Uncle Janice (20 page)

“You seen Ayad?” she asked him.

He bent forward at the waist to look past her down the block. Paper flyers covered the plywood wall, which was low enough that he could scramble over it if ever necessary. She saw hair- and teeth-straightening offers like the ones she’d thrown away earlier. The psychic with the reasonable rates—
DON’T GIVE UP HOPE, SEE MADAM SANDRA
—had her sticker beneath a section of the wall that said
NO FLYERS
in small letters. The guy, Janice. Pay attention to the guy. His bubble jacket extended far enough past his waist to conceal any gun bulges. His arms were big enough to crush the breath from her lungs. All the neighborhood dealers lately seemed to be huge. When he leaned back against the wall, the paper flyers crinkled behind him.

“You know Ayad?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I was supposed to meet him here.”

“That a fact?” The guy’s lips barely moved when he spoke, as if it pained him to talk to her. “You like literally just missed him.”

“You’re messing with me.”

“Not yet I’m not,” he said. “What you thinking you need?”

She opened her purse, careful not to let him see the handgun sitting at the bottom. With a steady hand she passed him a twenty. He held it up to the sun, like an outdoor bank clerk, and then smiled or maybe grimaced, she couldn’t tell. Maybe, upset, he was chewing on the insides of his cheeks. She looked behind her to see if Tevis was crossing the intersection—no, thank God—and when she turned back around the guy was spitting a baggie of crack rocks into his palm. They looked real, with a dawnish discoloration around the edges, not that she cared. She shoved the saliva-wet baggie into her pocket, not her purse, which would’ve been harder to clean.

“So, listen,” the guy said. He scratched at his ear, but really he was just trying to cover up his leech of a birthmark. “Are you and Ayad like—”

“Thanks a lot!” she said over her shoulder.

Back on the avenue, a 7 train roared across the el tracks. The pigeons had long ago scattered, but Roosevelt’s more sensitive children were just now plugging their ears. She paced outside La Escuelita, its windows too sturdy to rattle, too dark for her to see through. After the train had passed, in the relative quiet it had left behind, she whispered into her Nextel.
I made a buy? Hello? Do you copy? I made a buy
.

Three down, one to go.

She told the investigators that she had maintained her post outside the bar. The whole time. Never left it. The Mexican dude? He had approached
her
. Understand?
He
was the one who’d initiated the sale, practically
forcing
the rocks on her. What was she supposed to do? Say no? Just because she was ghosting? Tell him to fuck off and sell his drugs to someone else: a child, a nun, a recovering addict? After making the buy—outside La Escuelita, mind you—she watched the Mexican wander around the corner, the dude so fat and so slow that she bet the investigators could catch up to him easy. Because Sergeant Hart needed the overtime, he chose to believe her. Detective First Grade Chester Tevis, however, was as always a whole other story. While McCarthy and Duckenfield were head-steering the birthmarked Mexican into a p-van, Tevis met her three blocks south of Roosevelt, at the investigator car, away from any potential witnesses except for Cataroni and Hart in the front seat. She sat on the warm hood and tried to rub the chill out of her arms. She was afraid to look into his face. She stared at his throat instead, his coat buttoned to the top even though he hadn’t made any buys. He had been close, though, he told her. He had been just about to make a buy when he got this mother-f’ing call on his Nextel. Cataroni and Hart, with the dashboard heat blasting their faces, could see Tevis standing over her but probably not hear what he was saying.

“Fourteen years I’ve been doing this,” Tevis told her. “Fourteen years and I’ve
never
had a ghost leave me. Not once.”

“You’re not listening,” she said. “The whole time, I’m telling you, I was outside the—”

“No,” he said. “This is to my face now. You’re peddling this nonsense to my face, Itwaru.”

“You’re not listening!”

“
You’re
not listening. Tell them whatever,” he said, gesturing to the investigators, “but you gotta understand I’m not falling for this, Itwaru. It doesn’t work on me. I’m the one who
taught
you how to lie.”

Wrong. Her father taught her how to lie—don’t hesitate, don’t overdetail, don’t change stories, because no matter how angry people seem, they really do want to believe you—but she didn’t tell Tevis that. “I swear to God,” she said. “I never had the bar out of my sight.”

“My life’s at stake with this shit,” he whispered, cursing for the first time in front of her. “I can’t … I have daughters, understand? I can’t be playing this game.” He reached into his pocket for the Kangol cap, as if to signal the end of their transaction. “I know your eighteen months is coming up. Just so you don’t get in any trouble with that, it should probably be you and not me to ask Prondzinski for a partner switch. She’ll give it to you, I’m sure. Tell her … I don’t know. Tell her whatever you want. You’ll think of something, I can guarantee that.”

“What is this?” she said and hopped off the Impala’s hood. “You’re breaking up with me? Over
this
?”

“I can’t work with somebody I don’t trust,” he told her calmly. “Those are the rules. Those are
my
rules. And I don’t give out second chances, ever. It’s why I’m still alive.”

“But I didn’t even do anything wrong!”

“Oh man, it’s convincing, Itwaru. I gotta congratulate you, I really do. You know what you sound like? You sound just like a drug fiend. Like an actual frickin’ drug fiend.”

Hart rolled down the Impala’s window to hurry them along. It was time to go, time for him to go at least. With the Mexican officially in a p-van headed to the 115 Precinct, McCarthy and Duckenfield needed the
Impala to come scoop them up. But—feeling magnanimous, high on the anticipatory pleasures of time-and-a-half—Hart offered to drop the uncles off at their car first. It was over a mile away in Woodside, parked where they always parked it for drug runs, across from the Himalayan Yak, but Tevis said he’d rather walk.

“She’ll go with you, though,” he told Hart. “Right, Itwaru? You want to get into Investigations anyway, yeah? Before you move on to the commissioner’s office?”

“Trouble in paradise?” Hart asked.

Tevis opened a backseat door for her. He wanted to make this a bigger deal than it needed to be? He wanted to disparage her ambition? Dissolve their partnership over a misunderstanding, walk back to the uncle car alone through the cold, well then fine, whatever, go walk back to the uncle car alone through the cold. After she settled herself in the backseat, he clicked the door shut for her, not at all slamming it as she would have. Cataroni turned around to make a sympathetic
yikes
face. She expected Hart to say something nasty, but the Impala just sped away toward Roosevelt and left Tevis behind. The radio played WFAN sports talk, the investigators’ post-buy ritual. The story of the minute: Tiger Woods’s sixty-five-million-dollar mansion. Up ahead a young brown woman ran out into the street. She had jumped out from between two parked cars, dressed all in black like a shadow, her ponytail flouncing in the Impala’s headlights. To curb his boredom, to teach her a lesson, Hart gunned the engine then braked just short of murder. The woman was frozen; something heavy-sounding shifted in the trunk. Cataroni ricocheted hard against the dash, but Janice, who had sensed this was coming, had her arms extended, her hands braced against the driver’s-side headrest, as if the foot on the brake was her own.

Turn the clocks back six months. Zip across the country. Zip into a new country, into Mexico, where the famous Sierra Madre Mountains green the northwestern coast. It starts here. Actually it starts under the
ground, in the rich soil, with seeds sprouting roots, which sprout stalks five feet tall. Imagine a farmer. To better picture him, give him something a little strange, like an eye patch. At night his hands twitch through his dreams. During the day he snips thousands of marijuana buds off hundreds of marijuana plants. Keep it in the family: the buds then go to his sisters, who live in a nearby adobe with outrageous electricity bills and a satellite dish that snatches dubbed American television dramas out of the air. One sister loves
Grey’s Anatomy
, the other favors
Lost
, and they have little to talk about as they set their brother’s buds in a ten-rack industrial dehydrator. After that, they bunch the buds into bricks, wrap those bricks up in cling wrap, and coat that cling wrap in grease, motor oil, and mustard, a smell not unlike Brother Itwaru’s. Up the driveway comes a 1999 Honda Civic, modified, with its battery hidden in the trunk. Under the hood an empty shell of a dummy battery waits for three of the sisters’ bricks.

Now you have to find someone ambitious or desperate or both. It never takes long. There’s a town not too far away from the adobe—El Rosario maybe?—and in this town there’s a nineteen-year-old boy. Let’s give him a snazzy name, something that hints at his bravery and eventual suckerdom, something like Jerónimo Chávez Morán. The Sinaloa cartel, or rather someone on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel, pays Morán five thousand pesos, roughly four hundred and fifty American dollars, to drive the Civic twenty miles north to the Otay Mesa border crossing. He has been instructed to take the far-right customs lane, where a border agent has been instructed to stop the car on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security. The drugs? The drugs are immediately found. The DHS agent calls over his superiors, who attempt an interrogation, but Morán can tell them nothing because he knows nothing. He hasn’t even been paid yet. Meanwhile, on the far-left lane of the Otay Mesa border crossing, a tractor-trailer carrying 6.9 metric tons of marijuana enters the United States.

In the backseat of her parents’ SUV, a little girl looking out the window tugs an imaginary handle above her head.

The trailer’s air horn responds with a satisfyingly noisy
honk-honk
.

Throughout Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, shady mechanics tinker on tricked-out trap cars. In the spirit of Manifest Destiny, we’ll send the tractor-trailer into California, into a nondescript warehouse with a nondescript name, less Vandelay Imports than Sunny Brothers Shipping Company. Workers there diversify the 6.9 metric tons of marijuana into a small fleet of vehicles, each one specially equipped with hydraulics that—when the doors are locked, the left-turn signal is blinking, and a switch beneath the dash is engaged—raises the backseat to reveal a secret compartment. Stopping only for gas, beef jerky, energy drinks, and more gas, it takes two guys working in shifts seventy-four hours and a significant amount of bickering to drive one of these cars to the East Coast, to a stash house in the mostly residential neighborhood of Mooreseville, North Carolina.

That was three and a half months ago.

Yesterday, a pair of Queens drug dealers drove up from North Carolina with a marijuana-stuffed suitcase in the trunk of their shitty rental car. Shitty because the passenger’s-side window rolled down but not up, as if ghetto touched. Both dealers caught terrible head colds. Professionals, they persevered. When they got home, they sold an ounce of weed to an overweight black kid, Dwayne Jenkins, an ambitious, desperate, American-born nineteen-year-old. Today, on this particular afternoon, you’d find him outside his mother’s apartment building, straddling a construction horse over a deep crater in the street. He had a system: he kept on his person a max of three baggies at a time so that if a DT from Narco ever rolled up on him, he could slip the evidence through a hole in his pocket. From there it would drop down his pant leg and into the crater beneath him. The only hitch: whenever he sold his third baggie, he had to hustle back across the street into his lobby, which is to say his mother’s lobby, where he kept his stash in her mailbox. It was fifty-seven degrees outside, way warmer than yesterday, and all the jetting back and forth had him sweating above his ass crack. With his teeth and long fingernails and the patience of the severely stoned, he picked at the sleeve seams of his sweatshirt so as to turn it into a more breathable sweat–tank top. It was surprisingly difficult work. He had one sleeve off
and was biting at the other when he saw a dude from around the neighborhood, a real sleazebucket named K-Lo, who everyone knew suffered from a dangerous blabber infection. He was of course coming Dwayne’s way. K-Lo had brought along with him a slice of hot mess, an Indian chick—dot, not feather—with a twitchy eyelid and chapped lips. Outside of Dwayne’s mother and certain bowling-alley waitresses, she was the most exhausted-looking woman he’d ever seen. She walked quickly, though. Behind her, across the street, out in front of his mother’s apartment building, more heads showed up, but they definitely weren’t customers, or at least they weren’t his kind of customers.

“You got twenty?” the girl asked.

“Forgive her,” K-Lo said. “She … we work together? At the copy center? And she’s not exactly the star of customer relations over there. Dwayne, this is Janice. Janice, this is Dwayne. See how that works, Jan?”

“You got twenty?” she asked.

“I do,” Dwayne told her. “But it’s not so safe right now, know what I mean?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean. Can you hook us up or what?”

“Five minutes ago, no problem. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But now? I can’t be doing nothing with police all up in my face.”

“What?” she said.

“What?” he said in a girly falsetto meant to mimic her panic. He chin-pointed across the street, where a Chevy Impala sat parked at a fire hydrant. Four antennae rose up out of the trunk, one for every plainclothes in the car. “I mean, are they for real?” Dwayne asked. “Four pissed-off looking white motherfuckers sitting in a tow-away zone? Doing nothing?”

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“Believe it,” he told her. “I’m gonna have to go, but I’ll be back here tomorrow, same spot and everything, if y’all looking to get hooked up again.”