Killing Ways 2: Urban Stories Read online

  “What was all that about?” Cooper’s partner asked.

  “I owe this guy Clyde a little money. He sent the kid to ask for it.”

  “This Clyde giving you trouble?”

  “Nah, it’s just a little debt I gotta pay. Gambling, you know, cards.”

  “Oh. You shoulda told me you can’t play cards; I’da brought a deck with me.”

  At about six thirty the next morning, Stoop walked past the stakeout car on Neill Street. Both officers were bleary eyed and neither noticed him. He walked into the twelfth precinct, his bookbag slung over both shoulders and hanging low down his back. It took a while for the desk sergeant to take note of him.

  “What do you want?”

  “You guys still give cash for guns?” Stoop asked.

  The sergeant sat up straight.

  “Why?”

  “Look,” Stoop said. “Do you give guys give cash for guns or not? I have to get on a schoolbus soon, and I need to know.”

  “Yeah, umm. Let me get the guy in charge.”

  The sergeant dialed an extension and mumbled something Stoop couldn’t catch and a few seconds later a lieutenant made his way down the precinct stairs and stood at Stoop’s side.

  “Are you the young man with the gun?” the lieutenant asked, putting his hand on Stoop’s shoulder.

  “Are you the man with a hundred dollars?”

  The lieutenant was, in fact, the man who would pay Stoop if he turned in a gun. But even though the program was supposed to be anonymous, no questions asked, the officer wanted to engage Stoop in conversation to learn something of the gun and the boy if possible.

  “What’s your name son?”

  “Look, if you’re gonna be asking me questions, I’ll go to another precinct…”

  “Okay, okay. Look, ah, let me think. You have a gun for us, right?”

  “I know where there is one.”

  “Well, I need to see it, kid.”

  “I need to see the money.”

  The lieutenant clucked his tongue and rolled his eyes, but none of that was going to make Stoop move, so he turned to the sergeant and had him bring a small cash box and a triplicate form.

  “I’m not filling out no forms,” Stoop said.

  “The form’s for me.” The lieutenant opened the cash box and showed Stoop a crisp hundred dollar bill. “Okay, kid. Where’s the gun?”

  Stoop took off his bookbag, unzipped it and pulled out what the sergeant and the lieutenant instantly recognized as a department issue 9mm semiautomatic, the kind the department had only recently switched to. Still, both officers knew they might easily be wrong. Smith and Wesson makes a lot of guns, and certainly there were thousands of that model in private hands. Maybe millions.

  Stoop handed the gun to the lieutenant and snatched the hundred-dollar bill.

  The lieutenant checked the gun though it didn’t have to be in working condition for Stoop to claim his money. It was loaded. He sniffed the barrel and knew it had been fired recently. Stoop folded the bill into his pocket and started to walk away.

  “Hey, kid. Where’d you find this?”

  “The empty lot on Hershey Street, near the bridge. Oh yeah, I found this stuff too.”

  He reached into his bag and took out a leather badge holder, complete with badge and nametag, and a pair of handcuffs with a smear of blood. He handed them to the lieutenant, closed his bag and zipped it shut. He slung it back over both shoulders.

  “There’s a lot of blood in that lot. You should see if that Cooper guy is still alive.”

  “What were you doing in the lot, kid?”

  “Me? I was just out for a walk. I guess something happened last night, but I don’t know nothing about that. I was in bed by nine. Like I said, check that Cooper guy. He might be dead.”

  “Out for a walk?” the lieutenant said. “That lot’s five miles from here.”

  Stoop shrugged and headed for the door.

  “You want a ride to school?” The lieutenant asked, but Stoop was no fool.

  “I got a hundred dollars, mister; I can get my own ride.”

  “Get Cooper on the radio,” Stoop heard the Lieutenant say as he went out the door. “And get Vincent and Johnson out to the lot on Hershey. Send a couple of units out with them.”

  Stoop waved to the detectives as they drove past him coming in to the precinct. They didn’t notice him. Cooper had a look of worry on his face which the rest of the day would prove was completely appropriate.

  I initially wrote this story with hope that PLOTS WITH GUNS would take it, but they folded. Jennifer Jordan picked it up for CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE. I’m grateful for that. So is Stoop. It was inspired by a short story by E.L. Doctorow called “Jolene.”

  The Biography of Stoop the Thief

  Chapter Three: Stoop and Elizabeth

  Elizabeth Jones abandoned her son one day after he was born, the same day she named him Stupendous. For most of the fourteen years after that day, Stoop thought about her – where she might be, what type of person she was, whether she might love him if she ever got to know him well enough.

  Once someone handed him a photo of her, or at least they thought it was her.

  “If that ain’t Lizzy Jones, then Lizzy ought to call the cops ‘cause someone done stole her face,” the woman said.

  “Can I keep this?” Stoop asked. He was about twelve at the time.

  “Sure,” the woman said, then she thought of it for a moment. “You got a dollar or something? Help a sister out?”

  Stoop thought often of looking for his mother, but there wasn’t time in the day – he maintained good grades which kept social workers from looking in on him, and he had to go outside of the neighborhood several times a week to swipe the food and clothes he needed to keep body and soul together. Most days ended with his energy exhausted. When he dreamed, he dreamed of how his mother would hold his face and smile into his eyes when he found her.

  Then one day he did.

  He had traveled all the way to the Hunt’s Point section of the Bronx – an area of factories and warehouses, wonderfilled hunting grounds for a person in his profession because there were always a hundred trucks being loaded and unloaded and not enough people keeping an open eye.

  There were also drug dealers, addicts, and prostitutes enough to fill a dozen police vans. This day there were only two vans, two squad cars and eight police officers, one of them a lieutenant. They ignored Stoop with his box of men’s fitted shirts. This day was for rounding up the addicts and dealers.

  “Name,” Stoop heard as he walked past an officer.

  Stoop didn’t turn to look; he knew the best thing was to keep walking.

  “Elizabeth Jo…” the voice started. “Elizabeth George.”

  Stoop turned around to look at the woman as soon as he heard the stutter in the name. A glance told him he was looking at an older, worn version of the photo he had in his pocket. The word “mama” nearly escaped his lips.

  He kept walking – no point in drawing attention to himself – and at the end of the block he dropped the box of shirts into a clump of tall grass. He searched the ground as he walked back to where his mother was now standing in a line, waiting to enter a van, her hands cuffed in front of her. He picked up a scrap of fencing wire.

  There were three people ahead of Elizabeth Jones, filing into a police van and two people behind her. One of the people behind her was a uniformed officer. Stoop tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Two dealers just ran up that way,” Stoop said. He pointed in the direction he just came from. “One of them had a gun out.”

  The officer looked back, then took a step over toward the lieutenant. Stoop moved to his mother’s side, took the scrap metal to the handcuff locks and had them off her in seconds. The cuffs and the wire fell to the ground, Stoop and Elizabeth started to walk off, and the man in line behind her moved up. It took him another minute to think he could have asked Stoop to do the same thing for him.

  “Damn,” he mut
tered to himself, but Stoop and Elizabeth had crossed the street and rounded the corner by then.

  Looking over her shoulder a minute later, Elizabeth smiled broadly. She was rubbing her wrists though the cuffs hadn’t been tight. She tapped Stoop on the sleeve.

  “Who you?” she asked. They were still walking quickly.

  “My name is Stupendous Jones,” he answered.

  “Stupendous,” she repeated back. “That’s a funny name if you don’t mind me saying. Why I only knew one other person with that…”

  Elizabeth stopped in her tracks.

  “Stupendous JONES, you said?”

  “It’s not safe to stop here,” Stoop answered. He took his mother gently by the upper arm and led her further from the cops and around another corner. After a few more steps with Elizabeth at his side, he pulled out the photograph of her and put it in her hands.

  Elizabeth Jones stopped again for a moment.

  “That’s me?” she asked.

  Stoop stopped just long enough to say,

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  They walked on another block, made another turn, and Stoop led his mother, still looking at the picture intently, hardly believing her eyes, into a four story apartment building. Inside, there was graffiti on the walls, household rubbish on the hallway floors, and a smell of rot in the air. Stoop jogged slowly up to the top floor stopping at each landing to wait for his mother. She was still dazed.

  Stoop unlocked the door to his apartment. His mother took a look around. There wasn’t much to see – a torn couch, a milk crate with a board on it as a coffee table, the kitchen counter had a stack of Chef-Boy-Ardee cans. There was a bowl, a fork, a spoon and a pot.

  “Want something to eat?” Stoop asked his mother, and she did.

  The two talked long into the night. Elizabeth wanted to hear all about what Stoop had been doing with himself since the day after he was born. Stoop wanted to know all about what she did with herself, where she lived. He didn’t ask why she had left him.

  At three in the morning, Elizabeth got up and tried to sneak out of the apartment, but Stoop was sleeping too lightly. She smiled at him shyly.

  “I need to…” she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence; she hadn’t had enough practice talking to her son yet.

  “What do you need, mama?”

  Elizabeth giggled a bit and looked down at her shoes.

  “I need to go out for a little bit. You know…Make myself right.”

  She rubbed her nose as though something were tickling her.

  It took Stoop a minute to fully understand what she was telling him. By then, his mother had left the apartment. He sat until dawn, waiting for her to return, wondering.

  “Stupendous,” his mother said when she returned.

  Her eyes rolled back in her head. They were glazed and red. The pause after saying her son’s name was fully fifteen seconds.

  “Stupendous,” she repeated trying to focus on his face. She reached out and put a hand on each of his shoulders. “A woman like me…I wasn’t meant to be no mother. Now. You’re gonna have to forget about me.”

  Stoop tucked her into the only bed in the apartment. It was noon. The next night when she left the apartment, Stoop followed after her. First it was an abandoned building a block away. The city had closed off the windows and doors using cinder blocks, but dealers had broken through an entrance. They left most of the blocks covering the front door intact, using only a small hole to pass through product for those that had handed them cash. Elizabeth was one of those.

  From there, Stoop’s mother moved on to a bar that Stoop knew had been closed so many times for various violations that they kept plywood in the storage room to board up all their windows. Closing time was four in the morning, and Stoop was outside waiting, trying every once in a while to get a glimpse inside whenever a patron left or entered. When Elizabeth came out, she was on the arm of a man Stoop had never met and both were stumbling and slurring a song. The man was tall and weighed twice what Stoop did. He laughed at nothing in particular at the end of the verse, and Stoop moved in to do what he could.

  “Hey, mister,” Stoop said, one hand on the man’s chest. “The bartender said you left your wallet inside.”

  “Wha?” the man said. He was having a hard time focusing on the boy.

  “Your wallet. You left it inside. They have it for you.”

  “I got my wallet,” the man said. A line of drool hung from his lower lip.

  “Where?” Stoop asked.

  The man patted himself, patted his pockets, found he did not, in fact, have his wallet.

  “Sheee-it,” the man drawled. He shook Elizabeth off his arm and stumbled back into the bar. Elizabeth laughed after him, but Stoop pulled her away. She let herself be pulled.

  “Mama, there are programs,” Stoop said the next afternoon as his mother was getting her hair in order.

  “Programs?” she asked.

  “Methadone,” he said.

  “Methadone?” she repeated. “Honey, I done tried the methadone.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Elizabeth asked halting her grooming process. “I like smack better. Plain and simple.

  “But, mama, you don’t need to get high like that. You don’t need to go with men like Walter.”

  “Walter? Who in the Hell is Walter?”

  “Walter Crowe. The man you were with last night.”

  Elizabeth racked her brains but couldn’t find a Walter.

  “You mean that guy that lost his wallet last night?”

  Stoop held the wallet up for her to see.

  “Oh,” his mother said. “You handy. Any cash money in that?”

  She started brushing her hair again.

  “Thirty-two dollars,” Stoop answered.

  “And you planning to keep all that for yourself?”

  “You can have it mama. Take it all. Just promise me, no men. No strangers tonight.”

  She stepped away from the bathroom mirror and put the brush down. She moved in front of Stoop and took his face in both her hands. She looked into his eyes and moved the thumb of her right hand along his cheek. The touch was so delicious to him that he closed his eyes to receive it.

  “Look at me Stupendous. You’re a nice boy, a good boy to his mama. But you got to see me for what I am, not what you want me to be. You understand? I’m an addict, boy. I will do what I have to do to whoever I have to do it to in order to catch my high. Understand? Hell, I’ve been chasing highs since before you was born. Shoot,” she said taking the wallet from Stoop’s hand. “I was high on THE DAY you was born.”

  “You remember the day I was born?” Stoop asked.

  “Of course I remember it, son. Well, I mean, parts of it anyway. I remember there was two doctors talking about how Stupendous you were. Two of them, and they ain’t never seen anything like you.”

  She touched his cheek again, then turned away and left. Stoop followed her again a few seconds later, but this time she got into a gypsy cab, and her son had to be content with waiting for her in his apartment.

  Three days later, Elizabeth was back, eyes raccooned, lip busted, nostrils rimmed with dry blood. Still, she was high and happy.

  She touched his cheek and passed out on his couch without a word, and Stoop thought throughout the night of what he needed to do to save her life.

  When she woke, Elizabeth first threw up then apologized to her son.

  “I got to get me some medicine, you know, like you was telling me – something like methadone. Maybe morphine. Something I can control. You can help me. You know. Little by little, you can help me get off the morphine.”

  Stoop nodded though there was nothing about morphine that he knew about except how to steal it. His mother interrupted his thoughts.

  “I most certainly am the saddest person,” she said.

  She looked at Stoop, and her face turned sad enough to match her description. She looked away a moment.

  “I kil
led a man in Jersey last year,” she said. “In HoHoKus. What kind of name for a place is that?” she asked, then she threw up again.

  That same night, after Elizabeth had taken another taxi, Stoop walked a mile to a three story hospital that he knew from experience had almost no security. He reported sharp stomach pains under a false name, and an hour later he was in a waiting area in the back, near the meds storage room. Fifteen minutes sitting there and he had seen three nurses punch in a code and use a swipe card. One accidental run in with a nurse later, Stoop was opening the door to the meds storage room himself.

  It was another half hour before the nurse missed her swipe card. She searched for it frantically two minutes and found the card under some paperwork at the station she had been working. She breathed a sigh of relief just as Stoop was entering his apartment with a small white box with ten glass vials in it and a handful of syringes. He waited the night and into the morning for his mother to come home so she could start her regimen. “Treatment” was the word Stoop used.

  Elizabeth woke her son in the morning by rustling the package on the makeshift coffee table. She was trying to read the package when he opened his eyes.

  “That say morphine?” she asked him.

  “Yes, mama,” he said. “We can start you off today.”

  Stoop padded into the bathroom. He was brushing his teeth when he heard the apartment door slam shut.

  He tried to think of good things that could happen with his mother out on the streets with ten vials of morphine. Nothing really came to mind.

  After a minute of bargaining, Elizabeth got the offer up to four speedballs, a nickel bag of marijuana, and a set of pills she couldn’t identify. As soon as she took hold of the package and tried getting out of the car, smile still warm on her face, a gun was put to her head through her passenger side window.

  “Get out of the car!” she was ordered. “Put your hands on your head!”

  Elizabeth didn’t return for hours. Near midnight, the police knocked at Stoop’s door.

  “Is it my mother?” he asked. It was an incautious word spoken to police, and you were never supposed to speak to the police at all.