Riding the Snake (1998) (37 page)

The back of the house had a small dirt yard with an old, rusted swing set next to a woodpile, where several sections of metal fencing were stacked. Wheeler parked and turned off the engine.

"That's my nephew LaFrance's glass-house Impala out front. He's a kitchen-table drug dealer and a big family problem. Those tennis shoes hanging on the phone line are a ghetto advertisement to anybody driving by that you can buy drugs inside. My grandmother, Nadine, is old. She can't handle him. I thought I ran La
-
France out a month ago."

They moved up onto the back porch, where Tanisha found a key under an empty, cracked flowerpot.

"Clever spot," Wheeler said.

"Honey, if you can still find anything in this house worth stealing, then the immediate family musta gone blind."

They entered a very dark hall with overstuffed chairs and old wooden furniture. The hammering beat of a Puff Daddy rap song was blasting the windows in the front of the house. They moved toward the laughter and music, into a room where ten teenage boys and girls were skinnin' and gfinnin'. There was a strong smell of laced cigarette smoke.

"What the fuck is this, LaFrance?" Tanisha demanded.

The roomful of Black teenagers turned and looked at her as if she had just been beamed down into their midst from outer space.

"It's the PO-lice," a tall, muscular seventeen-year-old drawled in amusement as he stood and moved away from his friends. He had eyes lidded by marijuana and a graceful indolence. Tanisha could see bags of narcotics and money on the coffee table behind him. Several of his crew got busy gathering up the baggies and the cash and stuffing them in Raider jackets or sagging pants.

"Where's Nadine?" Tanisha said, glaring at her nephew.

"She upstairs, boned-out, like she do," LaFrance said, performing a gangsta lean, bobbing his head for his friends. "It don't matter no way. What come 'round go 'round. I call the play now."

"You still rotating, LaFrance? I thought we got that straightened out last time you hit the numbers." "Rotating" was gang talk for selling drugs; "the numbers" was jail.

"That's my stack money," he said, indicating the money on the table. "Saved up from my job." She knew he didn't have a job. LaFrance was rocking on his heels now, almost as if he wanted to take a step away from her, but was afraid to show weakness to his homies. "Who dis gray cat you got with you?" he finally said, to change the subject.

"Friend of mine."

"You givin' this ice-slice, Gumby motherfucker some play? No wonder you be cracked on down here."

Wheeler unsnapped the gold band on his Rolex watch and let it slip down his wrist into his left pocket.

"Is that you, Breezy?" Tanisha said, looking around LaFrance at a young girl barely in her teens. She was LaFrance's half sister and sat on the sofa with both a cigarette and her adolescent beauty smoldering.

Tanisha glared at her nephew. "You gonna hook your own little sister to a dope ride?" Now Tanisha was angry, and she took a step toward LaFrance. He backed up slightly. "I oughta bust you myself for this pile a' candy cane and these laced blunts," she said, grabbing a bag of white powder off the table and holding it up. She shook the baggie and glared at her nephew. "This isn't coke. You sellin' heroin? I oughta nine-one-one your sorry ass."

"What you call yourself doin' here?" LaFrance said, his voice rising. "You bess be jaw-jackin', 'cause I ain't gonna stand here, whatever, let you call no blue light motherfuckers in. I be comin' outta the bag, you try that."

Wheeler took a step forward. "Anytime you feel froggy, dick
-
wad," he said softly.

LaFrance looked at his homies. He had to do something. He couldn't be fronted off by a middle-aged honky. His homies returned the stare, watching, calmly waiting to see how LaFrance would handle it.

Without warning, LaFrance let go with a wild right uppercut aimed at Wheeler's chin. Wheeler had been waiting for it and LaFrance had telegraphed the punch. Wheeler wasn't very good with
Uzis or nine-shot Italian target pistols, but he still had one of the best left hooks in Beverly Hills. As LaFrance swung his uppercut, Wheeler moved to the side and bent his knees, which dropped his center of gravity a half-foot. The uppercut went wild over his right shoulder. Simultaneously, Wheeler swung his left, connecting with LaFrance's midsection, directly under his exposed armpit. He could feel a rib snap as the hook landed. LaFrance stumbled back, screaming and holding his side. He crashed down on the coffee table. They glared at each other. uThe fuck you be doin'?" LaFrance whined.

"Kickin' your ass," Wheeler answered.

"We rollin'," one of the gangsters suddenly said. They got up and moved quickly out of the living room, onto the front porch, all in different directions up the street, disappearing in the dingy neighborhood like cockroaches under a baseboard.

LaFrance stood slowly, groaning in pain. He turned and looked at Tanisha. "You a fuckin' transformin' ho'," he said. "Turn on your own."

"I can't believe you're still dealing drugs in your own family's living room. What the hell's wrong with you?" she scolded.

LaFrance didn't answer. He turned and walked out of the house, still holding his side. A second later, they heard the Impala start, and, with mufflers rumbling loud through torn glass packs, he backed it out of the driveway and roared away. Now only Breezy was left.

"I'm sorry, Auntie," she said, standing and beginning to straighten up the living room, emptying the ashtrays.

"Girl, you gonna end up somebody's bag bride. You gonna be off doing a telephone number, and when that happens, none a' these busters gonna cut you any time." A "bag bride" was a coke addict prostitute; a "telephone number" was a long prison stretch. Tanisha was home now. She was back in the hood, her U
. C. L. A
. education undetectable as she talked street to her thirteen-year
-
old niece.

Breezy finished picking up the paper-clipped marijuana blunts in the ashtray and threw them into the downstairs toilet.

"How's Nadine?" Tanisha asked.

"She sleeping most of the time. The medicine they give her for arthritis be what's doing it to her."

"If LaFrance comes back, I want to know."

"I will, Auntie," Breezy said without conviction, and she nodded her head. "I gotta go. You gonna be 'round later?"

"I'm gonna ask Nadine if we can stay here a few days."

Breezy smiled, showing beautiful teeth. She was going to be a stunner someday if the laced joints and double-ups didn't get her first. Tanisha made herself a promise to watch her niece much closer. She was only one or two bad decisions from disaster. "Don't worry about LaFrance," Breezy suddenly said. "He gonna be right one day."

They both knew it wasn't true. LaFrance was headed toward self-destruction at warp speed.

Upstairs, Tanisha found her grandmother. She was in a four
-
poster bed, propped up with pillows, "sleeping with her eyes open," as she called it. Wheeler was standing in the upstairs hall.

"Granny . . ." Tanisha said, and waited until recognition flitted across Nadine's face. Her grandmother was a short, overweight woman who had completely lost her ability to smile.

"Hi, chile," she said, her jowls sagging as she struggled to sit up straighter. "You been a long time away."

Tanisha kissed her grandmother and then sat down on a chair next to the bed. "Granny, I just caught LaFrance downstairs doing a heroin deal. I don't want him bringing gangsters into your house to sell dope. I'm worried about Breezy."

"What I gonna do, chile? I can't move all de way downstairs ever' time I hear dey music. My ankle's been swellin', hurt somethin' awful."

"You call me. You tell me if he comes over and I'll get him out."

Nadine looked at Tanisha and nodded. If eyes were the windows to the soul, hers showed a tired, reluctant spirit that had given up all hope to pain and poverty. Tanisha went to the door and pulled Wheeler into the room from the spot where he'd been waiting.

"This is my friend Wheeler Cassidy," she said. "We'd like to stay here for a couple of days."

"Now, what you go be doin', girl? You bring a White man to visit, we gonna get ourselves in mo' trouble than Jack's stray cat."

"Granny, we had nowhere else to go. Somebody's after us, but they can't get to us down here."

Nadine closed her eyes. When she opened them, they showed tired acceptance. "Lord God a'mighty," she whispered softly. "What we gettin' our foolish selves into now?"

It was the same question Wheeler had been asking himself.

They were gathered before him, sitting on wooden chairs that they had dragged in from the meeting hall. The room was small and overheated and everybody was shiny with sweat, except for Wo Lap Ling, who sat patiently, cooled by his iron willpower. He listened as Dry Dragon recited the events of the botched assault at the airport. Dry Dragon still showed the effects of the terrible beating he had taken in South Central. His face and lips were swollen. He had been left barely conscious and had finally managed to get a taxi out of there, by using fifty dollars he always kept hidden in his shoe. He finished the miserable tale and looked in terror at the powerful Shan Chu.

"You have brought disgrace on yourselves and this Brotherhood," Willy said. Shame and culpability instantly shot up, heating Dry Dragon's cheeks, painting his ears red. "Do we have any idea where they might be?" Willy asked in Fukienese, because most of the Bamboo Dragons in the room were from Fukien Province and didn't speak much Mandarin or Cantonese.

"No, Shan Chu," the White Fan of the Los Angeles Triad said. He was a fifty-year-old, extremely fit Chinese gangster who had come from Taiwan in the late sixties. His name was Chu Lu. He wore his Bamboo Dragon fighting colors: black pants, black shirt, and a red bandanna. He was afraid that the most powerful Shan Chu of the Hong Kong chapter would simply raise a hand and have him disposed of for his failures. "We have an ear inside the Police Department," the White Fan added, looking for any way to appease Wo Lap Ling's judgment of him. "A switchboard operator. She can listen in on their calls. The Black woman detective has already called her Captain and left a phone number. She didn't give an address, but the prefix is two-one-three, and the first three digits of her phone number are four-eight-five. That means the call was made from somewhere in South Central."

"Where is South Central?" Willy asked. "Is it far?"

"It's a part of L
. A
.," the White Fan said respectfully.

"L
. A
. has over three million people. Are you suggesting we drive around looking for her? Surely this can't be your solution," Willy said. He was tired from his flight and angry at their failures. The local Chin Lo brethren were violent men, but seemed to have no sense of ingenuity or guile.

"Most Honorable Shan Chu," the White Fan said, bowing his head to show subservience, "South Central is a Black ghetto, where people are shot for no reason. However, we have great Guan-Xi in this place because the gangs sell our China White. We supply many dealers. The gangs control everything in that neighborhood, but they need our heroin. We have already told them there is a great reward for finding the Black policewoman, Tanisha Williams, and her White boyfriend." The White Fan looked into Wo Lap Ling's stoic face. He suddenly wondered if he had made a mistake telling the Shan Chu that he was relying on coloreds to solve this problem. "It does not matter if the cat is black or white as long as he catches rats," the White Fan added, using one of Deng Xiaoping's famous sayings.

Willy Wo Lap felt events had turned against him. Now that the two Americans were back inside their own country, how hard could it be for them to get the stolen document into dangerous hands? Time was now his most virulent enemy.

In less than two hours, the word was on the street. Tanisha Williams was worth fifty keys of China White.

At three that afternoon, LaFrance was sitting in front of the Payless, drinking Forty-Nine out of a paper bag. His side was killing him and he was still angry. A Santa Ana wind had started that afternoon and was blowing hot air out of the desert and the temperature was climbing, which didn't help his attitude. He could hear Bad Sam and Li'l T-Bear shooting hoops in the parking lot around the corner, doing lay-ups against an invisible basket, their voices drifting to him on the hot afternoon wind.

"Man, I be bust outta this shitbag, y'know, have me some fine pussy, be rollin' deep," Bad Sam said as Li'l T-Bear bounced the basketball, in no hurry to play because of the heat.

"Fifty keys, da man say?" Li'l T-Bear asked, and he stopped bouncing the ball. "This be pure or we talkin' ganker shit been stepped on a hundred times?"

"Dis ain't decoy. Da shit s'pose ta be pure. Dat what de Chinaman say," Bad Sam grinned.

Li'l T-Bear then made his move, dribbling around Bad Sam and doing a lay-up where a chalk line high on the wall marked the pretend basket.

LaFrance got up painfully off the low wall next to the liquor store and moved around into the parking lot. "What's this hoo-rah you be talkin'?" he asked them.

When they told him, LaFrance grinned for the first time since his ganja high left him. He knew he was about to become a very rich man.