The Last Street Novel (28 page)

He started thinking about making his son’s Saturday-morning football practice and spending the night with his daughter. Then he thought about making up with Jacqueline at his condo.

Harlem may have been home, but it was no longer where his heart was.

Shareef finished his breakfast, drank his orange juice, and paid his bill. Just as he was pushing away from his table, he got a call on his cell phone.

He read the number on the screen and saw that it was Cynthia calling him from a house number.

He answered her call and asked her, “Are you pulling everything together that you need to get? I see you break in the house.”

Cynthia didn’t answer him immediately. In fact, she didn’t answer his question at all. Instead, she choked up over the phone and said, “They killed him, Shareef. They killed him.”

Shareef looked around the cafe to make sure he didn’t overreact and say something to pull the other customers into his conversation.

“Who are you talking about?” he asked her.

“Michael. They killed him in prison this morning. Those motherfuckers!”

She began to sound hysterical.

Shareef asked her, “How do you know that already?”

She mumbled, “I called, and people called me back to confirm it.”

“And they know this already.”

“Yeah, they know,” she barked at him.

He sat silently at his table and didn’t know what to say.

“Damn!” he uttered. “So…how, um…” He wanted to ask her questions but he needed more privacy for that.

Cynthia read where he was going and answered, “They shanked him in the back and in the chest when he walked out of his cell this morning.” She added, “It was a setup.”

Shareef had no idea of prison rules and regulations outside of what he watched on television and in movies. So more questions popped into his head.

“Hold on,” he said as he stood from his table. He heard her sniffing over the phone as he hustled out of the cafe to walk and talk outside.

“So they get to come out of their cells in the morning? And they don’t know who did it?”

There were so many questions to ask.

Cynthia mumbled, “Look, just go on home, Shareef. It’s over with. I’m sorry for getting you involved,” and she hung up on him.

Shareef stopped and stood still on the sidewalk. He was stunned. Outside of a whole lot of questions he didn’t have answers to, he began to think a thousand thoughts.

Did I get this guy killed by talking to him about writing a book on his life?

He shook his head and denied it all.

“That’s crazy,” he told himself.
This shit is all crazy!

Shareef figured he’d make sense out of it all by calling the only person he was sure would know. Jurrell Garland. So he hustled back to his hotel room to find Jurrell’s number on the business card he had taken from him.

“Harlem Mobile,” Jurrell answered.

It threw Shareef off a second. How much had Jurrell really reformed himself? He still had obvious questions about that. Prejudice was a hard ailment to cure.

“Hey, man, this is Shareef. What are you up to for today?”

He didn’t want to talk to him about everything over the phone. They needed another face-to-face meeting.

Jurrell cheered up and said, “Shareef. What’s going on, man? It’s about time you called me. I figured I was gonna have to bump into you three more times first.”

Shareef smiled it off. “Nah, I said I would call you. I’ve just been busy running around.”

“Yeah, I can understand it. Harlem’ll make you do that. Ain’t that many fat people in Harlem; we work it off.”

Shareef chuckled to keep things light. He said, “But I wanted to talk to you about something, man. What are you doing for lunch?”

Since Jurrell had gone legitimate, a lunch date seemed normal to ask for.

He answered, “You know what, I can take you with me today. I got a few appointments to check out condos and business locations starting at one. What you got to do after that?”

Shareef answered, “My day is wide open, man. Let’s do it.”

“Aw’ight, well, meet me out at the Starbucks in an hour.”

“You got it.”

Shareef ended the call and thought it over. How safe would he be while hanging out with Jurrell? Did Jurrell still carry a gun? Did the streets respect him enough not to? It was all a new series of questions to answer.

“I guess I’ll just have to find out,” Shareef told himself.

He didn’t have enough time to check into a hotel downtown and make it back to Harlem in one hour. So he packed up his things and left his luggage down in the front desk storage office until he could get back to it. He hadn’t packed anything for this trip that was ultra valuable, so he wasn’t that concerned with theft. And he headed out to Starbucks.

It was only natural for a sane man to become more alert with his life on the line. That two-block walk on 125th Street became the longest two blocks Shareef had ever traveled in his life. Every male eye and brown arm that strolled by caught his attention as if he had radar.

This is ridiculous,
Shareef said to himself. It may have been, but he couldn’t ignore his instincts, and his instincts told him to watch his back. Other brown men from his hometown were out to get him.

“Ay, Shareef,” someone yelled out from behind him.

Shareef turned in a panic, expecting to duck, run, fight, or dive to save his life if needed. But instead of an enemy out to beat him, slice him, or gun him down, it was only The Spear with his box of books about street life.

“Oh, what’s up, man?” Shareef addressed him. It was better to have The Spear than a murderer calling him. Shareef would never have smiled as wide for his competitor in the publishing world otherwise.

The Spear walked up close and stated, “I heard you got some serious content you working on, brother.”

“Not anymore,” Shareef responded. “I’m out of here tonight.”

He wanted to get the word out that he was done with the Harlem book idea and leaving town immediately. Only he wasn’t gone yet. And that reality was bothersome and dangerous.

The Spear told him, “Well, I don’t know who advised you on this, man, but whoever it was wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Yeah, well, it’s over with now,” Shareef repeated.

“Are you sure?”

He stood still and pondered the question.

“What do you mean, am I sure?” What did the brother know.

He said, “If they think you know something, you just can’t leave town and think it’s over with. They’re gonna want to know what you know no matter where you are.”

Shareef didn’t sweat that idea. He knew enough about the ’hood to know that most of the criminals there rarely traveled. And if they did, they were traveling to relocate, not to make a hit. It was unsafe to make a hit in a place you were unfamiliar with. Thugs generally terrorized familiar terrain only. The Spear, however, seemed to know something. So Shareef inquired about it.

“What have you heard?”

The Spear searched around to make sure their conversation was only between them. Then he mumbled, “I heard you were talking to the wrong guy.”

“What was so wrong about him?”

The Spear looked around before he spoke again.

He answered, “Brother, you gotta ask yourself the question, ‘Why now?’ He could have tried to tell his story a long time ago. You feel me?”

Shareef shrugged his shoulders. “He didn’t have a way to get to me until now.”

The Spear shook his head, knowing better.

“Nah, brother. He tried to get other writers to tell his story too, and nobody would go anywhere near him. Until you came.”

Shareef nodded. “So, I’m the sucker now, hunh?”

“That’s what it looks like from here.” Then he slighted him. “You should have stuck to writing romance.”

Shareef took the diss on the chin and said, “Well, you tell whoever you know that’s involved that I don’t know nothing. I barely started talking to him. I was only there once.”

“Yeah, and
once
is all it takes to find out something you ain’t supposed to know.”

Shareef had heard enough already. He snapped, “Aw’ight, whatever, man. Just tell the
streets
what I said.”

He walked off for his destination thinking of “the streets” as one big earpiece. It seemed that the men of the inner city spread the word on criminal activity as strongly as their women spread the word on bedroom gossip.

As Shareef moved rapidly toward Starbucks, he noticed a dark car trailing him from the street to his left. He looked and noticed a young brother leaning out the open window, appearing to sneak looks at him.

Shareef slowed his pace and prayed that the young man wasn’t crazy enough to try and get to him on a crowded sidewalk. As soon as he slowed his pace, the car sped up the block. Shareef waited for the vehicle to make a right turn on Lenox before he crossed 125th Street for the opposite side. He was less than half a block away from Starbucks.

SSSKRRRTT
!

A white sedan jammed its brakes behind him.

“What the hell are you doing?” an older man yelled out of the driver’s side window. His adolescent son sat in the passenger seat with wide eyes, terrified that his father had nearly run a man over.

“Yo, my bad, man. My bad,” Shareef apologized to them both. He was so busy looking ahead to the corner of Lenox that he didn’t even see the car.

“You damn fuckin’ right it’s your bad!” the father cursed him.

Shareef’s nerves were too shot to argue. He made it across the street and continued on his way to Starbucks. When he arrived at the corner in front of Dunkin’ Donuts, he glanced south down Lenox to his right, looking for the dark sedan that had turned there. Once he saw that it was out of sight, he hustled across the street and into Starbucks to meet up with Jurrell.

Shit, them guys are probably going back to wait for me at my hotel,
he assumed.
And I still got my stuff there.

Through the shop’s window he spotted a taxi pull up right out front. He thought about leaving for the airport right then and there. To hell with his luggage! He could buy it all back again in Florida. But someone jumped into the cab before he could make up his mind.

“Damn,” he mumbled as the taxi took off with another customer.

“Shareef,” someone called from behind him again.

Shareef turned and looked. It was the young reporter from the
Amsterdam News
with a small coffee in his hand. He was wearing another pair of slacks, a button-down shirt, cheap tie, and a fresh haircut.

“Hey, what’s happening, man?” Shareef addressed him.

The young reporter seemed overjoyed to see him there.

He said, “I heard what you’re up here doing. That’s real brave of you. Now that’s a book I would read.”

Shareef studied his face and couldn’t believe his ears.

He repeated, “That’s a book you would read? Why?”

“Because it’s real, brother. This is Harlem. And you would do a great job writing a book about Harlem. I know it.”

Shareef said, “But you won’t read none of my other shit?”

He didn’t even care who overheard him at that point. He was expressing himself with raw emotion.

The young reporter said, “I started reading your new one. I’m halfway through it. But I mean…it’s not like what you’re about to write now. If what I hear is true.”

Shareef eyed him. He said, “So let me get this straight. You won’t read none of my books about positive black relationships and bringing black love back, but you’ll read all this crooked, gangsta shit, while I’m out here running for my life now from some motherfuckers who don’t even read. What, you think that shit is cool? You think it’s a fuckin’ game? And you a damn college student, gettin’ caught up in the same bullshit these young rappers get caught up in.”

He said, “This is real life, man. Learn to follow shit that keeps your mind alive. ’Cause this other shit is just poison.”

Customers in the coffee shop looked at Shareef as if he had lost it. And he had. A few of the women even recognized him, but they weren’t willing to speak to him after witnessing his outburst. And the young reporter was tired of being dissed by Shareef.

He spoke up and said, “Look, you need to get off that high horse you on, brother. If gangsta books are so wrong, then why you up here working on one?”

“Because it’s the only way to get your fucking attention, obviously.”

The reporter was no longer impressed with Shareef. He was damn near ready to defend himself. They stood chest to chest and were ready for anything.

“Is there a problem here?”

Jurrell Garland walked into the store and couldn’t help interjecting himself. He eyed the young reporter until he looked away.

Jurrell leaned into his view and asked him again. “I said, ‘Is there a problem here?’”