Urban Renewal (6 page)

IT WAS
getting close to the time the club usually started to empty out when the solitary man who’d asked about the new dancer finally realized she was already done for the night.

He slowly got to his feet, casually tossed some bills on the table, and walked out of the club.

Bruno slid into position behind him. Cross waved him off.

The tall, slender man strolled past the “Valet Parking” area and kept moving toward the back of the building. A
black man about half his height and twice his width stepped out of the shadows.

“No going around the back, pal.”

“I’m just—”

“You ain’t
parked
back there. Your car’s over in Valet Parking.”

“That’s right. I just wanted to wait for my girlfriend, make sure she knows I’m here to take her home.”

“You’re saying
she
told you to meet her back there?”

“Not exactly. I mean, she wouldn’t be going out the front, right? These kind of places, sometimes a guy will sit out there, waiting. You know what I mean.”

“That don’t happen here.”

“Come on, bro. I know there’s got to be
some
way …”

“Like, say, if I never saw you?”

“Yeah. Like that.”

“Only shade that turns me blind is green, ‘bro.’ ”

The slender man handed over a fifty-dollar bill.

“When I say ‘green,’ I mean a full glass, not a little sip,” the double-wide black man said, crunching the banknote into a ball and tossing it back disdainfully.

“A full glass is—?”

“Ten of those little sips.”

“Five yards?! Just to—”

“You can’t pay the toll, you don’t get to roll. ‘Bro.’ ”

The slender man peeled five hundreds off the outside of a wad, reflecting that he couldn’t go back much deeper without hitting the smaller bills at its core.
Bitch is gonna pay me for all this!
played in his head, like a jukebox with only one selection.

The toll-taker faded back into wherever he had come
from. The man who’d paid the toll slowly walked around to the back of the club.

The air of supreme confidence that he wore the way another might wear a favorite jacket vanished as he viewed the unlit slab of garage doors. He pulled his cell phone and punched a speed-dial key for at least the twentieth time that night. And once again got the robotic voice of a voice-mail system that told him nothing.

No way she got here on her own. Maybe she just called a cab …? Maybe the guy on the door …?

Reluctantly acknowledging that he was running short of bribe money, and not eager to have a conversation with the thug at the door, who had made no effort to conceal his shoulder holster, the slender man glanced at his wafer-thin watch.

I wasted the whole night on the bitch. Gonna be light, soon. Time to jet. Just wait for her back at my place. Where else she gonna go? Sooner or later, she got to …

THE CHARCOAL
Lexus coupe glided through the West Side, but neither the layered aroma of its rich leather interior nor the muted mixture of Bird and Miles flowing from its sixteen-speaker system soothed the slender man as it usually did. Rap was a lot of things, but no one ever called it “sleek,” and nothing short of that standard ever made his personal playlist. But now …

Even the knowledge that the car
belonged
to him was cold comfort against the heat-seeker thoughts moving inside his head.

Sophistication was his trademark, not flying colors or waving guns around. Those gang boys would never understand that you have to
slide
your way through this world. He knew how to act if stopped by the cops: “Always let
them
tell you what they want. Could be license and registration, could be that old ‘busted taillight’ game so they can search your ride, could be the tax for using their streets,” the ancient pimp had schooled him, back when he was still in his early teens.

“How am I gonna pull any—”

“You
ain’t
gonna be pulling no girls, son. That game is lame today. Oh, there’s always gonna be girls working the streets. Looking for a daddy, too. But half of them are poison. Underage. Runaways. You get caught with one of those in your stable, you gonna see the Walls, and be looking at them for a long time. And remember this: a bitch on the pipe never made
no
man
no
money,
no
how. Used to be you could keep that under control: a little Boy-and-Girl, that can still be mellow. But meth is death, young boy. Turn a racehorse into a scaly-leg skank in a month.”

The old man stopped to take a long, deep hit from the oxygen tank next to his bed. He knew he didn’t have long, and passing on the wisdom of decades spent in The Life gave him a kind of satisfaction the silver-tongued devil could never put into words. He knew the rules, as they’d been passed on down to him: “You know why they call some parts of town—any town—the ‘Red Light District’? That’s because the Game is only played in the Fast Lane. Which means, sooner or later, you gonna run a red light. That means ‘Stop!’ Right? Thing is, you don’t stop, you gonna
get
stopped.”

THE OLD
pimp knew his baby sister’s son wasn’t coming by to visit him every few days out of love … or even concern. He hadn’t known the boy even existed until Lucy had told him he was an uncle. “His name’s Lawrence, Samuel. I know what you are. What you did. But you can still get yourself right with the Lord.”

“I’m too old to be going on
Oprah
, Luce.”

“You can just stop your slick-talk, Samuel. You know I don’t mean asking for forgiveness. You probably couldn’t even remember all the women you wronged in your sinful life. But I want you to listen to me now.

“My youngest, Lawrence, he’s way too pretty, you know? And I take some blame there. I tried, but without no man in the house, a boy
is
going to run the streets. And I spoiled him, too. Me and Marcella and Jessee Lynn, all of us. We even let his big sisters show him off. Do his hair, spend their own money so he could look fine. Like he was a pet.

“As if that wasn’t enough, taking him to church didn’t teach him a thing but how to sweet-talk. I don’t mean the Gospel, I mean … Well, that boy could sell salvation to sinners if he wanted, but he says there’s no money in it. Can you imagine?”

“Boy should take a look at what some of those Revs you like so much have put together for themselves. I don’t know their game as good as my own, but I know even the holiest woman will give up her money to a honey-talking preacher.”

“Yes, that is
exactly
how you’d see it. So what else is my
boy going to be but a man like you was? You’re out of that world now. And you’re not going back, not with that TB killing you slow. Now, Lawrence, he’s heard your name a thousand times. ‘True Blue.’ He says it like you a … legend or something.”

“Ain’t no ‘or something’ about it, Sis.”

“You just
can’t
get off that train, can you, Samuel? Even when you know it’s taking you straight into hellfire. But you don’t have to die here, not in this dirty place. I could take you home with me. There’s a room we could fix up with all this same stuff. And—”

“What’s the hook, Luce?”

“Always got to be a hook, Samuel?”

“Always,” the old man intoned, as piously as his sister would have thrown a Bible quote at him.

Minutes of silence passed. Then his sister said, “The ‘hook’ is you save my boy’s life.”

“How am I gonna do that now? You gonna put me on exhibit, tell him, ‘See what happens when you make the wrong choice? That wasted old man there, he was called True Blue back in the day. You heard his name. You know what he had. Cars, clothes, gold, diamonds. More women than you could count. But look at him now, what do you see?’ ”

“I don’t mean
nothing
like that, Samuel. All I want you to do is school him. Tell him the
truth
. Not just one side of it, the whole thing.”

“Pimping ain’t the same as it once was.”

“You be sure to tell him
that
, too.”

“No Bible on the bedstand?”

“For what? It would just be wasted on you, Samuel. But
the truth can still set
some
free. And in the world my boy’s gonna live in, it’s not the Good Book that knows the Word.”

AND THE
old man had to admit that his baby sister—half-sister, really—kept her word. His room was always fresh and clean, the food was
truly
fine, and he even had a little TV of his own. So, every time the boy came around to pump him about the pimping game, True Blue always told him nothing but the truth.

Some of that truth would have caused his little sister to pull the hose out of his oxygen tank.

“
THE MACK MAN
had a
role
once, son. I don’t mean a role to play. I mean, there was a need … and it was his job to make sure it got filled. But what you got in The Life now is some truly sorry stuff. Mangy dogs, not wolves. Simps, not pimps. They can’t make it, so they fake it.”

“There’s plenty of them, still.”

“Of them, maybe. Of
us
, not even a trace. Listen, now: I’m not saying there wasn’t some gorilla pimps back then. Kind of man who’d beat a woman half to death if she didn’t come back with the money. But how many church girls you think
they
ever turned out?

“As for girls that got pulled, they was
already
on the game. You pulled some, some got pulled from you. Never meant a thing, and you never took it personal. You miss one train, there’s always another one coming.

“But snatching children and raping them? Making them work in some hot-sheet house, turning dime tricks? Calling themselves ‘players’ on that stupid Internet thing you showed me? That’s not pimping. They should get shot just for calling themselves that name.”

He never even took a hit off his oxygen tank
, the young man marveled. The emaciated pimp’s voice seemed to recapture strength as he went on.

“And why did it go that way? ’Cause, for the punks who could only talk with their hands, there wasn’t no
other
way. And the top-drawer girls, they go into business for themselves now. Advertise on that same Internet, only for real. No more out-front working girls—they all ‘escorts’ now.”