The short version? It’s an ugly business and it dehumanizes everyone involved with it. Anyone who thinks otherwise should do an up-close observation of one day in the life of a crack baby.
“What’s the haps, Monarch?” I said.
He was sitting in the passenger seat of his Firebird, his feet stretched out on the dirt beyond the curb. His mouth was pursed from the thickness of the stitches inside his gums. He drank out of his soda cup, tilting it gently to his mouth, letting the mixture of Coke and melting ice slide over his tongue. “No haps, Mr. Dee,” he said.
“Just call me Dave.”
“Call you Mr. Dee.”
“I need to talk with you in a confidential fashion, know what I mean?” I said.
He seemed to think about my proposal, his gaze wandering to a small grocery on the corner, kids riding their bikes along a trash-strewn ditch, a tattered wisp of rope, which used to support a tire swing, swaying from an oak limb overhead. He nodded at one of his friends, and without saying a word all five of them walked to the grocery store and went inside. Monarch got up from the car seat and positioned himself in front of the weight set under the tree. “This about them UL boys?” he said.
“You going to file on the Bruxal kid?” I said.
“Who?” he replied.
He bent over, hooking his palms under the weight bar, his stomach distended like an overflowing tub of bread dough. Then he lifted what I counted to be at least a hundred and forty pounds of steel plate. He curled the bar into his chest ten times, his back straight, his knees locked, his upper arms tightening into croquet balls. He set the bar down on the ground and stepped back from it, breathing slowly through his nose.
“Don’t try to square your problem with the Bruxal kid on your own. His old man is a gangster, the real article, a Brooklyn wiseguy who uses a hired psychopath to take care of his personal problems.”
“What you saying is he was a hump for them dagos in Miami.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
He bent over to pick up the weights again. I put my hand on his shoulder. It felt like concrete under his shirt. “Forget the Mr. Universe routine for a minute. You want to take this kid down, I’ll help you. In the meantime, you watch your back.”
“Since when y’all started going out of your way to jam up rich white boys?”
“Slim Bruxal is a special case.”
“Yeah, he special, all right. That’s why the FBI been trying to plug my dick into a wall socket. They after his old man, ain’t they?”
“Maybe. What’ve they got on you?”
“Some agents come by my house. They say they might be looking at me for t’ree-strikes-and-you- out.”
“How many adult convictions do you have?”
“Two. But right now I’m a li’l warm on a deal wasn’t my fault. My cousin hid his works at my house so his P.O. wouldn’t catch him wit’ them. I didn’t know they was there. A DEA narc busted my cousin and my cousin give me up. His syringe and spoon and a half ounce of tar was under my lavatory. So they say I either flip or I go down for the whole ride. That’s life wit’out no parole, Mr. Dee.”
He hefted up the weight bar and curled it toward his sternum, releasing it slowly so that the tension built unmercifully in his forearms, his face impassive to the pain burning in his tendons.
He put on a good show, but he was caught and he knew it. The Feds would probably squeeze him until blood was coming out of his fingernails. I wondered how stand-up Monarch really was. Enough to do mainline time? If the FBI flipped him, they wouldn’t use him just on the Bruxal case, either. He would become a permanent rat, at the beck and call of the Bureau whenever they wanted him.
Monarch had made his own choices and I couldn’t feel sorry for him. He wasn’t an addict; he was a dealer. He robbed his customers of their souls and profited off the misery of his own people. But he was not without certain qualities, and he didn’t ask for the kind of world he had been born into.
He did ten curls and dropped the weights in the dirt. I tapped his upper arm with my fist. “You take steroids?” I asked.
“You ever see steroid freaks take a shower at the health club?”
“Come to think of it, no,” I replied.
“That’s ’cause they don’t take showers at the health club. That’s ’cause their package usually looks like smoked oysters.”
“Nine months to a year ago, somebody did a hit-and-run on a guy out in the parish. I wondered if you heard of anyone needing body or fender work about that time, somebody who didn’t want to go to a regular shop?”
“I could ax around. That gonna buy me some juice wit’ the t’ree-strikes-and-you-out sit’ation?”