Cemetery Road (6 page)

We took our time putting everything together. We were in no hurry to act. For four weeks, R.J., O’ and I took turns shadowing Rucker until his routine made his safe houses evident, and then we watched the safe houses themselves. We did our own census of occupants and visitors, tracking every movement and habit, and compiled careful records of the hours in which lights went dim in windows and doors were dead-bolted shut. We knew who and how many, what they drove and, in some cases, how well they were armed, and eventually, we knew exactly where we wanted to take Excel down.

It was an ordinary little duplex apartment out in Inglewood, several miles west of the dealer’s normal scope of operations. The apartment was home to a woman and three men, a quartet we broke down to a supervisor, his wife, and a pair of male soldiers. The supervisor was obese and non-threatening, and the soldiers were typical of the breed in their interminable projection of menace, but it was the woman who may have spooked us the most. She was a wild-haired crazy who flew into spontaneous rages, the kind of rages that precipitate many a prison yard killing, and in partnership with the enforcers who catered to her every whim, she was arguably the most intimidating of all the guard dogs under Excel Rucker’s employ.

More than the people who occupied it, however, it was the Inglewood apartment itself that made the site ideal for our purposes. Excel’s three other safe houses were either apartments in large complexes or single-family homes crawling with children. They were all crowded and cramped, in buildings that seemed to be separated from their neighbors by the breadth of a chalk line, and none of them offered easy entrance nor exit to a thief. Conversely, the Inglewood duplex sat on a short, quiet block outside the chaos of the ’hood proper, with room to breathe on all sides, and there was rarely very much in the way of vehicular or foot traffic around to disturb it. Though it had bars on all its windows, and a pair of relative innocents lived in the unit adjacent to Excel’s, these were minor drawbacks easily trumped by the additional access of an alley out back and an uncomplicated, single-story layout its exterior made all but obvious.

We watched the place for twenty-two days. During that time, it was Rucker’s routine to visit twice a week, on Monday and Thursday nights, and always around ten thirty p.m. We were never able to determine which night was for deposits and which was for withdrawals, nor what, exactly, was the currency involved – dope or cash? – but based upon what few clues the dealer and his crew gave us, we eventually concluded that our biggest take awaited us immediately after one of his Thursday night appearances.

The plan, as I’ve said, was to enter, grab the cash and dope, and get out, without bloodshed of any kind. We had no experience in gunplay and did not intend to resort to any now. But Excel Rucker was not our typical mark, and certain concessions had to be made. If something went wrong and we weren’t prepared to deal with it, we could all wind up dead, and even I wasn’t ready to take that risk.

The day R.J. showed O’ and me the three guns he had secured for our use, the three of us all sitting around O’s dining room table, I was given my first clue that what we were about to do could only end badly.

‘This one here,’ R.J. said, bouncing a black, .45 caliber Colt around in his right hand like a kid with a new baseball, ‘will take a motherfucker’s head off from across the room. This right here is
mine
.’

O’ and I looked over the two weapons remaining – a 9 mm Smith & Wesson semi-auto, and an old, badly scarred .38 caliber Beretta revolver – with equal disinterest.

‘Do you care?’ O’ asked.

‘No. Why should I? They’re only going to be for show.’

‘Shee-it,’ R.J. said, laughing.

I turned to face him directly. ‘I say something funny?’

R.J. looked first to O’ – ‘“For show”, the man says.’ – then back at me. ‘You think that’s all we might have to do?
Show
them niggas a gun?’ He shook his head at the sheer stupidity of the idea. ‘You need to stop trippin’, Handy.’

‘Trippin’? Who’s trippin’?’ I could feel my face burning red.

‘Take it easy, Handy,’ O’ said.

‘No, no, fuck that. We’ve already had this conversation. We aren’t firing a goddamn shot that we don’t have to fire. This fool here doesn’t like that, we can forget this whole thing right now.’

R.J. frowned as if amused. ‘Who you callin’ a fool?’

‘Nobody. He’s not callin’ anybody a fool. Both of you niggas chill out,’ O’ said.

‘Only fool around here is you,’ R.J. said, maddogging me, ‘if you think we gonna go in there and take Excel’s shit without fuckin’ somebody up or gettin’ fucked up ourselves. It’s a drug dealer’s safe house, dumb-ass, not a furniture warehouse! We’re in the big leagues now.’

He was grinning from ear to ear. I turned to O’, demanding his intervention.

‘Put the gun down, R.J.,’ he said.

‘What? This?’

‘Yeah, that. Put it down.’

R.J. did as he was told, but the grin stayed where it was.

‘Homeboy’s right. Ain’t nobody here gonna be pulling the trigger on any of these pieces. And I’m gonna tell you why, just as soon as you wipe that ignorant-ass smile off your face.’

This time, it took R.J. a little longer to comply.

‘Because if we do, it means somebody fucked up. Forgot what the plan was, or did something stupid. And ain’t none of us are gonna do that, are we?’

‘O’, all I’m sayin’—’

‘I said, none of us are gonna do that, are we?’

R.J. sat there for a long minute, burning. No one had the influence over him O’ did, but sometimes, even O’ could push him too far. One day they were going to throw down on each other and R.J. would have O’s neck in two pieces before he remembered who he was sparring with.

‘No. We ain’t,’ R.J. said.

It was O’ who had asked the question, but R.J.’s sneer was directed at me.

I tried to make peace with him later that evening, as we walked out to our cars to drive home. He’d had little to say to either of us after O’ called him out, and I didn’t want his foul mood to carry over into the critical days ahead.

‘Look, brother,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about getting in your face about the guns. But you were freaking me out. Talking like you’re actually
hopin’
to shoot somebody, or something.’

R.J. looked at me in a way that left no doubt that he found my naivety pathetic. ‘I ain’t gotta hope,’ he said.

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means jackin’ Excel Rucker was
your
idea, nigga, not mine or O’s. You the one got the hard-on for him, not us.’

‘So?’

He got right up in my face, nose-to-nose. ‘So I ain’t gonna let neither one of us get killed tryin’ to do this shit your way, Handy. I told you from the get-go, fuckin’ with a playa like Excel ain’t no joke. You wanna go up in his house and rip him off, you gotta be ready to lay a motherfucker
out
.’ He stuck a finger in my chest. ‘And that’s exactly what I’m gonna be.’

He gave me one last jab to cast me aside and walked away. I thought about going after him, but I couldn’t see any point.

I had a chance right then to call the Excel Rucker job off and I didn’t take it. The memory of Olivia Gardner was still a call for revenge too powerful for me to ignore. To put myself at ease, I told myself we had devised a plan that even R.J.’s volatility could not impair. All we had to do was follow it to the letter, avoid all improvisation and error, and our success would be assured.

What I failed to understand is that no plan is ever impervious to chance. No matter how scrupulously rehearsed or executed, the designs of mortal men will always be as prone to the unexpected as cloud patterns in the sky.

It was a lesson I was doomed to learn the hard way.

EIGHT

M
y brother Chancellor was the only family I left behind when I fled Los Angeles for good in the winter of 1979. Our mother had died of ovarian cancer three years earlier and our father had disappeared six years before that, allegedly with a fat woman who had money. We were our parents’ only offspring, and as far as my brother and I knew, we had no other living relatives west of the Mississippi.

I cannot say we parted on the best of terms. Olivia Gardner’s death had shaken Chancellor badly, and he was already on the downward spiral that would not bottom out for many years when I told him I was leaving. My reasons were all hollow and fabricated, and he knew it, but all he did to let on was accept them in silence, as if they weren’t even worth the breath it would take to discount them. Like our mother, he had never cared for R.J. and O’, and had always been able to see the trouble my association with them would bring me, so there was nothing about my sudden need to put some distance between us he could find particularly surprising.

My leaving hurt him nonetheless.

We kept in contact for the first year or so strictly by telephone, calling each other after months of avoiding it just to keep the illusion of interest alive. Then we just stopped. Chancellor’s descent into alcoholism became too pronounced for him to disguise anymore, and I couldn’t keep the ring of pity out of my voice. I had never before seen the loss of a woman drag a man that far down into despair, and in my ignorance of the phenomenon, I decided it would be better to abandon my brother altogether than to bear witness to his resounding weakness.

I have no actual knowledge, then, of the depths he eventually reached. I only know that the woman who answered his phone late one night in 1989 could not stop weeping long enough to properly explain his absence, and that was the last time the number I had for him worked at all. I had given him up for dead until he resurfaced four years later, ending our estrangement not with a phone call but a letter, written from a hospital bed. It was an invitation to resume contact and little else, sprinkled with allusions to his recovery from a personal nightmare he would not name.

Whatever had prompted his disappearance, he came out of it a new man, equally laconic, perhaps, but stronger and less self-absorbed. Gradually, and with considerable caution, we returned to our routine of intermittent phone calls, and in the course of our reconciliation, Chancellor went back to school and married the weepy woman who’d answered his phone that night in 1989. He earned a degree in Journalism from Cal State Dominguez Hills and eventually parlayed it into the steady job he continued to hold today, staff writer for the
Los Angeles Guardian
, the oldest black-owned newspaper in the city.

I hadn’t bothered to look my brother up when I’d come out for R.J.’s funeral, having only planned to be in town less than a day, but now that I’d returned with the idea of staying for a while, I couldn’t see my way around to not getting in touch. He invited me to dinner at his home in Carson early Monday night, and I accepted, anxious to see how much of his rehabilitation was of my own invention, and how much was real.

Like O’Neal Holden had a week before, Chancellor lied and told me I looked good, but he was the one who showed marked improvement from the last time we had met. Gone was the little brother who had always been smaller and less muscular than me; the only physical advantage I held over my sibling today was in height, and that by only the merest of margins. He was hard and chiseled from head to toe, and his every movement transmitted a message of power and vitality that belied his age. Now he had smarts
and
good looks, and I couldn’t help but envy his incredible transformation.

‘You could have stayed with us, you know,’ he said after dinner, as his wife Andrea did the dishes in the kitchen and he and I sat in the quiet of his living room, absently watching a muted television. ‘We have plenty of room.’

I shook my head. ‘I’d be too much of a nuisance. Coming and going at all hours of the night. I’m better off at a motel.’

I had told him I was here on a rare parts search for a repair job I’d taken on back home, and if he had any doubts about this explanation, he had yet to let on.

‘I think you forget we have two teenage boys,’ he said, laughing. ‘People come and go in this house twenty-four-seven.’

His wife chuckled from the kitchen, having overheard the joke. Andrea was a tall, big-boned Filipina with the face of a child’s doll, and I could picture her standing at the sink, her whole body trembling with genuine mirth. She too had made a transformation of sorts, in that I imagined the crying, grief-stricken woman I first met over the phone sixteen years earlier was also a thing of the past.

‘Where are the boys now?’ I asked. I had seen photos of my nephews but we had never actually met, and I’d been looking forward to finding out how their individual personalities meshed with the stoic, almost surly countenance they had in common.

‘In the street. Where else?’

‘It’s after ten. They don’t have curfew?’

‘Eleven o’clock, same as the one Momma gave us. But it’s flexible. Byron’s sixteen and Garrett’ll be fifteen in three weeks. Their mother and I figure as long as they keep bringing As and Bs home from school, it doesn’t much matter what time they get in.

‘So tell me again what you’re doing out here,’ my brother said, seemingly eager to dispense with all the small talk. ‘You said you’re looking for parts of some kind?’

‘Pieces to a set of lamps I’m refurbishing,’ I said, repeating the story I’d concocted on the drive over. ‘A company called Modeline made ‘em back in the sixties, and most of the few lamps still in existence are out here in LA where they were originally manufactured.’

‘The company’s no longer around?’

‘They went out of business years ago.’

‘You try looking on the Internet?’

‘I’ve tried everything. The things are all wood and brass with canvas shades, so units in any kind of decent shape are rare as hell. Hollywood seems to have a fondness for the brand as movie props, though, and if I’m lucky, I might be able to find one or two in shops that cater to that kind of business.’