Chapter 1
Wooley’s hands shook, so Johnson offered him a tug on the reefer and Wooley took it. The sweet-grass filled his throat and nostrils, then his lungs, and he held it. Moments later, his brain felt like a wad of soggy cotton and every moment seemed to live in a perfect little bubble, separate from the last, like pearls on a string. His hands didn’t shake anymore, and Johnson grinned beside him in the dark, teeth bright white in his mahogany face.
“Dig this! Wooley’s grinnin’ ear to ear!”
Tibbs rode shotgun. He huffed and jacked the breech on his pump twelve to make sure a shell was ready and waiting. “That mean you niggers are ready to roll?”
Johnson’s reply, “Who you callin’ nigger, nigger?” came with a smile, but there was venom in it. Wooley took another tug on the reefer and handed it back to Johnson. He blew on it, and the cherry glowed in the darkness of their idling Model T.
“Cocked and locked?” Bedoux asked from behind the wheel. Wooley answered with a snort, as did the others, and Bedoux eased the accelerator. The car crawled up the street toward their targets.
Wooley saw them up ahead through the windscreen: Lester Bernice, with the little tin lunch pail he used to shuttle the bolito slips from his route; his policy-boss, Chester, next to another one of the Harlem Knight block-bosses, Frupp; and a kid that Wooley didn’t know, probably not even seventeen yet.
Not much younger than Wooley himself.
XX
“So pay attention,” Lester said, and Beau did his best to listen, though it was getting late and he knew Fralene would want him home soon. If he wasn’t careful, he’d have to explain to Lester, Chester, and Frupp why his sister was out wandering up and down Lenox Avenue after midnight, calling Beau by his unwieldy Christian name, Buchanan.
Lester plunged into his umpteenth explanation. “The pail’s full of dough and slips. You bring it back to your block-boss, and they collect and give you blank slips for the following day. Never hand over the slips or the dough unless there’s at least one witness, if not more. You don’t want to do it out in front of God and everybody, but for fuck sakes, don’t be dumb enough to hand over a pail fulla cash to anybody—anybody!—when there ain’t somebody else there to vouch for you makin’ your drop.”
“Sound advice,” Chester said, eyes still on the checkerboard before him. He and Frupp were melted into their chairs in front of Frupp’s Barbershop, which had been closed for hours, but which Frupp never seemed to leave. The old barber and the bolito boss sat smoking thin little Mexican cigars, munching boiled peanuts, mulling over whether to jump or crown next.
“You gonna move?” Frupp asked. “Slow as molasses in goddamn January...” Frupp was boss for this block, but Beau was apprenticed with Lester, who made his slip and dough deliveries to Chester. Chester had promised that the game would soon be over and they’d all cross 128th and 129th Streets back to his block to see the slips and dough safely deposited at the night bank. But presently, the game didn’t seem close to ending, and Beau was more than a little nervous, standing out on the street in the middle of the night next to a middle-aged Negro numbers runner carrying a tin lunch-pail filled with hundreds of dollars in coin and small bills, not to mention the receipts for the first flush of the following day’s policy slips. Still, best to keep his mouth shut and go with it. They were the experts, he the newbie.
Chester made a double jump. Frupp countered with a triple, leading to a king. “Son of a bitch!” Chester huffed. Frupp burst out with a round of wizened laughter that sounded like a dull handsaw on a termite-ridden log.
“Shit on a stick, Ches,” Lester moaned. “I saw that comin’. You didn’t see that comin’? You blind, old man?”
Beau heard a click behind them and turned in time to see a heavy woman in a loose housedress come stomping out of the brownstone next to Frupp’s Barbershop. She looked pissed, and something about the flip-flop of her slippers on the stoop stones and the sway of her ample bosom under the housedress filled Beau with maternal terror.
“Y’all wanna shut your filthy old mouths?” the woman hissed. “I got my little ones sleeping right inside—” she indicated the ground-floor window just a coin-flip from where Beau stood, “and I don’t need you wakin’ ‘em up with all your carryin’ on. Ain’t you got gin joints to patronize?”
“Well, ma’am,” Chester began, with a mock courtesy that Beau had seen him employ a hundred times in the name of good-natured sarcasm, “first and foremost, I’m insulted that you’d even suggest gentlemen such as we would patronize any establishment that’d serve liquor. This is a dry nation, after all.”
“Here here,” Frupp chimed in. “Goin’ on five—naw—six years dry! That’s Prohibition, miss! The law of the land, case you didn’t know!”
Chester waggled a finger at her. “You’d do well to keep your own sorry after-dark activities to yourself, miss!”
Beau laughed in spite of himself and the fat woman in the housedress came pounding down the stoop steps toward them, thick lips pursed, eyes bulging angrily.
That’s when the black Model T rolled into view and the gun chatter started.
XX
This was Wooley’s first spitfire for the West Indies, but he hoped it wouldn’t be his last. Running numbers was fine and good; likewise dealing at Papa House’s card tables or crouping at the dice games; but real money and respect came by the gun. Kings didn’t trust wetworks to just any flunky, and if your king offered you the opportunity—as Papa House had offered Wooley—then you took it and you made damn sure you didn’t screw the pooch and spank her.