and trade. Money ruthlessly extracted, from every mom and pop grocer, hot dog stand and business, legitimate or otherwise, up and down the block. Everyone paid. No one bought or sold, from the lowest tamale cart to the national Sear’s and Roebucks outlet.

Late payers feared burnout or death. No one paid late. Every drug deal that went down in his territory; Isaac was entitled to a cut. This was enforced with ruthless efficiency. Prostitution, gambling. He controlled that too. Everyone paid him. It was a money making machine. Isaac was the “Yurtle the Turtle” of 42 square blocks of Hamtramck. King of a house, King of a tree, the hulking tenement project, The Hornets, that was his castle. Isaac guarded his empire with a jealously and paranoia that was beyond vengeance. Nothing more sophisticated or complicated entered into his brain. Violence he understood, territory he understood, respect he demanded and murder was his only response.

Money, on the other hand, the art of making money from money that was a mystery. Isaac was a thug. He was content when he could make a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there. What he didn’t understand was the real art of making money. That money makes money. The whole notion that the couple of pathetic thousand dollars he turned every month could somehow miraculously transmute into hundreds thousands of dollars. The idea that two thousand dollars made in a drug deal, instead of being evaporated into the ether, squandered on paying his satellite cable bill, that the same two-thousand dollars could instead be transformed, invested, into a hundreds of thousand of dollars, millions of dollars. The art of finance, negotiations, of investment. The big picture, the world stage. All that was lost on Isaac

High-Top was a different creature altogether, he was left brained, these concepts he understood perfectly. High-Top understood with a clear clarity, and Zen like spiritually that there was a whole world outside of Yonkers and that world had money, he had money. He had freight, and the whole world was his oyster.

Except for the color of his skin, his lack of advantage, his lack of education, High-Top could have been a top executive trader with Smith Barney. What he lacked in any degree whatsoever in finance, he made up for in “horse-smarts.” High-Top intuitively understood how to make money with money. He tried to explain this to Isaac. “Money makes money.”

Brandishing his trademark Glock 19, Isaac countered, “Fucking fear makes money.”

High-Top went away in despair. He remained undeterred, Isaac was wrong, Isaac was a Neanderthal. High-Top continued to search for ways to invest the 42nd Street boy’s money. He was a smooth talker, a consummate “used-car” salesman, a person who could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo and steal it back again. All without the Eskimo ever knowing, he’d been scammed.

Even without being a fucked-up paranoid psychotic, Isaac instinctively recognized that High-Top’s ambition was a danger. High-Top was smarter than he was; Isaac knew that brains made High-Top a dangerous rival. Worst of all, High-Top was popular. His crew was loyal; High-Top was a good boss, a valuable man, he thinks he’s cool, but a chipper awaits him. Note to self―Kill High-Top.

The deal was for $2,000,000. The underwriting partner negotiated in the black and called himself Sherman-Williams. Williams assured them that he hated niggers, secondly, if anything went wrong, anything at all, he would kill them, he would find them, he would kill their families, and he would kill anyone they ever knew.

Isaac, unaccustomed to being threatened, a King in his own country, told the buyer to “Go fuck yourself!” High-Top, always the cool negotiator, corralled his boss, explained that there were bigger fish in the sea than 42 blocks of real estate in a run-down neighborhood in a sorry-ass wanna-be suburb of Detroit. That he wasn’t top of the heap. Isaac needed to learn, he needed to learn he could do better, he wasn’t going to do better if he wasn’t willing to except he wasn’t top-o-the-heap, the biggest fish in the sea.

“Gangsta, I's gittin my dawgs on your ass! Yo are not fucking Pablo Escobar! Yo dawg, need to learn yo place man, bide your time. Two million dollars, dat’s more money dan we’ll ever see in our sorry-ass life time. Listen up muthafucka, yo have any idea how long it takes to extort two-million dollars out of a tamale cart! Dey want to do business with us, I say we kiss der ass!”

Two million dollars, that is enough money to make a man think, that sum of money didn’t even exist in Curtis Isaac’s universe. Two thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars, even two-hundred thousand dollars. Isaac understood these numbers. Two million dollars? High-Top assured him the deal was to go down. The drugs were in their possession. The money was to be transferred to an anonymous Swiss bank account. In return, Isaac was to supply 40 kilos of freight. Not some junk crack, but pure cocaine, with a street value of $95,000 per click. Cocaine, transferred in propane tanks to a nameless faceless container ship, bound to the Dominican Republic but in fact under the direct auspices of the Mexican government and the Mexican Mafia via El Salvador, ultimately, to make sale on the streets of Amsterdam. A place Isaac didn’t even know existed outside of windmills and wooden shoes. Stupid fucks, the Dutch will buy anything. This was the biggest deal in Isaac’s universe. Two million dollars, this was all or nothing.

There was only one problem, one nettlesome catch. One detail of which Isaac did not like one little bit. There was no fat brief case full of money. No stacks and stacks of neatly bundled 100 dollar bills. No money, no money at all, no money exchanged hands, just a plan manila envelope, the contents of which contained a single stiff piece of white bond paper, the 20 lb. variety. Written upon which in single spaced 12-point New Roman Times, was a code, a password. Sixteen digits, sixteen letters and numbers granting access to a bank account in Switzerland. Without the password, there was no money. Two-million dollars was suddenly reduced to a single white sheet of paper and sixteen numbers and letters. To Isaac this was incredulous. Isaac wanted to kill someone.

“I give somebody forty clicks of cocaine! You tell me nigga, where’s da fucking money?”

High-Top reassured his boss. The money is in the account. “Trust me dawg, its safer dis way.” High-Top showed him the special check-book, showed him where to sign his name, the password. To Isaac, this was all too much it amounted to foolishness, double-talk, a sham, bullshit . . .

The money is in the fucking account. The money is in the fucking account. Issac's brain was on fire with paranoia. Now, where to hide the password? This presented a conundrum without solution that burned Isaac’s thoughts. Inside the toilet tank? Too easy, “I could have thought of that.” Under the floorboards? Paper? Paper is no good. Paper can be stolen. There was nowhere, nothing could be trusted. There was no hiding place good enough. Every time he thought of a place, he knew High-Top was smarter, and could think of that place too. His own stupidity infuriated him.

Isaac sat in his chair; he drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes as he considered his problem. His fiendish brain worked back and forth, kneading the problem. What to do with the code? Whack High-Top that was the main problem, he considered all the angles, killing High-Top that was the easy part, High-Top trusted him. He could lure him into any ambush of his choosing, High-Top’s crew, on the other hand, that could be a problem; They were loyal, if they knew their boss was dead, they could be out for revenge. He would have to kill a few of them too.

Isaac drew down on a cigarette; he had a skull-splitting headache and a raging hard-on. He spun the poly-composite pistol on the table beside him like some kind of divining device. He stared down vast expanse of his own naked belly. Every inch of which was covered with gang tattoos. His stomach wasn’t so taught, his physique wasn’t so lean. The tattoos bulged and undulated, as his now paunchy 30’s something body heaved with every breath. The tattoo’s spoke for themselves, each one added in succession, a chain, a tombstone, a skull. Each was symbolic, added after an initiation, a murder, time spent in prison, the tattoos amounted to a gangster’s résumé. A rite of passage, Isaac stared at his own ink-festooned naked belly, at once he had a ghetto borne epiphany. There was his answer. Flesh! Smooth, white, pristine flesh, flesh was the ideal hiding place . . . Flesh, moved, flesh was transitory, depending on who’s flesh, flesh was beyond suspicion.

“Now who's flesh?" That was the question.

“Shaila! Ahhh, git me dat lil’ joker kid, tell dat lil’ devil fuck to come'ere im gittin some disrespect over ‘ere. You talk her stupid finger-fuck talk. Tell ‘er to com’ere. She’s so stupid, that dumb lil’ white-nigger shan’t tell nobody.”

Luka played quietly on the dinning room floor, she had a coloring book, crayons and a doll that Lea had given her. She couldn’t hear Isaac bellow, but she felt the vibrations of her sister’s footfalls. Luka knew at once, something was up, either she had done something or was to blame for something, but either way, this was no good. Luka was terrified, she gathered her things in a defensive circle. Shaila at first tried to beckon the deaf girl, pretending to be friendly, she offered her a cookie, the very same cookies Luka had stolen from Mc Donald’s the night before. Luka was too smart, Shaila was not her friend. Luka retreated under the table. When trickery didn’t work, Shaila summoned her two brothers, acting as thugs; the three siblings tackled their sister. Punching her, and with the help of her two brothers, Shaila dragged and pulled her half-white sister down the hall, kicking, twisting, but otherwise without a sound. Luka didn’t scream, not in a normal sense, she didn’t know how.

But she did manage one word.

“KITTY!”

“You dumb lil’ white bitch!” Shaila punched her sister, she punched her again for good measure, blood poured from Luka's nose.

“You shut the fuck up. You don’t scare me! There is no Kitty!”

Luka struggled against the combined weight of her sister and two brothers as she was dragged down the hall like a sacrificial lamb. Luka made what noise she could, nothing mattered. Thrown before the alter of a lazy boy, that contained Isaac, drunk and high on cocaine, he flashed a gold toothed grille, as he caught a hold of the girl and held her up at arms length like a prize turkey, all seventy-four pounds of her, legs and arms splayed out akimbo.

Luka struggled fiercly, Isaac laughed, and flung the girl over on the couch. When she tried to flee, he yanked her back so hard he nearly dislocated her shoulder. Ten-years-old, going on eleven; Isaac pinned the hapless child down with his knee, clamped his hand over her mouth. The zipper made a metalic tearing noise as he stripped down her jeans, he felt the cotton of her "Little Mermaid" underpants. Luka closed her eyes. There was no denying that Isaac was enjoying himself. The idea that what the girl thought was going to happen, and what in fact was going to happen gave him cruel pleasure.

"Not now baby, not yet."

There was business to attend to, the girl lay helpless, half-naked, pinned under his weight. Isaac set fire to the single sheet of bond paper and watched it burn to a cinder, he spat into the ashtray, poured in a little beer for good measure, and stirred the black ashy mass into a thick amorphous paste. He selected a particularly sharp needle and held it up to her face. The girl flinched. Her skin was the color of pure white oak; he smoothed her flesh up to the nap of her underpants.

“Time for a little jail house tattoo, baby.”

* * *

SHE OWNED THE NIGHT. She stalked the asphalt jungle that was the rooftops of Hamtramck. A dangerous predator, her belly growled, she was hungry, a lone she-cat crept along the brick and parapet, hunting for prey. Her eyes, sharp as razors, caught every nuance of movement, supremely adapted to hunting in darkness, the night represent no more impediment to her than a cloudy day to a two-legger. Her sharp ears, picked up every sound, a cricket, a mouse, her nose, so keen no scent escaped her. She was a hunting and killing machine.

The tuna fish can, set out by the “little one” was empty. Phoebe licked at it hopefully, searching for more. There was no food this night on the rooftops, save the pigeons. Pigeons were a special case, abundant, they were plentiful, but catching them in sufficient quantity to feed her veracious appetite was a problem. For a large predator like herself to expend such energy for a reward of such a small meal, in the end, she was often left with little to eat save a mouth full of feathers.

The whole of the urban landscape seemed more like a desert to her. There was no vast expanse of open grassy range, no herds of animals to hunt. Even finding water in this urban environment presented a problem. The “little one” she was always quite regular, setting out a bowl of milk and a pail of fresh water. The cat came every night. Sometimes there was a special treat in the form of a can of tuna or a Big Mac. Phoebe had no concept of what a “Big Mac” was outside that if was fat and juicy and very tasty. The corporate connection or even the slightest notion of the human conundrum and ramifications involved for the “little one” to offer such a tasty meal. How Luka had to lie, cheat, and steal, to get the sandwich from the restaurant, past her covetous brothers and sister, up to the rooftop. All that was lost on a top-predator, she gobbled the sandwich down without even the slightest care in the world. That Phoebe was Luka’s only friend, the great cat did not understand. The cat came, ate the offerings, sometimes stayed, she purred, watched with interest as Luka made finger signs for:

I

L ● O ● V● E

K ● I ● T ● T ● Y.

Phoebe came every night. She ate the food, but wasn’t grateful, since gratitude was a complex human emotion to which she was incapable. She came at night, took what was offered and disappeared into the darkness. Sometimes she left a mouse or chipmonk, if that amounted to gratitude, then that was a close to gratitude as she came.

Whereas gratitude was purely a human concept, what Phoebe did posses was keen sense of territory. The rooftop, six floors up, a sprawling Johnson era projects building, known colloquially as “The Hornets.” Phoebe considered this to be her territory. She urinated and scratched copiously to mark what she considered hers. What she did not know, what she could not know, was there was a certain “two-legger” known as Curtis Isaac who also claimed this same brown stone building as “his territory.” Interestingly enough, both Phoebe and Isaac shared exactly the same primordial views on territory. Territory is to be fought for; territory is to be defended unto death. Territory is to die for.

The die is cast; the great stage of conflict was set, the urban gangster and the she-cat. 9 mm vs. mercurial tooth and claw, neither one even knew of the other’s existence yet each was the other’s mortal enemy. The she-cat, felt the ache of an empty womb, and had inadvertently, inexplicably, claimed the very property most coveted by Isaac. The she-cat claimed the “little one” as a surrogate cub. Isaac too claimed the same "little white-nigger bitch” as his own personal property; her leg was swollen and sore, his mark was on her, her flesh was now his flesh, a mark worth two million dollars. The stage was set for the inexorable clash between primordial entities. The law of the Jungle: Never come between a mother and her cub, and the law of the street: Never fuck with Curtis Isaac.