Slow Motion Riot (32 page)

Darryl King woke with a start and a
loud throbbing in his ears.

At first, he thought it was his
heart pounding double time from all the crack he'd smoked the night before.
Then he realized somebody's car stereo downstairs had the bass turned all the
way up, so it sounded like a giant heartbeat on wheels.

He was pissed about being awake.
For a second, he thought about finding his 9 mm and firing a couple of rounds
out the window. He'd been having a nice dream.

Now he couldn't remember what it
was.

At ten o'clock, on a morning when
the city seems dipped in bacon grease, I follow Angel, Bill, and four other
field service officers into the lobby of Building C of the Charles J. Stone
Houses. The Fortress is spray-painted above the entranceway in bold black
letters. A forbidding name for another numbingly dull building in a numbingly
dull city housing project. Three teen-aged boys loiter by the front door,
watching us carefully. One of them, a jumpy teenager with a flattop and a
harelip, opens his eyes wide and goes dashing for the stairwell door. I think
I've seen him somewhere before, but I can't remember when.

It gives me an uneasy feeling.
"What do you think that's all about?" I ask, trying not to sound so
hyped-up.

"Ah, he probably thought we're
cops and he's carrying drugs on him," Bill Neill grunts. "For crying
out loud, don't make a federal case out of everything."

I got myself up with three cups of
coffee this morning and I've been riding on a wave of fear and adrenaline ever
since. I almost threw a petty thief down a flight of stairs while we were
taking him in a couple of hours ago, and since then everybody keeps telling me,
"Cool out, cowboy." But all I can think about is Darryl and how I
can't wait to get my hands on him. It's not even rational anymore. He's just
this thing standing in the middle of my life, and I have to get rid of him.

Let's deal with them on their
terms, is the way I'm looking at it now. They slap us in the face, let's kick
them in the nuts. It's all right with me. I know the old way doesn't work
anymore.

"Where's our police
backup?" I ask.

"Hey, Baum," Bill says,
furrowing his brow, "we're just talking to a potential informant here. If
you're scared, you can sit in the car outside. It's probably just gonna be the
guy who buried the rest of Shoe Man's shoes."

I point out where it says "O.K.
All the Way" on the wall by the elevators. "Does that look like
nothing?"

"Ah, people write all sorts of
shit on the walls," Bill says. "If you grew up in a project, you'd
know that, Baum."

I don't like him pulling ethnic
rank on me like that. I wonder if this is the start of a subtle rift between
us. "I'd still like to know where these cops are."

We just recently began taking
special precautions on these investigative fishing expeditions. After Darryl's
big shoot-out and the incident where the cop shot Jamal Perkins, there was a
flurry of interdepartmental memos and a bunch of high-level meetings with the
brass and community groups. So the other day, the commissioner declared that we
should go out in units of at least four and have at least one senior police
officer on hand when we go looking for Darryl. I guess they're worried that
otherwise one of us might shoot another kid or something.

Bill frowns at me and tries to
raise the police on his walkie-talkie. For a few seconds, all we hear is a
snowstorm of static and then a cop's voice cuts through. "Where the hell
are you guys?" he says. "We're waiting for you on the twelfth floor."

Bill clicks the radio off.
"Okay, Baum? Good enough? Or do you need somebody to hold your hand?"

"It's all right, man,"
Angel tells me as he swats at a passing fly. "Bill's just being
hump..."

While I cool out a little, Bill
asks another officer, who's holding a walkie-talkie, if there's any further
information about Darryl King.

"That King guy is probably a
million miles from here," Angel says, pushing the "up" button at
the bank of elevators. I notice the light doesn't go on.

"Now that is pure
bullshit," Bill tells Angel as he lifts his injured left leg and hops up
and down on his right leg to stay balanced. "That mutt has probably never
been more than ten blocks from the house he was born in. Where is he gonna go?
Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos? Here is all he knows... You know that, Baum,
don't you?"

"Sure thing, Bill."

Bill directs me to look out at the
courtyard the way a college professor would direct a student's attention to the
blackboard. "Given Darryl King's life experiences, I say he is still at
large in this borough, if not this immediate neighborhood."

"You sound pretty sure."
Angel hitches up his jeans under his bulletproof vest and Virgin Islands
T-shirt. "Especially since they might have caught the guy this morning
already..."

There was an unconfirmed radio
report earlier this morning that said somebody answering Darryl's description
got picked up in Brooklyn last night.

"Pure bullshit," Bill
insists.

"Okay," says Angel.
"Care to put ten dollars on a bet?"

Bill shakes his hand
enthusiastically. "Remember," Bill says with a grin. "I'm not
saying he has to be in this building or anything. Just the general area... like
the Eastern seaboard..."

"Heh, heh, heh. You're fulla
crap, Bill."

I notice one of the elevators seems
to be stuck on the sixth floor and the three other elevators are completely out
of service. I push the buttons three more times before I give up. "I think
we're gonna have to use the stairs," I say.

Everyone groans, except for Angel,
who grins and slaps his taut, muscular thighs. "I run up and down stairs
like these five times a day," he says, reaching over to pat Bill's ample
stomach. "Unlike certain members of this unit who exercise primarily by
opening and closing the icebox..."

The seven of us head for the
stairwell. The higher we go, the more evidence we find of insane and dangerous
behavior. By the second floor the air is stinking from recently smoked crack
and sprayed urine. The graffiti on the walls is unintelligible. Nobody could
mistake this for art anymore. It's just bits and pieces of angry, throttled
language. "XMCREW"— "DJC34"—"EHWRT." Like the
artists got too deranged to put their ideas in any kind of order.

What's really extraordinary,
though, is the vomit. It's caked on the walls, as though somebody threw up on
the floor and then picked it up and put it there with his hands.

"How far do we have to
go?" Bill asks me on the fourth-floor landing, which is strewn with crack vials.

He grimaces and grips the banister
as he lifts his left leg slowly. For a moment, I smile because Bill looks like
an overweight ballerina doing a bar exercise. But then I realize how much it
must hurt to climb all these stairs with his wounded leg.

"Twelfth floor," Angel
says for the fifth time this morning.

"Why couldn't he meet us at
the bar around the corner from work?" Bill asks.

"I don't know. I guess he
feels safer here," Angel says, sprinting ahead of the rest of us. The
guy's in incredible shape, even for a former lightweight fighter. He must never
drink beer at home or something.

"Well, if he does have
anything to tell us," Bill says, "he won't be safe for long. Everyone
in this building will know we came by to see him." He steps over a turd
and a spent bullet shell on one of the steps. "Fuckin' animals," he
mumbles.

"It's our job to keep 'em
locked up, Mr. Bill," Angel says over his shoulder.

"Bullshit," Bill tells
him.

From the floors above us, we can
hear the echoes of feet shuffling, doors slamming, and voices squealing.
Between the fourth and fifth floors, we pass this strange-looking guy with a
tangled beard and squeegee, who's just standing there, pointing upward, like we
need him to tell us where we're going.

Then he looks at us like we owe him
a tip or something. Fuck him too. By the seventh floor, the stuffiness is
getting to me and I find myself short of breath. Bill uses the break as an
opportunity to light another cigar.

I look around at the cracked steps
and broken railings. Bill blows out another heavy cloud of cigar smoke and the
rest of us begin to choke and cough.

"You guys didn't smoke, we'd
be there by now," Angel taunts us as he heads up toward the next flight.

"If the people didn't smoke
crack, we wouldn't have to come at all," one of the new guys in the unit
says. Another of the rookies yodels like a Swiss mountain climber.

"Oh, shut the fuck up,"
Bill says, rubbing his wounded knee. "Look at this, Baum. Angel and me are
surrounded by idiots."

"You know something I just
realized, Bill?" I ask. "This is the building Lee Harvey Oswald lived
in when he stayed in New York..."

"Really?" Bill asked.

"Oh yeah," I tell him
with a straight face. "He sang in a doo-wop group called the Red Squares.
You knew that, Bill, didn't you?"

Bill looks at me carefully for a
second and then waves his cigar in disgust. "Oh, you're fulla shit too
..."

Everyone else starts laughing and
Angel whacks me affectionately on the shoulder. Even Bill smiles.

"Onward and upward, Private
Vasquez," Bill says, trudging up to the next flight.

"Whatever you say, General
Custer." Angel salutes.

A few minutes later, we arrive on
the twelfth-floor landing. Bill clasps both hands around the butt of his gun,
glances through the porthole, and shoves himself out into the hall. Angel gives
me a look like he thinks Bill is being a self-conscious show-off. The rest of
us spin out after him, one by one.

Darryl told his mother to get his
great-grandmother out of the apartment. "Aaron says they're coming
upstairs right now," he said. "She's making too much noise."

Ethel McDaniels, his
seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother, was holding on to the frame of the
kitchen doorway as Darryl, Bobby, and the dozen other young men handled their
guns. The old woman was too scared to stop crying.

"She'll be all right,"
Darryl's mother said.

"Tell her to shut up or I'll
shoot her."

Darryl's mother went over to hold
her grandmother's hand and stroke her trembling gray head. "Don't mind
him, Grandma," she said. "He's just feeling hyper."

"Bobby," said Darryl.
"Go see what's up."

Bobby Kirk shoved his .45 and his 9
mm into the tight waistband of his broad jeans. He straightened the thick gold
chains around his neck, opened the apartment's front door, and stepped out into
the hall.

The first thing I hear on the
twelfth floor is the jangling of necklace chains. The first thing I see is an
enormous young guy wearing the chains and a nameplate ring. Two big H's are
carved in the hair on either side of his head.

"Oh look at this guy,"
Bill mutters.

The big kid starts to amble down
the airless, seaweed green hall. Almost all the doors have triple locks, I
notice, and are covered with chipped black paint. The same television game show
seems to be playing inside several of the apartments. A few crack vials and
broken light bulbs lie on the sticky black-and-yellow-checked linoleum floor.
Behind the big kid with the chains and the H's in his hair, a little girl with
bare feet lugs what appears to be a bedpost into the incinerator room. It
strikes me as an odd way to get rid of an old bed, but then I don't live here.

Daniels, a pink-cheeked new guy
with the Field Service Unit, keeps stepping on the backs of my sneakers. Since
the cops don't seem to be here, Angel takes three of the other officers around
the corner and down another hall looking for them. After a few seconds, I
faintly hear Angel's voice saying, "Not Building D, Building C. You
schmucks are in the wrong building," into the walkie-talkie. I guess it's
going to take that backup unit a while to get here. Just as well. Once they
arrive, they'll take over and make us the backup unit.

Now it's just Daniels, Bill, and
me.

"Hey, homeboy," Bill
calls out to the big kid in the chains who's standing less than fifteen yards
away from us. "Where's da man?"

I'd shudder if I heard a white cop
talking this way. Even coming from a black social worker like Bill, I find it a
little unnerving.

The big kid in the chains gives
Bill a blank look. "I said, where's the man?" Bill repeats.
"O.K., homes. Darryl. Where he at, homeboy?"

The big kid takes a huge step
forward and looks at the gun in Bill's hand. "Who you talkin' about?"
he says unconvincingly.

"An actor," Bill says out
of the side of his mouth. "That's very cute. 'Who you talkin' about?'
"

"Bill, I don't think this is
our informant," I tell him. "You better stop fucking around."

The guy in the chains takes another
step and puts his hands behind his back like he's had a lot of practice wearing
handcuffs.

"We're looking for somebody
who can tell us about Darryl King," Daniels, the rookie, asks in a loud,
gawky voice.

I close my eyes in embarrassment.
Maybe it's true, I think. Maybe social workers and probation officers don't
have any business pretending to be cops.

I hear a door opening behind the
big kid in chains, about thirty feet to our right. For a moment, we get
distracted by the sound. The kid with the chains takes his hands from behind
his back and assumes a shooter's stance. He's still pretty far away from us.
Even with my contact lenses in, he's like a figure on a TV screen. In his right
hand, he has a gun with a long barrel. He begins firing it.

The door down at the right end of
the hall opened a little more and Darryl King peered out at the gunfire. Then
he pushed a fourteen-year-old boy known as "Life Knowledge" out into
the hall. "Life Knowledge" was part of a youth gang who called
themselves gods and considered themselves to be invincible. His gun, however,
was a Raven .25 caliber worth less than seventy dollars. He fired it once and
the handle came apart in his hands. A slug from Bill Neill's .38 service
revolver tore through the boy's forehead and Life Knowledge fell to the floor, dead.

Behind one of the other apartment
doors, a baby cried and a game show audience cheered wildly.

Daniels, the rookie, turns around
and runs down the other end of the hall, shrieking that he's going to get Angel
and the others.

The big kid with the H's in his
hair continues to fire his 9 mm Browning wildly. Bill and I return the shots
and look desperately for cover. One of Bill's bullets grazes the left side of
the big kid's rib cage and the big kid does a half-turn downward to the floor.
He steadies himself with his left hand against the cinder block wall, and with
his right hand, he squeezes the trigger of the Browning again.

Bill falls over backward with blood
gushing from a spot near his chin.

All of a sudden, this whole thing
doesn't seem like it's happening on TV anymore. It's sickeningly real. I've got
my back flat against one of the apartment doors. I start banging on it with my
elbow and pleading with the person inside to let me in to safety. I hear the
door at the other end of the hall open once more, and the gunfire resumes.

I bang harder on the door I'm
leaning against. "Please let me in, dear God. Please."

"It's not locked," a weak
voice finally tells me from inside.

But by then I'm so crazed with
panic I can't figure out if the door opens to the outside or the inside. I just
keep yanking on the doorknob, because I'm afraid that if I stop long enough to
figure it out, someone will come up behind me and shoot me in the head.

I'm out of bullets. Bill Neill is
lying there, bleeding on the floor. And I still can't get the door open. My
breathing sounds so frenzied that for a second I think it's someone else doing
it. Finally, I look right at the metal doorknob. I twist it the wrong way and
it doesn't move at all. I try it the other way and the latch clicks. But before
I can press my weight on the door, I feel the presence of someone standing
directly behind me.

I turn and see Darryl King pointing
a .45 right at me. If I hadn't spent so much time looking at his picture over
the past few weeks, I wouldn't have recognized him.

His appearance is shocking. He's
preternaturally thin now, like a wire sculpture. His sunken skin looks like
it's been melted over his skeleton. His head is completely out of proportion
with his once-solid build and his limbs seem elongated and frail. He wears a
soiled brown T-shirt and rumpled green velour slacks. I've seen a lot of crack
addicts, but never anyone so utterly deformed by the habit. Darryl is all
bulging eyes and big hands. It's as if he's been boiled down to his fiercest essence.

He puts the barrel of the gun right
up to my temple. "You gonna die now," he says.

Three other young guys stand behind
him, shaking their heads slowly. I can't believe my life is about to end so
abruptly. It doesn't make sense. It's not my time. There hasn't been enough of
a build-up. I feel angry and cheated.

"Hey," I say.

But none of them answer and I see
Darryl's about to press down on the trigger. I hold my breath and the blood
rushes to my head. I want to pray but I'm too confused.

"What's going on, Baum?"
I hear Angel asking from the other end of the hall. His tone is meant to be
reassuring.

Darryl grabs me by the arm and
turns me roughly so that I'm facing Angel and Darryl is standing behind me with
the gun to my head. I smell vomit, crack, and cigarettes on his breath. I start
to gag and Darryl digs his nails into my arm.

"Okay, everybody should just
chill the fuck out a minute," Angel says firmly.

"FUCK YOU, MAN!" Darryl
King screams. "I AM RELAXED!"

With the halt in the shooting, people
are beginning to peek cautiously out of the doorways up and down the hall. I
can see how terrified they are, but my insides feel bound up in catgut and
thorns. The short hairs of my left temple catch on something at the end of
Darryl's gun barrel and I wince as a couple of them get pulled out.

"WHAT'RE YOU MAKIN' A FACE
FOR, MAN!" Darryl screams senselessly at me. "YOU THINK THIS IS SOME
KINDA FUCKIN' JOKE?! I BLOW YOUR FUCKIN' HEAD OFF!!!"

"All right, let's take it easy
now," Angel says, taking tiny steps forward. "Let's chill, people
..."

"FUCK YOU! I KILL HIM IN THE
FUCKIN' HEAD, MAN!!"

Angel and the three other field
service guys have their guns trained on Darryl and his gang. Darryl's men are
looking at him strangely, as though they're afraid he might actually pull the
trigger on the spot and get them all killed.

"Darryl, don't you do nothing
stupid," a woman's voice calls from down the hall behind where we're
standing.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP, MOMS!"
Darryl yells. "ELSE I KILL YOU NEXT!"

I hear Darryl's mother complaining
to somebody else in the apartment about her son's lack of respect. Angel makes
a deliberate show of moving back the safety catch on his gun. The other
officers follow his example. "So let's work this out," Angel says, advancing
a few more steps toward Darryl.

"Back up, chump," says
the skinny fourteen-year-old kid with the flattop and the harelip who I saw
before in the lobby. Only now he's carrying an Uzi.

"Come on, man." Angel
holds out his free hand like a peace offering. "Let him go."

Now I see what a fearless
motherfucker he must've been in his street gang days.

"I'M GIVIN' THE ORDERS,"
Darryl King says, banging the side of my head for emphasis. "YOU TAKE
'EM."

A single dingy light bulb hangs
from a loose ceiling wire just a few inches in front of my face. From somewhere
to my left, I hear Bill Neill making gurgling noises. I hope he's not dying. I
can't even look down at him on the floor because Darryl still has the gun to my
head. No one's paying much attention to the kid in the Life Knowledge T-shirt
who came out of the apartment with the shitty little gun. I happen to catch a single
glimpse of him as Darryl swings me around. He's lying facedown in a widening
puddle of blood.

Angel asks Darryl if he'll at least
back up a few steps so they can reach Bill's body and get him emergency medical
treatment. Darryl remains unmoved. "This here is our prisoner," he
says, lowering his gun to my jaw.

"Prisoner of war," says
the big kid with all the chains and the H's in his hair. He's clutching his
side where Bill's shot must've just grazed him.

"Prisoner of the crack
wars," someone else says. One or two people laugh.

Darryl wraps his free hand around
my neck and begins pulling me backward toward the apartment he emerged from.
The bile rises in my throat as my black sneakers squeak on the floor tiles.

"Hey, man, where you taking
him?" Angel calls out. "Don't make it hard on everyone,
Darryl..."

I feel like I'm getting dragged
down to hell, far away from the world of the living. Everybody in the hall is
yelling at each other. Their voices blend together in my ears and their words
are indistinct—except somebody keeps saying, "Take no prisoners,"
loud and clear. Darryl tightens his stranglehold and my eyes roll back into my
head. I black out for a moment.

When I come to, I realize I've been
pulled back into the apartment at the south end of the hall. I'm dropped on the
carpet and somebody puts a knee on my chest.

"STEP OFF, MAN!!!" I hear
Darryl shouting. "STAY BACK!!! WE KILL THE FUCKIN' HOSTAGE RIGHT HERE ON
THE RUG!!!"

"Whatever you say, man,"
Angel's voice says from somewhere out in the hall. "Let's not do anything
we'll be sorry about."

"No, I won't," Darryl
says with sudden calm.

There's a protracted silence and
then a long fusillade of automatic weapons firing from the apartment out into
the hall. When the shots finally cease, I hear the voices of Angel and the
other Field Service guys fading and the scuff of their sneakers getting lighter
as they retreat down the hall floor.

"Yeah, that's right,"
says the big kid with the chains and the H's in his hair, lowering himself into
a large chair and trying to pull his bloodied shirt off. "Run away,
faggots."

"Chicken," somebody else
says.

Still lying on my back, I look up
and see two women's faces. One appears to be in her seventies; she wears heavy
glasses and has a sad, wrinkled mouth. The other woman I recognize from court
as Darryl's mother. She appears uninterested in anything going on around her.

"This is my probation officer,
Moms," Darryl says.

"He behind enemy lines,"
adds the big kid with the chains and the H's, who's having some trouble
breathing.

"Yeah," Darryl's mother
says to me. "You in another country now."