Terminal (6 page)

“The woman told us she had to deliver money to various places. Serious cash, okay? She was worried about somebody moving on the money. Victor”—he nodded his head in the direction of the dark-haired guy—“he picked up a couple of grand for every delivery. He carried the bag. We thought it was a regular series of payoffs—she never took anything back when she turned over the money.”

I didn’t say anything. I had a lot of questions, but it wasn’t my turn to talk.

“She told Victor no weapons. If someone made a move on them with a gun, he was supposed to turn over the bag he was carrying. He was just muscle, okay?”

I nodded. The woman hadn’t been worried about being hijacked—Victor was there to intimidate the people who supplied the kids. One look at him would get that job done.

“You’re sure she has this picture?” the leader asked.

“No question,” I told him.

“This means she has others? That she does this all the time?”

“It’s what she does,” I said, flat.

The leader was wearing his sunglasses even inside the garage, but I could feel his eyes burn behind the dark lenses. “I’m a thief,” he said, “just like you are. We don’t fuck kids.”

“I know that,” I said.

“Some of our guys, they’re a little crazy. Like B.T. He’d stab a nigger just to stay in practice, you know?”

“I know.”

“But none of us would do little kids. Our brotherhood…”

I bowed my head slightly. “You have everyone’s respect,” I told him.

“
We do
now,”
he said, his voice soft. “If word got out that we were involved with stuff like that…”

“It won’t,” I said.

He went on like he hadn’t heard me. “If that word got out, we’d have to do something serious, you understand? We can’t have anything hurt our name—people would get stupid with us.”

I kept quiet, waiting.

“If we give you the information you want, are you going to try and buy this picture from her?”

“If she’ll sell it.”

“And if she won’t?”

I shrugged.

“Victor made a lot of those cash runs for her,” he said. “A couple of day-care centers, private houses…even a church. There has to be a fucking lot of those pictures around.”

“Like I said, she’s in the business.”

The leader put his hand over his heart—I could see the tattoo on his hand. His voice was still very soft. “Her name is Bonnie. The house is on Cheshire Drive in Little Neck, just this side of the Nassau County border. A big white house at the end of a dead-end street. There’s a white wall all around the property—electronic gate to the driveway. Big, deep backyard, trees and shrubs all around. Two stories, full basement, maybe some room in the attic, too.”

“Anything else?” I asked him.

“She has that school bus you talked about—a little one, maybe a dozen seats in the back. She uses the big fat guy as the driver.”

“Any security in the house?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When we work, we play it straight. We weren’t even thinking about taking her off.”

I handed him five grand, all in hundreds. “That square us?” I asked. “And you take care of B.T.?”

He nodded, and we were done.

They stepped away. Later, I stepped in.

It made the papers.

The perpetrators were never caught.

B
obby had spent a lot of time trying to get me to spray my old Plymouth. The guy I’d gotten it from had been trying to build the ultimate New York taxicab, until the wheels came off his life. Bobby passionately believed I could get the two-ton beast into the twelves if I went nitrous.

I knew he’d love the Roadrunner I drive today. Kept telling myself I’d bring it over, show it off, take him out for a ride.

Someday.

The car I’d heard was well past us by the time I came back to the present. I pocketed the .357, nodded at the man I’d been holding it on, telling him we were back in business.

“I
’ll start over,” the AB-OG said. Making it clear he wasn’t expecting me to acknowledge what he’d called my “references.” He just wanted me to understand that he knew I’d been certified, measured up to the real convict’s standard. Time-tested. “The…other stuff, it has to come in. But just a stage-setter, no soapbox. Work for you?”

“Your dice,” I told him.

“P
eople think prisons were always mixed, but that’s wrong. It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson was making all his moves that they started desegregating the joints. I was in Q in ’64. Already been through the whole Youth Authority. Soon as I turned seventeen, they decided I was all grown up.

“It sounds like it would have been bad there. But I’d been schooled, spent more time locked up than I had on the streets. If they’d just kicked me to the street, I would have been lost. But a prison—even a much bigger prison, full of older guys—I knew how to get along there.

“I found a little car to ride in—that’s what we called crews back then, cars—and I was just jailing. You know: lifting on the yard, playing cards, moving slow, doing a little of whatever was around, jawing, TV, even some reading. Time, you know how it is.

“But the minute they made us mix, the niggers took over. They grabbed
everything.
I don’t just mean they ran the place; I mean it wasn’t safe to be a white man in there anymore.

“They didn’t try to
ease
in—negotiate, make deals, split things up. Fucking animals wanted the drugs, they wanted the cash-queens, they wanted the gambling, they wanted the home-brew. They wanted
anything
that was yours, they just took it. You know what I’m saying?

“So that’s where we sprung from,” he said, tapping a crude “AB” tattooed in Prussian script over his heart. “’Cause it wasn’t just the colored gangsters coming at us, it was the fucking ‘revolutionaries,’ too. White trash like me, bad-to-the-bone outlaw peckerwoods. Born someplace else, it always seems like. Our people came to the Coast one step ahead of the law, and raised us to be worse than them. No education, no hopes. A whole breed of winos and check-collectors, and
we
were the fucking ‘oppressor’?! The ‘ruling class,’ if you believed those stupid fucking apes.”

He lit a smoke, showed some teeth. “You know what’s funny? The only ones who ever
did
believe them were the same rich motherfuckers
we
hated.”

He blew out a long exhale, giving me a chance to talk if I wanted it. I didn’t.

“And then you had the beaners,” he said. “Specially EME then. Flexing their muscles, starting to get strong, too. It was like it had been up in Tracy. ‘Get in the car,’ that’s all you heard if you were white in there. ‘Ride with us, or ride alone.’

“You ride alone, you don’t ride long. So we rode together. But we didn’t have anything to
hold
us together. That’s where the Aryan thing came from. Blood. Pure white blood. Same thing our grandfathers got bought off with, understand?”

“No,” I said. This wasn’t a man you ever wanted to pretend you understood if you didn’t. I sat back. He lit another smoke from the butt of his last one, settled in.

“You’re living in shacks and trailers, eating off food stamps, got nothing, never going to
have
nothing, but at least you’re not a nigger. You get conned, tricked, put down, spit on, you’re not welcome in the good parts of town. That’s what ‘trash’ means, right? After you’re done with it, you throw it away. But at least you’re not a nigger,” he said, self-mockingly. “So you beat the crap out of a man for looking at some pig of a slut you wouldn’t fuck if you were drunk
and
blind, and you call it protecting the race.”

I said nothing, waiting.

“Yeah,” he rolled on, grim-faced. “Got that beautiful, pure white blood beating in your veins. Remember, your ancestors
owned
those fucking niggers once.

“Well, that wasn’t what we were about. I don’t mean any of us were liberals, but hating niggers, that’s an attitude, not a job. When
we
went out to work, we wore ski masks, not punk-ass white sheets over our heads, like faggot ghosts.

“Didn’t matter what you did so long as it was work, am I right? We were robbers, burglars, dope-dealers, muscle for hire, safe-crackers…in that class. The Life, the
outlaw
life, that was our identity then.
That’s
what set us apart.

“So, when we got locked up, we were somebody. Convicts, not inmates. And what we cared about wasn’t white supremacy, it was supremacy, period—see? Being in charge. Running things.

“You know what? Quiet as it’s kept, some of us, we worked with colored guys. In the World, I mean. When you’re working, you want the best. Turns out the best wheelman out there’s a different color than you, who gives a fuck? Work, that’s the thing. You know the two tests, right?”

“What’d you go down for? And did you come alone?”

“Yep. Same as it is everywhere. I worked with black guys who’d walk into the fucking Death House alone—rather die like a man than live as a rat. But a diddler? Sicko like that, he could never be with us, no matter what kind of skills he had. Because a baby-raper, he’ll give you up before they get the second bracelet on his wrists.

“Inside, sure, we stayed to ourselves, color-wise. But when we
thought
of ourselves, we didn’t think of ‘Aryan,’ that never came into the picture. Way before we got started, you had bikers wearing Nazi crap, you know, like Kaiser helmets and stuff like that. Plenty of them even wore big-ass swastikas on their jackets. But that wasn’t about anything but blowing minds. Making a show. All they wanted to do was ride, fuck, and fight. Took
them
a long time to get the picture, too.

“Anyway,” he said, with the air of a man who knew he’d digressed, “when things changed Inside, we saw right away that we needed something more than being stand-up thieves to keep us together. You got niggers who’d stab each other in the back walking around calling each other ‘brother.’ What’s
that
tell you?

“Right,” he said as if I’d actually responded to his speech. “All of a sudden you got the black-liberation guys. They didn’t want nothing to do with nigger pimps, but they’re not trying to knock them out of the way, they’re trying to
recruit
them. Just like those Muslims. They got their religion shuck, but they were a gang, for real. Good
tight
gang, I’ll give them that. So now you got George Jackson spades who want to ice guards; and you got Elijah jungle bunnies who say, ‘When you in the Man’s house, you live by the Man’s rules.’ And, naturally, you
always
got niggers who just want to take over the rackets, like in the streets. You see what I’m saying? Color’s never enough.

“And I’m not just talking about niggers, either. Say you’re a Mex, it matters if you’re from south or north. California, I mean. Their Mason-Dixon Line was Bakersfield, I heard. I mean, EME and Nuestra Familia, they’re both brown, right? But could they ever get together? Fuck, no.”

I shook my head in agreement. I hadn’t come up with Mexicans, but Puerto Ricans have gone the same route here—they won’t mix Latin Kings and Netas on the same tier at Rikers unless they
want
a war.

“And
those
motherfuckers are all born blade-men,” he went on. “Turned the joint into Shank City. But you know what they all had in common? If you were with one of the crews, any of them, you were safe. Not safe when race war jumped—anyone can die then, you know that. But say you were a seventeen-year-old black kid. Light-skinned, sweet face, skinny little body. You walk the yard alone, you’ve got a daddy by nightfall. Or you get busted up so bad that, next time the wolf barks, you turn right over. But you claim Black Muslim, that’s not going to happen. A lot did, for just that reason.

“So we knew we had to stand together, or we’d all be plucking our eyebrows, putting on lipstick, and cutting the back pockets off our jeans. We had to
consolidate,
because there weren’t enough of us to split into separate crews, like the niggers had. So we needed something else. Something the niggers had. And the spics, too.
Brotherhood.
We had to be the same. Shared blood. Heritage.

“That’s where this started. And now it’s full-circle. We were a gang, threatened by bigger ones, so we all came together for protection. Way it always happens, you think about it. Then we got this…ideology. The key word in AB isn’t ‘Aryan,’ it’s ‘Brotherhood.’ And we still use it, for the same reasons. We use it to recruit, to hold us together. But the last part of the circle is where we are now. All of us. We all know it’s a lie.

“You listen to some of us, you listen to Elijah’s boys—I guess they’re Foghorn’s now—you’d hear the exact same thing: It’s the fucking Jews. They’re the ones who cause all the misery we suffer. They’re the reason we’re
in
the joint to begin with: Jew laws, Jew lawyers, Jew judges.

“But’s that a mountain of bullshit. And when you’re
serious
about your work, bullshit gets in the way. We got some dumbass ‘Aryans’ who can tell you all about the Vikings. Odin. Valhalla. All that crap. Always reading. Big students of history. Assholes are as lame as the Christers who they used to send around from outside. The only history a good thief should care about is history he can
use.
” He laughed, sweet as cyanide.

He lit another smoke, asked: “Did you know that Al Capone only committed one murder himself in his whole life? I mean, he must have ordered a couple of hundred hits, but he only did one himself. You know who he whacked?”

“Some punk who beat up his best friend,” I said.

He gave me a look, said nothing.

“Guy named Jake Guzik,” I went on, making it clear I could go on a lot longer if he wanted.

“Yeah,” he said, slowly, shifting his tone, not his posture, but it was enough of a tell that I’d surprised him. “And when he did that Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was the Purple Gang he called in for the work. Kikes, every one of them.”

“Dumb ones, too,” I said.

This time, his laugh was chestier. “Yeah, there goes another rumor down the toilet. But that boat still floats. You got Italian guys saying they’re ‘Aryans.’ You got skinners thinking they’re part of the ‘Master Race.’ They go around quoting Nietzsche, got their spiderweb tattoos, all that crap. But here’s the joke: any real con with half a brain knows it’s all a hose job. Just like those Black Muslim bosses—you think they really believe some mad scientist on a secret island created the whole white race in a test tube? Sure.

“What we are now is a gang. Same as the bikers. May have started out different, but now we’re about money. Most of the race stuff, it never makes it to the streets. Look at the white kids we should be recruiting. But what do you find in the trailer parks, now? Dumb-fuck skinheads who just want to get wasted and go out and whack somebody with a baseball bat. Or punk-ass ‘Nazis’ who have to hide behind the goddamn
police
when they go on one of their little marches. And white kids are turning into stone whiggahs—they want to be fucking ‘rappers’ or play in the NBA.

“Look, this is about
business,
okay? There’s even…You ever hear of the Nazi Lowriders?”

“No,” I lied. More to keep in practice than for any other reason.

“They started out like an…auxiliary, I guess you’d call them. We were in; they were out. So they got things done for us, specially the drug stuff. Worked out good for everyone. Only thing, some of them are spics. I don’t mean no half-and-halves, either.”

“Nazis, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, dry-laughing. “Heil fucking Hitler.”

“I get it,” I said. Not lying, then.

“As long as you have prisons, you’ll have gangs,” he went on, like I hadn’t spoken. “They got them in Australia, they got them in Thailand, they got them in Russia. And when members get out—and most do—they just keep on trucking. Back to business. It works for us, and it works for them, too.”

“Them?” I asked, keeping anything resembling a challenge out of my voice.

“You think, if all the gangs Inside got together, the guards could hold the joints against us? Not for a minute. Long as they can keep us killing each other, they’re pretty safe. Sure, every blue moon, they put an ultra-hard-core like Tom Silverstein in a unit with a guard that just
has
to fuck with him, and then…But most of the time, the cops Inside just stay out of the way, let us do what we need to do, so long as we don’t do it to them.”

He fired another cigarette. “Ever notice how often you hear ‘blood’ in this? Niggers call each other ‘blood’—even named one of their gangs that way—the one that kills another nigger gang on sight. It’s
all
a trick, and we
all
get played.

“Now, listen for another minute, ’cause I’m coming to what
really
counts. You know what every AB man Inside fears most today?”

“The same thing they experiment on in labs.”

“Huh?”

“White rats.”

“That’s it,” he said, grimly. “There’s
dozens
of our men looking at the Death House right now because they got snitched off. Not infiltrated—those movies where they put undercovers in prison, never happen.
Couldn’t
happen—we’ve got that acid test for new members. Cops kill people all the time—blow away a bunch of dealers, keep their stash, and get medals for it. Fuck, some of them hire
out
as killers. But there’s no way their bosses give them
permission
to take someone out just so they could work undercover. That kind of thing, there has to be a record of it. I met some dumb motherfuckers who carry a badge, but never one
that
pure-grade stupid.

“No, it’s always one of our own that turns. Some pure white Aryan warrior, one hundred percent man, ready for Valhalla when his time comes,
that’s
who gets on the stand and fingers us.

“That’s why all the Brand bosses got their California life sentences commuted by the governor a while back—so they could start on their federal time. That was supposed to be to spread out the leadership, but it was really about setting us up for one big take-down.

“And it worked. By now, there’s so much paranoia running wild that you got guys checking in because they think they’re about to be put on knock-off, see? If you’re going to be iced for ratting when you’re innocent, why not make yourself guilty, and score all the rewards that go along with it?”